According to Osho, refuge-lessness and helplessness look alike: both lack outer support, but differ radically. Helplessness is negative: you crave a prop, fear grips you, and you sink without it. Refuge-lessness is affirmative: you stand on your own feet, trust your strength, and swim without boats; meditation and joy arise. Outward solitude remains, yet inwardly one is self-rooted, not dependent.
Helpless is like wanting a float and crying when it is missing; refuge-less is learning to swim and enjoying the water by yourself.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, what is the proof of God’s existence?
And you still ask for proof? There have been people who offered proofs, and all their proofs are futile. No proof works. All the proofs for God so far are not worth a penny. Someone says: everything that is made must have a maker; such a vast world—surely it must have a maker. But that proof commits suicide; the moment it meets an atheist, it goes lame. The atheist says: If every made thing must have a maker, if God is needed to make the world, then who made God? With that he tightens the noose around your neck. Who made God? You protest: No, no one made God. Then the atheist says: If God can be without being made, why can’t the world be without being made? The argument collapses; it falls flat. You say: just as the potter makes the pot, so that Great Potter made this world.…
Beloved Osho, I am seeing a certain helplessness arising in me. It is a feeling that I had feared and always tried to avoid in the past. Yet, as it begins to overwhelm me, it brings a sense of freedom I have seldom, if ever, experienced before. Beloved master, does this helplessness have something to do with what you call "let-go"?
The rabbi finished quickly -- rabbis are very efficient people -- and he came in his Cadillac, but the bishop was still in the confession booth. It has a small window, and the bishop or the pope or anybody who is representing God is on one side, and on the other side, the person who confesses. A device that the person does not feel awkward, embarrassed; he is not seen by the priest. But there was a long queue. So from the other side, the rabbi entered the cabin and said to the bishop, "It is getting late, and I don't see that you will be able to finish till Judgment Day! Because the queue is so long... and you don't seem to be very efficient. You don't know business." The bishop said, "I am doing it as quickly as possible, but these idiots are such that they don't confess…
Man is weak and helpless what can he do to find strength?
Imagination has the power to take you somewhere. If you just allow it to go, it will move into the future. It will go to the moon and to planets and to stars and anywhere. This is one dimension of movement: Call it the dimension of time. Ordinarily our imagination travels only in one dimension: the dimension of time. It goes into the future or the past. It moves in time. With observation, there is a change. Imagination begins to move in space not in time. That is the change that observation creates. The arrow of imagination moves from 'there and then' to 'here and now'. Space is always here and now: it has no expansion in time. So imagination has two dimensions to develop in. Without observation, it goes from the past to the future and from the future to the past. With observation, it goes into space. If…
Question: SADHU, CONSIDER THIS: RIDE IN A BOAT AND DROWN MIDSTREAM; HELPLESS, GET ACROSS. REACH THE TOWN BY SOME BACK WAY; GET LOOTED ON THE HIGHWAY. BY ONE ROPE ALL GET TIED, BOTH THE BOUND AND THE FREE. ENTER YOUR TEMPLE; BE BATHED FROM ALL SIDES. WHO REMAINS WITHOUT STAYS DRY. CHOP OFF THE HEAD FOR ETERNAL JOY; AN UNCHOPPED HEAD IS SUFFERING. THE WHOLE WORLD LOOKS WITHOUT SEEING, EYES REMAINING BLIND. SAYS KABIR: I UNDERSTAND, SEEING THE WAYS OF THE WORLD. Once a Zen disciple was bidding farewell to his master. The night was dark and he was a little afraid; the road was deserted and he had to pass through a dense forest where there were many wild animals. He looked so nervous his master remarked, "You seem afraid." The disciple replied, "I am afraid.
Osho, inside me there seems to be a kind of stunned stillness, a hush. It feels empty, as if a void has spread over everything. And at the same time, the assault of good and bad thoughts keeps overpowering me. What should I do? I feel as if I’ve gone a bit mad. I find myself very helpless, alone, and insecure. I am afraid.
It is Saroj’s question. This happens. It is natural. Because the moment we turn within, we become alone. That is why people are afraid to go inside. Outside there are others; inside there is no one. Inside it is you, and only you. Outside are countless people, bustle and stir; inside, silence. Outside there is so much fullness; inside, the void. And for lifetimes we have lived outside—lived in relationships, with others, in the crowd and the marketplace, the house and household—thousands of occupations! So when you begin to move within, you suddenly start to feel: all that is left far behind, and into this inner space not even your nearest and dearest can come. This is your utterly solitary space. It is so private that you cannot invite even your lover into it. Here there is only you—simply you. In the beginning this great stillness, this hush, this emptiness…