Osho Quotes on Moment to Moment Living

Osho Quotes on Moment to Moment Living

1. Abandon all future, and start living moment to moment rejoicing in the small things of life.
2. Start living this moment and you will see that the more you live, the less problems there are.
3. A buddha lives moment to moment — and if you start living moment to moment, you become a buddha. This is the answer: live moment to moment and you become a buddha. A buddha is one who lives moment to moment, who does not live in the past, who does not live in the future, who lives here now. Buddhahood is a quality of being present here and now — and buddhahood is not a goal, you need not wait, you can become just here and now.
4. Live in the moment for the sheer joy of living it. Then each moment has the quality of an orgasm. Yes, it is orgasmic. This is how my sannyasins have to live, with no should, with no ought, with no must, with no commandment. You are not here to be with me to become martyrs, you are here to be with me to enjoy life to its fullness. And the only way to live, love, enjoy, is to forget the future. It exists not.
5. God is available only when you are unburdened. But they will never know. They will knock at the doors of temples but they will never know where the real temple exists. The real temple is freedom: dying moment to moment to the past and living the present. And freedom to move, to move into the dark, into the unknown — that is the door to the divine!
6. Those two words, “Live dangerously,” are significant. Sannyas is a way to live your life in total danger. What do I mean when I say sannyas is living dangerously? It means living moment to moment without any past. The past makes your life convenient, comfortable, because the past is known; you are familiar with it, you are very efficient with it. But life is never past, it is always present. The past is that which is no more, and life is that which is. Life is always now, here, and all your knowledge comes from the past. Trying to live the present through the past is the way of the coward; it is the calculated way. People call it sanity, but it is very superficial and never adequate. There is no rapport with the present.
7. You are always given a single moment; you are not given two moments together. If you know the secret of living one moment, you know the whole secret of life. Because you will always get one moment — and you know how to live it, how to be totally in it.
8. Whenever you live in total awareness you live moment to moment. You cannot plan, even for the next moment you cannot plan — because who knows, the next moment may never come! And how can you plan it beforehand, because who knows what the situation will be in the next moment? And if you plan too much you may miss it, the freshness of it. Life is such a flux, nothing remains the same, everything moves.
9. Just live the moment with intensity and totality. Live it with as much joy as possible, with as much love as possible, with no fear, no guilt. This existence is yours and this moment is a gift — don’t let it go to waste. And don’t be worried about enlightenment, the moon. This moment, living totally, is enlightenment.
10. The spontaneous man is the way to the real man, to the essential man, to the God within. You cannot decide direction, you can only live this moment that is available to you. By living it, direction arises. If you dance, the next moment is going to be of a deeper dance. Not that you decide but you simply dance this moment. You have created a direction: you are not manipulating it. The next moment will be more full of dancing, and still more will be following.
11. Live when life is there. Be committed to the earth while on the earth; die when death comes. Move with life and move with death. Dying, don’t cling to life. Dying, don’t resist death; dying, die. Living, live; dying, die. Let the moment be total. Float with it, be committed to it. When death comes, then don’t be sad. Then accept death. Then accept it with such totality that even death cannot kill you. A total person cannot be killed, and a divided person never lives. A total person is already beyond death.
12. I don’t promise you anything. I don’t promise you the kingdom of God, I don’t promise you enlightenment — I don’t promise at all. My whole approach is of living moment to moment; enlightened or unenlightened, what does it matter? Living moment to moment joyously, ecstatically, living moment to moment totally, intensely, passionately…. If one lives passionately, the ego dissolves. If one is total in one’s acts, the ego is BOUND to dissolve. It is like when a dancer goes on and on dancing: a moment comes when only the dance remains and the dancer disappears. That is the moment of enlightenment.
13. You have to learn the methods of flowing like a river with existence, each moment. Die each moment to the past, and be born each moment to the new. Unless that becomes your religion, you are going to be in trouble, and your society is going to be in trouble.
14. My vision is that of a goalless life. That is the vision of all the buddhas. Everything simply is, for no reason at all. Everything simply is utterly absurd. If this is understood, then where is the hurry, and for what? Then you start living moment to moment. Then this moment is given to you, a gracious gift from God or the whole or whatsoever you want to call it — Tao, dhamma, logos. This moment is available to you: sing a song, live it in its totality. And don’t try to sacrifice it for any other moment that is going to come in the future. Live it for its own sake.
15. Relaxation means you don’t have any shoulds. You are simply living moment to moment, not according to some future idea of yourself, but according to your reality that is herenow. To live with the reality, moment to moment, is to be sane. To live with the idea is to be insane. The whole earth has become almost a madhouse because of these perfectionists. Perfectionism is a sort of madness; only mad people try to be perfectionists. Sane people never try to be perfectionists.
16. The word tathata is of great profundity. A man who understands what tathata is becomes undisturbed in every situation; nothing can disturb him, he becomes unperturbable. And TATHAGAT means one who has been living moment-to-moment in tathata. Tathagat is one of the most beautiful words possible in any language: one who lives simply according to his nature without being bothered about other people’s nature.
17. Buddha says: Learn sitting silently — become a mirror. Silence makes a mirror out of your consciousness, and then you function moment to moment. You reflect life. You don’t carry an album within your head. Then your eyes are clear and innocent, you have clarity, you have vision, and you are never untrue to life. This is authentic living.
18. Millions live in the past, and the remaining millions live in the future, and it is very rare to find a person who lives herenow. But that is the real person, that is the person who is really alive. Life needs only one thing: to be rooted in the present. There is nowhere else for it to be rooted. Past is memory, future is imagination; both are unreal. The real is this moment — thisness.
19. The way of living unconsciously is called by Buddha the dark way. And the way of living consciously, attentively, moment to moment, bringing your consciousness to each act, each small act, each detail, is the way of light.
20. The buddha is awake even while he is asleep. He has no compartments in his being. He is not many, he is one. Because he is one and he has no clinging to memories and no desires for the future, the present is enough for him. Then he lives moment to moment in its totality; he does not go on living partially. Your dreams simply show that you live partially, and the unlived parts have to be lived in your dreams. If you live totally each moment, then there is no possibility of any dreams.
21. Just being herenow, just living moment to moment with no ideology, with no utopia. The real sannyasin, the real mystic, is not against the past, is not for the future. He is so utterly absorbed by the present that he has no time, no energy, for the past and the future. This is how the rebel is born.
22. Nobody, not even you yourself, knows what is going to happen in the next moment. You start living moment to moment. The calculation is gone. the planning disappears, you float like a white cloud in the sky: moving but without any motivation; moving but not knowing where you are going; moving but remaining in the moment, so totally herenow that past and future make no sense, only present is meaningful.
23. Never plan for the future, because when the future will come, it will come. You just go on living each moment as totally as possible, so when the future becomes present you can live that, too — totally. Don’t plan for it, because it is unpredictable. All your planning is going to be irrelevant. And once you have planned for something and it doesn’t happen, then you are frustrated. And it never happens.
24. Heaven is not somewhere else: it is a way of living. So is hell — a style of life. Hell is living unconsciously; heaven is living consciously. Hell is your own creation, so is heaven. If you go on living unconsciously, through your unconscious desires, instincts, motives — of which you are not the master but only the victim — then you create hell around yourself. But if you start living a conscious life, a life of bringing more and more light to the deep, dark corners of your being, if you start living full of light, your life is moment-to-moment ecstasy.
25. My sannyas is spontaneity, living moment to moment without any prefabricated discipline, living with the unknown, not exactly knowing where you are going. Because if you know already where you are going you are dead. Then life runs in a mechanical way. A life should be a flow from the known towards the unknown. One should be dying each moment to the known so the unknown can penetrate you. And only the unknown liberates.
26. You are nothing but your past. What are you? Just a collection of the past. Drop your past, and you are not. The ego is nothing but a collective name for your whole past; and when you don’t live in the past, you start living egolessly. Then moment to moment you go on dying to the past, you go on renouncing the past, and each moment you are fresh, young, virgin. And in that virginity is God.
27. There is no goal of life, for the simple reason that life is its own goal. The goal is intrinsic, not something outside; not there, far away, but herenow, in this very moment. The very idea of goal is future-oriented. The moment you start living for a goal you stop living in the present, in the immediate. The goal becomes more important. Tomorrow becomes more important, and you have to sacrifice today for tomorrow; and the trouble is, tomorrow never comes, has never come, is not going to come ever. But you go on sacrificing your today — which is your only treasure, which is all that you have got. You risk that which you have for that which is only a mind desire.
28. Life has no goal because life is its own goal. Drop all goals. Drop the very idea of future. Forget completely that there is going to be a tomorrow. Collect yourself from every dimension and direction. Be concentrated herenow, and in that single moment you will be able to know life in its eternity. Then the hunger for living, and living forever, will not be there. Tasting life in a single moment makes you aware that life is eternal. There is no need to desire it, it is already eternal.