According to Osho, youth is not about age but an inner freshness: the courage to doubt inherited beliefs, to use discernment, and to drop dead traditions. The truly young question their own faiths, refuse to worship the past, and seek direct understanding. Cultivate alertness and inquiry; only then can authentic faith and a living, creative life arise.
To be truly young, think for yourself—question your own hand-me-down beliefs and stay alert to find truth directly.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, what is the relationship between meditation and patience?
If you sit to meditate to remove mental restlessness, you will keep looking back again and again: “Has it gone yet?” And the irony is that when you begin to meditate, restlessness will increase. Because what has been repressed will start surfacing; catharsis will begin. The rubbish you have kept hidden within and never allowed to express—meditation will break open those doors too. It will clean the house. Dust piled up for years, for births, will rise again; there will be gusts and storms. For a while even the little peace you had will be lost. Then you will panic: “I came for peace, and even what I had is gone.” Without patience, you could even become unhinged, because meditation brings such a great storm. The disease is not from a day or two; it’s from lifetimes. Meditation will break through all the layers to reach your innermost core. In…
Great psychological understanding will be needed so that each child is sent in the direction where he will learn something. And in every school, every college, every university at least one hour of meditation for everybody must be compulsory, so that whenever one feels frustrated or depressed one has a space within himself that he can move to, and immediately can get rid of all the depression and frustration. He need not turn to drugs. Meditation is the answer. But rather then doing all these things, the people who are in power go on doing idiotic things -- prohibition, punishment. They know that for ten thousand years we have been prohibiting, and we have not succeeded. If you prohibit alcohol more people become alcoholic, and a dangerous kind of alcohol becomes available. Thousands of people die by poisoning, and who is responsible?
Osho, you are always immersed in bliss—what is the secret of it? When will I be able to attain this ecstasy?
Yogananda, I have given you the name Yogananda; the whole secret is in it. A human being can live in two ways: either cut off from existence, or in oneness with it. Whoever lives separate will live in sorrow—anxiety and anguish. That is natural, for to live apart from existence is like a tree pulling its roots out of the earth and trying to live. It will wither; the leaves will droop, flowers will cease to bloom. Spring will come and keep coming, but that tree will never become a bride, never a bridegroom. For it there will be no spring. If the roots have been torn from the soil, what remedy can even the honeyed month of spring offer? Then where is bliss, where is ecstasy! Then there is no dawn—only a dark new-moon night, a night with no morning. Such a life is called ego. And the tree…
Chaitanya Kirti has asked me: Osho, you have issued a call to young men and women. From all over the world they have begun to come, and people from at least fifty countries are present here. But Indian youth don’t even seem to stir. There’s no trace of them! Don’t they hear your call?
The branches have shed their coyness, They will all don new attire; Rustling over the dry leaves The lord of seasons has come near! The west wind has begun to sway, The village singer has begun to sing Holi; A new color in every limb, In every vein, a thirst for nectar! Light red, the horizon is flushed, The palash is deep red! Phagun, the spring month, has blossomed like a flower! My sannyas is spring. My sannyas is the month of Phagun. My sannyas is like flowers. It is a celebration of life. It is gratitude to the divine, a feeling of grace. It is not renunciation. It is not indulgence either. It transcends both renunciation and indulgence. It is to enjoy in such a way that you enjoy yet are not bound. To pass through the world in such a way that you pass through and yet the…
Osho, what is the definition of God?
Words are very small. If you say God is light, then what of darkness? The scriptures have said that God is light. Suppose we accept this as a definition—then what about darkness? Where will darkness go? Darkness is too; in fact it is far more than light. Light sometimes is and sometimes is not; darkness is always, eternal. Where will you place darkness? If you say God is light, darkness is left out. If you say God is darkness, then light is left out. If you say God is both darkness and light, a contradiction arises: they cannot be together. Try to have both darkness and light in the same room. If you bring in light, darkness disappears; if you preserve darkness, you cannot have light. Then how can both be together? That becomes an impossibility. So you cannot say “both” either. Then the fourth device is to say: it…