According to Osho, what we call an 'accident' is usually our ignorance of subtle causes. Events arise from a vast, interconnected chain we don’t yet perceive; with fuller science or awareness, they would appear orderly, not random. Premonitions and shared hunches hint at these hidden links. This isn’t blind fate, but causality too fine for our current understanding.
Nothing happens for no reason; we just don’t see the reasons yet.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, what is the reason behind so-called accidental events?
No event is accidental. In fact, we call an event “accidental” when we cannot discover its cause. There are events whose causes elude our understanding, but no event is accidental.
Osho, ... that in bringing something into being we search out an idea and make a plan, and still there will be one thing we cannot plan for... this is an... accident.
No. I ask because, in fact, any such event only tells us this: what life is, how it unfolds, and how it comes to an end. We do not know it, nor do we seem to have any ultimate authority over it — that is all the event reveals. Only this much — so negative.
You sometimes use the word 'accident' or 'accidental' to describe an event. Are there any accidents in life in reality?
In reality there are only accidents and accidents, and nothing else. The factual world is the world of cause and effect; the world of truth is the world of freedom. Freedom means that causes don't work at all. Freedom means that now everything is accidental, now everything is possible. Nothing is impossible in the world of reality. From the moment you become enlightened everything becomes possible. Now no cause and effect have any hold on you. But I understand your question. It comes again from the same ideology -- that how can anything be accidental? The world is confined to cause and effect. Everything can be reduced to cause and effect. Nothing happens as a miracle. That is the scientific approach. That's why men like B. F. Skinner or Pavlov and other behaviourists go on saying that the idea of freedom is just stupid. There is no freedom. Man has…
Osho, are there any meaningless coincidences, or is everything a gigantic, precise mechanism?
If somebody asks you why you have fallen in love with a woman or a man, what you are going to say? And whatsoever you will say will look very silly. The color of the eyes, somebody will say -- now, what nonsense is this? -- or the length of the nose, or the shape of the eyes, or the way she walks... or the way he stands . .. What nonsense! What it has to do with love? You are just finding something so that you can pretend to be rational, conscious, in control. And just as people fall in love they fall out. And when they fall out it is the same nose, the same color of the eyes, the same hairstyle, the same woman, the same man. And what has happened now? Nothing has changed. You can fall in love today and you can fall out tomorrow.…
Question: OSHO, ARE THERE REALLY ANY COINCIDENCES? Prem Doug, MAN WHILE HE IS UNCONSCIOUS lives only in coincidences; his life consists of only coincidences and nothing else. The unconscious life is an accidental life. Only the conscious man goes beyond the accidental and enters into the intrinsic. The conscious man transcends coincidences. Without being totally conscious you are a victim of all kinds of unknown forces that surround you. You don't know why things are happening to you, why you have done this and why not that, why you have chosen this and why not that. When I passed my matriculation and went to university I wanted to fill in my form, but I had no fountain pen with me.