Do everything wholeheartedly, give friends freedom, and let excitement and peace sit together—then opposites work like two wings helping you fly.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, how to be with the work and the silence together, friendliness and aloneness, excitement and calmness at the same time?
Deva Majnu, you never ask how to be together with your two eyes, how to be together simultaneously with your two hands, or your two legs. Certainly the same is true about the deeper things of life: work and silence together. What is the problem? You can chop wood -- of course there will be the noise of chopping wood, but you can remain silent. Your silence has nothing to do with it. It is not disturbed by chopping the wood. In fact, if your total energy is involved in chopping the wood, you will find you are silent. That's why I insist: Be total when you are doing something. In this totality you will simultaneously find your silence. You are asking how to be alone and friendly together. Have you ever seen that freak of nature, two children born joined together? Their only use is to be exhibited in…
Beloved Osho, when we're sitting in front of you, hearing your words and feeling your presence, everything feels possible. But when we return to our daily living conditions, things do not seem so clear and we feel cut off from you. You have told us that we should not renounce the world, but be meditative within it. You have also said that we should be spontaneous and mad. How can we integrate the two without alienating our families and friends and the society around us?
Religious people are afraid of hell, and they seek and hanker for heaven. These people are not religious at all, because heaven and hell are both conditions without -- they are not your own qualities. These are the worldly people. That's what worldly people are doing. They say: If this condition is fulfilled, then I will be happy. So happiness depends on the condition. If a palace is there then I will be happy; so much money in the bank balance, then I will be happy; such a beautiful wife, then I will be happy, or such a good, loving husband, then I will be happy. You are happy only when something is fulfilled outside, and you say: If this is not fulfilled, I am unhappy. This is what an unreligious man is. And the so-called religious men also go on seeking heaven, avoiding hell. They are doing the same!…
Beloved Osho, there are always two parts in me related to you. One part of me has the drive to work, run around, organize, jump up and down, fight, talk to press and politicians, just shout from the rooftops. The other part, which has become so much stronger over the last years, just wants to sit at your side and absorb everything -- you, your silence and your words. Was it that I had to be so active just to be able to sit silently now? Osho, please can you say something about your outer and your inner work?
There is no split in you. If a part fights in the outer world for my message to be spread to all nooks and corners, and the other part simply wants to sit close to me, drinking my silence, my presence, my peace, rejoicing in my blissfulness, being ecstatic just without doing anything.... Ordinarily it may seem that these two parts are against each other. They are not. The more you shout from the housetops, the more you will be able to sit silently, close to me; and the more you can sit silently, close to me, the more you will have something to share with the world, something to fight for. Man is both the inner and the outer, and it has been a fallacy, a very ancient fallacy, to condemn one in favor of the other. In the East, people renounce the outer in favor of the inner.…
Osho, you often advise us to follow two courses of action that seem to be incompatible with each other. First you tell us to be completely in the moment, without mind, to be our fear, our joy, or rage. Then you tell us to become detached from our egos, to watch what comes up within ourselves. How can we do both? Please explain.
And what I am doing here is not helping you to become great philosophers. My whole approach is anti-philosophical, anti-logical. My approach is existential. You have to experience; except experience there is no proof of what I am saying. Don't listen to my words, listen to the intervals. Don't be too much obsessed with what I say, become more and more attuned with my silence. The moments when nothing is said are far more pregnant. My message is not in the words but beyond the words. But I can understand, Lisa, your difficulty. That is the difficulty of all logical people -- and the whole world is trained for logic. Here we are doing just a totally different thing. We are trying to undo what the society, the college, the university has done to you. They have made you obsessed with language and logic. Language certainly divides things; that's why…
Osho, sometimes you say, “Live from the feeling within,” and sometimes you say, “Live in tathata with whatever life brings, live in total acceptance.” How can the inner rhythm and the outer situation always be one? Kindly guide.
When your inner instrument gets tuned—have you seen a musician tuning his instrument? He taps, tightens the drum, tightens the strings—likewise, when within you tighten your strings, set your instrument, when music is born within you, when you begin to dance inside, to be ecstatic—then suddenly you see the entire world ready to support you. Helping hands come from all around. In this land we gave God a thousand hands—for this very reason. A lovely image. How can a two-handed God support everyone who needs support? We made Him a thousand-handed God. A thousand is symbolic—for infinite, numberless. And more than a thousand are hard to carve in paintings or statues. The meaning is clear: awaken just once, and with a thousand hands the Divine supports you. From every side His hand reaches for you. His hand has always been reaching—you have been running away. You keep defending yourself from…