According to Osho, when you embrace solitude and enjoy silence, you step outside the crowd’s conditioning and its misery, become alert and self-reliant, and discover values firsthand in the present. Initial fear arises of becoming a stranger and losing contacts, but what falls away are superficial ties; in their place, deeper, intelligent companionship and authentic growth appear. Solitude matures you into a lion, not a sheep.
Loving quiet aloneness makes you strong and clear, dropping shallow company so you can find real friends—and yourself.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, the other day you talked so beautifully about the sadness which follows the first experience of our innermost silence. Is it necessarily so, that when I first experience this silence, I also feel with my whole being that I am absolutely alone on my journey?
Aloneness is also one of the fundamental experiences as you enter silence. In silence there is nobody else, you are simply alone. The deeper your silence will be, thoughts will be gone, emotions will be gone, sentiments will be gone -- just pure being, a flame of light, burning alone. One can get scared because we are so much accustomed to living with people -- in the crowd, in the marketplace, in all kinds of relationships. You may not be aware that in all these relationships -- with friends, with your husbands, with your wives, with your children, with your parents -- you are basically trying to avoid the experience of aloneness. These are strategies so that you are always with somebody. It is a well-known fact, psychologically established, that if a person is left alone in isolation, after seven days he starts talking... a little like whispering. For seven…
Your heart settles only in the crowd. Sitting idle you read the newspaper. Newspaper means news of the crowd. Idle, you switch on the radio, the television. Idle, you go to a friend’s house, to the club, to the neighbor. Idle, you do something—anything. Without the other, your heart does not settle. So dependent! The other is your master? Without another you cannot pass even a moment? What kind of freedom is this? What kind of self-ownership? You are not even your own. One begins to become one’s own who starts to relish solitude—who delights in being with oneself. Whose only joy is not being with the other; whose supreme joy becomes being with oneself. And a very delightful—though paradoxical—thing: one who enjoys being with himself deeply—others will enjoy being with him. You are bored with yourself; you will bore others too. What else can you do?
the second alternative is to experience your aloneness, your silence that absolutely virgin spot inside your being where nobody can enter, nobody can trespass that is your true world knowing it, experiencing it, one is surprised that there was no need to escape from it it is one of the most ecstatic experiences even love is secondary the person who has known his aloneness also loves but his love has a tremendous beauty t is positive: he is not escaping from himself he is rooted in himself, centred in himself and because of that rootedness and centering he is so full of joy that he wants to share it his love is a sharing, it is not an escape his love is a gift the other is not being used as a means the other is dignified by his love ordinarily love reduces people into slaves into bondage, into possessiveness,…
Osho, when I first met you I knew nothing at all. I don’t know from where to where you have carried me! Solitude now feels sweet. Now there is nowhere to go and nowhere to come. Nothing to become and nothing to know. I have received so much, more than I was worthy of. So now, farewell and pranam. Who knows where today my boat has set sail—sailing, sailing, my boat sails. Some say it goes here, some say it goes there; I say, it goes to the Beloved’s village.
This is exactly what we all have done with God. We do not give thanks for what has been given. In those ten years he never once said thank you. But when fifty dollars were cut, he was angry, complaining, blazing. His fifty dollars are being cut? If you ask—first, you will not receive. And it is good that you do not—because whatever you ask is wrong. You cannot ask rightly. You are wrong; from the wrong only wrong asking can arise. In a neem tree only neem’s bitter fruit can grow; there is no possibility of the mango’s sweet fruit. What is not in your roots cannot appear in your fruits. If you are wrong, whatever you ask will be wrong. So first: you will not receive. And it is auspicious that you do not. It is God’s great compassion that what you ask is not granted. Sit sometime…
[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.] Blissfulness is like a bud opening as a flower. In misery one closes up; in misery one starts dying, one starts withdrawing from life, one starts shrinking. In bliss one expands, one relates; one dances, sings, celebrates. And that is the only way to find truth, god, love and all the great values. One has to drop all the stupid formality of civilization, one has to become more spontaneous, like primitive man; like a child. The child represents the primitive man, the child has yet to be civilized. Psychologists are aware of the fact that we cannot remember anything before the age of four.