According to Osho, personal experiences in spirituality can validate a concept for the experiencer without universal replication or external verification. Religious inquiry is subjective; its fruits are self-evident only within. Others can only infer or recognize it if the same awakening has happened in them. Hence teaching proceeds stepwise, offering only preliminaries until inner capacity matures; real proof comes through one’s own experiment.
You can know a spiritual truth only by feeling it yourself, and others will understand it only when they feel the same inside.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, is it possible—is it conceivable that way? Just as a scientist conducts an experiment: not everyone repeats it at home; yet from what they describe it seems that it could be so.
Between the two there is a fundamental difference. This is not a scientific experiment in that sense; because the basic difference between the experiments of science and of religion is that the scientific experiment is objective. Someone makes an electric fan. It’s not that only the maker can see the fan; those who didn’t make it can also come and see it. If you switch it on, they can see it running; they agree, yes, the fan runs, it throws air. Science conducts its experiments with objects, while religion conducts its experiments with the subject. The experiments I have done with myself cannot, under any circumstances, be visible to you. There is no reason they should be. In truth, beyond my body nothing of me is visible to you. How could it be? The body is an object. But I can never become an object for you, nor can you…Read the full discourse →
Osho, what do those people mean who say that, so that there is no explosion, one should search within with a subtle, refined vision...
But the effortless awakening I speak of—once it arrives, there is no question of its departure, because you did not bring it; it came. Gradually you and awakening are not two; you are the awakening. You did not make even anger “the other,” so how would awakening be “other”? It becomes you. There is no question of its return. Whatever we have truly known cannot be unknown. You cannot undo knowing. Yes, what we have merely learned by rote can wobble. But what is known—like a child who comes to know love; once he knows, he cannot un‑know it. Knowing becomes part of you; it cannot fall away. Reading four books about love is different; that can be forgotten. Through the experiment of awakening, whatever happens in us reveals itself gradually. Awakening is not something that comes from outside; it is your inner being uncovering itself. If it were an…Read the full discourse →
Osho, but in that knowing, Maharaj-ji, can there not be sameness—that as another has known, I may know the same? And may that sameness become available to me.
If you look very closely, such sameness is possible only if I am exactly as the other was. Otherwise it can never be. See the full implications: when I am knowing, my whole personality, my total being, is knowing. Only if your whole personality is exactly as mine, could the event of our knowing be one and the same. And no two persons are ever the same. In fact, forget persons—that is a far-off matter. Pick up a stone from a Delhi street; search the whole earth and you will not find another exactly like it. Pluck a flower from a garden; comb all the forests and you will not find another just like it. Here, each and every thing has its own uniqueness. And that very uniqueness is its soul. In my view, this uniqueness is its soul. A machine has no soul, because a machine is not unique.…Read the full discourse →
Osho, is the experience of the Divine different for each person?
Think of it like this: you go home from this garden, and your children say, “Tell us—what was the garden like?” A painter might tell you by making a painting: “It was like this.” A poet will write a poem—of the trees, of the winds passing through them, of the sun filtering between their leaves. Now a poem and a painting differ greatly. Or perhaps someone is a musician; he will not even write a poem—he will lift his vina. Why write? The winds passed through the trees and there was sound and resonance—he will reproduce that resonance on the vina. The colors in the trees he will translate into tones. The sun and shade he will pour into music. He will play the garden on his vina. Another will write a poem; another will render it on paper. The three expressions will differ. And if you look only at…Read the full discourse →
And people, from a distance, will say: this is not right. Keep quiet—neither call it right nor wrong—until you have experimented within. Life is not so simple that it can be tested from a distance. You have to dive in. If one has no experience of love and he speaks about love—what is the value? And often it happens that those who have no experience of love discuss love the most. The reason is that through discussion they gratify the mind. Since there is no love in their life, they get a little juice by talking of love. Often the people who write love poetry are precisely those who have never experienced love. The poem is a substitute. What they would have done in love, they could not; they are doing with words. So do not go to meet the poet after reading his love poems—otherwise you will be disappointed.Read the full discourse →