According to Osho, feelings arise from the heart—the center of love, beauty and joy—and are a wiser guide than the head’s thinking; yet they are not the ultimate. One can also get stuck in emotions. Their true role is to lead you inward, through meditation, into the being, where awareness, clarity, and bliss transcend both thought and feeling.
Let your feelings guide you more than your thoughts, but use meditation to go deeper to the quiet place inside that knows without needing feelings or thinking.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, a therapist once told me that we can get stuck in our feelings just as much as in the mind and that feelings too have to be dropped or gone beyond. I often wonder about this, as my feelings are usually my guide in life and also, I feel things very intensely. Would you please comment?
Anand Trinda, it is a significant question you have asked: "A therapist once told me that we can get stuck in our feelings just as much as in the mind and that feelings too have to be dropped or gone beyond. I often wonder about this as my feelings are usually my guide in life and I feel things very intensely." There are three centers from which all your actions come: the head, the heart, and the being. The head is the most superficial. It has to think about things -- even if you fall in love the head thinks about it, am I really in love? And if it decides that yes, it seems you are in love, the head is going to propose to the woman, "I think I am in love with you." But thinking is base. Man functions from the head. It has its utilities --…
Feel: my thought, I-ness, internal organs -- me.
BEFORE DESIRE AND BEFORE KNOWING, HOW CAN I SAY I AM? CONSIDER. DISSOLVE IN THE BEAUTY. If you feel the presence of thoughts, the crowd, you can feel this also -- that they are not yours. The crowd has come to you, it has gathered around you, but it doesn't belong to you. And if this can be felt -- that no thought is mine -- only then you can throw the mind. If they are yours, you will defend them. And the very feeling that `this thought is mine' is the attachment. Then I give it roots in myself. Then I become the soil and the thought can remain rooted in me. If anything that I can see is not mine is uprooted, then I am not attached to it. The feeling of `mine' creates attachment. You can fight for your thoughts, you can even become a martyr for…
When you move into the world of the feelings, you move into chaos. Feelings are irrational; they don't have any system. When you go into feelings you don't know where you are. You can never be certain. Everything is changing, every moment -- it is a flux. Everything is liquid, and nothing is certain, nothing is solid. One moment there is one thing, and another moment something absolutely new arises -- even diametrically opposite. One moment it is anger, another moment it is love. One moment it is happiness, another moment you are so low, so sad. There is no consistency. The world of feelings is very contradictary; of course, very alive, but very contradictary. One who is ready to go into it is ready to go into chaos. It needs courage. With the reason, with the head, everything is clear-cut, formulated. There is a framework and there is consistency.
Osho, how does the energy of thought transform into feeling?
Therefore I am not teaching you religious thoughts. I am initiating you into no-thought. Generally, what goes on in temples and mosques is just this: people full of worldly thoughts are stuffed instead with spiritual thoughts—nothing more. But what difference does it make? You have given the disease a pious, pretty name; what changes? So long as you want to be anything, so long as you harbor the ambition to become something in the future, so long as you are eager for tomorrow, you will remain unquiet. The stream of thought will keep flowing. And as long as the stream of thought flows, you will remain cut off from God. I am telling you that religious thoughts are just as great an obstacle between you and God as worldly thoughts. Thought is the barrier; no-thought is union. Gorakh has said: See the Unseen, ponder what is seen, seat the Invisible…
Put mindstuff in such inexpressible fineness above, below and in your heart.
CONSIDER ANY AREA OF YOUR PRESENT FORM For a logician, knowledge must be expressible -- that which can be known can be made known to others, there is no problem. If you have known it, then where is the problem? You can make it known to others. But the mystic's knowledge is not of thoughts. He has not known it as a thought, he has known it as a feeling. So really, it is not good to say, "I know God." It is better to say, "I feel." It is not good to say, "I have known God." It is better to say, "I have felt him." That is a more accurate description of the phenomenon because the `knowledge' is through the heart it is like feeling, it is not like knowledge. PUT MINDSTUFF IN SUCH INEXPRESSIBLE FINENESS.... Mindstuff, consciousness, CHITT, is inexpressible. If a single thought is moving, it…