According to Osho, heaven isn’t a distant place or future reward but the present-moment state of silent, innocent awareness. It is here-now when you are psychically attuned and harmonious with existence; hell is inner disturbance. Mind’s projections of ‘there/then’ create exile from paradise. Meditation dissolves identification with mind, restoring nowness—Eden—as our ever-present reality. There is nowhere to go; only awakening.
Heaven isn’t somewhere you go later—it’s the calm, awake feeling you have right now when your mind is quiet and you feel in tune with life.
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…
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!
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…
[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.] There is no heaven and no hell outside. Both are within, and we create them. If we live unconsciously we go on creating misery for ourselves. But the strategy of the unconscious mind is that it always throws the responsibility on others; that's its protection. Then it goes on working from behind. A sannyasin has to take the total responsibility upon himself. It is hard in the beginning because our habit is to throw it on others. It seems convenient and comfortable that others are making you miserable. But nobody can make you miserable; it is always your own work.
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,…