According to Osho, youth are the planet’s hope; don’t turn despair inward. Suicide is easy and changes nothing; if you’re ready to die, risk your life in a living rebellion—reject dead traditions, inequality, nationalism, and poverty. Transform society and claim your individuality through love, freedom, and creativity; you may discover life worth celebrating instead of ending.
If you feel like ending your life, use that same courage to fix what’s broken around you—you may find life becomes worth living.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
In holland the suicide rate among teenagers is going up. You once said that the youth is our hope for the future. They themselves don't seem to have any hope. Can you please say something to them?
I still say that the youth is the hope for the future. But your past generations have killed the very phenomenon of being young; they have destroyed the youth. They have lost the love and the trust of the youth, because they have deceived them so many times that it has become impossible for them to believe the older generations. What the older generations have done to young people, they have been doing for centuries. Now it has come to a climax. They have repressed the youth as far as their love is concerned. They have not allowed them to choose their partners; they have been trying to arrange marriages for them -- and every marriage is a failure. I have not come across a marriage which is not a failure. It may look a success from the outside, but you will have to know the inside story. It is…
Osho, life seems meaningless. I want to take sannyas too, but I’m afraid of society—and I hold back. Then, seeing life’s meaninglessness, the thought of suicide comes again and again. What do you say about suicide?
The “meaning” of this life—earning your bread, running a shop, the same routine day after day. Morning you’re up again, round and round like an ox on the mill; evening you return and fall into bed; morning again. The same quarrels, the same chatter, the same ideologies. Sooner or later anyone with a little intelligence will feel: what is going on? What’s the point? I did this forty years; I’ll do it another twenty-five or thirty; then I’ll die. To what end? Only fools never have this thought. It is auspicious that you feel life is meaningless. But it is not right to decide on suicide on that basis. First search further. Another way of living may be possible. I tell you, another way of living exists. I speak from knowing: another way exists. One life heads outward; it is futile. Another turns inward; it is meaningful. Everyone is seeking…
Osho, I always think of committing suicide, and wonder what you would say about my death?
Transform your life, Prashant, into a quest. Question the values that you have accepted. Question all that you have been brought up to believe in. Question the way you have lived up to now. Question your mechanicalness, question your robotlike existence. Yes, something drastic has to be done, but it is not suicide. It won't help, it won't change you; you will be back again in another womb somewhere. Millions of stupid couples are making love every moment. Beware! You will be caught in some net somewhere. And you will get only what you deserve, remember; you can't get more than you deserve. You get the womb that is right for you. And dying in suicide is dying in such anguish, because it is one of the most unnatural things to do, most abnormal things to do. No animal commits suicide, no tree ever commits suicide -- only man. Only…
Beloved Osho, I come from a family where there are four suicides on the maternal side, including my grandmother. How does this affect one's death? What helps to overcome this perversion of death which runs as a theme through the family?
Heidegger has said: "Death isolates me and makes of me an individual." It is my death, not that of the multitude to which I belong. Each of us dies his own death; death cannot be repeated. I can sit an examination twice, or thrice; compare my second marriage with my first, and so on and so forth. I die only once. I can get married as many times as I like, I can change my jobs as many times as I like, I can change my town as many times as I like... but I die only once. Death is so challenging because it is at once certain and uncertain. That it will come is certain, when it will do so is uncertain. Hence there is great curiosity about death, about what it is. One wants to know about it. And there is nothing morbid about this contemplation of death.…
Osho, I no longer feel like staying in this body; I feel like taking leave of it. Yet for your sake I am pulled back from leaving. I cannot explain anything. I don’t even know what to write. Osho, what should I say?
Anand Bharti, the body is a temple. One who stands for the deity cannot be against the deity’s house. The Divine has made a dwelling in this body. Honor this body, accept it, and feel gratitude toward the Divine for it. But I know where this repeated impulse to leave the body comes from. For centuries you have been taught enmity toward the body. For centuries the same conditioning has been given: the body is the enemy; it must be destroyed, dropped; one must contrive never to be born in a body again. The body has been so vilified that naturally this conditioning has seeped into the blood, bones, flesh, and marrow. Yet the truth is exactly the opposite: it is the mind that is to be dropped, not the body. The mind is man-made; the body is a gift of God. The body is neither Hindu nor Muslim, neither…