According to Osho, confusion is a deliberate device: he ‘spreads’ it to shake you out of second-hand certainties, collapse borrowed beliefs, and expose the mind’s mechanical grip. When old conclusions wobble, a space of not-knowing opens—ripening awareness, honesty, and receptivity. Through this creative disorientation, you rely on direct experience and meditation, and authentic clarity arises as lived insight.
Confusion knocks down your borrowed answers so your own clear seeing can grow.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Confusion is natural. If you come to me you are going to pass through a chaos, because all that you have thought before becomes meaningless. All that you have becomes futile. Your whole past is simply nullified... simply washed away. All that belonged to you no more belongs to you. The past is the certainty. When the past is gone, certainty is gone. The past is the certainty because the past is certain -- now nothing can be changed about the past. You say,'Why is the past certain?' It has happened. Good, bad, happy, unhappy -- it has happened. Now there is no way to change it. So when you have the past as your belonging, you are certain -- the future is uncertain. With the future is confusion.
Learn to live with the confusion. Don't be in a hurry to conclude. Confusion is not something necessarily wrong. Don't label it confusion. Labelling is wrong. Sometimes just a wrong label can create so much trouble. It is not really confusion: it is a state of transition, of change. You are uprooted from the old soil and you are searching for the new, and in-between the two there is bound to be this. It is not confusion, it is simply an unsettled, growing state. It is growth, and whenever there is growth one can label it confusion. But by labelling it confusion you have wrongly interpreted it; then you start somehow to solve it. If you call it growth then there is no hurry to solve it. In fact you have to support it: it is growth!
Utter confusion is my part. Good and bad have ceased to exist. I am neither proud nor ashamed and yet I am both. Whatever I have achieved seems lost in a fog, resolved together with my failures. Like smoke I feel, but through the smoke a tremendous sadness arises like a sharp rock with a velvet covering. Osho, I can't perceive the end of it -- or is there no end? Is it ecstasy carrying the weight of impurity? Please, Osho, give me sannyas.
This opportunity can turn into a curse too, if you fall victim to some Adolf Hitler; but this curse can become a great opening into the unknown if you are fortunate enough to be in the vicinity of a buddha. If you are fortunate enough to be in love with a buddha, your life can be transformed. People who are still rooted in tradition, and who think they know what is right and what is wrong, will never come to a buddha. They will continue to live their life -- the routine life, the dull, the dead life. They will go on fulfilling their duties as their forefathers used to do. For centuries they have been following a track and they will go on following that trodden track. Of course, when you follow a trodden track, you feel certain -- so many people have walked on it. But when you…
At times you seem to intend to confuse us about love and meditation. Sometimes you stress the ultimate futility of love but on other occasions you pronounce meditation as being useless. And sometimes you say both love and meditation are fundamental paths of enlightenment.
The questioner says, 'At times you seem to intend to confuse us'. No, you have not listened to me well. I am always confusing, not only at times. Confusion is my method. What I am trying to do by confusing you is to uproot you from your mind. I would not like you to have any roots in the mind in the name of love or in the name of meditation or in the name of God. Your mind is very cunning. It can thrive on anything; on meditation, on love, it can thrive. The moment I see that your mind is thriving on anything, I immediately have to uproot you from it. My whole effort is to create a no-mind state in you. I am not here to convince you about anything. I am not here to give you a dogma, a creed tolive by. I am here to…
Beloved master, a while ago I wrote to you about being confused, and you said you were taking care. Now since then I have got even more confused! What are you doing to me?!
Prem Asang, taking care! That's my way of taking care! You get confused because you are carrying certain ideas and prejudices in the mind. If you don't carry any ideas, any prejudices in the mind, even I cannot confuse you; nobody in the whole world can confuse you. Confusion arises from your own inner causes. For example, if you believe in a certain idea and I say something against it, then there is confusion. You cannot leave the old idea; it is so old, it has got so many roots in you and you have lived with it so long that it has become comfortable and cozy. You have believed in it so long, it has given you so many consolations, that now suddenly to drop it will mean moving in a state of insecurity; it has become your security and safety. But listening to me you cannot cling to…