You ask me: How is anxiety related to desire?
Desire is a cover-up for anxiety. It is a trick, a strategy. And meditation is to uncover it.
That’s why people can’t sit silently even for a few minutes. Because when they sit silently, anxieties start raising their heads. They become very much afraid. That’s why people ask, even in meditation, “What should we do? Can we chant a mantra?” Then it is okay; then the mantra becomes your cover. Then you can repeat, “Ram, Ram, Ram,” and you can go on repeating. This repetition keeps your anxiety repressed.
Real meditation is Zen, Vipassana. Real meditation is nothing but to sit silently, doing nothing. Just doing nothing, sitting silently, that is real meditation. There is no other technique, no technique at all in it. No mantra has to be repeated. No prayer has to be done, no God’s name to be pronounced.
You simply sit . . . but that is the hardest thing to do in the world. Looks so simple!
When I say again and again:
Sitting silently,
Doing nothing,
And the Spring comes
And the grass grows by itself…
You think it is very easy: “We can sit, and the spring will come, and the grass will grow by itself.” This is the hardest and the most difficult and the most arduous thing in the world: to sit silently, doing nothing. And this is the greatest meditation. […]
Real meditation is not a technique. Real meditation is just relaxing, sitting silently, letting it happen, whatsoever it is. Allowing the whole anxiety to come up, to surface. And watching it, watching it. And doing nothing to change it. Witnessing it is real meditation.
In that witnessing your Buddhahood will become more and more powerful. Witnessing is the nourishment for your Buddhahood. And the more powerful your Buddhahood is, the less anxiety there is. The day your Buddhahood is complete, all anxiety is gone.
-Osho
From The Perfect Master, V.1, Discourse #8
Copyright© OSHO International Foundation
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Short and succinct. Perfect. Thank you so much.