According to Osho, a curve is the hidden circularity of existence: what seems a straight line is merely a tiny arc of an immense circle, which is why a truly straight line cannot be drawn. He extends this insight to mind and language—thoughts and words move in circles. Meditation is the austere leap out of this circular motion into wordless awareness.
A curve is a small piece of a huge circle, and just like that, our thoughts and words loop around until we step into silence.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, the stream of the timeless is what Lord Buddha called a muhurta for a fleeting instant, and you call the same thing the present. This too makes sense to me, and yet it remains beyond my understanding. But even from this little understanding the joy that arises fills me with gratitude. Osho, I come to your refuge.
All those who have known, all who have awakened, have said one thing with certainty: truth is outside the stream of time—timeless, beyond time. The world is within time—or say, whatever is within time is the world; whatever is outside time is liberation. You can gather a few glimpses of this in your own life now and then. Consider: when you are unhappy, time seems long. When pain becomes intense and your very life writhes in suffering, time grows lengthy. The clock’s pace remains the same; the clock does not see your pleasure and pain, it knows nothing of them. It moves at its own rhythm, yet an hour passes as if centuries are passing. Whoever has known sorrow has known the long stretch of time; time becomes longer and longer. A loved one is dying, and you sit by their cot through the night; the night becomes so long…
I am a very curious person. That's why I have come to you. Osho, what do you say about curiosity?
Curiosity is good, curiosity is beautiful, but don't stop at it. It is a good beginning, but not the end, because curiosity always remains lukewarm. It is an intellectual gymnastics. It is good to be curious because that is how one starts the journey of inquiry into existence; but if one simply remains curious, then there will be no intensity in it. One can move from one curiosity to another -- one will become a driftwood -- from one wave to another wave, never getting anchored anywhere. Curiosity is good as a beginning, but then one has to become more passionate. One has to make life a quest, not only a curiosity. And what do I mean when I say one has to make one's life a quest? Curiosity creates questions, but your life never becomes a quest. Questions are many, a quest is one. When some question becomes so…
Question: First question: Osho, The city grows deserted as awareness turns back upon itself; the highway becomes a footpath; the flame trembles, then steadies; unknown, and yet some humming seems familiar. Words-thoughts fall like leaves; the net of logic—once the mind’s glory—is fraying, torn moment by moment. Honey fills the hour, the day, the night, the month; childhood hides and reappears; the earth is cooled by the cascade of the inner stream. Upon the lofty peak of consciousness, adorned with a hundred-thousand sun-rays—O resplendent white radiance! O Great Life-Breath, source of energy for hundreds upon hundreds of lotuses! Accept at your feet all my righted and inverted beats and notes; O ocean that pours out heaps upon heaps of gems! I bow my head, O divine gateway of the whole cosmos—salutations, Lord, salutations!
These are three concentric circles around the center. Of course the heart is closer to being, so it is better to be in the heart than to be in the mind. The mind is closer than the body; it is better to be in the mind than in the body. But the ultimate goal is to be just your being -- no action, no thought, no feeling, just pure witnessing. And then the satori happens and one becomes full of light, full of truth. Then to live is a blessing. Before it, it is just a drag; after it, it is a dance. (Really, meditation is a journey, Osho told Bhavan, from your head to your heart to your being.) Meditation is not-knowing, it is not like knowledge, It is far closer to feeling. It is not like logic, it is far more like love.
Osho, life is suffering, yet man does not wake up. Despite the hell of life, how does man keep on going?
You asked, “Life is suffering...” You have not yet seen this for yourself. You have heard the buddhas say that life is suffering. It is not your own realization, not your own seeing. That won’t do. Borrowed words will prick your chest like thorns; they will not turn into flowers. Borrowed words become thorns—pricking, wounding—but from them the rain of joy does not fall. Have you known that life is suffering? Or have you merely heard the buddhas? Or have you agreed that since the buddhas say so, it must be true? Why would they be wrong? If they knew, they must be right. That is like someone believing that fire burns because others say so. Can you see the difference between others saying “fire burns” and your own knowing that fire burns? One’s own knowing creates a revolution. Then, as they say, once burned by milk, you blow even…