According to Osho, disappointment is not in the world; the world is neutral. It comes from hope: egoic demands that the future match our desires. Drop personal hope and the urge to win; surrender like a wave moving with the ocean. Align with existence's inner order, and defeat dissolves; spontaneous joy, enduring "lamps" of hope, and effortless victory arise on their own.
Stop expecting life to obey your wishes; relax and go with the flow, and disappointment fades while natural happiness shows up by itself.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, is it only disappointment that one finds in the world? Is it utterly futile to keep hope?
A little boy asks his old granny, “Granny, can you croak?” She says, “Yes, son, why not?” The boy says, “Then croak, please! Because mom was saying: ‘When that old woman croaks we’ll get lots of money.’” But the child can be forgiven; he understood as much as he could. He thinks it’s only a matter of saying “croak”—say it and we’ll get money. He doesn’t know what lies behind death. But even grown-ups behave the same way. Neither do you understand what is said to you, nor do you understand what you see. As long as mind is there, you deform everything. Only free of mind does truth begin to appear. Then this world is wondrous. Then it is not maya. Your mind has made it appear as maya. Your mind has cast the net of illusion upon it. Bhartrihari left palace and home for the forest to meditate.…
IS THIS DISAPPOINTMENT I SEE IN YOUR EYES? Do you know that when disappointment shows in one's eyes it means the fire in one's heart has gone out, that one has become stagnant and dull. Disappointment is a great sin; it restrains the energy of life, it keeps it from moving upwards. Not only is it sin, it is suicide, because the man who is not striving for a better life is moving like an automaton towards death. It is an eternal law that one who does not rise falls back, that one who does not move ahead is pushed backwards. Whenever I see someone falling I know he has stopped trying to scale the peaks of life. Rising to the summit of life is a positive action; falling back, plunging into the dark valleys is the negative aspect of not striving onwards and upwards.
This word “free of hope” must be understood very carefully. In life we are bound more by hope than even by desire. Saints tell you to drop desire—they do not tell you to drop hope. For if you drop hope, even the saints’ own support goes—hope of heaven, hope of moksha; “if not here, then in the hereafter”—the hope. Mahavira’s statement is different: hope must be known and dropped. Without freedom from hope there is no liberation. Hope is the subtlest form of desire. Hope means: what did not happen today, will happen tomorrow. What could not be done today, tomorrow we will do. We missed today; tomorrow we shall not miss. Hope is the convenience of postponing life to tomorrow. We lose every day, yet we keep the hope of tomorrow alive.
Osho, life is suffering, yet man does not wake up. Despite the hell of life, how does man keep on going?
You asked, “Life is suffering...” You have not yet seen this for yourself. You have heard the buddhas say that life is suffering. It is not your own realization, not your own seeing. That won’t do. Borrowed words will prick your chest like thorns; they will not turn into flowers. Borrowed words become thorns—pricking, wounding—but from them the rain of joy does not fall. Have you known that life is suffering? Or have you merely heard the buddhas? Or have you agreed that since the buddhas say so, it must be true? Why would they be wrong? If they knew, they must be right. That is like someone believing that fire burns because others say so. Can you see the difference between others saying “fire burns” and your own knowing that fire burns? One’s own knowing creates a revolution. Then, as they say, once burned by milk, you blow even…
Osho, the world has very cruelly dashed all my hopes. Even if I want to forgive the world, how can I?
Under brisk feet, groaning with pain, it lifts its face toward the young ears on both sides, then falls silent thinking only this: Had the travelers not crushed my womb by their ceaseless walking! my sons too would by now have become young men, my daughter too would have been fit to wed. Within everyone there are a thousand-and-one desires, passions; they are not fulfilled. Even if they are fulfilled, nothing is resolved. One is fulfilled, ten are born. To awaken from this futility is what sannyas is. And then, when you live without hope—Buddha has said—when you live with nirasha, only then for the first time do you live in bliss. But understand the meaning of nirasha. Buddha’s nirasha is not the same as yours. Your meaning of despair is: hope has broken. Buddha’s meaning of nirasha is: there is freedom from hope. In Buddha’s nirasha there is neither…