According to Osho, the holy fire is the inner flame of awareness—your living, witnessing consciousness. It is not a ritual blaze but the transformative heat that burns ignorance, ego, and karmic residues, melting you into love and clarity. When kindled through meditation, it radiates warmth, courage, and joy, as in Milarepa’s inner heat.
It’s the warm light of paying full attention inside you that melts confusion and makes you kind and clear.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, in the second part of the verse it is said: an oblation into the yogic fire, the steadiness established in the Divine, illumined by knowledge. Kindly explain what is meant by yogagni, the yoga-fire.
Those who are free of the urge to harm arrive at the same goal that others reach through yoga, through sankhya, through service offered to God. What does it mean to be free of the urge to harm? Here is the strange thing: all these different paths are connected deep down to one root. As long as there is greed in the senses, freedom from violence is impossible. As long as a man is frantic to gratify the senses, nonviolence is impossible. The senses are constantly committing violence. When your eye becomes lust upon someone’s body, violence has happened—you have raped. The court cannot catch you; it has no means yet to prosecute rape by the eyes. But when your gaze falls upon someone’s body and becomes demand, desire, lust—and in a moment you possess that body, and the smoke of the urge to enjoy it spreads—rape has happened. It…
Question: OH FIRE, LEAD US TO THE RIGHTEOUS PATH. OH GOD, THE KNOWER OF ALL KNOWLEDGE AND ACTIONS, DESTROY OUR DECEITFUL SINS. WE BOW TO YOU INNUMERABLE TIMES. It is necessary to bear in mind one or two other points about fire so that it will be easy to remember its divine form, its divinity. It will be useful to understand the prayer of the sage, "O fire, lead me to the right path," and to realize why such a prayer was offered to fire. You have seen fire, you have seen water also. However low it may sink, water remains. Flowing down from a mountain it enters a valley, but it is not lost, it does not vanish. Fire rises towards the sky, but vanishes after rising only a little distance. Truly speaking, one who makes an upward journey will vanish.
Chidagni swaroopam dhoopah "to create the fire of awareness in oneself is dhoop, the incense."
Lin-chi was lecturing one morning and someone suddenly asked, "Just answer me one question: Who am I?" Lin-chi got down. nd went to the man. The whole hall became silent. What was he going to do? It was a simple question. He should have answered from his seat. He reached the man. The whole hall was silent. Lin-chi stood before the questioner looking into his eyes. It was a very penetrating moment. Everything stopped. The questioner began to perspire. Lin-chi was just staring into his eyes. And then Lin-chi said, "Do not ask me. Go inside and find out who is asking. Close your eyes. Do not ask 'Who am I?' Go inside and find out who is asking, who is this questioner inside. Forget me. Find out the source of the question. Go deep inside!" And it is reported that the man closed his eyes, became silent and suddenly…
We have seen fire. We have also seen water. No matter how far water descends, it remains present. It comes down from the mountain into the ravine—yet it is not annihilated. Fire rises toward the sky, and as soon as it rises a little it is dissolved. In truth, whatever goes upward will also be dissolving. Moment to moment it merges; soon its ego-sense is lost; it is no more—it becomes one with the sky. The path of fire is visible only a little way; then it becomes invisible. You cannot even see where it has gone—lost in the void. Water, however far it flows down, remains present. On the downward journey the ego-sense remains. And if it descends very far, water becomes ice. And if ego descends very far, it becomes hard like stone. Remember: the farther down you go, the stronger, frozen, hard, crystallized the ego becomes.
There is only one bliss in the world, and that bliss comes by becoming whole. And this is the most fundamental thing in becoming whole: your man and your woman inside must fall in love and disappear into each other. The inner being should become androgynous -- neither man nor woman. Then one is integrated, one is one. Otherwise one is many, otherwise one is poly-psychic, and to be poly-psychic is to be neurotic. To be poly-psychic means that one has many minds, one is a crowd -- a thousand and one voices, and each dragging one in its own direction. One's life remains just a constant struggle... for no purpose. One rushes into one direction and then into another and then into another. This goes on and on and then one falls into the grave. From the cradle to the grave one rushes, runs too much, but reaches nowhere.