Osho - altaredstate.co.uk

OSHO

“Life begins where fear ends”

Osho

Rajneesh or Osho was born in India in 1931. He achieved notoriety through a commune he established in Oregon that was allegedly involved in mass food-poisoning attacks and assassination attempts. But if you can see beyond the hype, he remains a hugely influential spiritual teacher, rebel, and counter-culture guru.

Osho was critical of society, organised religions, and orthodox ways of thinking. He advocated fully embracing life, and freedom from possessions and false identities. He loved paradox and contradiction – his lectures were often difficult to pin down but always interspersed with challenge and a keen sense of humour. He taught us to achieve our potential, to avoid the limiting norms of society, to question everything, to find truth within, to be sexually liberated and beyond convention.

“Truth is not something outside to be discovered, it is something inside to be realized.”

“Intelligence is dangerous. Intelligence means you will start thinking on your own; you will start looking around on your own. You will not believe in the scriptures; you will believe only in your own experience.”

“With me, illusions are bound to be shattered. I am here to shatter all illusions. Yes, it will irritate you, it will annoy you – that’s my way of functioning and working. I will sabotage you from your very roots! Unless you are totally destroyed as a mind, there is no hope for you.”

“The family is the root cause of millions of diseases; it is the basic brick that nations are made of, races are made of, religious organizations are made of. And the family has destroyed the blissfulness of men and women of the whole of mankind.”

He believed most Westerners were too neurotic to sit in meditation and taught a style called dynamic meditation that involves shaking and shouting as preparation for stillness. He saw meditation as a state of awareness to be maintained in every moment, a total awareness that awakens the individual from the sleep of mechanical responses conditioned by beliefs and expectations.

He coined the term “new man”, an enlightened being who “should be as accurate and objective as a scientist … as sensitive, as full of heart, as a poet … and as rooted deep down in his being as the mystic.” The new man would no longer be trapped in institutions such as family, marriage, political ideologies and religions. The new man “is not necessarily the better man. He will be livelier. He will be more joyous. He will be more alert. But who knows whether he will be better or not? As far as politicians are concerned, he will not be better, because he will not be a better soldier. He will not be ready to be a soldier at all. He will not be competitive, and the whole competitive economy will collapse.”

Osho’s Ten Commandments

Never obey anyone’s command unless it is coming from within you also.

There is no God other than life itself.

Truth is within you, do not search for it elsewhere.

Love is prayer.

To become a nothingness is the door to truth.

Nothingness itself is the means, the goal and attainment. #

Life is now and here.

Live wakefully.

Do not swim – float.

Die each moment so that you can be new each moment.

Do not search. That which is, is. Stop and see.