According to Osho, when a longing rises that is beyond pleasure and pain, you step off the coin whose two faces keep flipping. The oscillation between happiness and sadness ends, compulsion and dependency drop, and a quieter, choiceless joy appears. Such longing becomes prayer or meditation: a freedom where you relate without clinging, experience without seeking payoff, and suffering loses its covert attraction.
When your heart wants something deeper than feeling good or avoiding hurt, the rollercoaster stops and a calm, steady happiness remains.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, I am seeing that within the experience of pleasure there arises a deep longing to know something which is more total. Pleasure-pain, happiness-sadness, seem to be one, and I feel there must be something which transcends them. Is my longing for what you call bliss?
Yes. Pleasure and pain are not two things; happiness and sadness -- just two sides of the same coin. That's why every happiness can turn into sadness, every pleasure can turn into pain. One Mohammedan emperor -- who was a little bit crazy -- loved a young woman and wanted her consent to marry him. In Mohammedan marriages the priest asks the woman three times, "Are you, of your own accord, without being forced, ready to marry this man?" And the woman has to say yes three times. If she does not say it, the marriage is not possible. So even the Mohammedan emperor could not force any woman to marry him. He was persuading this woman, but she was not willing. One day he went to see the woman and he found her in the arms of a young man. They were hugging each other with a great joy.…
A friend has asked, Osho, after surrendering oneself at God’s feet, will feelings of pleasure and pain no longer arise in us? And if they do, what is the way to stop them?
Bliss is not pleasure. Dictionaries and language make it seem that bliss is “super-pleasure.” Don’t think that even by mistake. Bliss is related to pleasure exactly as it is to pain—or not related at all. Bliss means the state of consciousness where both pleasure and pain have become meaningless. After surrender there is bliss. If there isn’t, understand that there is no surrender. Do not conclude that there is no bliss after surrender; if there is no bliss after surrender, understand that surrender has not happened. After surrender, bliss is. Surrender is the body and bliss its soul. But the surrender must be total. Total surrender means: now I have no choice. I no longer say, “Let this happen,” and I no longer say, “Let that not happen.” Now I am not. Now I have no decision. I have put the reins into his hands. If he leads to the…
Osho, religions call worldly pleasures unstable and fleeting and thereby try to create dispassion in us. But isn’t it precisely their fleetingness that is also the reason for their attraction?
Certainly, it is so; transience itself is the cause of attraction. And religions do not create dispassion by merely declaring life transient. Religion says: wherever there is transience, suffering will follow like a shadow. Transience is not the cause of dispassion; the suffering that comes in its wake is. Transience attracts, it beckons. The faster life runs away, the more the mind says—Enjoy, quickly! Now it’s here, now it’s gone. Who knows when the curtain will fall? So enjoy as much as you can; live with the utmost urgency. Let not even a single moment go idle—suck it dry. Exhaust the full possibility of each moment. Transience is attraction. Death is approaching; that is precisely why we cling to life. If death did not come, who would cling to life? If pleasures came and never left, who would worry? The cause of attraction is transience. The faster a thing dissolves,…
Question: The first question: Osho! Ah, what joy! Ah, what pain! Vinod Bharati, at first one is startled when it feels like this: such joy, such pain—together! They arise together; they can only arise together—in equal proportion. But the glory of bliss, its magic wand, is that it fills even pain with a new sweetness. Pain is no longer pain. A sannyasin, Bhavani Dayal—well known—returned to India after years of traveling in the West. In his autobiography he writes: I went on a pilgrimage to the Himalayas. A steep ascent, blazing noon, the sun like fire, the slope sheer—a struggle to take each step—drenched in sweat. Just ahead of me a mountain girl, no more than eleven or twelve, was climbing with her younger brother on her shoulder. The boy, though small—three or four at most—was pretty heavy, a sturdy hill child. The girl was dripping with sweat.
Osho, at times I feel I am on the very peak of life. It seems that everything—the whole mystery of life—has been found. But then, in certain moments, I also experience a very dense sadness and helplessness. I cannot grasp what my real problem is.
As long as there are peaks, there will be valleys. As long as there is the longing for the peak, you will have to endure the melancholy of the valleys as well. One who has asked for pleasure has, along with it, asked for pain. And when pleasure comes, pain enters with it like a shadow. We change the names of our pleasures, but we do not become free of pleasure; and the one who is not free of pleasure will not be free of pain. Ashtavakra’s entire teaching is just this: be free of duality. Only the one who is free of duality arrives. The peak you think you have reached is the illusion of arrival—because there is no peak to arrive at. Arrival is a vast plain—neither height nor depth. Arrival is like a scale that has balanced: both pans exactly equal and the needle at rest. Or…