Osho Quotes on Transcendence

Osho Quotes on Transcendence

1. I am not for hope; I am not for hopelessness. I am against all extremism. All excess is futile. Buddha used to say, ‘My path is the middle path.’ That is the path of transcendence.
2. This watchfulness, this witnessing is the ultimate secret of creating a religious life, of creating a life of transcendence, a life of spirituality, of enlightenment, of buddhahood.
3. I teach you transcendence — neither positive nor negative. Be a watcher: witness both. When there is day, witness the day, and when there is night, witness the night — and don’t get identified with either. You are neither the day nor the night; you are the transcendental consciousness. Become more and more centered there in that transcendence. True religion is not positive, nor is it negative. It is neither via negativa nor via positiva; it is via transcendence.
4. Somewhere a deep balance is needed. Just between the two, exactly between the two, is transcendence.
5. Buddha used to call his path ‘the middle path’, MAJJHIM NIKAYA, because he said, “Everywhere, excess is prohibited. Always choose the middle.” The exact middle is the point beyond. If you can find the exact middle ground between two opposites, two rivals, you have gone beyond them, you have reached a transcendence. The transcendence opens just in the middle; the middle is the beyond.
6. I am not teaching you the positive way of living, I am not teaching you the negative way of living: I am teaching you the way of transcendence. All dualities have to be dropped: the duality of mind and heart, the duality of matter and mind, the duality of thinking and emotion, the duality of the positive and the negative, the duality of male and female, yin and yang, the duality of day and night, summer and winter, life and death… all dualities. Duality as such has to be dropped, because you are beyond duality. The moment you start moving away from both yes and no, you will have your first glimpses of the ultimate. Hence the ultimate remains absolutely inexpressible; you cannot say no, you cannot say yes.
7. Tathata means total acceptance: whatsoever the situation is, don’t fight with it. Accept it wholeheartedly, because it is through total acceptance that transcendence happens. If you fight with it you will be unnecessarily wasting your energy. Accepting it you preserve your energy. Accepting it you become capable of understanding it, because only one who accepts can understand; one who rejects cannot understand.
8. Right samadhi is a transcendence: you go beyond mind, but you are fully alert, aware. Only then is samadhi right — when it grows in awareness and when awareness grows through it. When you become enlightened you have to be absolutely awakened; otherwise you missed at the last step.
9. Every desire is the same. The objects differ, but not the quality of desiring. You desire money, somebody else desires God; you desire power, somebody else desires paradise. It is all the same. Hence there are no religious desires, remember. Nondesiring is religious. Desiring is worldly, desire is the world. Nondesire is transcendence.
10. When I say, “Become desireless,” I am not saying to let this become your goal. I am not saying that now you have to make efforts to become desireless; I am not saying to make this your desire — becoming a desireless person. No, not at all; otherwise you would have misunderstood the whole point. Try to understand the desire and all its miseries and all its futilities, and in that very understanding is transcendence.
11. The transcendence needs nothing but just a silent understanding.
12. These are the only two situations possible, and you are in the sad situation. Everybody may know about you — who you are — but you yourself are completely oblivious of your transcendence, of your real nature, of your authentic being. This is the only sadness in life. You can find many excuses, but the real sadness is this: you don’t know who you are. How can a person be happy not knowing who he is, not knowing from where he comes, not knowing where he is going? A thousand and one problems arise because of this basic self-ignorance.
13. The journey of transcendence is dangerous. You will be disappearing and something new will come into existence. You will be sacrificing yourself for the new to arrive, but this sacrifice is a great bliss, because you are a creator — you have become a womb for the new, and for the great.
14. NETI, NETI — neither this nor that — is the secret formula of transcendence: neither positive nor negative. But it does not mean NOT to live the positive and the negative. If you avoid living you will become dull, very dull; you will lose all intelligence.
15. Transcendence is not repression. Transcendence is a natural outgrowing — you grow above, you go beyond — just as a seed breaks and a sprout starts rising above the ground. When sex disappears, the seed disappears. In sex, you were able to give birth to somebody else, a child. When sex disappears, the whole energy starts giving birth to yourself. This is what Hindus have called DWIJA, the twice-born. One birth has been given to you by your parents, the other birth is waiting. It has to be given to you by yourself. You have to father and mother yourself. Then your whole energy is turning in — it becomes an inner circle.
16. You don’t have to transcend anything. You have to live everything that is natural to you, and live it fully, without any inhibition — joyously, aesthetically. Just by living it deeply, a transcendence will come. You are not to transcend anything. Remember my words. A transcendence will come by itself, and when it comes by itself it is such a release and such a freedom. If you try to transcend, you are going to repress, and repression is the sole reason why people cannot transcend; so you are getting into a vicious circle. You want to transcend, so you repress, and because you repress you cannot transcend, so you repress more. As you repress more, you become more incapable of transcendence. Live it out fully, without any condemnation, without any religion interfering with your life. Live it out naturally, intensely, totally — and a transcendence comes. It is not your doing, it is a happening. And when it comes by itself, there is no repression, there is no antagonism.
17. Unless you transcend sex the mind will play the last trick, and it will be the winner, not you. But repression is not transcendence, It is escape. Move into desire with full awareness; try to be in the sex act but alert. By and by, you will see the emphasis changing: the energy will be moving more into alertness and less into the sex act. Now the thing has happened, the basic thing has happened. Sooner or later the whole sex energy becomes meditative energy, then you have transcended. Then, whether you stand in the market or sit in a forest, apsaras cannot come to you. They may be passing on the street but they will be there no more for you. If your mind is there absent apsaras become present; if your mind is not there present apsaras disappear.
18. A person who has understood that sex has to be transcended is not even worried about transcending it, because transcendence comes through experience. You cannot manage it. It is not something that you have to do. You simply pass through many experiences, and those experiences make you more and more mature.
19. Enlightenment has nothing to do with knowledge. It is freedom from knowledge, it is absolute transcendence of knowledge. It is going beyond knowing.
20. Buddhahood is a transcendence of both. In buddhahood there is no object, no subject; all duality has disappeared. There is no knower, no known; there is no observer and nothing as observed — there is only one. Whatsoever you want to call it you can call it: you can call it God, you can call it nirvana, you can call it samadhi, satori… or whatever, but only one remains. The two have melted into one.
21. Buddha gave to the world a nonmetaphysical religion, a psychological religion. He simply helps you to go beyond mind. He helps you to understand the mind because it is only through understanding that transcendence happens.
22. If you become a transcendence of the mind, a witness to the mind, and you know that you are separate, and the mind no longer has any sway over you, you are no longer hypnotized by it, then you will be able to really appreciate it. I appreciate it. And you will also be able to use it, and you will never be able to abuse it. A conscious person cannot abuse anything.
23. Transformation means to change the plane of your understanding. It comes through transcendence. If you want to change your mind, you have to go to the state of no-mind. Only from that height will you be able to change your mind, because from that height you will be the master. Remaining in the mind and trying to change the mind by mind itself is a futile process. It is like pulling yourself up by your own shoestrings. It is like a dog trying to catch hold of its own tail; sometimes they do, sometimes they behave very humanly. The dog is sitting in the warm sun early in the morning and he looks at the tail just resting by his side — naturally, the curiosity arises: Why not catch hold of it? He tries, fails, feels offended, annoyed; tries hard, fails harder, becomes mad, crazy. But he will never be able to catch hold of the tail — it is his own tail. The more he jumps, the more the tail will jump. Psychology can give you a few insights into the mind, but because it cannot take you beyond the mind it can’t be of any help.
24. First go deep into love so you can have a few tastes of death. Then death will come one day — then go dancingly into it, because you know it is going to be the greatest orgasm that you have ever known, that it is going to be the deepest of love. And that’s how one transcends — knowing that both are one. That very knowing is transcendence.
25. My effort here is not to change the Western mind into the Eastern, not to change the Eastern mind into the Western, but to let here be a meeting of both — not in part but in totality. And remember, when two wholes meet, it becomes one whole. When two totalities meet, it becomes one totality: that is transcendence. It is urgently needed, because without it there is no hope for humanity, no future for humanity.
26. These two words have to be understood because the difference is very delicate and subtle: ‘indifference’ and ‘transcendence’. Indifference simply means you avoid the positive to avoid the negative. Transcendence means you avoid nothing, neither the positive nor the negative. You live the positive in its totality and you live the negative in its totality, with a new quality — and that quality is that of a witness. You live totally but at the same time you remain silently alert, aware.
27. Joy is a state of transcendence. One is neither happy nor unhappy, but utterly peaceful, quiet, in absolute equilibrium; so silent and so alive that his silence is a song, that his song is nothing but his silence. Joy is forever; happiness is momentary. Happiness is caused by the outside, hence can be taken away from the outside — you have to depend on others. And any dependence is ugly, any dependence is a bondage. Joy arises within, it has nothing to do with the outside. It is not caused by others, it is not caused at all. It is the spontaneous flow of your own energy.