“If you have loved a person, when the person is gone you don’t feel relief – and you don’t cry and you don’t weep. In deep silence you accept the fact, the helplessness of it and the love continues – because love does not end with the body, love does not end with the mind. Love goes on flowing.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“Less and less memories will come as the time moves. There will be gaps – you would like to relive something but nothing is coming – and those gaps are beautiful. Then a day will come when you will not be able to move backwards because everything is complete. When you cannot move backwards, only then do you move forwards. Be finished with the past. As you become freer from the past, the mountain starts disappearing. And then you will attain unison: you will become, by and by, one.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“When sadness comes, be really sad. Don’t try to escape from it – allow it, cooperate with it. Let it dissolve in you and you be dissolved in it. Become one with it. Be really sad: no resistance, no conflict and no struggle. When happiness comes, be happy: dance and be ecstatic. When happiness comes, don’t try to cling to it. Don’t say that it should remain always and always; that is the way to miss it. When sadness comes, don’t say, ‘Don’t come to me,’ or, ‘If you have come, please go soon.’ That is the way to miss it. Don’t reject sadness and don’t cling to happiness.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“Sadness has a song… a very deep phenomenon is sadness. Accept it. Enjoy it. Taste it without any rejection, and you will see that it brings many gifts to you which no happiness can ever bring. If you can accept sadness it is no longer sadness; you have brought a new quality to it. You will grow through it. Now it will not be a stone, a rock on the path blocking the way; it will become a step.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“Sadness is sad because you dislike it. The sadness is sad because you would not like to be in it. The sadness is sad because you reject it. Even sadness becomes a flowering of tremendous beauty, of silence and of depth, if you like it. Happiness is always shallow; sadness, always deep. Happiness is like a wave; sadness is like the innermost depth of an ocean. In sadness you remain with yourself, left alone. In happiness you start moving with people and you start sharing. In sadness you close your eyes and you delve deep within yourself.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“Old age is tremendously beautiful, and it should be so because the whole of life moves towards it. It should be the peak. How can the peak be in the beginning? How can the peak be in the middle? But if you think your childhood is your peak, as many people think, then of course your whole life will be a suffering because you have attained your peak – now everything will be a declining, coming down. If you think young age is the peak, as many people think, then of course after thirty-five you will become sad, depressed, because every day you will be losing and losing and losing and gaining nothing. The energy will be lost, you will weaken, diseases will enter into your being, and death will start knocking at the door. The home will disappear, and the hospital will appear. How can you be happy? No, but in the East we have never thought that childhood or youth is the peak. The peak waits for the very end.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“If you have lived your life, you will welcome death. It will come like a rest, like a great sleep. If you have peaked, climaxed in your life, then death is a beautiful rest, a benediction. But if you have not lived, then of course death creates fear. If you have not lived, then certainly death is going to take time from your hands, all future opportunities to live. In the past you have not lived, and there is going to be no future: fear arises. Fear arises not because of death but because of unlived life.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“Once you know what death is you will receive it with great celebration. You will welcome it. It is the fulfillment of your whole life’s effort. It is the fruition of your whole life’s effort. The journey ends. One comes back home. In death you don’t die. Just, the energy that was given to you through the body and through the mind is released and goes back to the world. You return home.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“The fear is not of death, the fear is of time, and if you look deeply into it then you find that the fear is of an unlived life – you have not been able to live. If you live, then there is no fear. If life comes to a fulfillment there is no fear. If you have enjoyed, attained the peaks that life can give – if your life has been an orgasmic experience, a deep poetry vibrating within you, a song, a festival, a ceremony, and you lived each moment of it to its totality – then there is no fear of time. Then the fear disappears.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“Just think of someone who has never come across a mirror. Can he close his eyes and see his face? Impossible. He cannot even imagine his face, he cannot meditate on it. But a man who has come to a mirror, looked into it, known his face through it, can close his eyes and see the face inside. That’s what happens in relationship. When a person moves into a relationship the relationship mirrors, reflects himself, and he comes to know many things that he never knew existed in him.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“Once you understand that death is not the opposite of life but part of it, an intrinsic part of it, which can never be separated from it – once you accept death as a friend, suddenly a transformation happens. You are transfigured, your vision now has a new quality in it. Now there is no fight, no war, you are not fighting against anybody, now you can relax, now you can be at home. Once death becomes a friend only then does life become a friend also. This may look paradoxical but it is so, only the appearance is paradoxical. If death is the enemy, then deep down life is also the enemy, because life leads to death.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“The more you fight with death, the more anxiety-ridden you will become, you are bound to become. It is a natural consequence. If you fight with death you know that you are going to be defeated. How can you be happy with a life which is going to end in defeat? You know that whatsoever effort you make, nothing is going to succeed against death. Deep down you are certain about only one thing and that is death. In life everything else is uncertain, only death is certain. There is only one certainty, and in that certainty you have an enemy. Fighting with certainty and hoping for uncertainties how can you be in a repose? How can you be relaxed, calm, collected? Impossible.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“You start dying really when you start breathing, at the same moment. It is not right to say that death comes in the end, it has always been with you from the very beginning. It is part of you, it is your innermost center, it grows with you, and one day it comes to a culmination, one day it comes to flowering. The day of death is not the day of death’s coming, it is the flowering. Death was growing within you all this time, now it has reached a peak; and once death reaches a peak you disappear back into the origin.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“Hell is not part of geography, it is part of your psychology, and so is heaven. You create your hell, you create your heaven. And it is not in the future. Herenow somebody is living in heaven and somebody is living in hell – and they may be sitting together, they may be friends. Don’t be worried about hell and heaven; they are just your states. If you live in the mind, you live in hell. If you live in the no-mind, you live in heaven.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“What is the secret to the art of life? The secret is this – live in full awareness. Don’t grope in the darkness; don’t walk in sleep; walk in awareness. Whatsoever you do, no matter what it is – even if it is as insignificant as opening and closing your eyes – do it thoughtfully, do it with awareness. Who knows, everything may depend on that tiny action, on opening and closing your eyes. You may be walking along the road and see a woman, and you may spend your whole life with her! Even opening and closing your eyes, stay alert.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“If you have not lived rightly, you will not be able to die rightly. Death is the final offering. It is the highest; it is the crowning or the peak. Death is the essence and the flowering of life. How can your death be right if you have spent your life wrongly? How can your death be full of meaning if your life has been a waste? How can a tree whose roots are rotten bear sweet fruit? It is impossible.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“The believer is not a seeker. The believer does not want to seek, that’s why he believes. The believer wants to avoid seeking, that’s why he believes. The believer wants to be delivered, saved, he needs a savor. He is always in search of a messiah – somebody who can eat for him, chew for him, digest for him. But if I eat, your hunger is not going to be satisfied. Nobody can save you except yourself.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“A man is really a mature man when he has come to this conclusion: ‘If death is happening to everybody else, then I cannot be an exception.’ Once this conclusion sinks deep into your heart, your life can never be the same again. You cannot remain attached to life in the old way. If it is going to be taken away, what is the point of being so possessive? If it is going to disappear one day, why cling and suffer? If life is not going to remain forever, then why be in such misery, anguish, worry?” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“Life is spread out over a long time – seventy years, one hundred years. Death is intense because it is not spread out – it is in a single moment. Life has to pass one hundred years or seventy years, it cannot be so intense. Death comes in a single moment; it comes whole, not fragmentary. It will be so intense you cannot know anything more intense. But if you are afraid, if before death comes you have escaped, if you have become unconscious because of the fear, you have missed one of the golden opportunities, the golden gate. If your whole life you have been accepting things, when death comes, patiently, passively you will accept and enter into it without any effort to escape. If you can enter death passively, silently, without any effort, death disappears.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“When someone says words that may not feel good in your body, seem sarcastic in tone, and are meant to judge versus uplift you, this only offers you greater opportunities to raise the vibration of your response. By responding to anyone’s criticism with love, compassion and acceptance, you are stepping forward as a master of relationships to create your own experiences, which has nothing to do with how anyone treats you.” ~ Matt Kahn