Osho Quotes on Death

1. Whoever may have died right now… each death is your death, because each death is a reminder that you are not going to be here forever. Each death is an opportunity to be awake. Before death comes use the opportunity of life to attain something which is beyond death.
2. The secret is, start living more fully, more totally. Be more alert so that you can find within yourself something that is unreachable by death. That is the only shelter, the only security, the only safety. And if you want to help your friends and family, let them become aware of this secret.
3. The danger is more, but as life is itself always in the grip of death, it is a good opportunity to be aware. Otherwise your death comes without any pre-information: suddenly it comes and you don’t have even a single moment. And even in cases where death is certain — in cancer or in AIDS — the doctors, the family, the friends, everybody tries to hide the fact that it is so close… with good intentions, but good intentions won’t do. They are harming the person. The person should be made aware: “Your death is going to come within one month. You don’t have any more life, so this month do the best thing that can give you a taste of immortality.” Then when you die there is no sadness, no misery — you simply move from this body into another body, or if you become enlightened… A sudden awareness of death can make you enlightened.
4. A man of realization knows there is no death. Death is a fiction, you have never died. Yes, you have changed your form many times. You have changed your house many times, many times. But you have never died. Have you ever seen yourself dying? It is always somebody else who dies.
5. life and death are two phases of the same energy. Death is not the end of life. Death itself is part of life, and life goes on. You have died many times, and still you are alive. Your life is eternal. Death is a small episode here and there, when you change your house, but the essential of your being remains the same. How many times you change houses does not matter, but it is inconceivable to the mind.
6. Mind only thinks about things. “What will happen after death?” Why can’t you wait? One thing is certain: you will die — I guarantee it! How you prefer to die, that is another matter.
7. You were a child, you have become a grown-up, you will become old. This is phenomenal, this is unreal. But there is something within you which never becomes anything other than itself. In your childhood it is the same, in your youth it is the same, in your old age it is the same, in your death it is the same. A man of meditation knows his eternal being, his immortal being. There is no deathbed for him.
8. A right kind of education will teach people to live herenow, to create a paradise of this earth, not to wait for death to come, and not to wait for death to come, and not to be miserable till death stops your misery. Let death find you dancing and joyous and loving. It is a strange experience that if a man can live his life as if he is already in paradise, death cannot take away anything from that man’s experience.
9. Because of our mind we always divide everything into opposite polarities. Delusion and enlightenment, night and day, birth and death, they are all one process but the mind cannot conceive it. It is intrinsically incapable of conceiving of the oneness of life and death, of light and darkness.
10. Once enlightened, your death is going to be the last death. In other words, only enlightened people die. The unenlightened … very difficult  — they go on coming back, they never die. Only the enlightened person can afford death; the unenlightened cannot afford it, he is not yet ready. Life is a school, and unless you have learned the lesson you will have to come back again and again to the same class. Once you have learned the lesson, passed the examination, then even if you want to come back into the class you will find all doors are closed for you. You have to move higher, to a different level of being.
11. The authentic man lives the unknown, allows the unknown, moves on the unknown path, risks everything. He may not find gold mines, but he finds a tremendous satisfaction. His life is a life of blessings; his death is a death of fulfillment.
12. The whole function of the master is to create such energy, such a magnetic force that you are pulled in and slowly, slowly start disappearing. And a point comes when you have become one with existence. This I call real death.
13. The ordinary death that you see every day is not real death; It is only a change of the house, or a changing of your clothes. The master is the real death — because once you are consumed in the energy that the master makes available to you, you will not be coming back into any form; you will disappear into the vast universe. It is death from one side: you will not be this small, imprisoned soul.
14. It is life eternal from the other side: you will be freed from the prison and you will become one with life itself. You will not be separate; you will be immortal, you will be universal. Just all your misery, all your limitations — the birth, the death, the old age — all these will disappear. You will be simply young, vibrating, eternal life. On the one hand the master is a death. On the other, he is the resurrection.
15. If you have known life, you will have certainly known death — and then death is not the enemy, death is the friend. Then death is nothing but a deep sleep. Again there is a morning, again things will start. Then death is nothing but rest — a tremendous rest, needed rest. After the whole life of toil and tiredness, one needs a great rest in God. Death is going back to the source, just as in sleep.
16. Every night you die a little death. You call it sleep; it would be better to call it a little death. You disappear from the surface, you move into your innermost being. You are lost, you don’t know who you are. You forget all about the world, and the relationship, and the people. You die a small death, a tiny death, but even that tiny death revives you. In the morning you are full of zest and juice again, again throbbing with life, again ready to jump into a thousand and one adventures, ready to take the challenge. By the evening you will be tired again. This is happening daily. You have not even known what sleep is; how can you know death? Death is a great sleep, a great rest after the whole life. It makes you anew, it makes you fresh, it resurrects you.
17. Live the way existence wanted you to live. Your very life should be so intense and so total that you burn your life’s torch from both ends. In that very intensity you will know that you have touched something of eternity. And if you have known it in your life, in your death you will find a deeper confirmation of the fact. People who live in personality always die unconscious. They have never lived. They don’t know what consciousness is, so before death they become unconscious. That’s why we don’t remember our past lives. You were unconscious, and death happened in your unconsciousness. But if you live consciously, as an individual, then you will die consciously, the way Socrates is dying — so conscious to the last breath. And this memory will be with you in the next life too.

Osho Quotes on Death

1. Your birth was the beginning of death. Since then you have not been doing anything except dying — every day, continuously — although the process is very slow. It may take seventy years or eighty years to reach your grave, but you have been moving towards it since you left your cradle… consistently… never taking a single holiday, never going astray. There is no way of going astray! Whatever you do, wherever you go, you are going towards the graveyard. One day you were not… one day you are again not — although you existed for seventy years.
2. Birth and death are simply devices, because neither birth is true nor death is true. We have been before birth, so how can birth be true? And we will be after death, so how can death be true? Only one thing is true: the consciousness that comes with you through birth and goes with you through death — perhaps birth is a door, and death too! Perhaps they are the same door, just your direction is different.
3. If you can have just a glimpse of yourself you will know you have never been born and you have never died. Yes, birth and death have been happening around you but not to you. The body was dying, the mind was dying; the body was being born, the mind was being born again, but you have remained eternally the same.
4. At the moment of death all your knowledge of the world will be lost into thin air. Only one thing will go with you, and that one thing is being constantly ignored — that is your self-knowledge, your self-realization. In fact, this is the only ignorance — ignoring yourself.
5. To know life in its insecurity is to know life in its immense beauty, is to know life in its authenticity. To know life in its insecurity, without any fear, is to transcend death, because life never dies.
6. Have you ever consciously looked at death? Have you ever gone to the cemetery and sat there and thought about the people who are lying in their graves? No… you will go only one time and one way — you will not come back. Why are graveyards and cemeteries and funeral grounds made outside the city, out of the way? — so that you don’t have to come across them. In fact, the graveyards should be made exactly in the middle of the city, so you have to come across them many times every day, knowing perfectly well that the people who are sleeping in those graves were also one day living just like you, and one day you also will be lying in the same kind of grave.
7. Remember, if the fear of death disappears then all other fears disappear automatically, because all other fears are nothing but by-products of the main, basic fear — the fear of death. Go into any of your fears and ultimately you will come to the rock-bottom, and that will be the fear of death. You are afraid of losing money? Go deep into it and you will find that money somehow gives you a feeling that you are more protected, that you can resist death more than the poor man; hence you are afraid of losing money. If you are powerful, politically powerful, it gives you an appearance, as if you have conquered death.
8. Time is mind. Time is death. Going beyond time is going beyond mind and beyond death.
9. It is always death that comes before your desires are fulfilled. Even if you live for a thousand years your desires are not going to be fulfilled.
10. And that’s what sannyas is all about. It is to accept the insecurity of life, it is to accept death, it is to accept that everything can disappear at any moment. Your love, your friendship, you, everything is only for the moment. The next moment the petals will wither away, all will be gone.
11. From birth to death man is a long sleep, sometimes dreaming with eyes closed, sometimes dreaming with eyes open, but dreaming all the same, all the time.
12. Each one has to carry his own cross, each one has to prepare for his own ultimate death — I don’t mean physical death, remember. Physical death has happened to you many times; millions of times you have died physically. That is not true death because the mind continues, enters into another womb, starts another game; again the whole story is repeated. You go on moving in circles; that is not true death.
13. The true death is known only by the devotee who comes to a point when he CANNOT live without God, it is impossible to live without God. When this impossibility arises, that one cannot live without God… this is what Jesus means, by ‘carrying your own cross’. Of course, nobody else can carry it for you. This death is so deep that nobody can help you. This death is so much of the interior that nobody can approach it from the outside. You cannot be murdered, you can only commit suicide — about THIS death, about THIS internal disappearance, about THIS subjective annihilation, cessation.
14. It happens to every meditator: the more you meditate the more your inner voice says, “Let the ego die.” The more you meditate, the more you become aware that a certain death is going to happen. And you know only one kind of death, so naturally you misinterpret; you think, “I am going to die.” You are not going to die, only the ‘I’, the ego, the personality is going to die, is going to disappear.
15. But each time somebody dies, something in you becomes shaky. Each death is a small death to you. Never send somebody to ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. Each death is your death. Even when a dry leaf falls from the tree, it is your death. Hence we go on protecting ourselves.

Osho Quotes on Death and Dying

1. This life is going to end in a few days, or in a few years. It is not something to cling to. Each moment death is coming closer; before death grabs you, you have to figure out something which is eternal, which is immortal.
2. It seems obvious that death is the end of life; that is not true. Death is only a beginning of a new life — a refreshment, a rejuvenation. The old body is tired. You need more experiences to become mature. You have to move through many other forms of life, and there are millions of forms of life.
3. Death can be sweet if you move from one body, one existence, one form, with pure awareness into another and higher. Then it is sweet, really sweet.
4. When you encounter death, when you see it face to face, when you don’t avoid, when you don’t dodge, when you don’t escape, when you don’t create a cloud around you, when you face it, encounter it, the fact of death, suddenly you become aware that death is life. The deeper you move into death, the deeper you move in life because, Heraclitus says, the opposites meet and mingle, they are one.
5. Death makes one understand fear, but it is not the death of somebody else, it is your own death, and that too with the condition that you are conscious.
6. All the riches that you have can be lost, can be stolen, will be lost — one day death will come and will take everything away. When somebody has come to that inner diamond that is one’s own being, death cannot take it away. Death is irrelevant to it. It cannot be stolen, it cannot be lost. Then one has become iswara, then one has become a holy lord. Then one has become bhagavan.
7. Death is the point at which knowledge fails, and when knowledge fails, mind fails. And when mind fails, there is a possibility of truth penetrating you. But people don’t know. When somebody dies you don’t know what to do, you are very embarrassed. When somebody dies it is a great moment to meditate. I always think that each city needs a Death Center. When somebody is dying and his death is very, very imminent he should be moved to the Death Center. It should be a small temple where people who can go deep in meditation should sit around him, should help him to die, and should participate in his being when he disappears into nothing.
8. If you are identified with anything, you will suffer death.
9. Life has to be a joy, a dance, a celebration. And when death comes, it has to be welcomed with silence, with serenity — wholeheartedly, not holding anything back. This is a way to kill death itself.
10. Buddhists call these three ‘the messengers of God’: old age, sickness, death — three messengers of God. Why? — because only through these experiences in life do you become aware of death. And if you become aware of death and you start learning how to go into it, how to welcome it, how to receive it, you are released from the bondage, from the wheel of life and death.
11. Whenever you feel death close by, go into it through the door of love, through the door of meditation, through the door of a man dying. And if some day you are dying — and the day is going to come one day — receive it in joy, benediction. And if you can receive death in joy and benediction, you will attain to the greatest peak, because death is the crescendo of life. Hidden in it is the greatest orgasm, because hidden in it is the greatest freedom.
12. The basic fear is the fear of death. All other fears are just reflections of the basic fear. All other fears can be reduced to one fear: the fear of death, the fear that, “One day I may have to disappear, one day I may have to die. I am, and the day is coming when I will not be” — that frightens, that is the fear.
13. Life and death are not two separate phenomena; they are two faces of the same coin, two aspects of the same coin. If you penetrate deeply you will see that life is death and death is life. The moment you are born, you have started dying. And if this is so, then when you die you will start living again. If death is implied in life, then life will be implied in death. They belong to each other, they are complementary.
14. If you are trying to escape from death, remember, you will be escaping from life also; that’s why you look so dead. This is the paradox: escape death and you remain dead; face, encounter death and you become alive. At the moment when you face death so deeply, so intensely, that you start feeling that you are dying — not only around, but within also, you feel and touch death — the crisis comes. That is the cross of Jesus, the crisis of dying. At that moment, from one world you die — the world of the horizontal, the world of the mind — and you resurrect into another world.
15. Life and death are one — one phenomenon, one energy. Life is the manifestation of that energy, and death is again relaxation. Life is coming to a form, and death is moving again into the formless. The end and the beginning meet. Life is not separate from death, death is not separate from life — they meet and mingle. Even to say they meet is not right because the mind immediately brings: “If there is a meeting then there must be two.” It is not a meeting, it is one phenomenon.
16. If you have lived joyously, you will be ready to welcome death too — invite her for a dance! Death is powerful only over people who have never lived, who don’t have the courage to relax peacefully in moments of death without any fear — because no accident, no disease, nothing can make even a dent in your consciousness; you are always intact.
17. Death brings to the surface your essential personality.
18. At the time of death, the most important subject in the minds of people who are not conscious is going to be sex — because sex and death are two sides of the same coin.
19. The bardo is suggestions to the dying person: “Now be silent. Leave this life consciously. Rather than death taking it away from you, relax your hold; don’t be defeated by death, don’t struggle. Just drop all your attachment. This world is finished for you, and this life is finished for you. There is no point in holding on to it; in holding on to it you will be fighting with death. You cannot win, and a very significant possibility will be missed.