According to Osho, live with intensity by being totally present and total in each act, breathing and feeling the body, saying a clean yes or no, risking truth and love, and letting creativity flow. Alternate passionate engagement with meditative witnessing and rest. Cut distractions, care for your energy, and remember death—impermanence sharpens awareness. Then aliveness becomes a luminous flame, not strain.
Do one thing with your whole heart, stay aware of your breath and body, be honest, dare a little, create and love, rest well, and remember life is short.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
That intensity—yes, how to live it?
I can’t provide Osho’s exact words without the source text; here is a neutral response on living with intensity: 1) Be totally present: Do one thing at a time, with your whole attention. Half-heartedness dilutes energy. 2) Breathe and feel: Let the breath be deep and unhurried; stay in the body. Sensation anchors intensity without strain. 3) Speak cleanly: Say yes when it’s yes, no when it’s no. Clarity concentrates energy. 4) Take small risks daily: Tell a simple truth, try a new action, show a real feeling. Risk keeps the flame alive. 5) Cut distractions: When engaged, silence the unnecessary—notifications, background noise, idle chatter. 6) Care for your energy: Sleep, move, eat simply. A clear system can sustain a bright flame. 7) Practice witnessing: Sit 20 minutes daily; notice breath, sensations, thoughts—without pushing or holding. Awareness sharpens without tension. 8) Create and love: Channel intensity into art, service, relationship.…
Osho, how can the feeling of bliss be cultivated? How to taste that throb of bliss, that thrill, that excitement, that dance of bliss? How can life be filled with it?
The man said, “What difficulty is there in that? We all do the same.” The fakir replied, “If only! The day everyone on earth does just this, no one will need to go anywhere to seek liberation. For when you sleep, you don’t only sleep—you do a thousand other things. Your sleep is a long disturbance, a long agony, a long nightmare. When you eat, you don’t only eat—you do a thousand things. You appear to be eating but you are also at your shop, or in court fighting a case. Whatever you do, you do a thousand other things along with it. No act of yours gathers your whole being. “There is only one practice: when you do something, do it totally. When you work, total work. When you rest, total rest.” Then you keep traveling between the two banks of bliss, day and night—swinging from one to the…
Some friends have also asked: this morning I spoke on “the art of living.” Let me say more precisely what I mean by “the art of living.”
The fakir laughed: “If there are no bones in a wooden statue, how can there be God in it? Go—there is a lot of night left. Two more statues are there. Bring them. You warm yourself; I will warm myself.” That very night the fakir was thrown out of the temple into the cold—because the priest saw God in the wooden statues and did not care that this living God would be cold outside. He was thrown out. In the morning when the priest went out, he saw the fakir sitting by the milestone at the roadside, hands folded in prayer. He was as amazed as he had been at night. He shook him and said, “Madman! What are you doing? Praying to a stone?” The fakir said, “I see God everywhere—everywhere! Last night I burned the statue precisely to see how deeply you see God. You were not ready…
Beloved Osho, would you talk some more on the art of how to be fully alive?
A meditator neither bothers about the past that is gone, nor bothers about the future that has not come yet. He is focused in the present, and whatever he has, he enjoys it to its full. He squeezes the juice of the present moment to its maximum. Naturally, his life is not the life of a beggar. He is never asking for more, although he is living at the maximum with totality and intensity. Otherwise, you have to be satisfied. That's what your religions teach you -- to be satisfied with little. Satisfaction and contentment have been raised to great values. They are simply opium to the people so that you can at least tolerate the suffering that surrounds you and the misery in which you are drowning continuously. A man is playing golf, and he hits his ball into the woods. He goes to retrieve it and comes upon…
Beloved Osho, why such an enormous fear of allowing myself to be really alive?
The Jews have been tortured for two thousand years because they crucified Jesus, and now this is a crucifixion for all the Jews -- Israel. They have poured their money into it, they have come from faraway lands, they have been working hard, because it is a desert; and besides there is continuous harassment from the Mohammedans who are not going to accept that Israel is not theirs. On their maps they still show Palestine, not Israel. The trouble has increased more and more just now, in a way in which the Jews were not even aware would happen. There are outside enemies all around, and now there are inside enemies. Firstly, the Mohammedans who have been living for centuries in the land are still there; they function as informers to the Mohammedans, because their devotion is to Mohammedanism. And now something new, inconceivable is happening... because some Jews have…