Should we remain continuously calm and aware?

Therefore, the friend who has asked: “Should we remain continuously calm and aware?”

So, first, bid farewell to false answers. First point: never ask borrowed questions in life; they have no worth. Second point: do not be content with secondhand answers; there is no solution in them—send them away. Let all answers be dismissed. Let your own question remain alone inside, like a burning ember. Accept no answer given by memory or by what you have learned. Then, like an ember, the question will begin to sear your life-breath; like an arrow, it will start to pierce within. And a moment will come when your very soul will answer. Only that answer will be meaningful in your life. Only that answer will transform your life. To live with a question is an art. To give a quick answer is no art. What is needed is to live with the question. The one who quietly hides his question in his heart like a seed…

Osho, to abide in oneself beyond the knower, knowledge, and the known—can one live in that state for an entire lifetime? Just as a lake is sometimes calm, sometimes playful, and sometimes stormy, does the self-realized one remain unaffected by worldly circumstances in the same way? Osho, dispel my ignorance!

Spring means harmony between season and mood. Meditation means harmony between you and the whole. You become harmonious. Whatever is, is perfectly okay—accepted. Nowhere any refusal, nowhere any opposition. Whatever is happening is auspicious. That is trust; that is meditation. Such meditation naturally takes you into an altogether new experience. Storms will rise; they will not stop because you meditate. Diseases will not stop coming to the body because you meditate. They will come. A thorn will sometimes pierce the foot. Raman had cancer; so did Ramakrishna—great storms came! Ramakrishna got cancer of the throat; he could neither eat nor drink. Vivekananda said to him, “What is not in your power! Why don’t you pray to the Lord at least to allow food and water to pass? We suffer watching you writhe.” Ramakrishna said, “Ah, it never even occurred to me to pray. How could it occur—to one whose prayer…

Osho, may that song—the nightingale’s colorful, new melody—happen just once. May the bud’s eye open, may the garden awaken.

I tell you: pundits do not reach; the ignorant reach. By “ignorant” I mean one who has absolutely rejected borrowed knowledge from outside and who has dived within and sat there. One who has said, “What is experienced within me—that alone is mine; the rest is borrowed, stale, leftovers.” You do not wear other people’s shoes, you do not wear other people’s clothes—and you borrow other people’s knowledge? You do not eat food left over by others, and yet the words that have become leftovers on a thousand lips you press to your chest? This is the hindrance. Otherwise close your eyes, and there is nothing but his radiance. We are that which we are not. Feelings that never took form, words that were never spoken, tones submerged in the sorrow of living that could not resound, that never became a raga, the ultimate moments on life’s uncharted margins— of…

Osho, “If there is awareness, the other is always beneficial.” Is this what you mean by a buddha, an awakened one?

If there is awareness, the other is neither beneficial nor harmful; if there is awareness, you draw your well-being from everywhere. Without awareness, you draw your ill-being from everywhere. If there is awakening, wherever you are, heaven begins to be created—because of your awakening. If there is no awakening, wherever you are, the stench of hell begins to rise—because of you. Understand it this way: to live in stupor builds hell; to live awake builds heaven. No one has ever suffered while awake. No one has ever known happiness while asleep. In sleep, at most you can hope for happiness; happiness never arrives. In the hope of happiness you can bear a great deal of suffering, but happiness never arrives. What comes with wakefulness—that alone is happiness. There is no relation to the other at all. If you understand rightly, there is no other; it is you. Your idea about…

Osho, you say, “As He wills, let us become mere instruments; whatever role in life we have been given, let us fulfill it.” But letting what happens happen—i.e., flowing along with the body, mind, and ego—gives rise to suffering. So should we keep applying the principle of instrumentality even in relation to the body, mind, and ego, and go on suffering? How do we solve the riddle between the principle of instrumentality and the continuous reality of suffering?

That supreme bliss is beyond both pleasure and pain. It is neither like night nor like day. It is twilight. The sun has set, night has not yet come; the light remains—very gentle, sweet, non-aggressive—that is twilight. Morning has come, the sun is not yet risen, the night has gone—such is the twilight. One who abides in that twilight—that is what we call prayer. That is why Hindus call their prayer sandhya. Sandhya means one who has stopped in between the dualities, who has found the truce between the two. Between pleasure and pain, love and hate, victory and defeat, night and day, life and death—one who has found the pact and stands in that concord. Seek that interval of conjunction. Krishna says, it is simple to find. If you cease to be the doer, you will find it instantly. It is only through your doer-ship that you keep missing.…