You're not the changing bubble or wave (your body and roles), but the big ocean of life that never begins or ends.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, you said that if one speaks of the body you will say it is mortal; and if one speaks of the soul you will say, you were never born. Then when Buddha says, “It was just a bubble that disappeared; I never was—so where would I go?” then who is the conscious one? And what is the unborn?
That is why I said: speaking of the body, I speak thus. By body I mean what is visible as name-and-form. By soul I mean that which will be even when name-and-form fall, that which was even when name-and-form were not. By soul I mean the ocean; by body I mean the wave. Both must be understood together. If confusion arises between the two, all the difficulties of the world come up. Within us is that which can never die. Hence, deep down we always feel: “I will never die.” We may see millions die, yet the feeling does not arise within that “I will die.” No echo of that truth is born deep inside. People may die before our eyes and yet some vigilant sense within keeps saying, “I cannot die.” Somewhere deep, the statement “I will not die” seems self-evident. Granted, external facts deny it, and events insist,…Read the full discourse →
You said that if one were talking about the body you would say that the body was death-oriented and if one were talking about the soul you would say, "you were never born at all." buddha has said of the soul, "it was just a bubble which is now no more. I myself am not there, so where will I go?" then what is it that is immortal and who is unborn?
No sooner is it born when it starts bursting. That is why I described the body as death-oriented. By body I mean that which manifests through birth with a name and form. By soul I mean that which remains even after that name and form are lost. When there was no such name and form, then also it was. By the soul I mean the sea and by the body I mean the wave. It is necessary to understand these things clearly. That which is within us never dies, so inwardly we feel that "I will never die." We see that hundreds of thousands of people are dying but still we are not convinced that we will also die. In our deepest depths there is no echo that "I too will die." People die before our very eyes and still that inner feeling of immortality remains. In deeper moments we…Read the full discourse →
Osho, is the soul itself God?
Yes, that very essence is God. That very essence is God. In truth, from childhood we are given certain notions: we are told there is a God sitting up in the sky who runs everything. There is no such God sitting anywhere. The whole universe is not only matter; within matter, consciousness is also hidden. The name of that totality—the total consciousness hidden throughout the whole cosmos—is God. God is not a person. God is the name of the entire flow of the total consciousness. And the name of the entire flow of insentience is the world. Here we are so many people sitting together. Two kinds of happenings are taking place here: so many bodies are sitting here, and so many consciousnesses are sitting here...Read the full discourse →
A friend has asked: Osho, if in the mother’s womb man and woman create the opportunity for a soul to be born, does that mean souls are separate and there is no all-pervading Soul? He also asked: I have said many times that truth is one, God is one, the soul is one—then don’t these two statements seem contradictory, opposed?
These two statements are not opposed. The Divine is one; in truth the soul is one. But bodies are of two kinds. One is what we call the gross body, which we can see; the other is the subtle body, which we cannot see. When death happens, the gross body falls away, but the subtle body does not die. The soul abides within two bodies, a subtle body and a gross body. At death the gross body drops. This body made of earth and water, of bone, flesh and marrow, falls. What remains is an extremely subtle body—of thoughts, subtle sensations, subtle vibrations, subtle filaments. That filament-woven body begins the journey again with the soul and takes birth anew by entering a new gross body. When a new soul enters a mother’s womb, it means the subtle body has entered. At ordinary death only the gross body falls, not the…Read the full discourse →
Osho, it is true that the soul is immortal, of the nature of knowledge. Then how does it fall into ignorance? How does it fall into bondage? How does it take on a body—when the body is to be dropped, when one is to be free of the body? How does this become possible?
The soul is free—first point. That is, the soul is immortal, the soul is full of knowing; just as deep is this truth that the soul is free—there is no dependence upon it. Freedom means that it may choose to take up happiness or to take up sorrow; it may choose to live in knowing or to lose itself in darkness; it may choose to live in desire or to be free of desire. Freedom means that both paths are equally open to it. And therefore it is very inevitable that the possibility of freedom will take it into those states that are painful. And only then, through that experience, can it return. So, as I said, Nigod—Nigod is that state where souls are just as they are. Nigod is that state where they have had no contrary experience. Nigod is that state where they have not made use of…Read the full discourse →