Osho Quotes on Philosophy

 

 

 

Philosophy means knowing something about the unknown without knowing it. It is just preconceptions, hypotheses, man-constructed ideologies.

 

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Philosophy tries to explain things -- never succeeds. At the most, it can succeed only in explaining away things, but it never succeeds in explaining them. Religion makes no effort to explain life. It tries to live it. Religion does not take life as a problem to be solved -- it takes life as a mystery to be lived. Religion is not curious about life. Religion is in awe, in tremendous wonder about life.

 

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Philosophy is a substitute for religion. Those who go into philosophy are lost to religion, and those who want to go into religion, they have to drop all kinds of philosophizing.

 

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Philosophy is just intellectual gymnastics, it has nothing to do with reality. It talks, argues, creates magnificent systems of thought, but it does not change the man who is creating all this. He remains the same man.

 

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Philosophy is baseless. It makes castles in the air. Ideas are just ideas. You can project an y idea you like, nobody can prevent you; and once you project the idea you can find all kinds of rationalizations to support it. There is no difficulty.

 

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Science grows out of doubt. Religion grows out of wonder. Between the two is philosophy; it has not yet decided -- it goes on hanging between doubt and wonder. Sometimes the philosopher doubts and sometimes the philosopher wonders: he is just in between. If he doubts too much, by and by he becomes a scientist. If he wonders too much, by and by he becomes religious. That's why philosophy is disappearing from the world -- because ninety-nine percent of philosophers have become scientists. And one person -- a Buber somewhere, or a Krishnamurti somewhere, or a Suzuki somewhere -- great minds, great penetrating intellects, they have become religious. Philosophy is almost losing its ground.

 

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Beware of getting lost in philosophy and religion if you really want to know what truth is. Beware of being Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, because they are all ways of being deaf, blind, insensitive.

 

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RELIGION IS NOT CONCERNED with philosophical questions and answers. To go on looking this way is stupid, and a sheer waste of life, time, energy and consciousness, because you can go on asking and answers can be given -- but from answers only more questions will come out. If in the beginning there was one question, in the end, through many answers, there will be a million questions. Philosophy solves nothing. It promises, but never solves anything -- all those promises remain unfulfilled.

 

Still it goes on promising. But the experience which can solve the riddles of the mind cannot be attained through philosophical speculation. Buddha was absolutely against philosophy -- there has never been a man more against philosophy than Buddha. Through his own bitter experience he came to understand that all those profundities of philosophy are just superficial. Even the greatest philosopher remains as ordinary as anyone. No problem has been solved by him, not even touched. He carries much knowledge, many answers, but he remains the same in his old age -- no new life happens to him. And the crux, the core of the matter is that mind is a question-raising faculty: it can raise any sort of question, and then it can befool itself by answering them. But YOU are the questioner, and You are the one who solves them.

 

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Philosophy is a disease, and it is like a cancer: no medicine exists for it yet, you have to go through surgery, a great operation is needed. And philosophy has a similar type of growth, a canceric growth: once it is in you it goes on growing by itself, and it takes all your energies. It is a parasite. You go on becoming weaker and weaker and it becomes stronger and stronger and stronger. Every word creates another word -- and it can go on infinitely.

 

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Philosophy means that a man has become completely head-oriented. He looks towards existence through the eyes of logic and not through the eyes of love.

 

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The philosophy of positive thinking means being untruthful; it means being dishonest. It means seeing a certain thing and yet denying what you have seen; it means deceiving yourself and others. Positive thinking is the only bullshit philosophy that America has contributed to human thought -- nothing else. Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, and the Christian priest, Vincent Peale -- all these people have filled the whole American mind with this absolutely absurd idea of a positive philosophy. And it appeals particularly to mediocre minds.

 

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I do not believe in any philosophy of positive thinking; nor do I believe in the opposite, in the philosophy of negative thinking -- because both are there. The positive and the negative make one whole. My philosophy is holistic -- neither positivist, nor negativist, but holistic, realistic. You see the whole in its totality, whatever it is. Good and bad, day and night, life and death, they both are there. My approach is to see exactly what is the case. There is no need to project any philosophy on it.

 

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Think about truth -- that is allowed! That's why in the West philosophy has grown to great heights and depths. But it is always thinking about truth. It is like madmen thinking about sanity, blind men thinking about light. However the blind man tries to think about light... he may create a big system of thought about what light is, but it is not going to be anything like light. For light, you need eyes.

 

You cannot think about truth, because thinking will be done by your mind -- which is full of lies, nothing but lies. How are you going to think about truth? Truth can be found only when you have put the mind aside. In the East we say truth is the experience that happens in the state of no-mind or in the state of beyond mind. But in the West the very idea has not existed. And that will make one thing clear to you: philosophy is a Western thing. In the East there is nothing like philosophy.

 

It is very strange: the East is far older, at least ten thousand years old, but there is nothing like philosophy in the East. What is called Eastern philosophy is a wrong name. In the East it is called darshan -- darshan means "to see." It has nothing to do with thinking. The very word darshan means "to see."

I had to coin my own word for it: I call it philosia, as against philosophy, because philosophy means "to think," and philosia means "the love of seeing." Philosophy means "the love of thinking" -- but what can you think? Just to avoid the danger of people going beyond mind, and becoming dangerous to the society, a substitute, a toy has been created. That is philosophy.

 

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Life is a quest not a question, a mystery not a problem, and the difference is vast. The problem has to be solved, can be solved, must be solved, but the mystery is insoluble; it has to be lived, experienced. The question has to be solved so that it disappears; encountering a mystery, you have to dissolve in it. The mystery remains, you disappear. It is a totally different phenomenon. In philosophy the problem disappears, but YOU remain; in religion the mystery remains, you disappear, you evaporate. The ego is very much interested in questions and very much afraid of the mystery. The questions arise out of the ego. It plays with the questions, tries to find out answers -- and each answer in its own turn brings more questions.

 

It is an unending process; that's why philosophy has not come to any conclusion. Five thousand years of philosophizing, and not even a single conclusion! It is proof enough that philosophy is an exercise in sheer futility; its claims are very bombastic. In India we have a proverb that you dig the whole mountain and in the end you find only one rat -- but philosophy has not even been able to find the rat. It has been trying, and with great effort, to find some way out of the questions, but it gets more and more lost in the jungle. Now there are more philosophical problems than there were before, and they will go on increasing because the moment you assert a single answer it immediately explodes into many questions. It solves nothing, it simply gives you more work to do.