According to Osho, non-attachment arises not by special effort for 'ordinary' people but by seeing that non-attachment is your very nature. Drop the search to acquire it; inquire how you drifted from it. Like water beyond hot and cold, awareness rests in the middle; when this is understood, attachment/renunciation fall away and your innate freedom flowers.
You don’t have to get non-attachment; it’s already you—just notice how you began clinging and relax back to your calm center.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
This non-attachment—someone has asked—how can it arise in an ordinary person?
All are ordinary until non-attachment arises. So the question is not how it can come to “ordinary” people. Until it comes, everyone is ordinary; only when it flowers does extraordinariness bear fruit in life. Hence there are not two paths—one for the ordinary and one for the extraordinary—because “extraordinary” only means one who has attained non-attachment. Ask instead: how to attain it? How is this non-attachment to be realized? And before we ask that, first see how it was missed in the first place. How have we gone astray from non-attachment? In Krishna’s vision, non-attachment is our very nature. How did we miss our nature? So it is not that we have to do some special practice to acquire non-attachment. We only need to understand how we drifted from our nature. How did we lose non-attachment? Someone came to me and said, “I am searching for God.” I asked him,…
Questioner: krishna says that by giving up desiring and attachment, which he calls niskamta and anasakti respectively, one is released from bondage and he attains to the supreme. But it is so difficult for ordinary men and women to be free of desiring and attachment. Please explain the significance of desirelessness and non-attachment and ways to achieve them.
In the first place try to understand the meaning of the word anasakti or non-attachment. It is unfortunately one of the most misunderstood words. Non-attachment is generally taken to mean aversion, but it is not aversion. Aversion is a kind of attachment -- the opposite of attachment. Someone is attached to sex and someone else is attached to its opposite -- brahmacharya or celibacy. Someone is attached to wealth; he is running after wealth, and someone else is attached to renunciation of wealth; he is running away from wealth. One person is obsessed with the idea of looking handsome; another person is obsessed with the idea of looking ugly. But those who are averse to sex, money or good looks appear to be non-attached because their attachments are negative. Attachment has two faces, positive and negative. You can fancy a thing so much that you madly run after it, you…
Osho, what is attachment? Why do we become so attached to things, ideas and persons? And is there freedom from attachment?
“So do one thing,” she told the courtesan. “I will pay you whatever you ask. Go to him at midnight. He meditates at midnight—has done so for thirty years. I want to know whether meditation has happened or not before I die. His hut door is only latched; no one ever goes there. Open it and go in. Whatever he says, notice every word and tell me. Go and embrace him—then come back and report. Before I die, I want to be sure that my service was not in vain.” The courtesan went. She opened the door. The monk was startled. He opened his eyes—he had been sitting in meditation—and shouted, “You wicked woman! Why are you here? Get out! What need have you to come at midnight?” But his tongue faltered; his body trembled. The woman had taken her money; she went right in. He cried, “Stay back! Why…
Osho, is action without attachment a practice of sadhana, or is it the effortless flowering of attainment? Please clarify.
All the words man has are such that they say something, explain something—and also create some misunderstanding and confusion. Take, for example, a road that leads to the destination. The moment a man steps onto the road, in one sense he is connected with the destination, because the road is connected to it. If he has walked one step on the road, he has also, in a sense, come one step closer to the goal. But in another sense, where has he reached the destination? He is still only on the road; much remains to be walked. If the destination is a hundred steps away, even after walking ninety-nine steps he is still on the road, not yet at the goal. So sadhana and siddhi are like the road and the destination—and non-attachment (anasakti) is both. When you begin, it is sadhana; when it is complete, it is siddhi. At…
Question: THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF NONATTACHMENT: THE ORDINARY AND THE SUBLIME. THAT ATTITUDE OF NONATTACHMENT TO THE OBJECTS OF DESIRE IN WHICH THE SEEKER KNOWS THAT HE IS NEITHER THE DOER NOR THE ENJOYER, NEITHER THE RESTRAINED NOR THE RESTRAINER, IS CALLED ORDINARY NONATTACHMENT. HE KNOWS THAT WHATEVER FACES HIM IN THIS LIFE IS THE RESULT OF THE DEEDS OF HIS PAST LIFE. WHETHER IN PLEASURE OR IN PAIN, HE CAN DO NOTHING. INDULGENCE IS BUT A DISEASE AND AFFLUENCE OF ALL KINDS A STOREHOUSE OF ADVERSITY. EVERY UNION LEADS INEVITABLY TO SEPARATION. THE IGNORANT SUFFER THE MALADIES OF MENTAL ANXIETY. ALL MATERIAL THINGS ARE PERISHABLE, BECAUSE TIME IS CONSTANTLY DEVOURING THEM. THROUGH THE UNDERSTANDING OF SCRIPTURAL PRECEPTS, ONE'S FAITH IN MATERIAL THINGS IS UPROOTED AND ONE'S MIND FREED OF THEM. THIS IS CALLED ORDINARY NONATTACHMENT.