According to Osho, colors like saffron, yellow, white, and deep blue that appear in meditation are inner projections from your mind’s stored sensory essences—not universal symbols with fixed meanings. Their order and quality differ for each person and only indicate that you’re going deeper. Don’t cling to them; let all such experiences cease to transcend the mind and reach the formless silence within.
Those colors are your mind replaying memories as you go inward—notice them, but keep going until everything becomes quiet.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, when one experiences different forms of light and colours in meditation -- such as red, yellow, blue, ochre, etc. -- how can one know to which layers of being they belong? Is there any gradual sequence of colour and light experiences before reaching the ultimate light experience?
There is a Sufi sect which uses black -- black clothes for their fakirs. Black is also very, very meaningful. It shows absence of color, everything absent. It is just the contrary of white. Sufis say that unless we become totally absent, the God cannot be present to us. So one must be like black -- absolutely absent, a nonentity, a nonbeing, just a nothingness. They have chosen black. Colors are meaningful. So with whatsoever you choose you show much. Even your clothes indicate much. Nothing is just accidental. If you have chosen a particular color for your clothes, it is not accidental. You may not be aware why you have chosen it, but science is aware -- and it shows much. Your clothes show much because they belong to your mind, and your mind chooses. You cannot choose without your mind having certain leanings, certain tendencies. So the sequence…
During my lsd experiences I saw a particular sequence of colors: saffron, then yellow, then white, then a deep blue. What do these colors mean?
We do not see every color. The seven colors that we can see are not all the colors that exist -- beyond those seven we are colorblind. Below and beyond these seven colors are infinite ranges of colors. We have not seen them so we will not experience them in our inner journey. All that is felt or experienced is what we have stored within us of the outer world. If a musician goes into meditation he will experience sounds that a nonmusician can never know. A painter will experience colors that a nonpainter can never know. If someone like Van Gogh were to go into meditation, we cannot conceive of the colors he would see or what new combinations he would know. This, too, will differ from individual to individual. Only one thing is certain: when you go deep within on your own inner path, things will begin to…
Osho, what does it mean to wear saffron clothes?
Clothes do not make one a sannyasin—but a sannyasin too has his own kind of clothes. Clothes do not make one a sannyasin, yet a sannyasin may have his own robes. Clothes are a very ordinary thing, but not utterly meaningless. What you wear has many meanings. Why you wear it also has many meanings. One man wears loose clothes. Wearing loose clothes in itself makes no difference, but why does a person choose loose clothes? And why does another choose tight clothes? These are indicators of the person. If a man is very calm, he will not like tight clothes. A taste for tight clothes hints that the person may be quarrelsome, restless, aggressive, sensual. Loose clothes are not suitable for fighting. That is why you cannot dress a soldier in loose clothes; you can dress only a monk in them. A soldier should wear tight clothes—the work is…
Osho, yesterday you said that when anger is watched consciously, it dissolves. But why is it that when sexual desire arises, even in awareness its intensity persists? Why is it so?
There is no entanglement in the breath. If you try to practice on anger… Anger is not happening every moment; it happens sometimes. And when it happens, it happens with such intensity that you are already going deep into it; so much is at stake in those moments that you may think, “We will look into awareness later; first let’s settle this now.” Lust is very deep, because existence has made it so deep; life depends on it. If lust were so easy that you decided and were freed, perhaps you would not even have been born—because many before you would have become free, and the possibility of your being would have been almost nil. But your parents, and their parents, did not become free; therefore you are. You too will not get free so easily, because your children are also to be—they are waiting: “Do not run away midway.”…
Questioner: what is the meaning of wearing orange clothes as a sannyasin?
It is not accidental that a book on sexology like the KAMASUTRA was not written in a country with a cold climate. It is the same with TALES OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS; it is the product of a tropical climate. People living in tropical climates are more sexual because of the sun. Therefore people who were working on sannyas from many directions thought that sexuality could be calmed if the red color were kept away from sannyasins' bodies -- hence ochre was selected. You can ask why ochre was selected and not red. Pure red could well have been selected; it would have been more effective in calming sexuality. But there was a difficulty in choosing red, true out-and-out red; it would have totally prevented red from entering the body. But the body needs some amount of red rays to keep fit, so it would have been bad for the…