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Meditation is a Bridge – Osho

Whoever clings to mind sees not the truth of what’s beyond the mind.

If you cling to the mind, thoughts, emotions, then you will not be able to see that which is beyond the mind – the great Mind – because if you cling, how can you see it? If you cling, your eyes are closed by your clinging. And if you cling to the object, how can you see the subject? This “clinging-ness” has to be dropped.

Whoever clings to mind is identified, and sees not the truth of what’s beyond the mind. Whoever strives to practice dharma finds not the truth of beyond practice.

All practice is of the mind. Whatsoever you do is of the mind. Only witnessing is not of the mind, remember this.

So, even while you are doing meditation, remain a witness, continuously see what is happening. You are whirling in a dervish meditation? – whirl, whirl as fast as you can, but remain a witness inside and go on seeing that the body is whirling. The body goes on, faster and faster and faster, and the faster the body goes, the deeper you feel that your center is not moving. You are standing still, the body moves like a wheel, you stand still just in the middle of it. The faster the body goes, the deeper you realize the fact that you are not moving, and the distance is created.

Whatsoever you are doing, even meditation – I make no exception – don’t cling to meditation either, because a day has to come when even that clinging has to be dropped. Meditation becomes perfect when it too is dropped. When there is perfect meditation, you need not meditate.

So keep it constantly in your awareness that meditation is just a bridge; it has to be passed over. A bridge is not a place to make your house. You have to pass it and go beyond it. Meditation is a bridge; you have to be watchful about it also, otherwise you may stop being identified with anger, greed, and you may start being identified with meditation, compassion. Then you are in the same trap again; through another door you have entered the same house.

It happened once: Mulla Nasruddin came to the town bar and he was already too drunk, so the barkeeper told him, “You go away! You are already drunk and I cannot give you any more. You just go back to your house.” But he was insisting, so the barkeeper had to throw him out.

He walked a long distance in search of another bar. Then he came to the same bar from another door, entered, looked at the man with a little suspicion because he looked familiar. The barman said, “I have told you once and forever that tonight I am not going to give you anything. You get away from here!” Mulla was insisting again, he was thrown out again.

He walked a long distance in search of another bar, but in that town there was only one bar. Again, from the third door, he entered, looked at the man, who looked so familiar. Mulla said, “What is the matter? Do you own all the bars in the town?”

This happens. You are thrown out from one door; you enter from another door. You were identified with your anger, your lust; now you become identified with your meditation. You were identified with your sexual pleasure; now you become identified with the ecstasy that meditation gives. Nothing is different – the town has only one bar. Don’t try to enter the same bar again and again. And from wherever you enter you will find the same owner – that is the witness. Be mindful of it, otherwise much energy is unnecessarily wasted. Long distances you travel to enter into the same thing again.

Whoever clings to mind sees not the truth of what’s beyond the mind.

What is beyond the mind? You. What is beyond the mind? Consciousness. What is beyond the mind? Sat-chit-anand – truth, consciousness, bliss.

Whoever stives to practice the dharma finds not the truth of beyond practice.

And whatsoever you practice, remember, practice cannot lead you to the natural, the loose and the natural, because practice means practicing something which is not there. Practicing means always practicing something artificial. Nature has not to be practiced; there is no need, it is already there. You learn something which is not there. How can you learn something which is already there? How can you learn nature, tao? It is already there! You are born in it. There is no need to find any teacher so that you can be taught – and that is the difference between a teacher and a master.

A teacher is one who teaches you something, a master is one who helps you to unlearn all that you have already learned. A master is to help you unlearn. A master is to give you the taste of the non-practiced. It is already there; through your learning you have lost it. Through your unlearning you will regain it.

Truth is not a discovery, it is a rediscovery. It was already there in the first place. When you came into this world it was with you, when you were born into this life it was with you, because you are it. It cannot be otherwise. It is not something external, it is intrinsic in you, it is your very being. So if you practice, says Tilopa, you will not know that which is beyond practice.

Remind yourself again and again, that whatsoever you practice will be a part of the mind, the small mind, the outer periphery, and you have to go beyond it. How to go beyond it? Practice, nothing is wrong in it, but be alert; meditate, but be alert – because in the final meaning of the term, meditation is witnessing.

All techniques can be helpful but they are not exactly meditation, they are just a groping in the dark. Suddenly one day, doing something, you will become a witness. Doing a meditation like the dynamic, or kundalini or whirling, suddenly one day the meditation will go on but you will not be identified. You will sit silently behind; you will watch it – that day meditation has happened; that day technique is no more a hindrance, no more a help. You can enjoy it if you like, like an exercise, it gives a certain vitality, but there is no need now – the real meditation has happened.

Meditation is witnessing. To meditate means to become a witness. Meditation is not a technique at all. This will be very confusing to you because I go on giving you techniques. In the ultimate sense meditation is not a technique; meditation is an understanding, awareness. But you need techniques because that final understanding is very far away from you; deep hidden in you, but still very far away from you. Right this moment you can attain it, but you will not attain it, because your moment goes on, your mind goes on. This very moment it is possible and yet impossible. Techniques will bridge the gap, they are just to bridge the gap.

So in the beginning techniques are meditations; in the end you will laugh, techniques are not meditation. Meditation is a totally different quality of being, it has nothing to do with anything. But it will happen only in the end; don’t think it has happened in the beginning, otherwise the gap will not be bridged.

This is the problem with Krishnamurti, and this is the problem with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi – they are the two opposite poles. Mahesh Yogi thinks that technique is meditation, so once you are attuned to a technique – Transcendental Meditation or any other – the meditation has happened. This is right and wrong. Right, because in the beginning a beginner has to attune himself to some technique, because his understanding is not ripe enough to understand the ultimate. So approximately . . . a technique is approximately a meditation.

It is just like a small child learning the alphabet – so we tell the child that “m” is the same letter as when you use “monkey,” the monkey represents “m.” With the “m” the monkey is there, the child starts learning. There is no relationship between monkey and “m.” “M” can be represented by millions of things, and still it is different from everything. But a child has to be shown something. Monkey is nearer the child; he can understand the monkey, not “m.” Through the monkey he will be able to understand “m” – but this is just a beginning, not the end.

Mahesh Yogi is right in the beginning, to push you on the path, but if you are stuck with him you are lost. He has to be left, he is a primary school; good as far as it goes, but one need not always remain in the primary school. The primary school is not the university, and the primary school is not the universe; one has to pass from there. It is a primary understanding that meditation is a technique.

Then there is Krishnamurti at the other pole. He says there are no techniques, no meditations, but choiceless awareness. Perfectly right! – but he is trying to help you enter into the university without the primary school. He can be dangerous because he is talking about the ultimate. You cannot understand it; right now, in your understanding it is not possible – you will go mad. Once you listen to Krishnamurti you will be lost, because you will always intellectually understand he is right, and in your being you will know that nothing is happening.

Many Krishnamurti followers have come to me. They say intellectually they understand: “Of course it is right, there is no technique and meditation is awareness – but what to do?” And I tell them, “The moment you ask what to do, it means you need a technique. ’What to do?’ You ask how to do it, you are asking for a technique. Krishnamurti will not help you. Rather, go to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi – that will be better.” But people are stuck with Krishnamurti and there are people who are stuck with Mahesh Yogi.

I am neither – or I am both; and then I am very confusing. They are both clear, their standpoints are simple; there is no complexity in understanding Mahesh Yogi or Krishnamurti. If you understand language, you can understand them, there is no problem. The problem will arise with me because I will always talk about the beginning and will never allow you to forget the end. I will always talk about the end and always help you to start from the beginning. You will be confused because you will say, “What do you mean? If meditation is simply awareness, then why go through so many exercises?”

You have to go through them; only then will that meditation help you . . . that will happen to you which is simple understanding.

Or you say, “If techniques are all, then why do you go on saying again and again that techniques have to be left, dropped?” . . . Because then you feel: “Something learned so deeply, with so much effort and arduous labor has to be left again?” You would like to cling to the beginning. I will not allow you. Once you are on the path, I will go on pushing you to the very end.

This is a problem; with me this problem has to be faced, encountered and understood. I will look contradictory. I am; I am a paradox – because I am trying to give you both the beginning and the end, the first step and the last. Tilopa is talking of the ultimate. He is saying:

Whoever strives to practice dharma finds not the truth of beyond practice. To know what is beyond both mind and practice, one should not cling, one should cut cleanly through the root of the mind and stare naked.

That’s what I am calling witnessing: stare naked. Just staring naked will do, the root is cut. This staring naked becomes like a sharp sword.

-Osho

From Tantra: The Supreme Understanding, Discourse #8

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 is the Bee’s Knees of Meditation

Months ago, we began the module Osho Tantra and the Secrets of Meditation with the first three of Shiva’s 112 meditation techniques, Between Two Breaths, As Breath Turns from Down to Up, and Whenever In-Breath and Out-Breath Fuse, all three of these meditation techniques focused on the breath. We moved on to the third eye with Attention Between Eyebrows and self-remembering with Be Aware You Are.

With the technique Wherever Your Mind is Wandering, we began to get a glimpse of witnessing. With Consider Your Essence as Light Rays Rising, we explored the chakras. We tossed attachment for body aside with You are Everywhere and dropped thinking with Thinking No Thing.

And then we moved on to the more subtle techniques, including Contemplate Something Beyond Perception, and the sublime Put Mindstuff in Such Inexpressible Fineness. In our last Tantra program, we entered shunyam, emptiness with Suppose Your Passive Form to be an Empty Room.

In today’s program, we will come to the end of Osho Tantra and the Secrets of Meditation with this the twentieth program. This program is based on the last of the meditation techniques from The Book of Secrets, number 112 of the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra and is called Enter Space, Supportless, Eternal, Still.

Yesterday in our dialogue the topic of blending techniques and whether Osho’s Witnessing Meditation is a technique and not to be blended with the 112 techniques.

Yes, we are instructed not to blend the techniques. But Osho’s Witnessing is not a technique. What is it? It is “seeing what is, without interfering.” We watch the activities of the body (what is), we watch the activities of the mind (what is), we watch the activities of the heart (what is), all without interfering. It is simply witnessing. Witnessing is not a technique. It is Zazen Meditation. It is sitting silently, doing nothing.

Because we are already doing much, in order to come to doing nothing, something has to change. What has to change is that we have to stop the doing. How do we stop the doing, i.e., thinking, dreaming, etc.? We stop thinking by watching our thinking without interacting.

It also seems to me with almost every one of the 112 techniques witnessing comes into play.

For example:

Attention Between Eyebrows, Let Mind Be Before Thought. How do we “let mind be before thought”? By watching mind with indifference.

Eyes Closed See your Inner Being in Detail. How do we “see our inner being in detail”? By not going out and interacting with mind.

When Singing, Seeing, Tasting, Be Aware You Are. How do we become aware we are? By not being in thinking. By watching the body in singing, etc. with a double pointed arrow. The double pointed arrow means, “remember you are.”

Wherever Your Mind is Wandering. We watch our mind wandering but without grasping, rejecting, analyzing, judging.

Before Desire and Before Knowing. Ditto.

Thinking No Thing. Witnessing.

Suppose You Contemplate Something Beyond Perception. Ditto.

Perceive One Being as Knower and Known. The double pointed arrow of the witness.

Put Mindstuff in Such Inexpressible Fineness. How do we “put mindstuff in such inexpressible fineness”? By watching, by witnessing.

And all the rest even up to the last technique, Enter Space, Supportless, Eternal, Still. How to enter that space? We enter by sitting silently, doing nothing, just remaining a witness until there is nothing left to witness. Just supportless, eternal, still.

So yes, we are instructed not to blend the techniques, but witnessing is not a technique and is at the very core of each of these techniques. And it is through watching, witnessing, that we enter these techniques, and it is by watching, witnessing, that we arrive at the space which these techniques are pointing.

So, why do I refer to Osho’s Witnessing Meditation (O-Meditation) as the “bee’s knees?” Because it is the way and the goal, the first step is the last step.

-purushottama

See all 0f Prem’s notes.

The Sun of Awareness – Osho

Chidaditya swaroopam deepah.

To be established in the sun of awareness is the only lamp.

One day a lady came to Mulla Nasrudin’s school with her small child, her son. The lady asked Mulla to frighten the boy. He had become unruly, and he would not listen to anyone. He needed to be frightened by some big authority. Of course, Mulla was a big authority in his village. He assumed a very frightening posture. His eyes were bulging, all fiery, and he began to jump. The lady felt, “Now it is impossible to stop the Mulla – he may even kill the boy.”

The lady fainted, the boy escaped, and Mulla became so frightened of himself he had to run out of the school. He waited outside and the lady came back. Then he entered, slowly, silently, seriously. The lady said, “Mulla, it is strange! I never asked you to frighten me.”

Mulla said, “You do not see the real fact. It was not only you who was frightened; I myself was frightened of myself. When fear takes over, it destroys all. To start it is easy, but to control it is difficult. So I was the master when I started, but soon fear took over and it was the master, and I was the slave; I could not do anything. And, moreover, fear has no favorites. When it strikes, it strikes all.”

This is a beautiful parable, one which shows a deep insight into the human mind. You are conscious in everything just in the beginning, and then the unconscious takes over. The unconscious takes charge, and the unconscious becomes the master. You can start anger, but you can never end it. Rather, the anger ends you. You can start anything, but sooner or later the unconscious takes charge; you are relieved of your duty. So only the beginning is in your hands, never the end. And you are not the master of the consequences that follow.

This is natural because only a very small fragment of the mind is aware. It works just like a starter in your motor car. It starts, and then it is of no use; then the motor takes it over. It is needed only to start; without it, it is difficult to start. But do not go on thinking that because you start a certain thing you are the master. This is the secret of this parable. Because you started, you begin to feel that you are the master. Because you started, you think you could have stopped.

You may not have started, that is another thing, but once started soon the voluntary becomes the non-voluntary and the conscious becomes unconscious, because the conscious is just the upper layer, just the surface of the mind, and nearly the whole mind is unconscious. You start, and the unconscious begins to move and work.

So Mulla said, “I am not responsible for what has happened, I am not responsible! I am responsible only for starting, and it is you who told me to start. I started to frighten the boy, then the boy was frightened, then you fainted, then I was frightened, and then everything was a mess.”

Everything is a mess in our lives also, with the conscious starting and the unconscious taking over every time. If you do not feel it, if you do not realize it, this mechanism, you will always be a slave. And the slavery becomes more convenient if you go on thinking that you are the master. It is difficult to be a slave knowingly, knowing that you are a slave. It is easy to be a slave when you go on deceiving yourself that you are the master – of your love, your anger, your greed, your jealousy, your violence, your cruelty; even your sympathy and your compassion.

I say “your”, but it is yours only in the beginning. Just for a moment, just a spark is yours. Then your mechanism has started, and your whole mechanism is unconscious. Why is this so? Why this conflict between the conscious and the unconscious? And there is a conflict. You cannot predict even about yourself. Even you, your acts, are unpredictable to you, because you do not know what is going to happen, you do not know what you are going to do. You are not even aware of what you are going to do the next moment because the doer is deep in darkness. You are not the doer. You are only a starting point. Unless your whole mechanism becomes conscious, you will be a problem to yourself and a hell. There will be nothing but a long misery.

As I have been emphasizing daily, one can become whole in only two ways. The first is that you can lose the fragmentary consciousness, throw this fragment of the mind which has become conscious, into the dark unconscious, dissolve it, and you are whole. But then you are just like an animal, and that is impossible. Whatsoever you may do, it is not possible. It is conceivable, but not possible. You will be thrown forward again and again.

That small part which has become conscious cannot become unconscious again. It is like an egg which has become a hen. Now the hen cannot move back to be an egg again. A seed which has sprouted has begun the journey to be a tree. Now it cannot go back; it cannot regress and become a seed. A child which has come out of the womb of his mother cannot now go back, no matter how pleasant the womb may be.

There is no going backward. Life always moves in the future, never in the past. Only man can think of the past. That is why I say it is conceivable, but it cannot be actualized. You can imagine, you can think to go back, you can believe in it, you can try to go back, but you cannot go. That is an impossibility. One has to move forward. That is the second way to become whole. Knowingly or unknowingly, one is moving every moment. If you move knowingly, then the speed is accelerated. If you move knowingly, then you do not waste energy and time. Then the thing can happen even in one life which will not happen in a million lives of your just moving unknowingly, because if you move unknowingly you move in a circle. Every day you repeat the same, in every life you again repeat the same, and life becomes just a habit, a mechanical habit, a repetition.

You can break the repetitive habit if you move knowingly. Then there is a breakthrough. So the first thing is to be aware that your awareness is of such a small measure that it works only as a starter. Unless you have more awareness than unawareness, more consciousness than unconsciousness, the balance will not change. What are the hindrances? Why is this the situation? Why is this the fact? Why this conflict between conscious and unconscious? This must be considered.

It is natural. Whatsoever is, is natural. Man has evolved through millions of years. This evolution has created you, your body. your mechanism. The evolution has been a long struggle – millions and millions of experiences of failures, of successes. Your body has learned much; your body has been continuously learning things. Your body knows much, and its knowledge is fixed. It goes on repeating its own ways of behaving. Even if the situation has changed, the body remains the same. For example, when you feel anger, you feel it in the same way as any primitive man, you feel it in the same way as any animal, you feel it in the same way as any child. And this is the mechanism: when you feel anger your body has a fixed routine, a ritual, a routine work to do.

The moment your mind says “anger”, you have glands which begin to release chemicals into the blood. Adrenalin is released into the blood. It is a necessity because in anger you will have to strike or else you may be struck by your opponent. You will need more blood circulation, and this chemical will help more circulation to be there. You may need to fight, or you may need to escape from a situation, to run away. For both cases, this chemical will help. So when some animal is angry, the body becomes ready to fight or to take flight. And these are the two alternatives: if the animal feels that he is stronger than the opponent, he will fight; if he feels that he is not the stronger one, he will escape. And the mechanism works very smoothly.

But for man the situation has become totally different. When you feel anger, you may not even express it. That is impossible for the animal. It depends on the situation. If it is against your servants, then you may express it. If it is against your master, then you may not express it. Not only that: you may even laugh or smile; you may even persuade your master, your boss, to think that not only are you not angry, but that you are very happy. Now you are confusing the whole mechanism of the body. The body is ready to fight, and you are smiling. You are creating a mess in the body. The body cannot understand what you are doing. Are you mad? It is ready to do one of two things which are natural: to fight or escape.

This smiling is something new. This deception is something new. The body has no mechanism for it, so you have to force the smile without the chemical flowing in which helps you to smile, which helps you to laugh. There are now no chemicals to laugh. You have to force a smile, a false smile, and the body has released chemicals into the blood to fight. Now what will the blood do? The body has a language that it understands very well, but you are behaving in a very mad, insane way. Now a gap is created between you and your body. This mechanism is unconscious, this mechanism is non-voluntary. Your volition, your will, is not needed because will takes time and there are situations in which no time can be lost.

A tiger has attacked you: now there is no time for meditation. You cannot contemplate about what to do. You have to do something without the mind. If the mind comes in you are lost. You cannot think; you cannot say to the tiger, “Wait! Let me think about it – about what to do.” You have to act immediately, without any consciousness.

The body has a mechanism. The tiger is there: the mind just knows that the tiger is there; the body mechanism begins to work. That working is not dependent on the mind because mind is a very slow worker, very inefficient. It cannot be relied upon in emergency situations, so the body begins to work. You are frightened. You will run away; you will escape.

But the same thing happens when you are standing on a platform to address a big audience. There is no tiger, but you are frightened by the great gathering. Fear takes shape; the body is informed.

That information that you are in fear is automatic. The body begins to release chemicals – the same chemicals that it will release when a tiger attacks you. There is no tiger, there is really no one who is attacking you, but the audience seems to be making a great attack. Everyone there is really aggressive, it seems. That is why you have become afraid.

Now the body is ready to fight or to take flight, but both the alternatives are closed. You have to stand there and speak. Now your body begins to perspire, even on a cold night. Why? Because the body is ready to run or to fight. The blood is circulating more, heat is created, and you are standing there. So you begin to perspire, and then a subtle trembling takes over. Your whole body begins to tremble.

It is just the same as if you start a car and press the accelerator and the brake both simultaneously. The engine will be heated, raced, and you are braking also. The whole body of the car will tremble. The same happens when you are standing on a platform. You feel fear, and the body is ready to run. The accelerator is pushed, but you cannot run. You have to address the gathering. You are a leader or some such thing. You cannot run. You have to face it, and you have to be there standing on the platform. You have to take the floor.

Now you are doing two things simultaneously that are very contradictory. You are stepping on the accelerator and pressing the brake also. You do not run, but the body is ready to run. You begin to tremble, and heat is created. Now your body wonders, “How are you behaving?” The body cannot understand you. A gap is created. The unconscious is doing one thing and the conscious goes on doing something else. You are divided. This gap has to be understood deeply.

In your every act this gap is there. You are looking at a film, an erotic film: your sex is aroused. Your body is ready to explode into a sexual experience, but you are only seeing a film. You are just sitting on a chair and your body is ready for the sex act. The film will go on accelerating, it will go on pushing you. You are aroused, but you cannot do anything. The body is ready to do something, but the situation is not, so a gap is created. You begin to feel yourself different, and there is a barrier between you and your body. Because of that barrier and because of this constant arousal and suppression simultaneously, this acceleration and braking simultaneously, this constant contradiction in your existence, you are diseased.

If you would fall back and be an animal. which is impossible, then you would be whole and healthy. This is a strange fact: animals are not ill in their natural state, but put them in a zoo and they begin to imitate human diseases. No animal is homosexual in its natural surroundings, in its natural state, but put animals in a zoo and they begin to behave absurdly: they begin to behave homosexually. No animal goes insane naturally, but in a zoo animals go mad.

It has never been reported in the whole history of human understanding that any animal has committed suicide, but in a zoo animals can commit suicide. This is strange, but not strange really, because the moment man begins to force animals into a life which is not natural, then they become divided inside. A division is created, a gap is created, the wholeness is lost.

Man is divided. Man is born divided. So what to do? How not to create this gap and how to bring awareness to every cell of the body, to every nook and corner of your being? How to bring awareness? That is the only problem for all religions, for all of yoga and for all systems for Enlightenment: how to bring consciousness to your total being so that nothing is unconscious.

Many methods have been tried, many methods are possible, so I will talk about some methods for how every cell of your body can become aware. And unless you as a total being become aware, you cannot be in bliss, you cannot be in peace. You will continue to be a madhouse.

Each cell of your body affects you. It has its own working, it has its own learning, its own conditioning. The moment you start, the cell takes over and begins to behave in its own way. Then you are disturbed. “What is happening!” you wonder, “I never intended this; I never thought about it.” And you are right. Your desires may have been completely different. But once you give your cells, your body, something to do, it is going to do it in its own way, in its own learned way. Because of this, scientists – particularly Russian scientists – think that we cannot change man unless we change the cells. […]

The religious emphasis is on transformation of consciousness, and the first thing is to create a greater force of awareness inside to help that awareness to spread. This sutra is beautiful. It says, “To be established in the sun of awareness is the only lamp.”

The sun is very, very far away. Light takes ten minutes to travel to the earth, and light travels very fast – 186,000 miles per second. It takes ten minutes for the sun to reach the earth; it is very, very far. But in the morning the sun rises, and it reaches even to the flower in your garden.

“Reach” has a different meaning. Just rays reach, not the sun. So if your energy becomes a sun deep inside your center, if your center becomes a solar center, if you become aware, centrally aware, if your awareness grows, then the rays of your awareness reach to every part of your body, to every cell. Then your awareness penetrates every cell of the body.

It is just like when the sun rises in the morning, everything begins to be alive on the earth. Suddenly there is light, and sleep disappears; the monotonous night disappears. Suddenly everything seems to be reborn. The birds begin to sing, and they are again out on the wing, the flowers flower, and everything is alive again just from the touch, just from the warmth, of the sun’s rays. So when you have a central consciousness, a central awareness in you, it begins to reach to every pore, to every nook and corner; to every cell it penetrates. And you have many, many cells – seventy million cells in your body. You are a big city, a big nation. Seventy million cells, and now they are all unconscious. Your consciousness has never reached them.

Grow in consciousness and every cell is penetrated. And the moment your consciousness touches the cells, it is different. The very quality changes. A man is asleep; the sun rises and the man is awakened. Is he the same man who was asleep? Is his sleep and awakening the same? There was a closed, dead bud, and the sun has risen, and the bud opens and becomes a flower. Is this flower the same? Something new has penetrated. An aliveness, a capacity to grow and blossom, has appeared. A bird was just asleep, as if dead, as if just dead matter, but the sun comes up and the bird is on the wing. Is it the same bird? It is a different phenomenon. Something has touched and the bird has become alive. Everything was silent, and now everything is singing. The morning is a song.

The same phenomenon happens inside the cells of a Buddha’s body. It is known as buddha-kaya – the body of an Enlightened One, of a Buddha. It is a different body. It is not the same body as you have, not even the same body as Gautam had before he became a Buddha.

Buddha is just on the verge of death, and someone asks him, “Are you dying? Then where will you be?” Buddha says, “The body that was born will die. But there is another body – the buddha-kaya, the body of a Buddha, which is neither born, nor can it die. I have left that body which was given to me, that came to me from my parents. Just as a snake leaves the old body every year, I have left it. Now there is the buddha-kaya – the Buddha-body.”

What does this mean? your body can become a Buddha-body. When your consciousness reaches to every cell, the very quality of your being changes, becomes transmuted, because then every cell is alive, conscious, Enlightened. Then there is no slavery. You have become the master. Just by becoming a conscious center, you become a master.

This sutra says, “To be established in the sun of awareness is the only lamp.” So why are you taking an earthen lamp to the temple? Take the inner lamp! Why are you burning candles on the altar? They will not help. Kindle the inner candle! Become a Buddha-body! Let your every cell become conscious; do not allow any part of your being to remain unconscious.

Buddhists have preserved some bones of Buddha. People think they are just superstitious. They are not, because those are not ordinary bones. They are not! The cells, the particles, the electrons, of those bones, have known something which happens rarely. In Kashmir, in a mosque, one hair of Mohammed is preserved. That is no ordinary hair. It is not just superstition. That hair has known something.

Just try to understand it in this way: a flower which has never known any sunrise and a flower which has known, encountered the sun, are not the same, cannot be the same. The flower that has never known a sunrise has never known a light to rise in it, because it rises when the sun rises. That flower is just dead – a potentiality. It has never known its own spirit. A flower which has seen the sunrise has also seen something rise in itself. It has known a soul. Now the flower is not just a flower. It has known a deep stirring inside. Something has stirred; something has become alive in it.

So the hair of Mohammed is a different thing; it has a different quality. It has known a man, it has been with a man who was an inner sun, an inner light. This hair has taken a deep bath in something mysterious which rarely happens. To be established in this inner light is the only lamp worth taking to the altar of the deity. Nothing else will do.

How to create this center of awareness? I will discuss several methods. Because I was talking about Buddha and the buddha-kaya, it will be good to start with Buddha. He invented a method, one of the most wonderful methods, a most powerful method, for creating an inner fire, an inner sun, of awareness. And not only to create it: the method is such that simultaneously the inner light begins to penetrate to the very cells of the body – to your whole being.

Buddha used breathing as the method – breathing with awareness. The method is known as “Anapansati Yoga” – the Yoga of incoming and outgoing breath awareness. You are breathing, but it is an unconscious thing. And breath is prana, breath is the Bergsonian elan vital: the vitality, the very vitality, the very light – and it is unconscious. You are not aware of it. If you needed to be aware of it, you might drop dead any moment because then it would be very difficult to breathe.

I have heard about certain fishes which cannot sleep for more than six minutes, because if they sleep more, they die: they forget to breathe. If their sleep is deepened, they forget to breathe, so they die. Those particular fishes cannot sleep for more than six minutes. They have to live in a group, always in a group. Some fishes are sleeping, other fishes have to be constantly alert not to allow them to go more into sleep. When the time is over, they will disturb the sleep; otherwise, a sleeping fish will just go dead. He will not come back again.

This is a scientific observation. It would be a problem with you also if you had to remember it – if you had to do breathing. Then you would have to remember constantly in order to do it, and you cannot remember anything even for a single moment. If one moment is missed, you will be no more. So breathing is unconscious; it does not depend on you. Even if you are in a coma for months together, you will go on breathing.

Really, just by the way, I would like to say that those fishes are rare. And someday science may come to know that they have a certain deep awareness which even man lacks, because to breathe consciously is a very difficult thing. Those fishes may have attained a certain awareness which is not with us.

Buddha used breath as the vehicle to do two things simultaneously: one, to create consciousness; and the other, to allow that consciousness to penetrate to the very cells of the body. He said, “Breathe consciously.” It is not a pranayama. It is just making breath an object of awareness without any change. There is no need to change your breath. Let it be just as it is – natural. Let it be as it is. Do not change it. Do something else: when you breathe in, breathe consciously. Let your consciousness move with the ingoing breath. When the breath goes out, move out. Go in, come out. Move consciously with the breath. Let your attention be with the breath; flow with it; do not forget even a single breath.

Buddha is reported to have said that if you can be aware of your breath even for a single hour, you are already Enlightened. But not a single breath should be missed. One hour is enough. It looks so small, only a fragment of time, but it is not. When you try it, one hour of awareness will look like millennia because ordinarily you cannot be aware for more than for five or six seconds – and that too for a very alert man. Otherwise, you will miss every second. You will start: the breath is going in. The breath has gone in, and you have gone somewhere else. Suddenly you remember again that the breath is going out. The breath has gone out and you have moved somewhere else.

To move with the breath means that no thought should be allowed, because thought will take your attention, thought will distract you. So Buddha never says stop thinking, but he says, “Just breathe consciously.” Automatically, thinking will stop. You cannot do both – think and breathe consciously.

A thought comes to your mind, and your attention is withdrawn. A single thought and you become unconscious of your breathing process. So Buddha used a very simple technique and a very vital one. He would say to his bhikkhus, “Do whatsoever you are doing, but do not forget a simple thing: remember the incoming and outgoing breath. Move with it; flow with it.” The more you try, the more you endeavor, the more you can be conscious Consciousness will increase by seconds and seconds. It is arduous, a difficult thing, but once you can feel it you are a different man – a different being in a different world.

This works in a double way: when you consciously breathe in and out, by and by you come to your center, because your breath touches the center of your being. Every moment that the breath goes in, it touches your center of being.

Physiologically you think that breath is just for the purification of the blood, that it is just a function of your heart, that it is bodily. You think that it is a function of your heart – just a pumping system to refresh your blood-circulation, to give to your blood more oxygen which is needed, and to throw out carbon dioxide, which is excreta, used stuff: to throw it out, to remove it and replace it.

But this is only physiologically. If you begin to be aware of your breath, by and by you will go deep – deeper than your heart. And one day you will begin to feel a center just near your navel. That center can only be felt if you move with your breath continuously – because the nearer you reach to the center, the more you tend to lose consciousness. You can start when the breath is going in. When it is just touching your nose, you can start being alert. The more inward it moves; the more consciousness will become difficult. And a thought will come or some sound or something will happen, and you will move.

If you can go to the very center, where for a single moment breath stops and there is a gap, the jump can happen. The breath goes in, the breath goes out: between these two there is a subtle gap. That gap is your center. When you move with the breath, then only, after a very long effort, will you become aware of the gap – when there is no movement of the breath, when breath is neither coming nor going. Between two breaths there is a subtle gap, an interval – in that interval you are at the center.

So breath is used by Buddha as a passage to come nearer and nearer and nearer to the center. When you move out, be conscious of the breath. Again, there is a gap. There are two gaps: one gap inside and one gap outside. The breath goes in, the breath goes out: there is a gap. The breath goes out and the breath goes in: there is a gap. It is even more difficult to be aware of the second gap.

Look at this process. Your center is in between the incoming breath and the outgoing breath. There is another center – the Cosmic center. You may call it “God”. When the breath goes out and the breath comes in, there is again a gap. In that gap is the Cosmic center. These two centers are not two different things, but first you will be aware of your inner center and then you will become aware of your outer center, and ultimately you will come to know that both these centers are one. Then “out” and “in” lose meaning.

Buddha says move with the breath consciously and you will create a center of awareness. And once the center is created, awareness begins to move with your breath into your blood, to the very cells – because every cell needs air and every cell needs oxygen and every cell, so to speak, breathes – every cell! And now, scientists say, it even seems that the earth breathes. And because of the Einsteinian concept of an expanding universe, now theoretical scientists say that it seems that the whole universe is breathing.

When you breathe in, your chest expands. When you breathe out, your chest shrinks. Now theoretical scientists say that it seems that the whole universe breathes. When the whole universe is breathing in, it expands. When the whole universe breathes out, it shrinks.

In the old Hindu Puranas – mythological scriptures – it is said that creation is Brahma’s one breath, the incoming breath; and destruction – pralaya – the end of the world, is the outgoing breath: one breath, one creation.

In a very miniature way, in a very atomic way, the same is happening in you. When your awareness becomes so one with breathing, then your breathing takes your awareness to the very cells. Rays now penetrate, and the whole body becomes a Buddha-body. Really, then you have no material body at all. You have a body of awareness. This is what is meant by the sutra, “To be established in the sun of awareness . . .” this is the only lamp.

Just like we are learning about Buddha’s method, it will be good to understand another method, one more method. Tantra has used sex. That is again another very vital force. If you want to go deep, you have to use very vital forces – the deepest in you. Tantra uses sex. When you are in a sex act, you are very near to the center of creation – to the very source of life. If you can go into a sex act consciously, it becomes meditation.

It is very difficult – more difficult than breath. You can breathe consciously in a small measure, of course, that you can, but the very phenomenon of sex requires your unconsciousness. If you become conscious, you will lose your sexual desire and lust. If you become conscious, then there will be no sexual desire inside. So Tantra has done the most difficult thing in the world. In the history of experiments with consciousness, Tantra goes the deepest.

But, of course, one can deceive, and with Tantra deception is very easy, because no one other than you knows what the fact is. No one else can know. But only one in a hundred can succeed in the Tantric method of awareness – because sex needs unconsciousness. So a Tantric, a disciple of Tantra, has to work with sex, sex desire, just like with breathing. He has to be conscious of it; when actually going into the sex act, he has to be conscious.

Your very body, the sex energy, comes to a peak to explode. The tantric sadhak – seeker – comes to the peak consciously, and there is a method to judge. If sex release happens automatically and you are not the master, then you are not conscious of it. Then the unconscious has taken over. Sex comes to a peak, and then you cannot do anything but release. That release is not done by you. You can start a sexual process, but you can never end it. The end is always taken over by the unconscious.

If you can retain the peak and if it becomes your conscious act to release it or not to release it, if you can come back from the peak without release or if you can maintain that peak for hours together, if it is your conscious act, then you are the master. And if someone can come to a sexual peak, just on the verge of orgasm, and can retain it and be conscious of it, suddenly he becomes aware of the deepest center inside – suddenly! And it is not only that he is aware of the deepest center inside of himself: he is also aware of the center of his partner, the deepest center.

That is why a Tantra practitioner, if he is a man, will always worship the partner. The partner is not just a sex object. She is Divine! She is a goddess! And the act is not carnal at all. If you can go into it consciously, it is the deepest spiritual act possible. But the deepest is bound to be virtually impossible. So use either breath or sex.

Mahavir has used hunger. That again is a very deep thing. Hunger is not just hunger for your taste or for something else – it is for your very survival. Mahavir used hunger, fasting, as a method of awareness. It is not an austerity. Mahavir was not an ascetic. People have misunderstood him completely. He was not an ascetic at all. No wise man ever is. But he was using fasting, hunger, as a vehicle for awareness.

You might have stumbled upon the fact that when your stomach is full, you begin to feel sleepy, you begin to feel unconscious. You want to go to sleep. But when you are hungry, fasting, you cannot sleep. Even in the night you will turn this way and that. You cannot sleep on a fast. Why can’t you sleep? Because it is dangerous to life. Now sleep is a secondary need. The first need is food, to get food. That is the first need. Sleep is not a problem now.

But Mahavir used it in a very, very scientific way. Because you cannot fall asleep when you are fasting, you can remember things more easily. Consciousness comes to you more easily. And Mahavir used this very hunger as an object of consciousness. He would stand continuously. You might have seen Buddha’s statue sitting, but Mahavir’s statues are, more or less, standing. He was always standing. You can feel your hunger more when you are standing. If you are sitting, you will feel it less; if you are lying you will feel it still less. When you are standing, the whole body begins to be hungry. You feel the hunger all over the body. The whole-body flows: it becomes one river of hunger. From head to foot, you are hungry. It is not only the stomach: the feet feel it, even the whole body feels the hunger. And Mahavir would stand silently watching, moving with hunger just like one moves with breath. It is reported that in his twelve-year period of silence, he fasted more or less for eleven years. Only for three hundred and sixty days in twelve years did he take food. Hunger was the method.

Food and sex are two of the deepest things, just like breath. When you go on being conscious of your hunger, doing nothing but just being conscious, suddenly you are thrown to your center, to your being. First hunger moves from the surface. If you do not feed the surface, the deeper layers become hungry. If you do not feed these deeper layers, then still deeper layers become hungry. And it goes on and on and on; ultimately the whole body begins to be hungry. When the whole body is hungry, you are thrown to the center.

When you feel hunger, that is a false hunger. Really, that is more or less a habit, not hunger. If you take your lunch at a particular time, say at one o’clock, then at one o’clock you begin to feel your hunger. This is a false hunger, not connected with the body at all. If you do not take food at one o’clock, then at two o’clock you will feel that the hunger has disappeared. If it was natural, it would have grown more. Why should it disappear? If it was real, then you would feel it more at two and more at three and more at four. But it has disappeared. It was just a habit, a very superficial habit.

If a well-fed man fasts for three weeks, then only can he come to a real hunger. Then, for the first time, he will know what real hunger is. Just now you can never feel that hunger is as forceful as sex. It is more forceful, but only the real hunger. So it happens, when you are on a fast, that your sex desire will die, because now a more foundational thing is at stake.

Food is for your survival; sex is for the survival of your race. It is a distant phenomenon, not related with you. Sex is food for the race, not for you. You will die, but through sex humanity can live. So it is not really your problem; it is a racial problem. You can even leave it, but you cannot leave food because that is your problem. It is concerned with you. So if you go on a fast, by and by sex will disappear; it will become more and more distant.

Because of this, many people are just fooling themselves. They think that if they take less food, they have become celibate, brahmacharins. They have not. The problem has only been shifted. Give the proper food, and sex desire will come back – more forcibly, more fresh, more young.

If you fast for even more than three weeks, then your whole body hungers. Each cell, every cell of your body, begins to feel the hunger. Then, for the first time, you are hungry, your stomach is hungry, your whole body is hungry. You are surrounded by a deep fire of hunger. Mahavir used this as a method for being aware; so he would be hungry – fasting and aware.

A man can live without food for three months – a healthy man, of course. A normally healthy man can live for three months without food – for three months! If you go on fasting for three months, then, suddenly one day, you will be just on the verge of death. This is a conscious encounter with death, and that encounter comes only when you are on the verge of leaving your body and jumping into your center, inside. Now the whole body is exhausted. It cannot continue. You are thrown back to your source, and you cannot live in the body. By and by you are thrown from the body – inside, inside, inside.

Food takes you outside, fasting takes you inside. A moment comes when the body cannot carry you any further; then you are thrown to your center. In that moment the inner sun is released.

So Mahavir would fast for three months – even for four months. He was extraordinarily healthy. And then, suddenly, he would go to the village to beg for food. It is yet a secret why suddenly, after three or four months, he would go to the village to beg for food. Really, whenever he came on the verge where even a single moment could prove fatal, only then would he go to beg for food. He would again enter the body and then again, he would fast, then again go to the center; again enter the body, again go to the center.

Then he could feel the passage: just breath coming in, breath going out; life coming into the body, life going out of the body. And he would be aware of this process. He would take food and he would be aware of this process. He would take food and he would be back into the body, so to speak, and then he would fast again. This he was doing continuously for twelve years. This was an inner process.

So I discussed three things: breath, sex and hunger – very basic, foundational things. Be conscious in any. Breath is the easiest. It will be difficult to use the Tantra method. The mind would like to use it, but it will be difficult. It will be difficult to use the hunger method. The mind would not like it. These two are very difficult. Whether you like them or not, they are difficult. Only the breath process is simple. And for the coming age, I think Buddha’s method will be very helpful. It is moderate, easy, not very dangerous. That is why Buddha is known always as the originator of the middle path – majhim-nikaya – the golden mean. Sex and food are between these two. Breath is the golden mean, the exact middle.

And there are many more methods. With any method you can be established in that inner light. And once you are established, your light begins to flow to your body cells. Then your whole mechanism is refreshed, and you have a Buddha-body – an Enlightened One’s body.

-Osho

From The Ultimate Alchemy, V.2 #3

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.

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The Tantra Vision – Osho

The Tantra vision is a direct approach towards God, towards reality, towards that which is. It has no mediators, no middlemen – it has no priests. And Tantra says: The moment the priest enters, religion is corrupted. It is not the devil who corrupts religion, it is the priest. The priest is in the service of the devil.

God can only be approached directly. There is no via media. You cannot go via somebody else because God is immediacy, God is here-now, already surrounding you. Within, without, only God is. There is no need to find somebody to help you to find God. You are already in it, you have never been away from it. Even if you want to, you cannot be away from it. Even if you make all the efforts, it is impossible to go away. There is nowhere else to go. And there is nothing else to be.

Tantra is not a religion in the ordinary sense, because it has no rituals, it has no priest, it has no scriptures. It is an individual approach towards reality. It is tremendously rebellious. Its trust is not in the organization, its trust is not in the community; its trust is in the individual. Tantra believes in you.

I have heard . . .

It happened in a Billy Graham revival meeting.

A guy was collecting donations, and then he started to split with the money. Two policemen caught him red-handed in time. They brought him to Billy Graham’s feet. Naturally, Billy Graham was very angry, and said to the man ‘This money belongs to God . . . and what were you trying to do? Trying to cheat God?’

The man said ‘Sir, I took the money in an effort to get closer to God – by eliminating the middleman, of course.’

The middleman is not needed at all. The real Master never tries to become the middleman – he is not. He helps you not to reach to God, he helps you only to become aware of that which is already there. He is not a bridge between you and God, he is just a bridge between your unawareness and awareness. The moment you become aware, you are joined to God directly, immediately, without anybody standing between you and God.

This Tantra vision is one of the greatest visions ever dreamt by man: a religion without the priest, a religion without the temple, a religion without the organization, a religion which does not destroy the individual but respects individuality tremendously, a religion which trusts in the ordinary man and woman. And this trust goes very deep. Tantra trusts in your body. No other religion trusts in your body. And when religions don’t trust in your body, they create a split between you and your body. They make you enemies of your bodies; they start destroying the wisdom of the body.

Tantra trusts in your body. Tantra trusts in your senses. Tantra trusts in your energy. Tantra trusts in you – in toto. Tantra does not deny anything, but transforms everything.

How to attain to this Tantra vision?

This is the map to turn you on, and to turn you in, and to turn you beyond.

The first thing is the body. The body is your base, it is your ground, it is where you are grounded. To make you antagonistic towards the body is to destroy you, is to make you schizophrenic, is to make you miserable, is to create hell. You are the body. Of course, you are more than the body, but that ‘more’ will follow later on. First you are the body. The body is your basic truth, so never be against the body. Whenever you are against the body, you are going against God. Whenever you are disrespectful to your body, you are losing contact with reality, because your body is your contact. Your body is your bridge. Your body is your temple. Tantra teaches reverence for the body, love, respect for the body, gratitude for the body. The body is marvelous. It is the greatest of mysteries.

But you have been taught to be against the body. So sometimes you are over-mystified by the tree by the green tree – sometimes mystified by the moon and the sun, sometimes mystified by a flower, but never mystified by your own body. And your body is the most complex phenomenon in existence. No flower, no tree has such a beautiful body as you have. No moon, no sun, no star has such an evolved mechanism as you have.

But you have been taught to appreciate the flower, which is a simple thing. You have been taught to appreciate a tree, which is a simple thing. You have even been taught to appreciate stones, rocks, mountains, rivers, but you have never been taught to respect your own body, never to be mystified by it. Yes, it is very close, so it is very easy to forget about it. It is very obvious, so it is easy to neglect it. But this is the most beautiful phenomenon.

If you look at a flower, people will say ‘How aesthetic!’ And if you look at a woman’s beautiful face or a man’s beautiful face, people will say ‘This is lust.’ If you go to the tree, and stand there, and look in a dazed state at the flower – your eyes wide open, your senses wide open to allow the beauty of the flower to enter you – people will think you are a poet or a painter or a mystic. But if you go to a woman or a man and just stand there with great reverence and respect and look at the woman with your eyes wide open and your senses drinking the beauty of the woman, the police will catch hold of you. Nobody will say that you are a mystic, a poet, nobody will appreciate what you are doing. Something has gone wrong.

If you go to a stranger on the street and you say ‘What beautiful eyes you have!’ you will feel embarrassed, he will feel embarrassed. He will not be able to say ‘thank you’ to you. In fact, he will feel offended. He will feel offended, because who are you to interfere in his private life? Who are you to dare?

If you go and touch the tree, the tree feels happy. But if you go and touch a man, he will feel offended. What has gone wrong? Something has been damaged tremendously and very deeply.

Tantra teaches you to reclaim respect for the body, love for the body. Tantra teaches you to look at the body as the greatest creation of God. Tantra is the religion of the body. Of course it goes higher, but it never leaves the body; it is grounded there. It is the only religion which is really grounded in the earth: it has roots. Other religions are uprooted trees – dead, dull, dying; the juice does not flow in them.

Tantra is really juicy, very alive.

The first thing is to learn respect for the body, to unlearn all the nonsense that has been taught to you about the body. Otherwise, you will never turn on, and you will never turn in, and you will never turn beyond. Start from the beginning. The body is your beginning.

The body has to be purified of many repressions. A great catharsis is needed for the body, a great rechana. The body has become poisoned because you have been against it; you have repressed it in many ways. Your body is existing at the minimum, that’s why you are miserable. Tantra says: Bliss is possible only when you exist at the optimum – never before it. Bliss is possible only when you live intensely. How can you live intensely if you are against the body?

You are always lukewarm. The fire has cooled down. Down the centuries, the fire has been destroyed. The fire has to be rekindled. Tantra says: First purify the body – purify it of all repressions. Allow the body energy to flow, remove the blocks.

It is very difficult to come across a person who has no blocks, it is very difficult to come across a person whose body is not tight. Loosen this tightness – this tension is blocking your energy; the flow cannot be possible with this tension.

Why is everybody so uptight? Why can’t you relax? Have you seen a cat sleeping, dozing in the afternoon? How simply and how beautifully the cat relaxes. Can’t you relax the same way? You toss and turn in your bed, you can’t relax. And the beauty of the cat’s relaxation is that it relaxes utterly and yet is perfectly alert. A slight movement in the room and it will open its eyes, it will jump and be ready. It is not that it is just asleep. The cat’s sleep is something to be learnt – man has forgotten.

Tantra says: Learn from the cats – how they sleep, how they relax, how they live in a non-tense way. And the whole animal world lives in that non-tense way. Man has to learn this, because man has been conditioned wrongly. Man has been programmed wrongly.

From the very childhood you have been programmed to be tight. You don’t breathe . . . out of fear. Out of fear of sexuality, people don’t breathe, because when you breathe deeply, your breath goes exactly to the sex center and hits it, massages it from the inside, excites it. Because you have been taught that sex is dangerous, each child starts breathing in a shallow way – hung up just in the chest. He never goes beyond that because if he goes beyond it, suddenly, there is excitement: sexuality is aroused and fear arises. The moment you breathe deeply, sex energy is released.

Sex energy has to be released. It has to flow all over your being. Then your body will become orgasmic. But afraid to breathe, so afraid that almost half the lungs are full of carbon dioxide . . .

There are six thousand holes in the lungs and ordinarily three thousand holes are never cleaned; they always remain full of carbon dioxide. That’s why you are dull, that’s why you don’t look alert, that’s why awareness is difficult. It is not accidental that Yoga and Tantra both teach deep breathing, pranayama, to unload your lungs from the carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide is not for you – it has to be thrown out continuously, you have to breathe in new, fresh air, you have to breathe more oxygen. Oxygen will create your inner fire, oxygen will make you aflame. But oxygen will also inflame your sexuality. So only Tantra can allow you real deep breathing – even Yoga cannot allow you real deep breathing. Yoga also allows you to go up to the navel – not beyond that, not to cross the hara center, not to cross swadhistan, because once you cross swadhistan you jump into the muladhar.

Only Tantra allows you total being and total flow. Tantra gives you unconditional freedom, whatsoever you are and whatsoever you can be. Tantra puts no boundaries on you; it does not define you, it simply gives you total freedom. The understanding is that when you are totally free, then much is possible.

This has been my observation: that people who are sexually repressed become unintelligent. Only very, very sexually alive people are intelligent people. Now, the idea that sex is sin must have damaged intelligence – must have damaged it very badly. When you are really flowing. and your sexuality has no fight and conflict with you, when you cooperate with it, your mind will function at its optimum. You will be intelligent, alert, alive.

The body has to be befriended, says Tantra.

Do you ever touch your own body sometimes? Do you ever feel your own body, or do you remain as if you were encased in a dead thing? That’s what is happening. People are almost frozen; they are carrying the body like a casket. It is heavy, it obstructs, it does not help you to communicate with reality. If you allow the electricity of the body flow to move from the toe to the head, if you allow total freedom for its energy – the bioenergy – you will become a river, and you will not feel the body at all. You will feel almost bodiless. Not fighting with the body, you become bodiless. Fighting with the body, the body becomes a burden. And carrying your body as a burden you can never arrive to God.

The body has to become weightless, so that you almost start walking above the earth – that is the Tantra way to walk. You are so weightless that there is no gravitation, you can simply fly. But that comes out of great acceptance. It is going to be difficult to accept your body. You condemn it, you always find faults with it. You never appreciate, you never love it, and then you want a miracle: that somebody will come and love your body. If you yourself cannot love it, then how are you going to find somebody else to love your body? If you yourself cannot love it, nobody is going to love your body, because your vibe will keep people repelled.

You fall in love with a person who loves himself, never otherwise. The first love has to be towards oneself – only from that center can other kinds of love arise. You don’t love your body. You hide it in a thousand and one ways. You hide your body’s smell, you hide your body in clothes, you hide your body in ornamentation. You try to create some beauty that you continuously feel you are missing, and in that very effort you become artificial.

Now think of a woman with lipstick on her lips… it is sheer ugliness. Lips should be red out of aliveness, they should not be painted. They should be alive out of love; they should be alive because you are alive. Now, just painting the lips… and you think that you are beautifying yourself. Only people who are very conscious of their ugliness go to beauty parlors, otherwise there is no need.

Do you ever come across a bird which is ugly? Do you ever come across a deer which is ugly? It never happens. They don’t go to any beauty parlor, and they don’t consult an expert. They simply accept themselves and they are beautiful in their acceptance. In that very acceptance they shower beauty upon themselves.

The moment you accept yourself you become beautiful. When you are delighted with your own body, you will delight others also. Many people will fall in love with you, because you yourself are in love with yourself. Now you are angry with yourself: you know that you are ugly, you know that you are repulsive, horrible. This idea will repel people, this idea will not help them to fall in love with you; it will keep them away. Even if they were coming closer to you, the moment they will feel your vibration, they will move away.

There is no need to chase anybody. The chasing arises only because we have not been in love with ourselves. Otherwise, people come. It becomes almost impossible for them not to fall in love with you if you are in love with yourself.

Why did so many people come to Buddha, and why did so many people come to Saraha, and why did so many people come to Jesus? These people were in love with themselves. They were in such great love and they were so delighted with their being that it was natural for whosoever would pass to be pulled by them; like a magnet they would pull. They were so enchanted with their own being, how could you avoid that enchantment? Just being there was such a great bliss.

Tantra teaches the first thing: Be loving towards your body, befriend your body, revere your body, respect your body, take care of your body – it is God’s gift. Treat it well, and it will reveal great mysteries to you. All growth depends on how you are related to your body.

And then the second thing Tantra speaks about is the senses. Again, the religions are against the senses. They try to dull the senses and sensitivity. And the senses are your doors of perception, the senses are the windows into reality. What is your eye? What are your ears? What is your nose? Windows into reality, windows into God. If you see rightly, you will see God everywhere. So eyes have not to be closed, eyes have to be opened rightly. Eyes have not to be destroyed. Ears have not to be destroyed because all these sounds are divine.

These birds are chanting mantras. These trees are giving sermons in silence. All sounds are his, and all forms are his. So if you don’t have sensitivity in you, how will you know God? And you have to go to a church, to a temple to find him . . . and he is all over the place. In a man-made temple, in a man-made church you go to find God? Man seems to be so stupid. God is everywhere, alive and kicking everywhere. But for that you need clean senses, purified senses.

So Tantra teaches that the senses are the doors of perception. They have been dulled. You have to drop that dullness, your senses have to be cleansed. Your senses are like a mirror which has become dull because so much dust has gathered upon it. The dust has to be cleansed.

Look at the Tantra approach about everything. Others say: Dull your senses, kill your taste! And Tantra says: Taste God in every taste. Others say: Kill your capacity to touch. And Tantra says: Flow totally into your touch, because whatsoever you touch is divine. It is a total reversal of the so-called religions. It is a radical revolution – from the very roots.

Touch, smell, taste, see, hear as totally as possible. You will have to learn the language because the society has befooled you: it has made you forget.

Each child is born with beautiful senses. Watch a child. When he looks at something, he is completely absorbed. When he is playing with his toys, he is utterly absorbed. When he looks, he becomes just the eyes. Look at the eyes of a child. When he hears, he becomes just the ears. When he eats something, he is just there on the tongue. He becomes just the taste. See a child eating an apple. With what gusto! With what great energy! With what delight! See a child running after a butterfly in the garden . . . so absorbed that even if God were available, he would not run that way. Such a tremendous, meditative state – and without any effort. See a child collecting seashells on the beach as if he were collecting diamonds. Everything is precious when the senses are alive. Everything is clear when the senses are alive.

Later on in life, the same child will look at reality as if hidden behind a darkened glass. Much smoke and dust have gathered on the glass, and you are hidden behind it and you are looking. Because of this, everything looks dull and dead. You look at the tree and the tree looks dull because your eyes are dull. You hear a song, but there is no appeal in it because your ears are dull. You can hear a Saraha and you will not be able to appreciate him, because your intelligence is dull.

Reclaim your forgotten language. Whenever you have time, be more in your senses. Eating – don’t just eat, try to learn the forgotten language of taste again. Touch the bread, feel the texture of it. Feel with open eyes, feel with closed eyes. While chewing, chew it – you are chewing God. Remember it! It will be disrespectful not to chew well, not to taste well. Let it be a prayer, and you will start the rising of a new consciousness in you. You will learn the way of Tantra alchemy.

Touch people more. We have become very touchy about touch. If somebody is talking to you and comes too close, you start moving backwards. We protect our territory. We don’t touch and we don’t allow others to touch; we don’t hold hands, we don’t hug. We don’t enjoy each other’s being.

Go to the tree, touch the tree. Touch the rock. Go to the river, let the river flow through your hands. Feel it! Swim, and feel the water again as the fish feels it. Don’t miss any opportunity to revive your senses. And there are a thousand and one opportunities the whole day. There is no need to have some separate time for it. The whole day is a training in sensitivity. Use all the opportunities. Sitting under your shower, use the opportunity – feel the touch of the water falling on you. Lie down on the ground, naked, feel the earth. Lie down on the beach, feel the sand. Listen to the sounds of the sand, listen to the sounds of the sea. Use every opportunity – only then will you be able to learn the language of the senses again. And Tantra can be understood only when your body is alive and your senses feel.

Free your senses from habits: habits are one of the root causes of dullness. Find out new ways of doing things. Invent new ways of loving. People are very much afraid.

I have heard . . .

The doctor told the working chap that he could not complete his examination without a sample of Urine. The small boy who was sent with the specimen spilled most of it while messing about. Fearing a good hiding, he topped it up with a cow in the field.

The doctor hastily sent for the man, who returned home to his wife in a furious temper and said ‘That’s you and your fancy positions! You would be on top wouldn’t you? And now I am going to have a baby!’

People have fixed habits. Even while making love, they always make it in the same position – ‘the missionary posture’. Find out new ways of feeling.

Each experience has to be created with great sensitivity. When you make love to a woman or a man, make it a great celebration. And each time bring some new creativity into it. Sometimes have a dance before you make love. Sometimes pray before you make love. Sometimes go running into the forest, then make love. Sometimes go swimming and then make love. Then each love experience will create more and more sensitivity in you and love will never become dull and boring.

Find out new ways to explore the other. Don’t get fixed in routines. All routines are anti-life: routines are in the service of death. And you can always invent – there is no limit to inventions. Sometimes a small change, and you will be tremendously benefitted. You always eat at the table; sometimes just go on the lawn, sit on the lawn and eat there. And you will be tremendously surprised: it is a totally different experience. The smell of the freshly cut grass, the birds hopping around and singing, and the fresh air, and the sun rays, and the feel of the wet grass underneath. It cannot be the same experience as when you sit on a chair and eat at your table; it is a totally different experience: all the ingredients are different.

Try sometimes just eating naked, and you will be surprised. Just a small change – nothing much, you are sitting naked – but you will have a totally different experience, because something new has been added to it. If you eat with a spoon and fork, eat sometimes with bare hands, and you will have a different experience; your touch will bring some new warmth to the food. A spoon is a dead thing: when you eat with a spoon or a fork, you are far away. That same fear of touching anything – even food cannot be touched. You will miss the texture, the touch, the feel of it. The food has as much feel as it has taste.

Many experiments have been done in the West on the fact that when we are enjoying anything, there are many things we are not aware of which contribute to the experience. For example, just close your eyes and close your nose and then eat an onion. Tell somebody to give it to you when you don’t know what he is giving – whether he is giving you an onion or an apple. And it will be difficult for you to make out the difference if the nose is completely closed and the eyes are closed, blindfolded. It will be impossible for you to decide whether it is an onion or an apple, because the taste is not only the taste; fifty per cent of it comes from the nose. And much comes from the eyes. It is not just taste; all the senses contribute. When you eat with your hands, your touch is contributing. It will be more tasty. It will be more human, more natural.

Find out new ways in everything. Let that be one of your sadhanas.

Tantra says: If you can go on finding new ways every day, your life will remain a thrill, an adventure. You will never be bored.

A bored person is an irreligious person. You will always be curious to know, you will always be on the verge of seeking the unknown and the unfamiliar. Your eyes will remain clear, and your senses will remain clear, because when you are always on the verge of seeking, exploring, finding, searching, you cannot become dull, you cannot become stupid.

Psychologists say that by the age of seven, stupidity starts. It starts near about the age of four, but by the seventh year it is very, very apparent. Children start becoming stupid by the age of seven. In fact, the child learns fifty per cent of all the learnings of his whole life by the time he is seven. If he will live until seventy, then in the remaining sixty-three years, he will learn only fifty per cent – fifty per cent he has already learned. What happens? He becomes dull, he stops learning. If you think in terms of intelligence, by the age of seven a child starts becoming old. Physically he will become old later on – from the age of thirty-five he will start declining – but mentally he is already on the decline.

You will be surprised to know that your mental age, the average mental age, is twelve years. People don’t grow beyond that; they are stuck there. That’s why you see so much childishness in the world. Just insult a person who is sixty years of age, and within seconds he is just a twelve-year-old child. And he is behaving in such a way that you will not be able to believe that such a grown-up person could be so childish.

People are always ready to fall back. Their mental age is just skin-deep, hidden behind. Just scratch a little, and their mental age comes out. Their physical age is not of much importance.

People die childish; they never grow.

Tantra says: Learn new ways of doing things, and free yourself of habits as much as possible. And Tantra says: Don’t be imitative, otherwise your senses will become dull. Don’t imitate. Find out ways of doing things in your own way. Have your signature on everything that you do.

Just the other night a sannyasin who is going back was saying that love between her and her husband has disappeared. Now they are hanging together just for the children. I told her to meditate, to be friendly to the husband. If love has disappeared, all has not disappeared; friendship is still possible. Be friendly. And she said ’It is difficult. When a cup is broken, it is broken.’

I told her that it seemed she had not heard that Zen people in Japan will first purchase a cup from the supermarket, bring it home, break it, then glue it together again to make it individual and special. Otherwise, it is just a market thing. And if a friend comes and you give him tea in an ordinary cup and saucer, that is not good; that is ugly, that is not respectful. So they will bring a fresh new cup and break it. Of course, then there is no other cup in the world exactly like it – there cannot be. Glued together, now it has some individuality, a signature. And when Zen people go to each other’s house or each other’s monastery, they will not just sip the tea. First, they will appreciate the cup, they will look at it. The way it has been joined together is a piece of art – the way the pieces have been broken and put together again. The woman understood, she started laughing. She said, ‘Then it is possible.’

Bring individuality into things, don’t just be an imitator. To imitate is to miss life.

I have heard . . .

Mulla Nasruddin has a very horny parrot. The parrot was continuously saying foul things, particularly whenever there was a guest, and Mulla was very worried. It was getting terrible. Finally, somebody suggested to him that he take it to the vet.

So he takes the parrot to a vet. The vet examines the parrot extensively and says ’Well, Nasruddin, you have a horny parrot. I have a sweet, young, female bird. For fifteen rupees your bird can go in the cage with my bird.’

Mulla’s parrot is in the cage listening. And Mulla says ‘God, I don’t know . . . fifteen rupees?’

The parrot says ‘Come on, come on, Nasruddin. What the hell?’ Finally, the Mulla says ‘All right’ and gives the vet the fifteen rupees.

The vet takes the bird, puts him in the cage with the female bird and closes the curtain. The two men go and sit down. There is a moment of silence, and then suddenly ‘Qua! Qua! Qua!’ Feathers come flying over the top of the curtain.

The vet says ‘Holy Gee!’ runs over, opens the curtain. The male has got the female bird down on the bottom of the cage with one claw, with the other claw he is pulling out all her feathers and shouting in delight ‘For fifteen rupees I want you naked, naked!’

Then, seeing the vet and his master, Mulla Nasruddin, he screams again in joy and says, ‘Hey Nasruddin, isn’t this the way you also like your women?’

Even a parrot can learn human ways, can become imitative, can become neurotic. To be imitative is to be neurotic. The only way to be sane in the world is to be individual, authentically individual. Be your own being.

The third thing that Tantra says is: First, the body has to be purified of repressions. Second, the senses have to be made alive again. Third, the mind has to drop neurotic thinking, obsessive thinking, and has to learn ways of silence. Whenever it is possible, relax. Whenever it is possible, put the mind aside.

Now you will say ‘It is easy to say, but how to put the mind aside? It goes on and on.’ There is a way.

Tantra says: Watch those three awarenesses. Awareness one: let the mind go, let the mind be filled with thoughts, you simply watch, detached. There is no need to be worried about it – just watch. Just be the observer and by and by you will see that silent gaps have started coming to you. Then, awareness two: when you have become aware that gaps have started coming, then become aware of the watcher. Now watch the watcher and then new gaps will start coming – the watcher will start disappearing, just like the thoughts. One day, the thinker also starts disappearing. Then real silence arises. With the third awareness, both object and subject are gone; you have entered into the beyond.

When these three things are attained: body purified of repressions, senses freed from dullness, mind liberated from obsessive thinking, a vision arises in you free from all illusion – that is the Tantra vision.

-Osho

From Tantric Transformation, Discourse #7

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.

A Course in Witnessing Blossoms

Covid changed the entire landscape. Out of the garden of our in-person meditation gatherings, A Course in Witnessing grew. We did not have any intention to create it. But covid changed everything.

We had been holding almost weekly meditation meetings wherever we happened to be living. They had started in Prescott, AZ, moved to Gainesville, FL, and on to the Atlanta area.

But covid created the need to reimagine the meditation meetings. And then we heard about Zoom. We began to experiment with holding our meditation meetings on Zoom on a weekly basis.

Several years before, I had begun to explore Osho’s books chronologically: from the earliest talks, through the meditation camps, the Bombay discourses, the talks in Pune 1, the discourses in Rajneeshpuram, the talks held around the globe on Osho’s world tour and his talks on his return to Pune 2. All the while, I was collecting pieces where Osho spoke on his teaching of witnessing. I discovered that witnessing was the common thread through all the discourses from the very beginning all the way to the last Zen series where Osho led us into witnessing in the no-mind, let-go guided meditations.

For our meditation meetings, we had created recorded Osho/music satsangs, so that we could just put on a CD and join in the meditation ourselves. In addition to the satsangs created, we also put together some of Osho’s talks on Shiva’s meditation techniques from The Book of Secrets in order to be able to work with, and practice them, in our meditation meetings.

The blog site Sat Sangha Salon had been created many years before and was the repository of the collected works.

When we moved our meditation meetings to Zoom, a whole new world opened up. First of all, friends could join us from anywhere, and secondly, it allowed the possibility of having two-hour meditations rather than the one-hour meetings that we had restricted ourselves to previously.

Soon, all those posts of Osho discourse excerpts and The Book of Secrets meditations were forming the basis of what I began to see as modules, all part of one whole, which we would call A Course in Witnessing. I must state here that much credit for the creation of A Course in Witnessing has to be given to all the friends who joined us in our online meditations, because this became the laboratory in which the course emerged.

Before we knew it, we had created 144 two-hour meditation programs collected in seven modules. I say, “before we knew it,” but the complete course blossomed 14 years after the first satsang recording was created.

So, what exactly are the meditation programs? They are in two parts: first the Listening Meditation and then the Satsang Meditation.

The Listening Meditation is an approximately one-hour discourse excerpt. We call it Listening Meditation because we encourage the participants to bring a meditative quality to the space of listening. That means listening without either agreeing or disagreeing, listening without judging, and listening without analyzing. Osho has called this right listening, or total listening. It is the kind of listening we would bring to our time sitting in front of Osho during discourse. In the discourse excerpts in A Course in Witnessing, we are listening to Osho describe in great detail the whole journey of witnessing, sometimes through the teachings of the Upanishads, sometimes through the meditation techniques of Yoga or Tantra, sometimes through Zen stories, and sometimes through answering questions from his sannyasins.

Throughout all of these discourses is a common thread and that is Osho’s teaching of witnessing.

The second part of the meditation program is Satsang Meditation. These meditations are made up of alternating periods of silence, music and spoken word (highlights from the discourse). This is an opportunity to experiment with, explore more fully in our own light, that which has been heard in the listenings, maybe one of the techniques that has been introduced or maybe Osho’s guidance through the flow of watching, being and witnessing.

Currently we are holding weekly Zoom meditation meetings based on A Course in Witnessing. If you would like to be put on our mailing list to receive announcements for the meditation meetings, send an email with name and email address to info@o-meditation.com.

Whether in our meditation meetings or in your own time, we invite you to explore A Course in Witnessing:

Osho Sakshi and the Science of Awakening (16 programs)

Osho Transcendence from the Many to the One (16 programs)

Osho Alchemy and the Fire of Awareness (16 programs)

Osho Tantra and the Secrets of Meditation (20 programs)

Osho Yoga and the Discipline of Transformation (20 programs)

Osho Zen and the Mystery of No-Mind (20 programs)

Osho Dhamma and the Flowers of Awarefulness (36 programs)

The modules can be done independently, consecutively or randomly. They are arranged chronologically, however, in the order that Osho spoke them. The individual meditation programs within the modules can also be done randomly or in chronological order. There is, however, much benefit in doing them chronologically, especially the first six modules because the discourses that make up these meditation programs have a natural progression.

If you choose to do the programs randomly, you may want to print out the Map of Programs, so that you can check off the ones completed in order not to repeat.

I have also created a syllabus for the course, which, of course, is only a suggestion, a possibility: A Syllabus for A Course in Witnessing.

The Listening Meditations in the modules Osho Sakshi and Osho Transcendence are from discourses that Osho gave at meditation camps in different locations around India, mostly on various Upanishads. Osho Alchemy and Osho Tantra are from discourses that Osho gave at his apartment in Mumbai on the Atma Pooja Upanishad (The Ultimate Alchemy) and Vigyan Bhairav Tantra (The Book of Secrets). The discourses in Osho Yoga on The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali were given in Mumbai and then continued in Pune after his move there. Osho Zen includes discourses that Osho gave on Zen both from Pune 1 and Pune 2. The last eight programs of Osho Zen include Osho guiding us into no-mind meditation. The module Osho Dhamma is made up of discourses arranged mostly chronologically that Osho gave in Pune 1, Rajneeshpuram, on his world tour, and finally, back in Pune 2.

We have also gathered all of the discourses from the listening meditations and compiled them into PDF books based on the seven modules, A Course in Witnessing Module Books.

Osho spent his whole life working to awaken as many individuals as possible through the practice of meditation. In addition to teaching the 112 ancient meditation techniques of the Vigyan Bhairava Tantra, Osho also devised new “active” meditation techniques designed specifically to overcome the complexities and busyness of the modern mind. Osho, however, also says that the very core of meditation is witnessing.

“Real meditation is not a technique. Real meditation is just relaxing, sitting silently, letting it happen, whatsoever it is. Allowing the whole anxiety to come up, to surface. And watching it, watching it. And doing nothing to change it. Witnessing it is real meditation.

“In that witnessing your Buddhahood will become more and more powerful. Witnessing is the nourishment for your Buddhahood. And the more powerful your Buddhahood is, the less anxiety there is. The day your Buddhahood is complete, all anxiety is gone.”

-Osho

From The Perfect Master, V.1, Discourse #8

Enjoy!

Purushottama and Amido

Be Attentively Inattentive – Osho

This is what tantra says: the royal way – behave like a king, not like a soldier. There is nobody on top of you to force you and order you; there should not be really a style of life. That is the royal way. You should live moment to moment, enjoying moment to moment – spontaneity should be the way. And why bother about tomorrow? – This moment is enough. Live it! Live it in totality. Respond, but don’t react. “No habits” should be the formula.

I am not saying live in a chaos, but don’t live through habits. Maybe, just living spontaneously, a way of life evolves in you – but that is not forced. If you enjoy the morning every day, and through enjoyment you get up early in the morning, not as a habit, and you get up every day… and you may get up for your whole life, but that is not a habit. You are not forcing yourself to get up – it happens.

It is beautiful; you enjoy it, you love it.

If it happens out of love, it is not a style, it is not a habit, not a conditioning, not a cultivated, dead thing. Less habits – you will be more alive. No habits – you will be perfectly alive. Habits surround you with a dead crust and you become enclosed in them, you become encapsulated. Like a seed a cell surrounds you, hard. Be flexible.

Yoga teaches you to cultivate the opposite of all that is bad. Fight with evil and attend to good. There is violence – kill the violence within you and become nonviolent, cultivate nonviolence. Always do the opposite and force the opposite to become your pattern. This is the soldier’s way – a small teaching. Tantra is the great teaching – the supreme. What does tantra say? Tantra says: don’t create any conflict within yourself. Accept both, and through the acceptance of both, a transcendence happens, not victory but transcendence. In yoga there are victories, in tantra there are none. In tantra . . . simply transcendence. Not that you become nonviolent against violence, you simply go beyond both, you simply become a third phenomenon – a witness.

I was sitting once in a butcher’s shop. He was a very good man and I used to go to visit him. It was evening and he was just going to close the shop when a man came and asked for a hen. And I knew because just a few minutes before he had told me that everything was sold today – only one hen was left. So he was very happy; he went in, brought the hen out, threw it on the scale and said, “That will be five rupees.”

The man said, “It is good, but I am going to give a party and many friends are coming and this hen seems to be too small. I would like to have a little bigger one.”

Now I knew that he had no hen left, this was the only one. The butcher brooded a little, took the hen back inside the room, stayed there a little, came back again, threw the hen on the scale – the same one – and said, “This will be seven rupees.”

The man said, “Tell you what, I will take both of them.”

Then the butcher was really in a fix.

And tantra puts the whole existence itself in a fix. Tantra says, “I will take both of them.”

There are not two. Hate is nothing but another aspect of love. Anger is nothing but another aspect of compassion, and violence is nothing but another face of nonviolence. Tantra says, “Tell you what, I will take both of them. I accept both.” And suddenly through this acceptance there is a transcendence, because there are not two. Violence and nonviolence are not two. Anger and compassion are not two. Love and hate are not two.

That’s why you know, you observe, but you are so unconscious that you don’t recognize the fact. Your love changes into hate within a second. How is it possible if they are two? Not even a second is needed: this moment you love, and next moment you hate the same person. In the morning you love the same person, by the afternoon you hate, in the evening you love again. This game of love and hate goes on. In fact, love and hate is not the right word: love-hate, anger-compassion – they are one phenomenon, they are not two. That’s why love can become hate, hate can become love, anger can become compassion, compassion can become anger.

Tantra says the division is brought by your mind and then you start fighting. You create the division first; you condemn one aspect and you appreciate another. You create the division first, then you create the conflict and then you are in trouble. And you will be in trouble. A yogi is constantly in trouble because whatsoever he will do the victory cannot be final, at the most temporary.

You can push down anger and act compassion, but you know well that you have pushed it down into the unconscious and it is there – and any moment, a little unawareness and it will bubble up, it will surface. So one has to constantly push it down. And this is such an ugly phenomenon if one has to constantly push down negative things – then the whole life is wasted. When will you enjoy the divine? You have no space, no time. You are fighting with the anger and greed and sex and jealousy and a thousand things. And those thousand enemies are there; you have to be constantly on watch, you can never relax. How can you be loose and natural? You will always be tense, strained, always ready to fight, always afraid.

Yogis become afraid even of sleep, because in sleep they cannot be on watch. In sleep all that they have forced down surfaces. They may have attained to celibacy while they are awake, but in dreams it becomes impossible – beautiful women keep on floating inside, and the yogi cannot do anything. Those beautiful women are not coming from some heaven as it is written in Hindu stories, that God sent them. Why should God be interested in you? A poor yogi, not doing anybody any harm, simply sitting in the Himalayas with closed eyes, fighting with his own problems – why should God be interested in him? And why should he send apsaras, beautiful women, to distract him from his path? Why? Nobody is there. There is no need for anybody to send anybody. The yogi is creating his own dreams.

Whatsoever you suppress surfaces in the dreams. Those dreams are the part the yogi has denied. And your waking hours are as much yours as your dreams are yours. So whether you love a woman in your waking hours, or you love a woman in dream, there is no difference – there cannot be, because it is not a question of a woman there or not, it is a question of you. Whether you love a picture, a dream picture, or you love a real woman, there is in fact no difference – there cannot be, because a real woman is also a picture inside. You never know the real woman; you only know the picture.

I am here. How do you know that I am really here? Maybe it is just a dream – you are dreaming m here. What will be the difference if you dream me here and you see me actually here? – and how will you make the difference? What is the criterion? … Because whether I am here or not makes no difference – you see me inside your mind. In both the cases – dream or real – your eyes take the rays in and your mind interprets that somebody is there. You have never seen any actual person, you cannot see.

That’s why Hindus say this is a maya, this is an illusory world. Tilopa says, “Transient, ghostlike, phantomlike, dreamlike is this world.” Why? – because in dream and actuality there is no difference.

In both the cases you are confined in your mind. You only see pictures, you have never seen any reality – you cannot see, because the reality can only be seen when you become real. You are a ghostlike phenomenon, a shadow – how can you see the real? The shadow can see only the shadow. You can see reality only when the mind is dropped. Through the mind everything becomes unreal. The mind projects, creates, colors, interprets – everything becomes false. Hence the emphasis, continuous emphasis on how to be no-minds.

Tantra says don’t fight. If you fight you may continue your fight for many lives and nothing will happen out of it, because in the first place you have missed – where you have seen two was only one. And if the first step has been missed, you cannot reach the goal. Your whole journey is going to be continuously a missing. The first step has to be taken absolutely rightly, otherwise you will never reach the goal.

And what is the absolutely right thing? Tantra says it is to see the one in two, to see the one in many.

Once you can see one in duality, already the transcendence has started. This is the royal path.

Now we will try to understand the sutra.

To transcend duality is the kingly view.

To transcend, not to win – to transcend. This word is very beautiful. What does it mean, to “transcend”?

It is just as if a small child is playing with his toys. You tell him to put them away and he becomes angry. Even when he goes to sleep he goes with his toys, and the mother has to remove them when he has fallen asleep. In the morning the first thing that he demands to know is where his toys are and who has taken them away. Even in the dream he dreams about the toys. Then suddenly one day he forgets about the toys. For a few days they remain in the corner of his room, and then they are removed or thrown away; never again does he ask for them. What has happened? He has transcended, he has become mature. It is not a fight and a victory; it is not that he was fighting against the desire to have toys. No, suddenly one day he sees this is childish and he is no more a child; suddenly one day he realizes that toys are toys, they are not real life and he is ready for the real life. His back is turned towards the toys. Never again in dreams will they come; never again will he think about them. And if he sees some other child playing with toys, he will laugh; he will laugh knowingly… a knowing laugh, a wise laugh. He will say, ”He’s a child, still childish, playing with toys.” He has transcended.

Transcendence is a very spontaneous phenomenon. It is not to be cultivated. You simply become more mature. You simply see the whole absurdity of a certain thing . . . and you transcend. One young man came to me and he was very much worried. He has a beautiful wife, but her nose is a little too long. So he was worried and he said, “What to do?” Even plastic surgery was done – the nose became a little more ugly; because there was nothing wrong, and when you try to improve something where nothing is wrong, it becomes more ugly, it makes more of a mess. Now he was more troubled and he asked me what to do.

I talked to him about the toys and I told him, “One day you will have to transcend. This is just childish – why are you obsessed so much with her nose? The nose is just a tiny part, and your wife is so beautiful and such a beautiful person – and why are you making her so sad because of her nose?” – because she has also become touchy about her nose, her nose has become as if it was the whole problem of life. And all problems are like this! Don’t think that your problem is something greater – all problems are like this. All problems are out of childishness, juvenile, they are born out of immaturity.

He was concerned so much with the nose that he would not even look at his wife’s face, because whenever he saw the nose he was troubled – but you cannot escape things so easily. If you are NOT looking at the face because of the nose, still you are reminded of the nose. Even if you are trying to evade the issue, the issue is there. You are obsessed. So I told him to meditate on the wife’s nose.

He said, “What? I cannot even look.”

I told him, “This is going to help – you simply meditate on the nose. People used in the ancient days, to meditate on the tip of their own nose, so what is wrong in meditating on the tip of your wife’s nose? Beautiful! You try.”

He said, “But what will happen out of it?”

“You just try,” I told him, “and after a few months you tell me what happens. Every day, let her sit before you and you meditate on her nose.” One day he came running to me and he said, “What nonsense I have been doing! Suddenly, I have transcended. The whole foolishness of it has become apparent – now it is no more a problem.”

He has not become victorious because, in fact, there is no enemy there so that you can win, there is no enemy to you – this is what tantra says. The whole life is in deep love with you. There is nobody who is to be destroyed, nobody who is to be won, nobody who is an enemy, a foe to you. The whole life loves you. From everywhere the love is flowing.

And within you also, there are no enemies – they have been created by priests. They have made a battleground; they have made you a battleground. They say, “Fight this – this is bad! Fight that – that is bad!” They have created so many enemies that you are surrounded by enemies and you have lost contact with the whole beauty of life.

I say to you: anger is not your enemy, greed is not your enemy; neither is compassion your friend, nor is nonviolence your friend – because friend or foe, you remain with the duality. Just look at the whole of your being and you will find they are one. When the foe becomes the friend and the friend becomes the foe, all duality is lost. Suddenly there is a transcendence, suddenly an awakening. And I tell you, it is sudden, because when you fight you have to fight inch by inch. This is not a fight at all. This is the way of the kings – the royal path.

Says Tilopa,

To transcend duality is the kingly view.

Transcend duality! Just watch and you will see there is no duality.

Bodhidharma, one of the rarest jewels ever born, went to China. The king came to see him, and the king said, “Sometimes I am very much disturbed. Sometimes there is much tension and anguish within me.”

Bodhidharma looked at him and said, “You come early tomorrow morning at four o’clock, and bring all your anguish, anxieties, disturbances with you. Remember, don’t come alone – bring all of them!”

The king looked at this Bodhidharma – he was a very weird-looking fellow; he could have scared anybody to death – and the king said, “What are you saying? What do you mean?”

Bodhidharma said, “If you don’t bring those things, then how can I set you right? Bring all of them and I will set everything right.”

The king thought, “It is better not to go. Four o’clock in the morning – it will be dark, and this man looks a little mad. With a big staff in his hand, he can even hit. And what does he mean that he will put everything right?”

He couldn’t sleep the whole night because Bodhidharma haunted him. By the morning he felt that it would be good to go, “because who knows? – maybe he can do something.”

So he came, grudgingly, hesitatingly, but he reached. And the first thing Bodhidharma asked – he was sitting there before the temple with his staff, was looking even more dangerous in the dark, and he said, “So you have come! Where are the other fellows that you were talking about?”

The king said, “You talk in puzzles, because they are not things that I can bring – they are inside.”

Bodhidharma said, “Okay. Inside, outside, things are things. You sit down, close your eyes and try to find them inside. Catch hold of them and immediately tell me and look at my staff. I am going to set them right!”

The king closed his eyes – there was nothing else to do – he closed his eyes, afraid a little, looked inside here and there, watched, and suddenly he became aware the more he looked in, that there was nothing – no anxiety, no anguish, no disturbance. He fell into a deep meditation. Hours passed, the sun started rising, and on his face there was tremendous silence.

Then Bodhidharma told him, “Now open your eyes. Enough is enough! Where are those fellows? Could you get hold of them?”

The king laughed, bowed down, touched the feet of Bodhidharma, and he said, “Really, you have set them right, because I could not find them – and now I know what is the matter. They are not there in the first place. They were there because I never entered within myself and looked for them. They were there because I was not present inside. Now I know – you have done the miracle.”

And this is what happened. This is transcendence: not solving a problem but seeing whether really there is a problem in the first place. First you create the problem and then you start asking for the solution. First you create the question and then you roam around the world asking for the answer. This has been my experience also, that if you watch the question, the question will disappear; there is no need for any answer. If you watch the question, the question disappears – and this is transcendence. It is not a solution because there was no question at all to solve. You don’t have a disease. Just watch inside and you will not find the disease; then what is the need of a solution?

Every man is as he should be. Every man is a born king. Nothing is lacking, you need not be improved upon. And people who try to improve you, they destroy you; they are the real mischief makers. And there are many who are just watching like cats for mice: you come near them and they pounce upon you and they start improving you immediately. There are many improvers – that’s why the world is in such a chaos – there are too many people trying to improve on you. Don’t allow anybody to improve upon you. You are already the last word. You are not only the alpha; you are the omega also. You are complete, perfect.

Even if you feel imperfection, tantra says that imperfection is perfect. You need not worry about it. It will look very strange to say that your imperfection is also perfect, nothing is lacking in it. In fact, you appear imperfect not because you are imperfect but because you are a growing perfection. This looks absurd, illogical, because we think perfection cannot grow, because we mean by perfection that which has come to its last growth – but that perfection will be dead. If it cannot grow then that perfection will be dead.

God goes on growing. God is not perfect in that way, that he has no growth. He is perfect because he lacks nothing, but he goes from one perfection to another, the growth continues. God is evolution; not from imperfection to perfection but from perfection to more perfection, to still more perfection.

When perfection is without any future, it is dead. When perfection has a future to it, still an opening, a growth, still a movement, then it looks like imperfection. And I would like to tell you: be imperfect and growing, because that is what life is. And don’t try to be perfect, otherwise you will stop growing. Then you will be like a Buddha statue, stone, but dead.

Because of this phenomenon – that perfection goes on growing – you feel it is imperfect. Let it be as it is. Allow it to be as it is. This is the royal way.

To transcend duality is the kingly view. To conquer distractions is the royal practice.

Distractions are there, when you will lose your consciousness again and again. You meditate, you sit for meditation, a thought comes – and immediately you have forgotten yourself; you follow the thought, you have got involved in it. Tantra says only one thing has to be conquered, and that is distractions.

What will you do? Only one thing: when a thought comes, remain a witness. Look at it, observe it, allow it to pass your being, but don’t get attached to it in any way, for or against. It may be a bad thought, a thought to kill somebody – don’t push it, don’t say, “This is a bad thought.” The moment you say something about the thought, you have become attached, you are distracted. Now this thought will lead you to many things, from one thought to another. A good thought comes, a compassionate thought: don’t say, “Aha, so beautiful! I am a great saint. Such beautiful thoughts are coming to me that I would like to give salvation to the whole world. I would like to liberate everybody.” Don’t say that. Good or bad, you remain a witness.

Still, in the beginning, many times you will be distracted. Then what to do? If you are distracted, be distracted. Don’t be worried too much about it, otherwise that worry will become an obsession. Be distracted! For a few minutes you will be distracted, then suddenly you will remember, “I am distracted.” Then it is okay, come back. Don’t feel depressed. Don’t say, “It was bad that I was distracted” – again you are creating a dualism: bad and good. Distracted, okay – accept it, come back. Even with distraction you don’t create a conflict.

That’s what Krishnamurti goes on saying. He uses a very paradoxical concept for it. He says if you are inattentive, be attentively inattentive. That’s okay! Suddenly you find you have been inattentive, give attention to it and come back home. Krishnamurti has not been understood and the reason is that he follows the royal path. If he had been a yogi he would have been understood very easily. That’s why he goes on saying there is no method – on the royal path there is no method. He goes on saying that there is no technique – on the royal path there is none. He goes on saying no scripture will help you – on the royal path there is no scripture.

Distracted? – The moment you remember, the moment this attention comes to you that “I have been distracted,” come back. That’s all! Don’t create any conflict. Don’t say, “This was bad”; don’t feel depressed, frustrated that you have been again distracted. Nothing is wrong in distraction – enjoy it also.

If you can enjoy the distraction, less and less it will happen to you. And a day comes when there is no distraction – but this is not a victory. You have not pushed the distracting trends of your mind deep into the unconscious. No. You allowed it also. It too is good.

This is the mind of tantra, that everything is good and holy. Even if there is distraction, somehow it is needed. You may not be aware why it is needed; somehow it is needed. If you can feel good about everything that happens, then only are you following the royal path. If you start fighting with anything whatsoever, you have fallen from the royal path and you have become an ordinary soldier, a warrior.

To transcend duality is the kingly view. To conquer distractions is the royal practice.

-Osho

From Tantra: The Supreme Understanding, Discourse #7

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.

If One Sees Nought – Osho

Now try to understand Tilopa’s sutra:

If one sees nought when staring into space, if with the mind one then observes the mind, one destroys distinctions and reaches buddhahood.

If one sees nought when staring into space . . . This is a method, a tantra method: to look into space, into the sky, without seeing; to look with an empty eye. Looking, yet not looking for something: just an empty look.

Sometimes you see in a madman’s eyes an empty look – and madmen and sages are alike in certain things. A madman looks at your face, but you can see he is not looking at you. He just looks through you as if you are a glass thing, transparent; you are just in the way, he is not looking at you. And you are transparent for him: he looks beyond you, through you. He looks without looking at you; the “at” is not present, he simply looks.

Look in the sky without looking for something, because if you look for something a cloud is bound to come: “something” means a cloud; “nothing” means the vast expanse of the blue sky. Don’t look for any object. If you look for an object, the very look creates the object: a cloud comes, and then you are looking at a cloud. Don’t look at the clouds. Even if there are clouds, you don’t look at them – simply look, let them float, they are there. Suddenly a moment comes when you are attuned to this look of not-looking – clouds disappear for you, only the vast sky remains. It is difficult because eyes are focused, and your eyes are tuned to look at things.

Look at a small child the first day born. He has the same eyes as a sage – or like a madman: his eyes are loose and floating. He can bring both his eyes to meet at the center; he can allow them to float to the far corners – they are not yet fixed. His system is liquid, his nervous system is not yet a structure, everything is floating. So a child looks without looking at things; it is a mad look. Watch a child: the same look is needed from you, because again you have to attain a second childhood.

Watch a madman, because the madman has fallen out of the society. Society means the fixed world of roles, games. A madman is mad because he has no fixed role now, he has fallen out: he is the perfect drop-out. A sage is also a perfect drop-out in a different dimension. He is not mad; in fact, he is the only sanest possibility. But the whole world is mad, fixed – that’s why a sage also looks mad. Watch a madman: that is the look which is needed.

In old schools of Tibet, they always had a madman, just for the seekers to watch his eyes. A madman was very much valued. He was searched after because a monastery could not exist without a madman. He becomes an object to observe. The seekers will observe the madman, his eyes, and then they will try to look at the world like the madman. Those days were beautiful.

In the East, madmen have never suffered like they are suffering in the West. In the East they were valued, a madman was something special. The society took care of him, he was respected, because he has certain elements of the sage, certain elements of the child. He is different from the so-called society, culture, civilization; he has fallen out of it. Of course, he has fallen down; a sage falls up, a madman falls down – that’s the difference – but both have fallen out. And they have similarities. Watch a madman, and then try to let your eyes become unfocused.

In Harvard, they were doing one experiment a few months ago, and they were surprised, they couldn’t believe it. They were trying to find out whether the world, as we see it, is so or not – because many things have surfaced within the few last years.

We see the world not as it is; we see it as we expect it to be, we project something onto it.

It happened that a great ship reached a small island in the Pacific for the first time. The people of the island didn’t see it, nobody! And the ship was so vast – but the people were attuned, their eyes were attuned to small boats. They had never known such a big ship; they had never seen such a thing. Simply their eyes would not catch the glimpse, their eyes simply refused.

In Harvard, they tried [experimented] on a young man: they gave him spectacles with distorting glass, and he had to wear them for seven days. For the first three days he was in a miserable state, because everything distorted, the whole world around distorted . . . It gave him such a severe headache, he couldn’t sleep. Even with closed eyes those distorted figures would . . . the faces distorted, the trees distorted, the roads distorted. He couldn’t even walk because he couldn’t believe what is true and what is given by the projection of distorting glasses.

But a miracle happened! After the third day he became attuned to them; the distortion disappeared. The glasses remained the same, distorting, but he started looking at the world in the same old way. Within a week everything was okay: there was no headache, no problem, and the scientists were simply surprised; they couldn’t believe it was happening. The eyes had completely dropped, as if the glasses were no longer there. The glasses were there, and they were distorting – but the eyes had come to see the world for which they were trained.

Nobody knows whether what you are seeing is there or not. It may not be there; it may be there in a totally different way. The colors you see, the forms you see, everything is projected by the eyes. And whenever you look fixedly, focused with your old patterns, you see things according to your own conditioning. That’s why a madman has a liquid look, an absent look, looking and not looking together.

This look is beautiful. It is one of the greatest tantra techniques:

If one sees nought when staring into space . . .

Don’t see, just look. For the beginning few days, again and again you will see something, just because of old habit. We hear things because of old habit. We see things because of old habit. We understand things because of old habit.

One of the greatest disciples of Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, used to insist on a certain thing to his disciples – and everybody resented it, and many people left simply because of that insistence. If somebody said, “Yesterday you told . . .,” he immediately would stop him and say, “Don’t say it like that. Say, ‘I understood that you said this thing yesterday. I understood . . ..’ Don’t say what I said, you cannot know that. Talk about what you heard.” And he would insist so much because we are habitual.

Again, you might say, “In the Bible, it is said . . .,” and he would say, “Don’t say that! Simply say that you understand that this is said in the Bible.” With each sentence he insisted, “Always remember that this is your understanding.”

We go on forgetting. His disciples went on forgetting again and again, and every day, and he was stubborn about it. He would not allow you to go on. He would say, “Go back. Say first that, ‘I understand you said this, this is my understanding,’ . . . because you hear according to yourself, you see according to yourself – because you have a fixed pattern of seeing and hearing.”

This has to be dropped. To know existence, all fixed attitudes have to be dropped. Your eyes should be just windows, not projectors. Your ears should be just doors, not projectors.

It happened: One psychoanalyst who was studying with Gurdjieff tried to do this experiment. In a wedding ceremony, he tried a very simple but beautiful experiment. He stood by the side, people passing, and he watched them, and he felt that nobody at the receiving end was hearing what they were saying – so many people, some rich man’s wedding ceremony. So he also joined in, and he said very quietly to the first person in the receiving line, “My grandmother died today.” The man said, “So good of you, so beautiful.” Then to another he said it and the man said, “How nice of you.” And to the groom, when he said this, he said, “Old man, it is time you also followed.”

Nobody is listening to anybody. You hear whatsoever you expect. Expectation is your specs – that is the glasses. Your eyes should be windows – this is the technique.

Nothing should go out of the eyes, because if something goes [out] a cloud is created. Then you see things which are not there, then a subtle hallucination . . . Let pure clarity be in the eyes, in the ears; all your senses should be clear, perception pure – only then existence can be revealed to you. And when you know existence, then you know that you are a buddha, a god because in existence everything is divine.

If one sees nought when staring into space, if with the mind one then observes the mind . . .

First stare into the sky; lie down on the ground and just stare at the sky. Only one thing has to be tried: don’t look at anything. In the beginning you will fall again and again, you will forget again and again. You will not be able to remember continuously. Don’t be frustrated, it is natural because of so long a habit. Whenever you remember again, unfocus your eyes, make them loose, just look at the sky – not doing anything, just looking. Soon a time comes when you can see into the sky without trying to see anything there.

Then try it with your inner sky:

. . . if with the mind one then observes the mind . . .

Then close your eyes and look inside, not looking for anything, just the same absent look. Thoughts floating but you are not looking for them, or at them – you are simply looking. If they come it is good, if they don’t come it is good also. Then you will be able to see the gaps: one thought passes, another comes – and the gap. And then, by and by, you will be able to see that the thought becomes transparent, even when the thought is passing you continue to see the gap, you continue to see the hidden sky behind the cloud.

And the more you get attuned to this vision, thoughts will drop by and by, they will come less and less, less and less. The gaps will become wider. For minutes together no thought coming, everything is so quiet and silent inside – you are for the first time together. Everything feels absolutely blissful, no disturbance. And if this look becomes natural to you – it becomes, it is one of the most natural things; one just has to unfocus, decondition:

. . . one destroys distinctions . . . then there is nothing good, nothing bad; nothing ugly, nothing beautiful . . . and reaches Buddhahood.

Buddhahood means the highest awakening. When there are no distinctions, all divisions are lost, unity is attained, only one remains. You cannot even call it “one,” because that too is part of duality.

One remains, but you cannot call it “one,” because how can you call it “one” without deep down saying “two.” No, you don’t say that “one” remains, simply that “two” has disappeared, the many has disappeared. Now it is a vast oneness, there are no boundaries to anything.

One tree merging into another tree, earth merging into the trees, trees merging into the sky, the sky merging into the beyond . . . you merging in me, I merging in you . . . everything merging . . . distinctions lost, melting and merging like waves into other waves . . . a vast oneness vibrating, alive, without boundaries, without definitions, without distinctions . . . the sage merging into the sinner, the sinner merging into the sage . . . good becoming bad, bad becoming good . . . night turning into the day, the day turning into the night . . . life melting into death, death molding again into life – then everything has become one.

Only at this moment buddhahood is attained […]

When Buddha attained to the ultimate, the utterly ultimate enlightenment, he was asked, “What have you attained?” And he laughed and said, “Nothing – because whatsoever I have attained was already there inside me. It is not something new that I have achieved. It has always been there from eternity; it is my very nature. But I was not mindful about it, I was not aware of it. The treasure was always there, but I had forgotten about it.”

You have forgotten, that’s all – that’s your ignorance. Between a buddha and you there is no distinction as far as your nature is concerned, but only one distinction, and that distinction is that you don’t remember who you are – and he remembers. You are the same, but he remembers, and you don’t remember. He is awake, you are fast asleep, but your nature is the same.

Try to live it out in this way – Tilopa is talking about techniques – live in the world as if you are the sky, make it your very style of being. Somebody is angry at you, insulting – watch. If anger arises in you, watch; be a watcher on the hills, go on looking and looking and looking. And just by looking, without looking at anything, without getting obsessed by anything, when your perception becomes clear, suddenly, in a moment, in fact no time happens, suddenly, without time, you are fully awake; you are a buddha, you become the enlightened, the awakened one.

What does a buddha gain out of it? He gains nothing. Rather, on the contrary, he loses many things: the misery, the pain, the anguish, the anxiety, the ambition, the jealousy, the hatred, the possessiveness, the violence – he loses all. As far as what he attains, nothing. He attains that which was already there, he remembers.

-Osho

From Tantra: The Supreme Understanding, Discourse #2

The first part of this talk is here The Root Problem.

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.

Consider Your Essence as Light Rays Rising – Osho

Consider Your Essence as Light Rays Rising from Center to Center up the Vertebrae, and so Rises ‘Livingness’ in you.

The first technique:

Many yoga methods are based on this. First understand what it is, then the application. The vertebrae, the spine, is the base of both your body and mind. Your mind, your head, is the end part of your spine. The whole body is rooted in the spine. If the spine is young, you are young. If the spine is old, you are old. If you can keep your spine young, it is difficult to become old. Everything depends on your spine. If your spine is alive, you will have a very brilliant mind. If the spine is dull and dead, you will have a very dull mind. The whole yoga tries in many ways to make your spine alive, brilliant, filled with light, young and fresh.

The spine has two ends: the beginning is the sex center and the end is sahasrar, the seventh center at the top of the head. The beginning of the spine is attached to the earth, and sex is the most earthly thing in you. From the beginning center in your spine you are in contact with nature, with what Sankhya has called prakrati – the earth, the material. From the last center, or the second pole, sahasrar, in the head, you are in contact with the divine. These are the two poles of your existence. First is sex and second is the sahasrar. There is no word for sahasrar in English. These are the two poles. Either your life will be sex oriented or sahasrar oriented. Either your energy will be flowing down from the sex center back to the earth, or your energy will be released from the sahasrar into the cosmos. From the sahasrar you flow into the brahman, into the absolute Existence. From sex you flow down into the relative existence. These are the two flows, the two possibilities. Unless you start flowing upwards, your misery will never end. You may have glimpses of happiness, but only glimpses – and very illusory ones.

When the energy starts moving upwards you will have more and more real glimpses. And once it reaches the sahasrar and is released from there, you will have the absolute bliss with you. That is nirvana. Then there is no glimpse; you become the bliss itself. So the whole thing for yoga and tantra is how to move energy upwards through the vertebrae, through the spinal column, how to help it move against gravity. Sex is very easy because it follows gravitation. The earth is pulling everything down, back; your sex energy is pulled by the earth. You may not have heard it, but astronauts have felt this – that the moment they move beyond the earth’s gravity they don’t feel much sexuality. As the body loses weight, sexuality dissolves, disappears.

The earth is pulling your life energy down and this is natural, because the life energy comes from the earth. You eat food and you are creating life energy within you; it comes from the earth, and the earth is pulling it back. Everything goes to its source. And if it continues to move in this way, life energy going back again and again, and you are moving in a circle, you will go on moving for lives and lives. You can go on moving this way infinitely unless you take a jump just like the astronauts. Like the astronauts, you have to take a jump and move beyond the circle. Then the pattern of earth’s gravitation is broken. It can be broken!

The techniques for how it can be broken are here – for how the energy can move vertically and rise up within you, reaching new centers; for how new energies can be revealed within you, making you a new person with every move. And the moment the energy is released from your sahasrar, the opposite pole of sex, you are no more man. Then you don’t belong to this earth; you have become divine. That is what is meant when we say Krishna is God or Buddha is God. Their bodies are just like yours – their bodies will have to fall ill and they will have to die – everything happens in their bodies as it happens to you. Only one thing is not happening in their bodies which is happening to you: the energy has broken the gravitation pattern. […]

How can the pattern be broken? This technique is very useful for breaking the pattern. First understand something basic. One, if you have observed at all, you must have observed that your sex energy moves with imagination. Just through imagination your sex center starts functioning. Really, without imagination it cannot function. That is why if you are in love with someone it functions better – because with love imagination enters. If you are not in love it is very difficult. It will not function. […]

The sex center functions through imagination. That is why even in dreams you can get erections and ejaculations. They are actual. Dreams are just imagination. It has been observed that every man, if physically fit, will have at least ten erections in the night. With every movement of the mind, with only a slight thought of sex, the erection will come. Your mind has many energies, many faculties, and one is will. But you cannot will sex. For sex, will is impotent. If you try to love someone, you will feel you have gone impotent. So never try. Will never functions with sex; only imagination will function. Imagine, and the center will start to function. Why am I emphasizing this fact? Because if imagination helps the energy to move, then you can move it upwards or downwards just by imagination. You cannot move your blood by imagination; you cannot do anything else in the body by imagination. But sex energy can be moved by imagination. You can change its direction.

This sutra says, “Consider your essence as light rays” – think of yourself, your being, as light rays – “from center to center up the vertebrae” – up your spine – “and so rises ‘livingness’ in you.” Yoga has divided your spine into seven centers. The first is the sex center and the last is sahasrar, and between these two there are five centers. Some systems divide into nine, some into three, some into four. Division is not very meaningful; you can make your own division. Just five centers are enough to work with; the first is the sex center, the second is just behind the navel, the third is just behind the heart, the fourth is behind your two eyebrows, just in between, in the middle of the forehead. And the fifth, sahasrar, is just on the peak of your head.

These five will do.

This sutra says, “Consider yourself . . .,” which means imagine yourself – close your eyes and imagine yourself just as if you are light. This is not just imagination. In the beginning it is, but it is reality also because everything consists of light. Now science says that everything consists of electricity, and tantra has always said that everything consists of light particles – and you also. That is why the Koran says that God is light. You are light! Imagine first that you are just light rays; then move your imagination to the sex center. Concentrate your attention there and feel that light rays are rising upwards from the sex center, as if the sex center has become a source of light and light rays are moving in an upsurge – upwards towards the navel center. Division is needed because it will be difficult for you to connect your sex center with the sahasrar. So smaller divisions will be of help. If you can connect, no divisions are needed. You can just drop all divisions from your sex center onwards, and the energy, the life force will rise up as light towards the sahasrar. But divisions will be more helpful because your mind can conceive of smaller fragments more easily.

So just feel that the energy – just the light rays – is rising up from your sex center to your navel like a river of light. Immediately, you will feel a warmth rising in you. Soon your navel will become hot. You can feel the hotness; even others can feel that hotness. Through your imagination, the sex energy will have started to rise. When you feel that now the second center at the navel has become a source of light, that the rays are coming and being collected there, then start to move to the heart center. As the light reaches the heart center, as the rays are coming, your heartbeat will be changed. Your breathing will become deeper, and a warmth will come to your heart. Go on upwards.

Consider your essence as light rays from center to center up the vertebrae, and so rises ‘livingness’ in you. And as you will feel warmth, just side by side you will feel a “livingness,” a new life coming to you, an inward light rising up. Sex energy has two parts: one is physical and one is psychic. In your body everything has two parts. Just like your body and mind, everything within you has two parts – one material and the other spiritual. Sex energy has two parts. The material part is semen; it cannot rise upwards, there is no passage for it. Because of this, many physiologists of the West say that tantra and yoga methods are nonsense and they deny them completely. How can sex energy rise up? There is no passage and sex energy cannot rise. They are right and still wrong. Semen, the material part, cannot rise – but that is not the whole of it. Really, it is only the body of sex energy, it is not the sex energy. The sex energy is the psychic part of it, and the psychic part can rise. And for that psychic part, the spinal passage is used – the spinal passage and its centers. But that has to be felt and your feelings have gone dead.

I remember somewhere that a certain psychotherapist wrote about a patient, a woman. He was telling her to feel something, but the psychotherapist felt that whatever she did she was not feeling but thinking about feeling – and that is a different thing. So the therapist put his hand on the woman’s hand and pressed it, telling her to close her eyes and relate what she felt. She said immediately, “I feel your hand.”

But the therapist said, “No, this is not your feeling. This is just your thinking, your inference. I have put my hand in your hand; you say you are feeling my hand. But you are not. This is inference. What do you feel?”

So she said, “I feel your fingers.”

The therapist again said, “No, this is not feeling. Don’t infer anything. Just close your eyes and move to the place where my hand is; then tell me what you feel.”

Then she said, “Oh! I was missing the whole thing. I feel pressure and warmth.”

When a hand touches you, a hand is not felt. Pressure and warmth are felt. The hand is just inference, it is intellect, not feeling. Warmth and pressure, that is feeling. Now she was feeling. We have lost feeling completely. You will have to develop feeling; only then can you do such techniques. Otherwise, they will not function. You will just intellectualize, you will just think that you are feeling, and nothing will happen. That is why people come to me and say, “You tell us this technique is so significant, but nothing happens.” They have tried, but they are missing a dimension – the feeling dimension. So first you will have to develop that, and there are some methods which you can try.

You can do one thing. If you have a small child in your house, follow the child around for one hour every day. It will be better and more fulfilling than following a buddha. Allow the child to move on all fours, and you also move on all fours. Just follow the child moving on all fours, and you will feel for the first time a new life energy coming to you. You will again become a child. Look at the child and just follow. He will go to every corner; he will touch everything – not only touch, he will taste everything, he will smell everything. Just follow, and do whatsoever he is doing.

You were also a child once; you have done this. The child is feeling. He is not intellectualizing; he is not thinking. He feels a smell, so he moves to that corner from where it is coming. He sees an apple, so he tastes it. Just taste like a child. Watch when he is eating the apple, look at him: he is totally absorbed in it. The whole world has dropped, the world is no more there – only the apple. Even the apple is not and the child is not – only the eating. Just follow a small child for one hour. That hour will be so enriching, you will become again a child.

Your defense mechanisms will drop, your armor will drop, and you will start looking at the world as a child looks – from the feeling dimension. When you feel that now you can feel, not think, you will enjoy the texture of the carpet on which you are moving like a child, the pressure, the warmth – and just by innocently following a child. Man can learn much from children, and sooner or later your real innocence will erupt. You were once a child and you know what it means to be one. You have simply forgotten.

The feeling center must start functioning; only then will these techniques be of any help. Otherwise you will go on thinking that energy is rising, but there will be no feeling. And if there is no feeling, imagination is impotent, futile. Only a feeling imagination will give you a result. You can do many other things and there is no need to make a specific effort to do them. When you go to sleep just feel your bed, feel the pillow – the coldness. Just turn onto it; play with the pillow.

Close your eyes and listen to the noise of the air conditioner, or of the traffic, or of the clock, or anything. Just listen. Don’t label, don’t say anything. Don’t use the mind. Just live in the sensation. In the morning, in the first moment of waking, when you feel that now sleep has gone, don’t start thinking. For a few moments you can again be a child – innocent, fresh. Don’t start thinking. Don’t think about what you are going to do, and when you are starting for the office, and what train you are going to catch. Don’t start thinking. You will have enough time for all that nonsense. Just wait. For a few moments, just listen to the noise. A bird is singing, or the wind is passing through the trees, or a child is crying, or the milkman has come and is making sounds, or the milk is being poured. With anything that happens, feel it. Be sensitive to it, open to it. Allow it to happen to you, and your sensitivity will grow.

When taking a shower, feel it all over the body – every drop of water touching you. Feel the touch, the coldness, the warmth! Try this the whole day whenever you have the chance, and everywhere there is a chance – everywhere! When just breathing, feel the breath – its movement within and its going out – just feel it! Just feel your own body. You have not felt it.

We are so afraid of our own bodies. No one touches his own body in a loving way. Have you ever given any love to your own body? The whole civilization is afraid of anyone touching himself because from childhood touching has been denied. It appears to be masturbatory to touch oneself in a loving way. But if you cannot touch yourself in a loving way, your body will go dull and dead. It has gone so. Touch your eyes with your palms. Feel the touch, and your eyes will feel fresh and alive immediately. Feel your body all over. Feel your lover’s body, your friend’s body. Massage is good. Two friends can massage each other and feel each other’s bodies. You will become more sensitive.

Create sensitivity and feeling. Then it will be easy for you to do these techniques, and then you will feel “livingness” arising in you. Don’t leave this energy anywhere. Allow it to come to the sahasrar. Remember this: whenever you do this experiment, don’t leave it in the middle. You have to complete it. Take care that no one disturbs you. If you leave this energy somewhere in the middle, it can be harmful. It has to be released. So bring it to the head and feel as if your head has become an opening.

In India we have pictured sahasrar as a lotus – as a thousand-petalled lotus. Sahasra means a thousand petalled – an opening of a thousand petals. Just conceive of the lotus with a thousand petals opened and from every petal this light energy is moving into the cosmos. Again, this is a love act – not with nature now, but with the ultimate. Again, it is an orgasm.

There are two types of orgasms: one is sexual and the other spiritual. The sexual comes from the lowest center and the spiritual from the highest center. From the highest you meet the highest and from the lowest you meet the lowest. Even while actually in the sex act, you can do this exercise; both the partners can do this. Move the energy upwards, and then the sex act becomes tantra sadhana; it becomes meditation.

But don’t leave the energy somewhere in the body at some center. Someone may come and you will have some business, or some phone call will come and you will have to stop. So do it at such a time that no one will disturb you, and don’t leave the energy in any center. Otherwise, that center where you leave the energy will become a wound, and you may create many mental illnesses. So be aware; otherwise, don’t do this. This method needs absolute privacy and no disturbance, and it must be done completely. The energy must come to the head, and it should be released from there.

You will have various experiences. When you will feel that the rays are starting to come up from the sex center, there will be erections or sensations at the sex center. Many, many people come to me very afraid and scared. They say that whenever they start meditation, when they start to move deep, there is an erection. They wonder, “What is this?” They are afraid because they think that in meditation sex should not be there. But you don’t know life’s functioning. It is a good sign. It shows that energy is now there alive. Now it needs movement. So don’t become scared and don’t think that something is wrong. It is a good sign. When you start meditation, the sex center will become more sensitive, alive, excited, and in the beginning the excitement will be just the same as any sexual excitement – but only in the beginning. As your meditation becomes deeper, you will feel energy flowing up. As the energy flows, the sex center becomes silent, less excited.

When the energy will really move to the sahasrar, there will be no sensation at the sex center. It will be totally still and silent. It will have become completely cool, and the warmth will have come to the head. And this is physical. When the sex center is excited, it becomes hot; you can feel that hotness, it is physical. When the energy moves, the sex center will become cooler and cooler and cooler, and the hotness will come to the head.

You will feel dizzy. When the energy comes to the head, you will feel dizzy. Sometimes you may even feel nausea because for the first-time energy has come to the head and your head is not acquainted with it. It has to become tuned. So don’t become afraid. Sometimes you may immediately become unconscious, but don’t be afraid. This happens. If so much energy moves suddenly and explodes in the head, you may become unconscious. But that unconsciousness cannot remain for more than one hour. Within one hour the energy automatically falls back or is released. You cannot remain that way for more than one hour. I say one hour, but in fact it is exactly forty-eight minutes. It cannot be more than that. It never has been in millions of years of experiments, so don’t be afraid. If you do become unconscious, it is okay. After that unconsciousness you will feel so fresh that it is as if you have been in sleep for the first time, in the deepest sleep.

Yoga calls it by a special name – Yoga Tandra: yogic sleep. It is very deep; you move to your deepest center. But don’t be afraid. And if your head becomes hot, it is a good sign. Release the energy. Feel as if your head is opening like a lotus flower – as if energy is being released into the cosmos. As the energy is released, you will feel a coldness coming to you. You have never felt the coldness that comes after this hotness. But do the technique completely; never do it incompletely.

-Osho

From The Book of Secrets, Discourse #47

Here you can listen to the discourse excerpt Consider Your Essence as Light Rays Rising.

Osho Tantra and the Secrets of Meditations.

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.

Tantra Believes in You – Osho

Man can be considered in three ways: in terms of the normal, the abnormal and the supernormal. Western psychology is basically concerned with the abnormal, the pathological, with the man who has fallen down from the normal, who has fallen down from the norm. Eastern psychology, tantra and yoga, consider man from the standpoint of the supernormal – of the one who has gone beyond the norm. Both are abnormal. One who is pathological is abnormal because he is not healthy, and one who is supernormal is abnormal because he is more healthy than any normal human being. The difference is of negative and positive.

Western psychology developed as part of psychotherapy. Freud, Jung, Adler and other psychologists were treating the abnormal man, the man who is mentally ill. Because of this the whole Western attitude towards man has become erroneous. Freud was studying pathological cases. Of course, no healthy man would go to him – only those who were mentally ill. They were studied by him, and because of that study, he thought that now he understood man. Pathological men are not really men, they are ill, and anything based on a study of them is bound to be deeply erroneous and harmful. This has proved harmful because man is looked at from a pathological standpoint. If a particular state of mind is chosen and that state is ill, pathological, then the whole image of man becomes disease-based. Because of this attitude, the whole Western society has fallen down – because the ill man is the base, the perverted has become the foundation.

And if you study only the abnormal, you cannot conceive of any possibility of supernormal beings. A buddha is impossible for Freud, not conceivable. He must be fictitious, mythological. A buddha cannot be a reality. Freud has only come in contact with ill men who are not even normal, and whatsoever he says about normal man is based on the study of abnormal man. It is just like a physician who is doing a study. No healthy man will go to him, there is no need. Only unhealthy people will go. By studying so many unhealthy people, he creates a picture in his mind of man, but that picture cannot be of man. It cannot be because man is not only illnesses. And if you base your concept of man on illnesses, the whole society will suffer.

Eastern psychology, particularly tantra and yoga, also has a concept of man, but that concept is based on the study of the supernormal – Buddha, Patanjali, Shankara, Nagarjuna, Kabir, Nanak – on persons who have reached to the peak of human potentiality and possibility. The lowest has not been considered, only the highest. If you consider the highest your mind becomes an opening; you can grow because now you know higher reaches are possible. If you consider the lowest, no growth is possible. There is no challenge. If you are normal you feel happy. It is enough that you are not perverted, that you are not in a mental asylum. You can feel good, but there is no challenge.

But if you seek the supernormal, the highest possibility that you can become, if someone has become that possibility, if that possibility has become actual in someone, then a possibility for growth opens. You can grow. A challenge comes to you, and you need not be satisfied with yourself. Higher reaches are possible and they are calling you. This must be understood deeply. Only then will the psychology of tantra be conceivable. Whatsoever you are is not the end. You are just in the middle. You can fall down, you can rise up. Your growth has not finished. You are not the end product; you are just a passage. Something is constantly growing in you.

Tantra conceives of, and bases its whole technique on, this possibility of growth. And remember, unless you become that which you can become, you will not be fulfilled. You must become that which you can become – it is a must! Otherwise you will be frustrated, you will feel meaningless, you will feel that there is no purpose in life. You can carry on, but there can be no joy in it. And you may succeed in many other things, but you will fail with yourself. And this is happening. Someone becomes very rich and everyone thinks that now he has succeeded. Everyone except himself thinks that he has succeeded. He knows his failure. Wealth is there, but he has failed. You are a great man, a leader, a politician. Everyone thinks that they have succeeded, but they have failed. This world is strange: you succeed in everyone’s eyes except your own.

People come to me daily. They say they have everything, but now what? They are failures, but where have they failed? As far as outward things are concerned they have not failed, so why do they feel this failure? Their inner potentiality has remained potent. They have not flowered. They have not achieved what Maslow calls “self-actualization.” They are failures – inner failures, and ultimately, what others say is meaningless. What you feel is meaningful. If you feel that you are a failure, others may think that you are a Napoleon or an Alexander the Great, but it makes no difference. Rather, it depresses you more. Everyone thinks that you are a success, and now you cannot say that you are not – but you know you are not. You cannot deceive yourself. As far as self-actualization is concerned you cannot deceive. Sooner or later, you will have to call upon yourself and look deeply into yourself at what has happened. The life is wasted. You have given up an opportunity and gathered things which mean nothing.

Self-actualization refers to the highest peak of your growth, where you can feel a deep content, where you can say, “This is my destiny, this is for what I was meant, this is why I am here on earth.” Tantra is concerned with that self-actualization – with how to help you grow more. And remember, tantra is concerned with you, not with ideals. Tantra is not concerned with ideals; it is concerned with you as you are and as you can become. The difference is great. All teachings are concerned with ideals. They say become like Buddha, become like Jesus, become like this or that. They have ideals, and you have to become like those ideals. Tantra has no ideal for you. Your unknown ideal is hidden within you; it cannot be given to you. You are not to become Buddha, there is no need. One Buddha is enough, and no repetition is of any value. Existence is always unique, it never repeats; repetition is boredom. Existence is always new, eternally new, so even a Buddha is not repeated – such a beautiful phenomenon left unrepeated.

Why? Because even if a Buddha is repeated it will create boredom. What is the use? Only the unique is meaningful; copies are not meaningful. Only if you are firsthand is your destiny fulfilled. If you are secondhand, you have missed.

So tantra never says be like this or that; there is no ideal. Tantra never talks about ideals; hence, the name “tantra.” Tantra talks about techniques – never about ideals. It talks of how you can become; it never says what. It exists because of that how. Tantra means technique; the very word tantra means technique. It is concerned with “how” you can become, it is not concerned with what. That “what” will be supplied by your growth. Just use the technique, and by and by your inner potentiality will become actual. The uncharted possibility will become opened, and as it opens you will realize what it is. And no one can say what it is. Unless you become it, no one can predict what you can become.

So tantra gives you only techniques – never ideals. This is how it is different from all moral teachings. Moral teachings always give ideals. Even if they talk about techniques, those techniques are always for particular ideals. Tantra gives no ideal to you; you are the ideal, and your future is unknown. No ideal from the past can be of any help because nothing can be repeated, and if it is repeated, it is meaningless.

Zen monks say to remember and be alert. If you meet Buddha in your meditation, kill him immediately; don’t allow him to stand there. Zen monks are Buddha’s followers, and yet they say kill Buddha immediately if you meet him in your meditation, because the personality, the ideal of Buddha may become so hypnotizing that you may forget yourself, and if you forget yourself you have missed the path. Buddha is not the ideal; you are the ideal, your unknown future. That has to be discovered.

Tantra gives you techniques of discovery. The treasure is within you. So remember this second thing: it is very difficult to believe that you are the ideal – difficult for you to believe because everyone is condemning you. No one accepts you, not even you yourself. You go on condemning yourself. You always think in terms of being like someone else, and that is false, dangerous. If you go on thinking like that you will become a fake and everything will be phony. Do you know from where the word ‘phony’ comes? It comes from telephone. In the early days of the telephone, the transmission was so false, so unreal, that a real voice and a phony voice were heard from the telephone – a phony voice that was mechanical. The real voice was lost – just in those beginning days. From there comes the word phony. If you are imitating someone else, you will become phony, you will not be real. A mechanical device will be there all around you, and your reality, your real voice, will be lost. So don’t be phony, be real.

Tantra believes in you. That is why there are so few believers in tantra – because no one believes in himself. Tantra believes in you and says that you are the ideal, so don’t imitate anyone. Imitation will create a pseudo personality around you. You can go on moving with that pseudo personality thinking it is yourself, but it is not. So the second thing to remember is that there is no fixed ideal. You cannot think in terms of the future; you can only think in terms of the present – just the immediate future in which you can grow. No fixed future is there, and it is good that there is no fixed future; otherwise there would be no freedom. If there were a fixed future, man would be a robot.

You have no fixed future. You have multi possibilities; you can grow in many ways. But the only thing that will give you ultimate contentment is that you grow – that you grow in such a way that every growth produces further growth. Techniques are helpful because they are scientific. You are saved from unnecessary wandering, unnecessary groping. If you don’t know any techniques, you will take many lives. You will reach the goal because the life energy within you will move unless it comes to the point where no movement is possible. It will go on moving to the highest peak, and that is the reason why one goes on being born again and again. Left to yourself you will reach – but you will have to travel very, very long, and the journey will be very tedious and boring.

With a master, with scientific techniques, you can save much time, opportunity and energy. And sometimes within seconds you can grow so much that within lives even you will not be able to grow that much. If a right technique is used growth explodes, and these techniques have been used in millions of years of experiments. They were not devised by one man; they were devised by many, many seekers, and only the essence is given here. In these one hundred and twelve techniques, all techniques from all over the world have been covered. Nowhere does there exist any technique which has not been covered in this one hundred and twelve; they are the whole spiritual search in essence. But all the techniques are not for everyone, so you will have to try them out. Only certain techniques will be helpful to you, and you will have to find them out. There are two ways: either by your own trial and error, until you stumble upon something which starts working and you start growing, and then you move in it; or you surrender to some teacher and he finds out what will suit you. These are the two ways. You can choose.

-Osho

From The Book of Secrets, Discourse #47

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.

Let Attention be at a Place Where you are Seeing Some Past Happening – Osho

Let attention be at a place where you are seeing some past happening, and even your form, having lost its present characteristics, is transformed.

You are remembering your past – any happening – your childhood, your love affairs, the death of your father or mother . . . anything. Look at it, but do not get involved in it. Remember it as if you are remembering someone else’s life. And when this happening is being filmed again, is on the screen again, be attentive, aware, a witness, remaining aloof. Your past form will be there in the film, in the story.

If you are remembering your love affair, your first love affair, you will be there with your beloved; your past form will be there with your beloved. You cannot remember otherwise. Be detached from your past form also. Look at the whole phenomenon as if someone else were loving someone else, as if the whole thing doesn’t belong to you. You are just a witness, an observer.

This is a very, very basic technique. It has been used much, particularly by Buddha. There are many forms of this technique; you can find your own way of approaching this. For example, when you are just falling into sleep at night, just ready to fall into sleep, go backwards through the memories of the whole day. Do not start from the morning. Start right from where you are, just on the bed – the last item – and then go back. Then go back by and by, step by step, just to the first experience in the morning when you first became awake. Go back, and remember continuously that you are not getting involved.

For example, in the afternoon someone insulted you. See yourself, the form of yourself, being insulted by someone, but you remain just an observer. Do not get involved; do not get angry again. If you get angry again, then you are identified. Then you have missed the point of meditation. Do not get angry. He is not insulting you, he is insulting the form that was in the afternoon. That form has gone now.

You are just like a river flowing: the forms are flowing. In your childhood you had one form, and now you do not have that form; that form has gone. River-like, you are changing continuously. So when in the night you are meditating backwards on the happenings of the day, just remember that you are a witness – do not get angry. Someone was praising you – do not get elated. Just look at the whole thing as if you are looking indifferently at a film. And backwards it is very helpful, particularly for those who have any trouble with sleep.

If you have any trouble with sleep, insomnia, sleeplessness, if you find it difficult to fall into sleep, this will help deeply. Why? because this is an unwinding of the mind. When you go back you are unwinding the mind. In the morning you start winding, and the mind becomes tangled in many things, in many places. Unfinished and incomplete, many things will remain on the mind, and there is no time to let them settle at the very moment that they happen.

So in the night go back. This is an unwinding process. And when you will be getting back to the morning when you were just on your bed, to the first thing in the morning, you will again have the same fresh mind that you had in the morning. And then you can fall asleep like a very small child. You can use this technique of going back for your whole life also. Mahavira used this technique of going back very much. And now there is a movement in America called dianetics. They are using this method and finding it very, very useful. This movement, dianetics, says that all your diseases are just hangovers of the past. And they are right. If you can go backwards and unwind your whole life, with that unwinding many diseases will disappear completely. And this has been proven by so many successful incidents; there are so many successful cases now.

So many persons suffer from a particular disease, and nothing physiological, nothing medical helps; the disease continues. The disease seems to be psychological. What to do about it? To say to someone that his disease is psychological is no help. Rather, it may prove harmful, because no one feels good when you say his disease is psychological. What can he do then? He feels he is helpless.

This going backwards is a miraculous method. If you go back slowly – slowly unwinding the mind to the first moment when this disease happened – if by and by you go back to when for the first time you were attacked by this disease, if you can unwind to that moment, you will come to know that this disease is basically a complex of certain other things, certain psychological things. By going back those things will bubble up.

If you pass through that moment when the disease first attacked you, suddenly you will become aware of what psychological factors contributed to it. And you are not to do anything, you are just to be aware of those psychological factors and go on backwards. Many diseases simply disappear from you because the complex is broken. When you have become aware of the complex, then there is no need of it; you are cleaned of it, purged.

This is a deep catharsis. And if you can do it daily, you will feel a new health, a new freshness coming to you. And if we can teach children to do it daily, they will never be burdened by their past. They will not need ever to go to the past, they will be always here and now. There won’t be any hang-up; nothing will be hovering over them from the past.

You can do it daily. It will give you a new insight for going backward through the whole day. The mind would like to start from the morning, but remember, then there is no unwinding. Rather, the whole thing is re-emphasized. If you start from the morning, you are doing a very wrong thing.

There are many so-called teachers in India who suggest to do it – to reflect on the whole day – and they always say to do it again from the morning. That is wrong and harmful, because then you are re-emphasizing the whole thing and the trap will be deepened. Never go from the morning to the evening, always go backward. Only then can you clean the whole thing, purge the whole thing. The mind would like to start from the morning because it is easy: the mind knows it and there is no problem. If you start going backward, suddenly you will feel you have jumped into the morning and you have started going forward again. Do not do that – be aware, go back.

You can train your mind to go back through other things also. Just go back from a hundred – 99, 98, 97. . . go back. Go from a hundred to one, backwards. You will feel a difficulty because the mind has a habit to go from one to hundred, never from a hundred to one.

In the same way you have to go backward with this technique. What will happen? Going backward, unwinding the mind, you are a witness. You are seeing things that happened to you, but now they are not happening to you. Now you are just an observer and they are happening on the screen of the mind.

While doing this daily, suddenly one day you will become aware during the day, while working in the market, in your office or anywhere, that you can be a witness to events that are happening just now. If you can be a witness later on, and look back at someone who had insulted you without becoming angry about it, why not right now, to what is presently happening?

Someone is insulting you: what is the difficulty? You can pull yourself aside just now and you can see that someone is insulting you, and still you are different from your body, from your mind, from that which is insulted. You can witness it. If you can be a witness to this, you will not get angry; then it is impossible. Anger is possible only when you are identified. If you are not identified, anger is impossible – anger means identification.

This technique says, look at any happening of the past – your form will be there. The sutra says your form, not you. You were never there. Always your form is involved; you are never involved. When you insult me, you do not insult ME. You cannot insult me, you can insult only the form. The form which I am is there just here and now for you. You can insult that form and I can detach myself from the form. That is why Hindus have always been insisting on being detached from name and form. You are neither your name nor your form. You are the consciousness who knows the form and the name, and the consciousness is different, totally different.

But it is difficult. So start with the past, then it is easy, because now, with the past there is no urgency. Someone insulted you twenty years back, so there is no urgency in it. The man may have died and everything is finished. It is just a dead affair, just dead from the past; it is easy to be aware of it. But once you can become aware there is no difficulty in doing the same with what is happening just here and now.

But to start from here and now is difficult. The problem is so urgent and it is so near that there is no space to move. It is difficult to create space and move away from the incident. That is why the sutra says to start with the past: look at your own form, detached, standing aloof and different, and be transformed through it.

You will be transformed through it because it is a deep cleaning, an unwinding. Then you can know that your body, your mind, your existence in time are not your basic reality. The substantial reality is different. Things come and go upon it without touching it in the least. You remain innocent, untouched; you remain virgin. The whole thing passes, the whole life passes: good and bad, success and failure, praise and blame – everything passes. Disease and health, youth and old age, birth and death – everything passes, and you are untouched by it.

But how to know this untouched reality within you? That is the purpose of this technique. Start with the past. There is a gap when you look at your past; the perspective is possible. Or look at the future. But to look at the future is difficult. Only for a few persons is observing the future not difficult – for poets, for people with imagination who can look into the future as if they are looking at reality. But ordinarily the past is good to use; you can look into the past. For young men it may be good to look into the future. It is easier for them to look into the future because youth is future-oriented.

For old men there is no future except death. They cannot look into the future; they are afraid. That is why old men always start thinking about the past. They always go again and again into their memories, but they commit the same mistake. They start from the past toward their present state of being – that is wrong, they should go backward.

If they can go backward many times, by and by they will feel that their whole past is washed away from them. And then a person can die without the past clinging to him. If you can die without the past clinging to you, you will die consciously; you will die fully aware. Then death will not be a death to you. Rather, it will be a meeting with the deathless.

Clean the whole consciousness of the depth of the past, and your very being will be transformed through it. Try this. This method is not very difficult, only persistent effort is needed; there is no inherent difficulty in the method. It is simple, and you can start with your day. Just tonight on your bed go backward, and you will feel very beautiful, you will feel very blissful. And then the whole day will have passed. But do not be in a hurry, pass it slowly so that nothing is missed. It is a very strange feeling, because many things will come up before your eyes. Many things you have really missed while passing through the day because you were too much engaged. But the mind goes on collecting even when you are unaware.

You were passing through a street. Someone was singing, but you might not have paid any attention. You might not have even been aware that you have heard the sound, just passing in the street. But the mind has heard and recorded it. Now that will cling; that will become a burden to you unnecessarily. So go back, but go very slowly, as if a film is being shown to you in very slow motion. Go back and see the details, and then your one day will look very, very long. It is, really, because for the mind there has been so much information, and the mind has recorded everything. Now go back.

By and by you will become capable of knowing everything that has been recorded. And once you can go back, it is just like a tape recorder: it is washed away. By the time you will reach the morning you will fall asleep, and the quality of the sleep will be different – it will be meditative. Then again, in the morning when you feel that you have awakened, do not open your eyes immediately. Go backward into the night.

It will be difficult in the beginning. You may go a little. Some part, some fragment of a dream which you were just dreaming before the sleep was broken may come to your mind. But by and by, with gradual effort, you will be able to penetrate more and more and more, and after a three-month period you will be capable of moving backward to the point when you fell asleep. And if you can go backward deep within your sleep, your quality of sleep and waking will change completely, because then you cannot dream; dreaming will have become futile. If you can go back in the day and in the night, dreaming is not needed.

Now psychologists say that dreaming is really an unwinding. If you yourself have done it, then there is no need. All that has been hanging in the mind, all that has remained unfulfilled, incomplete, tries to complete itself in the dream.

You were passing and you have seen something – a beautiful house – and a subtle desire arose in you to possess it. But you were going to your office and that was no time for daydreaming, so you just passed by. You did not even notice that the mind had created a desire to possess this house. But now that desire is hanging there, suspended, and if it cannot be removed it will be difficult to sleep.

Difficulties in sleep basically mean only one thing, that your day is still hanging over you and you cannot be relieved of it. You are clinging to it. Then in the night you will see a dream that you have become the owner of this house – now you are living in this house. The moment this dream comes to you, your mind is relieved.

So ordinarily people think that dreams are disturbances to sleep – that is absolutely wrong. Dreams are not disturbances to your sleep. They are not disturbing your sleep, they are really helping; without them you could not sleep at all. As you are you cannot sleep without dreams, because your dreams are helping to complete things which have remained incomplete.

And there are things which cannot be completed. Your mind goes on desiring absurd desires, and they cannot be completed in reality, so what to do? Those incomplete desires go on in you, and they keep you hoping, they keep you thinking. So what to do? You have seen a beautiful woman and you were attracted to her. Now the desire has arisen to possess her. It may not be possible, the woman may not even look at you. So what to do? The dream will help you.

In a dream you can possess the woman, and then the mind is relieved. As far as the mind is concerned, there is no difference between dream and reality. What is the difference? Loving a woman in reality and loving a woman in a dream, what is the difference for the mind? There is no difference. Or this may be the difference, that the dream phenomenon may be more beautiful, because then the woman will not disturb you. It is your dream and you can do anything, and the woman will not create any problems for you. The other is absent completely, you are alone. There is no barrier, so you can do whatsoever you like.

There is no difference for the mind; mind cannot make any distinction between what is dream and what is reality. For example, if you could be put in a coma for one whole year, and you dream on and on, for one year you will not be able to feel in any way that whatsoever you are seeing is a dream. It will be real, and the dream will continue for one year.

Psychologists say that if you can put a man in a coma for a hundred years he will dream for a hundred years, not for a single moment suspecting that whatsoever he is doing is just a dream. And if he dies he will never know that his life was just a dream, that it was never real. For the mind there is no difference: reality and dream are both the same. So mind can unwind itself in dream.

If you do this technique, then there will be no need for dreams. The quality of your sleep will be changed totally, because without dreams you fall to the very bottom of your being, and without dreams you will be aware in your sleep. That is what Krishna says in the Gita, that while everyone is deeply asleep the yogi is not, the yogi is awake. That doesn’t mean that the yogi is not sleeping – he is also sleeping, but the quality of the sleep is different. Your sleep is just like a drugged unconsciousness. A yogi’s sleep is a deep relaxation with no unconsciousness. His whole body is relaxed; every fiber and cell of his whole body is relaxed, with no tension left. But he is fully aware of the whole phenomenon.

Try this technique. Start from tonight, try it, and then do it in the morning also. And when you feel that you are attuned to the technique, that you can do it, after one week try it for your whole past. Just take one day off. Go to some lonely place. It will be good if you fast – fast and be silent. Lie down on some lonely beach or under some tree, and just move toward your past from this point: you are lying on the beach feeling the sand and the sun, and now move backward. Go on penetrating, penetrating, penetrating, and find out the last thing that you can remember.

You will be surprised. Ordinarily you cannot remember much, and you cannot pass the barrier of four or five years of age. Those who have a very good memory may go back to the age barrier of three years, but then suddenly a block comes and everything goes dark. But if you try with this technique, by and by you will break the barrier, and very easily you can come to remember the first day you were born. And that is a revelation.

Back again with your sun and beach, you will be a different man. If you make more effort, you can penetrate to the womb. And you have memories of the womb – nine months of memories with your mother. That nine-month period is also recorded in the mind. When your mother was depressed, you have recorded it because you felt depressed. You were so connected with the mother, so united, so one, that whatsoever happened to your mother was happening to you. When she was angry, you were angry. When she was happy, you were happy. When she was praised, you felt praised. When she was ill, you felt the pain, the suffering, everything.

If you can penetrate to the womb, now you are on the right track. And then, by and by, you can penetrate more and you can remember the first moment when you entered the womb. Only because of this remembrance, Mahavira and Buddha could say that there are past lives, rebirth. Rebirth is not really a principle, it is just a deep psychological experience. And if you can remember the first moment you entered the womb of your mother, then you can penetrate more and you can remember the death of your past life. Once you touch that point then the method is in your hands; then you can move very easily to all your past lives.

This is an experience, and the result is phenomenal, because then you know that through many, many lives you have lived the same nonsense that you are living now. You have been doing this whole nonsense so many times, repeatedly. The pattern is the same, the format is the same, only the details differ. You loved some other woman, now you love this woman. You gathered money . . . the coins were of one kind, now the coins are different. But the whole pattern is the same; it is repetitive.

Once you can see that for many, many lives you have lived the same nonsense, how stupid has been this whole vicious circle, suddenly you are awakened and the whole thing becomes a dream. You are thrown away from it, and now you do not want to repeat the same thing in the future.

Desire stops, because desire is nothing but the past being projected into the future. Desire is nothing but your past experience in search of another repetition again. Desire means just an old experience that you want to repeat again – nothing else. And you cannot leave desire unless you become aware of this whole phenomenon. How can you leave it? The past is there as a great barrier, a rock-like barrier. It is upon your head; it is pushing you toward the future. Desires are created by the past and projected into the future. If you can know the past as a dream, all desires become impotent. They fall down, they just wither away – and the future disappears. In that disappearance of past and future, you are transformed.

-Osho

From The Book of Secrets, Discourse #15

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.

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