Meditation basically is nothing but a state of total awareness. Our mind is only partially aware; only one tenth of our totality is conscious, nine-tenths is in a deep dark night. All our problems arise out of that darkness, that blindness. And it is nine times more than our awareness. The so-called religions, moralities, go on trying to cultivate that fragment of consciousness.
You can teach, you can program that small fragment of consciousness, but it will remain superficial. In times of stress, it won’t help. One will remain very polite and humble, but only when everything is going good. When things start going wrong then suddenly all the repressed anger, violence, overwhelms one. Then the cultivated morality, the facade of character is of no use at all. That’s why people do things which you never thought they could do. A very good man, a nice man, in every way respected, can commit murder. He himself will not be able to believe how he could do it; hence the phrase ‘in spite of myself.’ It is a retrospective thinking later on when he comes back to his superficial consciousness, he can see that he has done it in spite of himself, because he is identified only with the conscious part. He has rejected the unconscious and that is nine times more.
That is our true reality, it cannot be rejected; and by cultivating the conscious part it remains unaffected, it remains the same. Hence my approach is not through character but through meditation.
The most fundamental thing is to make our consciousness bigger, to change the unconscious into consciousness — that is true religion. That’s what the whole purpose of alchemy was: the transformation of darkness into light, of the baser metal into gold. The gold represents light. And it is possible if you start becoming aware of what you are doing, of what you are thinking, of what you are feeling — just an undercurrent of awareness of all these three dimensions — then slowly, slowly awareness deepens. More and more parts of the unconscious are claimed by consciousness.
And once you have learned the knack of changing the unconscious into consciousness, then it is only a question of time, effort, patience. Then the day is not far away when the whole of unconsciousness disappears, and your inner world is full of light. Then whatsoever you do is moral, whatsoever happens through you is virtue — and that virtue is not cultivated at all. It is spontaneous. And when it is spontaneous it has a beauty of its own. When it is cultivated, it is pseudo, phony. It creates only hypocrites, and that’s why the whole world is full of hypocrites. It is not their fault; it is ten thousand years of stupidity perpetuated in the name of religion. Religion should be simply an alchemical process of transforming unconsciousness into consciousness.
A man without meditation is windowless, utterly closed to existence. No sun, no wind, no rain, reaches him. He lives almost in a grave. He is not alive. You are alive only in the proportion to which you are vulnerable, open. The more alive you are, the more windows you have, the more doors you have; and you are totally alive when you are just under the sun, under the sky, utterly naked, with nothing to keep you isolated, to keep you encapsulated. And that’s the function of meditation to create windows in you. In the beginning, windows, then doors; then by and by all the walls disappear. One day you find yourself for the first-time merging, melting, into the whole.
That’s the ultimate experience of bliss. But the beginning is in creating a small window; then go on making it bigger and bigger and bigger, so one day there is only window left. All the doors, all the walls, everything has disappeared. When there is nothing to disconnect you from existence, nothing to debar you, you experience godliness.
Meditation gives you unbounded space. It makes you as vast as the ocean. Without it one is only a dewdrop, confined into a very small space, imprisoned. And that’s our misery, that wherever we try to move there is a limitation. The body limits us, the mind limits us, even the heart limits us.
One has to go beyond the body, beyond the mind, beyond the heart. Only then, these three concentric circles transcended, you become as vast as existence itself. You are no more in that vastness. You cannot be the way you have always been; there is no ego.
The ego can exist only in the dewdrop. The ocean means egolessness. The moment you are infinite, you taste the truth for the first time; otherwise whatsoever we go on thinking about truth is not truth. Thinking about truth can never be truth. Truth is a taste on the tongue. The person who has never tasted sweetness may go on thinking about it for millions of years; still, he will not know what it is.
The blind man can think he knows light but all his thinking is futile. He may write a thesis, a great thesis, on light, he may be awarded a Ph.D. or a D. Lit., but still because he is blind he knows nothing of light. All his knowledge is mere knowledge, not knowing.
Truth has to be known. No information can be of any help. It is an existential experience and the only way to know it is to become it — to digest it and to be digested by it. Only in that union where I and thou disappear, where all dualities melt and become one, one knows. That state I call oceanic. That is the goal of sannyas.
One has to come out of the confinement of a dewdrop and become the ocean. One has to allow one’s dewdrop to slip into the ocean and disappear into the ocean. To be one with the whole is the only way to be holy.
Meditation is the essence of all true religion. Everything other than meditation is nothing but ritual. It is good for deceiving people, it is good for exploiting the fools, it is very good for the priests; the popes, the imams, but it is not religion. And a very strange thing is that all the vested interests are against meditation. They are all for going to the church, to the temple, to the mosque. They are all in support of reading the Bible every day, or the Gita, reciting it again and again and again but they are not in favor of meditation, because they have become aware again and again down the ages that the meditative person becomes a rebel.
The meditative person becomes so intelligent that he cannot be exploited and oppressed. The meditative person becomes so full of life that he cannot be repressed, crippled, paralyzed. He becomes so full of bliss and joy that you cannot make him afraid and you cannot make him greedy either; so your hell and heaven both become superstitions for the meditative person, because hell is nothing but exploitation of fear and heaven is exploitation of greed — two sides of the same coin. Because people are living in fear and in greed, the priest has invented hell and heaven; otherwise there is no hell, no heaven.
There is life eternal. And if you are silent, meditative, this very moment you are in paradise. And if you have gone astray from your own center, if you are no more centered in your being, you are in hell. Hell simply means living a life unconsciously and heaven means living a life consciously.
All the religions are afraid of meditation because it gives you the taste of paradise herenow and they all depend on a paradise after death; so you and your life can be postponed. Heaven will be after death and right now you have to live a meaningless life. So they go on giving you hope and hope is nothing but opium.
Meditation means becoming so aware, so intensely aware, now, this very moment, that all these stupidities are seen as stupidities, and the moment you see something as false you are free of it. Not only that, there is even more danger for the vested interests, for the establishment; the person who has come to know the false as the false and the true as the true does not remain hidden. He cannot remain hidden. He has to share his experience. He has to spread his fire.
And that fire can burn all the temples and all the churches and all the mosques. The meditative person will not be Christian, will not be Hindu, will not be Buddhist, will not be Mohammedan. He will simply be human. Hence the Christians will be against him, the Hindus will be against him, all the organised religions will be against him. He will not be a Christian of course; he will be a Christ. He will not be a Buddhist but he will be a Buddha — and that is dangerous.
The Buddhists don’t want another Buddha to be here, because the latest Buddha is bound to change the twenty-five-centuries-old scriptures of the Buddhists, because he will speak the idiom of the day, he will speak in the context of the contemporary humanity.
Christians will not like Christ to be here again. He will destroy all their business; hence nobody is in favor of meditation — and meditation is the essential core of religion. In other words all religions are against religion, against the true religion, against the essential religiousness. And my effort here is to make you aware that rituals are not religion, that scriptures are not religion, that belonging to a certain sect is not religion. Religiousness is a totally different phenomenon: it is the experience of your own being. Knowing it, all is known.
Mind separates, meditation unites. Mind functions as a wall, meditation functions as a bridge. Meditation simply means a state of no-mind; slipping out of the mind and the games of the mind is the whole art of meditation. And it is not a difficult thing — we have just never tried it, that’s why it appears difficult. We have always lived in the mind so we don’t know that there is a way to live beyond the mind too.
Once you have taken even a single step out of the mind you will be surprised; you were living unnecessarily in a prison. There was nobody guarding the door, you were not chained, you were just not aware that there is a beyond too. And the way out of the mind is to become aware of the mind and its mechanism, memory, imagination, thoughts, desires, fantasies — the traffic is there, continuously going on. You have just to stand by the side and watch whatsoever is passing, with no judgement, with no evaluation; just a silent mirror reflecting whatsoever is passing by. Not even making any comments that this is good, this is bad, that this is not so good, that this should not be or should be — without any commentary, just watching.
In the beginning it seems difficult because our habit is of continuously commenting, but just a little patience, sitting silently, doing nothing, just watching; it comes. And when it comes it opens a totally new dimension. You can see the whole mind passing by and then you know that you are not the mind, because the one who is seeing the mind passing by cannot be the mind. The observer cannot be the observed — and that is the moment you are out of the mind. That is the moment a tremendous freedom comes. One is no more confined to anything. The imprisoned splendor is released; and life begins only then. Before that we are just living a so-called life, lukewarm, with no intensity, with no passion, with no totality.
Man lives mechanically, just like a sleepwalker, a somnambulist; he goes on doing things but almost like a robot. If you start watching your acts you will be surprised that you go on making the same mistakes every day. And you have decided many times not to do them again, but those decisions are meaningless. When the situation arises again, you react immediately in the old pattern. You don’t know how to respond.
These two words are significant. ‘Reaction’ means mechanical, unconscious and ‘response’ means non-mechanical, conscious. ‘Response’ means acting according to the situation and ‘reaction’ means acting according to the old pattern. reaction means following ready-made answers, following a built-in programme, being dictated and dominated by the past — that is reaction. And living in the moment, in the moment, with no interference from the past, is response.
A sannyasin has to be responsible in this sense, not in a moralistic sense, not in the sense of being dutiful, but in the sense of being conscious. To be conscious means acting out of the light of awareness; otherwise people are acting out of darkness — stumbling, groping. Yes, once in a while just accidentally they can do something right, but that is accidental. It has no value at all.
Ninety-nine per cent they will do wrong. One percent, accidentally, they will do right; but accidental right has no value. It is not virtue.
One has to be full of light. And when there is light you know where the door is, you need not stumble. You know where the furniture is, you need not stumble. You know exactly what is what and you act according to that understanding.
Meditation creates light within you. Without meditation one is living in a dark night of the soul. And the strange thing is that we have all the things necessary to create light.
In a Sufi story, a man is hungry. He has flour, he has water, he has butter, he has fuel, he has fire, he has everything — he can make bread. But he is just sitting there hungry, because he cannot eat the fuel, he cannot eat the flour, he cannot eat all these things which only need to be put in a certain combination. Once they are put in a certain combination they will become eatable.
We are born with everything that is needed to create light, but you have to use a little intelligence to put everything in its right place. And that’s what meditation is: putting things in their right place. And once they are in the right place a great harmony arises. Once life becomes such a deep accord, so full of music, so full of joy, so full of light, out of that joy, that music, that light, whatsoever you do is right.[…]
So I am all for reality. My approach is pragmatic.
I am a realist, not an idealist. I don’t believe in all that hocus-pocus. And to be my sannyasin means to be utterly realistic, pragmatic, grounded in the Earth. And because one is grounded one starts growing like a tree into the sky towards the stars, and then there is immense contentment.
Meditation is a process of rebirth. The first birth is only physiological, biological material. Don’t think that that’s all there is to life. Coming out of the womb of the mother is only an opportunity for a second birth, for the real birth. The day you come out of the womb of your psychology, you are really born. In India we have called the people who have known the truth, twice born, dwija. And unless one becomes twice born, one lives in vain. […]
-Osho
From The Old Pond, Plop!, Chapter #17 (an unpublished darshan diary)
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Sat Sangha Salon 