If you keep all the toys just in your house, they get dusty and no one has fun—sharing keeps them alive and everyone happier.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho! Revered Daddaji has, since my childhood, treated me as his own, showering unreserved affection and inspiration. Amid a heap of memories, his sense of kinship with all, childlike love, readiness to give everything away, and a presence that filled the whole atmosphere with joy kept filling me within, and filling me. Every day, on one pretext or another, he would say to me: “Apna hai kya—lutaao! What is there that is ours—give it away!” Please kindly tell us the purport of this dear saying.
Narendra! That is precisely the fundamental meaning of sannyas: “What is there that is ours?—Give it away!” Whoever takes anything to be “mine” has built the world. And whoever builds the world for himself forges his own prison, casts his own chains. Our chains are cast from mine-and-thine—this is mine, that is yours; here is the boundary of mine, there the boundary of yours. All our boundaries become prisons—chains on our hands and feet. And the more we become entangled in “mine,” the more miserly we become, the more stingy. And the Divine can never be available to a miser. Why not? Because to attain the Divine there is one condition a miser cannot fulfill—and that condition is love. A miser simply cannot love; for the miser, love is impossible. He fears that if he loves someone, he will have to drop the feeling of mine-and-thine. What else is love?…
Osho, saints have always been against possessions. But one cannot get by without possessions. Then how much should a seeker of truth keep?
And if he were to shower down gold coins, breaking the roof, we would not refuse, saying, “I am not a sensualist, I am a renunciate—what are you doing? What injustice is this!” Or if today he were to carry everything off from the house—God is a robber indeed; that is why we call him Hari: Hari means the one who takes away, who steals. He is a thief indeed—here he gives, there he also snatches away. Today he gives, tomorrow he may take. And in between you will get into great, unnecessary entanglements. There is a Sufi story. A fakir had two beloved sons, twin boys. They were the pride of the town. Even the emperor, seeing those boys, was filled with envy. The emperor’s sons were neither so handsome nor so gifted. Those two boys were the light of that village; their conduct was equally gracious and noble.…
Osho, you often say that material prosperity is the foundation of spiritual growth; but in your last discourse on non-possession you said that the fewer things one has, the less enslaved one is, and the more things one has, the more enslaved one becomes. Please clarify this fundamental paradox between prosperity and non-possession, and also explain how more things make a person more enslaved. And how does the possessor become possessed?
Material prosperity is the foundation of spiritual life, but a building is not raised by the foundation alone. It can happen that the foundation is there and the house is never built. A house never exists without a foundation, but a foundation can exist without a house. One may lay the footings and leave them filled in—then there will be a foundation, not a building. But wherever there is a building, it cannot be without a foundation. Prosperity is the base of detachment. Without becoming prosperous, no one ever really discovers that prosperity is futile. Without having wealth, no one ever realizes that nothing essential is gained by wealth. The greatest gift of wealth is not wealth—it is the breaking of the illusion about wealth; it is disillusionment. If wealth is never attained, its futility is never known. The poor, the needy, the destitute find it very hard to be…
Osho, in Hermann Hesse’s famous book Siddhartha there is a character named Vasudeva. Vasudeva says to the protagonist Siddhartha: I learned from the river; you too learn from the river. The river teaches everything. What does Vasudeva mean by learning from the river—please tell us.
Second: the river is seeking the unknown ocean—unknowingly. The river doesn’t know where it is going, or why; yet it feels its way toward the sea. It has set out in search of the vast. No map in hand. No scripture in hand. No Veda, Quran, or Bible. It has begun the search for the infinite without maps. No guru; not a follower of anyone. It probes on its own—and arrives. All rivers arrive—you have seen this. Small rivers arrive, big rivers arrive. Brooks and streams arrive. All reach the sea. If they cannot reach by their own strength, small streams fall into bigger streams, bigger streams into rivers, rivers into greater rivers—but they reach the ocean. Vasudeva is saying: if you keep seeking, you will reach the divine. Maps are not needed—Hindu, Muslim, Christian—no maps needed. What is needed is urgency, intensity, density of search. Maps do not work;…
Osho, Sant Palatu Das says the looting of the divine treasure is going on and “whoever wants may take.” If that is so, why is it that among millions only one or two become wealthy with it?
When Buddha left his palace, his old charioteer—who had driven him since childhood and loved him like a son—fell at his feet in the forest and pleaded, “What are you doing? Where are you going—leaving this marble palace, your beautiful wife Yashodhara, your newborn son Rahul, your aged father? You are his staff in his old age. What will you find in the jungle? I’ve roamed the forests; there is nothing there. The whole world wants to come to palaces, and you are leaving one! Anyone would want to be a king, and kingship is in your grasp—yet you turn away?” The old man wept. From his side too, he was right: the forest showed him nothing; all value was in the palace. To the poor man, wealth seems to live in palaces; it takes an actual rich man to discover that palaces are empty. Having seen, he finds no…