According to Osho, escaping from oneself means fleeing life’s challenges, relationships, and responsibilities under religious pretexts—outsourcing your conscience to gurus, wearing renunciation as a mask, and turning living into ‘unpleasant duty.’ True religion doesn’t promote flight; it infuses your ordinary home with sacredness, invites intelligent responsibility, and transforms burdens into joyous participation.
It’s when you try to run from your own problems by calling it ‘spiritual,’ instead of staying present, loving, and fixing what’s in front of you.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
A friend has asked: Osho, what is the difference between sin and virtue? And as long as the mind is filled with sin, how can there be faith, devotion, feeling? How will prayer happen while the mind is full of sin? So first let the mind be filled with virtue; then prayer will happen!
It sounds right. It seems reasonable. Yet it is not right—and it is full of unawareness. It sounds right to say, “As long as the mind is full of sin, how can there be prayer!” But that is like a physician saying, “As long as you are sick, how can I give you medicine! First get well and healthy, and then take the medicine.” But once you are well, why would you need medicine? If you decide to pray only after you’ve dropped all sin, you will never get the chance to pray. As long as there is sin, you won’t pray. And when there is no sin left, why pray? What would be the meaning of prayer then? Prayer is the medicine. Therefore, one has to pray while still a sinner. And another thing: how will sin go? It cannot go without prayer. Those who try to remove sin…
Osho, what family or social discontent did Mahavira have? Isn’t his renunciation an escape from responsibilities?
Such a person can rightly be called an escapist—not a person like Mahavira. He raises no new entanglements and flees from no fear; out of understanding, out of a knowing consciousness, he changes staircases—he goes to another step. I see it like this: if someone runs out of fear from something, that is one thing; if someone runs to gain something, that is entirely different. The man with a gun at his back runs; and the man who has seen a diamond mine runs. Both run. But one runs out of fear of the gun; the other runs because he has seen diamonds. You cannot call the second one an escapist. You can call him one who is in motion, running—but not fleeing. He is not running from something; he is running to something. The emphasis of his vision is not on what he leaves but on where he goes.…
Osho, in other religions death is almost never spoken of and when it is mentioned the tones are grave and fearful. In your religion, death is talked about freely and happily is this significant?
They said, "He has fallen sick. He is very sorry that he has not come, but don't be worried: he has talked about you to every man of any importance in Bombay. But we were expecting that you would be very old because of the way he described you and said,'Nobody speaks like this man.' We were not thinking of just a young man, a thirty -- year old." At that meeting naturally, among those twenty, thirty thousand people nobody knew about me. Chitrabhanu spoke first and he talked about one of the most significant things about Mahavira, the only things that can be called a miracle in Mahavira's life. A snake, a cobra, bites him; Mahavira is standing naked in meditation and a cobra bites him. Instead of blood, milk comes out of the wounds on his feet. Jainas have always believed that -- there is no problem. When…
Osho, should I understand that not accepting a challenge is a kind of escapism?
Yes, not accepting challenges is a kind of escape, an escapism. And until we accept challenges, our real birth cannot happen. The second birth I speak of will happen only when we accept all challenges. We accept them, we fight with them, we face them; in that very facing, the soul is born within us. In an escapist, the soul is never going to be born, because he runs away from the very occasions where the soul takes birth. Take a seed: the gardener plants it in the soil. If the seed gets frightened and says, “I am not going into the darkness of the earth; I was fine lying in a corner of the gardener’s house. I will not go into the earth, into the dark,” then the seed is refusing the challenge of descending into darkness—no sprout will ever arise in it. Or suppose the seed is placed…
Osho, what is the definition of God?
Words are very small. If you say God is light, then what of darkness? The scriptures have said that God is light. Suppose we accept this as a definition—then what about darkness? Where will darkness go? Darkness is too; in fact it is far more than light. Light sometimes is and sometimes is not; darkness is always, eternal. Where will you place darkness? If you say God is light, darkness is left out. If you say God is darkness, then light is left out. If you say God is both darkness and light, a contradiction arises: they cannot be together. Try to have both darkness and light in the same room. If you bring in light, darkness disappears; if you preserve darkness, you cannot have light. Then how can both be together? That becomes an impossibility. So you cannot say “both” either. Then the fourth device is to say: it…