According to Osho, 'future plans' are the mind's projections - attempts to escape the uncertainty of the present and impose control on life. He says planning has limited utility for practical arrangements, but psychologically clinging to plans breeds anxiety and dulls aliveness. Real wisdom is meditative responsiveness: live wholeheartedly now, and allow intelligence to act spontaneously as situations unfold, rather than scripting tomorrow.
Plans are fine for chores, but don’t live in tomorrow—be here now and let your awareness handle what comes.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, can one live without planning? Not counting the dreams about a hazy future, I see that a lot of my mind activity goes into planning -- for next week, for next month. And when I try to act spontaneously I look like a weather vane that does not know how the wind blows.
These are the people who have made the proverb: Man proposes and God disposes. There is no God and nobody disposes. Your very proposition is wrong. Proposing anything from your side means you are not trusting existence. Just be a weather vane which slowly moves without any reluctance, without any resistance, wherever the wind is blowing. It enjoys all directions. The whole of life has to be enjoyed; existence in all its colors has to be enjoyed. But the mind is one of the most stupid things that you are carrying within you. When it is morning it is longing for the evening, when it is evening it is longing for the morning; it is the root cause of all your misery and frustrations. What is the need? I cannot understand why the weather vane should want to know how the wind blows. Can you figure it out? Is there…
Let joy be your discipline... and a discipline is a discipline only when it is out of joy. If it is forced and you are not joyously in it then it is a self-imposed slavery, it is not discipline. You are torturing yourself, you are a kind of masochist -- you enjoy self-torture. Then it is a disease and it cannot liberate you; it will create an imprisonment. Of course, you will be the prison and you will be the prisoner, you will be the gaoled and you will be the gaoler. But still you will suffer and you will become divided -- the gaoled and the gaoler; you will have two beings in you, split. One will be trying to control the other. But that's what has existed in the world down the ages.
Do you teach then that one should not plan for the future at all?
Psychologically one should not plan for the future at all, but that does not mean that practically you should not plan. The difference is great, and has to be understood. If you are going to travel, if you are going to the Himalayas, you will have to go to the railway station and book your ticket a few days ahead. That's simply practical. You cannot say 'When the idea arises to go to the Himalayas I will simply go.' It will be difficult: you may not get a ticket on the train or on the plane. Don't be foolish. But psychologically, yes, don't plan for the future. What is the meaning of psychological? You are here, and in your mind's eye you start trekking in the Himalayas, and you start enjoying -- just in fantasy. You are already there where you are not. This is psychological. This has to be…
[A sannyasin says: I heard... you said that a sannyasin is one who has no past and no future, and that that could be frightening.] The future is a great problem and one has to come to grips with it. Firstly the future is nothing but your unlived past, projected. Whatsoever has remained incomplete in the past, tends to complete itself in the future. So the future is a reflection of the past. When one lives moment to moment, completely, totally, wholly, by and by the future disappears by itself. That's why I say that a sannyasin has no future, because the future is a pathology of the mind. By a sannyasin I mean one who is healthy or who at least is trying to be healthy; who has no wounds. If you don't have any wounds you need not have any future, because there is nothing to heal.
Beloved Osho, what do you feel the next phase of your work will be, once you have found a stable residence, and what do you see your sannyasins doing?
That's really a problem -- an unanswerable one too, because I never think of tomorrow, and I don't know what is going to happen tomorrow. I leave it up to tomorrow! I don't burden myself too much. Today is enough unto itself. Tomorrow I will be there, the problems will be there, the challenges will be there; and I will be available to those challenges, to those problems. My whole life I have lived this way -- without any predecision, without any commitment for the future, without any promise to myself or to anybody else for the next moment. And that has given me the most precious gift of life. I have become attuned with existence; knowing not where I am going, I am going joyously. One thing I know: existence has no goal, and as part of existence I cannot have any goal. The moment you have a goal,…