OSHO on Decisions

The following is an excerpt from a talk given in India by OSHO (formerly Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh) who died in 1990.  I was struck by the simplicity and power of his words:

The decision was difficult — decisions are always difficult but it is good to be decisive. Sometimes one may even take a wrong decision; then too it is better to be decisive rather than remaining indecisive, because in indecisiveness one disintegrates, one becomes fragments; one has a center no more. The center is created through constant decisiveness. Each moment one has to decide. It is not very important what you decide. My emphasis is not on what you decide; my emphasis is on that you decide.

So start making decisions in small things, in very small things. For example if you have decided that at ten o’clock you will go to sleep, then go to sleep. It is not very important whether you go at ten or eleven, that is not important, but decide that you will be going at ten every night, and suddenly you will feel very good. Or decide that you will get up early in the morning at a fixed hour or you will eat at a certain time . . . . Just start being decisive in as many things as possible and then you will find more and more decisiveness coming to you. It needs practice, that’s all. You have never practiced it; you have always been hanging in a vague way, ambiguous, this or that. One can go on hanging between this and that the whole life.

Ordinarily the problem is created because people make much fuss about the right thing to be decided. That’s why. Because we have been taught always to decide the right thing that creates a problem. It is not always so easy to decide whether this is right or not.

My whole approach is: don’t be bothered too much about right and wrong and don’t be bothered about what is better. The whole thing at stake is to be decisive. Try in as many things as possible, and then after a few months you will suddenly see that a new kind of center has arisen in you from where decisions easily flow, they don’t take so long a time. And if a decision takes too much time it is always inadequate, because the right moment, the right situation is already gone. By the time you decide it is no more the moment for it, so you are lagging behind.

For example, somebody says something and you start deciding what to answer. By the time you decide, the man is gone, or whatsoever he said has become already irrelevant; it needs no answer now . . . .

Life is a constant decisiveness. Each moment one has to decide. And sometimes not knowing what is right and what is wrong, sometimes not knowing which is better, one has to decide. One cannot afford not to decide, mm? otherwise one will start disintegrating.