Meaninglessness

Osho, Indian sages do not talk as much about meaninglessness and boredom as they do about love, meditation, and bliss. Is speaking directly of love, meditation, and bliss useful for understanding life’s meaninglessness and boredom? Kindly tell us.

In the West there is much talk that life is boredom, meaningless, futile, without essence—insubstantial. The very result of that talk has been that people have gradually accepted that life is futile and insubstantial. People have become sad. They have lost their roots in life. They are merely going through the motions—almost as if they are just waiting to die. The exuberance of life has disappeared. And although there is a little truth in what Western thinkers say, it is only a half-truth. Only half. Life is boring, life is futile, life is insubstantial. Our sages have also said that life is futile and insubstantial. But they did not stop there. That is only half a statement. This life is insubstantial because there is another life that is essential. This life is insubstantial, but life as such is not only insubstantial. This life is futile, but there is another dimension…

Osho, why do I feel that if life is meaningless and empty? It seems that I am deathly afraid of being alone. How can I go totally into my aloneness with joy instead of fear?

I am not in favor of all these five "existentialists" -- in quotes -- because I am not even ready to call them existentialists. Kierkegaard never really lived, or if you call his life, life, then it was worse than death. He came out of his house only once a month, and the house was not much, just a small room. His father, seeing that his son seemed to be a little crazy -- continuously reading and writing -- tried to read his books, and threw them away because he could not manage to figure out what Kierkegaard wanted to say. And he goes on and on about nothing, much ado about nothing. Kierkegaard never got married. One foolish woman was in love with him... must have been foolish, because he was an ugly man in the first place, and a strange type, eccentric, who lived in the darkness of…

Osho, In a heart gone out the lamp will not burn—what should we do? You tell us now, O faithful beloved, what should we do?

He said, “Yes, I prayed and asked forgiveness. But God said: Don’t worry; when I first saw it I too thought it was a lion—though it is a dog. You weren’t the only one deceived; I was deceived too.” Do you think the elders’ proclamations are different from this child who announces a dog as a lion? The same exaggeration goes on. Why such exaggeration? In some way we want to puff up our ego. The child is saying: A lion was after me and couldn’t harm a hair. You too say the same. Look at your own declarations, your statements. How you enlarge little things! And behind it all is the single game: in this way the ego swells. It gives the feeling that I am someone special. There is no need for this feeling. You are special—already! To declare it is utterly futile. Nor are you the only…

Osho, does the awareness of life’s futility itself become the starting point of meaning in life?

People only keep saying: childhood was like heaven. If someone presses you to prove it, you will not be able to prove what heaven there was. If a logical person asks, “Prove it—what was heaven in childhood?” you will not be able to prove it. It has become like the experience of deep sleep now. Only a memory remains. You yourself are not fully sure it happened, it is almost forgotten. What does not fit with the structure of your present life gradually slips into oblivion. Slowly you remember only that which matches your mind’s frame; the mismatched we drop. The mismatched is hard to remember. Somewhere within you there is such an experience. In some deep moment of love, if you ever loved and the mind fell still—in a vision of beauty, or gazing at the sky on a moonlit night, and the mind fell silent—you have known a…