When old comforting beliefs fall away, you might feel alone, but if you look inside quietly, that emptiness turns into a warm feeling that you belong to everything.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
My deepest pain is that of being an outsider, that I don't belong here in this life, that I am essentially wrong, and death is just waiting to claim me unmercifully. That sense of belonging here, valuing myself and being valued by existence, and thus letting myself live and celebrate fully eludes me. Is this feeling the result of god-oriented religions?
God was preventing you because he was outside. Your prayer was towards the God who was not there. You are here, there is no need of any evidence that you are here. There is no need for any argument to prove that you are here. So why not explore this "hereness", this presence that you are, this consciousness that you are. Why not explore it? Those who have explored it have never come back saying they are outsiders. They have not even said that they are insiders, because even an insider is separate. They have come out and declared, "Aham brahmasmi!" -- I am the whole, "Ana'l haq!" -- I am the truth, I am existence itself. There is no question of outsider or insider. Those are two sides of the same coin. The whole coin is dropped, suddenly you find yourself one with the cosmic dance, a tremendous rhythm…
Question: OSHO, NEVER BELONGED, NEVER BEEN ON THE 'INSIDE', NEVER FELT 'AT ONE' WITH ANOTHER, WHY SUCH A LONER ALL MY LIFE? LIFE is a mystery, but you can reduce it to a problem. And once you make a mystery a problem you will be in difficulty, because there can be no solution to it. A mystery remains a mystery; it is insoluble -- that's why it is called a mystery. Life is not a problem. And that is one of the most basic mistakes we all go on committing: we immediately put a question mark. And if you put a question mark on a mystery, you will be searching for the answer your whole life and you will not find it, and naturally it brings great frustration. My observation of you, Madhura, is that you are a born meditator. Rather than making it a problem, rejoice!
Ouspensky writes, 'It was a cold night and I started shivering. Though there was a fire in the room, I started shivering, perspiring... a cold perspiration. Such a fear I have never experienced -- as if I were going to die! I started to write but nothing was coming -- I went blank. I could not write what I knew. In fact the more I looked into it, the more I felt I knew nothing. After an hour I had to come out and give the paper back, and say, "I don't know anything, so you can start!" ' Gurdjieff said, 'Then there is possibility. One grows when one accepts one's ignorance.' So, 'I don't know', is one of the most beautiful answers for any question whatsoever. Abide in it, rest in it. And if you can remember it, nothing else is needed. This will become your door.
Beloved Osho, more and more it happens that I'm alone, and I am beginning to love and enjoy this silent space. But a fear is coming up: I am afraid that in this way I will lose contact with others and I will become a stranger. I feel a longing that brings me towards you, but a passion and desire to fall in love with someone seems to be no more there. My beloved master, can you please tell me what is happening? Am I right or am I going astray?
And once you start feeling the same heartbeat with these beautiful people who are here and around the world, you will not feel lonely. You will certainly remain alone, but you will never feel lonely. You will remain a stranger to the world, but I have gathered all kinds of strangers; you will not be a stranger here. Here everybody is a stranger, everybody is an outsider. Amongst my people, nobody will condemn you, nobody will say that you are worthless. You will be loved and respected as you are, not as you should be. Shoulds we have dropped; we live in the existential and the real. We don't insist that "first you should be according to my ideal and then I will love you." Once when I was a child my father told me, "Unless you follow the religion of our family, which our ancestors have followed for thousands…
Beloved master, sometimes there is such a feeling of not belonging anywhere that even my orange and my mala are no consolation. Are we really so alone, or am I just being negative and closed when I feel that?
You cannot escape. If you are going to die in Samarra, you will reach there somehow. You cannot escape death and you cannot escape aloneness. Try as you will -- try, but all efforts fail. Nobody has ever succeeded in avoiding aloneness, because aloneness is your being. When you are avoiding aloneness you are avoiding yourself -- how can you avoid yourself? How can you escape from yourself? In trying to escape, you miss -- you miss the beauty of being alone. In fact, you start thinking of yourself as lonely because you have missed the beauty of aloneness. Aloneness is tremendously beautiful, loneliness is ugly. They don't mean the same, notwithstanding what the dictionaries say. Aloneness is such a beautiful experience. You ARE -- pure, uncontaminated by anybody else's presence; no shadow falling on you -- a clarity, unclouded... your being pure, virgin -- nobody has ever travelled in…