Can a person meditating an hour a day gain enlightenment in this life?
It has been found by all the great meditators of the world that just forty-eight minutes, exactly forty-eight minutes, are enough to make you enlightened. But to meditate for forty-eight minutes – I’m not even making it sixty, I’m giving you the exact time – is not an easy thing.
Even to meditate for a single minute, a whole single minute, sixty seconds, is a difficult thing – but not impossible. You can try it to check. Just put a small watch in front of you with a second hand, and start looking at the second hand the moment it moves from twelve. Just keep watching the second hand and see how long you can manage watching it.
At the most, somewhere between ten to twelve seconds you will have missed, you will have gone somewhere else. And by the time you come back, a few seconds are lost, the hand has moved. If you do it daily, then in a few days it is possible to remain for sixty minutes silently watching.
The same is the process of vipassana. You have to watch your breathing – that is the method that Buddha used, a very simple and very scientific method. You just watch the breath going in, you go with it; it is coming out, you come out with it. You don’t forget at any time the watching; you don’t go astray.
If you can manage it for forty-eight minutes, that very day you will become enlightened, in this life!
There is no need to wait for another life and there is no need even to wait for one hour. Those twelve extra minutes may be too difficult. Just forty-eight is the exact right time.
To attain those forty-eight minutes may take years, but it need not be postponed for another life, it can happen in this life.
It all depends on your intensity.
It all depends how much you are ready, willing, open, receptive, vulnerable.
-Osho
From The Sword and the Lotus, Discourse #11
Copyright© OSHO International Foundation
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As a beginner , just before you actually start meditating , a basic question that your mind loves to pop up is “Is there really something called meditation ? In case it exists ,does it really work or it’s just a fairy tale made famous by some so called mystics ?”
Eventually, after getting some knowledge (only Knowledge & NOT the experience yet), you get convinced that yes, Meditation is very much a reality and that once you start meditating, all your queries ,doubts will get answered automatically .
However the contrary happens . Few days /months into meditation , only the ‘Kind’ of questions raised by your brain change, but quantum of doubts rather keeps on increasing .
Lets try answering some of such basic queries,usually put forward by beginners :
https://the-passport-souls.travel.blog/2017/07/12/meditation-is-a-journey-not-the-destination/
Would love hear you back as feedback !