Must one suffer during the journey to enlightenment or is there a possibility of peace?

Question: Third question: Osho, how can one be free from suffering? Suffering has not bound you; you are bound to suffering. Suffering is not a chain someone else has put on your hands. Suffering is an ornament you have chosen to wear yourself. Understand this first point clearly. Even dust is wondrous, for from dust we are made, and tomorrow we will dissolve back into dust. Dust is our mother—so welcome even dust. Life exists because of death. If death were not, life could not be. Therefore thank death as well. Just think: you are born once and then remain forever—never able to die. Have you ever considered it? If you had to remain eternally, for an infinite time, do whatever you might and yet never be able to die—would you not panic, grow bored, become tormented, exhausted?

Osho, why is there so much suffering in life?

Suffering is a challenge—an opportunity for growth. Suffering is inevitable. Without it, you will not awaken. Who will wake you up? As it is, even suffering is not managing to wake you; you have slowly made peace with it. You are like someone living at a railway station: trains keep coming and going, shunting goes on, noise and clamor continue—yet his sleep does not break. You have slept so deeply that now even suffering does not seem to wake you. But suffering has only one use in existence: it scours you, it awakens you. Suffering is not bad. Without suffering, you would all become heaps of dung. Suffering gives you a soul. Suffering is a challenge. Everything depends on how you take it. Take suffering as a challenge. But you have been taught something else—that suffering is the fruit of your sinful deeds. All nonsense! Suffering is a challenge, an…

Osho, we know suffering; the Buddhas know bliss. Do we really know suffering? If we truly know suffering, then why do we not move toward bliss?

One of Buddha’s monks, Sariputta, asked him, “How may I find bliss?” Buddha said, “Drop the search; just be present here and now. There is no need to seek. Bliss is here. You are the one who has run away; therefore you fail to meet that which is here.” Bliss is not an object that will be attained in the future; it is embedded in the heartbeat that comes with our birth. Bliss is our very nature. There is no need to search for it. It is precisely because we search that we miss. Do not search; seize it this very moment. Do not postpone it till tomorrow. The unhappy person is the one who seeks happiness tomorrow, and the blissful person is the one who does not postpone—who dives into it this very moment. This diving is called dhyana, samadhi. So when you learn the art of diving into…

Osho, does the awareness of life’s futility itself become the starting point of meaning in life?

People only keep saying: childhood was like heaven. If someone presses you to prove it, you will not be able to prove what heaven there was. If a logical person asks, “Prove it—what was heaven in childhood?” you will not be able to prove it. It has become like the experience of deep sleep now. Only a memory remains. You yourself are not fully sure it happened, it is almost forgotten. What does not fit with the structure of your present life gradually slips into oblivion. Slowly you remember only that which matches your mind’s frame; the mismatched we drop. The mismatched is hard to remember. Somewhere within you there is such an experience. In some deep moment of love, if you ever loved and the mind fell still—in a vision of beauty, or gazing at the sky on a moonlit night, and the mind fell silent—you have known a…

Osho, is there only suffering in the world, or is there some happiness too?

Samsara is synonymous with suffering. This question is like asking, “In suffering, is there only suffering, or is there some happiness too?” There is hope for happiness. But happiness never actually happens; that hope proves delusive. The world assures you that happiness will come—but here assurances are never fulfilled. One promise breaks and the world gives you ten more. In giving promises the world is not miserly; it opens its heart and gives in plenty. However much you ask, it shows readiness to give a thousand times more. But it gives nothing. With these very promises as support, it takes your life from you. On the strength of these hopes it makes you run and run; exhausted, you fall into the grave. Even as you fall into the grave your trust in promises has not broken. Then you think, while falling into the grave—there is Vaikuntha, there is heaven; there…