According to Osho, you feel protective because whatever is higher—love, compassion, enlightenment—appears flower-like: radiant yet vulnerable amid coarse forces like hate and mass ignorance. Sensing both my inner strength (rooted in lived truth) and the delicacy of its expression, your love wants to shield it. The impulse reflects reverence for authenticity meeting the world’s roughness.
You feel like guarding me because truth and love are delicate flowers—beautiful and real, but easily hurt by rough winds.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, you are at once such an incredible strength and sweetness seeping through me. Why do I feel there is a need to protect you?
"If you are throwing me out, who is going to welcome me? And I don't want to leave Athens -- I love it, and I love its youth, and I love the few intelligent people in this city who have been able to understand me. I don't care about the crowd, I care about those selected people with whom I have a certain heart-to-heart communion. No, I cannot leave Athens. That will be worse than death." The judges said, "The second alternative is that you can remain in Athens, but you stop speaking, you stop teaching." Socrates, for the first time in the whole trial, laughed. He said, "You are asking more and more absurd things. What is Socrates without his teaching? What is Socrates without his truth? That's my life and my being. Please don't try to be kind to me -- death is more respectful than to concede…
When I first saw you, Osho, I felt I had found protection. Osho will protect. But now I am asking myself 'how is Osho going to protect me from Osho himself?' please comment.
That is not your problem. That is my problem. How am I going to protect you from myself? That is my problem.!t is none of your business. One thing I can say...Let me say it through an anecdote. Life was over. His wife had left him and taken the children. He had lost his job. The bank had just foreclosed the mortgage on his house. He decided the only thing left for him to do was to jump off a bridge and kill himself. He walked to Brooklyn Bridge, climbed as high as he could and was just about to jump when he heard a voice down below, screeching. "Don't jump! I can help you.' He yelled back, 'Who are you?' To which the voice replied, 'I am a witch.' Curious, he climbed down and there before him was an ugly old crone. She looked at him and said, 'I…
Beloved Osho, this question is asked by a trembling heart, written by a trembling hand. My gratitude feels so inadequate for your gift. Why do I feel so unworthy of you?
You will be surprised to know that this M.G. Road is named after Mahatma Gandhi; M.G. is short for Mahatma Gandhi Road -- and Poona has killed, assassinated Mahatma Gandhi! The day a Poona-ite assassinated Mahatma Gandhi sweets were distributed and there was celebration. And now they are calling their main market M.G. market. This is the guilt that somehow has to be erased, so they have raised the statue to Mahatma Gandhi. Strange... you kill the man and then you raise the statue. You must have seen on the hills, just nearby the bridge, there is one beautiful bungalow where Mahatma Gandhi used to stay. The people to whom that bungalow belongs used to come to listen to me in Bombay. And when I was moving to Poona, I said to those people, "That bungalow is empty and that will be the best place for the ashram because of…
And only when one is full of light.... The first child of light is love. And love contains all that is beautiful, all that is divine: compassion, prayer, creativity, grace. They all follow love, you need not think about them, they are by-products, consequences of love. But love itself happens only through light. All meditation techniques are devices to bring you out of your sleep, to help you wake up. OSHO (to Aige) : Your heart starts pulsating in a different rhythm. The whole world remains the same but your eyes are no more the same; hence you start seeing things which you have never seen before and you stop seeing things which you have always been seeing. So in a sense the world remains the same and in another sense it is no more the same, because when the seer changes, the seen changes.
Osho, I have fallen in love with chuang tzu, with joshu, with mumon, with bodhidharma. How can I not follow them? I feel already they have transformed me. How can I not be thankful?
Let me tell you one anecdote first. When Rabbi Nor, Rabbi Moudekai's son, assumed the succession after his father's death, his disciples noted that there were a number of ways in which he conducted himself differently to his father, and asked him about this. 'I do just as my father did,' he replied.'He did not imitate and I do not imitate.' Meditate over this anecdote. He said,'I do just as my father did. He did not imitate and I do not imitate.' If you really understand Joshu, Bodhidharma or me, you will not imitate -- because I have not imitated, because Bodhidharma never imitated anybody. Joshu used to say to his disciples,'If you utter Buddha's name, go and rinse your mouth immediately.' Joshu also used to say,'If you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him immediately.' And he used to worship Buddha every day. Ordinarily Zen looks puzzling, but…