According to Osho, gifts have meaning only when they carry consciousness, not convention. He gives watches to say be watchful: time is life, and a true gift is a reminder to live alertly, beyond superstition or social ritual. Offered with awareness, a gift becomes a device to dissolve ego, deepen presence, and turn every moment into ecstasy.
A real gift isn’t the thing itself, but a loving reminder to stay awake and kind with each other right now.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Many people are so miserly about energy that it is unbelievable why they are so miserly. From the very beginning every child is taught to be miserly. The mathematics of life is that the more you spend your energy, the more energy you get. The less you spend. you less you get, because there is no need. If you don't spend at all. you don't get at all. Then the old energy remains like a stagnant dead thing, and it becomes by and by poisonous. Energy has to be fresh, continuously fresh. I can see it... every pore of your body needs flow. So in these five weeks that you will be here, dance, sing, relate with people. meet, have contacts, love. In these five weeks completely forget your old habit of holding. Here, things are allowed.
Godliness is eternal. All that is needed is that you create emptiness in yourself -- not that you seek God. The moment you are empty something from the beyond penetrates you, fills your emptiness. You start overflowing with something absolutely new which you have never tasted, never known before. It is such a blessing, such a benediction. It is such an ecstasy that from that very moment you know that there is no birth, no death; you are also eternal. From that very moment you are part of a tremendous energy called godliness. Godliness is like an oceanic energy; we are just waves in it. We are making every effort here to help you, through different devices, so that you can feel the presence of something which escapes ordinary intellect, which needs extraordinary intelligence to be grasped, which really needs less logic and more love, less head and more heart.
Beloved Osho, would you speak about the significance of the gachchhamis? How can we keep them fresh and alive and prevent them from becoming like the meaningless, stereotyped rituals practiced in other religions?
The first is, buddham sharanam gachchhami: I go to the feet of the awakened one. It does not say, "I go to the feet of Jesus, Mohammed, Mahavira, Gautam Buddha" -- no. Buddham is not Gautam Buddha. Gautam Buddha's original name was Gautam Siddharth. When he became awakened, then Siddharth was dropped and the world has know him since then as Gautam Buddha. "Buddha" is nobody's property. It simply means the sleep is over, you are no longer dreaming, no longer hallucinating; you are simply awake. Reminding yourself, "I go to the feet of the awakened one," is not worshipping, because the awakened one is not any person in particular. There are no feet of the awakened one. It simply says, and reminds you, that you are surrendered to the fact of awakening, that this is your decision, this is your commitment. The second line of the gachchhamis is, sangham…
Beloved Osho, the other day, out of the silence of your namaste came the unexpected gift of your dance. My heart burst open, and suddenly I was like a child, innocent and utterly in awe of the mystery of your presence. Would you please say something about how it is that the slightest gesture made by you affects us so deeply?
But, unfortunately, in the name of love such pseudo things exist in the world that they have contaminated the greatest word we have. People "love" their cars, people "love" their houses. They don't understand that love is a sacred experience, it is not mundane. The moment you pull it down to the world of mundane reality you are being terribly destructive. You have to raise the mundane reality to the level of love, the sunlit peaks of sacredness. But people are doing just the opposite -- and suffering unnecessarily. Life is not meant to be a suffering; it is meant to be a blissfulness. But one has to learn the art. Brickman and Horowitz were relaxing on the beach in Puerto Rico. "You know," said Brickman, "this Racquel Welch -- what does everyone see in her? Take away her hair, her lips, her eyes and her figure, and what have…
When one looks backwards, one can always see that nothing has ever been a wastage. Even those few moments when one had gone astray, even they have contributed something immensely valuable; even mistakes and errors are necessary parts of growth. You are here because of all that you have done in the past: good, bad, right, wrong. So in the ultimate reckoning even wrong is not wrong because it helps the right; without it the right cannot exist. Without darkness there is no possibility of light. Then one simply feels grateful for all that life has been, with no choice -- not that this has been good and this has not been good; all has been good. Everything falls into a harmony. And the moment has come for that harmony. Now something immensely valuable is going to happen. It is time to collect all that you have lived in fragments.