According to Osho, feeling life is an accident means you are asleep—living without awareness, identity, or inner direction, pushed by the crowd and conditioning. You imitate suggestions, trends, and the accident of birth—even your religion—like a log in the current. Until you awaken to who you are, actions remain happenstance; awakening brings clarity, choice, and responsibility instead of drift.
It’s like being a leaf blown by the wind; until you wake up inside and know yourself, you just copy others.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, I feel my life is just an accident. What do you say?
In a huge company, a computer-driven factory suddenly shut down. Losses of lakhs per day began. They searched and probed—no clue. An expert could come—from faraway America. He demanded an outrageous fee, but there was no alternative; the factory had to run. The plant was fully automatic, not dependent on workers. The expert came, went inside, took a small hammer from his kit, gave one slight tap at a single spot—just a gentle “khataak”—put the hammer back. The factory started. And he demanded what he had quoted—thousands of dollars! The wealthy owner stood watching. He said, “Aren’t you ashamed to demand thousands of dollars for a little tap of a hammer?” The expert said, “The issue isn’t tapping with a hammer. The issue is—where to tap. No one else in the world knows that but me. That’s what I’m charging for.” Everyone has been given life, but where to tap…
Osho, for many days I have been feeling that my life is an accident. I find myself incapable of doing anything. Because of this I am suffering greatly. Please show me the way.
Before answering the question—whenever I say something to you, my intention is one thing, and you take it to mean something else. I say, flowers are needed, so that you set out in search of flowers and a rain of fragrance may fall upon your life. But you do not go in search of flowers; you fill yourself with the pain of thorns. I tell you the lotus must blossom; therefore cleanse the water, purify the lake. But you drop concern for the lotus and sit beating your chest on the bank of this stagnant water, crying, “The water is rotten—what can we do now?” I am telling you: my intention is one thing, and you take it to mean something else. As I said yesterday, life should not be an accident. There should be a direction in life. There should be a harmony, a sequence. Do not keep drifting…
You sometimes use the word 'accident' or 'accidental' to describe an event. Are there any accidents in life in reality?
In reality there are only accidents and accidents, and nothing else. The factual world is the world of cause and effect; the world of truth is the world of freedom. Freedom means that causes don't work at all. Freedom means that now everything is accidental, now everything is possible. Nothing is impossible in the world of reality. From the moment you become enlightened everything becomes possible. Now no cause and effect have any hold on you. But I understand your question. It comes again from the same ideology -- that how can anything be accidental? The world is confined to cause and effect. Everything can be reduced to cause and effect. Nothing happens as a miracle. That is the scientific approach. That's why men like B. F. Skinner or Pavlov and other behaviourists go on saying that the idea of freedom is just stupid. There is no freedom. Man has…
Osho, are there any meaningless coincidences, or is everything a gigantic, precise mechanism?
If somebody asks you why you have fallen in love with a woman or a man, what you are going to say? And whatsoever you will say will look very silly. The color of the eyes, somebody will say -- now, what nonsense is this? -- or the length of the nose, or the shape of the eyes, or the way she walks... or the way he stands . .. What nonsense! What it has to do with love? You are just finding something so that you can pretend to be rational, conscious, in control. And just as people fall in love they fall out. And when they fall out it is the same nose, the same color of the eyes, the same hairstyle, the same woman, the same man. And what has happened now? Nothing has changed. You can fall in love today and you can fall out tomorrow.…
Osho, ... that in bringing something into being we search out an idea and make a plan, and still there will be one thing we cannot plan for... this is an... accident.
No. I ask because, in fact, any such event only tells us this: what life is, how it unfolds, and how it comes to an end. We do not know it, nor do we seem to have any ultimate authority over it — that is all the event reveals. Only this much — so negative.