According to Osho, "yes" means saying a total, trusting acceptance to existence - dropping the ego, opening like a flower, and melting into the whole. It is the essence of religion and the doorway to meditation: trust, relax, and align with life. In contrast, "no" is resistance, separation, conflict, and a windowless prison of the mind.
Saying yes means trusting life, letting go of your ego, and relaxing into what is instead of fighting it.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved master, what is yes? I find that I have no real understanding of it. I have seen that whenever I say yes, there is a hint of surprise, as if I am amazed that there is no reason to say no. My yes is always instead of no. Where is the seat of this experience, yes...?
Just the other day Buddha was talking about trust: Trust, meditate, and see. Yes means trust, and trust is the beginning of meditation. Meditation means relaxing with existence. Unless you trust, unless you can say yes to existence, how can you relax? People cannot relax because they are afraid. People cannot relax because they fear that if they relax they may be cheated. People can relax only with others whom they trust. With a stranger in your room you may not be able to sleep in the night. Who knows, he may cut your throat. Who knows, he may steal your money and escape. But with your wife or husband you go into deep sleep, you can trust. The child can go with his father or mother anywhere. Even if the father is going into fire, the child can go singing a song, dancing, inquiring, questioning, unafraid, because he knows…
Beloved Osho, yes!
Sarjano, this simple word "yes" contains all the religions of the world. It contains trust, it contains love, it contains surrender. It contains all the prayers that have ever been done, are being done, and will ever be done. If you can say yes with the totality of your heart, you have said all that can be said. To say yes to existence is to be religious, to say no is to be irreligious. That's my definition of the atheist and the theist. The atheist is not one who denies God, and the theist is not one who believes in God -- not necessarily so, because we have seen great theists who never believed in any God. We have known Buddha, Mahavira, Adinatha: we have known tremendously enlightened people who never talked about God. But they also talked about yes; they had to talk about yes. God can be dropped…
Osho explains the meaning of veet nisadha: beyond no, beyond negation.... Drop no-saying; become more and more of a yea-sayer.] Yes, say yes to life. And if one is aware, then one will be surprised that many times we unnecessarily say no... and we harm nobody except ourselves by saying that. No is fear-oriented; yes is love. When you say yes, you are in a loving mood; whenever you are in a loving mood, you say yes -- they both go together. When you say no, you reject life, and when you reject life, life rejects you. Then one becomes more and more sour, more and more bitter, and then there is a vicious circle. When you are bitter you say no more; when you say no more, life goes on rejecting you.
Question: BELOVED OSHO YES, YES, YES, OSHO. YES. Mukta, that's what prayer is. Prayer consists of only one single word. That is the meaning of AMEN: it means yes. If you have said yes with your total heart, you have said all that can be said, that need be said. If you can say yes with your total heart, you are in celebration. If you can say yes to existence, you have arrived. Get deeper and deeper into yes. Say yes to each and every thing. Say yes to good and bad, to day and night, to summer and winter. Say yes to success and to failure. Say yes to life and to death. Forget everything else; just remember one word: yes, and it can transform your whole being, it can become a radical change, a revolution. Yes is all that is meant by prayer.
Osho, yesterday you said that when anger is watched consciously, it dissolves. But why is it that when sexual desire arises, even in awareness its intensity persists? Why is it so?
There is no entanglement in the breath. If you try to practice on anger… Anger is not happening every moment; it happens sometimes. And when it happens, it happens with such intensity that you are already going deep into it; so much is at stake in those moments that you may think, “We will look into awareness later; first let’s settle this now.” Lust is very deep, because existence has made it so deep; life depends on it. If lust were so easy that you decided and were freed, perhaps you would not even have been born—because many before you would have become free, and the possibility of your being would have been almost nil. But your parents, and their parents, did not become free; therefore you are. You too will not get free so easily, because your children are also to be—they are waiting: “Do not run away midway.”…