According to Osho, in the Upanishadic vision 'aloneness' names your innermost divinity: God is your unencroachable, indestructible inner space—freedom itself. It is not loneliness but ripened, spacious being that remains intact amidst all relationships, flowering into all-oneness. The Master’s fire (true Upanishad: sitting near the Master) burns impurities so this native aloneness is realized, beyond scripture and dependence on the other.
Real aloneness is your true self (God) inside—not loneliness—and you discover it by living fully and letting a wise Master burn away what’s false.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Will you please comment on the following verse from the upanishads: 'he is the aloneness that is within you.... You are standing all alone before the sacred fire, and from this time on the fire that will be given to you will be lonely, and you will be alone with it. Are you ready to accept that aloneness?'
To be with the Master is to be in such a space where you are alone. The closer you come to the Master, the more and more the disciple and the Master meet and mingle and disappear, the more aloneness is left -- that purity, that freedom, that silence. "ARE YOU READY TO ACCEPT THAT ALONENESS?" Are you ready to become an initiate? Are you ready to enter into the temple of fire? The questioner is Dady C. Dady. Here you are facing the fire, and you are talking about some old scriptures. I ask you: Are you ready to accept that aloneness? Are you ready to accept that fire? The fire is available, and one knows not for how long it will be available. Tomorrow it may be gone. It is either now or never. Don't waste your time in bringing scholarly questions. Open your existence to me. I'm…
Master, after the tidal wave of events and with the memory of a profound experience, I face new aloneness. Efforts to share or escape into distractions have bad results. Why do I cling to this habit of escaping aloneness? A few comments may help me for the task ahead.
And, Amrito, what has happened to you has been aloneness, but your interpretation is wrong. Your interpretation is coming from your past experiences, from your past mind. It is from your memory. Your mind is giving you a wrong idea. You drop the mind. You go into your aloneness: watch it, taste it. All the aspects of it have to be looked into. Enter into it from all the possible doors; it is the greatest temple there is. And it is in this aloneness that you will find yourself -- and to find oneself is to find God. God is alone, and once you have looked into it without the mind interfering you will not want to be distracted at all. Then there is nothing to distract, then there is no need to be distracted. Then you would not like to escape from it because it is life, it is…
In the outer and inner, above and below, in all dimensions, in all ten directions, there is the resonance of the One! ‘...and who always delights in aloneness, only he has obtained the fruit of knowledge and of yogic practice.’ Knowledge is fruit; consequence; result. So you may read the scriptures as much as you please, collect them—knowledge will not happen. Turn the pages of yourself! Go within a little. Open your own book. You have kept it tied up for so long—you never opened it. Lifetimes have passed—you carry this book, but never open it. You roam asking others: “Who am I?” You are—and you do not know, so how will another know! You yourself, closest to your own existence, are missing—what answer will another give! Another can only see you from the outside. From the inside, only you are able to see yourself—no one else.
Beloved Osho, when you talked about the ultimate death of this world, I got suddenly in touch with deep aloneness, and this voice inside me said, "remember: each single moment, remember that you are alone. "my beloved master, after our death will you still be, in some mysterious way, with our wandering consciousness?
It makes your life for the first time meaningful, significant, religious. But you will not be a Hindu, and you will not be a Christian, and you will not be a Jew; you will be simply religious. By being a Hindu, or a Mohammedan, or a Christian, or a Jaina, or a Buddhist, you are destroying the purity of religiousness -- it needs no adjectives. Love is love -- have you ever heard about Hindu love? Mohammedan love? Consciousness is consciousness -- have you ever thought about Indian consciousness or Chinese consciousness? Enlightenment is enlightenment: whether it happens in the white body or in the black body, whether it happens in the young man or in the old man, whether it happens in a man or in a woman, it does not make any difference. It is the same experience, the same taste, the same sweetness, the same fragrance. The…
Question: IS IT LONELY UP THERE? It is not lonely, but it is alone. Whenever you say 'lonely', you show a desire for the other; you are missing the other. The word 'lonely' is indicative that you are not happy with yourself, that this loneliness hurts, that this loneliness is getting a little boring, that you would like to move away from his state of loneliness. When you say 'lonely,' you have already condemned it. Loneliness means absence of the other -- not YOUR presence. You are missing the other and your eyes are focused on that missing, on that absence. Up there, it is absolutely alone. That's why Mahavir has called it 'kaivalya'. 'Kaivalya' means absolute aloneness. But the quality of aloneness is totally different from loneliness. In the dictionaries they may both mean the same; I'm not talking about the dictionary.