“The idea behind Nowhere – choosing to sit still long enough to turn inward – is at heart a simple one. If your car is broken, you don’t try to find ways to repaint its chassis; most of our problems – and therefore our solutions, our peace of mind – lie within. To hurry around trying to find happiness outside ourselves make about as much sense as the comical figure in the Islamic parable who, having lost a key in his living room, goes out into the street to look for it because there’s more light there.” ~ Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness
“Going nowhere, isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.” ~ Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness
“Not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it’s often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources – it’s a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources. Going nowhere is not about austerity so much as about coming closer to one’s senses.” ~ Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness
“With machines coming to seem part of our nervous systems, while increasing their speed every season, we’ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off – our holy days, as some would have it; our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.” ~ Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness
“Making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.” ~ Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness
“Sitting still with his aged Japanese friend, sipping Courvoisier, and listening to the crickets deep into the night, was the closest he’d come to finding lasting happiness, the kind that doesn’t change even when life throws up one of its regular challenges and disruptions.” ~ Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness
“If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.” ~ Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz
“People should be taught that nobody can love twenty-four hours a day; rest periods are needed. And nobody can love on order. Love is a spontaneous phenomenon. Whenever it happens, it happens, and whenever it doesn’t happen it doesn’t happen. Nothing can be done about it. If you do anything, you will create a pseudo phenomenon, an acting. Real lovers, intelligent lovers, will make each other alert to the phenomenon: ‘When I want to be alone that does not mean that I am rejecting you. In fact, it is because of your love that you have made it possible for me to be alone.’ And if your woman wants to be left alone for one night, for a few days, you will not feel hurt. You will not say that you have been rejected, that your love has not been received and welcomed. You will respect her decision to be alone for a few days. In fact, you will be happy! Your love was so much that she is feeling empty; now she needs rest to become full again. This is intelligence.” ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships
“In Latin there is a dictum: agere sequitur esse – to do follows to be; action follows being. It is tremendously beautiful. Don’t try to change your action – try to find out your being, and action will follow. The action is secondary; being is primary. Action is something that you do; being is something that you are. Action comes out of you, but action is just a fragment. Even if all of your actions are collected together they will not be equal to your being because all actions collected together will be your past. What about your future? Your being contains your past, your future, your present; your being contains your eternity. Your actions, even if all collected, will just be of the past. Past is limited, future is unlimited. That which has happened is limited; it can be defined, it has already happened. That which has not happened is unlimited, indefinable. Your being contains eternity, your actions contain only your past.” ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships
“Unless you know yourself as eternal beings, part of the whole, you will remain afraid of death. The fear of death is simply because you are not aware of your eternal source of life. Once the eternity of your being is realized, death becomes the greatest lie in existence. Death has never happened, never happens, never will happen, because that which is, remains always – in different forms, on different levels, but there is no discontinuity. Eternity in the past and eternity in the future both belong to you. And the present moment becomes a meeting point of two eternities: one going toward the past, one going toward the future.” ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships
“The very idea of bringing up children is nonsense. You can help at the most, you cannot ‘bring them up.’ The very idea of building up children is nonsense – not only nonsense, very harmful, immensely harmful. You cannot build… A child is not a thing, not like a building. A child is like a tree. Yes, you can help. You can prepare soil, you can put in fertilizers, you can water, you can watch whether sun reaches the plant or not – that’s all. But it is not that you are building up the plant, it is coming up on its own. You can help, but you cannot bring it up and you cannot build it up.” ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships
If through sex you fall into harmony, if through love you become relaxed – if love is not just throwing energy because you don’t know what to do with it, if it is not just a relief but a relaxation, if you relax into your woman and your woman relaxes into you – if for a few seconds, for a few moments or a few hours you forget who you are, and you are completely lost in oblivion, you will come out of it purer, more innocent, more virgin. And you will have a different type of being – at ease, centered, rooted.” ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships
“Love is a form of work or a form of courage. Specifically, it is work or courage directed toward the nurture of our own or another’s spiritual growth. We may work or exert courage in directions other than toward spiritual growth, and for this reason all work and all courage is not love. But since it requires the extension of ourselves, love is always either work or courage. If an act is not an of work or courage, then it is not an act of love. There are no exceptions.” ~ Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
“I say to you, you are absolutely free, unconditionally free. Don’t avoid the responsibility; avoiding is not going to help. The sooner you accept it the better, because immediately you can start creating yourself. And the moment you create yourself great joy arises, and when you have completed yourself, the way you wanted to, there is immense contentment, just as when a painter finishes his painting, the last touch, and a great contentment arises in his heart. A job well done brings great peace. One feels that one has participated with the whole.” ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships
“If you love a person and live the whole life with him or with her, a great intimacy will grow and love will have deeper and deeper revelations to make to you. It is not possible if you go on changing partners very often. It is as if you go on changing a tree from one place to another, then another; then it never grows roots anywhere. To grow roots, a tree needs to remain in one place. Then it goes deeper; then it becomes stronger. Intimacy is good, and to remain in one commitment is beautiful, but the basic necessity is love. If a tree is rooted in a place where there are only rocks and they are killing the tree, then it is better to remove it. Then don’t insist that it should remain in the one place. Remain true to life – remove the tree, because now it is going against life.” ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships
“When you say to a woman or a man, ‘I love you,’ you are simply saying, ‘I cannot be deceived by your body, I have seen you. Your body may become old but I have seen you, the bodiless you. I have seen your innermost core, the core that is divine.’ Liking is superficial. Love penetrates and goes to the very core of the person, touches the very soul of the person.” ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships
“Many times I say learn the art of love, but what I really mean is: Learn the art of removing all that hinders love. It is a negative process. It is like digging a well: You go on removing many layers of earth, stones, rocks, and then suddenly there is water. The water was always there; it was an undercurrent. Now you have removed all the barriers, the water is available. So is love: Love is the undercurrent of your being. It is already flowing, but there are many rocks, many layers of earth to be removed.” ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships
“When you don’t need a person at all, when you are totally sufficient unto yourself, when you can be alone and tremendously happy and ecstatic, then love is possible. But then, too, you cannot be certain whether the other’s love is real or not – you can be certain about only one thing: whether your love is real. How can you be certain about the other? But then there is no need. This continuous anxiety about whether the other’s love is real or not simply shows one thing: that your love is not real. Otherwise, who bothers? Why be worried about it? Enjoy it while it lasts, be together while you can be together! It is a fiction, but you need fiction.” ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships
“Unless meditation is achieved, love remains a misery. Once you have learned how to live alone, once you have learned how to enjoy your simple existence, for no reason at all, then there is a possibility of solving the second, more complicated problem of two persons being together. Only two meditators can live in love – and then love will not be a koan. But then it will not be a relationship, either, in the sense that you understand it. It will be simply a state of love, not a state of relationship.” ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships