According to Osho, contemplating suicide signals a life that has not blossomed—love, creativity, and inner music are missing—so the mind turns morbid and fixates on death. Death is easy and in your hands; life is vast and requires courage. Redirect that energy into living, meditation, and sannyas; let your buds bloom and suicidal thoughts naturally dissolve.
If you feel like dying, it means your life feels empty—fill it with love, creativity, and courage, and the dark thoughts fade.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, life seems meaningless. I want to take sannyas too, but I’m afraid of society—and I hold back. Then, seeing life’s meaninglessness, the thought of suicide comes again and again. What do you say about suicide?
The “meaning” of this life—earning your bread, running a shop, the same routine day after day. Morning you’re up again, round and round like an ox on the mill; evening you return and fall into bed; morning again. The same quarrels, the same chatter, the same ideologies. Sooner or later anyone with a little intelligence will feel: what is going on? What’s the point? I did this forty years; I’ll do it another twenty-five or thirty; then I’ll die. To what end? Only fools never have this thought. It is auspicious that you feel life is meaningless. But it is not right to decide on suicide on that basis. First search further. Another way of living may be possible. I tell you, another way of living exists. I speak from knowing: another way exists. One life heads outward; it is futile. Another turns inward; it is meaningful. Everyone is seeking…
Why do I continuously think of committing suicide?
In the old days, the authority was there to tell you what was right and what was wrong. You were not left on your own to decide. Things were clear-cut: "This is right and that is wrong." People followed the authorities. Now authorities have disappeared, the world is living in a kind of freedom. The more a society is free, the more people will think of suicide. the more a society is free, the more people will COMMIT suicide. In the East, particularly in India, the so-called religious saints feel very very enhanced by the idea that the suicide rate in India is very low compared to America. And they think America is committing suicide because it is materialist. They are utter fools -- America is committing suicide more because America has more freedom. America is more tense, in anxiety, because America is creating individuality. India is not yet that…
Osho, I always think of committing suicide, and wonder what you would say about my death?
Transform your life, Prashant, into a quest. Question the values that you have accepted. Question all that you have been brought up to believe in. Question the way you have lived up to now. Question your mechanicalness, question your robotlike existence. Yes, something drastic has to be done, but it is not suicide. It won't help, it won't change you; you will be back again in another womb somewhere. Millions of stupid couples are making love every moment. Beware! You will be caught in some net somewhere. And you will get only what you deserve, remember; you can't get more than you deserve. You get the womb that is right for you. And dying in suicide is dying in such anguish, because it is one of the most unnatural things to do, most abnormal things to do. No animal commits suicide, no tree ever commits suicide -- only man. Only…
Osho, in answer to my question you humorously told many stories of suicides failing. But none of those methods appeal to me. I keep having only one thought: to jump from my house. I live on the thirteenth floor of a skyscraper in Bombay. Osho, how could this method fail?
I knew about this method. But it is a very dangerous method, and that is why I left it out. With the methods I mentioned, there could be failure. With this method there is an even greater danger. A silly joke. Tun Tun was troubled by her fat body and jumped from the third floor of the building where she lived. In the morning when she opened her eyes in the hospital, she asked the doctor, “Doctor! Am I still alive?” The doctor said, “Devi! You are alive; but the three people you fell on died!” That is why I left this method out. Don’t do this at all. And she fell from the third floor—three dead; you live on the thirteenth—you could kill thirteen! Please don’t do this. Why such relish for suicide? Put this much thought into living; put that much strength and attention into the search for…
Beloved Osho, I come from a family where there are four suicides on the maternal side, including my grandmother. How does this affect one's death? What helps to overcome this perversion of death which runs as a theme through the family?
Heidegger has said: "Death isolates me and makes of me an individual." It is my death, not that of the multitude to which I belong. Each of us dies his own death; death cannot be repeated. I can sit an examination twice, or thrice; compare my second marriage with my first, and so on and so forth. I die only once. I can get married as many times as I like, I can change my jobs as many times as I like, I can change my town as many times as I like... but I die only once. Death is so challenging because it is at once certain and uncertain. That it will come is certain, when it will do so is uncertain. Hence there is great curiosity about death, about what it is. One wants to know about it. And there is nothing morbid about this contemplation of death.…