According to Osho, a true mentor (master) is a living mirror and catalytic presence who awakens your awareness, transmits silence beyond words, and lovingly dismantles your illusions—not to make you dependent, but to help you stand alone in your own light. The master serves as a midwife to your inner birth, guiding you from borrowed beliefs to direct experience of truth.
A real guru wakes you up and helps you find your own inner wisdom, so you don’t have to depend on anyone.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, is not spiritual guidance an absolute necessity for human growth?
Making faces before the mirror is very childish. There is nothing wrong about it; it is not a sin. It is your mirror, it is your face, you are not doing any harm to anybody. But certainly the observer instantly changes you. You start doing other things just to look busy, as if you are doing meaningful things. Just a moment before you were doing meaningless things, now you are doing meaningful things. The same was discovered in the innermost core of the atom: the electrons behave differently when there is no observer. And the moment the scientist and his instruments make them aware that somebody is observing, they change their rules; a sudden transformation takes place. This was very shocking to the scientists because electrons are supposed to be particles of electricity: that's the meaning of electron. They are supposed to be material, but they are behaving with such…
What makes someone a guru, a spiritual master?
When you are not there, when you have completely disappeared, the other becomes an open book to you. The more other-oriented you are, the less you can know what is happening to the other. The more you become self-oriented, the more possibility there is of knowing what is happening within someone else. A moment comes when you are completely dissolved. Then you know the other totally. Then the other is not the other; he is not something separate from you. You don't react him; there is no need. There is a response, not a reaction. Only in this way can one become a guru and help others, otherwise not. To me, a spiritual master needs this capacity of being totally uninvolved, of being totally unrelated -- just being an absence: with nothing to impose, nothing to project, no need to react. Then he can help you. He cannot come to…
Osho, is it wrong to try to save somebody? Is it not part of compassion?
That reminds me again of Natthu Kaka. I was a regular visitor to his salon. I had no beard at that time -- I was a child -- and no mustache, so there was no fear, but I had to use a scarf because I had long hair, and if Natthu Kaka was in the mood he might start cutting. And once he had cut your hair you could not do anything. And he was such a nice man, he would say, "Why be worried? -- you need not pay." It was, every day, a problem that he had shaved somebody without asking him, and now the man was angry. Particularly in India, people shave if they become sannyasins; that means they are dying in a ritualistic way. When a person dies, he is shaved; it is just symbolic. Just as when a person dies he is shaved, in the…
Being beyond the limits of time he is the master of masters. He is known as aum.
REPEAT AND MEDITATE ON AUM. REPEATING AND MEDITATING ON AUM BRINGS ABOUT THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALL OBSTACLES AND AN AWAKENING OF A NEW CONSCIOUSNESS. Remember this -- desire and need -- these two words. Desire is of the mind; need is of the body. Desire and need, then you are a clock with hands. Only need, no desire, then you are a clock without hands, and when need also drops, you have gone beyond time. This is eternity; beyond time is eternity. For example: if I don't look at the watch -- and I have to look continuously the whole day -- if I don't look at the watch, I don't know what is the time. Even if I have seen it five minutes before, again I have to look because I don't know exactly, because now -- no time inside -- only the body is ticking. Consciousness has no…
Maneesha, you are asking, "this anecdote evokes such a beautiful image of what transpires between master and disciple. Can you talk about the `peck and tap' that we call our relationship with you?"
A young actor has just been hired for his first role in a play being performed on Broadway. "You have only one line," the director tells him, "but it is an extremely important one. When you hear the sound of guns going off you say, `Hark! I hear the cannons roar!' Do you understand?" "Of course," replies the actor confidently, "Hark! I hear the cannons roar! No problem, I've got it already." The following night the theater is packed and the young actor is striding about backstage repeating over and over, "Hark! I hear the cannons roar." Then the audience goes quiet as the play begins. The director signals for the young man to go out on the stage and the curtain raises. Suddenly a loud thundering noise rolls through the theater. The startled actor spins round and shouts, "Shit! What the fuck was that?" A Texan in England enters…