In this article, we are going to discuss Osho’s commandments to live by. But at the same time, as you know, according to Osho philosophy, it’s always a disease to ask for advice. He liked to say that first, we should use our own mind – give it a chance to get sharper.
There is no need to postpone the search for the answers to your questions. All the postponement is inconvenient. A person of integration does not put off the most important thing in his life – self-knowledge. Osho liked to say: “come in, the doors are open!”.
In 1970, one correspondent asked Osho to give his 10 commandments. He replied: “You ask for my ten commandments. This is a difficult task because I am against any commandments”. And then “for fun” he gave his list. So here are Osho’s commandments to live by.
10 Osho’s Commandments
1. Never obey anyone’s commandment.
This is one of the most paradoxical Osho’s commandments! Just think about it – “My first commandment – never obey anyone’s commandments”.
According to Osho, life is so vast, so strange, so mysterious, that it cannot be reduced to a rule or commandment. All the commands are too small; they cannot contain life and vital energies. Therefore, the first commandment is that there are no commandments is quite significant.
A true man does not live by rules or commandments. It’s a pseudohalogen. The real man just lives.
Yes, if you ask a genuine person, he can tell you certain rules, but they are not rules that he follows himself. He just found them on the way of life, like collecting seashells on the beach. He didn’t plan to collect seashells, he was going to enjoy the early morning, fresh air, sun, sea, sand. And by the way, he found these seashells.
All the rules are collected by people who do not follow them. Because the people who follow commandments and rules have committed suicide a long time ago.
Anyone who lives by the rule destroys himself, poisons himself, because this rule is found by someone, not you, somewhere where you will never be, in some time, in some space, which is not your time and not your space. It is very dangerous to follow the rules. You will distract your life from its center.
2. There is no God other than life itself.
Friedrich Nietzsche says: “God is dead”. That’s not right, because God has never existed. Life is existence. It always has existed, always will be. That’s why we all should allow ourselves to be obsessed with life.
The so-called religions of the past have always told us the exact opposite. They say, “Deny.” And Osho says, “Celebrate!” The religions say that life is something untrue, and illusory. They created an abstract idea of God, which is nothing but a projection of their own minds. And they worship that projection. What exists is denied for the sake of what is merely an abstraction of the mind. God is only the word, but they say that God is real.
Reality is life. You feel it in your heartbeat, it pulsates in your blood, it is everywhere – in flowers, rivers, stars. And religions say it’s all Maya, an illusion. They say it’s made of the same stuff as dreams. And they create God – and each of them, of course, creates God in his own imagination. That’s why there are thousands of gods.
3. Truth is within you, do not search for it elsewhere.
This is the main feature of the truth – you have to find it by yourself.
Osho liked to say that everyone should discover his own truth. We can learn from Buddha with the hope and confidence that one day we will find our own truth.
But don’t try to borrow somebody else’s truth. We can only borrow words. But words are meaningless. The true meaning and understanding come only from the experience.
4. Love is prayer.
Osho didn’t say “pray” because according to his belief there is no God to pray to. He said that prayer makes people religious. It gives false religiosity. That’s why he suggested replacing the word “prayer” with the word ” love”.
Osho didn’t mean love for some invisible God. He meant love to all human beings, animals, trees, oceans, and mountains. He said we should spread our wings of love as wide as we can.
Love doesn’t need a system of faith. Even atheists, communists, and materialists are capable of love.
Love is something that is inherent to you, not something imposed from the outside.
5. To become a nothingness is the door to truth. Nothingness itself is the means, the goal, and the attainment.
Everyone wants to be extraordinary, this is very common. But to be ordinary and just relax in this ordinary existence is the highest extraordinary quality.
The one who perceives his ordinariness without any discontent and grumbling but with joy – only such a person cannot destroy his bliss. No one will steal it, no one will take it.
6. Life is in the present moment (here and now).
Never think about the past, as you are wasting the present, which is the only real thing in your hands. And never think about the future, because no one knows what tomorrow will be, how tomorrow will be, how everything will turn out, where you will land – you can not imagine it.
Stay in the moment, truly in the moment, the here and now as if there was never yesterday and tomorrow will never come – only then can you be completely here and now.
And this fullness of being in the present connects you with existence, because existence does not know the past, does not know the future. It’s always here and now.
When you’re all here, yesterday doesn’t pull you back, tomorrow doesn’t pull you somewhere else, you’re completely relaxed.
7. Live wakefully.
According to Osho to live awakened means to realize that you are outside the mind that determines you. When you’re experiencing the state of “beyond the mind” you are able to clearly see the mind as an object of perception. This does not mean that your mind disappears. It just means that you do not live in your mind anymore. And it is at this stage you start watching and controlling your mind. The mind is still present, but you are not its prisoner anymore.
At this stage, it is important to allow your observation to gain full strength through meditation. This is where the “emptying of consciousness” should take place. If you are not conscious, it is very easy to slip back into the clutches of the mind. But it is also possible to see the horizon. We know what it takes to make it happen. No one can make “this” happen, but it is necessary to create an opportunity for “this” to happen.
8. Do not swim – float.
Osho said that the river of life flows and we should flow with it. We don’t need to swim; we just need to let the river guide us. We shouldn’t fight it, we shouldn’t waste our energy fighting it. We just should relax and move with the flow.
If we can move with the flow without any conflicts, without looking back on our part, then suddenly we will start to realize that we are not a river. We will feel that the river is around us, but we are not the river.
When we’re fighting with the river of life we lose ourselves. Don’t fight! There is no need for this because by fighting you can not enter the change. So don’t be afraid. Live in peace. Don’t be afraid, because when you’re afraid the world cannot enter you. Live it!
9. Die each moment so that you can be new each moment.
According to Osho, we should start dying every moment for our past. We should cleanse ourselves of the past every moment. If we learn how to die for the known then the unknown becomes available to us. Dying and allowing ourselves to be reborn in every moment, we can live life and we can live death.
Osho said that this is the true spirituality: to live death to the fullest and to live life to the fullest. He said we should live life and death so fervently, that we’ll have nothing left as not experienced behind, even death. If we can live life and death totally, then we will go beyond.
In this tremendous passion and the fullness of life and death, we will go beyond duality and will come to One. Being One is the real truth. You can call it God, you can call it life, you can call it truth, Samadhi, ecstasy, or whatever you want to.
10. Do not search.
When you start searching, you take the wrong starting point. In the search itself, you start from the fact that you don’t have what you’re searching for — that’s where the mistake is. You have to accept that you already have what you’re searching for. Starting to look for something, you immediately become neurotic, because you can not find anything — there is no place to look for because everything is already found.
You are like a man who’s looking for glasses while they are already on his eyes, on his nose: he’s looking through the glasses and looking for them! He will never find them unless he remembers that the search is in vain unless he remembers: “If I see something, then the glasses are already in front of my eyes; how else would I see?”
There is a hidden truth in everything we see. A seeker is always sought — that is the problem, the only problem that human beings are trying to endlessly solve and which is increasingly confounding them. Rather than seeking, an individual would do better to simply become still and try to develop more awareness. Then the answers to their questions simply reveal themselves through effortless observation as opposed to tireless searching.
Should We Follow Osho’s Commandments?
At the end of this article about 10 Osho’s commandments, we would like to remind you about two very important things.
First of all, Osho gave this list for fun.
Secondary, out of Osho’s 10 commandments the first one is the most important one – “never obey anyone’s commandment”. In other words, the most important commandment is there are no commandments!
Always listen to your heart and voice within.