According to Osho, heaven isn’t a place but a state of consciousness: living here-now with spontaneity, truth, love, beauty and freedom. Hell is psychological bondage—hypocrisy, guilt, compromise, living by others’ expectations—endless “prisons” of identity. Drop these layers until pure, unconditioned awareness remains; then paradise is immediate. Heaven and hell depend on inner space, not geography; transform perspective, live joyously and totally.
Heaven is how you feel when you live freely and lovingly now; hell is when you’re trapped by guilt and others’ rules.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
What is your idea of heaven?
There is no heaven and there is no hell. They are not geographical, they are part of your psychology. They are psychological. To live a life of spontaneity, truth, love and beauty is to live in heaven. To live a life of hypocrisy, lies and compromises, to live according to others, is to live in hell. To live in freedom is heaven, and to live in bondage is hell. You can decorate your prison cell beautifully, but that makes no difference, it is still a prison cell. And that's what people have been doing, they go on decorating their prison cell. They give it beautiful names, they go on painting it, putting new pictures on the walls, arranging the furniture in new ways, purchasing more and more things -- but they live in prisons. Your marriage is a prison, your church is a prison, your nationality is a prison. How…
Is there really a hell?
Heaven and hell are only two sides of your mind. The religions that were born outside India have remained with these two ideas, heaven and hell. They could not rise above them. Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- all the three religions born outside India, have no idea of something transcendental. In India we have a third word MOKSHA, NIRVANA. Hell is a wrong psychology, ill, abnormal, neurotic, pathological; heaven is a right psychology, normal, healthy. But there is a beyond where you are no more a mind, when both sides of the mind have been dropped, where you are a no-mind, where you are neither negative nor positive, where you are neither dark nor light, where you are neither this nor that -- where you are just a witness to all, to misery and bliss, to all, just a witness, where you are not identified with either misery OR bliss, where…
Question: OSHO, DO YOU THINK THAT YOU WILL GO TO HEAVEN WHEN YOU DIE? There is no heaven anywhere, it is here. It is always here, it is never there. It is always now, it is never then. The very idea of heaven somewhere else -- there, then -- is a strategy of the mind to deceive you, to keep you ignorant of the heaven that surrounds you every moment. Existence knows no past, no future. The only time existence knows is now, and the meditator has to enter this 'nowness' of things. this is heaven. This very moment we are in it. You are of aware, I am aware of it. That's the only difference: you are sleep, I am awake. But we exist in the same space. There is nowhere to go!
Does hell really exist?
Praying to Christ -- and for seven days he had not slept, thinking the whole night, thinking the whole day -- he fell asleep before the statue of Christ and he had a dream. In the dream he saw a train ready to leave for heaven. He jumped in. He said, "This is perfectly right. Why shouldn't I go there and see with my own eyes? If I see Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Tamburlaine, in heaven, then the question is solved. Or if I see Socrates, who did not believe in God but was one of the most virtuous of men, if I see Gautama the Buddha, who did not believe in God but was one of the most godly persons who ever walked on the earth, then the question is solved." He rushed into the train and the train left. He reached heaven. He was a little surprised, puzzled,…
Osho, what is hell? Is there really such a place?
If you have intelligence, awareness, even in hell you can manage to air-condition it. That's what I am doing. Can't you see the hell all around? But somehow I have got a few people banded together and we are trying to create a small heaven of our own. What to do? People have decided to live in hell, they are not ready to listen, then the only wise choice is: we can create our own heaven. And if we can create our own heaven, that will become an example, a model, that this way also one can live. When people come for the first time to our commune they are surprised. Just the other day a young priest wrote a letter to me, a Catholic priest, who now has become interested in me, and wants to get married, and wants to get rid of the Catholic church. He has written…