According to Osho, social-life treatment means using social interaction like a utility or medicine: take only the dose that increases your joy and peace—no more. Set precise personal limits and tell others. Avoid both over-socializing and withdrawal. Continuously measure by inner ease; when burden begins, turn back. This clarity creates balanced, happy living.
Treat socializing like medicine: take just enough to feel good, stop when it starts to hurt, and let people know your limits.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, to rise above mental afflictions like lust, anger, greed and attachment, and states like ego and stupefaction, the Buddha, Mahavira, and all Indian saints have prescribed only practices such as meditation-awakening, devotional singing and chanting, and satsang. But why are you—on what basis—adding new means like therapy-groups (group psychotherapy) along with other methods for Indian friends? Kindly explain.
I have no desire for your respect or your applause. I am not here to reproduce any enlightened one. I will live in my own way. I will say what is mine to say. So drop these expectations. Don’t keep throwing names like Buddha, Mahavira, and the rishis and munis at me; you bore me with them. Let them be. If you meet them somewhere, ask them why they don’t conduct group psychotherapy! I will live in my own way. I am a category unto myself. I am not a repetition of anyone, nor do I have any taste for that. Time is changing. It changes every day. What was needed then, the Buddha would have done. What is needed today, I will do. That need did not exist then. People were simple, straightforward, rural. Understand a little. If a woodcutter who chops wood daily comes here, I will not…
OSHO (TO PRITO): One has to be two things: at the center, bliss, at the circumference, love; inside, bliss, outside, love. Love is the outside of bliss; bliss is the inside of love. Hence bliss can happen when you are alone, but love needs sharing, love needs togetherness. The whole past history of humanity is the history of a long failure, an exercise in utter futility, and this has been the reason, because we tried to do the impossible. Either we wanted to save the outside, so people tried to be loving.... But how can you be loving if you are not blissful? And how can you be unloving if you are blissful? They both happen simultaneously. And that's my effort: to introduce both together to my sannyasins. So in meditation be alone and enjoy your aloneness, but don't become shut up within yourself.
[A sannyasin says: I'm not sure which direction to take -- whether to go out more to people or to go inside myself more. I'm not sure which is best for my growth. Osho checks his energy.] Good, come back. The energy is really good. You have to do both. Choosing won't be good. These are not alternatives -- whether one should go out, meet, mix with people, or should go in. Both are needed together. If you move towards one, you will become lopsided. So sometimes go out, mix with people, forget yourself. Then really go out. And make it part of meditation that going out is good. Balance is needed; choice is not needed. All choice is wrong, because these are are not alternatives; they are complementaries. Together they make the whole, and together they make you holy and healthy. Together they will heal you.
Osho, how should life be lived, and what is its purpose?
Enter life—stay awake and experiment; try waking and observe; try sleeping and observe; try eating; try lying and truth-telling; try anger and forgiveness; try love and enmity—taste all. In all of it, wherever depth increases, where peace increases, where joy increases, where a glimpse of the divine comes—recognize that as the rule forming for your life. And do not make even that rule so rigid that there is no possibility of change tomorrow. No one knows what life will bring tomorrow. The straight path may suddenly need a turn. What was pleasurable may become painful. Keep an opening for tomorrow. Hence the second thing: discover life’s rules from within. And also: do not consider your discovered rule absolute. Do not regard it as perfect. It must have the flexibility to change tomorrow. Life flowers fully only in one who can change each moment. But we are “consistent” people. We insist:…
Osho, as I understand your teaching, you want every individual to be aware and to understand life in its totality. But today’s society is very complicated. Our environment is so complicated that it does not allow us to live a free life, to love people, or to live in the state in which we could live a very clean and smooth life.
Society is as it is; only by accepting this truth can anything be done. Society is like this—but if a person can see that apart from a simple, loving, joyous, clean life there is no life at all; if he sees that without becoming loving he will remain deprived of life’s joy; if he sees that without becoming simple there is no path to reach truth—then he will drop worrying about what society is like. For what can society give him—what is it giving? Once he sees that in another direction—which society does not offer and in fact obstructs—there lies the doorway to his life’s bliss, he will begin to move toward it. Certainly the social order will create obstacles. But for such a person they will not be obstacles; they will turn into challenges, and he will try to make steps out of them. The stones thrown onto his…