The Bridegroom is Waiting for You – Osho

Now, try to understand these sutras of Patanjali.

The seen which is composed of the elements and the sense organs is of the nature of stability, action, and inertia, and is for the purpose of providing experience and thus liberation to the seer.

 The first thing to be understood is that the world exists for you to be liberated. Many a time the question has arisen in your mind: “Why does this world exist? Why is there so much suffering? For what? What is the purpose of it?” Many people come to me and they say, “This is the ultimate question — ‘Why are we at all?’ And if life is such a suffering, what is the purpose of it? If there exists a God, why can’t he destroy all this chaos? Why can’t he destroy this whole suffering life, this hell? Why does he go on forcing people to live in it?” Yoga has the answer: Patanjali says, ” . . . for the purpose of providing experience and thus liberation to the seer.”

It is a training; suffering is a training — because there is no possibility of becoming mature without suffering. It is like fire: the gold, to be pure, has to pass through it. If the gold says. “Why!” then the gold remains impure, worthless. Only by passing through the fire will all that is not gold be burned, and only the purest gold will remain. That’s what liberation is all about: a maturity, a growth so ultimate that only the purity, only the innocence remains, and all that was useless has been burned.

There is no other way to realize it. There cannot be any other way to realize it. If you want to know what satiety is, you will have to know hunger. If you want to avoid hunger, you will avoid satiety also. If you want to know what deep quenching is, you will have to know thirst, deep thirst. If you say, “I don’t want to be thirsty,” then you will miss that beautiful moment of deep quenching of the thirst. If you want to know what light is, you will have to pass through a dark night; the dark night prepares you to realize what light is. If you want to know what life is, you will have to pass through death; death creates the sensitivity in you to know life. They are not opposites; they are complementary.

There is nothing which is opposite in the world; everything is complementary. “This” world exists so that you can know “that” world; “this” exists to know “that.” The material exists to know the spiritual; the hell exists to come to heaven. This is the purpose. And if you want to avoid one you avoid both, because they are two aspects of the same thing. Once you understand, there is no suffering: you know this is training, a discipline. Discipline is to be hard. It has to be hard because only then will real maturity come out of it.

Yoga says this world exists as a training school, a learning school — don’t avoid it and don’t try to escape from it. Rather live it and live it so totally that you need not be forced again to live it. That’s the meaning when we say that an enlightened person never comes back — there is no need. He has passed all the examination that life provides. He need not come back. You have to be forced again and again to the same life pattern because you don’t learn. You go on repeating the experience without learning. The same experience you repeat again and again — the same anger. How many, how many thousand times have you been angry? Count it. What have you learned out of it? Nothing. Whenever the situation arises, you will be angry again — the same, as if it is for the first time that you are getting into anger.

How many times has greed, lust possessed you? Again, it will possess. And again, you will react in the old way — as if you have decided not to learn. And to be ready to learn is to be ready to become a yogi. If you have decided not to learn, if you want to remain blindfolded, if you want to repeat the same nonsense again and again; then you will have to be thrown back: you will have to be sent back to the same class — unless you pass.

Don’t take life in any other way. It is a vast training school, the only university there is. The word “university” comes from “universe.” In fact, no university should call itself “university”; the name is too big. The whole universe is the only university. But you have created small universities, and you think that when you pass through them you have become entitled, as if you have become a knower. No, these small, man-made universities won’t do. You will have to pass through this university your whole life.

Says Patanjali, ” . . . for the purpose of providing experience and thus liberation . . .” Experience is liberating. Jesus has said, “Know the truth and the truth will liberate you.” Whenever you experience a thing, alert, aware, fully watching what is happening — participating and watching together — -it is liberating. Immediately, something arises out of it: an experience which becomes true. You have not borrowed it from scriptures; you have not borrowed it from somebody else.

Experience cannot be borrowed; only theories can be borrowed. That’s why all theories are dirty, because they have been passing through so many hands, so many millions of hands. They are just like dirty currency notes. Experience is ever fresh — fresh like the dew in the morning, fresh like this morning’s rose. Experience is always innocent and virgin — nobody has ever touched it. You come upon it for the first time. Your experience is yours, it is nobody else’s, and nobody Can give it to you.

Buddhas can indicate the way, but you have to walk. No Buddha can walk for you; there is no possibility. A Buddha cannot give his eyes to you so that you can look through them. Even if the Buddha gives you the eyes, you will change the eyes — the eyes will not be able to change you. When the eyes will be fit into your mechanism, your mechanism will change the eyes themselves, but the eyes cannot change you. They are parts; you are a very big phenomenon.

I cannot lend my hand to you. Even if I do, the touch will not be mine, it will be yours. When you will go and feel something — even from my hand — it will be you who will feel, not my hand. There is no possibility of borrowing reality.

Experience liberates. Every day I come across people who say, “How is one to get free from anger? How is one to get free from sex, lust? How is one to get free from this and that?” And when I say, “Live it through,” they are shocked. They had come to me in search of a method to repress themselves. And if they had gone to another guru in India, they would have found some method to repress themselves with. But repression can never be liberating, because repression means repressing experience. Repression means cutting all the roots of experience. It can never be liberating. Repression is the greatest bondage that you can find anywhere.

You live in a cage. Just the other day, one new sannyasin told me, “I feel like an animal in a cage.” There is every possibility that he meant that he wanted me to help him so that the animal is killed, because we say “animal” only when we condemn. The very word carries condemnation. But when I told the sannyasin, “Yes, I will help you. I will break the cage and make the animal completely free,” he was a little shocked; because when you say “animal” you have already valued it, condemned it — it is not a simple fact. In the very word “animal” or “animality” you have said everything that you wanted to say. You don’t accept it. You don’t want to live it. That’s why you have created the cage.

Cage is character. All characters are cages, imprisonments, chains around you. And men of character are imprisoned men. A really awakened man is not a man of character. He is alive. He is fully alive, but he has no character, because he has no cage. He lives spontaneously; he lives through awareness — so nothing can go wrong — but he has no cage around him to protect him.

The cage is a substitute for awareness. If you want to live a sleepy life you need character, so the character gives you guidelines. Then you need not be alert. You are going to steal something — the character just hinders you: it says, “No! This is wrong! This is sin! You will suffer in hell! Have you forgotten the whole Bible? Have you forgotten all the punishment that a man has to go through?” This is character. This is just hindering you. You want to steal; character is just a hindrance.

A man of awareness will not steal, but he has no character; and that is the miracle and the beauty. He has no character, and he will not steal, because he understands. Not that he is afraid of sin — there is nothing like sin; at the most, errors — nothing like sin. He is not afraid of being punished, because punishment is not in the future — it is not that sins are punished, in fact: sins are the punishment. It is not that you are angry today and tomorrow you will be punished or in the next life — sheer nonsense. When you put your hand in the fire today, do you think it will be burned in the next life? When you put your hand in the fire today it burns today; immediately it burns. Putting the hand in and the burning of it — all simultaneous. Not even a single moment’s gap. Life never believes in the future because life is only present.

Not that sins will be punished in the future, sins are the punishment. Intrinsic punishment is there: you steal and you are punished. In the very stealing you are punished — because you are more imprisoned: you will become more afraid; you will not be able to face the world; continuously, you will feel some guilt, you have done something wrong, any moment you can be caught. You are already caught! Maybe nobody ever catches you and no court punishes you — and there is no other heavenly court anywhere — but you are caught. You are caught by yourself. How will you forget it? How will you forgive yourself? How will you undo the thing that you have done? It will linger and linger. It will follow you like a shadow; it will haunt you like a ghost. It itself is the punishment.

Character hinders you from committing wrong things, but it cannot hinder you from thinking them. But to steal or to think about it is the same. To commit a murder really and just to think about it is the same, because as far as your consciousness is concerned you have committed it if you have thought about it. It never became action because the character hindered you; if the character was not there it would have become action. So in fact character, at the most, does this: it hinders the thought; it doesn’t allow it to be transformed into action.

It is good for the society, but nothing good for you. It protects the society; your character protects the society. Your character protects others, that’s all. That’s why every society insists on character, morality, this and that; but it does not protect you.

You can be protected only in awareness. And how to gain awareness? There is no other way except to live life in its totality. ” . . . for the purpose of providing experience and thus liberation to the seer.”

“The seen which is composed of the elements and the sense organs is of the nature of . . .” three gunas. Yoga believes in three gunas: sattva, rajas, tamas. Sattva is the quality which makes things stable; rajas is the quality which gives action; and tamas is the quality which is inertia. These three are the basic qualities. Through these three this whole world exists. This is the yoga trinity.

Now physicists are ready to agree with yoga. They have split the atom and they have come across three things: electrons, neutrons, protons. Those three are of the same three qualities: one is of the quality of light — sattva — stability; another is of the quality of rajas — activity, energy, force; and the third is of the quality of inertia — tamas. The whole world consists of these three gunas; and through these three gunas, a man of awareness has to pass. He has to experience all these three gunas. And if you experience them as a harmony, which is the real discipline of yoga . . .

Everybody experiences: sometimes you feel lazy, sometimes you feel so full of energy; sometimes you feel so good and light, and sometimes you feel so evil and bad; sometimes you are a darkness, and sometimes you are a dawn. You feel all these gunas. Many moments of them come continuously, you move in a wheel, but they are not in proportion. A man of lethargy is ninety percent lethargy. He is active also — he has to be because just to keep on living a life of lethargy he will have to act a little. That’s all his activity is — just to support his inertia. And he has to be a little good to people also; otherwise people will be very, very bad to him. People will not tolerate his inertia.

Have you watched? People who are not very active . . . For example, very fat people are always smiling. That is their protection. They know they cannot fight. They know that if the fight happens, they cannot escape, they cannot “flight.” You always see very fat people smiling, happy. What is the reason? Why do thin people look sad and why do fat people never look so sad, always happy? Psychologists and physiologists say that is their protection, because in the struggle of life it will be very difficult for them to be always in a fighting mood, as lean and thin people always are. They can fight — if the other person is weak, they will beat him; if the other person is strong, they will escape. They can do both, and the fat person cannot do either — he goes on smiling; he goes on being good to everybody. That’s his protection so others should be good to him.

Lazy people are always good. They have never committed any bad thing because even to commit a sin one need be a little active. You cannot make a lazy person a Hitler, impossible. You cannot make a lazy person a Napoleon or Alexander, impossible. Lazy persons have not committed any great sin; they cannot. They are, in a way, good people because even to commit a sin or to do something bad they will have to be active — that’s not for them.

Then there are active people, unbalanced; they are always on the go. They are not worried in any way where to reach; they are only worried how to go with speed. They don’t bother about whether they are leaching anywhere — that is not the point at all. If they are moving with speed everything is okay. Don’t ask, “Where are you going?” They are not going anywhere; they are simply going. They have no destiny. They have only energy to be active. These people are the dangerous people in the world, more dangerous than the lazy people. Out of this second category come all Adolf Hitlers, Mussolinis, Napoleons, Alexanders. All mischief-mongers come from the second category because they have energy, a disproportionate energy.

Then there is a third kind of people, which is rare to find: somewhere a Lao Tzu just sitting silently — not lazy, passive. Not active, not lazy — passive: full of energy, a reservoir, but sitting silently. Have you watched somebody sitting silently, full of energy? You feel a field around him, radiant with life, but still — not doing anything, just being.

And yoga is to find the equilibrium between these three. If you can find a balance between these three, suddenly you transcend. If one is more than the others, then that one becomes your problem. If you are more lazy than active, then laziness will be your problem: you will suffer through it. If activity is more than laziness, then you will suffer from your activity. And the third is never more, it is always less; but even if that is theoretically possible — that somebody is too good — that too will be a suffering for him, that too will create imbalance. A right life is a life of balance.

Buddha has eight principles for his disciples. Before every principle he adds a word, sama. If he says, “Be aware,” he not only says “smriti,” he says “samyak smriti.” In English they have always been translating it as “right memory.” If he says, “Be active,” he always says, “Be rightly active.” By “rightly” he means be in an equilibrium. The Indian term samyak means equilibrium. Even for samadhi, even for meditation, Buddha says “samyak samadhi.” Even samadhi can be too much, and then it will be dangerous. Even good can be too much, and then it will be dangerous.

Equilibrium should be the key factor. Whatsoever you do, always be balanced like a man walking on a tightrope, continuously balancing. That is the rightness: the factor of balance. The man who wants to attain to the ultimate marriage, ultimate yoga, has to be in a deep balance. In balance you transcend all the three gunas. You become gunateet: you go beyond all these three attributes. You are no longer part of the world; you have gone beyond.

The three gunas — stability, action, and inertia — have four stages: the defined, the undefined, the indicated, and the unmanifest.

These three gunas have four stages. The first, Patanjali calls “the defined.” You can call it matter; that is the most defined thing around you. Then, “the undefined” — you can call it mind; that too is there, felt by you continuously, but is an undefined factor. You cannot define what mind is. You know it, you live it continuously, but you cannot define it. Matter can be defined but not mind. And then “the indicated” — the indicated is even subtler than the undefined: it is the self. You can only indicate it. You cannot even say it is undefined because to say something is undefined is, in a subtle way, to define it, because that too is a definition. To say that something is undefined . . . you have already defined it in a negative way; you have said something about it. So, then, there is this subtle layer of existence, which is self, that is the indicated. And then beyond it there is again the subtlest which is “the unmanifest” — unindicated — that is, no-self.

So: matter, mind, self, no-self — these are the four stages of all these three gunas.

If you are deeply in lethargy, you will be like matter. A man of lethargy is almost matter, vegetates; you don’t find him alive. Then there is the second quality, mind. If rajas, activity, is too much, then you become too much of the mind. Then you are very, very active — mind is continuously active, obsessed with activity, continuously in search of new occupations. Somebody asked Edmund Hillary, who was the first man to reach the Everest peak, “Why? Why did you take such a risk?” He said, “Because the Everest peak was there, man had to go.” There is nothing . . . Why is man going to the moon? Because the moon is there. How can you avoid it? You have to go. A man of activity is continuously in search of occupation. He cannot remain unoccupied, that is his problem Unoccupied he is hell; occupied he forgets himself.

If tamas, inertia, is too much, you become like matter. If rajas is too much you become mind: mind is activity. That’s why mind goes mad. Then, if sattva is too much you become self, you become atma. But that too is an imbalance. If all the three are in balance, then comes the fourth, the no-self. That is your real being where not even the feeling of “I” exists, that’s why the term “no-self.”

These are the four stages — three of un-equilibrium, and the fourth of equilibrium. First is defined, second is undefined, third is indicated, fourth is not even indicated. unindicated; and the fourth is the most real. The first seems to be most real because you live in the first. The second seems to be very near because you live in the mind. The third even seems to be a little far away, but you can understand. Fourth seems to be simply unbelievable — no-self? Brahman, God, whatsoever you name it, seems to be very far away, seems to be almost non-existential; and that is the most existential.

The seer, although pure consciousness, sees through the distortions of the mind.

And that fourth, even if you attain it . . . while you are in the body you will have to use all the layers of your being. Even a Buddha, when he talks to you, has to talk through the mind. Even a Buddha, when he walks . . . he has to walk through the body. But now, once you have known that you are beyond mind, the mind can never deceive you: you can use it and you will never be used by it. That’s the difference. Not that a Buddha doesn’t use mind, he uses: he uses; you are being used. Not that he doesn’t live in the body: he lives; you are being lived — the body is the master and you are the slave. Buddha is the master; the body is the slave. A total change, a total mutation happens — that which is up goes down and that which is down goes up.

The seen exists for the seer alone.

This is the climax of yoga or vedanta: “The seen exists for the seer alone.” When the seer disappears, the seen disappears, because it was there only for the seer to be liberated. When the liberation has happened, it is not needed. This will create many problems because a Buddha . . . for him the seen has disappeared, but for you it still exists. There is a flower, somebody amongst you becomes an enlightened person: for him the flower has disappeared, but for you it still continues. So how is it possible — for one it disappears and for you it continues?

It is just like this: you all go to sleep this night, you all dream; then, one person becomes awake — his sleep is broken, his dream disappears — but all others’ dreams continue. His disappearance of the dream does not help in any way for your dreams to be disturbed; they continue on their own. That’s why enlightenment is individual. One person becomes awakened; all others continue in their ignorance. He can help others to be awakened. He can create devices around you to help you come out of your sleep, but unless you come out of your sleep your dream will continue: “The seen exists for the seer alone.”

Although the seen is dead to him who has attained liberation, it is alive to others because it is common to all.

 In India we have made only one distinction between dream and that which you call reality, and this is the distinction: that dreams are private realities and this reality that you call the world is a common dream, that’s all. When you dream you dream a private world. In the night you live a private life; you cannot invite anybody else to share in your dream. Even your closest friend or your wife or your beloved is far away. When you are dreaming you are dreaming alone. You cannot take anybody there; it is a private world. Then what is this world, because in India we have called this world also dreamlike? This is a common dream. We all dream together because our minds function in the same way.

Just go to the river. Take a straight stick with you; you know the stick is straight. Push it down in the river: immediately, you see it has become crooked, bent. Pull it out; you know it is straight. Again put it in the water; it has again become bent. Now, you know well that the stick remains the same, but the functioning of your mind and the functioning of the light rays create the phenomenon, illusion, that it has become bent. Even if you know now, still it will be bent. Your knowledge will not help. You know well, perfectly well, it is not bent, but it looks bent — because the functioning of the eyes and the light rays is such that the illusion is created. Then take a dozen friends with you: you all will see it bent. It is a common illusion. The world is a common dream.

The seer and the seen come together so that the real nature of each may be realized.

The cause of this union is ignorance.

To be united with this world. which is like a dream, to be united with the body, with the mind — which you are not — is a necessity. Through this union you will be prepared for a greater union. Through this union you will come to realize that this union is false. The day you realize that this union is false, the final union will happen.

When you are divorced from the world, you get married to the divine. When you are married to the world, you remain in a divorce from God. That’s why all the mystics — Meera, Chaitanya, Kabir; in the West, Theresa — they all talk in terms of marriage, in terms of bride and bridegroom. And they are all waiting for a final consummation.

The allegory has always been used. Psychologists have even become suspicious about it, about why mystics use that allegory of love, marriage, embrace, kiss. In India even sexual intercourse has been used as an allegory: when the final marriage happens there is the ultimate crescendo, the total orgasm of the individual with the whole, of the wave with the ocean.

Why do these people use sexual allegories? Psychologists suspect that there must be some repression about sex. They are wrong. There is no repression about sex, but sex is such a fundamental phenomenon, how can religion avoid it? It has to be used. And sex is the only, the deepest, phenomenon where you lose yourself. You don’t know any other phenomenon where you lose yourself so completely. And in God or in the total one loses himself completely — becomes a no-self. In sex just a little glimpse of it comes to you. It is good to use the allegory of marriage, of bride and bridegroom.

Remain married to the world and you remain divorced from the divine. Pass through the worldly experience — enriched, liberated — suddenly you become aware that this marriage was illusory, a dream. Now, the real marriage is getting ready for you. The bridegroom is waiting for you.

-Osho

From Yoga: A New Direction, Discourse #5; Yoga: Science of the Soul, V.5 (previously titled Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, V.5)

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

Meditation Involves all Three

Osho often talks about the difference between concentration, contemplation and meditation or dhyana. Mostly, he is making a distinction in order to prod us on into real meditation or dhyana. But just this morning, and it is so obvious I am almost embarrassed to say that it was a realization, I did, in fact, realize that meditation involves all three. Many times, when I begin my sitting, I first gather myself to move out of identification with the mind into being able to watch the mind. So first, I am focusing my energy into watching. This is concentration.

Only after the watching is concentrated am I able to watch the mind with indifference, to watch the mind like I would watch a river flow from the bank. This watching is equal to contemplation. Just letting the thoughts flow without interference.

If I am able to watch without grasping, without rejecting, without judging and without analyzing, then the flow of thought begins to subside. It is the grasping, rejecting, judging, interfering that perpetuates the movement of thought. When I am able to watch without doing those things and thought subsides, that is when dhyana begins to be revealed. When there is nothing to be seen and there is only watchingness, awareness aware of itself, that is dhyana.

-purushottama

For more on this topic, you may wish to explore:

The Awakening of the Double-Pointed Arrow

Watching and Forgetting the Content

Awakening Before Enlightenment

After Awakening Before Enlightenment

See all 0f Prem’s notes.

 

The Awakening of the Double-Pointed Arrow

It seems to me that the awakening of the double-pointed arrow is the fulcrum point, the nexus, of meditation. Before the awakening, all meditation is an exercise in creating and realizing the double-pointed arrow. After the awakening of the double-pointed arrow, meditation is about stabilization, and then with this stabilized awareness – the witness – the transformation occurs.

 

 

What is the double-pointed arrow? The simplest definition is awareness, or the witness. It is not only awareness of objects but also awareness of our own subjectivity, hence the witness. Without this element, there is no possibility of transformation. In fact, it is because of this element of a double-pointed arrow, the witness, that transformation takes place.

When we begin by watching the activities of the body or watching the breath, we are endeavoring, knowingly or unknowingly, to create the level of awareness where one is also aware of oneself, the double-pointed arrow.

It is in the activity of watching the mind that the turning point happens. It is by watching the mind that one becomes aware of being something other than the mind, and this is precisely the awakening of the double-pointed arrow, the awakening of the witness. It is important to point out that this awareness of being something beyond the mind is not just an intellectual or conceptual understanding. But rather it is the experience of there being thought (mind) but also the knowingness, the actual experiencing of being something beyond the mind, hence the double-pointed arrow.

And it is here after one first becomes aware of this double-pointed arrow that the work of stabilization takes place. For some time, one finds oneself shifting back and forth between pre-awakening and post-awakening until finally this state of double-pointed arrow is stabilized. This shifting back and forth is natural to the stabilization process.

From this stabilized watching, we witness the heart, and transformation gains momentum until finally what is watched is watchingness itself, being, the witness. At this point there is no longer a double-pointed arrow, just a single all-encompassing awareness. Here the observer is the observed. Here there is no center and no periphery, there is only oneness.

Bodhi Svaha!

-purushottama

For more on this topic, you may wish to explore:

Meditation Involves all Three

Watching and Forgetting the Content

Awakening Before Enlightenment

After Awakening Before Enlightenment

See all 0f Prem’s notes.

Remember that You are Not the Mind – Osho

We live enclosed in our own minds, and we carry that enclosure with us everywhere. So whatsoever we see, whatsoever we hear, whatsoever happens around us, it is never transmitted to the inner consciousness directly. The mind remains in between, always playing tricks.

One must be aware that this is happening […] – to be aware of what your mind is doing to you. It is coming in between. Wherever you move, it moves before you. It is not like a shadow which follows. you have become a shadow to it. It goes, and you have to move. It moves before you and colors everything.

So you are never in contact with the “facticity” of anything. The mind creates a fiction. You must be aware of this phenomenon of what the mind is doing. But you are not – because we are identified with the mind, we never think that the mind is doing something. When I say something and it does not tally with your thought, it is not that you will think that your mind is not tallying with the thought. You will think, “No, I am not convinced.” You do not have a gap between you and your mind. You are identified – and that is really the problem. […]

You are identified with a thought or with a thought process. And this is strange, because only two days before this the thought was not yours. You heard it somewhere; now you have absorbed it and it has become your own. And now this thought will say, “No – this is not right because this is not according to me.” You will not feel the difference that this is mind speaking, memory speaking, the mechanism speaking. You will not feel that “I must remain aloof.” […]

The mind can be changed, and you must remain capable of changing it. If you become identified with it, then you lose your freedom. The greatest freedom is to be free of one’s own mind. The greatest I say – to be free from one’s own mind – because it is a subtle bondage, so deep that you never feel it as a bondage. The very prison becomes your home.

Be constantly aware that your mind is not your consciousness. And the more you are aware, the more you will feel that consciousness is something totally different. Consciousness is the energy; mind is just the thought content. Be the master of it! Don’t allow it to be the master; don’t allow it to just go ahead of you everywhere. Let it follow you, use it, but don’t be used by it. It is an instrument, but we are identified with this instrument. Mm? So break the identification. Remember that you are not the mind.

-Osho

From The Ultimate Alchemy, V.1 #2, Q3

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

A Rhythm of One – Osho

First try to understand the word ‘suchness’. Buddha depends on that word very much. In Buddha’s own language it is tathata – suchness. The whole Buddhist meditation consists of living in this word, living with this word, so deeply that the word disappears and you become the suchness. For example, you are ill. The attitude of suchness is: accept it – and say to yourself, “Such is the way of the body,” or “Such are things.” Don’t create a fight, don’t start struggling. You have a headache – accept it. Such is the nature of things. Suddenly there is a change, because when this attitude comes in a change follows just like a shadow. If you can accept your headache, the headache disappears.

You try it. If you accept an illness, it starts dispersing. Why does it happen? It happens because whenever you are fighting, your energy is divided: half the energy moving into illness, the headache, and half the energy fighting the headache – a rift, a gap and the fight. Really this fight is a deeper headache.

Once you accept, once you don’t complain, once you don’t fight, the energy has become one within. The rift is bridged. And so much energy is released because now there is no conflict – the release of energy itself becomes a healing force. Healing doesn’t come from outside. All that medicines can do is to help the body to bring its own healing force into action. All that a doctor can do is just to help you to find your own healing power. Health cannot be forced from outside; it is your energy flowering.

This word ‘suchness’ can work so deeply that with physical illness, with mental illness and finally with spiritual illness – this is a secret method – they all dissolve. But start from the body, because that is the lowest layer. If you succeed there, then higher levels can be tried. If you fail there, then it will be difficult for you to move higher.

Something is wrong in the body: relax and accept it and simply say inside – not only in words but feel it deeply – that such is the nature of things. A body is a compound, so many things combined in it. The body is born, it is prone to death. And it is a mechanism, and complex; there is every possibility of something or other going wrong.

Accept it, and don’t be identified. When you accept you remain above, you remain beyond. When you fight you come to the same level. Acceptance is transcendence. When you accept, you are on a hill, the body is left behind. You say, “Yes, such is the nature. Things born will have to die. And if things born have to die they will be ill sometimes. Nothing to be worried about too much” – as if it is not happening to you, just happening in the world of the things.

This is the beauty: that when you are not fighting, you transcend. You are no more on the same level. And this transcendence becomes a healing force. Suddenly the body starts changing. And the same happens to mental worries, tensions, anxieties, anguish. You are worried about a certain thing. What is the worry? You cannot accept the fact, that’s the worry. You would like it in some way different from how it is happening. You are worried because you have some ideas to enforce on nature.

For example, you are getting old. You are worried. You would like to remain young forever – this is the worry. You love a wife, you depend on her and she is thinking to leave, or of moving with another man, and you are worried – worried because what will happen to you? You depend on her so much, you feel so much security with her. When she is gone there will be no security.

She has not only been a wife to you, she has been also a mother, a shelter; you can come and hide against the whole world. You can rely on her; she will be there. Even if the whole world is against you, she will not be against you, she is a consolation. Now she is leaving, what will happen to you? Suddenly you are in a panic, worried.

What are you saying? What are you saying by your worry? You are saying you cannot accept this happening; this should not be so. You expected it just the otherwise, just the contrary; you wanted this wife to be yours forever and ever, and now she is leaving. But what can you do? When love disappears what can you do? There is no way; you cannot force love, you cannot force this wife to remain with you. Yes, you can force – that’s what everybody is doing – you can force.

The dead body will be there, but the living spirit will have left. Then that will be a tension on you.

Against nature nothing can be done. Love was a flowering, now the flower has faded. The breeze has come into your house, now it has moved into another. Such is the way of things; they go on moving and changing. The world of things is a flux; nothing is permanent there. Don’t expect! If you expect permanency in the world where everything is impermanent, you will create worry. You would like this love to be forever. Nothing can be forever in this world – all that belongs to this world is momentary. This is the nature of things, suchness, tathata.

So you know now the love has disappeared. It gives you sadness – okay, accept sadness. You feel trembling – accept trembling, don’t suppress it. You feel like crying, cry. Accept it! Don’t force it, don’t make a face, don’t pretend that you are not worried, because that won’t help. If you are worried you are worried; if the wife is leaving, she is leaving; if the love is no more it is no more. You cannot fight the facticity; you have to accept it.

And if you accept it gradually, then you will be continuously in pain and suffering. If you accept it without any complaint, not in helplessness but in understanding, it becomes suchness. Then you are no more worried, then there is no problem – because the problem was arising not because of the fact, but because you couldn’t accept it the way it was happening. You wanted it to follow you.

Remember, life is not going to follow you, you have to follow life. Grudgingly, happily – that’s your choice. If you follow grudgingly, you will be in suffering. If you follow happily you become a Buddha, your life becomes an ecstasy. Buddha has also to die – things won’t change – but he dies in a different way. He dies so happily, as if there is no death. He simply disappears, because he says a thing which is born is going to die.

Birth implies death, so it is okay, nothing can be done about it.

You can be miserable and die. Then you miss the point, the beauty that death can give to you, the grace that happens in the last moment, the illumination that happens when body and soul part. You will miss that because you are so much worried, and you are so much clinging to the past and to the body that your eyes ate closed. You cannot see what is happening because you cannot accept it, so you close your eyes, you close your whole being. You die – you will die many times, and you will go on missing the point of it.

Death is beautiful if you can accept, if you can open the door with a welcoming heart, a warm reception: “yes, because if I am born, I am to die. So the day has come, the circle becomes complete.” You receive death as a guest, a welcome guest, and the quality of the phenomenon changes immediately.

Suddenly you are deathless: the body is dying; you are not dying. You can see now: only the clothes are dropping, not you; only the cover, the container, not the content. The consciousness remains in its illumination – more so because in life many were the covers on it, in death it is naked. And when consciousness is in total nakedness it has a splendor of its own; it is the most beautiful thing in the world. But for that an attitude of suchness has to be imbibed. When I say imbibed, I mean imbibed – not just a mental thought, not the philosophy of suchness, but your whole way of life becomes suchness.

You even don’t think about it; it simply becomes natural. You eat in suchness, you sleep in suchness, you breathe in suchness, you love in suchness, you weep in suchness. It becomes your very style; you need not bother about it, you need not think about it, it is the way you are. That is what I mean by the word ‘imbibe’. You imbibe it, you digest it, it flows in your blood, it goes deep in your bones, it reaches to the very beat of your heart. You accept.

Remember, the word ‘accept’ is not very good. It is loaded – because of you, not because of the word – because you accept only when you feel helpless. You accept grudgingly, you accept halfheartedly. You accept only when you cannot do anything, but deep down you still wish; you would have been happy if it had been otherwise. You accept like a beggar, not like a king – and the difference is great.

If the wife leaves or the husband leaves, finally you come to accept it. What can be done? You weep and cry and many nights you brood and worry, and many nightmares around you and suffering . . . and then what to do? Time heals, not understanding. Time – and remember, time is needed only because you are not understanding, otherwise instant healing happens.

Time is needed because you are not understanding. So by and by – six months, eight months, a year – things become dim, in the memory they are lost, covered with much dust. And a gap comes of one year; by and by you forget.

Still, sometimes the wound hurts. Sometimes a woman passes on the road and suddenly you remember. Some similarity, the way she walks, and the wife is remembered – and the wound. Then you fall in love with someone, then more dust gathers, then you remember less. But even with a new woman, sometimes the way she looks . . . and your wife. The way she sings in the bathroom . . . and the memory. And the wound is there, green.

It hurts because you carry the past. You carry everything, that’s why you are so much burdened. You carry everything! You were a child; the child is still there; you are carrying it. You were a young man; the young man is still there with all his wounds, experiences, stupidities – he is there. You carry your whole past, layers upon layers – everything is there. That’s why you sometimes regress. If something happens and you feel helpless, you start crying like a child. You have regressed in time; the child has taken over. The child is more efficient in weeping than you, so the child comes in and takes over, you start crying and weeping. You can even start kicking, just like a child in a tantrum. But everything is there.

Why is so much load carried? Because you never really accepted anything. Listen: if you

accept anything it simply never becomes a load, then the wound is not carried. You accept the phenomenon; there is nothing to carry from it, you are out of it. Through acceptance you are out of it. Through half – helpless acceptance it is carried.

Remember one thing: anything incomplete is carried by the mind forever and forever, anything complete, it is dropped. Because mind has a tendency to carry the incomplete things just in a hope that someday there may be an opportunity to complete them. You are still waiting for the wife to come, or for the husband, or for the days that have gone you are still waiting. You have not transcended the past.

And because of a too much loaded past, you cannot live in the present. Your present is a mess because of the past, and your future is also going to be the same – because the past will become more and more heavy. Every day it is becoming heavier and heavier.

When you really accept, in that attitude of suchness there is no grudge, you are not helpless. Simply you understand that this is the nature of things. For example, if I want to go out of this room I will go out through the door, not through the wall, because to enter the wall will be just hitting my head against it, it is simply foolish. This is the nature of the wall, to hinder, so you don’t try to pass through it! This is the nature of the door, that you pass through it – because the door is empty you can pass through it.

When a Buddha accepts, he accepts things like wall and door. He passes through the door; he says that is the only way. First you try to pass through the wall, and you wound yourself in many millions of ways. And when you cannot get out – crushed, defeated, depressed, fallen – then you crawl towards the door. You could have gone through the door in the first place. Why did you try and start fighting with the wall?

If you can look at things with a clarity, you simply don’t do things like this, trying to make a door out of a wall. If love disappears, it has disappeared! Now there is a wall – don’t try to go through it. Now the door is no more there, the heart is no more there, the heart has opened to somebody else. And you are not alone here; there are others also.

The door is no more for you, it has become a wall. Don’t try, and don’t knock your head on it. You will be wounded unnecessarily. And wounded, defeated, even the door will not be such a beautiful thing to pass through.

Simply look at things. If something is natural, don’t try to force any unnatural thing on it. Choose the door – be out of it. You are doing every day the foolishness of passing through the wall. Then you become tense, and then you feel continuous confusion. Anguish becomes your very life, the core of it – and then you ask for a meditation.

But why in the first place? Why not look at the facts as they are? Why can’t you look at the facts? Because your wishes are too much there. You go on hoping against all hope. That’s why you have become so hopeless a case.

Just look: whenever there is a situation, don’t desire anything, because desire will lead you astray. Don’t wish and don’t imagine. Simply look at the fact with your total consciousness available and suddenly a door opens and you never move through the wall, you move through the door, unscratched. Then you remain unloaded.

Remember, suchness is an understanding, not a helpless fate. So that’s the difference. People are there who believe in fate, destiny. They say, “What can you do? God has willed it such a way. My young child has died, so it is God’s will and this is my fate. It was written; it was going to happen.” But deep down there is rejection. These are just tricks to polish the rejection. Do you know God? Do you know fate? Do you know it was written? No, these are rationalizations – how you console yourself.

The attitude of suchness is not a fatalist attitude. It does not bring in a God, or a fate, or a destiny – nothing. It says simply look at things. Simply look at the facticity of things, understand, and there is a door, there is always a door. You transcend.

Suchness means acceptance with a total welcoming heart, not in helplessness.

In this world of suchness there is neither self nor other than self.

And once you merge – you are merged into a suchness, in tathata, in understanding – there is no one as you and there is no one as other-than-you, no self, no other-self. In a suchness, in a deep understanding of the nature of things, boundaries disappear.

Mulla Nasruddin was ill. The doctor examined him and said, “Fine, Nasruddin, very fine. You are improving, you are doing well, everything is almost okay. Just a little thing has remained; your floating kidney is not yet right. But I don’t worry a bit about it.”

Nasruddin looked at the doctor and said, “Do you think if your floating kidney was not all right I would worry about it?”

The mind always divides: the other and I. And the moment you divide I and the other, the other becomes the enemy, the other cannot be a friend. This is one of the basic things to be deeply understood, you need a penetration into it. The other cannot be the friend, the other is the enemy. In his very being the other, he is your enemy.

Some are more inimical, some less, but the other remains the enemy. Who is a friend? The least of the enemies, really, nothing else. The friend is one who is least inimical towards you and the enemy is one who is least friendly towards you, but they stand in a queue. The friend stands nearer, the enemy further away, but they all are enemies. The other cannot be a friend. It is impossible, because with the other there is bound to be competition, jealousy, struggle.

You are fighting with friends also – of course, fighting in a friendly way. You are competing with friends also, because your ambitions are the same as theirs. You want to attain prestige, power; they also want to attain prestige and power. You would like to have a big empire around you, they also. You are fighting for the same, and only a few can have it.

It is impossible to have friends in the world. Buddha has friends, you have enemies. Buddha cannot have an enemy, you cannot have a friend. Why does Buddha have friends? Because the other has disappeared, now there is nobody who is other than him. And when this other disappears the I also has to disappear, because they are two poles of one phenomenon. Here inside exists the ego, and there outside exists the other – two poles of one phenomenon. If one pole disappears, if ‘you’ disappears, ‘I’ disappears with it; if ‘I’ disappears, ‘you’ disappears.

You cannot make the other disappear, you can only make yourself disappear. If you disappear there is no other; when the I is dropped there is no thou. That’s the only way. But we try, we try just the opposite – we try to kill the ‘you’. The ‘you’ cannot be killed, the ‘you’ cannot be possessed, dominated. The ‘you’ will remain a rebellion, because the ’you’ is in an effort to kill you. You are both fighting for the same ego – he for his, you for yours. The whole politics of the world is how to kill the ‘you’ so that only ‘I’ is left and everything is at peace. Because when there is nobody else, you alone are there, everything will be at peace. But this has never happened and will never happen. How can you kill the other? How can you destroy the other? The other is vast, the whole universe is the other.

Religion works through a different dimension: it tries to drop the I. And once the I is dropped there is no other, the other disappears. That’s why you cling to your complaints and grudges – because they help the I to be there. If the shoe pinches, then the I can exist more easily. If the shoe is not pinching, the foot is forgotten – then the I disappears.

People cling to their diseases, they cling to their complaints, they cling to all that pinches. And they go on saying that “These are wounds and we would like them to be healed.” But deep down they go on making the wounds, because if all the wounds are healed, they will not be there.

Just watch people – they cling to their illness. They talk about it as if it is something worth talking about. People talk about illness, about their negative moods, more than about anything else. Listen to them, and you will see that they are enjoying talking about it.

Every evening I have to listen, for many years I have been listening. Look at their faces, they are enjoying it! They are martyrs . . . their illness, their anger, their hatred, their this problem and that, their greed, ambition. And just look, the whole thing is simply crazy – because they are asking to get rid of those things, but look at their faces, they are enjoying it. And if they are really gone, what will they enjoy then? If all their illnesses disappear and they are completely whole and healthy, there will be nothing for them to talk about.

People go to psychiatrists and then they go on talking about it, that they have visited this psychiatrist and that, they have been to this Master and that. Really, they enjoy saying that “All, everybody, has failed with me. I am still the same, nobody has been able to change me.” They enjoy this, as if they are succeeding because they are proving every psychiatrist a failure. All ‘pathies’ have become failures.

I have heard about one man who was a hypochondriac, continuously talking about his illnesses. And nobody believed him, because he was checked and examined in every possible way and nothing was wrong. But every day he would run to the doctor – he was in serious difficulty.

Then by and by the doctor became aware that “Whatsoever he hears – if on the TV there is an advertisement about some medicine and talk about some illness – immediately that illness comes to him. If he reads about any illness in a magazine, immediately, the next day, he is there at the doctor’s office – ill, completely ill. And he imitates all the symptoms.”

So the doctor said once to him, “Don’t bother me too much, because I read the same magazines you read and I listen to the same TV program you listen to. And just the next day you are here with the disease.”

Said the man, “What do you think? Are you the only doctor in town?”

He stopped coming to this doctor, but he would not stop his madness about illness.

Then he died, as everybody has to die. Before his death he told his wife to write a few words on a marble stone on his grave. They are still written there. In big letters on his gravestone it is written: “Now do you believe that I was right?”

People feel so happy about their misery. I also feel sometimes that if all their misery disappears, what will they do? They will be so unoccupied they will simply commit suicide. And this has been my observation: you help them come out of one, the next day they are present there with something else. You help them to come out of that, they are again ready . . . as if there is a deep clinging to misery. They are getting something out of it, it is an investment – and it is paying.

What is the investment? The investment is that when the shoe is not fitting, you feel more that you are. When the shoe fits completely, you simply relax. If the shoe fits completely, not only is the foot forgotten, the I disappears. There cannot be any I with a blissful consciousness – impossible!

Only with a miserable mind can the I exist; the I is nothing but a combination of all your miseries. So if you are really ready to drop the I, only then will your miseries disappear. Otherwise, you will go on creating new miseries. Nobody can help you, because you are on a path which is self-destructive, self-defeating.

So whenever next time you come to me with any problem, just first inquire inside whether you would like it to be solved, because be aware – I can give it. Are you really interested in solving it or just talking about it? You feel good talking about it.

Go inwards and inquire, and you will feel: all your miseries exist because you support them. Without your support nothing can exist. Because you give it energy, then it exists; if you don’t give it energy it cannot exist. And who is forcing you to give it energy? Even when you are sad, energy is needed, because without energy you cannot be sad.

To make the phenomenon of sadness happen, you have to give energy. That’s why after sadness you feel so dissipated, drained. What happened? – because in depression you were not doing anything, you were simply sad. So why do you feel so much dissipated and drained? Out of sadness you must have come full of energy – but no.

Remember, all negative emotions need energy, they drain you. And all positive emotions and positive attitudes are dynamos of energy; they create more energy, they never drain you. If you are happy, suddenly the whole world flows towards you with energy, the whole world laughs with you. And people are right in their proverbs if they say: “When you laugh, the whole world laughs with you. When you weep, you weep alone.” It is true, it is absolutely true.

When you are positive the whole existence goes on giving you more, because when you are happy the whole existence is happy with you. You are not a burden, you are a flower; you are not a rock, you are a bird. The whole existence feels happy about you.

When you are like a rock, sitting dead with your sadness, nursing your sadness, nobody is with you.

Nobody can be with you. There simply comes a gap between you and the life. Then whatsoever you are doing, you have to depend on your energy source. It will be dissipated, you are wasting your energy, you are being drained by your own nonsense.

But one thing is there, that when you are sad and negative you will feel more ego. When you are happy, blissful, ecstatic, you will not feel the ego. When you are happy and ecstatic there is no I, and the other disappears. You are bridged with existence, not broken apart – you are together.

When you are sad, angry, greedy, moving just within yourself and enjoying your wounds and seeing them again and again, playing with your wounds, trying to be a martyr, there is a gap between you and existence. You are left alone, and there you will feel I. And when you feel I, the whole existence becomes inimical to you. Not that it becomes inimical because of your I – it appears to be inimical.

And if you see that everybody is the enemy, you will behave in such a way that everybody has to be the enemy.

In this world of suchness there is neither self nor other-than self.

When you accept nature and dissolve into it, you move with it. You don’t have any steps of your own, you don’t have any dance of your own, you don’t have even a small song to sing of our own – the whole’s song is your song, the whole’s dance is your dance. You are no more apart.

You don’t feel that “I am”; you simply feel, “The whole is. I am just a wave, coming and going, arrival and departure, being and non-being. I come and go, the whole remains. And I exist because of the whole, the whole exists through me.”

Sometimes it takes forms, sometimes it becomes formless – both are beautiful. Sometimes it arises in a body, sometimes it disappears from the body. It has to be so, because life is a rhythm. Sometimes you have to be in the form, then you have to rest from the form. Sometimes you have to be active and moving, a wave, and sometimes you go to the depth and rest, unmoving. Life is a rhythm.

Death is not the enemy. It is just a change of the rhythm, moving to the other. Soon you will be born – alive, younger, fresher. Death is a necessity. YOU are not dying in death; only all the dust that has gathered around you has to be washed. That is the only way to be rejuvenated. Not only Jesus is resurrected, everything is resurrected in existence.

Just now the almond tree outside has dropped all his old leaves, now new leaves have replaced them. This is the way! If the tree clings to the old leaves then it will never be new, and then it will get rotten. Why create a conflict? The old disappears just for the new to come. It gives place, it makes space, room, for the new to come. And new will always be coming and old will always be going.

You don’t die. Only the old leaf drops, just to make room for the new. Here you die, there you are born; here you disappear, there you appear. From the form to the formless, from the formless to the form; from the body to the no-body, from the no-body to the body; movement, rest; rest, movement – this is the rhythm. If you look at the rhythm you are not worried about anything, you trust.

In the world of suchness, in the world of trust, there is neither self nor other-than self.

Then you are not there, neither is there any thou. Both have disappeared, both have become a rhythm of one. That one exists, that one is the reality, the truth.

-Osho

From Hsin Hsin Ming: The Book of Nothing, Discourse #9

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

That Area is Meditation – Osho

Maneesha, Ryusui is pointing to a very fundamental question which Gautam Buddha raised for the first time in human history.

The question is, is enlightenment something to be achieved, desired, longed for? If so, then there must be practices, disciplines, rituals, and the whole paraphernalia. And millions of people have gone astray in search of enlightenment. Buddha is the first human being who has said that everything is absolutely arbitrary because you need not go anywhere. Enlightenment is your very nature.

It is consciousness that you are built with; this house, this body is not you. And this mind also is not you. And there is not much problem to stand aside and watch the mind and its functioning, to stand aside and watch the gestures of the body. This watcher is your reality, your truth. It is already here, so don’t go in search somewhere else. Whenever, wherever you find it, you will always find it here and now. Now is the time and here is the space. If you can be now here, you are a Gautam Buddha.

I have heard a small story about a man who was a great atheist. The whole day he was arguing against religion, against all kinds of superstitions. He had written in his sitting room in big letters: God is nowhere.

Then a small child was born to him.

One day the small child was looking at the writing. He was just learning to write, learning the alphabet, so he could not manage to read God is nowhere; on the contrary, he read: God is nowhere – nowhere can be divided into two.

The father heard it and was amazed. He had never thought about it, that ‘nowhere’ consists of ‘now’ and ‘here’.

The small child changed the man’s whole approach; he started thinking about now and here. And he was puzzled . . . because he has never been now; his mind has been wandering in the past or in the future, but never now, never in the present.

Meditation means no mind – no past, no future, no present . . . just eternity, a pure mirror which reflects the whole and is not scratched by anything. Just as the sky is not scratched by the clouds moving, or the sun rising, or the full-moon night, the sky remains unscratched.

The father had defeated many philosophers, but this small child changed his whole life because he started to be here, and to be now, and he found a new area opening within himself.

That area is meditation.

Meditation means no mind – no past, no future, no present . . . just eternity, a pure mirror which reflects the whole and is not scratched by anything. Just as the sky is not scratched by the clouds moving, or the sun rising, or the full-moon night, the sky remains unscratched.

You have heard the Zen haiku about the shadows of the bamboos . . . sweeping the temple steps, but they don’t make any noise.

The moon in the sky is reflected in the smallest pond but it does not disturb the pond. It does not create even a single ripple. And the miracle is, neither does the pond want the moon to reflect nor does the moon want to be reflected. But existence manages spontaneously a beautiful phenomenon – a single moon being reflected all over the earth.

In rivers, in oceans, in ponds, in lakes, in streams . . . even in a single dewdrop on a lotus leaf, the full moon is reflected as fully as in the biggest ocean.

But everything is happening so silently on its own accord.

In existence there is no effort, there is no intention. Everything is very relaxed and at ease.

Gautam Buddha was the first man to say that anybody who is searching for himself is a fool. The very search is preventing you from finding. Don’t search! Don’t go anywhere, just sit down and close your eyes and be within. Forget all about past and future, forget the body and the mind – you are the host. This is only a house, a temporary caravanserai; by the morning you will have to go on. The caravan continues from one serai to another serai, so don’t get attached to the caravanserai where you happen to be right now, in this moment.

Detached, aloof, just watching . . . and the mind disappears.

Mind is your attachment with the body and through the body with the world and all its greed, anger, love, hate, jealousy. The whole world is a projection of your mind, in which you live in suffering and misery – or once in a while a little joy, a little pleasure, but very superficial, not even skin deep. But behind all this scene is hiding your buddha, your awareness, your pure consciousness – unclouded, unscratched, from eternity to eternity.

To realize this is the greatest experience in the world.

But all the religions have been driving people astray, searching for gods which don’t exist, praying before gods they have never met. No prayer has been responded to, but all the religions are combined in a conspiracy to take you away from yourself. These are the ways . . . God is far away; self-realization is going to be through arduous practices, disciplines. Everybody cannot afford it. Nobody has that much time, nobody has that much capacity for self-torture. Nobody is so much a masochist that he can become a saint.

Naturally, the ultimate outcome is the present-day humanity: everybody has lost his way to himself. And it is a single step – just turning in. It is not a finding, it is not a discovery, it is not an invention. It is simply a remembrance.

You can forget it, you can remember it. These are the only two things you can do about your nature, about your intrinsic consciousness.

But between the two there is not much difference; the difference between sleep and waking is the only difference. And one who is awake today was asleep yesterday; one who is asleep today may become awake tomorrow, so it is only a question of timing. It is only a question of your decision, when to recognize. As far as buddhahood is concerned, it is waiting there since eternity to eternity. Whether you recognize it or not, it does not matter.

If you recognize it, all your actions will change. Your world view will change. Mind will not be any more a master to you but will be a very good and very efficient servant, a good bio-computer. But first the master has to be recognized, then the mind and the body function according to the wisdom of the master.

-Osho

From Turning In, Discourse #1

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

Meditation through Biofeedback – Osho

Research over the past few years has suggested that certain states of consciousness brought about by meditation techniques appear to evoke specific brainwave patterns. These states are now being created by electronic and auditory stimulation of the brain, and the can be learned through biofeedback.

The traditional ‘meditative state’ – sitting silently (or at least quietly alert) is composed of bilateral, synchronous alpha waves. Deeper meditation also has bilateral theta waves. A state called ‘lucid awareness has the bilateral synchronous alpha and theta waves of deep meditation, plus the beta waves of normal thought processes. ‘Lucid awareness’ can be learned through biofeedback, using the most modern equipment.

Are these kinds of stimulation and biofeedback useful tools for the meditator? Whatt is the relationship of these technological techniques to the meditation beyond technique? Is this an example of bringing science together with meditation?

I would like to experiment with these new technologies – both personally in my own meditation, and professionally in work as a physician. Do I have your blessings?

It is a very complex question. You will have to understand one of the most fundamental things about meditation – that no technique leads to meditation. The old so-called techniques and the new scientific biofeedback techniques are the same as far as meditation is concerned. Meditation is not a byproduct of any technique.

Meditation happens beyond mind. No technique can go beyond mind.

But there is going to be a great misunderstanding in scientific circles, and it has a certain basis. The basis of all misunderstanding is: When the being of a person is in a state of meditation, it creates certain waves in the mind. These waves can be created from the outside by technical means. But those waves will not create meditation — this is the misunderstanding.

Meditation creates those waves; it is the mind reflecting the inner world. You cannot see what is happening inside. But you can see what is happening in the mind. Now there are sensitive instruments . . . we can judge what kind of waves are there when a person is asleep, what kinds of waves are there when a person is dreaming, what kinds of waves are there when a person is in meditation. But by creating the waves, you cannot create the situation — because those waves are only symptoms, indicators. It is perfectly good, you can study them. But remember that there is no shortcut to meditation, and no mechanical device can be of any help. In fact, meditation needs no technique — scientific or otherwise. Meditation is simply an understanding.

It is not a question of sitting silently, it is not a question of chanting a mantra. It is a question of understanding the subtle workings of the mind. As you understand those workings of the mind a great awareness arises in you which is not of the mind. That awareness arises in your being, in your soul, in your consciousness.

Mind is only a mechanism, but when that awareness arises, it is bound to create a certain energy pattern around it. That energy pattern is noted by the mind. Mind is a very subtle mechanism. And you are studying from the outside, so at the most you can study the mind. Seeing that whenever a person is silent, serene, peaceful, a certain wave pattern always, inevitably appears in the mind, the scientific thinking will say: if we can create this wave pattern in the mind, through some biofeedback technology, then the being inside will reach the heights of awareness.

This is not going to happen. It is not a question of cause and effect. These waves in the mind are not the cause of meditation; they are, on the contrary, the effect. But from the effect you cannot move towards the cause. It is possible that by biofeedback you can create certain patterns in the mind and they will give a feeling of peace, silence and serenity to the person. Because the person himself does not know what meditation is and has no way of comparing, he may be misled into believing that this is meditation — but it is not. Because the moment the biofeedback mechanism stops, the waves disappear, and the silence and the peace and the serenity also disappear.

And you may go on practicing with those scientific instruments for years; it will not change your character, it will not change your morality, it will not change your individuality. You will remain the same.

Meditation transforms. It takes you to higher levels of consciousness and changes your whole lifestyle. It changes your reactions into responses to such an extent that it is unbelievable that the person who would have reacted in the same situation in anger is now acting in deep compassion, with love — in the same situation.

Meditation is a state of being, arrived at through understanding. It needs intelligence, it does not need techniques. There is no technique that can give you intelligence. Otherwise, we would have changed all the idiots into geniuses; all the mediocre people would have become Albert Einsteins, Bertrand Russells, Jean-Paul Sartres. There is no way to change your intelligence from the outside, to sharpen it, to make it more penetrating, to give it more insight. It is simply a question of understanding, and nobody else can do it for you — no machine, no man.

For centuries the so-called gurus have been cheating humanity. Now, in the future instead of gurus, these guru machines will cheat humanity. The gurus were cheating people, saying that “We will give you a mantra. You repeat the mantra.” Certainly by repeating a mantra continuously, you create the energy field of a certain wave length; but the man remains the same, because it is only on the surface. Just as if you have throw a pebble into the silent lake and ripples arise and move all over the lake from one corner to the other corner — but it does not touch the depths of the lake at all. The depths are completely unaware of what is happening on the surface. And what you see on the surface is also illusory. You think that ripples are moving — that’s not true. Nothing is moving.

When you throw a pebble into the lake, it is not that ripples start moving. You can check it by putting a small flower on the water. You will be surprised: the flower remains in the same place. If the waves were moving and going towards the shore, they would have taken the flower with them. The flower remains there. The waves are not moving, it is just the water going up and down in the same place, creating the illusion of movement. The depths of the lake will not know anything about it. And there is going to be no change in the character, in the beauty of the lake by creating those waves.

The mind is between the world and you. Whatever happens in the world, the mind is affected by it; and you can understand through the mind what is happening outside. For example, you are seeing me — you cannot see me; it is your mind that is affected by certain rays and creates a picture in the mind. You are inside, and from inside you see the picture. You don’t see me; you can’t see me. The mind is the mediator. Just as when it is affected by the outside, the inner consciousness can read it — what is happening outside — what the scientists are trying to do is just the same: they are studying meditators and reading their wave lengths, the energy fields created by meditation. And naturally, the scientific approach is that if these certain patterns appear without any exception when a person is in meditation, then we have got the key; if we can create these patterns in the mind, then meditation is bound to appear inside. That’s where the fallacy is.

You can create the pattern in the mind, and if the person does not know about meditation, he may feel a silence, a serenity – for the moment, as long as those waves remain. But you cannot deceive a meditator because the meditator will see that those patterns are appearing in the mind . . . Mind is a lower reality, and the lower reality cannot change the higher reality. The mind is the servant; it cannot change the master. But you can experiment. Just remain aware that whether it is a biofeedback machine or a chanting of OM, it does not matter; it only creates a mental peace, and a mental peace is not meditation. Meditation is the flight beyond the mind. It has nothing to do with mental peace.

One of America’s great thinkers, Joshua Liebman, has written a very famous book, Peace of Mind. I wrote him a letter many years ago when I came across the book, saying that “If you are sincere and honest, you should withdraw the book from the market because there is no such thing as peace of mind. Mind is the problem. When there is no mind then there is peace, so how there can be peace of mind? And any peace of mind is only fallacious; it simply means the noise has slowed down to such a point that you think it is silence. And you don’t have anything to compare it with.”

A man who knows what meditation is, cannot be deceived by any techniques, because no technique can give you understanding of the workings of the mind. For example, you feel anger, you feel jealousy, you feel hatred, you feel lust. Is there any technique that can help you to get rid of anger? of jealousy? of hatred? of sexual lust? And if these things continue to remain, your lifestyle is going to remain the same as before.

There is only one way — there has never been a second. There is one and only one way to understand that to be angry is to be stupid: watch anger in all its phases, be alert to it so it does not catch you unawares; remain watchful, seeing every step of the anger. And you will be surprised: that as awareness about the ways of anger grows, the anger starts evaporating. And when the anger disappears, then there is a peace. Peace is not a positive achievement. When the hatred disappears, there is love. Love is not a positive achievement. When jealousy disappears, there is a deep friendliness towards all.

Try to understand. . . .

But all the religions have corrupted your minds because they have not taught you how to watch, how to understand; instead, they have given you conclusions — that anger is bad. And the moment you condemn something, you have already taken a certain position of judgment. You have judged. Now you cannot be aware. Awareness needs a state of no-judgment. And all the religions have been teaching people judgments: this is good, this is bad, this is sin, this is virtue — this is the whole crap that for centuries man’s mind has been loaded with. So, with everything — the moment you see it — there is immediately a judgment about it within you. You cannot simply see it, you cannot be just a mirror without saying anything.

Understanding arises by becoming a mirror, a mirror of all that goes on in the mind. […] In every situation where mind starts any kind of desire, greed, lust, ambition, possessiveness, the meditator has to be just a mirror. And what is that going to do?

To be just a mirror means you are simply aware. In pure awareness the mind cannot drag you down into the mud, into the gutter. In anger, in hatred, in jealousy, the mind is absolutely impotent in the face of awareness. And because the mind is absolutely impotent, your whole being is in a profound silence – the peace that passeth understanding.

Naturally that peace, that silence, that joy, that blissfulness will affect the mind. It will create ripples in the mind, it will change the wave lengths in the mind, and the scientist will be reading those waves, those wave patterns and he will be thinking, “If these wave patterns can be created in someone by mechanical devices, then we will be able to create the profoundness of a Gautam Buddha.” Don’t be stupid.

All your technical devices can be good, can be helpful. They are not going to do any harm; they will be giving some taste of peace, of silence — although very superficial, still it is something for those who have never known anything of peace. For the thirsty, even dirty water does not look dirty. For the thirsty, even dirty water is a great blessing.

So you can start your experiments with all my blessings, but remember it is not meditation that you are giving to people — you don’t know meditation yourself. You may be giving them a little rest, a little relaxation — and there is nothing wrong in it. But if you give them the idea that this is meditation then you are certainly being harmful — because these people will stop at the technical things, with the superficial silence, thinking that this is all and they have gained it.

You can be helpful to people. Tell them that “This is just a mechanical way of putting your mind at peace, and mind at peace is not the real peace — real peace is when mind is absent. And that is not possible from the outside, but only from the inside. And inside you have the intelligence, the understanding to do the miracle.”

It is good for people who cannot relax, who cannot find a few moments of peace, whose minds are continuously chattering — your technical devices are good, your biofeedback mechanisms are good. But make it clear to them that this is not meditation, this is just a mechanical device to help you relax, to give you a superficial feeling of silence. If this silence creates an urge in you to find the real, the inner, the authentic source of peace, then those technical devices have been friends, and the technicians who have been using them have not been barriers but have been bridges. Become a bridge.

Give people the little taste that is possible through machines, but don’t give them the false idea that this is what meditation is. Tell them that this is only a faraway echo of the real; if you want the real, you will have to go through a deep inner search, a profound understanding of your mind, an awareness of all the cunning ways of the mind so that the mind can be put aside. Then the mind is no longer between you and existence, and the doors are open.

Meditation is the ultimate experience of blissfulness. It cannot be produced by drugs, it cannot be produced by machines, it cannot be produced from the outside.

-Osho

From Beyond Enlightenment #29, Q1

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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Surrender vs Be a Light unto Oneself – Osho

Can I truly surrender and still be a light unto myself?

That is the only way to be a light unto yourself to surrender. Life is paradoxical: day/night, birth/death, summer/winter, love/hate, and so on ad infinitum.

If a person thoroughly understands this, he will agree and not worry. In other words, he knows when he loves that soon he will hate; therefore, he will laugh when he is going uphill, and weep when he is going downhill. He will realize the paradox of life, that he cannot be perfect and he cannot be consistent either. Our idea is to be consistent and to have absolutely clear situations, but it is impossible – it is too one-sided, and we are not one-sided. We are infinite; we contain both the poles in our being, and both the poles have to be lived.

Hence, if you surrender you become a light unto yourself. If you become a light unto yourself, you become capable of surrendering.

It was constantly a question before Buddha – constantly, because he used to say to his people: Be a light unto yourself. That is his statement: Appo dipo bhava – be a light unto yourself. That was his constant teaching, the undercurrent of all his teachings. And still he was teaching people surrender.

When people came to be initiated they would have to declare a triple surrender: buddham sharnam gachchhami – I come, I surrender myself to Buddha’s feet; sangham sharnam gachchhami – I surrender to the commune of the sannyasins; dhammam sharnam gachchhami – I surrender to the fundamental law of life, logos, tao, dhamma.

These three surrenders would make a person a disciple – and Buddha’s whole teaching was: Be a light unto yourself. So he was asked again and again, “There is a contradiction! On the one hand people surrender to you, on the other hand you go on saying to them: Be a light unto yourself.” And yet there is no contradiction – they are complementaries.

This is how life works. Life is so vast that it contains contradictions, and yet those contradictions are not enemies, not opposites. They are complementaries and they help each other. In fact, without the one the other will not be possible.

Surrender will help freedom, and freedom will make you capable of surrender. Don’t choose one, otherwise you will remain half. Never choose one pole, otherwise you will always remain half – and to remain half is to remain split.

You have to be a whole; you have to be one piece. Always remember to choose the whole paradox, and then you will be at ease. Then great silence and great bliss will arise out of your totality. The total is musical, it is a symphony.

-Osho

From Philosophia Perennis, V.2, Discourse #9, Q4

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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Listening Intellectually is Not Listening at All – Osho

When I sit in front of you and listen to you speak, I feel as if a process of osmosis is happening. I find I don’t intellectually listen. Is this the right way or am I missing something?

This is the right way.

If you listen to me intellectually you miss, not something, but all. Intellectual listening is a kind of deafness.

When I say something, you can listen to the word. You have a mind, a library in the mind of all your prejudices, philosophies, ideologies. The word has to go through all those preconceived patterns, and by the time it reaches to you it is no longer the same.

It has changed so many times, passing through the whole process of intellectual listening, that when it comes out it is absolutely something else. And yet it appears to be rationally the right thing; it fits with your mind. The process of listening has managed to cut it here and there, change it here and there; to color it here and there, to make it what you want it to be, not what it is. And you will agree with it; it is your own idea; it has nothing to do with me.

Listening intellectually is not listening at all. It is a way of avoiding. The right way is that you don’t bring your mind in and you let me go into your innermost being without being hindered. Then there will be an understanding. Then there will be a communion, a real listening, because in the very process of listening, you have changed.

Now the agreement that arises in your being is not agreeing with your mind, it is agreeing with something new, which your mind knows nothing of. The mind is always old, and the truth is always new; they never meet, they never coexist.

You are fortunate that you can listen the right way — putting the mind aside, just allowing me to sink deeper and deeper within you. Then even though words have been used, silence has been conveyed. Even though words have been used, that which cannot be said has been said — at least has been heard. And saying is not important, hearing is important.

Right listening means you will never ask how to do it. For example, if I am talking about silence and you are listening the right way, you will never ask how to be silent, because in the very listening you would have tasted it. In the very listening you will have experienced it — the window has opened. The people who listen intellectually are bound to ask later on how to do it. Their question about how to do it signifies that they have missed what was conveyed to them.

It is not only words that I am saying to you — I am conveying my very heart. The words are only vehicles. Through the intellect the vehicles will reach, but I will be left behind. When you are listening without the mind, the vehicle becomes unimportant; its only use is that it helps me to reach to you. It is my outstretched hand, so that I can touch your heart.

-Osho

From Beyond Psychology, Discourse #21, Q1

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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Transcendence is True Therapy – Osho

You speak on the psychology of the buddhas, the psychology of transcendence, as the essence of transcendence, as the essence of the work happening here in the buddhafield. What is the uniqueness of this third psychology? Is there a psychology of transcendence?

Amitabh, Sigmund Freud introduced psychoanalysis into the world. It is rooted in analyzing the mind. It is confined to the mind. It does not step out of the mind, not even an inch. On the contrary, it goes deeper into the mind, into the hidden layers of the mind, into the unconscious, to find out ways and means so that the mind of man can at least be normal. The goal of Freudian psychoanalysis is not very great.

The goal is to keep people normal. But normality is not enough. Just to be normal is not of any significance. It means the normal routine of life and your capacity to cope with it. It does not give you meaning, it does not give you significance. It does not give you insight into the reality of things. It does not take you beyond time, beyond death. It is at the most a helpful device for those who have gone so abnormal that they have become incapable of coping with their daily life — they cannot live with people, they cannot work, they have become shattered. Psychotherapy provides them a certain togetherness — not integrity, mind you, but only a certain togetherness. It binds them into a bundle. They remain still fragmentary. Nothing becomes crystallized in them; no soul is born. They don’t become blissful, they are only less unhappy, less miserable.

Psychology helps them to accept the misery. It helps them to accept that this is all that life can give to you, so don’t ask for more. In a way, it is dangerous to their inner growth, because the inner growth happens only when there is a divine discontent. When you are absolutely unsatisfied with things as they are, only then do you go in the search, only then do you start rising higher, only then do you make efforts to pull yourself out of the mud.

Jung went a little further into the unconscious. He went into the collective unconscious. This is getting more and more into muddy water, and this is not going to help.

Assagioli moved to the other extreme. Seeing the failure of psychoanalysis he invented psychosynthesis. But it is rooted in the same idea. Instead of analysis he emphasizes synthesis.

The psychology of the buddhas is neither analysis nor synthesis; it is transcendence, it is going beyond the mind. It is not work within the mind; it is work that takes you outside the mind. That’s exactly the meaning of the English word ‘ecstasy’ — to stand out.

When you are capable of standing out of your own mind, when you are capable of creating a distance between your mind and your being, then you have taken the first step of the psychology of the buddhas. And a miracle happens: when you are standing out of the mind all the problems of the mind disappear, because mind itself disappears; it loses its grip over you.

Psychoanalysis is like pruning leaves of the tree, but new leaves will be coming up. It is not cutting off the roots. And psychosynthesis is sticking the fallen leaves back onto the tree again — gluing them back to the tree. That is not going to give them life either. They will look simply ugly; they will not be alive, they will not be green, they will not be part of the tree — but glued, somehow.

The psychology of the buddhas cuts the very roots of the tree which create all kinds of neuroses, psychoses, which create the fragmentary man, the mechanical man, the robot-like man. And the way is simple . . .

Psychoanalysis takes years, and still the man remains the same. It is renovating the old structure, patching up here and there, whitewashing the old house. But it is the same house, nothing has radically changed. It has not transformed the consciousness of the man.

The psychology of the buddhas does not work within the mind. It has no interest in analyzing or synthesizing. It simply helps you to get out of the mind so that you can have a look from the outside. And that very look is a transformation. The moment you can look at your mind as an object you become detached from it, you become dis-identified from it; a distance is created, and roots are cut.

Why are roots cut in this way? — Because it is you who goes on feeding the mind. If you are identified, you feed the mind; if you are not identified you stop feeding it. It drops dead on its own accord.

There is a beautiful story. I love it very much . . .

One day Buddha is passing by a forest. It is a hot summer day and he is feeling very thirsty. He says to Ananda, his chief disciple, “Ananda, you go back. Just three, four miles back we passed a small stream of water. You bring a little water — take my begging bowl. I am feeling very thirsty and tired.” He had become old.

Ananda goes back, but by the time he reaches the stream, a few bullock carts have just passed through the stream, and they have made the whole stream muddy. Dead leaves which had settled into the bed have risen up; it is no longer possible to drink this water — it is too dirty. He comes back empty-handed, and he says, “You will have to wait a little. I will go ahead. I have heard that just two, three miles ahead there is a big river. I will bring water from there.”

But Buddha insists. He says, “You go back and bring water from the same stream.”

Ananda could not understand the insistence, but if the master says so, the disciple has to follow. Seeing the absurdity of it — that again he will have to walk three, four miles, and he knows that water is not worth drinking — he goes.

When he is going, Buddha says, “And don’t come back if the water is still dirty. If it is dirty, you simply sit on the bank silently. Don’t do anything, don’t get into the stream. Sit on the bank silently and watch. Sooner or later the water will be clear again, and then you fill the bowl and come back.”

Ananda goes there. Buddha is right: the water is almost clear, the leaves have moved, the dust has settled. But it is not absolutely clear yet, so he sits on the bank just watching the river flow by. Slowly, slowly, it becomes crystal-clear. Then he comes dancing. Then he understands why Buddha was so insistent. There was a certain message in it for him, and he understood the message. He gave the water to Buddha, and he thanked Buddha, touched his feet.

Buddha says, “What are you doing? I should thank you that you have brought water for me.”

Ananda says, “Now I can understand. First, I was angry; I didn’t show it, but I was angry because it was absurd to go back. But now I understand the message. This is what I actually needed in this moment. The same is the case with my mind — sitting on the bank of that small stream; I became aware that the same is the case with my mind. If I jump into the stream, I will make it dirty again. If I jump into the mind more noise is created, more problems start coming up, surfacing. Sitting by the side I learned the technique.

“Now I will be sitting by the side of my mind too, watching it with all its dirtiness and problems and old leaves and hurts and wounds, memories, desires. Unconcerned I will sit on the bank and wait for the moment when everything is clear.”

And it happens on its own accord, because the moment you sit on the bank of your mind you are no longer giving energy to it. This is real meditation. Meditation is the art of transcendence.

Freud talks about analysis, Assagioli about synthesis. Buddhas have always talked about meditation, awareness.

You ask me, Amitabh, “What is the uniqueness of this third psychology?”

Meditation, awareness, watchfulness, witnessing — that is the uniqueness. No psychoanalyst is needed. You can do it on your own; in fact, you have to do it on your own. No guidelines are needed, it is such a simple process — simple if you do it; if you don’t do it, it looks very complicated. Even the word ‘meditation’ scares many people. They think it something very difficult, arduous. Yes, if you don’t do it, it is difficult and arduous. It is like swimming. It is very difficult if you don’t know how to swim, but if you know, you know it is so simple a process. Nothing can be more simple than swimming. It is not an art at all; it is so spontaneous and so natural.

Be more aware of your mind. And in being aware of your mind you will become aware of the fact that you are not the mind, and that is the beginning of the revolution. You have started flowing higher and higher. You are no longer tethered to the mind. Mind functions like a rock and keeps you. It keeps you within the field of gravitation. The moment you are no longer attached to the mind, you enter the buddhafield. When gravitation loses its power over you, you enter into the buddhafield. Entering the buddhafield means entering into the world of levitation. You start floating upwards. Mind goes on dragging you downwards.

So it is not a question of analyzing or synthesizing. It is simply a question of becoming aware. That’s why in the East we have not developed any psychotherapy like Freudian or Jungian or Adlerian — and there are so many in the market now. We have not developed a single psychotherapy because we know psychotherapies can’t heal. They may help you to accept your wounds, but they can’t heal. Healing comes when you are no longer attached to the mind. When you are disconnected from the mind, unidentified, absolutely untethered, when the bondage is finished, then healing happens.

Transcendence is true therapy, and it is not only psychotherapy. It is not only a phenomenon limited to your psychology; it is far more than that. It is spiritual. It heals you in your very being. Mind is only your circumference, not your center.

-Osho

From The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, V.10, Discourse #4

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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