According to Osho, the essence of feeling is the silent, living energy of the heart—prior to thought, name, and judgment. When you rest in awareness, feelings reveal their core as love, sensitivity, and presence, guiding you beyond mind’s noise. Feeling, unresisted and witnessed, becomes a doorway to meditation, intimacy with life, and authentic action.
Feeling is your heart’s quiet knowing before thinking; gently notice it and it shows you love and what’s true.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, how does the energy of thought transform into feeling?
Therefore I am not teaching you religious thoughts. I am initiating you into no-thought. Generally, what goes on in temples and mosques is just this: people full of worldly thoughts are stuffed instead with spiritual thoughts—nothing more. But what difference does it make? You have given the disease a pious, pretty name; what changes? So long as you want to be anything, so long as you harbor the ambition to become something in the future, so long as you are eager for tomorrow, you will remain unquiet. The stream of thought will keep flowing. And as long as the stream of thought flows, you will remain cut off from God. I am telling you that religious thoughts are just as great an obstacle between you and God as worldly thoughts. Thought is the barrier; no-thought is union. Gorakh has said: See the Unseen, ponder what is seen, seat the Invisible…
Feel: my thought, I-ness, internal organs -- me.
BEFORE DESIRE AND BEFORE KNOWING, HOW CAN I SAY I AM? CONSIDER. DISSOLVE IN THE BEAUTY. If you feel the presence of thoughts, the crowd, you can feel this also -- that they are not yours. The crowd has come to you, it has gathered around you, but it doesn't belong to you. And if this can be felt -- that no thought is mine -- only then you can throw the mind. If they are yours, you will defend them. And the very feeling that `this thought is mine' is the attachment. Then I give it roots in myself. Then I become the soil and the thought can remain rooted in me. If anything that I can see is not mine is uprooted, then I am not attached to it. The feeling of `mine' creates attachment. You can fight for your thoughts, you can even become a martyr for…
When you move into the world of the feelings, you move into chaos. Feelings are irrational; they don't have any system. When you go into feelings you don't know where you are. You can never be certain. Everything is changing, every moment -- it is a flux. Everything is liquid, and nothing is certain, nothing is solid. One moment there is one thing, and another moment something absolutely new arises -- even diametrically opposite. One moment it is anger, another moment it is love. One moment it is happiness, another moment you are so low, so sad. There is no consistency. The world of feelings is very contradictary; of course, very alive, but very contradictary. One who is ready to go into it is ready to go into chaos. It needs courage. With the reason, with the head, everything is clear-cut, formulated. There is a framework and there is consistency.
Beloved Osho, a therapist once told me that we can get stuck in our feelings just as much as in the mind and that feelings too have to be dropped or gone beyond. I often wonder about this, as my feelings are usually my guide in life and also, I feel things very intensely. Would you please comment?
Anand Trinda, it is a significant question you have asked: "A therapist once told me that we can get stuck in our feelings just as much as in the mind and that feelings too have to be dropped or gone beyond. I often wonder about this as my feelings are usually my guide in life and I feel things very intensely." There are three centers from which all your actions come: the head, the heart, and the being. The head is the most superficial. It has to think about things -- even if you fall in love the head thinks about it, am I really in love? And if it decides that yes, it seems you are in love, the head is going to propose to the woman, "I think I am in love with you." But thinking is base. Man functions from the head. It has its utilities --…
Consider your essence as light rays from center to center up the vertebrae, and so rises "livingness" in you.
OR IN THE SPACES BETWEEN, FEEL THIS AS LIGHTNING. FEEL THE COSMOS AS A TRANSLUCENT EVER-LIVING PRESENCE. In India, because of this, we have developed a particular yoga which we call SAHAJ YOGA. SAHAJ means spontaneous, easy, natural. Always remember SAHAJ. If you feel any technique spontaneously coming to you, if you feel more affinity with it, if you feel better with it -- more healthy, more alive, more at home -- then that is the method for you. Move with it; you can trust it. Don't create unnecessary problems. And the inner mechanism is very complex. If you do something which is too much for you, you may destroy many things. So it is better to move with something which feels harmonious to you. The third technique: <q>"FEEL THE COSMOS AS A TRANSLUCENT EVER-LIVING PRESENCE."</q> This again is concerned with light: "FEEL THE COSMOS AS A TRANSLUCENT EVER-LIVING PRESENCE."…