purushottama

Stilling the Mind vs. No-Mind – Osho

There has been a long misunderstanding about these two things: Keeping the mind still and mindlessness. There have been many people who have thought that they are synonymous. They appear to be synonymous, but in reality they are as far apart as two things can be, and there is no way to bridge them.

So first let us try to find the exact meanings of these two words, because the whole of Ta Hui’s sutra this evening is concerned with the understanding of the difference.

The difference is very delicate. A man who is keeping his mind still and a man who has no mind will look exactly alike from the outside, because the man who is keeping his mind still is also silent. Underneath his silence there is great turmoil, but he is not allowing it to surface. He is in great control.

The man with no mind, or mindlessness, has nothing to control. He is just pure silence with nothing repressed, with nothing disciplined — just a pure empty sky.

Surfaces can be very deceptive. One has to be very alert about appearances, because they both look the same from the outside — both are silent. The problem would not have arisen if the still mind was not easy to achieve. It is easy to achieve. Mindlessness is not so easy to achieve; it is not cheap, it is the greatest treasure in the world.

Mind can play the game of being silent; it can play the game of being without any thoughts, any emotions, but they are just repressed, fully alive, ready to jump out any moment. The so-called religions and their saints have fallen into the fallacy of stilling the mind. If you go on sitting silently, trying to control your thoughts, not allowing your emotions, not allowing any movement within you, slowly slowly it will become your habit. This is the greatest deception in the world you can give to yourself, because everything is exactly the same, nothing has changed, but it appears as if you have gone through a transformation.

The state of no-mind or mindlessness is just the opposite of stilling the mind — it is getting beyond the mind. It is creating such a distance between yourself and the mind that the mind becomes the farthest star, millions of light years away, and you are just a watcher. When the mind is stilled you are the controller. When the mind is not you are the watcher. These are the distinguishing marks.

When you are controlling something you are in tension; you cannot be without tension, because that which is controlled is continuously trying to revolt against you, that which is enslaved wants freedom. Your mind sooner or later will explode with vengeance. […]

The process of controlling and repressing and disciplining is taught by all the religions, and because of their fallacious teaching humanity has not moved a single inch — it remains barbarous. Any moment people start killing each other. It does not take a single moment to lose themselves; they forget completely that they are human beings, and something much more, something better is expected of them. There have been very few people who have been able to avoid this deception of controlling mind and believing that they have attained mindlessness.

To attain mindlessness a totally different process in involved: I call it the ultimate alchemy. It consists only of a single element — that of watchfulness.

Gautam Buddha is passing through a town when a fly comes and sits on his forehead. He is talking to his companion, Ananda, and he just goes on talking and moves his hand to throw off the fly. Then suddenly he recognizes that his movement of the hand has been unconscious, mechanical. Because he was talking consciously to Ananda, the hand moved the fly mechanically. He stops and although now there is no fly, he moves his hand again consciously.

Ananda says, “What are you doing? The fly has gone away . . . ”

Gautam Buddha says, “The fly has gone away . . . but I have committed a sin, because I did it in unconsciousness.”

The English word ‘sin’ is used only by Gautam Buddha in its right meaning. The word ‘sin’ originates in the roots which mean forgetfulness, unawareness, unwatchfulness, doing things mechanically — and our whole life is almost mechanical. We go on doing things from morning to evening, from evening to morning, like robots.

A man who wants to enter into the world of mindlessness has to learn only one thing — a single step and the journey is over. That single step is to do everything watchfully. You move your hand watchfully; you open your eyes watchfully; you walk, you take your steps alert, aware; you eat, you drink, but never allow mechanicalness to take possession over you. This is the only alchemical secret of transformation.

A man who can do everything fully consciously becomes a luminous phenomenon. He is all light, and his whole life is full of fragrance and flowers. The mechanical man lives in dark holes, dirty holes. He does not know the world of light; he is like a blind man. The man of watchfulness is really the man who has eyes.

– Osho

From The Great Zen Master Ta Hui, Discourse #28

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Ramana Maharshi’s Self-Enquiry

Self-enquiry

On hearing the expression ‘Self-enquiry’ (atma-vichara), people generally take it to mean either enquiring into Self or enquiring about Self. But how to do so? Who is to enquire into Self, or who is to enquire about Self? What does enquiry actually mean? Such questions naturally arise, do they not?

As soon as we hear the terms ‘Atma-Vichara’ or ‘Brahma–vichara’, many of us naturally consider that there is some sort of effulgence or a formless power within our body and that we are going to find out what it is, where it is, and how it is. This idea is not correct. Because, Self (atman) does not exist as an object to be known by us who seek to know it! Since Self shines as the very nature of him who tries to know it! Self-enquiry does not mean enquiring into a second or third person object. It is in order to make us understand this from the very beginning that Bhagavan Ramana named Self-enquiry as ‘Who am I ?’, thus drawing our attention directly to the first person. In this question, ‘Who am I?’, ‘I am’ denotes Self and ‘who’ stands for the enquiry.

Who is it that is to enquire into Self? For whom is this enquiry necessary? Is it for Self? No, Since Self is the ever-attained, ever-pure, ever-free and ever-blissful Whole, It will not do any enquiry, nor does it need to! All right, then it is only the ego that needs to do the enquiry. Can this ego know Self? As said in the previous chapters, this ego is a false appearance, having no existence of its own. It is a petty infinitesimal feeling of ‘I’ which subsides and loses its form in sleep. So, can Self become an object that could be known by the ego? No, the ego cannot know Self! Thus, when it turns out that Self-enquiry is unnecessary for Self and Self-knowledge is impossible for the ego, the questions arise: “What then is the practical method of doing Self-enquiry? Why is this term ‘Self-enquiry’ found in the sastras?” Are we not to scrutinize thus and find out? Let us do so.

There is a difference between the sense in which the term ‘enquiry’ is used by Sri Bhagavan and the way in which the sastras use it. The sastras advocate negating the five sheaths, namely the body, prana, mind, intellect and the darkness of ignorance, as ‘not I, not I’ (neti, neti). But who is to negate them, and how? If the mind (or the intellect) is to negate them, it can at best negate only the insentient physical body and the prana, which are objects seen by it. Beyond this, how can the mind negate itself, its own form? And when it cannot even negate itself, how can it negate the other two sheaths, the intellect (vijnana-maya kosa) and the darkness of ignorance (anandamaya kosa), which are beyond its range of perception? During the time of enquiry, therefore, what more can the mind do to remain as Self except to repeat mentally, “I am not this body, I am not this prana”? From this, it is clear that ‘enquiry’ is not a process of one thing enquiring about another thing. That is why the enquiry ‘Who am I?’ taught by Sri Bhagavan should be taken to mean Self-attention (that is, attention merely to the first person, the feeling ‘I’).

The nature of the mind is to attend always to things other than itself, that is, to know only second and third persons. If the mind in this way attends to a thing, it means that it is clinging (attaching itself) to that thing. Attention itself is attachment! Since the mind is to think about the body and prana – though with the intention of deciding ‘this is not!, this is not!’ Such attention is only a means of becoming attached to them and it cannot be a means of negating them! This is what is experienced by any true aspirant in his practice. Then what is the secret hidden in this?

Since, whether we know it or not, Self, which is now wrongly considered by us to be unknown, is verily our reality, the very nature of our (the Supreme Self’s) attention itself is Grace (anugraha). This means that whatever thing we attend to, witness*, observe or look at, that thing is nourished and will flourish, being blessed by Grace.

* The practice of witnessing thoughts and events, which is much recommended nowadays by lecturers and writers, was never even in the least recommended by Sri Bhagavan, Indeed, whenever He was asked what should be done when thoughts rise (that is, when attention is diverted towards second or third persons) during sadhana, He always replied in the same manner as He had done to Sri Sivaprakasam Pillai in ‘Who am I?’, where He says, “If other thoughts rise, one should, without attempting to complete them, enquire ‘To whom did they rise?’. What does it matter however many thoughts rise? At the very moment that each thought rises, if one vigilantly enquires ‘To whom did this rise ?’, it will be known ‘To me’. If one then enquires ‘Who am I?’, the mind (our power of attention) will turn back (from the thought) to its source (Self)”. Moreover, when He says later in the same work, “Not attending to what-is-other (that is, to any second or third person) is non-attachment (vairagya) or desirelessness (nirasa)”, we should clearly understand that attending to (witnessing, watching, observing or seeing) anything other than Self is itself attachment, and when we understand thus we will realize how meaningless and impractical are such instructions as ‘Watch all thoughts and events with detachment’ or ‘Witness your thoughts, but be not attached to them’, which are taught by the so-called gurus of the present day.

Though one now thinks that one is an individual soul, since one’s power of attention is in fact nothing but a reflection of the ‘knowing-power’ (chit-sakti) of Self, that on which it falls or is fixed is nourished by Grace and flourishes more and more! Hence, when the power of attention of the mind is directed more and more towards second and third person objects, both the strength (kriya-bala) to attend to those objects and the ignorance – the five sense-knowledges in the form of thoughts about them – will grow more and more, and will never subside! Have we not already said that all our thoughts are nothing but attention paid to second and third person objects? Accordingly, the more we attend to the mind, the thoughts which are the forms (the second and third person objects) of the world, the more they will multiply and be nourished. This is indeed an obstacle. The more our attention – the glance of Grace (anugraha-drishti) – falls on it, the more the mind’s wavering nature and its ascendancy will increase. That is why it is impossible for the mind to negate anything by thinking* ‘I am not this, I am not this’ (neti, neti) – On the other hand, if our (Self’s) attention is directed only towards ourself, our knowledge of our existence alone is nourished, and since the mind is not attended to, it is deprived of its strength, the support of our Grace. “Without use when left to stay, iron and mischief rust away” – in accordance with this Tamil proverb, since they are not attended to, all the vasana-seeds, whose nature is to rise stealthily and mischievously, have to stay quiet, and thus they dry up like seeds deprived of water and become too

*This is why aspirants who, in order to destroy evil thoughts like lust, anger and so on, fight against them and thereby think about them fail in their attempts, while aspirants practising Self-enquiry, who pay their full attention to Self with an indifference towards their thoughts, bypass them easily.

weak to sprout out into thought-plants. Then, when the fire of Self-knowledge (jnana) blazes forth, these tendencies (vasanas), like well-dried firewood, become a prey to it.

This alone is how the total destruction of all tendencies (vasanakshaya) is affected.

If we are told, ‘Abandon the east’, the practical way of doing so would be to do as if told, ‘Go to the west’! In the same manner, when we are told, ‘Discard the five sheaths, which are not Self’, the practical way of discarding the non-Self is to focus our attention on ourself. ‘What is this I?’ or ‘Who am I?’ Thinking ‘I am not this, not this’ (neti, neti) is a negative method. Knowing that this negative method is just as impractical as saying, ‘Drink the medicine without thinking of a monkey’* Sri Bhagavan has now shown us the practical way of drinking the medicine without thinking of a monkey, by giving us the clue, ‘Drink the medicine while thinking of an elephant’, that is, He has reformed the ancient negative method by giving us the positive method ‘Who am I?’,

“ … Verily, the ego is all! Hence the enquiry ‘What is it?” (in other words, ‘Who am I, this ego?’)” is the true giving up (renunciation) of all. Thus should you know!”

‘Ulladhu Narpadhu’, verse 28

Verily, all (that is, the five sheaths and their projections – -all these worlds) is the ego. So, attending to the feeling ‘I’,

*There is a traditional story of a doctor prescribing a medicine to a patient with the condition that It should be taken only while not thinking of a monkey; but the patient could not take the medicine under this condition, for every time he tried to drink it, the thought of a monkey would surely jump up.

‘What is it?’ or ‘Who is this I ?’, alone is renouncing the five sheaths, discarding them, eliminating them, or negating them. Thus Bhagavan Ramana has declared categorically that Self-attention alone is the correct technique of eliminating the five sheaths !

Since this is so, with what purpose did the sastras use the term ‘enquiry’ to denote the method ‘neti, neti’? By means of ‘neti, neti’, can we not formulate intellectually (that is, through paroksha) the test which we have given in paragraph 4 of chapter four of this book, “A thing is surely not ‘I’ if it is possible for one to experience ‘I am’ even in the absence of that thing”? So long as there exists the wrong knowledge ‘I am the body’ pertaining to the aforesaid five sheaths or three bodies, will not one’s paying attention towards the first person automatically be only an attention towards a sheath or a body – a second person ! But if we use this test, can we not find out that all such attentions are not the proper first person attention? Therefore, it is necessary first of all to have an intellectual conviction that these are not ‘I’ in order to practise Self-attention without losing our bearings. It is only the discrimination* by which we acquire this conviction that has been termed ‘enquiry’ by the sastras. What then is an aspirant to do after discriminating thus? How can the attention to these five sheaths, even though with an intention to eliminate them, be an attention to Self”? Therefore, while practising Self-enquiry, instead of taking anyone of the five sheaths as the object of our attention, we should fix our attention only on the ‘I’ -consciousness, which exists and shines as oneself, as the singular, and as a witness to and aloof from these sheaths.

*The discrimination dealt with in chapter four of this book is also with the same aim in view, yet it is not the actual process of enquiry. What is given in the last chapter of this book alone is the actual method of Self-enquiry.

Instead of being directed towards any second or third person, is not our power of attention, which was hitherto called mind or intellect, thus now directed only towards the first person? Although we formally refer to it as ‘directed’, in truth it is not of the nature of a ‘doing’ (kriya-rupam) in the form of directing or being directed; it is of the nature of ‘being’ or ‘existing’ (sat-rupam). Because the second and third persons (including thoughts) are alien or external to us, our attention paid to them was of the nature of a ‘doing’ (kriya). But this very attention, when fixed on the non-alien first person feeling, ‘I’, loses the nature of ‘paying’ and remains in the form of ‘being’, and therefore it is of the nature of non-doing (akriya) or inaction (nishkriya). So long as our power of attention was dwelling upon second and third persons, it was called ‘the mind’ or ‘the intellect’, and its attending was called a doing (kriya) or an action (karma). Only that which is done by the mind is an action. But on the other hand, as soon as the attention is fixed on the first person (or Self), it loses its mean names such as mind, intellect or ego sense. Moreover, that attention is no longer even an action, but inaction (akarma) or the state of ‘being still’ (summa iruttal). Therefore, the mind which attends to Self is no more the mind; it is the consciousness aspect of Self (atma-chit-rupam)! Likewise, so long as it attends to the second and third persons (the world), it is not the consciousness aspect of Self; It is the mind, the reflected form of consciousness (chit-abhasa-rupam)! Hence, since Self-attention is not a doing (kriya), it is not an action (karma). That is, Self alone realizes Self; the ego does not!

The mind which has obtained a burning desire for Self-attention, which is Self-enquiry, is said to be the fully mature one (pakva manas). Since it is not at all now inclined to attend to any second or third parson, it can be said that it has reached the pinnacle of desirelessness (vairagya). For, do not all sorts of desires and attachments pertain only to second and third persons? Since this mind, which has very well understood that (as already seen in earlier chapters) the consciousness which shines as ‘I’ alone is the source of full and real happiness, now seeks Self because of its natural craving for happiness, this intense desire to attend to Self is indeed the highest form of devotion (bhakti). It is exactly this Self-attention of the mind which is thus fully mature through such devotion and desirelessness (bhakti-vairagya) that is to be called the enquiry ‘Who am I ?’ taught by Bhagavan Sri Ramana! Well, will not at least such a mature mind which has come to the path of Sri Ramana, willingly agreeing to engage in Self-attention, realize Self ? No, no, it has started for its doom ! Agreeing to commit suicide, it places its neck (through Self-attention) on the scaffold where it is to be sacrificed !!

How? Only so long as it was attending to second and third persons did it have the name ‘mind’, but as soon as Self-attention is begun, its name and form (its name as mind and its form as thoughts) are lost. So we can no longer say that Self-attention or Self-enquiry is performed by the mind, Neither is it the mind that attends to Self, nor is the natural spontaneous Self-attention of the consciousness aspect of Self (atma-chit-rupam), which is not the mind, an activity !

“A naked lie then it would be

If any man were to say that he

Realized the Self, diving within

Through proper enquiry set in,

Not for knowing but for death

The good-for-nothing ego’s worth!

This Arunachala alone,

The Self, by which the Self is known !”

‘Sri Arunachala Venba’ verse 39

The feeling ‘I am’ is the experience common to one and all. In this, ‘am’ is consciousness or knowledge. This knowledge is not of anything external; it is the knowledge of oneself, This is chit. This consciousness is ‘we’, “We are verily consciousness”, says Sri Bhagavan in ‘Upadesa Undhiyar’ verse 23. This is our ‘being’ (that is, our true existence) or sat. This is called ‘that which is’ (ulladhu). Thus in ‘I am’, ‘I’ is existence (sat) and ‘am’ is consciousness (chit). When Self, our nature of existence-consciousness (satchit swarupam), instead of shining only as the pure consciousness ‘I am’, shines mixed with an adjunct (upadhi) as ‘I am a man, I am Rama, I am so-and-so, I am this or that’, then this mixed consciousness is the ego. This mixed consciousness can rise only by catching hold of a name and form. When we feel ‘I am a man, I am Rama, I am sitting, I am lying’, is it not clear that we have mistaken the body for ‘I’, and that we have assumed its name and postures as ‘I am this and I am thus’? – The feeling ‘this and thus’ which has now risen mixed with the pure consciousness ‘I am’ (satchit) is what is called ‘thought’, this is the first thought.

The feeling ‘I am a man, I am so-and-so’ is only a thought. But the consciousness ‘I am’ is not a thought; it is the very nature of our ‘being’. The mixed consciousness ‘I am this or that’ is a thought that rises from our ‘being’. It is only after the rising of this thought, the mixed consciousness (the first person), that all other thoughts, which are the knowledge of second and third persons, rise into existence.

“Only if the first person exists, will the second and third persons exist..”

‘Ulladhu Narpadhu’ verse 14

This mixed consciousness, the first person, is called our ‘rising’ or the rising of the ego. This is the primal mentation (adi-vritti) ! Hence:

“ Thinking is a mentation (vritti) ; being is not a mentation ! …”

‘Atma Vichara Patikam’, verse 1

The pure existence-consciousness, ‘I am’, is not a thought; this consciousness is our nature (swarupam). ‘I am a man’ is not our pure consciousness; it is only our thought! To understand thus the difference between our ‘being’ and our ‘rising’ (that is, between existence and thought) first of all is essential for aspirants who take to the enquiry ‘Who am I?’

Bhagavan Sri Ramana has advised that Self-enquiry can be done either in the form ‘Who am I?’ or in the form ‘Whence am I?’ Hearing these two interrogative sentences, many aspirants have held various opinions about them up till now and have become confused as to which of them is to be practised and how! Even among those who consider that both are one and the same, many have only a superficial understanding and have not scrutinized deeply how they are the same. Some who try to follow the former one, ‘Who am I?, simply begin either vocally or mentally the parrot-like repetition ‘Who am I ? Who am I?’ as if it were a mantra-japa. This is utterly wrong! Doing japa of ‘Who am I?’ in this manner is just as bad as meditating upon or doing japa of the mahavakyas such as ‘I am Brahman’ and so on, thereby spoiling the very objective for which they were revealed! Sri Bhagavan Himself has repeatedly said, “‘Who am I?’ is not meant for repetition (japa)”! Some others, thinking that they are following the second interrogative form, ‘Whence am I?’ try to concentrate on the right side of the chest (where they imagine something as a spiritual heart), expecting a reply such as ‘I am from here’! This is in no way better than the ancient method of meditating upon anyone of the six yogic centres (shad-chakras) in the body!! For, is not thinking of any place in the body only a second person attention (an objective attention)? Before we start to explain the technique of Self-enquiry, is it not of the utmost importance that all such misconceptions be removed? Let us see, therefore, how they may be removed.

In Sanskrit, the terms ‘atman’ and ‘aham’ both mean ‘I’. Hence, ‘atma-vichara’ means an attention seeking ‘Who is this I?’ It may rather be called ‘I-attention’, ‘Self-attention’ or ‘Self-abidance’. The consciousness ‘I’ thus pointed out here is the first person feeling. But as we have already said, it is to be understood that the consciousness mixed with adjuncts as ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that’ is the ego (ahankara) or the individual soul (jiva), whereas the unalloyed consciousness devoid of adjuncts and shining alone as ‘I-I’ (or ‘I am that I am’) is Self (atman), the Absolute (brahman) or God (iswara). Does it not amount to saying then that the first person consciousness, ‘I’, can be either the ego or Self? Since all people generally take the ego-feeling (‘I am the body’) to be ‘I’, the ego is also given the name ‘self’ (atman) and is called’ individual self’ (jivatma) by some sastras even now. It is only for this reason that even the attention to the ego, ‘What is it?’ or ‘Who is it?’, is also named by the sastras as ‘Self-enquiry’ (atma-vichara). Is it not clear, however, that Self, the existence-consciousness, neither needs to do any enquiry nor can be subjected to any enquiry? It is just in order to rectify this defect that Bhagavan Ramana named it ‘Who am I?’ rather than using the ancient term ‘Self-enquiry’ (atma-vichara)! The ego, the feeling of ‘I’, generally taken by people to be the first person consciousness, is not the real first person consciousness; Self alone is the real first person consciousness. The egofeeling, which is merely a shadow of it, is a false first person consciousness. When one enquires into this ego, what it is or who it is, it disappears because it is really nonexistent, and the enquirer, having nothing more to do, is established in Self as Self.

Because it rises, springing up from Self, the false first person consciousness mentioned above has to have a place and a time of rising. Therefore, the question ‘Whence am I?’ means only ‘Whence (from where) does the ego rise ?’. A place of rising can only be for the ego. But for Self, since it has no rising or setting, there can be no particular place or time.

“When scrutinized, we – the ever-known existing Thing – alone are; then where is time and where is space? If we are (mistaken to be) the body, we shall be involved in time and space; but, are we the body? Since we are the One, now, then and ever, that One in space, here there and everywhere *, we – the timeless and spaceless Self – alone are !”

‘Ulladhu Narpadhu’, verse 15

*Time and space apparently exist in us (Self), but we are neither in them nor bound by them, The experience of the Jnani is only ‘I am’ and not ‘I am everywhere and in all times’.

– thus says Sri Bhagavan. Therefore, enquiring ‘Whence am I?’ is enquiring ‘Whence is the ego?’. Only to the rising of the ego, which is conditioned by time and space, will the question ‘Whence am I?’ be applicable. The meaning which Sri Bhagavan expects us to understand from the term ‘Whence?’ or ‘From where?’ is ‘From what?’. When taken in this sense, instead of a place or time coming forth as a reply, Self-existence, ‘we’, the Thing (vastu), alone is experienced as the reply. If, on the other hand, we anticipate a place as an answer to the question ‘Whence?’, a place, conditioned by time and space, will be experienced within the body ‘two digits to the right from the centre of the chest’ (as said in ‘Ulladhu Narpadhu – Anubandham’ verse 18). Yet this experience is not the ultimate or absolute one (paramarthikam). For, Sri Bhagavan has positively asserted that Heart (hridayam) is verily Self-consciousness, which is timeless, spaceless, formless and nameless.

“He who thinks that Self (or Heart) is within the insentient body, while in fact the body is within Self, is like one who thinks that the screen, which supports the cinema picture, is contained within the picture ‘“

‘Ekatma Panchakam’, verse 3

Finding a place in the body as the rising-point of the ego in reply to the question ‘Whence?’ is not the objective of Sri Bhagavan’s teachings; nor is it the fruit to be gained by Self-enquiry. Sri Bhagavan has declared clearly the objective of His teachings and the fruit to be gained by seeking the rising–place of the ego as follows:

“When sought within ‘What is the place from which it rises as I?’, ‘I’ (the ego) will die ! This is Self-enquiry (jnana-vichara) .”

‘Upadesa Undhiyar’, verse 19

Therefore, the result which is aimed at when seeking the rising-place of the ego is the annihilation of that ego and not an experience of a place in the body. It is only in reply to the immature people who – not able to have even an intellectual understanding (paroksha jnana) about the nature of Self, which shines alone as the one, non-dual thing, unlimited by (indeed, absolutely unconnected with) time and space, unlimited even in the form ‘Brahman is everywhere, Brahman is at all times, Brahman is everything’ (sarvatra brahma, sarvada brahma, sarvam brahma) – always raise the question, “Where is the seat for Self in the body?”,that the sastras and sometimes even Sri Bhagavan had to say: “… two digits to the right (from the centre of the chest) is the heart.”* Hence, this heart–place (hridaya-stanam) Is not the ultimate or absolute Reality, The reader may here refer to ‘Maharshi’s, Gospel’, Book II, chapter IV, ‘The Heart is the Self’ (8th edition, 1969, pages 68 to 72; 9th edition, 1979, pages 72 to 76).

*It is worth noting that the mention of the location of the heart ‘two digits to the right from the centre of the chest’ is not included in ‘Ulladhu Narpadhu’ (the main forty verses), where the original and direct teachings of Sri Bhagavan are given, but only in ‘Ulladhu Narpadhu – Anubandham’ (the supplementary forty verses), since this is merely and of the diluted truths which the sastras condescendingly reply in concession to the weakness of immature aspirants. Moreover, these two verses, 18 and 19, are not original compositions of Sri Bhagavan, but only translations from a Malayalam work named ‘Ashtanga Hridayam’, which is not even a spiritual text, but only a medical one. It should also be noted here that these two verses do not at all recommend, nor even mention, the practice of concentrating the attention on this point in the body, two digits to the right from the centre of the chest. Indeed, in no place – neither in His original works, nor in His translations of others’ works, nor even in any of the conversations with Him recorded by devotees – has Sri Bhagavan ever recommended this practice (for meditation upon the right side of the chest or upon any other part of the transient, insentient and alien body is nothing but an attention to a second person, an object other than ‘I’), and when asked about it, He in fact used to condemn it (see ‘Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi’, number 273).

Thus, attending to oneself in the form ‘Whence am I?’ is enquiring into the ego, the ‘rising I’, But, while enquiring ‘Who am I?’, there are some aspirants who take the feeling ‘I’ to be their ‘being’ (existence) and not their ‘rising’ ! If it is taken thus, that is attention to Self. It is just to understand clearly the difference between these two forms of enquiry that the difference between our ‘rising’ and our ‘being’ has been explained earlier in this chapter, Just as the correct meaning of the term ‘meditation upon Brahman’ (brahmadhyanam) used by the sastras up till now is explained by Sri Bhagavan in the last two lines of the first benedictory verse of ‘Ulladhu Narpadhu’ to be ‘abiding in the Heart as it is’ (that is to say, abiding as Self is the correct way of meditating upon it), so also, the correct meaning of the term ‘Self-enquiry’ (atma-vichara) is here rightly explained to be ‘turning Selfwards’ (or attending to Self).

In either of these two kinds of enquiry (‘Who am I’?’ or ‘Whence am I ?’), since the attention of the aspirant is focused only on himself, nothing other than Self (atman), which is the true import of the word ‘I’, will be finally experienced. Therefore, the ultimate result of both the enquiries, ‘Whence am I ?’ and ‘Who am I ?’, is the same! How? He who seeks ‘Whence am I?’ is following the ego, the form of which is ‘I am so-and-so’, and while doing so, the adjunct ‘so-and-so, having no real existence, dies on the way, and thus he remains established in Self, the surviving ‘I am’. On the other hand, he who seeks ‘Who am I ? drowns effortlessly in his real natural ‘being’ (Self), which ever shines as ‘I am that I am’, Therefore, whether done in the form ‘Whence am I?’ or ‘Who am I ?’, what is absolutely essential is that Self-attention should be pursued till the very end. Moreover, it is not necessary for sincere aspirants even to name before-hand the feeling ‘I’ either as ego or as Self, For, are there two persons in the aspirant, the ego and Self? This is said because, since everyone of us has the experience ‘I am one only and not two’. we should not give room to an imaginary dual feeling – one ‘I’ seeking for another ‘I’ – by differentiating ego and Self as ‘lower self’ and higher-self’

“ … Are there two selves, one to be an object known by the other? For, the true experience of all is ‘I am one’ !”

‘Ulladhu Narpadhu’, verse 33

– asks Sri Bhagavan.

Thus it is sufficient if we cling to the feeling ‘I’ uninterruptedly till the very end. Such attention to the feeling ‘I’, the common daily experience of everyone, is what is meant by Self-attention. For those who accept as their basic knowledge the ‘I am the body’ – consciousness (jiva Bhava), being unable to doubt its (the ego’s) existence, it is suitable to take to Self-attention (that is, to do Self-enquiry) in the form ‘Whence am I?’, On the other hand, for those who instead of assuming that they have an individuality (jiva bhava) such as ‘I am so-and-so’ or ‘I am this’, attend thus, ‘What is this feeling which shines as I am?’, it is suitable to be fixed in Self-attention in the form ‘Who am I ?’ What is important to be sure of during practice (sadhana) is that our attention is turned only towards ‘I’, the first person singular feeling.

– Sri Sadhu Om

The Path of Sri Ramana, Part 1, Chapter 7

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Here to Now and Behind

We begin from Here, where we are. We are in the particular. We are completely identified with all that we perceive. We see thoughts and consider them our own; we sense and believe the body to be our self. We sense emotions and think they are us. We say I am happy or I am sad.

So, from here we bring attention to sensing and become aware that sensing appears in our consciousness. Everything that we notice appears in our consciousness and yet we are aware of all things. By being aware of all that is in consciousness, we are out of the particular. Only that which is on a higher plane can perceive. We are, in a way, above and beyond all that we sense and yet it is in us. We have been identified with the sensing – we move now to the identification with the Awareness of sensing.

In this awareness of sensing, we notice sensation around the heart space. We pay attention to our breathing. We see that we can only perceive one object at a time. If we are paying attention to our breathing, we are not able to give attention to the thoughts that are dancing just on the periphery. It is almost as if our attention is retreating from dispersion out into the particular and coming back home to our heart. It seems that all experiencing is a projection from this heart. Staying here with the heart, we notice that the energy that was occupied in the head is drawing down into the heart. We can almost feel it slide down into the heart. Perhaps down through the back of the head, down the spine, and into the heart cavity. This beingness we sense in our heart is nourishing, it is mothering, it is loving, it is welcoming. It is Now and we rejoice.

We realize that this being is indivisible. It is undifferentiated. It is Individual, and we are aware of it in us, in our consciousness. All of this experiencing is still happening within the space of non-experiencing, otherwise how could we possibly have perception? There must be a background on which the perceiving can manifest. This background, this unmanifest, this not-knowing, this unborn mind is our home in the absolute. We can never know it directly but can only infer it. It can never be an object of our awareness because it Is awareness. It is the ultimate subject. It is not divided although all multiplicity springs forth from this Oneness. This Awareness is never for a single moment not here. We cannot – not be in it.

This Awareness is our own true nature. If we remember the One to which all appears, if we understand that this is our one true abode and refer back to this unknowingness, this unborn mind, this original face, then it pulls us, it calls us back home. The pulling out into experience falls away and we rejoice, first in our beingness of the heart, and then even that experience leaves as we are rejoined from whence we came – back to Behind.

-purushottama

This is from the collection of stories, essays, poems and insights that is compiled to form the book From Lemurs to Lamas: Confessions of a Bodhisattva. Order the book Here.

O-theism

O-theism is Religion-less Religious-ness.

It is the No Religion of Whole religion.

O-theism is the understanding that there is no God separate from existence. It is the understanding that God is the Beingness which is experienced when one is at-one knowingly with the whole of existence.

It is the understanding that this Beingness is the potential of all human beings and that it is the identification with a fictitious entity (ego) which prevents the realization of this potential.

O-theism is the understanding that there have been many masters who have attained that Beingness and have expressed that experience in the language and culture in which they lived. Their experience is One but their expressions are many.

It is the perennial philosophy. It is the Heart of the teachings of all the Awakened Masters including Krishna, Lao Tzu, Mahavir, Mohammed, Zarathustra, Guru Nanak, Buddha and Christ.

O-theism is the religion-less of the Sufis, Tao, Advaita, Tantra, Yoga and Zen.

It is the religious-ness of Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi, Meher Baba, Krishnamurti and Osho.

O-theism is the religion of Enlightenment.

It is the ground in which Theism, Atheism and Deism dissolve.

See related post Osho on O-theism.

Two Hundred Torches Can Give Fire to Millions – Osho

You have just been saying that the words of the Master become mere words after the Master is gone. What will happen after you are gone?

Do you think my words are not already dead for you? First, think of that. The master is there, his words are there, but are those words alive for you? If they are alive for you, don’t be worried. You know the secret.

It is not the words. The master can be there, and the words can be dead. So why can’t it happen the other way around? – The master is dead, but the words are still alive. It all depends on you. It is not a question of the master’s life or death, but how you relate to those words.

Yes, it is simpler when the master is there, only in one way. Because those words are spoken, they carry some flavor of the master’s heart. They carry a few beats of the master’s heart towards you. It is simple in this way. But on the other hand, when the master is alive, perhaps the words will never become alive to you, because you start taking the master for granted. Then the words are dead.

It happened in the Second World War that Adolf Hitler declared that he was going to destroy the Tower of London. Millions of people rushed towards the tower – they had passed the tower thousands of times in their lives but had never taken the trouble to see it. People come from all over the world to see the Tower of London, but Londoners take it for granted. The moment Hitler said he was going to destroy it, suddenly those people who had lived their whole lives in London became aware that the Tower of London could not be taken for granted anymore. They rushed to see it before this madman, Adolf Hitler, destroyed it.

The master is alive – but the disciple can take him for granted. You can take me for granted. Then those words are already dead because your aliveness is not available. If you are capable of being alert, alive, responsive, it makes no difference: the master may be dead, but his words will go on resounding in you. Even the written words, which are dead, can become alive in you; you just have to open your heart.

The question is not of the master’s life and death, the question basically is of your response.

So don’t be worried about when I am gone. Those who are missing me now will be missing me then too – no loss. Those who are living my message now, they will go on living it. And if they go on living it, they cannot help but spread it. I am not depending on books – all the religions have depended on books – I am depending on you!

George Gurdjieff used to say – very sadly, of course – that if even two hundred people are enlightened, they can make the whole world full of light, full of life. Just two hundred people can transform the whole character of humanity. He could not manage it, but what he said is true.

I am going to manage it! I will not leave you unless I have made enough people enlightened so that they can make the whole world afire, alive. I am depending on you, not on any books. Those books may be helpful in some way to bring people to you, but my word will be throbbing in your heart; only then can you help anybody who comes to you.

And it is so simple. I have more than half a million sannyasins in the world, and more than one million people who are just on the borderline – a little push and they will be sannyasins. One million more who are lovers but cannot drop their camelhood . . .

On this big a scale, a worldwide scale, nobody has worked before. Gautam Buddha remained confined to the small state of Bihar in India – not even the whole of India. India has thirty states; Buddha remained confined to one space, one state. He did great work, but it was impossible to transform the whole quality of consciousness on the earth. The same is true about Jesus, Moses – anybody who has been trying.

For a simple reason I have been able to contact millions of people around the world: I am not confined to any tradition. I am not burdened by the past; I am completely weightless. So anybody who is burdened – and who is not burdened? – becomes interested in me, particularly the young people who are fed up with all the nonsense that is being taught in the churches and the synagogues, in the temples, in the mosques.

All these people, these churches, synagogues and mosques, are trying to bridge the gap. You have heard the phrase “generation gap.” Between you and the church, between you and the synagogue, there is not just a generation gap; there is a gap of hundreds of generations. And in trying to bridge it, they are proving themselves buffoons because truth never compromises. It cannot – with whom will it compromise? Compromising truth means compromising with lies.

And all these people have become afraid that young people are no longer interested; they don’t come to the synagogue, they don’t come to the church, so something should be done that can attract young people. Their whole business is going down.

I have heard about three rabbis . . . And by the way, don’t let me drift. Whenever I come across the word “rabbi” I immediately associate it with rubbish. These three rabbis were meeting, discussing, talking about great things. One rabbi said, “My synagogue is the most modern because we allow people to smoke in the synagogue. There is no harm in it.”

The second rabbi said, “This is nothing, my synagogue is even more modern: we even allow people to make love in the synagogue. What is wrong with it?”

The third rabbi said, “This is nothing. My synagogue is the most avant-garde.”

The two rabbis said, “Just tell us what you have done.”

He said, “My synagogue remains closed for Jewish holidays!”

They are trying hard, but it is just foolishness. They cannot catch hold of the new spirit of man.

I don’t give you any tradition.

I don’t give you any scripture.

I don’t give you any discipline.

Those are all non-essentials. I simply concentrate my whole work on making you more conscious. Consciousness is the key to transform the whole of humanity.

And yes, Gurdjieff is right: if even two hundred people are aflame, enlightened, the whole world will become enlightened because these two hundred torches can give fire to millions of people.

Those people are also carrying torches but without any fire. They have everything, just the fire is missing. And when fire passes from one torch to another, the first torch is not losing anything at all.

The enlightened consciousness is an infinite reservoir: it can give to you and yet it remains the same. Its quantity does not decrease because it is not a question of quantity at all; it is a question of quality. Qualities can be shared without losing anything.

You can love as many people as you want – that does not mean one day you will go bankrupt, and you will have to declare, “Now I have no love.” You cannot go bankrupt as far as love is concerned. Yes, you can go bankrupt as far as money is concerned. Money is a quantity; love is a quality. What to say of enlightened consciousness? It is the highest quality possible; there is nothing higher than that.

Don’t be afraid, worried that if I am gone, then what will happen to my words. I will not be gone before I have sown the seeds of those words in you. They are not mine! They are nobody’s. They are coming out of existence itself – I am simply a vehicle. You can become a vehicle. Everybody is capable of becoming a vehicle. Hence, I am not depending on old strategies; they have all failed. I am depending on living human beings.

And that is the only way to save humanity without becoming a savior, to save humanity without creating in them greed for heaven and fear of hell. The only way to save humanity is to give them some taste of what it means to be enlightened, a little fragrance, so they can feel the invisible.

And I am absolutely certain, utterly happy, that I have got the right people: people who are going to be my books, my temples, my synagogues. This is the reason I call this the first religion because it depends on living human beings, not on dead holy scriptures, traditions, beliefs.

I am giving you the taste of my being and preparing you to do the same, on your part, to others. It all depends on you, whether my words will remain living or will die. As far as I am concerned, I do not care.

While I am here, I am pouring myself into you. And I am grateful that you are allowing it to happen. Who bothers about the future? There is nobody in me who can care about the future. If existence can find me as a vehicle, I can remain assured that it can find thousands of people to be its vehicle. I am simply giving you a little opportunity to become vehicles of the whole.

-Osho

From The False to the Truth, Discourse #16, Q2

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Teilhard de Chardin’s Three Steps plus Three – Osho

Teilhard de Chardin believes that ‘the evolution of consciousness depends on three steps. And Chardin is one of the most important Christian thinkers of this century. But still he remains confined to Christianity; he cannot soar higher than Christian boundaries. These are the three steps that he talks about. Ordinarily, consciousness is simple, innocent. After that there are three steps. First he talks about complexity. He says ‘Consciousness grows through complexity.’

That is true. The original mind is absolutely simple, its taste is one, it has no duality. And because there is no duality there is no possibility of dialogue, argument. And because there is no possibility of argument and dialogue, there is no possibility of understanding. With the conflict, with friction, one evolves. So from one, man becomes dual; from unity, duplicity: from duplicity, triplicity: from triplicity, multiplicity. That’s how man goes on growing – complication.

Man’s consciousness is one in the original state, then it becomes many. Through the many… the growth; that is the Hegelian concept of growth, and Marxian too. Hegel calls it ‘the dialectical process’: thesis creates its antithesis, antithesis and thesis join into a synthesis, and the synthesis becomes a thesis and creates its antithesis. And this is how it goes on.

You cannot grow if your consciousness is unitary. It has to create a conflict in itself. With the conflict, energy is created. Conflict creates energy, friction creates energy. You strike two stones and fire is born. You strike two dry woods and fire is possible. You rub your hands and electricity is born. All energy is created through friction. So the original human consciousness has to become divided, has to become split, has to become dual. And the more evolved a mind man has, the more fragments he will have. So a thinker is almost a crowd. He is not one, he is not two, he is not three, he is many.

The second state Chardin calls ‘concentration’, because once the unity is lost and man has become many, there arises chaos and one loses one’s identity. One does not know who one is, then an identity is needed, a self is needed, an ego is needed to hold all these fragments together. Otherwise they will start falling apart and you will not be able to survive – hence the ego.

Ego is an effort to create a kind of unity inside yourself. The natural unity is lost. Now you have to create an unnatural, synthetic unity. The ego is a synthetic self, a created self, a managed self. One part of your being becomes the master and forces other parts to be slaves. A kind of government arises inside you.

Complexity creates energy. Concentration creates a possibility to use that energy; otherwise there will be no use for it. Energy will be there, and energy will kill you. It will be too much and it will be in so many directions. All those directions have to be focused in one direction, the whole energy has to be channelised into one. This is what Chardin calls ‘concentration’; unification around a centre; a self is born, ego is born, discipline is born.

And the third he calls ‘direction’. Once the ego is there, once you have a kind of self, a kind of unity – although managed, but still a unity – then the goal is possible. You can become an arrow, you can have a target in the future.

These three steps Chardin thinks are enough to explain human consciousness. They are not. They are important but not complete.

The Hindu vision of life is far more complete. Chardin’s vision is linear: unity, then complexity, then concentration, then direction. And the direction goes on and on, the arrow goes on and on and on, and there is no end to it. It is linear. The arrow goes on for infinity, it never comes back.

This is not true. This is logical, but not natural.

The Hindu vision is circular. Hindus say everything moves in a circle not in a line. Nature moves in a circle, seasons move in a circle, stars move in a circle, man’s life moves in a circle. Everything natural moves in a circle. The circle is the way of nature. The linear is just a concept of the mind. The line does not exist in nature. If you are aware of non-Euclidean geometry then you will know.

Euclid believes in line; non-Euclidean geometry says there is nothing like line in existence. The line also is part of a bigger circle, that’s all. No line is straight, and no line can be straight – you cannot draw a straight line. If you draw a straight line, that simply means you are sitting on a circular earth and drawing a straight line. Go on drawing the line from both ends go on drawing it, and you will find one day that the line has become a circle around the earth. So that small straight line was just a part of a big circle.

Hindus say it is circular. To me, the Hindu concept is far more true than the Christian concept of linear progress. But still, my own suggestion is a little different to both. My suggestion is: spiral – neither linear nor circular; evolution is a spiral. In that way both are joined together. In a spiral the progress moves as if it is moving in a line, because it never comes to exactly the same point again.

Christ never becomes Adam again, because Adam was ignorant and innocent, and Christ is innocent and fully aware. He never comes back to Adam, exactly to Adam. So the Hindu concept misses something. But in another sense he becomes Adam again because the innocence is the same, just that now it is fully aware. Then it was not aware, then it was asleep, now it is alert. In a sense Christ becomes Adam again because it is the same innocence. So Hindus are right. And in a sense Christ never becomes Adam again, because it is luminous innocence. In that sense Christians are right. But they are only half-half right.

To have the vision of the full truth, I would like to call evolution a spiral. It comes back to the original point but never on the same plane – on a higher plane. It comes again and again but always on a higher plane. If you have been trekking in the mountains you know what I mean. You go on a path; the path moves around the mountain. Again you come to the same point, the same rocks, the same valley, the same trees, but a little higher. It is a spiral.

To make it a spiral, I would like to add three more steps to it. Chardin says: complexity, concentration, direction. These three more steps have to be added. The first is: awareness, meditation. Concentration is just the beginning. Concentration is not relaxed, it is tense. One cannot concentrate twenty-four hours a day; one will go mad. So concentration can never become natural, but one can meditate twenty-four hours a day. One can live in meditation. It can become natural, it can become like breathing. It can be relaxed.

Concentration is focused consciousness. Meditation is just aware consciousness. For example, if you are listening to me, you can listen in a concentrated way. That will tire you, that will exhaust you. If you are listening very, very tensely so that you don’t miss a single word, then it will be tiring. But you can listen in a meditative way. That means you are relaxed and open, vulnerable, that’s all. You will not be tired. Listening for one and a half hours, rather than being tired, you will be enriched, rejuvenated. You will feel more energy afterwards than before, and you will feel more flow in your being. So the fourth thing has to be awareness, meditativeness, openness.

Concentration is directional, meditation is non-directional. Concentration has an object, a content. Meditation has no object, no content; it is just an opening. You are listening to me, a bird starts singing – that too you listen to, a train passes by – that too you listen to. You are not listening to me. All is included. You are open from all the sides, not only open to me. This is a higher stage of evolution than concentration is: it is de-concentration.

And the fifth I call playfulness. Christianity has no idea of playfulness, and Chardin has no idea of playfulness. ‘Direction’, ‘goal’, ‘purpose’ – that is very business-like, tiring, and makes man sad and serious. Something like playfulness has to be added, because a really grown-up person is capable of play. A really grown-up person is sincere but not serious. Seriousness is a kind of illness because seriousness will create tension in you; it will never allow you to celebrate. Only playfulness can become celebration and joy.

And there seems to be no space for joy in Chardin’s chart – nothing of playfulness. Complexity, concentration, direction – good as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough. And they don’t go into creating a happy, celebrating human being . And without celebration what is the purpose? All purpose leads to a purposeless play. You work, but you work finally to relax. You work hard, just so that you are able to play. You work five days, so that at the weekend you can rest on the beach. All purpose leads to purposeless play. So the fifth I call playfulness, non-seriousness, non-purposiveness, celebration, joy.

And sixth I call egolessness. Ego is needed – because one falls into a chaos, and a synthetic self is needed. But that self is synthetic, plastic, it is not real. It has to be dropped one day. Use it, go beyond it, and throw it! One has to come to egolessness; one has to forget that one exists separately from existence. In that forgetfulness, in that dropping of the ego, one becomes Adam again in a totally new way. One becomes Christ – again unity, again simplicity, again innocence, but now luminous this time. You are twice-born.

This way one again comes back to the original simplicity, the original face. But it is higher than the first originality, hence I call it spiral. It is primal innocence, but not just primal innocence. It has immense light in it, it is not dark. It is not primitive; it is the highest point of consciousness. It is divine innocence. What Plotinus calls ‘The One’ – this is the One. First the One was not aware of itself, now the One is aware of itself. God is born in you.

In Adam God was a seed; in Christ God has become a flowering. The seed has come to its full manifestation.

This is the difference between the child and the sage. Adam is the child, Christ is the sage. They both are alike and yet not alike at all. Something similar and something absolutely different: similarity in innocence, dissimilarity in awareness, luminosity. Or you can call the first state ‘nature’, and the second state ‘God’. When nature realizes itself, it becomes God. When nature recognizes itself, it becomes God. The beginning and the end have to be the same in some way and yet not the same in some other way. The alpha has to be the omega, and the omega has to be the alpha; and yet they have to exist on totally different planes. Adam is body, Christ is soul; Jesus is mind – a bridge just in between the two polarities.

– Osho

From I Say Unto You, Vol. 2, Discourse #9

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Be The Last Poem

And now we come to the end

Or is it the beginning?

It is here we start afresh

So much is gone

How much is unborn?

We take leave of becoming

Being what has always been

If only we had known

From the very beginning

That we are what we

-purushottama

This is from the collection of stories, essays, poems and insights that is compiled to form the book From Lemurs to Lamas: Confessions of a Bodhisattva. Order the book Here.

Prayer by Shankarcharya – Vimala Thakar

Translation & Commentary by Vimala Thakar

Pratah smarami hridi samsphura ta twam
Satchitsukham paramahansa gatim turiyam
Yat swapna jagara sushupta mavaiti nityam
Tad brahma nishkalamaham na cha bhuta sanghaha.

In the morning as I meet the dawn, I remember that my heart contains the God, the Beloved, who has not yet been defined and described. I remember that it is He who vibrates within my heart, enables me to breathe, to talk, to listen, to move. When I am thus aware, that it is He who lives and moves within me, then the three phases of consciousness, jagrat, swapna, sushupti : wakefulness, dreaming, and profound sleep, they are transcended into turiya, the fourth dimension, which is behind the wakefulness, the dream-consciousness, and the sleep-consciousness.

When I thus remember, that the underlying current behind the wakefulness, the dream, and the sleep-consciousness is He, who lives and moves within me, then that awareness gives me sat chit sukham, the flavor of the truth, the reality, and the bliss that is the nature, the basic primary nature of life.

Sat chit sukham. When I am always thus aware of the real nature of life, then I arrive at paramahan sagatim turiyam. I arrive at a state of being that has been called by the ancient wise Indians “Paramahansa”, a swan that swims through the waters of duality. That is how a sanyasi is called a paramahansa, one who lives in the renunciation of that austere awareness that it is not he who lives, as separate from the universe, but that he is only an expression of the universal.

The state of paramahansa is the state where a person is aware that he is not a conglomeration of sense organs and only the five elements, but he is the nishkala Brahman, the supreme Brahman, the divinity, who has taken the dense form of a mind and a physical body.

Pratara bhajami manaso vachasam agamyam
Vacho vibhanti nikhila yadanugrahena
Ya neti neti vachanaih nirgama avochu
Tamdeva devam ajam achyutam ahuragryam

But my mind, when I am awake, needs some work to do. It cannot remain without movement. So I give it a job. “Pratara bhajami manaso” – by the mind – “vachasam agamyam” – by the mind I move. On the frontiers of the mind I give the mind a job to explore that which lies beyond its own frontiers, that which is not accessible to the word, to the speech, as well as to the mind.

My mind asks me, “How shall I do it?” And I ask the mind to travel back, through the word, to the source of the word, the sound, and find out how the sound is born. I ask my mind to travel with the breath, to go inside: with the breath to travel. That is the only way you can find out how the sound is born, because breath and sound are woven together.

All speech and all sound is a blessing of that unspoken, unstruck sound. And unless one discovers the source from which all sound is born, one shall never set oneself free from the power of the word, that intoxicates and distorts the mind; that intoxicates the mind and sweeps it off its balance.

All the Upanishads and the Vedas have been searching for that source of sound. That source of breath. They arrived only at two words: na iti, na iti: it is “not this”, it is “not this.” So even the Vedas arrive at the point where nothing can describe and define. The source can only be experienced, the source can only be perceived and understood, but never defined and described. That is how the mind becomes silent. Not because I ask it, but while it is searching for the source of its own activity it takes a dive deep into silence, where the mind becomes the no-mind, where the knowing becomes the not-knowing.

Then I understand that silence is the only speech through which life speaks, and I feel blessed when I am in that silence.

Pratarnamami tamasah param arkavarnam
Purnam sanatana padam purushottamakhyam
Yasminnidam jagadashesham ashesamurtau
Rajjuam bhujangama iva pratibhatitam vai.

But then comes the body. It wants to do something. To worship, to admire, to adore. So I give it a job. I ask my body to bow down before the light of the earth, the sun, who dispels darkness from all the corners of the earth. And I ask my body to expose itself to that darkness dispelling sun – ask it to find out how that sun enters into the body through the doors of the eyes, and through the pores of all the veins and nerves, every pore of my being. I want my body to find out which are the avenues through which the light is received.

And when the body says, “It is the eyes through which the light enters,” I say, “Find out how the eyes can see the light. Is the light outside the eyes, or is it inside?” With the help of the mind, the body travels inward, to find out the source of the light.

And it discovers that it is not a blind person who can receive the light from outside. He who has an eye can receive the light. So that which receives the light is greater than the light seen from outside.

So I arrive at the source of light within me. And the awareness of that light dispels the illusion – the illusion and the fear that a man experiences when he sees “rajo bhujangama” : when he sees a rope in the darkness and he mistakes that for a snake, a cobra. I had mistaken the rope of duality for the snake and cobra of misery and sorrow. But the light dispels the darkness and I see that the duality is only a rope that cannot bind me in any way unless I bind myself with it.

That light is the purushottam, that is sanatana – eternal. Purnam – that is perfect. The perfect eternity. The God divine. That is really my nature. I had mistaken the tensions of duality to be me, but then the light dispels all the darkness, and I get rooted back into the ajam, the aychutam – that which can never be swept off its feet. Ajam – that which was never born, and can never die. I am that.

This is the prayer composed by Shankaracharya, the majestic exponent of the philosophy of non-dualism, vedanta or advait. This was sung by Vivekananda very often, and it is really on this prayer that Vivekananda’s “Song of Sanyasin” is based, where he sings, in great ecstasy:

They know not truth who dream such vacant dreams
As father, mother, children wife and friend –
The sexless Self, whose father, whose mother is he?
The self is All in All,
None else exists, and thou art that,
Sanyasin bold, say ‘Om Tat Sat Om’.

Where seekest thou that freedom?
This world nor that can give you.
Thine only is the hand,
That holds the rope that drags thee on.
Then cease lament, let go thy hold!
Sanyasin bold! Say ‘Om Tat Sat Om!’

-Vimala Thakar
Hunger Mountain, MA, October, 1972

Here is a link to an audio recording of Vimalaji chanting part of the above prayer. Prayer by Shankarcharya – Vimala Thakar

For more posts on Vimala Thakar look here.

There are quite a few of Vimala Thakar’s books that are downloadable.

Jesus and the Way – Franklin Merrell-Wolff

No man cometh unto the Father but by Me”. Thus spake Jesus. But many heard, though few understood, and so they sought the Father through belief in a man who dwelt for a short time upon this earth. But no man is “I” since man is an object while I AM always the subject. Hence to translate the above quotation as meaning, “no man cometh unto the Father but by Jesus,” is completely to change the meaning. The Father is Divinity, God, Brahman, the ultimate Transcendent Reality. Now this Reality is Consciousness wherein subject and object are no longer divided but together form a united Sea of Consciousness. The general tendency of mankind is to seek God as an object, that is, God is worshiped as an object which stands as other than the worshiper. What Jesus meant is that success cannot be attained by this road. It is only through the “I” that the Father can be reached.

While both the subjective and objective factors are blended in Absolute Consciousness, yet the quality is carried in the subjective moment. There is but one “I” or subject. Again, this is the most immediate and intimate of all facts. Hence, only through the “I” is identity realized. Approached in any other way, God is ever something other than the seeker and, therefore, is at a distance. To come to the Father is to be one with the Father, and this can be achieved only through the pure Subject or the SELF.

With the more current interpretation of the above quotation there is a distinct clash between the teaching of Jesus and that of the other leading spiritual Lights of the world. But with the interpretation here offered nearly, if not quite, complete reconciliation is afforded, not alone with the teachings of the other great Founders of religion, but also with the spontaneous sayings of nearly all spiritually illumined souls. It fits perfectly with the “I AM that I AM” of the Old Testament. It is identical in meaning with the central doctrine of Buddhism and Brahmanism, where we find the clearest and most complete formulation of all. The “Christ” of St. Paul is a mystic Christ and not a distinct person. It is a level of Consciousness of which Jesus Christ was the symbol for him. This level of Consciousness is identical with that from which Jesus spoke. This agreement can further be noted by reading the works of a number of God-Realized Men, such as Jacob Boehme, Spinoza, Whitman, Hegel, Rama Tirtha, and Inayat Khan. It is unnecessary to elaborate further here.

-Franklin Merrell-Wolff

from Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object, Chapter 7. – State University of New York Press

The Seven C’s of Jesus – Osho

Remember these seven words. Christ means to me these seven words, and this is his whole alchemy. First: catalytic; second: catalepsy; third: catharsis; fourth: catastrophe; fifth: cross; sixth: conversion; and seventh: Christ-consciousness. This is his whole alchemy, how he used to transform people. His work is different from Buddha’s; his methodology is different; different from Krishna’s, different from Mohammed’s. He is a unique Master.

First: catalytic. Jesus’ work is that of a catalytic agent. He wants people to be in contact with him, what Hindus call Satsang. To be in contact with the Master, to be in the presence of the Master – the very presence functions. Jesus does not give methods to people, that is not his way. Patanjali’s way is to create devices, methods; that is the way of Gurdjieff too – to create methods and devices so people can start growing. Jesus’ way is that of Satsang. He transforms people just by his touch. He overpowers people, he surrounds them. His energy starts dancing around them. He starts pulsating his being, and in his pulse – that powerful pulse of Jesus – the other person also starts pulsating. In the beginning, hesitant, afraid, not knowing where he is going, but slowly, slowly he gains momentum. It is like a dancer. Have you not watched when a dancer is dancing and the music is on, something of the dancer starts happening in you? Your feet start moving, you start tapping the chair with your hand, your head starts nodding. You are filled with it. Some pulsation has reached you.

Jesus’ methodology is to pulsate people through his pulse, to magnetise people through his magnetism; to be with them. And the best way to be with them is when they are very, very relaxed.

Hence Jesus was always ready to go to people, to drink with them, to eat with them, because that is the most relaxing moment in people’s lives. Buddha has never done that – that was not his way. When people are eating, they are relaxed.

Have you not watched it? Even businessmen like to take you for lunch, because then things are easier. You are more positive, you are more relaxed, you say yes more easily. So if the salesman wants to sell the car to you, he takes you for lunch. When your belly is feeling good and you are feeling very contented, and the aroma of the food and the joy of the food, and you are feeling really satisfied… it is very difficult to say no. It is easier for the salesman to sell something to you. And Jesus is the greatest salesman. It is not just accidental that his religion has become the greatest religion as far as numbers are concerned, the greatest salesman ever.

He would go to people to take food with them or to drink with them, and that was the moment when he would try to infiltrate their being with his presence. That was his catalytic, magnetic power. When people are drinking… You have drunk a little bit – you become more relaxed. Then things are more easy, you are less defensive.

Gurdjieff used to do that – that was his everyday work. Just as every day I go on talking to you, every day he used to invite his disciples for food. That was the greatest thing. Every day, every night. And it was not an ordinary dinner. It used to continue for five hours, six hours, seven hours, almost half the night. And then drinking… and he would force you to eat and drink, and he himself would be serving and it would be difficult to say no; eating, drinking, laughing, you would be less defensive. And he would be telling jokes, and people would become very, very relaxed. The atmosphere would become very homely – utterly homely. They would forget who Gurdjieff was and who they were. They would relax into his being, and his work would start.

That’s exactly what I am doing I go on talking to you. That is a kind of feast, a feast of words. You become involved in the words; you become utterly involved with the words, and my work, the Real work starts. That is indirect.

So the first thing, the first word to be understood about Christ is ’catalytic’. He is not a great philosopher like Buddha. He is not a great scientist like Patanjali. He is not a singer like Krishna is. But he has his own method and that method is of the catalytic agent.

In the East there have been many Masters like that, but Jesus is the ultimate in Satsanga: just being with people.

The catalytic agent means that nothing is done to you, but something happens to you. The catalytic agent does not go into you, and does not do anything in you. But just the presence, just the very presence provokes you, inspires you, and something starts growing in you. Just as scientists say, if you want to make water, hydrogen and oxygen are needed; but they cannot meet unless electricity is present as a catalytic agent. It does not enter into them, it remains aloof, but its very presence helps them to meet. That is very miraculous. Science has not yet been able to know how the catalytic agent works, because nothing goes out of it, it is simply there. But you can understand it.

Sometimes I am simply here, and something becomes silent in you. And this can happen even when you are far away if you remember me. If you remember totally, immediately you will find something has changed. The vibe around you is no more the same; something has fallen quiet, silent. The turmoil of the mind is a little far away, not so close by. You are settled and centered.

Just the other day somebody asked the question ‘While I am here listening to you and to your words, much is happening to me. But when I go back, will it continue to happen when I will be listening to your tapes or reading your books?’

It depends on you. It can’t depend on books, on tapes, but it depends on you. If in those moments of listening to the tapes or reading the books you can feel my presence, you can visualise my presence, you can think of me and remember me, it will go on happening. There will be no problem. Distance does not make much difference.

For the first time it is needed to be close. Once the contact has happened, then you can call me anywhere. And when I say you can call me anywhere, I mean you can simply fall into my presence anywhere, you can just remember me. Calm and quiet, remember me, be full of my presence, and suddenly it will be there, and it will function as a catalytic agent.

A catalytic agent is a miraculous thing. This is Jesus’ real miracle. Tao has a word for it, they call it Wei-Wu-Wei, action without action. The Master does not Do anything to you, he does not interfere in your being, he simply is there. But he is pulsating and his pulsation is strong; his pulsation is vital.

He is like a great wind which goes on blowing, surrounding you. You are like a fragile tree; you start swaying in the wind and something starts happening to you – the dance. The wind is invisible, and in fact the wind is not doing anything to you, it is simply blowing on its own way. But it can give you the thrill, it can wake you up! This is what acid people call a ‘contact high’.

It happens sometimes when somebody has taken LSD and is really deep into it, gone, and you are just taking care of the person. You have not taken LSD, you are just taking care of the person because it is dangerous to leave him, and suddenly you start feeling that something is turning on in you. This is now a universal experience, because so many people in this generation have taken LSD, marijuana, psilocybin and things like that. This is a universal experience now, that sometimes just by being in the presence of somebody who has gone deep in his LSD trip, you start feeling high. Something starts moving in you. Wings grow, and you start flying. And you have not taken anything! Then what is happening? Because that man’s pulsation is so powerful in this moment, that man is blowing like a great wind, he takes you with him unawares. You are pulled by him, you are taken by his stream of consciousness.

This is a new experience in the West, but in the East it is very ancient. And this is nothing, because LSD is LSD – such a small quantity you take. But a Jesus is pure LSD – just LSD and nothing else! He is made of the stuff LSD. A Buddha is absolute marijuana. Each single cell of his body is marijuana. It is not chemical, it is spiritual. It is such a vital force that there is no other force which is more vital. The only question is if you become available to it – then it turns you on.

The second word is catalepsy – the suspension of your old being. When you are in contact with a Christ or a Buddha, your old being is immediately suspended out of the very shock; you cannot function as you used to function before. The very presence of the Christ is such a shock that everything is suspended. For a moment all thoughts stop, all feelings disappear. For a moment you may miss a heartbeat. That’s why it happens that around great Masters you will see many people who look like zombies. They are in a kind of suspension.

Just the other day Divyananda came to me. He works in my garden. And he said ‘What is happening to me? I have become almost like a zombie, and I am afraid. Should I go and do something else?’ And I told him ‘You be a zombie. Be a perfect zombie, that’s all. You continue your work.’ Now something immensely valuable is happening, but he cannot understand it yet. This is what is happening: catalepsy. He is open to me, and working in my garden he has become even more open to me. He is in shock; he is forgetting who he is. He is losing his old identity, he is paralyzed! Why paralyzed? – Because the old cannot function and the new has yet to be born. So he is in the interval.

This is going to happen to many. Don’t be afraid when it happens! It will go, it is not going to remain, but it is on the way. It happens. This is a state of not knowing: you don’t know what is what, all your knowledge is lost; all your cleverness is gone. You become idiotic. You look like an idiot. People will say that you have become hypnotized or something, that you are no more your old self. That is true. But it is a kind of shock, and good, because it will destroy the past, it will make you discontinuous with the past, and it will bring the fresh, the new. It will allow something original to happen. But before the original happens, the past has to go.

You are like a pot in which there has been poison for a long time, for many years, for many lives. Now before something can be poured into it, the poison has to be thrown out and the pot has to be cleaned, utterly cleaned. Even if a little bit of poison remains hanging around, it will destroy the new that is coming, it will kill it.

That is the whole meaning of sannyas and disciplehood: that your past has to be completely washed away; your memory, your ego, your identity – all have to go. When you are just an empty pot, then something more is possible. That is the third state: catharsis. When your head is in shock, your heart becomes free, because the head is not allowing the heart to be free. It is keeping the heart as a prisoner. When the head has stopped in shock… And each Master beheads you, cuts your head mercilessly; destroys your reason, destroys your logic; brings you down from the head. And the only way is to cut the head completely.

This is the third state: catharsis. When the head is no more functioning, its control is lost and the prisoner is free, then the heart starts throbbing again – maybe after many, many lives.

And for many lives you have been repressing your emotions, feelings, tears, love – they all flood you. That’s what catharsis is – the appearance of the heart. The repressed explodes and the emotional bursts out – a kind of earthquake or a heartquake, a volcanic situation. You are flooded by the unconscious and the irrational. That’s why a real disciple always passes through a kind of insanity around a Master.

The fourth state is catastrophe. When reason is gone and the heart goes mad it is catastrophe.

And then the ego starts falling into pieces, because the ego is nothing but control. The control of the head over the heart is creating the ego. When the head is no more functioning, it is in shock, catalepsy, and the heart is in catharsis. The ego disappears because the ego is no more there. It cannot be there, the control is gone. And when the ego falls it looks like catastrophe. All is lost, chaos arises and now one feels that one has really gone mad. It is not just a temporary madness. It looks now as if it is going to remain there forever. One cannot look beyond it.

This is what Christian mystics call ’the dark night of the soul’: a kind of hopelessness arises. One is utterly lost and there seems to be no possibility of getting out- of it. One is drowned and drowning. And the powers that are drowning you are so vast that there seems to be no hope that you can get over them. The shores are no more visible; you are in the middle of the ocean.

And then comes the fifth: the cross. The ego dies on the cross.

In the fourth state it simply disintegrates, but goes on lingering in fragments, clinging here and there. In the fifth it dies, the ego completely dies – no more identity with body or mind, a state of negation, death, emptiness. Great trembling, fear… one is on the verge of the abyss called God. That’s where Jesus found him – on the cross. That cross has to come to everybody. Jesus says everybody has to carry his cross on his shoulders.

Then comes the sixth: conversion. Only when you are dead does God become alive in you. Only when the seed dies does it become a tree, only when the river disappears into the ocean does it become one with the ocean: conversion.

Conversion is a beautiful word very badly used by Christians. They think that if somebody is a Hindu and becomes a Christian, this is conversion. This is not conversion. A Hindu becoming a Christian, this is nothing. He has simply changed one prison for another, one priest for another, one book for another. But there has been no real change, no transformation. A Christian can become a Hindu; Hindus think this is conversion. This is not conversion. Conversion happens only when the ego dies and God is born in you. Conversion is when the human becomes divine, not when a Hindu becomes Christian or a Christian becomes Hindu. But when the human becomes divine, when Jesus becomes Christ, then there is conversion; when Gautama becomes Buddha, then there is conversion.

In the fifth, the cross, the ego dies. In the sixth, the self is born – the supreme self, the Atman, your real self. For the first time you know who you are. Mountains are again mountains, rivers are again rivers. All confusion gone… clarity arises. Your eyes become transparent, you can see things. Now there are no more any prejudices, no more any ideologies. One is neither Hindu, nor Mohammedan, nor communist, nor fascist. One simply is… a purity of isness. This is where what Hindus call Satyam, Shivam, Sunderam is felt. Satyam means truth, Shivam means good, and Sunderam means beauty. Not before that.

Before that, what you call beauty is nothing but lust. What you call good is nothing but conditioned morality. What you call truth is nothing but correspondence between you, your statement and things.

It is like you say ‘In the room there are three chairs.’ And somebody goes and finds three chairs, so it corresponds, it is ’true’. This has nothing to do with truth, it is just correspondence, a true statement. But what about truth? What is truth? – Three chairs? If there are two chairs, it is untrue. This is only linguistic and logical truth.

Truth means that which is hidden behind the trees and the mountains, hidden behind people, hidden behind everything. That ’hidden’ becomes unhidden, then you come to truth.

Truth… and then you come to Shivam; your life becomes good. Not in the sense of being a moral person, a Pharisee, a puritan, no; your life becomes spontaneously good. Not that you try to do good. But whatsoever you do is good. You cannot do bad! The bad is impossible, because you cannot think of yourself as separate from others. How can you do bad? You cannot hurt anybody because now hurting anybody is hurting yourself. Your ego is gone. You hurt somebody and you are hurt. You kill somebody and you are killing yourself. You steal from somebody and you are stealing from your own pocket. Now goodness is just natural – not imposed – spontaneous.

And Sunderam. And only then, when you have known what is and you have become spontaneous, can you know what beauty is. Beauty is not only poetry, it is the vision of truth, it is the vision of God.

But one step more. It is like you are one thousand miles away from the Himalayas in the early morning and you see in the clear sky no clouds, and the Himalayan peaks are standing there.

Those virgin snows shining like gold in the morning sun… but you are a thousand miles away. It is beautiful, it fills you with awe, but you are still distant.

So in conversion: Satyam, Shivam, Sunderam.

And then the seventh state is Christ-consciousness. You are no more away from the peaks, you have become the peaks! You are no more away from those virgin snows, you are those snows. You are not seeing sunrays reflected on the snow, you are those sunrays. Christ-consciousness is born: one becomes one with the whole. One becomes that which one really is. One becomes one with God. Buddha calls it Nirvana, Christ calls it ‘kingdom of God’, Hindus call it Satchitananda. Now again another trinity arises.

First in the sixth: Satyam, Shivam, Sunderam – truth, good, beauty.

In the seventh: Sat – being, Chit – consciousness, Ananda – bliss.

Remember these seven words and meditate on them.

– Osho

From I Say Unto You, Vol 2, Discourse #5

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available online from Amazon.com and in the U.S. from OshoStore-Sedona and Osho Here and Now.

Author: purushottama

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