According to Osho, auspicious ascendants and timings are the anxious mind’s props, not pathways to success. They neither ensure happiness nor avert failure; marriages and ventures blessed by muhurtas still suffer. For the spiritual, every moment is auspicious because it arises from the Divine. Real “success” comes from trust and surrender—dropping the ego—not from calculating stars or choosing favorable hours.
Picking a ‘lucky time’ won’t make life work; trust the Divine and your own surrender instead of horoscopes.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, Paltu Das says, “All auspicious ascendants and muhurts are false, and they even spoil the work.” And astrology says that by choosing an auspicious ascendant and time, the chances of success increase...?
Astrology is a pursuit of the worldly mind. No spiritual person goes to an astrologer. It is the worldly man who goes to astrologers: “We must do the ground-breaking for a new house—find a lagna-muhurt; we’re opening a new shop—find a lagna-muhurt; we’re inaugurating a new film—find a lagna-muhurt; my son’s getting married—find a lagna-muhurt.” The worldly man is afraid: “What if something goes wrong!” And there is reason for fear—everything is going wrong; so the fear is that even more might go wrong! That is how he is stuck: “May nothing else go wrong!” He is frightened. Out of fear he tries every possible safeguard. And he forgets the One from whom true safety can come. That is exactly what Paltu is saying: the One on whose support all becomes right—you don’t remember Him. Instead you arrange everything else: you ask for auspicious timings. With simple trust, with faith,…
Your whole life you are afraid of death. You keep yourself engaged, you don't want to recognize the fact that death is following like a shadow and nobody knows what is going to happen the next moment. People live in the world as if they are here forever and they know perfectly well that nobody is here forever. But these fearful people, fearful of death, of disease, of failure, become victims of cunning people. Astrology is an exploitation. And not only does it exploit you, it gives you a great egoistic idea also -- as if millions of light years away stars are interested in you, as if their movements decide and determine your fate. This way, a small man becomes the center of the whole universe. The astrologers satisfy your ego, dispel your fears, but the science is absolutely bogus.
One of the reasons for Goshalak being displeased with Mahavira was this incident concerning the plant. The astrology I am talking about concerns the essential, the fundamental. At best your curiosity as far as the semi-essential. You want to know how long you will live or whether or not you will suddenly die. But you are not curious to know what you will do if you live -- how you will live. You do want to know how you will die when the time comes or what you will be doing at that time. Your curiosity extends to events, not to the soul. That I am living is just an event, but what I am doing while living, or what I am, is my soul. When I die it will be an event, but at the moment of death, how I will be, what I will do, is my soul.
Osho, the stream of the timeless is what Lord Buddha called a muhurta for a fleeting instant, and you call the same thing the present. This too makes sense to me, and yet it remains beyond my understanding. But even from this little understanding the joy that arises fills me with gratitude. Osho, I come to your refuge.
All those who have known, all who have awakened, have said one thing with certainty: truth is outside the stream of time—timeless, beyond time. The world is within time—or say, whatever is within time is the world; whatever is outside time is liberation. You can gather a few glimpses of this in your own life now and then. Consider: when you are unhappy, time seems long. When pain becomes intense and your very life writhes in suffering, time grows lengthy. The clock’s pace remains the same; the clock does not see your pleasure and pain, it knows nothing of them. It moves at its own rhythm, yet an hour passes as if centuries are passing. Whoever has known sorrow has known the long stretch of time; time becomes longer and longer. A loved one is dying, and you sit by their cot through the night; the night becomes so long…
Astrology declares that if by divine grace we come to know the whole, then the future as such will not exist at all. But because we do not know the whole -- only a little fragment -- what we do not know becomes "the future." We are obliged to say, "Perhaps it may be like this," because much is unknown to us. If the whole were to be known then we could say, "It will be like this" -- and it will be exactly so. If everything is latent within the human seed, then it is only a matter of studying the seed. What I am talking about today must in some form have existed in my seed as a potentiality; otherwise, how can I talk about all this?