Osho,

Is it really possible to be in the “now-here” all the time? Most of my time seems to go in planning for, or worrying about, the future.

 

 

Whether you know it or not, you cannot be anywhere else than here and now. Wherever you are it will be here and now.

 

You are given only one moment at a time, and you are wasting that moment in planning or worrying about the future. And the future never comes. What comes is always here, now. It is a series of “nows” – one now, another now, but you are always living in the now.

 

There is no future, so how can you worry about the future? It is because of this kind of worrying and planning for the future that a certain proverb exists in all the languages of the world: Man goes on desiring, planning, worrying about the future, and God goes on disappointing him.

 

There is no God to disappoint you. In your very planning, you are sowing the seeds of disappointment. In your very worrying about the future you are wasting the present. And slowly, slowly it becomes your second nature to worry about the future. So when the future comes, it will come as the present. And because of your habit of worrying about the future, you will waste that moment also in worrying.

 

You will go on worrying about the future for your whole life. You will stop only when death comes and takes away all possibility of the future. You missed your whole life, you could have lived, but you only planned.

 

Live intensely and totally now because the next moment will be born out of this moment. And if you have lived it totally and joyously, you can be absolutely certain that the next moment will bring more blessings, more joy. [....]

 

Stop this habit of planning. Stop worrying about the future. If tomorrow comes, you will be there. And if you know how to live, if you know how to live joyously and dancingly, your tomorrow will also be full of dance and joy.

 

It is the miserable man who plans for the future, because his present is so miserable that he wants to avoid it, he does not want to see it. He thinks about tomorrows, good days are going to come. He is utterly impotent to transform this moment into a good moment. A long habit of transferring everything to the future, postponing, living for the future, will take your whole life out of your hands. There is no other way.

 

You are asking, “Is it really possible to be in the herenow all the time?” This is the only possibility. You cannot be anywhere else. You try, try to be in the tomorrow. Nobody has succeeded up to now – you cannot be in the coming minute. Do you think you can jump and reach into the future, jump out of today and reach into tomorrow? Even if you are planning for tomorrow, that too is being done herenow. Even if you are worrying about the future, that too is being done herenow. You cannot be anywhere else; whatever you do, existence allows only this space of here and now.

 

I can say to you that I am living here and now. I have also tried somehow to get into the future, but there is no way. You cannot go back into the past, you cannot go ahead of time into the future. In your hands is always the present. In fact, the present is the only time you have.

 

And now is such a meaningful word because that is your whole life – a “now” stretched from your birth to your death. But it is always now and here is the only space. You cannot be anywhere else than here, wherever you are, that place will become here.

 

Just be clear about it, otherwise life goes on slipping through your hands like water. Soon you will have empty hands, and meeting death with empty hands is an utter failure. Meet your death full of joy, silence and serenity.

 

Meet death with your hands full of ecstasy. In that ecstasy, death itself dies. You never die, your herenow continues forever and forever.

 

-Osho, "The Rebellious Spirit, #16“

 

⯎

 

Man appears to be in the present, but that is only an appearance. Man lives in the past. He passes through the present, but remains rooted in the past. The present is not really a time for the ordinary consciousness. For the ordinary consciousness, the past is the real time. The present is just a passage from the past to the future, just a momentary passage. The past is real and also the future, but the present is unreal for the ordinary consciousness. The future is nothing but the past extended. The future is nothing but the past projected again and again, and the present seems to be nonexistential.

 

If you think of the present, you will not find it at all because the moment you find it, it has already passed; and just a moment before, when you had not found it, it was in the future. But for a buddha-consciousness, for an awakened being, only the present is existential. For ordinary consciousness – unaware, sleepy like a somnambulist – the past and future are real and the present is unreal. Only when one awakes is the present real. Then both the past and future become unreal.

 

Why is this so? Why do you live in the past? – because the mind is nothing but an accumulation of the past. The mind is memory: all you have done, all you have dreamed, all you wanted to do and could not do, all you have imagined in the past, is your mind. The mind is a dead entity. If you look through the mind, you will never find the present because the present is life, and life can never be approached through a dead medium. Life can never be approached through dead vehicles. Life cannot be touched through death.

 

The mind is dead. The mind is just like dust gathered on a mirror. The more dust gathers, the less the mirror is mirrorlike. And if the layer of dust is very thick, as it is on you, the mirror does not reflect at all.

 

Everybody gathers dust, and not only do you gather, you cling to it, you think it is a treasure. But the past is gone. Why do you cling to it? You cannot do anything about it. You cannot go back, you cannot undo it. Why do you cling to it? It is not a treasure. And if you cling to the past and you think it is a treasure, of course your mind will want to live it again and again in the future. Your future cannot be anything but your modified past – a little refined, a little more decorated. But it is going to be the same because the mind cannot think of the unknown; the mind can only project the known, that which you know.

 

You fall in love with a woman and then the woman dies. Now what are you going to look for in another woman? The new woman is going to be a modified form of your dead wife. That is the only way you know: whatever you do in the future will be nothing but a continuation of the past. You can change a little – a patch here, a patch there – but the main part will remain the same, just the same. [....]

 

I look into your eyes and I see this: you have lived it many, many times, but your essential life has remained the same. You have been given a life many times. You have lived many times; you are very, very ancient. You are not new on this earth; you are older than the earth because you have also lived on other earths, other planets. You are as old as existence, and this is how it should be because you are part of it. You are very ancient, but repeating the same pattern again and again.

 

That’s why Hindus call it the wheel of life and death – a wheel because it goes on repeating itself. It is a repetition: the same spokes come up and go down, come up and go down, come up and go down. The mind projects itself, and the mind is past, so your future is not going to be anything other than the past.

 

And what is past? What have you done in the past? Whatever you have done – good, bad, this, that – whatever you have done has created its own repetition. That is the theory of karma. If you were angry the day before yesterday, you created a certain potentiality for anger. Then you were angry again yesterday: you repeated it, you gave more energy to the anger, the mood of anger – you rooted it more, you watered it. Now today you will repeat it again with more force, with more energy. And then tomorrow you will again be a victim of today.

 

-Osho, "The Alchemy of Yoga, #7“

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Osho,

Why shouldn't we live in the past? Cannot reliving one's pain make one stronger? Cannot rejoicing one's happy moments bring happiness?

 

 

The people who live in the past, who remember the happy moments of the past, are the people who are miserable in the present. If your present is more blissful than all the moments of your past, why should you live in those past moments? They are just memory, they have no reality. Past is past. The real is the present. If you want real bliss, you have to live in the present.

 

Your roots are not in the past. The past is only memory and the future is only imagination – and roots cannot exist in memories and imagination. Roots are always in the present. Everything real is always in the present. In fact, the very idea of dividing time into three tenses – past, present and future – is wrong.

 

Time knows only one tense and that is present. Knowing knows two tenses, past and future. And there is a confusion. It is always here and now that you are, that the whole world is, that the whole existence is. Your roots are here; your flowers are going to be here. People look backward just as a consolation because their present is so empty. They want somehow to forget the present; the past functions as opium. Or they start thinking of the future, which is nothing but a projection of the past, a desire to repeat the past moments even more joyously – but meanwhile you are missing the moment, which is the only reality you have.

 

That’s why I say: man should not live in the past; man should not live in the future – that is deceiving yourself. The only way to live is to live in the moment, and live it so totally – squeeze the whole juice of it – that all your past seems to be pale. And you are so totally involved in it, whatever you are doing – or not doing, just sitting silently, but so total in it, that there is no space for any imagination to move, or any memory clouds to pass through your mind. This is the key to reality.

 

The next moment will also be present.

 

Whatever you will ever have will be present.

 

You cannot have your past back, you cannot have your future now. Between future and past, sandwiched, is the small moment which is real. The past is long, it has ended – you may have lived forty years, fifty years. The future is there – you may live thirty years. The present is a single moment, an atomic moment. It is easy to forget it, but to forget it is to forget everything.

 

To live in the present is the beginning of a real, existential life. Otherwise you are living in dreams; and howsoever sweet the dream may be, it is a dream after all. In the morning you will find you are hungry. All those sweet dishes in the dream have not helped.

 

But this is how it has been happening for centuries. People are concerned with the past, concerned with the future. Nobody seems to be concerned with this small, atomic moment.

 

You cannot divide it. It is indivisible. And it goes so fast that by the time you are moving into past and future, so many moments of the present you have lost – that much life you have wasted. And many people are wasting their lives.

 

If you live each moment, that’s the only way to live. And if you live this moment greatly, your next moment is going to be greater – because now you know how to live. You go on becoming more and more skillful, more and more artful. Each moment becomes a learning, how to get more juice out of life.

 

And if a man can live just one life fully, totally, he will have tasted something of truth, something of the eternal…the fruit that Adam and Eve have missed.

 

-Osho, "Socrates Poisoned Again after 25 Centuries, #2“