Category: Meditation

I Want a Meeting of East and West – Osho

You have been using the key word “deprogramming” to describe your work. The techniques that you have suggested during these years, from Chaotic and Dynamic meditation to the modern therapeutic school.

I would like you to explain in brief why you had to create new meditation techniques like Kundalini Meditation or Dynamic Meditation, even though there is a tradition already including hundreds of techniques from Yoga, Sufism, Buddhism, etc.

What is also surprising to the West is that you are using therapies such as Gestalt, Primal, Encounter, in your commune. Is it really necessary? The suspicion is that your secret intentions are nothing but to brainwash people’s minds, and that cannot be tolerated because you are touching the most precious thing they have.

The ancient methods of meditation were all developed in the East. They never considered the Western man, the Western man was excluded. I am creating techniques which are not only for the Eastern man, which are simply for every man – Eastern or Western.

There is a difference between the Eastern tradition and the Western tradition – and it is the tradition that creates the mind. For example, the Eastern mind is very patient – thousands of years of teaching to remain patient, whatever the conditions may be. The Western mind is very impatient. The same methods of technique cannot be applicable to both. The Eastern mind has been conditioned to keep a certain equilibrium in success or in failure, in richness or in poverty, in sickness or in health, in life or in death. The Western mind has no idea of such equilibrium; it gets too disturbed. With success it gets disturbed; it starts feeling at the top of the world, starts feeling a certain superiority complex. In failure it goes to the other extreme; it falls into the seventh hell. It is miserable, in deep anguish, and it feels a tremendous inferiority complex. It is torn apart. And life consists of both. There are moments which are beautiful, and there are moments which are ugly. There are moments when you are in love, there are moments when you are in anger, in hatred. The Western mind simply goes with the situation. It is always in a turmoil. The Eastern mind has learnt… it is a conditioning, it is not a revolution, it is only a training, a discipline, it is a practice. Underneath it is the same, but a thick conditioning makes it keep a certain balance.

The Eastern mind is very slow because there is no point in being speedy; life takes its own course and everything is determined by fate, so what you get, you don’t get by your speed, your hurry. What you get, you get because it is already destined. So there is no question of being in a hurry. Whenever something is going to happen, it is going to happen – neither one second before nor one second after it. This has created a very slow flow in the East. It seems almost as if the river is not flowing; it is so slow that you cannot detect the flow. Moreover, the Eastern conditioning is that you have already lived millions of lives, and there are millions ahead to be lived, so the life span is not only seventy years; the life span is vast and enormous. There is no hurry; there is so much time available: why should you be in a hurry? If it does not happen in this life, it may happen in some other life.

The Western mind is very speedy, fast, because the conditioning is for only one life – seventy years – and so much to do. One third of your life goes into sleep, one third of your life goes into education, training – what is left? Much of it goes into earning your livelihood. If you count everything, you will be surprised: out of seventy years you cannot even have seven years left for something that you want to do. Naturally there is hurry, a mad rush, so mad that one forgets where one is going. All that you remember is whether you are going with speed or not. The means becomes the end.

In the same way, in different directions . . . the Eastern mind has cultivated itself differently than the Western mind. Those one hundred and twelve methods of meditation developed in the East have never taken account of the Western man; they were not developed for the Western man. The Western man was not yet available. The time that Vigyan Bhairava Tantra was written – in which those one hundred and twelve techniques have come to perfection – is nearabout five to ten thousand years before us. At that time there was no Western man, no Western society, no Western culture. The West was still barbarous, primitive, not worth taking into account. The East was the whole world, at the pinnacle of its growth, richness, civilization.

My methods of meditation have been developed out of an absolute necessity. I want the distinction between the West and the East to be dissolved.

After Shiva’s Vigyan Bhairava Tantra, in these five or ten thousand years, nobody has developed a single method. But I have been watching the differences between East and West: the same method cannot be applied immediately to both. First, the Eastern and the Western mind have to be brought into a similar state. Those techniques of dynamic meditation, kundalini meditation, and others, are all cathartic; their basis is catharsis.

You have to throw out all the junk that your mind is full of. Unless you are unloaded you cannot sit silently. It is just as if you tell a child to sit silently in the corner of the room. It is very difficult; he is so full of energy. You are repressing a volcano! The best way is, first tell him, “Go run outside around the house ten times; then come and sit down in the corner.”

Then it is possible, you have made it possible. He himself wants to sit down now, to relax. He is tired, he is exhausted; now, sitting there, he is not repressing his energy, he has expressed his energy by running around the house ten times. Now he is more at ease. The cathartic methods are simply to throw all your impatience, your speediness, your hurry, your repressions.

One more factor has to be remembered, that these are absolutely necessary for the Western man before he can do something like vipassana – just sitting silently doing nothing and the grass grows by itself. But you have to be sitting silently, doing nothing – that is a basic condition for the grass to grow by itself. If you cannot sit silently doing nothing, you are going to disturb the grass. I have always loved gardens, and wherever I have lived I have created beautiful gardens, lawns. I used to talk to people sitting on my lawn, and I became aware that they were all pulling the grass Out . . . just hectic energy. If they had nothing to do, they would simply pull the grass. I had to tell them, “If you go on doing this, then you will have to sit inside the room. I cannot allow you to destroy my lawn.”

They would stop themselves for a while, and as they started listening to me, again unconsciously, their hands would start pulling at the grass. So sitting silently doing nothing is not really just sitting silently and doing nothing. It is doing a big favor to the grass. Unless you are not doing anything, the grass cannot grow; you will stop it, you will pull it out, you will disturb it.

So these methods are absolutely necessary for the Western mind. But a new factor has also entered: they have become necessary for the Eastern mind too. The mind for which Shiva wrote those one hundred and twelve methods of meditation no longer exists – even in the East now. The Western influence has been tremendous. Things have changed.

In Shiva’s time there was no Western civilization. The East was at its peak of glory; it was called “a golden bird.” It had all the luxuries and comforts: it was really affluent.

Now the situation is reversed: the East has been in slavery for two thousand years, exploited by almost everyone in the world, invaded by a dozen countries, continuously looted, raped, burned. It is now a beggar.

And three hundred years of British rule in India have destroyed India’s own educational system – which was a totally different thing. They forced the Eastern mind to be educated according to Western standards. They have almost turned the Eastern intelligentsia into a second-grade Western intelligentsia. They have given their disease of speediness, of hurry, of impatience, of continuous anguish, anxiety, to the East.

If you see the temples of Khajuraho or the temples of Konarak, you can see the East in its true colors. Just in Khajuraho there were one hundred temples; only thirty have survived, seventy have been destroyed by Mohammedans. Thousands of temples of tremendous beauty and sculpture have been destroyed by Mohammedans. These thirty survived; it was just coincidence, because they were part of a forest. Perhaps the invaders forgot about them. But the British influence on the Indian mind was so great, that even a man like Mahatma Gandhi wanted these thirty temples to be covered with mud so nobody could see them. Just to think of the people who had created those hundred temples… each temple must have taken centuries to build. They are so delicate in structure, so proportionate and so beautiful, that there exists nothing parallel to them on the earth.

And you can imagine that temples don’t exist alone; if there were a hundred temples, there must have been a city of thousands of people; otherwise, a hundred temples are meaningless. Where are those people? With the temples those people have been massacred. And those temples I take as an example, because their sculpture will look pornographic to the Western mind; to Mahatma Gandhi it also looked pornographic. India owes so much to Rabindranath Tagore. He was the man who prevented Mahatma Gandhi and other politicians who were ready to cover the temples, to hide them from people’s eyes. Rabindranath Tagore said, “This is absolutely stupid. They are not pornographic; they are utterly beautiful.”

There is a very delicate line between pornography and beauty. A naked woman is not necessarily pornographic; a naked man is not necessarily pornographic. A beautiful man, a beautiful woman, naked, can be examples of beauty, of health, of proportion. They are the most glorious products of nature. If a deer can be naked and beautiful – and nobody thinks the deer is pornographic – then why should it be that a naked man or woman cannot be just seen as beautiful?

There were ladies in the times of Victoria in England, who covered the legs of the chairs with cloth because legs should not be left naked – chairs’ legs! But because they are called legs, it was thought uncivilized, uncultured, to leave them naked. There was a movement in Victoria’s time that the people who take their dogs for a walk should cover them with cloth. They should not be naked . . . as if nakedness itself is pornographic. It is the pornographic mind.

I have been to Khajuraho hundreds of times, and I have not seen a single sculpture as pornographic. A naked picture or a naked statue becomes pornography if it provokes your sexuality. That’s the only criterion: if it provokes your sexuality, if it is an incentive to your sexual instinct. But that is not the case with Khajuraho. In fact the temples were made for just the opposite purpose. They were made to meditate on man and woman making love. And the stones have come alive. The people who have made them must have been the greatest artists the world has known. They were made to meditate upon, they were objects for meditation. It is a temple, and meditators were sitting around just looking at the sculptures, and watching within themselves whether there was any sexual desire arising. This was the criterion: when they found there was no sexual desire arising, it was a certificate for them to enter the temples. All these sculptures are outside the temple, on the walls outside; inside there are no nudist statues. But this was necessary for people to meditate, and then they were clear that there was no desire; on the contrary those statues had made their ordinary desire for sex subside. Then they were capable of entering into the temple; otherwise, they should not enter the temple. That would be a profanity – having such a desire inside and entering the temple. It would be making the temple dirty – you would be insulting the temple.

The people who created these temples created a tremendous, voluminous literature also. The East never used to be repressive of sexuality. Before Buddha and Mahavira the East was never repressive of sexuality. It was with Buddha and Mahavira that for the first time celibacy became spiritual. Otherwise, before Buddha and Mahavira, all the seers of the Upanishads, of the Vedas, were married people; they were not celibate, they had children. And they were not people who had renounced the world; they had all the luxuries and all the comforts. They lived in the forests, but they had everything presented to them by their students, by the kings, by their lovers. And their ashramas, their schools, their academies in the forest were very affluent.

With Buddha and Mahavira the East began a sick tradition of celibacy, of repression. And when Christianity came into India, there came a very strong trend of repressiveness. These three hundred years of Christianity have made the Eastern mind almost as repressive as the Western mind. So now my methods are applicable to both. I call them preliminary methods. They are to destroy everything that can prevent you from going into a silent meditation. Once dynamic meditation or kundalini meditation succeeds, you are clean. You have erased repressiveness. You have erased the speediness, the hurry, the impatience. Now it is possible for you to enter the temple. It is for this reason that I spoke about the acceptance of sex, because without the acceptance of sex, you cannot get rid of repression. And I want you to be completely clean, natural. I want you to be in a state where those one hundred and twelve methods can be applicable to you. This is my reason for devising these methods – these are simply cleansing methods.

I have also included the Western therapeutic methods because the Western mind – and under its influence, the Eastern mind: both have become sick. It is a rare phenomenon today to find a healthy mind. Everybody is feeling a certain kind of nausea, a mental nausea, a certain emptiness, which is like a wound hurting. Everybody is having his life turned into a nightmare. Everybody is worried, too much afraid of death; not only afraid of death but also afraid of life. People are living half-heartedly, people are living in a lukewarm way: not intensely like Zorba the Greek, not with a healthy flavor but with a sick mind. One has to live, so they are living. One has to love, so they are loving. One has to do this, to be like this, so they are following; otherwise, there is no incentive coming from their own being. They are not overflowing with energy. They are not risking anything to live totally. They are not adventurous – and without being adventurous, one is not healthy. Adventure is the criterion, inquiry into the unknown is the criterion. People are not young; from childhood they simply become old.

Youth never happens.

The Western therapeutic methods cannot help you to grow spiritually, but they can prepare the ground. They cannot sow the seeds of flowers but they can prepare the ground – which is a necessity. This was one reason why I included therapies. There is also another reason: I want a meeting of East and West. The East has developed meditative methods; the West has not developed meditative methods, the West has developed psychotherapies. If we want the Western mind to be interested in meditation methods, if you want the Eastern mind to come closer to the Western, then there has to be something of give and take. It should not be just Eastern – something from the Western evolution should be included. And I find those therapies are immensely helpful. They can’t go far, but as far as they go, it is good. Where they stop, meditations can take over.

But the Western mind should feel that something of its own development has been included in the meeting, in the merger; it should not be one-sided. And they are significant; they cannot harm, they can only help. And I have used them for the last fifteen years with tremendous success. They have helped people to cleanse their beings, prepared them to be ready to enter into the temple of meditation. My effort is to dissolve the separation between East and West. The earth should be one, not only politically but spiritually too.

And you say that people think that this is a clever way of brainwashing. It is something more: it is mindwashing, not brainwashing. Brainwashing is very superficial. The brain is the mechanism that the mind uses. You can wash the brain very easily – just any mechanism can be washed and cleaned and lubricated. But if the mind which is behind the brain is polluted, is dirty, is full of repressed desires, is full of ugliness, soon the brain will be full of all those ugly things.

And I don’t see that there is anything wrong in it – washing is always good. I believe in dry-cleaning. I don’t use old methods of washing.

And yes, people will feel cheated that their mind has been taken away, and that was the only precious thing they had. This will be only in the beginning. Once the mind is taken away, they will be surprised that behind the mind is their real treasure. And the mind was only a mirror, it was reflecting the treasure, but it had no treasure in itself. The treasure is behind the mind – that is your being. But a mirror can deceive you. It can give you the idea that what is reflected in it is a reality. So unless the mind is taken away – and that’s what meditation is, it is a state of no-mind. It is taking away the mind and giving you a chance to see not the reflection of the treasure of your being, but the treasure itself.

It is at this point that the master becomes a tremendous help, because to lose the mind is the most difficult thing. I can understand, because that is the only thing you have, and to lose it means to lose all. And we know when somebody loses his mind he goes mad. So everybody clings to the mind – nobody wants to go mad.

It is here the master is a practical necessity, because you have a person who has lost his mind and yet is not mad. In fact by losing his mind he has become the sanest person possible. This is the moment when you need encouragement to take a jump, to risk it all. This is the moment when you need somebody you love and somebody who loves you, and somebody whose love is more precious than your mind, so that for his love’s sake you can lose your mind. And love is something that people can give their whole life for, what to say about their mind. If you love someone you can give your whole life – you can die for your love. So the mind is nothing. And the master grows the seeds of love slowly, slowly – seeds of trust. He will not do anything unless he feels the time is ripe; unless he sees that the time is ripe and your love is capable, has come of age, and it can be asked to throw the mind away.

It can happen very easily in love and trust. And when you have a living example before you and you have lived with the master for years and seen him in different situations, seen him from different perspectives – and always found him the same unflickering light, the same joy, without any change – then deep down in your heart love and trust go on growing.

And finally, when the heart is so strong with love and trust, you can risk the mind. It is not more valuable than your heart. And the moment you drop the mind, suddenly you open the doors of the real treasure. That’s what you have been seeking all your life, but the mind was a barrier.

-Osho

From Light on the Path, Discourse #16, Q1

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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.

Watching Without Involvement

For me, the key to Osho’s watching/witnessing meditation is his instruction to watch without any involvement. He says to watch without analyzing, without judging, without grasping or rejecting. All of those activities are how I watch with involvement.

So, what happens when I watch without involvement? What I notice is that as long as I am adding thought to the stream of thought by the above involvement, then I am supplying energy to the stream. But when I watch without involvement, then the energy that had been fueling the movement of thought begins to return home. It is in this energy returning home that the stream of thought begins to lose its potency. It begins to lessen and it is here that the gaps start to appear, gradually increase in size, until only the gap remains.

I just can’t see any way to move from a steady stream of thoughts passing, to an empty screen, without passing through this window of non-involvement. Of course, the window is just a metaphor. In reality, there is no window, except the one that I create through my own effort of thinking. So rather than passing through the window, I can simply stop creating it and then, I am out.

-purushottama

Responsibility for My Own Meditativeness

As many of you know, much of my time living at the Ranch was spent traveling around the U.S. and Canada selling Osho’s books to bookstores and distributors. With the smaller stores, that always involved speaking about Osho and the Ranch. This work even continued after the Ranch once we moved the books to Boulder, CO. At some point during one of my sales trips from Boulder, I remember having the realization that I was going around the country talking about Osho and his teaching, but I wasn’t living it myself. It was a turning point for me. I started to take responsibility for my own meditativeness.

After being out in the world, away from the daily bathing in innerness of the Poona discourses and the collective high of the Ranch, I had to start finding my own way in. I had to begin discovering for myself that same no-mind that Osho delivered daily on a silver platter.

How many of us were feeling blissful while we were in the communes, and now many years later find ourselves without a hint of that wonder and are questioning whether what we experienced was real or just a dream? Osho addresses this in this question that Osho answers.

“Listening to me you can feel that you are levitating, but you cannot levitate. The feeling is not the thing, not the real thing. Listening to me you can feel very happy, but that happiness is like a reflection. It is my happiness reflected in your mirror; it is not your happiness. You are bound to land somewhere in dog shit.

One should not depend on anybody else. You need your happiness. Listening to me, you can become engulfed, you can be overwhelmed, but the farther you go from me, that music will start disappearing from you. It was not yours in the first place.

It is as if I am sitting here: in my light your darkness disappears. Then you go away; the farther away you go, the darkness starts surrounding you again.

It is as the Sufis say:

Two travelers were going into a forest. One had a lamp, a lantern of his own, the other had none. But the other was not even aware of the fact. They both walked in light because one had the lantern, so the other also had the light on the path. Then came the moment where they had to depart; their paths were going separately. And when the man with the lantern went on his path, suddenly the other traveler recognized, realized, that there was immense darkness all around.

You can walk with me to a certain extent. The disciple can walk with the Master to a certain extent, but then the paths separate. Then you have to go on your own way. Suddenly you will find you are in darkness.

So while you are with a Master, don’t just enjoy his bliss. Enjoy, but learn also how to create your own bliss and your own light. Those moments with a Master have to be tremendously enjoyed — good. But just enjoyment is not enough. You have to learn the secret of how to create your own light — so when the Master departs, or you have to go on your own way and paths are separate, you are not lost in darkness. Otherwise, this will happen again and again. […]

In Zen they say: The art of meditation is almost the art of being a thief.

You have to be so aware that you can walk into somebody else’s house where you may never have been before; not only can you walk, you can remove things without making any noise; not only that, but without any light in the dark night. You have to be like a thief: very aware, very conscious.

What happened to this questioner? — he was floating, he was no more in this world, he had moved into another world. A vision had dawned on him; he was in a dream, he was not aware, he was drunk. Hence, he stepped into dog shit.

This is very, very meaningful; remember it. Otherwise, there are many ways to land in wrong places. Unless you are tremendously aware, many times you will come nearer to home and again you will miss the door.”

This is just an excerpt. To read the entire post click on the link below.

You have to be Like a Thief – Osho

Only the Heart Knows the Answer – Osho

Could you please comment on how to deal with a continuous questioning mind that is not interested in any answer anyway? Or am I just a Greek donkey?

The disciple who can wait will find all his questions answered at the right moment.

But waiting is a great quality: it is deep patience; it is great trust. The mind cannot wait; it is always in a hurry. It knows nothing about patience; hence it goes on piling questions upon questions without getting the answer.

It is something very delicate to understand: that it is not the answer that is significant but the right timing, your readiness to receive it; otherwise, it will just go above your head. The impatient mind is too much occupied in questioning. It forgets that questioning in itself is a meaningless activity — the real thing is the answer, but for the answer you need a certain silence, peace, openness, receptivity. The mind is incapable of these qualities; hence, for thousands of years the mind has been asking and asking but it finds no answer.

In the world of the mind there are only questions.

And in the world of the heart there is only the answer, because the heart knows how not to ask, how to wait: let the spring come by itself; wait like a thirsty earth . . . the rainclouds will come; they have always been coming. There is no need to distrust, because there is not even a single exception where trust has failed, where waiting is not fulfilled, where patience is not immensely rewarded.

The functioning of the heart and the mind are totally different; not only different, but diametrically opposite. The mind creates philosophies, theologies, ideologies — they are all questions that don’t have any answer. The heart simply waits. At the right moment, the answer blossoms by itself.

The heart has no question, yet it receives the answer.

The mind has a thousand and one questions, yet it has never received any answer because it does not know how to receive.

Your mind is full of questions yet you have been observing that by and by, they are being answered. This should create in you a new insight, a new trust. A new dimension is opening: that you have just to wait, alert and awake, and if it is needed the answer will come to you.

You are also seeing that most of the questions that the mind is filled with are silly.

They are—not most of them, all of them are silly for the simple reason that mind does not go through the discipline of asking receptively. It is more concerned with questions.

Even while the answer is being given, it has moved on to another question. Perhaps, listening to the answer, it has created ten more questions out of the answer itself.

Questions arise out of the mind just like leaves grow on the trees. And slowly, slowly, they become more and more silly — because it is very difficult to find many significant questions, and the mind is not satisfied with a small quantity of questions. It is greedy. It wants to ask everything; it wants to know everything without being ready to understand anything.

There are few significant questions.

And there is only one really fundamental question.

But that small quantity does not satisfy the greed of the mind. […]

The mind is a vulture. It is never satisfied with anything. You go on giving to it, it goes on taking, and it goes on asking for more. It never feels grateful; it is always complaining that it is not enough. Nothing is enough to the mind. Question after question — meaningful, meaningless, relevant, irrelevant — and not even a small space for any answer to enter into your mind. It is so crowded with questions.

The heart knows no questions.

And this is one of the mysteries of life: that the mind questions the whole life long and never receives any answer, and the heart never asks but receives the answer.

But there is one thing to be remembered: the mind is noisy, there is maddening noise. The heart may be receiving the answer, but because of the noise of the mind you may not come to feel that the answer has been received, that you are carrying it with you, that you are pregnant with it.

Not only does the mind disturb your peace, your silence; it disturbs it to such an extent that the heart — which is capable of listening to silence, waiting, receptive — is denied all connection with your being. The mind monopolizes your being; it simply puts the heart aside. And because the heart is silent, and a gentleman, it does not quarrel; it simply goes down the street, waits by the side of the road.

Mind wants to occupy the whole space.

The disciple has to understand this whole situation — that the dictatorship of the mind has to be destroyed, that the mind is only a servant, not a master. The master is the heart, because all that is beautiful grows in the heart; all that is valuable comes out of the heart — your love, your compassion, your meditation.

Anything that is valuable grows in the garden of the heart.

Mind is a desert, nothing grows there — only sand and sand and barren land. It has never given any fruit, any flower. You have to understand it: mind should not be supported as much as you have been supporting it up to now. Mind has to be put in its right place.

The throne belongs to the heart.

And this is the revolution through which the disciple becomes a devotee: when the heart becomes the master, and the mind becomes a servant.

This has to be remembered: that as a servant, the mind is perfect. As a master . . . it is the worst master possible; as a servant, it is the best.

And the heart — wherever it is, either on the throne or on the street — is your only hope, the only possibility for you to be bridged with your being, to be bridged with existence. It is the only possibility for songs to arise in you, stars to descend in you, for your life to become a rejoicing, a dance.

You are asking me how to stop this mind, its constant questioning, its silly crowd of questions.

That is where everybody takes the wrong step. If you try to stop it, you will never be able to stop it. Ignore it. Be indifferent to it. Let it chatter.

Be aloof, unconcerned — as if it does not matter whether it chatters or not, whether there are questions or not. Only this aloofness, this ignoring — Buddha has given it the right name, upeksha — this indifference slowly, slowly makes the miracle happen.

What you want to achieve by fighting is not possible, because when you fight with someone you are giving energy to the enemy. You are giving attention, and attention is food; you are getting entangled with the mind, and mind enjoys a good fight. It has never happened that anybody has been able to stop the mind by fighting with it. That is the most important thing to understand: don’t take any step towards fighting.

Just ignore, just be aloof, just let the mind do whatever it wants to do. When the mind feels unwelcomed, when the mind sees that you are no more interested in it, that it is pointless to go on shouting; you are not even hearing it, that you are not even curious about what is going on in the mind — it stops. […]

When you are indifferent, the mind starts feeling as if there is nobody — what is the point of all the questions? Because you are interested, curious, you get involved, you are giving juice to the mind.

Indifference to the mind is meditation.

And all those questions will disappear, because they are absolutely meaningless. And when the chattering of the mind has disappeared, there is a silence, a peace, so that you can hear the still, small voice of your heart.

Only the heart knows the answer . . . it already knows it.

And if you are with a master, the heart simply says yes to the master, because the heart knows the answer already. Perhaps the master is putting it in a better way, more articulate, but the heart is in complete agreement. And that agreement dissolves all distances between the master and the disciple.

Then silence is not only silence, it is also communion.

Then things are not said but heard; then things are not said but shown.

And when the heart is totally willing, life is such a simple, uncomplicated phenomenon that you cannot conceive of anything more simple.

It is the mind which creates complications, goes on creating complications and questions.

Mind’s whole expertise is to create complications.

If you want to live a simple, a beautiful, a silent, a joyful, a blissful life, let the mind be ignored and let the heart be restored to its status as master. This is the whole work of a religious seeker; nothing more is needed.

-Osho

From Beyond Enlightenment, Discourse #8, Q1

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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.

Trance is Always Unconscious – Osho

Can trance-like states be higher or lower than the conscious?

The trance-like state is always lower than the conscious. It is always unconscious. It is a very significant question, because for centuries it has been avoided and not discussed.

There have been people like Ramakrishna who used to go into a trance very easily. Ultimately Ramakrishna became enlightened, but he became enlightened when he met a master who taught him witnessing. Before that he was not an enlightened man. But he was a very simple, very spontaneous, very loving person, and he would go into a trance just by seeing something. For example, he was passing by the side of a lake. It was evening time, the sun was setting, and there was a black cloud – the rains were just going to come. And as he passed by, he disturbed almost two dozen cranes that must have been sitting by the side of the lake. Because of Ramakrishna’s coming there, they suddenly flew away – against the black clouds, the two dozen white cranes in a row and a beautiful sunset underneath. Then and there he fell suddenly into a trance. He had to be carried back to his home. It took three hours for him to come back. Just the beauty of it was enough. But it was not a superconscious state. It was tremendously relaxing, but it was below consciousness. […]

Trance is possible but for that you need a certain training in auto-hypnosis. Or, you may have a natural tendency of falling unconscious. You may have a very thin layer of consciousness, and anything that affects you very deeply – like Ramakrishna – may make you go unconscious; otherwise, you need a training. But the training will lead you to the unconscious – it is not a spiritual growth.

You have to be conscious, more conscious. That’s why my process is to first reach to the highest point of consciousness, then turn backwards. Now go down with the light that you have, the insight that you have, into the deeper, dark parts of your being. Now you will be going with light, and wherever you are, there will be light.

Your unconscious has treasures, your collective unconscious has treasures, your cosmic unconscious has treasures, but you need light and you need alertness. If you yourself are unconscious, how can you find any treasures in the three layers of your deep unconscious mind?

-Osho

From The Path of the Mystic, Discourse #13

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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.

Witnessing where Mindfulness and Self-Inquiry Meet

At first glance, one might think that there is a significant difference between Ramana’s Self-Inquiry and Osho’s Witnessing Meditation. But in my own experience I have found that not to be the case. What I discovered is that Osho’s Watching/Witnessing Meditation incorporates Ramana’s enquiry but also extends out to reach a much larger field of practitioners. How so? you might ask. Okay, here goes.

Ramana Maharshi’s method of self-inquiry is often described as such:
A thought appears.
The question is asked, “To whom does the thought appear?”
The answer, “Me,” arises.
And then the question, “Who is this me? Or who am I?” is enquired into.

Osho has described the following three steps for his watching meditation:
We begin with watching the activities of the body.

With this awareness we then turn inwards to watch the movement of mind, thought.

Even deeper still and ever more subtle we then begin to watch the feelings of the heart.

So where do these seemingly very different approaches to realizing the self overlap, and how are they related?

Ramana begins with “a thought appears.” So, for a thought to appear it presumes that one is watching the movement of mind. For many of us, this is not as easy as one might, excuse the pun, think.

And this is where Osho extends the field. He instructs us to begin with watching the activities of the body. Meaning: we watch, we bring awareness to daily activities, eating, walking, talking, showering, etc. By this bringing awareness we are reclaiming our consciousness. We are increasing our own capacity of being aware. We are learning the art of watching. We are beginning to be more conscious.

His next step is to take this awareness and begin to watch the movement of mind. First, we watch our continual getting lost into thought and then remembering which brings us momentarily out of the stream. This process takes time because we have to gradually increase our capacity to watch all that appears in consciousness. Soon we are able to see thought as something separate from our watching and slowly disidentification begins, but still we are drawn out into the fray again and again. But then there is one more instruction that Osho adds and that is to watch without grasping or rejecting, to watch without judging the thoughts, to watch without analyzing the thought stream. Through this quality of watching, we begin to see that it is “the grasping and rejecting, the judging and analyzing” that is keeping us tethered to the stream of thought. It is how we remain identified with thought. A thought appears and we grab onto it because we like it and go for a ride. Or a thought appears that we find unpleasant and we push it down not to be looked at. Or we judge our getting lost into a thought or even analyze why we are attracted to such a thought.

But when we discover watching without grasping or rejecting, without judging or analyzing we are able to disengage, disidentify with thought and remain the watcher. And it is the same process for feelings, moods, emotions.

It is here that Ramana’s second step comes in. He says, we ask, “To whom does the thought appear?” We are not able to ask this as long as we are glued together with the stream of thought, as long as we are grasping, judging, etc. With the quality of watching that Osho has instructed there is space for the inquiry, “To whom does the thought appear?” Here we are in the double-pointed arrow that Osho speaks about. The arrow pointing back is the enquiry – to whom does that thought appear.

Osho instructs us to remain in this watching with the double-pointed arrow, watching without judging, analzying … and slowly, slowly the content that the outward-pointing arrow is pointing to begins to disappear. It no longer has the fuel to continue because it was being supplied by the identification, by the engagement.

And it is here that Ramana’s inquiry of “who am I” is relevant. Here in this disengaged awareness, this witnessing without an object, one’s own true nature as the witnessing consciousness is revealed. And it is indeed who we are.

I have been known to say that Osho’s witnessing meditation is the bee’s knees of meditation because it incorporates both mindfulness and self-enquiry. And so it is, and so it does.

A big shout to those who have persisted in their questions requiring me to articulate ever more clearly this insight.

-purushottama

See all 0f Prem’s notes.

The Double-Pointed Arrow of Watchingness

Osho speaks often about watching the mind without grasping or rejecting, without judging, without analyzing. And he also speaks about watching with a double-pointed arrow of awareness.

After experimenting with these two viewpoints, it has been my discovery that they are two ways of describing the exact same phenomenon. When we manage to watch without grasping or rejecting, without judging, without analyzing we find ourselves watching with a double-pointed awareness. If we find ourselves in watching with the double-pointed arrow we discover that we are indeed watching without grasping or rejecting, etc., and we see that it is the grasping, the rejecting, the judging, the analyzing that is preventing us from having the double-pointed awareness

So whichever viewpoint we are more suited to, they both will be describing the same quality of watchingness. The key is watching without being drawn out (grasping, rejecting …) into the fray. This watching without being drawn out creates the second arrow of awareness.

-purushottama

See all 0f Prem’s notes.

Don’t Start with Love, Start with Meditation – Osho

Your silence goes so deep into my heart that it makes my love unconditional. Beloved Master, is this what “satsang” is?

Satyam Svarup, there are two ways to look at life. One is the way of the schizophrenic. That has been followed by the crowds around the world down the centuries. It divides things. It is very uneasy without dividing them. And because for thousands of years the teaching has penetrated into every mind it seems to be the only way.

It looks neat and clean divided, but existence does not follow it. It has its own undivided melting, merging into each other without making any demarcations. I am against the first because it has destroyed so much that the crime is incalculable. […]

The old way, the wrong way, the ugly and the insane way, divides love from silence, divides silence from ecstasy, divides ecstasy from self-realization and so on, so forth. But they are not divisions. It is a simple flow of energy moving into different spaces.

You are asking, “Your silence goes so deep into my heart that it makes my love unconditional.” To any logician, to any follower of the first path it will look absurd. What has silence to do with unconditional love? They seem to be worlds apart.

But, Satyam Svarup, you gathered courage to say something which goes against your training of logic. It was possible because it is not an intellectual question, it is your existential experience. And logic cannot overrule existential experiences.

Man is a miniature cosmos, everything intertwined. If your love deepens, your silence will deepen; your blissfulness will deepen, your innocence will deepen, your sensitivity, your aesthetic potentiality will come to flowering.

Just as your hands are not separate from your eyes, neither are your feet separate from your head; you are an organic unity – the same is the situation in the inner world. Your love, your meditation, your silence, your blissfulness – they are simply waves in the same ocean of consciousness. So don’t be disturbed by the mind, which is pretending to be the master. Listen to the heart and you will never be on a wrong track. And the more you listen to the heart, the more and more your life will go beyond intellect, beyond logic, beyond dialectics, beyond all kinds of discriminations.

It is beautiful that you have brought it into a question: “As your silence goes so deep into my heart, there it makes my love unconditional.”

Start from anywhere. You are a perfect circle, and so deeply interconnected, with everything in your life. You can start by being more meditative, which is the simplest because it does not involve other human beings. The others are a little complex; it is better to let them come on their own.

My own understanding is, don’t start with love, because your understanding of love is not the authentic love. It is simply biological infatuation, and if you start with that you have gone astray. Start with meditation because meditation is the only thing that biology has not given to you. It has a tremendous force of its own. That’s why the physiologist or the biologist will account for everything but will never mention the word ‘meditation’.

Meditation is the only bridge between you and the beyond. Start with meditation – and that’s what is happening to you, effortlessly. Sitting with me, listening to me, a silence enters into your heart and suddenly you feel springs of love unaddressed, radiating in all directions. It is not love to someone; it is simply being loving.

But if it comes from meditation, from silence, it will have purity, because it is not coming from biology.

It is not coming from your past, it is not coming from all your conditionings; it is coming from the spontaneous experience of silence. And suddenly you see a great aroma of love around you. You have known love, but it was always conditional. Anything conditional is not worth a penny, because the conditional will disappear. Once the condition is fulfilled there is no purpose in it. […]

Any love which has some conscious or unconscious conditions is bound to bring frustration, because those conditions cannot be fulfilled. The very nature of conditions is such. […]

When I say love has to be unconditional it means you are not expecting from the other anything. You are not expecting the other to be someone else. You are simply loving to the other, as he or she is. And your unconditional love will make you unattached to individuals; it will be just an aroma around you. You will be a loving person. You will love the trees, you will love the sunset, you will love a woman, you will love all that this universe provides you.

Right now, the conditional love is like an imprisonment. Two persons who don’t like each other are holding each other in imprisonment. It is a strange thing. If you don’t like the other, say good-bye.

But you cannot say good-bye because you are afraid he may enjoy himself somewhere else. It does not fit with your jealousy, he has to be happy with you. A husband does not like his wife to be laughing, to be happy with another man. Neither does the wife like such a situation.

So it is a very strange situation in which we have placed humanity. And unless a great awareness happens that this is our fundamental misery, you cannot be freed from this hell that you have made of the earth. Lovers – the so-called lovers, I mean – are more like detectives to each other than lovers. Jealously watching what the other is doing . . . every letter is opened; every pocket is searched.

One night, a woman heard . . . in sleep her husband was again and again saying, “Kamala, darling.”

The woman was listening to exactly what he was saying. In the morning, she asked, the first thing, “Who is this ‘Kamala darling’?”

The man said, “It is nothing, it is just the name of a female horse. I have been thinking to bet on that horse – you know the racing season is coming.”

And then, just when they were talking about this, the phone rang. The husband ran towards the phone; the wife said, “Stop, I will take it.” And then she handed over the phone to the husband: “That female horse ‘Kamala darling’ wants to talk to you.”

Even in sleep you are not free to say things. And people say there is freedom of speech! If there were a small window which God had managed to make into every head, the wife would have been looking through the window into your dreams. “What are you seeing? Who is this woman?” […]

This whole society is boiling with jealousy. Nobody says it, everybody hides it. But the more you hide it, the more it goes on like a cancerous growth, expanding in your interior being. Just look how many things you are jealous of: somebody has a beautiful house and somebody has a beautiful physique, and somebody has a beautiful strong body. Somebody is an intellectual giant and somebody has the most wealth that one could ever think of. So on, so forth, there are people all around who will make you jealous.

Instead of your life being in an oceanic love, it is suffering in a gutter of dirty jealousy. But unless you start looking inwards and finding the roots, you will not be able to transform it.

You are blessed, Svarup, that just without any effort my silence reaches to your heart. It will purify you; it will destroy all that is poisonous in you – jealousy, anger, greed, attachment, possessiveness.

It will make you just a beautiful flower of love.

What is happening has been called in the East satsang, being with a man who has attained the truth. Yes, this is satsang – where, without any effort on your part, just the grace of your master starts alchemical changes . . . so silently that you become aware only when the work is done.

And there are a few things . . . for example if you have known unconditional love, you cannot undo it. It is so vast and it is so beautiful that what you used to think was love looks like just an ugly nightmare compared to it. You would not like to go back to it; your whole being will resist going back to it.

My speaking to you is not especially to give you any philosophy or any dogma, or any creed or any theology or any religion. My talking to you is a device so that you can experience my presence, my silence. In an unaware moment perhaps, you can come closer to my heart without any fear.

This is a device for meditativeness.

I am not interested in any kinds of doctrines; they have tortured humanity long enough. I am interested in a loving humanity, in a humanity fragrant with silence, rejoicing this immense gift of life and existence. […]

-Osho

From Om Mani Padme Hum, Discourse #28

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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.

Shravan Means Right Listening – Osho

This sutra uses four words as four steps, four steps towards the unknown. The first is shravan. Shravan means right listening – not just listening, but right listening.

We listen, everyone listens, but right listening is a rare achievement. So what is the difference between listening and right listening, shravan?

Right listening means not just a fragmentary listening. I am saying something, you are listening to it there. Your ears are being used; you may not be just behind your ears at all; you may have gone somewhere else. You may not be present there. If you are not present there in your totality, then it cannot be right listening.

Right listening means you have become just your ears – the whole being is listening. No thinking inside, no thoughts, no thought process, only listening. Try it sometimes; it is a deep meditation in itself. Some birds are singing – the crows – just become listening, forget everything – just be the ears. The wind is passing through the trees, the leaves are rustling; just become the ears, forget everything – no thought process, just listen. Become the ears. Then it is right listening, then your whole being is absorbed into it, then you are totally present.

And Upanishads say, that the esoteric, ultimate formulas of spiritual alchemy cannot be given to you unless you are in a moment of right listening.

-Osho

From That Art Thou, Discourse #44

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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.

That One Technique is Witnessing – Osho

Paul Reps in the foreword to this book, ‘Zen Flesh, Zen Bones,’ writes, “ . . . that the one hundred and twelve techniques of ‘Vigyan Bhairava Tantra’ may well be the roots of Zen.”

Beloved Osho, do you agree with Paul Reps?

There is a possibility . . . the one hundred and twelve techniques of Vigyan Bhairava Tantra are basically one technique in different combinations. That one technique is witnessing. In different situations use witnessing, and you have created a new technique. In all those one hundred and twelve techniques, that simple witnessing is used.

And there is a possibility that it may not be joined directly with Shiva’s book. Vigyan Bhairava Tantra is five thousand years old, and Gautam Buddha is only twenty-five centuries old. The gap between Shiva and Buddha is long – twenty-five centuries – and there seems to be no connecting link.

So it may not be that he has directly taken the technique of witnessing from Vigyan Bhairava Tantra. But whether he has taken it directly or not, there is a possibility that somehow, from somebody, he may have heard. He had moved with many masters before he became a buddha. Before he himself found the technique of witnessing, he had moved with many masters. Somewhere he may have heard mention of Vigyan Bhairava Tantra but it does not seem to have a very direct connection, because he was still searching. In fact, it was not witnessing that he was practicing when he became a buddha.

The situation is just the reverse: he became a buddha first. Then he found, “My God! It is witnessing that has made me a buddha.” It was not that he was practicing witnessing, he had dropped everything. Tired of all kinds of yogas and mantras and tantras, one evening he simply dropped . . . He had renounced the kingdom; he had renounced everything. For six years he had been torturing himself with all kinds of methods.

That evening, he dropped all those methods, and under a tree which became known by his name, the bodhi tree, he slept silently. And in the morning when he opened his eyes, the last star was disappearing. And as the star disappeared – a sudden silence all around, and he became a witness. He was not doing anything special, he was just lying down underneath the tree, resting, watching the disappearing star. And as the star disappeared there was nothing to watch – only watching remained. Suddenly he found, “Whoever I have been seeking, I am it.”

So it was Buddha himself who discovered that witnessing had been his path without his awareness. But since Buddha, witnessing, or the method of sakshin, became a specific method of Zen.

Paul Reps’ guess has a possibility, but it cannot be proved historically. And according to me, Buddha was not practicing witnessing. He found witnessing after he found that he was a buddha. So certainly it has nothing to do with Vigyan Bhairava Tantra, but the method is the same. […]

Because the method is the same, in the mind of Paul Reps, a scholarly mind, the idea may have arisen easily that Buddha’s method, the Zen method, is connected with Vigyan Bhairava Tantra. […]

-Osho

From The Zen Manifesto: Freedom From Oneself, Discourse #3

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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.