According to Osho, there is profound hope for no-sayers: no is a necessary, purifying beginning—the seed and womb from which an authentic yes flowers. Use no consciously to burn the false, secondhand beliefs and create inner emptiness; but don't let it become a habit. When the negation is complete, a living, heartfelt yes arises—unborrowed, transformative—unlike the conditioned, parrotlike yes imposed by society.
Saying no can clean out borrowed stuff inside you so a real yes can grow—just use it wisely and don’t get stuck in no.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved master, I feel like such a no-sayer. Is there any hope for no-sayers?
Prem Jinesh, no-saying is a good beginning, but not a good end. No-saying is the seed; yes-saying is the flowering of it. The yes has to come through the no -- the no is the womb of the yes. If you cannot say no, your yes will be impotent. It won't have any meaning at all, it won't transform your life. It will be just on your lips, not in your heart. That's what has happened to the whole of humanity. People have been forced to become yea-sayers, theists, God-believers, without ever knowing the taste of no. The yes has been forced upon them. They have not arrived at the yes, the yes has been handed over to them, it is borrowed. It is a mere belief, and all beliefs are blind. They keep you blind, they keep you in darkness. They keep you stuck and stagnant. There is nothing…
Osho, all my life I have said yes and now that I am here with you and the yes seems really right, there comes only no. What is this no?
And the Master said, 'That's all that I can say or that I am allowed to say. You ask about the goal, I talk about the way, because the goal is so incomprehensible, so mysterious, that nothing can be said about it. I can simply sit in silence. If you have eyes to see, see! If you have ears to hear, hear! Hear my silence, and the song that my silence is, and the music that arises in it. If you cannot hear it, that simply shows you need meditation. So meditate.' The man said, 'Just this much -- one word, "meditation"? Won't you elaborate on it a little?' He wrote again in bigger letters: MEDITATION. That was his elaboration . The man was puzzled and he said, 'But you are simply repeating. Just writing it in bigger letters won't help.' So he wrote again in even bigger letters: MEDITATION.…
Osho explains the meaning of veet nisadha: beyond no, beyond negation.... Drop no-saying; become more and more of a yea-sayer.] Yes, say yes to life. And if one is aware, then one will be surprised that many times we unnecessarily say no... and we harm nobody except ourselves by saying that. No is fear-oriented; yes is love. When you say yes, you are in a loving mood; whenever you are in a loving mood, you say yes -- they both go together. When you say no, you reject life, and when you reject life, life rejects you. Then one becomes more and more sour, more and more bitter, and then there is a vicious circle. When you are bitter you say no more; when you say no more, life goes on rejecting you.
Osho, yesterday you said that when anger is watched consciously, it dissolves. But why is it that when sexual desire arises, even in awareness its intensity persists? Why is it so?
There is no entanglement in the breath. If you try to practice on anger… Anger is not happening every moment; it happens sometimes. And when it happens, it happens with such intensity that you are already going deep into it; so much is at stake in those moments that you may think, “We will look into awareness later; first let’s settle this now.” Lust is very deep, because existence has made it so deep; life depends on it. If lust were so easy that you decided and were freed, perhaps you would not even have been born—because many before you would have become free, and the possibility of your being would have been almost nil. But your parents, and their parents, did not become free; therefore you are. You too will not get free so easily, because your children are also to be—they are waiting: “Do not run away midway.”…
Just close your eyes and go into as deep sadness as you can, and if something happens in the body, allow it... be possessed by sadness. Let it penetrate, as deeply as possible... a dark night of the soul. [Osho had given a sannyasin, who habitually said 'no' to everything, a meditation to say 'yes' to everything for seven days. Tonight she reports back: Once I stopped saying no and started saying yes, and I felt all my confidence going and I felt really shaken, really at a loss.] Mm, that's bound to happen, because no has become your personality. That has become your definition. That's how you know who you are -- a no-sayer. That has become the very centre of your ego -- and no becomes very easily the centre of the ego. In fact, yes cannot become the centre of the ego.