According to Osho, when you become softer amidst a hard world, you shift from reactive hardness to compassionate presence. You see others’ cruelty as suffering, refuse violent retaliation, and embody love—the only real power. Softness makes you forgiving, playful, and helpful, enabling others to drop their shells, while giving you rare maturity and clarity beyond the collective nightmare.
Being gentle stops the fight, helps you feel others’ pain, and lets love—not anger—guide what you do.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, traveling with you over the past few months and seeing the hardness of the world, instead of being hardened in response I find myself only becoming softer and softer. Would you please comment?
The ordinary response will be to become even more hard, but you are not in an ordinary situation. Even a small touch of meditativeness, of silence, of love, of compassion, a small touch of the master's presence, will mean you have totally different responses. Seeing the hardness of the world, you will feel more compassionate towards them, you will feel softer. You will not react violently because that will be joining them in their same stupidity. Being with me, whether you know it or not you are learning thousands of things. One of them is that you cannot react. The world may be hard -- that hurts. It makes one sad that unfortunately man is still barbarous, but it does not give you the idea to curse them. On the contrary, it gives you the idea to help them, to be compassionate to them, so they can come out of…
Life is a flow. So even sometimes when you have an experience of flowing, the mind will try in every way to subvert it, sabotage it, to destroy it. And whenever the flow comes, you start feeling soft and sensitive; that's a natural consequence of the flow. It makes you fragile, flexible like a small child, soft, young. There is a story about a great indian mystic, Shankara, the founder of Advaita Vedanta. He was one of the greatest enlightened people ever. He was talking to his disciples and to illustrate some point, on the wall he drew a picture of a sage, a very young figure, almost boyish. Surrounding the figure were many disciples, very very old and ancient. One disciple asked, 'What are you doing sir? It seems you have forgotten and put things wrongly.
People don't know how to live with vibrating energy, otherwise the whole world would be fun of love. People have so much to give, and it is rotting inside them. They have so much music and it is just lying there. And death will take everything away. People are misers. They have completely forgotten their treasures of energies. So remember it. People are unnecessarily living in poverty. They can live like emperors because that much energy is already there. It just needs a little stirring, a little challenge, a provocation and a little courage. You can stir so much energy around you that you can create a whirlwind of love, and wherever you go, people will suddenly feel that a new breeze has passed. Everybody can do that; everybody has the potential. But people live at the minimum; they live poor -- they have decided to live that way.
In the western mind there is no concept like pralaya. God created the world, the christian/jewish god created the world, but they have no idea when he is going to destroy it. There is a fear in it. Why has the idea not happened? We know that everything that is created will, one day. on its own, die; nothing remains forever. The world cannot exist forever. Everything tires, exhausts itself, disappears into oblivion, is born again; it is part of the wheel. But the christian/jewish mind has not thought of it... not that the problem was not there; it has been avoided. God created the world, but it is there that the story ends. Then the novel begins but it never ends. The eastern mind has always been thinking in great symmetry: if man is born, then man dies; the world is born, the world will die.
Osho, meditation increases sensitivity. But as sensitivity grows, living seems to become more difficult—because the mind’s reactions become sharp and intense, and it feels as if one’s whole life is at stake at every small turn. In such a state, how can one find and hold the point of balance?
Certainly: as meditation deepens, sensitivity will also deepen. And with heightened sensitivity, problems grow too. Sensitivity means you will experience everything—every event—in its full velocity, with full intensity. If someone insults you, the way that hurt reverberates inside a meditator will not be the same for a non-meditator. If a thorn pricks, the meditator’s awareness of that sting will be much clearer than that of the non-meditator—because the non-meditator lives in a kind of stupor, a haze of unawareness. The duller the awareness, the less the pain is consciously felt. Perhaps that is exactly why we reduce our awareness—so we can feel less pain. Ask a psychologist and he will say: every child learns early how to numb their awareness. All children are born sensitive. Then they begin to kill their sensitivity—because living with raw sensitivity is very difficult. A certain blunting of feeling becomes “necessary.” That is why, at…