Osho Speaks On Truth

Image courtesy of Osho International Foundation, New York, USA.

I’ve often wondered, if there is anything we could describe as final truth in life. Whatever we might speak now should have no credibility tomorrow. I’ve seen this happening in my own case. All my past assumptions about this world and my life, which seemed faultless when I made them, have proven incorrect over the years. I had irrefutable reasons to believe in them, and they too seemed helping me at various stages of my life. However, as life passed on – and how steadfastly, intensely and uniformly it did so – so did my ideas about rights and wrongs dilute in air.

But, why should this inability of mine surprise anyone? Don’t we all face similar predicament in life at various stages? This is why many say perhaps they are learners in life until they breathed their last. The nature and expanse of this existence is so vast and so unpredictable, and the human mind so insignificant in comparison, that even to think about the so-called absolute truth is fundamentally flawed.

Even modern physics  seems to have noticed this human error, and invented the Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Mechanics to make its own life easier. (From wikipedia:) “According to Uncertainty Principle, it is, for instance, impossible to measure simultaneously both position and velocity of a microscopic particle with any degree of accuracy or certainty”.

It further adds: “This is not a statement about the limitations of a researcher’s ability to measure particular quantities of a system, it is a statement about the nature of the system itself as described by the equations of quantum mechanics.”

I disagree with the second part though, at the cost of being termed unscientific! The uncertainty, in my opinion, is not due to any of the system’s faults, but due to man-made limitations. The reach of human mind is limited and so is the scope of science, in contrast to the infinite existence surrounding us. In summation, no matter how rigorously one attempted to to understand the fundamentals of life, they won’t succeed in achieving that target ever.

What Osho Spoke about Truth

Now osho’s magical words on truth. I shall quote the following two paras from two different resources to convey Osho’s point of view.

Osho on Truth…click here

Remember the first preliminary of Atisha: truth is. You need not believe in it for it to be. Your belief or your disbelief is not going to make any difference to the truth. Truth is truth, whether you believe or you disbelieve.

But if you believe in something it starts appearing as true to you at least. That’s what the meaning of belief is: belief means to believe in something as true – you know that you don’t know, you know that the truth is unknown to you, but in your ignorance you start believing, because belief is cheap.
To discover truth is arduous, it needs a long pilgrimage. It needs a great emptying of the mind, it needs a great cleansing of the heart. It needs a certain innocence, a rebirth: you have to become a child again.

Only very few people have ever dared to discover truth. And it is risky, because it may not console you; it has no obligation to console you. It is risky: it may shatter all that you have known before, and you will have to rearrange your whole life. It is dangerous: it may destroy all your illusions, it may shatter all your dreams. It is really going through fire; it is going to burn you as you are, it is going to kill you as you are. And who knows what will happen later on?

Osho – What is Truth?…click here

The experience of truth is neither a thought nor a feeling. It is a vibrating and a throbbing of all the vital components of your entire being. It is not in you; you are in it. It is your whole being, not just an experience that is happening to you. It is in you yourself, but it is larger than you because the whole of existence is included in it as well.

You ask me for a definition of truth? There is no definition of truth. How can one’s self define one’s self? Pilate asked Christ, “What is truth?” and Christ simply looked at him and remained silent. Truth has no words, no sounds. Truth is an experience of the extreme depths of the self. It is total identification with what is.

Truth is not the opposite of untruth. The opposite of untruth is still untruth. All extremes are untruths. Truth is the mean between extremes. In other words, truth transcends all extremes.

As I see it, mankind has lost all sense of direction. And this has happened because man has chosen investigation of the physical world over exploration of his own inner being. Nothing should be more important to a man than himself. His first and fundamental inquiry should be into himself.

Unless a man knows himself all his knowledge lacks authenticity. In the hands of an ignorant man nothing can be creative, but even ignorance can become a creative tool in the hands of a knowledgeable one. If a man can understand himself, can master himself, only then will his other achievements have real merit. Unless this happens he is simply digging his own grave.