According to Osho, Freud’s death‑drive is not a spiritual aberration but a deep insight into existence’s duality: life always carries death as its shadow. Eastern wisdom names this dispassion (vairagya) and culminates in nirvana—freedom from return. Honoring both drives matures us, and through awareness we discover our true nature beyond life and death.
It’s normal to want both to live and to rest forever; seeing both clearly helps you find the quiet you that is beyond them.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, the psychologist Sigmund Freud spoke of the death-drive, Thanatos. Yesterday you spoke of jiveshana, Eros. Do you call Freud’s notion a spiritual aberration of the modern age? Kindly explain.
The third discovery is India’s. It is this: we are neither life nor death; these two are our legs. Duality appears such only when we fail to see the third. If the third becomes visible… synthesis. Understand it so: the notion of Eros, the life-drive, is the thesis. Then Thanatos, the death-drive, is the antithesis. If only the two remain, there will only be conflict; resolution becomes difficult. Had Freud lived a little longer—he did not—or in some next birth searched further, the synthesis, the dialogue, might have happened too: the final harmony, when he would have grasped the witness. He was on the right path; the destination was still incomplete, but the way was not wrong. The goal had not yet arrived; the journey was unfinished, but the direction was right. From life he had reached death; now only one move remained: to transcend both life and death. Astavakra…
Osho, the life I am living, and the way I am living—Is this what life is?
He didn’t listen. He came just now, greatly repentant—didn’t become chief minister, and is no longer even a minister. He said, Now tell me meditation. I said: Now come again—when the chance to become chief minister arises once more in your life. People want meditation free—without giving up anything. And meditation is the most precious thing in life. There is no gem greater than it. Even if you give up everything for it—you have lost nothing. Take to meditation, Madhukar! Your very name is sweet—Madhukar, honeybee! Within, the true flower is in bloom. Come inside. Hum its song there. There is the real nectar. Whoever has drunk it is satisfied forever. If to the blossoming mangoes the maddened bees do not come, how am I to know that springtime has arrived? Granted, the sky seems open now and washed, wide-spread, blue upon blue, the frost-burned lawn turns yellow-green again on…
Question: Osho, A dervish was on a sea voyage. As per custom, all the passengers came to him one by one and asked for wise counsel. The dervish told everyone the same thing: “Keep awareness of death until you come to know death itself.” It was a dervish’s meditation aphorism. But it did not appeal to any of the travelers. A little later a terrible storm arose at sea. Panic swept the whole ship. The sailors and the passengers all fell to their knees and began praying to God to save the ship. Yet amid this terror the dervish sat unperturbed and serene. Then the sea, too, grew calm. A fellow traveler asked the dervish, “Did you not see that during that dreadful storm there was nothing between us and death but a plank?” “Yes, I knew,” the dervish replied, “that at sea it is always so.
The East is obsessed with death; the West with sex. A materialist is bound to be obsessed with sex, and the spiritualist obsessed with death; and both are obsessions. And to live a life with any obsession, western or eastern, is to live almost without living... it is to miss the whole opportunity. The East and West are two sides of the same coin, and so are death and sex. Sex is the energy, the beginning of life; and death is the culmination of life. It is no coincidence that millions of people never know what real orgasm is. It is for the simple reason that unless you are ready to go into a sort of death, you cannot know what orgasm is. And nobody wants to die, everybody wants to live, to renew life again and again.
Verse (Sanskrit): Chapter 31 : Part 2 WEAPONS OF EVIL Even in victory, there is no beauty, And who calls it beautiful Is one who delights in slaughter. He who delights in slaughter Will not succeed in his ambition to rule the world. (The things of good omen favour the left. The things of ill omen favour the right. The lieutenant-general stands on the left, The general stands on the right. That is to say, it is celebrated as a Funeral Rite.) The slaying of multitudes should be mourned with sorrow. A victory should be celebrated with the Funeral Rite. Transliteration: Chapter 31 : Part 2 WEAPONS OF EVIL Even in victory, there is no beauty, And who calls it beautiful Is one who delights in slaughter. He who delights in slaughter Will not succeed in his ambition to rule the world. (The things of good omen favour the left.