Sufi means 'a seeker who is moving on the path of love.' God cannot be known through knowledge; knowledge is utterly meaningless. God can only be known through love. The way to god goes through the heart. It needs only an innocent heart, and you have it! And it is beautiful that your heart is still like a small child... it is rare. The head is carrying many burdens, but that is irrelevant...

Question 2 Why Do Sufis Deliberately Disguise and Hide Themselves? Because they want their energies to be used rightly, because they are creative people. They are not interested in name and fame, they are not interested in anything else; they are only interested in giving a new life to people who are desiring God, longing for God. Why should they waste their time and energy? There are man...

The Sufi is not an escapist, that is not his climate. He is utterly against escapism. He believes in celebrating the world, celebrating existence, celebrating life. It is the very fundamental of Sufism that the creator can be reached only through the creation. You need not renounce his creation to get to him; in fact if you renounce his creation you will never get to him. Renouncing his c...

Prem means love, Hamido is a Sufi name for God – it means the praiseworthy. Sufis continuously praise God. They call it jikr – remembrance They are continuously bowing inside to God. That is a way of effacing yourself. That is a way of destroying the ego, the way to destroy the person. When the person is completely effaced, dropped, he becomes a presence, and that presence is love. Love i...

EXISTENCE IS A DIALECTICS. IT DEPENDS ON POLAR OPPOSITES: man/woman, yin/yang, life/death, daylight. But the basic polarity in all the polarities is that of positive and negative. Only positive cannot exist, neither can the negative exist alone. They depend on each other. They are opposites and yet not opposites. If you understand this, you have a great key in your hands: they are opposit...

Question 1 Has sufism arisen as a rebel against the establishment of islam? or is it pre-islam? It is both. Anything that is alive is both. It is very ancient and it is very new -- together, simultaneously. Sufism is pre-Islam and yet it is a unique new phenomenon too. It is the essential core of Islam and yet it is a rebellion against the establishment of Islam too. That's how it is alwa...

Osho on Sufism There are religions and religions, but Sufism is the religion – the very heart, the innermost core, the very soul. Sufism is not part of Islam; rather, on the contrary, Islam is part of Sufism. Sufism existed before Mohammed ever was born, and Sufism will exist when Mohammed is completely forgotten. Islams come and go; religions take form and dissolve; Sufism abides, contin...

on Whirling Meditation Technique The first meditation, which you will be doing in the morning, is related to the rising sun. It is a morning meditation. When the sleep is broken the whole of nature becomes alive. The night has gone, the darkness is no more, the sun is coming up, and everything becomes conscious and alert. So this first meditation is a meditation in which you have to be co...

Sufism still depends on a hypothetical God. - You will have one day to change from Sufis to Zen - (Professor Coleman Barks - the translator of a collection of Rumi's work - has asked a question) Question 1: Professor Coleman Barks has asked a question: I feel very grateful for your enlightenment, your wisdom, your daring experiments, your life. Thank you! Rumi said, “I want burning, burni...

These are the two attitudes open to man: the attitude of a warrior and the attitude of a lover. It is your choice - you can choose. But remember... certain consequences will follow. If you choose the path of the warrior and you become a fighter with everything that surrounds you, you will always be in misery. This is creating a hell around you; in the very attitude of fighting the hell is...

Osho on Sufism Sufism is a vision. In fact to call it ’Sufism’ is not right because it is not an ’ism’ at all. Sufis don’t call it ’Sufism’; it is the name given by the outsiders. They call their vision TASSAWURI, a love-vision, a loving approach towards reality. It is falling in love with existence. The person who thinks about existence is a little bit antagonistic because he creates a p...

Question 1 I am not clear. Is being a Sufi a matter of will? Is it a blessing? or Is it something else? The Sufis have a very beautiful saying. They say, ’God is not found by seeking, and never found by those who don’t seek.’ First a man has to seek and then he has to surrender his seeking too – because in the seeking the seeker goes on existing. The seeker is the ego. Of course, if you n...

Tariqa means the path, the method RELIGION exists in three dimensions. That is the original source of the concept of Trinity, or the Hindu idea of trimurti - the three faces of God. Or we can say that religion exists on three planes - because man exists on three planes. Man exists in the body, in the mind, in the soul. Religion also has a body, a mind and a soul. If you only exist in the ...

Osho on Sufism Sufism is not concerned with knowledge. Its whole concern is love, intense, passionate love: how to fall in love with the whole, how to be in tune with the whole, how to bridge the distance between the creation and the creator. The so-called organized religions of the world teach a kind of duality, that the creator is separate from the creation, that the creator is higher t...

LA ILLAHA ILL ALLAH - There is no god but God. This is the fundamental essence of the way of the Sufis. This is the seed. Out of this seed has grown the Bodhi Tree of Sufism. In this small proclamation, all that is valuable in all the religions is contained: God is and only God is. This statement makes God synonymous with existence. God is the very isness of all that is. God is not separa...

Truth is one - cannot be otherwise because existence is a universe, it is not a 'multiverse'. It is one. It is glued together. It is a togetherness. It is a cosmos. That which keeps the universe together is what we call truth, or Tao, or God. Tao is not a person, neither is god a person, but the unity that runs through everything, like a thread running through a garland. The universe is n...

The purity of the spirit is the real poverty. The word 'sufi' comes from an Arabic word 'safa'. Safa means purity. Sufi means one who is pure in the heart. And what is purity? Don't misunderstand me, purity has nothing to do with morality. Don't interpret it in a moralistic way. Purity has nothing to do with puritans. Purity simply means an uncontaminated state of mind, where only your co...

You Are It Question 4 What is a mystical experience? Margo, first: a mystical experience is not an experience at all. It is called ’mystical experience’ because we have to call it something, but it is not an experience at all. An experience is always outside you. You see the clouds in the sky, or the lightning in the sky. Or, you can see the same inside too: you can close your eyes and yo...

Selfishness is Unawareness Your selfishness is nothing but your unawareness, your lack of discipline. Create an inner discipline, a little training in awareness, and your selfishness will disappear, because your SELF will disappear. And when there is no self left, then real Self with a capital S, the Supreme Self, arrives. You disappear as a wave, you appear as the ocean. That is liberati...

There is No Ladder Question 1 Every day you talk about the ‘Earth’ and about the ‘Sky’ – About the potential and about the ultimate. But what is the ‘ladder’ in between? What is the process that happens in between? Why do you not talk about the ‘ladder’? The ladder exists not. There is no ladder. There is no in between. There is not any gap, it is all one. The earth and sky are not discon...

Question : Why do the sufis dance? Yes, it is a pertinent question. Buddhists only sit silently. Why do Sufis dance? Zen people only meditate, sitting silently, not doing a thing, doing nothing — just sitting silently? spring comes, and the grass grows by itself. But Sufis dance. These are the two different paths, because there are two types of energy in the world: the positive and the ne...

Sufism Beyond Islam Once a learned Mohammedan came to me and asked, ‘You are not a Mohammedan, then why do you speak on Sufism?’ I told him, ‘I am not a Mohammedan, obviously, but I am a Sufi all the same.’ A Sufi need not be a Mohammedan. A Sufi can exist anywhere, in any form – because Sufism is the essential core of all religions. It has nothing to do with Islam in particular. Sufism c...

Osho on Sufi The word 'sufi' comes from an Arabic word 'safa'. Safa means purity. Sufi means one who is pure in the heart. ♦ Sufi is the Bhakta on the Mohammedan path; Bhakta is the Sufi on the Hindu path. There is no difference between a Bhakta and a Sufi. ♦ Curiosity is not enough. You have to be ready. Sufis say that a master accepts you not because of your inquiry, he accepts you beca...

The Sufis say that if a man has no awareness nothing can be taught. So the first thing to be taught will be awareness. And awareness takes a long time because you have lived many lives in unawareness. It has gone very deep in your blood, it has entered into your very texture, into every cell of your body; every fibre of your psyche is full of sleep. This sleep has to be broken. Once this ...

How to Die Every culture, every civilization, every so called religion, cuts every child off from his heart. It is a most dangerous thing. All that is dangerous comes out of the heart. Mind is more secure, and with the mind you know where you are. With the heart, no one ever knows where one is. With the mind, everything is calculated, mapped, measured. And you can feel the crowd always wi...

on Sufi Sayings - Man is a Machine Question 3 Why do the Sufis say that man is a Machine? Man is a machine, that's why. Man as he is is utterly unconscious. He is nothing but his habits, the sum total of his habits. Man is a robot. Man is not yet man: unless consciousness enters into your being, you will remain a machine. That's why the Sufis say man is a machine. It is from the Sufis tha...

“A man may be physically a man and may not be psychologically a man; he may have a feminine psyche. Hence things become complicated. A woman may have a masculine psyche. There is no necessity that the body should decide the psyche. The woman, the feminine quality I call the moon type, and the masculine quality I call the sun type. Their paths are bound to be different. Of course the goal ...

Remembrance LA ILLAHA ILL ALLAH – there is no God but God. There is no goal but the goal. And the goal is not separate from the source; the source and the goal are the same phenomenon. This is one of the most fundamental things to be understood: to reach the goal one has to reach the source. The alpha is the omega. If you go on trying to reach the goal you will remain in an eternal wander...