Osho Quotes on Search for Truth
- To be total is a basic thing for any seeker, for anyone in search of silence and truth.
- Every child is born with an innate search for truth. It is not something learned or adopted later on in life. Truth simply means, “I am, but I do not know who I am.” And the question is natural — “I must know the reality of my being.” It is not a curiosity.
- Truth brings freedom because it is your discovery. It makes you fully into man; otherwise you remain on the level of the animals: you are but you don’t know who you are. The search for truth is really the search for the reality of your being.
- We go on living out of fear — that’s why we go on poisoning every other experience. We love somebody, but out of fear: it spoils, it poisons. We seek truth, but if the search is out of fear then you are not going to find it. Whatever you do, remember one thing: Out of fear you are not going to grow. You will only shrink and die. Fear is in the service of death.
- Everybody has to create his own footpath. There are no superhighways towards truth, only footpaths, and they too are not ready-made, available; you have to walk and create them. You have to search for truth and in your very search you create the path. The path is not already there that you can simply go to the truth. The search for truth is an immense adventure. Each moment one is in for a great surprise.
- Atisha says: There is no need to have many goals, one goal is enough. Inquire into the truth of your life. Only one search is enough to deliver you from all your miseries, sufferings, hells. Inquire into the truth of your being, see all the facets of it — the anger, the greed, the lust. Go into each. And by going into each, you will find always and always the same source of joy, the same spring of joy. Slowly slowly you will become a festival. Nothing has been added from the outside, but you have discovered yourself. You have come into the kingdom of God.
- Sannyas is an ultimate love affair: the search for God, the search for truth. It is possible only when you have failed many times, loved and suffered, and each suffering has brought you more and more consciousness, more and more understanding. One day the recognition arrives that love can give you a few glimpses — and those glimpses are good, and those glimpses are glimpses of God — but it can only give you glimpses; more than that is not possible. But that too is too much; but without those glimpses you will never seek and search God.
- Truth is meaningful, but only as an instrument toward freedom. So religion is not against the search for Truth: religion is for freedom. Truth helps it, but then Truth is secondary. It is not primary, it is not basic. It is a means; freedom is the end. That is why moksha is the ultimate aim of all Hindu thinking, of all Hindu seeking — moksha! Truth helps to be free — so seek Truth. but only as a part of the greater search for freedom. Do not make Truth itself the end. If you make Truth itself the end, then your search is not religious: it becomes philosophical. That is the difference between the Greek mind and the Hindu mind.
- one thing I would like to tell you — that the search for truth is the search for the impossible. Religion itself is nothing but a passion for the impossible. But the beauty is — that impossible happens, that impossible also becomes possible. But you have to pay for it, and you have to pay tremendously. You have to sacrifice yourself utterly. You have to stake your whole life. If you stake your so-called life, you will attain to what Buddha calls to be alive, to what Jesus calls to be reborn, to what Hindus call to be twice born, dwij. Then a totally new dimension and a totally new quality of being arises in you… uncorrupted by time and space, uncontaminated by anything, absolutely and eternally virgin. Long for the impossible. Desire for the impossible.
- Faith is not a virtue, and it is not a great contribution to humanity’s evolution. Faith is the greatest hindrance in people’s search for truth. Before you go in search you have already been handed a secondhand dirty faith, and you are told that just this much is enough; you don’t have to search, Jesus has done it for you, Buddha has done it for you. But Buddha has been drinking water, and my thirst does not get quenched. Jesus has been drinking wine, and I don’t get drunk. How can Jesus help you by just having faith in him? Faith simply means hiding ignorance, and it is very cheap. Truth needs great energy, great urgency, and a total involvement in the search.
- You have to learn from the awakened person the beauty, the bliss of being awakened, that’s all, and then you have to search on your own. It is always an individual search, a private exploration. Truth cannot be transferred from one hand to another; it is untransferable.
- There is this danger in belief: it makes you feel that you know the truth. And because it makes you feel that you know the truth, this becomes the greatest barrier in the search. Believe or disbelieve and you are blocked — because disbelief is also nothing but belief in a negative form.
- Let me say that even when the truth is told to you, don’t believe in it! Explore, inquire, search, experiment, experience: don’t believe in it. Even when truth is conveyed to you, if you believe in it, you turn it into a lie. A truth believed is a lie, belief turns truth into a lie. Believe in Buddha and you believe in a lie. Believe in Christ and you believe in a lie. Don’t believe in Christ, don’t believe in Buddha, don’t believe in me. What I say, listen to it attentively, intelligently; experiment, experience. And when you have experienced, will you need to believe in it? There will be no doubt left, so what will be the point of belief? Belief is a way of repressing doubt: you doubt, hence you need belief. The rock of belief represses the spring of doubt. When you know, you know! You know it is so; there is no doubt left. Your experience has expelled all darkness and all doubt. Truth is: you are full of it. Truth never creates belief. How to attain to truth? By dropping all kinds of beliefs. And remember, I am saying all kinds — belief in me is included. Experience me, come along with me, let me share what I have seen, but don’t believe, don’t be in a hurry. Don’t say, “Now what is the point? Now Osho has seen it, all that is left for me is to believe it.” What I have seen cannot become your experience unless you see it. And it is the experience of truth that delivers you from ignorance, from bondage, from misery. It is not the belief that delivers you, it is truth.
- If you search the ultimate, each moment of your life will become more and more peaceful, calm, quiet, cool, fragrant. If you search for the ultimate, if you search for the truth, or God or nirvana or whatsoever you want to call it; if you are in search for the deepest in life and the highest in life and you are not after spurious things, then your very search will bring a new quality to your being. You will feel rooted, integrated; you will feel together. And you will feel a new joy arising in your heart, not coming from the outside. The real joy never comes from the outside, it is the spurious that comes from the outside — death can take away only that which has come from the outside.
- Once you are enlightened you are enlightened forever. There is no way of going back. How much more splendorous and how much more miraculous will be the inner spring! Even the outer is so great; the inner is not only quantitatively great, it is qualitatively great too. The search for truth is the search for inner spring.
- Many people come to me and they say they would like to search and seek what truth is. I ask them only one thing: Has your life, as you have lived it up to now, proved an illusion? If it has not proved an illusion, then the real thirst for truth cannot arise. When you have seen the illusoriness of your life, only then does a real thirst arise — to know WHAT TRUTH IS. If you are still in the illusion of life, if you are still enchanted by it, if you are still hallucinated by it, if you are still in that hypnosis of desiring and dreaming, then talking about truth will again be only another illusion, another desire. It will not help. Truth cannot be one of your desires. Truth can only be there when all the desires have proved to be futile, and your whole energy is available and you don’t know where to go, because the whole life seems to be meaningless. You are stuck. You are tremendously frustrated. You have FAILED and all your dreams have disappeared. You are shattered to the very roots. You are standing there throbbing with energy not knowing where to go. Then that energy becomes a pool and creates a new thirst in you: the thirst to know the truth. When the world has been known as an illusion, only then….
- Nothing else is essential. Search, seek, try to know what truth is — and truth is not in abstractions, and truth is not in scriptures, and truth is not to be found in the dialogues of the theologians. Truth is herenow. Truth IS: you have to become available to it. Truth is in the opening of your heart — love will become the bridge between you and truth. Right now you are trying to live with the world, with the ego-bridge. Ego separates, love joins. Love is the only yoga — `yoga’ means union. Ego separates, makes you an island — aloof. And look at the irony: first you cultivate the ego, and then you say, “I feel very lonely.” Ego makes you feel lonely, it makes you lonely. Ego makes you like a small island. Love… again you have become the continent. Love is the bridge between you and that which is.
- The moment truth is organized, it becomes a lie, it becomes politics. Organization is a political thing. Religion is an individual search.
- Truth is a constant remembering. Truth is not forgetting for a single moment that “God is: only God is. He has given me life, he has given me the desire to search for truth, he has chosen me to search for him. He must have called me in some mysterious way — otherwise how could I have moved in his direction?”
- Truth has nothing to do with your imagination. Neither has truth anything to do with your inference, your guesswork. Truth is already here: truth is. All that is needed on your part is not to seek and search for it but to be available, open and empty like a mirror, so that you can reflect that which is. Truth surrounds you; truth is within and without. Only truth is. you need not go anywhere, to Kaaba or to Kashi. You need not even go outside your room, you need not even go outside your body, you need not go anywhere. Sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. Just sitting silently in your own room, when you are empty, it is revealed. It was revealed to Mohammed when he was utterly silent and empty, it was revealed to Sanai when he was silent and empty, it was revealed to Mahavira when he was silent and empty. To be empty is to be religious.
- And anybody who clings to any method whatsoever is not a seeker of truth. The method is not the goal, one need not cling to the method; one has to search for the right method. And if some method is not working, drop it!
- An authentic, reasoning man is always in search of truth. Reason is the hunger for truth. Is your reason a hunger for truth? Is your reason a thirst for truth? Are you ready to sacrifice everything to find the truth? Just as the lion goes in search of food, reason goes in search of truth, in search of wisdom.
