According to Osho, beginning and end are one; non-attachment must be present from the first step as a seed and matures into effortless spontaneity at the end. Early on it requires conscious practice, alertness, and struggle with old patterns; later it becomes your natural flow of desirelessness. Start now—the first step already contains the last.
It’s both: start letting go now like planting a seed, and over time it grows into effortless freedom.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Patanjali has stressed the importance of non-attachment, that is, cessation of desires, for being rooted in oneself. But is non-attachment really at the beginning of the journey, or at the very end?
You have to grow. Only then can you create love in others. It cannot be demanded. If you demand it, it can become an attachment, but not love. So the child will love the mother because she is his mother. The mother or the father, they become the goals. These are relationships, not love. Then he becomes attached to the family, and family is a destructive force because the family of the neighbor is separate. It is not lovable because you don't belong to it. Then your community, your nation... but the neighboring nation is the enemy. You cannot love the whole humanity. Your family is the root cause. And the family has not been bringing you to be a lovable person, and a loving person. It is forcing some relationships. Attachment is a relationship, and love -- love is a state of mind. Your father will not say to…
Osho, is action without attachment a practice of sadhana, or is it the effortless flowering of attainment? Please clarify.
All the words man has are such that they say something, explain something—and also create some misunderstanding and confusion. Take, for example, a road that leads to the destination. The moment a man steps onto the road, in one sense he is connected with the destination, because the road is connected to it. If he has walked one step on the road, he has also, in a sense, come one step closer to the goal. But in another sense, where has he reached the destination? He is still only on the road; much remains to be walked. If the destination is a hundred steps away, even after walking ninety-nine steps he is still on the road, not yet at the goal. So sadhana and siddhi are like the road and the destination—and non-attachment (anasakti) is both. When you begin, it is sadhana; when it is complete, it is siddhi. At…
Beloved Osho, is vairagya, nonattachment, a method, a means, an intermediate stage, or an end in itself?
It is all -- because means and ends are not two things. The way and the goal are not two things. The way is just the beginning of the goal, and the goal is just the ending of the way. So please, don't divide, and don't think in terms of the means being different from the end. Means are the end. Once you can conceive of this, the quality of your effort will change immediately. Ordinarily mind is always concerned with the end; means are used, exploited, to reach the end. If you could avoid the means you would like to avoid them; if you could achieve the end directly without any means, if you could reach the goal without the way, without the path, you would like to do so. You would like to reach the goal immediately. The mind divides ends and means; end is meaningful, means are…
Osho, what is attachment? Why do we become so attached to things, ideas and persons? And is there freedom from attachment?
“So do one thing,” she told the courtesan. “I will pay you whatever you ask. Go to him at midnight. He meditates at midnight—has done so for thirty years. I want to know whether meditation has happened or not before I die. His hut door is only latched; no one ever goes there. Open it and go in. Whatever he says, notice every word and tell me. Go and embrace him—then come back and report. Before I die, I want to be sure that my service was not in vain.” The courtesan went. She opened the door. The monk was startled. He opened his eyes—he had been sitting in meditation—and shouted, “You wicked woman! Why are you here? Get out! What need have you to come at midnight?” But his tongue faltered; his body trembled. The woman had taken her money; she went right in. He cried, “Stay back! Why…
This non-attachment—someone has asked—how can it arise in an ordinary person?
All are ordinary until non-attachment arises. So the question is not how it can come to “ordinary” people. Until it comes, everyone is ordinary; only when it flowers does extraordinariness bear fruit in life. Hence there are not two paths—one for the ordinary and one for the extraordinary—because “extraordinary” only means one who has attained non-attachment. Ask instead: how to attain it? How is this non-attachment to be realized? And before we ask that, first see how it was missed in the first place. How have we gone astray from non-attachment? In Krishna’s vision, non-attachment is our very nature. How did we miss our nature? So it is not that we have to do some special practice to acquire non-attachment. We only need to understand how we drifted from our nature. How did we lose non-attachment? Someone came to me and said, “I am searching for God.” I asked him,…