Riding on a Miracle – Osho

Man has the greatest potential on the earth, in existence. If you are lacking something, it means you are lacking a great dream of surpassing yourself. You have become satisfied with the mundane. You have started creeping on the earth, crawling on the earth. You don’t look upward. There is a great beyond calling you forth! There is a great beyond challenging you. And only that man is truly a man who accepts the challenge of the beyond. All others are only men in name, in form, but not really men.

Be a man: accept the challenge of the unknown, of the beyond. Let it become a great dream in your being. That which you appear to be is only a seed. The seed has to fall into the soil, and has to die, and has to become a tree, and has to bloom.

If you cut the seed, you will not find flowers there. That’s where science is missing the whole point – it goes on cutting the seed. It says, “You say this seed will bring great flowering? We will cut and dissect the seed and see.” And they cut and dissect the seed, and they have the methodology to dissect the seed, but no flower is found. So they say there is no flower. That’s how they have come to the conclusion that there is no God in existence, that there is no soul, that there is no beyond, that life is just an accident and there is no destiny to life.

There is a famous saying of the Zen Master, Ikkyu.

“If you break open the cherry tree, where are the blossoms? But in springtime how they bloom!”

Wait for the springtime. If you want to see, then wait for the springtime. And then you will find a buddha, not a man; and you will find a Jesus, not a man; and you will find a Krishna, not a man. Then you will find the flower, and the seed is no more found there; the seed has disappeared, its function fulfilled. It was protecting something of immense value, it was carrying a blueprint; now it is no more needed. The soil has been found, the spring has arrived, and the seed was courageous enough to die.

Man’s ego is nothing but a seed. It is very protective. People ask me, “If ego is such a barrier toward God, then why in the first place does ego exist? If mind is such a barrier to God, then why does mind exist at all?” It exists to protect you, just as the hard shell of the seed exists to protect the potential. The potential is very soft; it will be destroyed if the hard shell is not around it. The hard shell is not the enemy. The hard shell will be the enemy only if the spring has come, and the soil has been found, and the seed rejects death. If the hard shell says, “Now, I will go on protecting you, even against the spring. I will protect you against this soil,” then there is going to be trouble. That’s where the problem arises.

The ego in itself is not a problem. The child needs it, otherwise the child will be very unprotected. He will not know how to survive in this world of struggle. He will not know how to protect himself against so many hazards. He is so soft, tender, he will die before he becomes a buddha. The ego helps him. The ego is a kind of armor, and so is the mind – it protects him.

It is not your enemy. It is the enemy only when the moment has come and you are ready to move into meditation – you have found a Master, you have found a method and you are ready – but the mind says, “No, I cannot die. Just think of all the blessings that I have showered upon you. Just think of all the benefits that I have given you. Just think of all that I have done for you! Feel grateful, and don’t try to destroy me.” Then the problem arises: then the protector becomes destructive. Then you have to fight against your own mind, you have to fight against your own ego, you have to fight against your own armor because the armor is no more needed. You have to release your inner potential – spring has come. So when spring has come, only then is it a problem; otherwise it is not a problem, it is a help. The helpful can become a hindrance. When its time is gone, it has to go.

Dream of the impossible. Dream of surpassing yourself. Dream of nirvana, dream of moksha, dream of the kingdom of God; only then will you start working and moving toward it, and only then – with that dream – will your feet have the quality of dance.

Without the dream you will become dull. That’s why people are dragging. How can they dance? For what? Just to go every day to the office and work and come back home and quarrel with the wife and listen to all the complaints of the children? And next day the same rut starts again – year in, year out. What is there to dance about? In fact, it is a miracle how man goes on living, why he does not commit suicide. What does he live for?

There is nothing that is awaiting him, there is nothing that he can look up to. There is no star in the night; it is all darkness. It is a miracle how man goes on living, how he manages. The people who commit suicide seem to be more logical. The people who go on living seem to be very illogical. Miserable, bored, dragging – but they go on living. But it shows something. It shows one thing: that your innermost being knows that the possibility is there. Any day you may become alert about the potential, about the possible. Any day, the dream will possess you. And then there will be meaning and there will be dance.

“Religion is art,” said William Blake. “Religion is art, not money.” This is a very, very pregnant statement. And only a man like William Blake could have made it. He is a mystic poet.

What is art? “Art is a way,” he says, “of doing something”: painting, poetry, dancing, sculpture, music, pottery, weaving. “Art is a way of doing something.” He does not say anything about creating oneself. But that is exactly what religion is. It is not painting, it is not poetry, it is not sculpture, it is not music, but something on the same lines, something beyond – creating oneself. Religion is a way of doing something also – living, loving, seeing, being.

All art is “making.” It is helping God to create. That’s why I call the man who said to God, “Can I help?” the religious man. If you want to know the creator you will have to become a creator in some measure on your own. Poetry may not be religion proper but it points in the right direction. When a poet is really in a creative state, he knows something of religion – a faraway distant music – because when he is in a creative state, he is no more himself. He participates – although in a very small measure, but he participates in God. Just a drop of divinity enters into him. That’s why great poets have always said, “When we write poetry, we are not the creators of it. We become possessed. Some unknown energy enters, sings, dances in us. We don’t know what it is.” When a painter is lost into his painting, he is utterly lost into his painting, his ego disappears. Maybe only for moments, but in those egoless moments God paints through him.

If you participate in God, God participates in you. Art is an unconscious form of religion. Religion is conscious art. Art is as if you are religious in a dream, but it is pointing in the right direction. The artist is the nearest to the religious. But it is not understood that way. You don’t think of a poet as religious or a painter as religious, on the contrary, if somebody fasts, tortures his body, makes his being ugly, you start thinking that he is religious. He is simply being violent with himself. He is just suicidal, he is neurotic, and you think he is religious.

Neurotics become mahatmas; they are respected and worshipped as saints. They are not religious at all. The difference between a so-called saint and a murderer is not much. The murderer murders somebody else, and your so-called saint murders himself. But both do the same thing: both are violent, both are destructive. And whenever you are destructive you are farthest from God because God is creativity. To me, aesthetics is the closest neighbor of religiousness, not ethics.

Lenin is reported to have said, “Ethics will be the aesthetics of the future.” I say: No, just the contrary; aesthetics will be the ethics of the future. Beauty is going to be the truth of the future because beauty can be created. And a beautiful person, who loves beauty, who lives beauty, who creates beauty is moral – and with no effort. His morality is not a cultivated morality; it is just his aesthetic sense that makes him moral. He cannot kill because he cannot think of killing as being beautiful. He cannot cheat, he cannot be dishonest because all these things make him feel ugly. His criterion is beauty. And I agree with William Blake that religion is art.

All art is making. All making necessitates a kind of faith. You see what is not there, and work in such a way that what was invisible, intangible, inaudible is given shape in time and space. What is produced will be apparent to the senses – a painting, a poem, or a garden. Art is not to be confused, however, with the object it produces. It is a beautiful distinction to be remembered. It will help you immensely to understand religion.

Art is not a painting or a piece of sculpture. What art dealers buy and sell are works of art, not art itself. Works of art are a form of property. Just as art is not the same thing as works of art, so religion is not to be confused with the objects and effects it produces – such as dogmas, doctrines, Bibles, Korans, Gitas, churches, temples, cathedrals. These are works of art. You can call them works of the art of religion, but religion should not be confused with them.

A church is a church. It may be beautiful, but it is not religion in itself. It is a by-product, a spin-off. A Koran is a beautiful poem, but as a work of art, a spin-off. Something happened in Mohammed’s heart – that was religion, but that remains invisible. Because something stirred in his soul, he started singing, he went into a mad expression. That’s exactly what he thought when for the first time alone on the mountains he started feeling the presence of God. He became so frightened, so afraid, he thought he had either gone mad or become a poet.

He rushed home. He was in a feverish state, trembling. His wife thought he had suddenly got a high fever. She asked, “What has happened to you?” And he said, “Either I have gone mad or I have become a poet. Something tremendously great is happening, and I don’t know what it is or from where it is coming. And I am so unworthy of it . . . I cannot believe my own eyes, and I cannot believe my own heart – what I am feeling. It is so immensely beautiful, so great, so vast, I am incapable of conceiving it.” That was religion.

A few days fever, and Mohammed cooled down and settled into his new state, his ecstasy, his samadhi. And then the flow started: the beautiful Koran was born. But the Koran is a by-product, so is the Gita, so is the Dhammapada. Remember always that no scripture contains religion – cannot contain it. All scriptures are by-products of religion – shadows, footprints, left on the banks of time. But footprints are footprints.

When Buddha walks on a sea beach, naturally, he will leave footprints, but those footprints are not Buddha himself, those footprints are beautiful because they belong to Buddha. Bow down to them! but don’t forget they are just by-products. And you have to be a buddha, not just the worshipper of a footprint .

Works of art are a form of property, that’s why you can sell them, purchase them; but you cannot sell art and you cannot purchase art. If you ask Pablo Picasso to sell you his art, it will be impossible. You may be ready to pay any fantastic price for it, but he cannot sell it. He can sell his paintings, but he cannot sell his art. There is no way of selling it because it is not a thing. It remains always invisible. Only effects become visible.

God remains invisible, only in the world does he becomes visible. You are invisible, only the body is visible. That’s why Blake says religion is not money. He is right. He means religion is not property. Religion is not like that, religion is like love – you cannot buy it, sell it, or keep it in a bank. You cannot possess it; on the contrary, it possesses you.

The work of art can be possessed; it is property, it is dead. You can learn the Koran and the Gita and the Bible, but you cannot learn religion. You have to live it – there is no way of learning it. You have to be possessed by God; you have to become available to God. You have to open up your being. You have to withdraw. You have to become empty so that God can enter and possess you totally. In that very possession, you have transcended humanity. You are no more a human being, you are a god, a Christ, a buddha.

These sutras are the secrets to help you release this Buddhahood that you are carrying as a blueprint, that you are carrying in a seed form – to help it bloom, to help it become a great tree with great foliage and many flowers.

The sutras.

Master Lu-tsu said:

Release is in the eye . . .

This potential that I have been talking to you about, this Buddhahood, this Christ-consciousness or Krishna-consciousness, or whatever you wish to call it, is in the third eye. Just between your two physical eyes there is an empty space, and that empty space is the seed of your being a god. Unless that third eye starts functioning, your potential will not be released.

Hence,

Master Lu-tsu said:

Release is in the eye . . .

Release means nirvana, moksha, deliverance, freedom. Release means enlightenment. If your third eye can start functioning . . . It is dormant, non-functioning; your energy has not reached up to it. It is a mechanism – perfect but without any energy reaching it. Your energy is flowing downward into your sexuality, into your greed, into your anger, into your worldly affairs – your energy is moving downward and outward. You don’t have enough energy to bring to the third-eye center. Unless you have an abundance of energy, it will not reach the third eye.

You have to become a reservoir of energy. And when you become a reservoir and energy is not wasted, its level starts going higher and higher every day. One day it reaches the third eye, and the moment the energy touches the third eye, immediately, instantly, it starts functioning. And then you know, and then you see for the first time. Then you have the vision of life – what it is. And only through the third eye will you be able to know God, reality, that which is.

Through the two physical eyes you know the world. And because your eyes are two, the world is divided, it is dual. Your two eyes make the world divided. The world in itself is not divided, but your way of seeing it divides it. It is like a ray passing through a prism. The ray is one; the moment it passes through a prism, it becomes seven; it is broken up into seven colors. That is how the rainbow is created: sunrays passing through drops of water hanging in the clouds. Those hanging drops function as prisms, and the sunrays passing through them are immediately split into seven colors.

Your energy moves through your two eyes and the whole world becomes dual. Then you see day and night as opposite, life and death as opposite, love and hate as opposite, matter and consciousness as opposite. Your two eyes make all things dual and polar. And because of these two eyes you cannot see the oneness of existence. Unless your two eyes become one eye, you will never know the indivisible, the universal.

The book, The Secret of the Golden Flower, says: energy going outward becomes dual; if you bring it backward it becomes again one – it loses duality, it becomes non-dual. When energy moves back from the two eyes, it starts falling into the original source.

If you mix the seven colors of the rainbow into one, it becomes white, it becomes one color. The method is the same. Energy moving outward passes through two eyes and the whole existence becomes dual. Energy moving backward passes through two eyes and moves into one eye, the third eye – which is just exactly in between the two – and suddenly all is one. This is samadhi: you are one with God.

Release is in the eye . . .

The seed-blossoms of the human body must be concentrated upward in the empty space.

Right now it is an empty space. But once energy starts moving inward, it becomes full of light.

Immortality is contained in this and also the overcoming of the world.

And the moment you have reached the one point in your being – Jesus says, “When your two eyes become one, you have entered the kingdom of God.” You know immortality because now you know life and death are not opposite but two wings of the same bird. Death does not destroy life but helps it to renew itself again. Death is not the enemy but the friend. It simply helps life to change its garments because they have become rotten; they have been used and they cannot be used anymore. It simply helps you to change the house, it does not end you. It only gives you a new beginning, a fresh lease of energy.

Then darkness and light are not two. Then opposites disappear and they become complementaries. Then the whole existence becomes a dance between the masculine energy and the feminine energy. Then it is an orgasmic dance. Then both are one, meeting, melting into each other. The conflict disappears. And when you see the whole existence without any conflict, certainly, great joy arises. There is no death. Death, one sees only from the outside. You see somebody else dying, you have never seen yourself dying. Nobody has ever seen himself dying.

When Socrates was given poison, he was very enchanted. His disciples were crying and weeping, and he said, “Don’t weep. Soon I will be gone, and then you can weep to your heart’s content. Right now, see this great experiment that is happening to me. I am very intrigued by the idea of death – whether I am really going to die or not. Don’t miss this opportunity. Just sit around me and watch.”

A Master teaches through his life and also teaches through his death. A Master uses every opportunity – even his own death he will use to teach his disciples. Because he shouted and was very angry and said, “Stop crying and weeping and come close! Don’t miss this opportunity!” the disciples looked. And Socrates said, “Wait. The poison is being given to me. Now I will tell you what is happening to me inside, so you can become aware of something that you cannot see.” And then he said, “Up to my knees, my legs are dead. But as far as I am concerned, I am intact and as whole as I was before.”

Then he said, “My whole legs have gone dead – below the waist I cannot feel anything.” He asked a disciple to touch his feet, to pinch them, but he could not feel anything. He said, “I cannot feel them, so half of my body is dead, but I am as whole as ever. My inner feeling is not that I am half-dead and half-alive, I am as alive as ever! Half of the body is gone, but my being is untouched by it.”

And slowly, slowly his hands became dead, and his chest started sinking. And then he said the last words. He said, “My tongue will not be able to say any more words. It is getting numb. But the last thing that I want to tell you is this: that although almost ninety percent of my body is dead, I am a hundred percent alive. If it is an indication of something, it shows that even when the body is one hundred percent dead, I will be alive, because I have seen ninety percent of my body go, but I am as whole as before. So ten percent more will go . . . You cannot see what is happening to me inside, but I can see it.”

Socrates is not an ordinary philosopher as are the other Greek philosophers. Even his own disciples, Plato, Aristotle . . . Aristotle, in fact, is not a disciple but an enemy. He does not understand Socrates at all, and what he proposes is absolutely against Socrates.

Socrates is a mystic. His philosophy is just a method of inquiry – and a very penetrating inquiry. He will not even leave death aside; he inquired into death. To the very last moment he was true to his method of inquiry.

Death one sees only from the outside: you see other people dying. But to be alive is different: you can see it from the inside. To be alive is to feel pain and pleasure, to love and to fear. To be alive is to be able to create, to think of something which is not and make it happen. That’s why the creative person only knows the highest form of life because when you create you are at the optimum point of your energy. When you create you are part of God. How one can do it is a mystery. How one can exist is a mystery. Every effect must have a cause. That is what we call the law of causation – that is what we are taught. But I can see no cause for the effect which I am.

I wake up riding on a miracle. My reason serves me well, but with the mystery of my being it fails. My reason itself is a tool of this mystery, hence it cannot know it.

You have to look within. To see what life is, first you have to feel it from the interior. And the best way to feel your life is to be creative because then you are at your maximum. Ordinarily, people live at their minimum, and whatsoever people go on doing can be done at the minimum because those are just habits; those are just routine things your body has learned. They have been transferred from your consciousness to the robot part of your body which goes on functioning on its own – as, for example, once you have learned to drive. When you first learn, you are very alive, very alert, because there is danger. You have to be alert – you don’t know what is going to happen. You have to keep aware of so many things: the steering wheel, the road, the clutch, the gears, the accelerator, the brakes – so many things to be aware and alert about – and the traffic, and the people passing by, and the cars passing by. But once you have learned, your knowledge is transferred to the robot part of your body. Then you need not bother; you can talk to your friend, you can sing a song, you can smoke, you can listen to the radio, and your body goes on doing. You need not be alert – only exceptionally. If some accident is going to happen, you will wake up for a moment because the danger is so great and the danger is so unknown that the robot part cannot face it. It has not happened before; it is new.

Ordinary life becomes a mechanical routine, and you start living at the minimum. You never flare up to your maximum. In creativity you flare up. And that is going to be one of my messages to my sannyasins. Be creative, because to be creative is worship. To be creative is prayer, to be creative is meditation. And to be creative is to be close to God. There is no need to go to the Kaaba because God is here as much as in the Kaaba. There is no need to go to the Himalayas because God is everywhere equally available – but available only to those who live at their maximum, whose life flame is not a dull flame, who pour their whole energy into it. And that happens only through creativity.

So, to me, the definition of a sannyasin is not the definition of the old kind of saint, sitting there dull and dead. The definition of a sannyasin is to be creative. Dance, sing, create music, paint, sculpt, or whatsoever you feel like doing. Find out what is your innermost joy and do it! And doing means: bring it from the invisible to the visible. Doing means: make the dream exist on the earth. Let the dream become actual. Transform the potential into the actual. And that is the greatest joy there is. The real bliss is attained only when you are able to bring something from the unknown to the known, when you make, create, when you are able to transform a dream into reality, when you have helped God. When in a certain way, in your own way, you have made the world a little more beautiful, when you have enhanced its joy, then you are a sannyasin.

And to know this way, your inner life, will help you to know that you are deathless, because once you know who you are in your utter capacity, when your inner torch is burning from both ends together, at the optimum, then you will know there is no death. And at the optimum your third-eye center starts functioning – and only at the optimum. So don’t live life as a drag. Don’t live it as if it is a burden, a duty to be fulfilled, make it a dance, let it be a celebration.

Immortality is contained in this and also the overcoming of the world.

If you can allow your flame of life to reach the third eye, you will see there is no death. And you will suddenly see that you are no more attached to the world.

Now, the difference has to be remembered. The old sannyas, the so-called old religious way of life, has been teaching people to renounce the world. I don’t teach renunciation, I teach you to bring your life energy to the optimum. And once you have seen the true in your being, the world carries no meaning anymore. The higher has happened, the lower becomes insignificant. You need not renounce it; it has already dropped. You need not escape anywhere. You can live in the world, but you have overcome it. And remember, escaping and overcoming are two totally different things. The real sannyasin has to overcome the world, not renounce it.

The light is not in the body alone, nor is it only outside the body.

And once you have seen the light inside, then you will become aware that it is not only inside, it is also on the outside. It is not confined to you. Remember: darkness is individual, light is universal. Death is individual, life is universal. Misery is individual, bliss is universal. For misery to exist, you have to exist – you have to exist as separate. And for bliss to come into existence, you have to become part of the whole, in harmony with the whole.

The light is not in the body alone, nor is it only outside the body. Mountains and rivers and the great earth are lit by sun and moon; all that is this light.

Once you have seen it on the inside you will recognize it everywhere: in the moon, in the sun . . . All light is the same – inner and outer make no difference.

Therefore it is not only within the body. Understanding and clarity, perception and enlightenment, and all movements of the spirit are likewise this light . . .

It is the same light that you see in the moon, and that you see inside yourself in the third eye. Once you have seen that it is the same light, the inner and the outer are no longer distinct. The inner is the outer, the outer is the inner. That’s why the Zen Masters say that samsara is nirvana, the world – this very world – is enlightenment. This very body the Buddha, this very earth the paradise. That’s why when Buddha became enlightened, he said, “It is incredible, it is unbelievable that the moment I became enlightened, the whole existence became enlightened with me.”

Down the centuries Buddhist meditators have been meditating over it, “What does he mean? What does he want to say – ‘The moment I became enlightened the whole existence became enlightened?’ But how can it be? – because there are still so many unenlightened people. What can he mean?” The meditator himself thinks, “I am as yet unenlightened, so how has the whole existence become enlightened?” It has become enlightened for the Buddha because he has seen that the distinction between the inner and the outer was nothing but the ego – the small thin curtain of the ego. Once that curtain has fallen there is nothing inner, nothing outer.

So Buddha cannot say, “I have become enlightened.” He says, “The whole has become enlightened.” All the trees, and all the rivers, and all the mountains, and all the people, and all the animals, and all the planets – all have become enlightened because now he has no separate identity. He does not mean that you have become enlightened, he is simply saying, “I cannot say that I have become enlightened. I was in bondage, that much I can say. I was ignorant, that much I can say. I was in misery, that much I can say. But now, I am no more.”

Existence is blissful. Existence is full of light. And the inner and the outer light are the same – there is nothing inner, there is nothing outer. All distinctions disappear when the light enters into the third eye – the one eye, the single eye. All distinctions disappear. The rainbow again becomes a single ray of white light. […]

Understanding and clarity, perception and enlightenment, and all movements of the spirit are likewise this light; therefore it is not just something outside the body.

It is neither outside nor inside, it is everywhere – inside too, outside too. And it is the same light – the same light that you see shining on the greenery and the flower, and dancing on the lotus. It is the same light that becomes clarity inside – enlightenment, perception, understanding.

And remember, the Master says, understanding, not knowledge. The Master says, clarity, not answers. One simply becomes so clear that the questions disappear. Not that you attain to some answers, only you are so clear that the confusion is no more there, that’s all. It is absence of questions not presence of answers, hence it is called understanding, not knowledge.

Just the other day, Aniruddha also asked, “What is the difference between our knowledge and your knowledge? I don’t see any difference,” he says.

The difference is not in knowledge. He must have been thinking that I know more than he knows. Just the contrary is the case. I don’t know more than you know; in fact, you know and I have no knowledge. I am only clear – a clarity, an understanding, not knowledge. Here are many people who know more than me, and that is their problem. They will have to drop that knowledge.

I don’t know anything, there is only clarity.

When you ask me a question, it is not that I have an answer for it, but I just focus my clarity on it – try to understand – and whatsoever response comes out of the clarity, I give to you. It is not knowledge. It is just a capacity to see.

Knowledge makes people blind. Their eyes become so full of knowledge they cannot see. Even before you have asked the question they have the ready-made answer there. They are ready to answer it. They don’t listen to your question, they don’t listen to the questioner, they don’t listen to his being, they don’t look into him to see what he means, they have a ready-made answer. They are in a hurry to answer you – and they must prove the answer with arguments and scriptures, and they must give all kinds of support to it.

I have only a kind of understanding, a vision, a capacity to see. That’s why the Master says:

Understanding and clarity, perception and enlightenment . . .

It is not knowledge, It is just an utterly cloudless sky within.

The light-flower of heaven and earth fills all the thousand spaces. But also the light-flower of the individual body passes through heaven and covers the earth.

It is a light-flower, this whole existence. This is the experience of the mystics: that existence is made of nothing other than light. It is all light; light is the basic constituent of existence. And modern physics agrees with it. They call it electricity. “Light” is much too poetic a word for them, they have to drag it down to earth; it becomes “electricity.” But what they are saying is exactly the same.

Matter has disappeared from modern physics, matter is no more. At the deepest core of matter is nothing but electricity, electrons, electrical particles dancing, energy particles dancing, with no matter in them, no weight. This has been experienced by mystics down the centuries, unexceptionally; whether the mystic was born in India or in China or in Tibet makes no difference. This has been the most fundamental experience of all the mystics: that the existence is made of light and nothing else.

The Secret of the Golden Flower says, “This light, this flower of light, these petals of light fill all the spaces outside and also inside.”

Therefore, as soon as the light is circulating, heaven and earth, mountains and rivers, are all circulating with it at the same time.

The same thing that Buddha said is said in different words. The moment you see light circulating in you, you will be able to see the dawn of light all over. Stars moving, and mountains and rivers – all will be nothing but streams of light, a tremendous dance of light energy.

To concentrate the seed-flower of the human body above in the eyes, that is the great key to the human body. Children, take heed! If for a day you do not practice meditation, this light streams out, who knows whither? If you can meditate for a quarter of an hour, by it you can do away with the ten thousand eons and a thousand births. All methods end in quietness. This marvelous magic cannot be fathomed.

The Master Lu-tsu says only fifteen minutes in twenty-four hours will do. If you can sit silently for fifteen minutes, concentrated in the third eye, that will be enough to change your whole future. You will not need to be born into the body again. You will not need to be thrown into the world again. You have learned the lesson, you have become worthy of moving without the body and the limitation of the body. Your soul will be free, unentangled, without any bondage. And then there will be no death, no birth. You will be an eternal flowering of light in this infinite existence.

Only fifteen minutes? Yes, only fifteen minutes can do the miracle. But people are not even ready to give fifteen minutes . . . to quietness, to silence.

I have heard . . .

When Ignatius Loyola heard the news that an unfriendly man had been elected Pope, he was asked what he would do if the new head of the Church should order the Society of Jesus dissolved, the work in which Loyola had invested his whole life. He replied, “Fifteen minutes in prayer and all will be the same.”

An immensely significant reply.

An unfriendly Pope had come into power and there was every possibility that Loyola’s whole work would be dissolved. He had created a small society of mystics. The work was esoteric, and Christianity has always been against esoteric work, has always been afraid of the mystics because these are the dangerous people: they bring truth to the world, and once they bring truth to the world, people are no longer interested in rituals, impotent rituals. Who cares about the church then?

So Christianity has consistently been destroying all mystic schools so that nobody can go outside the church, so that nobody can have any other door to reach God, so that everybody has to come to the priest. Whenever the desire to seek and search for God arises, no alternatives are to be left. Because of this stupid idea, Christianity destroyed religion in the whole world, because there are different people and they need different types of schools, and they need different types of techniques. And those who are really sincere in their search have to find esoteric groups. They cannot become part of the formal religion – that is not enough for them; it is very lukewarm, it is very superficial.

In the West, real religion had to go underground because of the church. People have to create many false facades to hide behind. Alchemy was one of the facades. The real work was something else: the alchemist was trying to create around himself the idea that he was working to transform baser metal into gold. This was allowed. The church was very happy. If you are trying to turn baser metal into gold, it is perfectly okay, you can do it. If you succeed, the church will have more gold, that’s all; there was no fear about it. But this was just a facade, it was not real alchemy; it was just on the outside. Behind the curtain the real work was totally different: it was transforming the lower being into the higher being. It was exactly the secret of the golden flower: how to transform your sexuality, the baser metal, into spirituality, the gold.

But unnecessary trouble had to be taken, they had to make arrangements on the outside such that society remained convinced that their work was something to do with gold. And everybody is interested in gold. The church is very interested in gold, not in God.

Loyola was a great mystic. He had created the Society of Jesus. And a very antagonistic Pope was in power. Somebody said to him, “What will you do? What will happen now? The Society can be dissolved by the order of the Pope.”

Loyola said, “Fifteen minutes in prayer, and all will be the same. It will just take me fifteen minutes to go deep into meditation, that’s all. Because whenever I am there, nothing matters. Nothing matters at all.”

Master Lu-tsu says: Just fifteen minutes . . .

. . . by it you can do away with the ten thousand eons and a thousand births. All methods end in quietness.

Remember it. Whatsoever the method, the goal is the same: quietness, utter silence inside, thoughtlessness, only consciousness without any content.

This marvelous magic cannot be fathomed.

It is an unfathomable depth. When thoughts disappear and you are simply silent, then the silence is a bottomless abyss; it cannot be fathomed. The Pacific Ocean can be fathomed – it has a five-mile depth; but the Pacific Ocean inside you cannot be fathomed – it is infinite. You can go on digging and digging and diving deeper and deeper and you will not come to fathom it, you will not come to the bottom of it at all.

Only thoughts can be measured, thoughtlessness is immeasurable. Hence, thoughtlessness is another name for God. But remember, thoughtlessness should not be a kind of sleep because that is very ordinary. It happens every day: deep in sleep, when dreams disappear, you fall into that abyss. That’s why deep sleep is so rejuvenating, so refreshing. In the morning you feel alive again, new, reborn. But that is unconscious. Patanjali has said deep sleep and samadhi are very similar, with only one difference: in sleep you are unconscious, in samadhi you are conscious. But you go to the same space, the same unfathomable, magical space within you, where there is no thought, no desire, no vibration in your mind, all is quiet. All methods lead to it – Yoga, Tantra, Tao, Hassidism, Sufism – all methods lead to it from different angles; they have been devised for different people.

But when the practice is started, one must press on from the obvious to the profound, from the coarse to the fine.

In the beginning great effort is needed . . . one must press on from the obvious to the profound . . . What is obvious? – the obvious is your continuous process of thought. And what is profound? – just a state of no-thought. What is gross? – all contents of the mind are gross. And what is subtle? – a state of no-content is subtle. One must go pressing on. In the beginning, great effort will be needed. In the beginning, you have to be utterly committed to the work, only then does the blissful moment arise when meditation becomes effortless.

First, meditation has to be masculine energy. Only then, in the end, can it become feminine energy. That’s why my insistence is on dynamic methods in the beginning. Bring all your effort to the maximum. Put all that you have at stake, don’t hold anything back, and then, one day, you will be able to relax without effort. Just by closing your eyes you will be able to reach the third eye.

. . . when the practice is started, one must press on from the obvious to the profound, from the coarse to the fine. Everything depends on there being no interruption.

And make it a regular phenomenon.

The beginning and the end of the practice must be one. In between there are cooler and warmer moments, that goes without saying. But the goal must be to reach the vastness of heaven and the depths of the sea, so that all methods seem quite easy and taken for granted. Only then have we mastered it.

The real mastery is when no effort is needed, when all efforts can be dropped. The real mastery is when no method is needed, when all methods can be dropped. The real mastery is when meditation is no longer a thing to do but has become your very state. You live in it, you walk in it, you sit in it: “Sitting in Zen, walking in Zen.” You eat in it; you sleep in it. You are it– that moment also comes. But in the beginning one has to go with all one’s energy.

Remember, just as water evaporates at a hundred degrees heat – not at ninety-nine, not at ninety-nine point nine, but exactly at a hundred degrees – so whenever you put your total energy, one hundred degrees, at stake, immediately the baser metal turns into gold. Immediately the sexual energy has penetrated into the spiritual world. Immediately the energy that was going out has taken a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, and the two eyes become one eye. And then all that is inner and all that is outer is enlightened.

Jesus has said, “Cleave the wood and you will find me. Strike the stone and I am there.”

This is the ultimate state: when you cleave the wood and you find God, and you strike the stone and you find God. Then you walk on God, in God, as God. Then you breathe God, then you eat God, you drink God, because all is God.

This ultimate experience is what Master Lu-tsu says is released. And it is in the third eye.

Enough for today.

-Osho

From The Secret of Secrets, Discourse #9

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

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

Podcast Episode: A Map from Mind to No-Mind

An imaginary podcast discussing a real post

Following is an A.I. generated conversation discussing Purushottama’s post: A Map from Mind to No-Mind.

click to play or download audio file:

A Map from Mind to No-Mind Podcast

Pip: Sat Sangha Salon — where the territory being mapped is the distance between thinking and the silence on the other side of it.

Mara: Today we’re working through a piece by Purushottama that traces that exact journey — the mechanics of moving from ordinary mind into no-mind, step by careful step.

Pip: Let’s start with the map itself.

A Map from Mind to No-Mind

Mara: The question this post is sitting with is a practical one: not whether no-mind is real, but how you actually get there — what the stages are, in order, with honest notes on where it gets hard.

Pip: The post lays out the sequence plainly, and here is the hinge of it: “We move from watching the objects of awareness — the thoughts of mind and the feelings of the heart — to seeing the watching itself.”

Mara: That shift is the crux. You stop being absorbed in what you’re watching and turn attention onto the act of watching — and that reorientation is what lets the objects quietly fade out.

Pip: It starts earlier, though. The first stage is just watching other people — the easiest available object. Then your own body, then your thoughts and moods. Each layer builds the watcher’s independence from whatever it’s watching.

Mara: And the post is specific about how to watch at that middle stage — thoughts and feelings require what it calls “indifferent watching, a watching without involvement, a watching without judging and also without analyzing.” That quality of watching is what earns the autonomy needed for the next move.

Pip: Which is the subtle one. Once the watching itself becomes the object, the original contents drift to the background and, without attention feeding them, begin to dissipate — until only seeing remains.

Mara: The post names that endpoint directly: “A seeing that is totally conscious because no energy is being lost in objects. This is no-mind.” And it’s careful to say this isn’t a one-time crossing — the map gets misplaced, the journey repeats, sometimes home is elusive, sometimes as present as the midday sun.

Pip: The companion pieces linked in the post — including Watching and also Forgetting the Content and The Awakening of the Double-Pointed Arrow — fill out the surrounding territory, but this piece is the spine: a sequential, first-person account of the mechanics.

Mara: What strikes me is how the post holds both the precision of a map and the honesty that maps are not always at hand.

Pip: A map you occasionally lose is still a map.

Mara: The through-line here is attention itself — what it does when it turns back on itself, and what becomes possible in that turning.

Pip: Something worth sitting with — maybe more than once, from different directions.

Here you can listen to the podcast on Youtube.

Here is the original Post from Purushottama, A Map from Mind to No-Mind.

The Golden Light Meditation – Osho

The Golden Flower is waiting at the highest peak of your being. In the yoga map it is called sahasrar, one-thousand-petalled lotus. It is the seventh chakra – in your head. The lowest is the sex chakra, muladhar, and the highest is the seventh chakra, sahasrar. From the lowest chakra, energy moves downward, creates new life. If the energy is conserved, helped to move upwards, it reaches one day to the sahasrar – and the Golden Flower blooms.

Of course, it needs energy. It is there only as a potential, as a possibility. Unless energy becomes available for it, it will not become actual.

It is like when you don’t give water to a tree: the tree is waiting, the water is not coming. The green juice is not flowing upwards. How can it bloom into a thousand and one flowers? – impossible. It will remain sad, it will almost remain dying. It will be a slow suicide. By and by the leaves will also wither away, by and by the branches will die, and ultimately, the roots. It needs a constant upward flow of energy.

Just as the green sap moves in a tree, man is also a tree. And this is not a new symbol that I am using – of man as a tree – it is one of the most ancient symbols. It has been used in the Jewish mystical schools: it is called the Tree of Life. Just as Buddhism has reached to its crescendo in Zen, and Islam in Sufism, Judaism has reached its ultimate peaks in the Kabbala. The Kabbala says that man is a tree, and it needs great energy for the flowers to bloom.

But remember, to conserve energy does not mean to repress energy; that’s where many people become misguided. To conserve energy does not mean to repress. The processes are absolutely different.

Repression means you are continuously repressing at the lowest center. If it becomes too much at the lowest center it will create perverted sexuality. If you don’t allow it a natural let-go and the energy accumulates at the lowest center too much, it will find some way or other; it can become perverted. It will become perverted! It will create pathology. Ask the psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts: they say, “Out of a hundred percent, ninety-five percent of the psychological cases are because of sexuality. Somewhere or other, sex is involved.” This is too big a number, ninety-five percent. And the people who never go to the psychiatrists and the psychoanalysts are not in a better position either. Everybody is suppressed.

Suppression is not transformation. Let it be understood once and for all! – repression can never become a transformation.

Then what is transformation? And what is conservation of energy?

Conservation of energy is a meditative process. It is not moralistic. I will suggest a small method to you that will be of immense help. It has been used by Taoists down the ages. It is given only from the Masters to the disciples; that’s why it has not been written in the books. But now the time has come that it should be given, because now millions of people are working on their spiritual search through books. Masters are not so available either.

This is a simple method of transforming your energy and leading it upwards. And always remember, Taoist methods are very simple, so don’t think, “How can such a simple thing be of such great importance?” Practice it, experiment with it and you will know.

The process is:

At least twice a day – the best times are early in the morning, just before you get out of your bed. The moment you feel you are alert, awake, do it for twenty minutes. Do it first thing in the morning! – don’t get out of the bed. Do it there, then and there, immediately! – because when you are coming out of sleep you are very, very delicate, receptive. When you are coming out of sleep you are very fresh, and the impact will go very deep. When you are just coming out of your sleep you are less in the mind than ever. Hence some gaps are there through which the method will penetrate into your innermost core. And early in the morning, when you are awakening, and when the whole earth is awakening, there is a great tide of awakening energy all over the world. Use that tide; don’t miss that opportunity.

All ancient religions used to pray early in the morning when the sun rose, because the rising of the sun is the rising of all the energies in existence. In that moment you can simply ride on the rising energy wave; it will be easier. By the evening it will be difficult, energies will be falling back; then you will be fighting against the current. In the morning you will be going with the current.

So the best time to begin is in the early morning, immediately, just when you are half-asleep, half-awake.

And the process is so simple. It needs no posture, no yogasana, no bath is needed, nothing. You simply lie down, as you are lying down in your bed, on your back. Keep your eyes closed.

When you breathe in, just visualize great light entering from your head into your body, as if a sun has risen just close to your head – golden light pouring into your head. You are just hollow and the golden light is pouring into your head, and going, going, going, deep, deep, and going out through your toes. When you breathe in, do it with this visualization.

And when you breathe out, visualize another thing: darkness entering through your toes, a great dark river entering through your toes, coming up, and going out through the head. Do slow, deep breathing so you can visualize. Go very slowly. And just out of sleep you can have very deep and slow breaths because the body is rested, relaxed.

Let me repeat: breathing in, let golden light come into you through your head, because it is there that the Golden Flower is waiting. That golden light will help. It will cleanse your whole body and will make it absolutely full of creativity. This is male energy.

Then when you exhale, let darkness, the darkest you can conceive, like a dark night, river-like, come from your toes upwards – this is feminine energy: it will soothe you, it will make you receptive, it will calm you, it will give you rest – and let it go out of the head. Then inhale again, and golden light enters in.

Do it for twenty minutes early in the morning.

And then the second-best time is when you are going back to sleep, in the night. Lie down on the bed, relax for a few minutes. When you start feeling that now you are wavering between sleep and waking, just in that middle, start the process again, and continue for twenty minutes. If you fall asleep doing it, it is the best, because the impact will remain in the superconscious and will go on working.

And after a three-month period, you will be surprised: the energy that was constantly gathering at the muladhar, at the lowest, the sex center, is no more gathering there. It is going upwards.

-Osho

From The Secret of Secrets, Discourse #29

You may wish to visit the page for OSHO Golden Light Meditation.

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 Door to the Divine – Osho

A parable.

Once there was a very rich magician who had a great many sheep. But at the same time this magician was very mean. He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence about the pasture where his sheep were grazing. The sheep consequently often wandered into the forest, fell into ravines, and so on, and above all they ran away, for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and skins and this they did not like.

At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotized his sheep and suggested to them first of all that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned, that, on the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant.

Secondly, he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them; and in the third place, he suggested to them that if anything at all were going to happen to them it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it.

Further, the magician suggested to his sheep that they were not sheep at all; to some of them he suggested that they were lions, to others that they were eagles, to others that they were men, and to others that they were magicians. And after this all his cares and worries about the sheep came to an end. They never ran away again but quietly awaited the time when the magician would require their flesh and their skins.

George Gurdjieff loved this parable very much. His whole philosophy is contained in this small parable. And this parable represents man in the ordinary state of unconsciousness. It is one of the most beautiful illustrations of man as he is.

Man is a machine. Man is not born to be a machine, but man lives like a machine and dies like a machine. Man has the seed of a great flowering of consciousness, man has the possibility to become God, but that doesn’t happen. It does not happen because man has been hypnotized – by the society, by the state, by the organized church, by the vested interests. The society needs slaves and man can remain a slave only if he is not allowed to grow to his uttermost flowering. The society needs your flesh and your skins and naturally, nobody likes it. Hence, the whole process of socialization, of civilization, is nothing but a deep hypnosis.

Man is being hypnotized from the very moment he is born. He is being hypnotized to believe that the society exists in his favor, for his good. That is utterly wrong. He is being hypnotized to believe that he is immortal. He is not. He can be, but he is not. And if the hypnosis persists he will never be immortal.

You live only as a mortal being, because you live in the body. The body is going to die. That which is born is bound to die. Birth is the beginning of the body and death the end. Do you know anything in you which is more than the body? Have you experienced anything higher than the body, deeper than the body? Have you seen anything in you which was even before you were born? If you have seen that, then you are immortal. If you know your face, your original face, the face that you had before you were born, then you know you will be there after death too; otherwise not.

Man can be an immortal, but man lives surrounded by death because man lives identified with the body. The society does not allow you to know more than the body. The society is interested only in your body – your body can be put to use – your soul is dangerous. A man of soul is always dangerous because a man of soul is a free man. He cannot be reduced to slavery. A man who has an immortal soul in him has a deeper commitment to existence itself, to God himself. He does not care a bit about the man-made structures of society, civilization and culture; these are prison cells for him. He does not exist as a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. He cannot be part of a crowd. He exists as an individual.

The body is part of a crowd, your soul is not. Your soul is deeply individual. Its flavor is that of freedom. But your soul cannot be put to any use in the market-place. The society needs only your body. And it is very dangerous for the society if you start striving for the soul, because then your interest changes. You turn from being an extrovert into an introvert; you start moving inwards. The society is outside, the society wants you to remain an extrovert, interested in money, power, prestige, and all that, so that your energy goes on moving outwards. If you start moving inwards, that means you have become a drop-out, you are no more part of the game that is being played on the outside. You don’t belong to it. You start diving deep within your own being. And there is the source of immortality.

The society prevents you from going inwards. And the best way is to give you a false idea that you are going inwards. The magician told the sheep that they were lions, suggested to them that they were immortals, hypnotized them into believing that they were not only men but great magicians.

When you go to a church you are not going inwards. When you go to the temple you are not going inwards. But the society has hypnotized you to believe that if you want to go inwards, go to the church. But the church is as much outside as anything else. The society has hypnotized you to believe that if you want to go inwards, go to the priest. And the priest is an agent of the state and the society. The priest has always been against the mystics, because if you go to a mystic you will start moving inwards.

A mystic lives in a totally different way. His energy moves in a different gestalt: his river moves inwards. So one who comes to a mystic, falls in tune with the mystic, will start moving inwards naturally, simply, spontaneously. That is the whole purpose of being with a Master, with a mystic.

This book, The Secret of the Golden Flower, is one of the most esoteric treatises in the world. It will show you the way to become more than the body. It will show you the way to go beyond death. It will show you the way to bloom – how not to remain a seed but to become a Golden Flower. What in India we have called the one-thousand-petalled lotus, in China they call the Golden Flower. It is a symbol.

The flower represents perfection, totality. The flower represents the uttermost expression of the potential, the actualization of the potential. The flower represents the beauty, the grandeur, the splendor of being. And unless you have become a thousand-petalled lotus or a Golden Flower . . .

Remember you have to go far. Remember that you have to get out of the traps that the society has put around you. Remember that you have not yet done the work for which you have come to the earth. Remember you are just a seed, not yet a soul.

This treatise, The Secret of the Golden Flower, is very ancient – possibly one of the most ancient treatises in the world certainly twenty-five centuries old, and the possibility is that it is older than that. But twenty-five centuries can be traced back very easily. And this treatise is also a great synthesis of all the great religions. That is rare, unique. The Bible belongs to the Christians, the Talmud belongs to the Jews, the Vedas belong to the Hindus, the Dhammapada to the Buddhists, the Tao Te Ching to the Taoists. But this small book, The Secret of the Golden Flower, belongs to no one in particular, or, it belongs to all.

It is deeply based in Taoist teachings. It is a flowering of the Taoist approach to life and existence. But it is not only that – Zarathustra has played a role. Zarathustra’s teachings have been incorporated in it. Buddhist teachings have also been incorporated in it. And a certain esoteric school of Christians, the Nestorians, they have also played their part. So Christianity and Judaism also have become part of it.

It is one of the most synthetical approaches. It combines all that is beautiful in all the traditions of the world. For centuries it was only transmitted orally, and the book remained esoteric. It was not available to the public because it has something very secret to teach; it was available only to the disciples. The Master would tell to the disciple only when the time was ripe, because it gives you such a potential secret that if you don’t understand rightly, if you do something wrong with it, there are found to be harmful effects from it. It has to be understood rightly, and it has to be worked at only in the presence of a Master. It is a powerful method it is as powerful as atomic energy.

Now, the secrets of atomic energy are kept hidden from the public. Once they start leaking out to the public there is going to be great danger. If people can manufacture atom bombs privately, there is bound to be great chaos. Great secrecy is maintained about atomic research. Exactly in the same way this book teaches you one of the most potential methods of inner explosion. For centuries the secrets were guarded – only given to the disciples in privacy, in intimacy. And the people who followed this particular esoteric school resisted all temptations to write the book. In fact, all the religions of the world have long resisted writing their spiritual teachings.

There is some beauty when something is transferred really. It is alive – one thing – the Master is behind it. it is not a dead word, the word has soul, wings. The experience of the Master supports it; the master is a witness to it. It is not just speculation, not only a philosophy, but something existential, experienced, lived. And the Master has travelled the path; he knows the dangers of the path, he knows the pitfalls, he knows the points at which people go astray, and he will take every care so that the disciple cannot go astray.

The closer you come to the truth, the more is the possibility of going astray, because when you come closer to the truth, you can become very egoistic: that “Now I know,” that “Now I am.” And if the ego exploits the situation, you will fall back to your old dark valley, you will lose the peak. When you come closer to the truth, a great desire arises to share it with people. But you have not attained it in its wholeness; and it is dangerous to share half-truths because half-truths are more dangerous than lies, because they are powerful. Lies are impotent. Sooner or later people will themselves find that it is a lie. But the half-truth can persist for centuries, can have effects for centuries.

Nobody can reach through the half-truth, and the person who travels half the way will belong neither to this world nor to the other. He will be in a limbo, and that is a very strange situation to be in: you lose the old and you don’t gain the new; you become a chaos. The old order is gone and the new has not happened. You become a cloud, you become confusion. Rather than becoming more clear, rather than becoming more alive, rather than becoming more light-full, your life becomes a conflict between two polarities. You are pulled apart, you start falling into pieces. Half of you belongs to the earth and half of you belongs to the sky. Now you are nowhere. Now you are nobody. This can create madness. So, for centuries The Secret of the Golden Flower was only conveyed orally.

Secondly, with an oral tradition the book remains always alive. That’s how it became a synthesis. Basically, it was born in the Taoist climate of China. But then Bodhidharma reached China – a new master with a new message from India, Buddha’s message. And the people who were following The Secret of the Golden Flower were very open people; they were not part of any established church. They could immediately see that Bodhidharma also had it – it was so apparent, so manifest. They allowed Bodhidharma’s teachings to be part of their teaching. And the same happened with Zoroastrian Masters, with Nestorian Christians. Again and again something came to China, and if it was worthwhile, it was incorporated.

An oral teaching remains alive, growing, like a river. New streams of water come and become part of it. Once a teaching is written, then it cannot incorporate anything anymore. Then it becomes rigid, it loses fluidity, it becomes dead; it is a corpse. Now The Secret of the Golden Flower is not growing. For centuries it has not grown. Since it has been written it has not grown.

Why have I chosen to speak on it? – so that it can still grow. It is such a beautiful message to the world, it should not die. I would like to revive it. And now I can talk to people who are disciples, who have come to me and who are ready to die in order to be reborn, who are ready to die for flowering. The seed has to die, only then can it grow. The seed has to disappear; only then can the tree happen.

I will be speaking to you on this small but immensely valuable book so that the book can become alive again. It can become alive between me and you. It can again start flowing. And it has something of immense importance. If you understand it and if you practice it, you will be enriched.

But the first thing to understand is: remember that you have been hypnotized, and you have to go through a dehypnotizing process. Remember that you have been conditioned and you have to be unconditioned. Remember that death is coming. Don’t think that it is not going to happen today; it can happen any moment.

In fact, all that happens always happens now. The seed dies now, the bud becomes the flower now, the bird starts calling now. All that ever happens, happens only in the space made available by now, this moment. Nothing ever happens in the past, and nothing ever happens in the future. All that happens always happens in the present – that is the only way for things to happen because the present is the only time there is.

Past is just your memory and future is just your imagination. But you have been hypnotized to live in the past, and you have been hypnotized to live in the future. Choose either past or future, but no society allows you to live in the present.

Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans – they condition you to live in the past. Their golden age was in the past. Communists, socialists, fascists – they condition you to live in the future, their golden age is in the future, the utopia is coming: when the revolution comes, then you will be able to really live, then there will be a golden age. Either you are taken to the past, which is false, or to the future, which is again false. No society tells you to live in the present, in the herenow.

To be a sannyasin, to be a real seeker means to live herenow. And there is no other life. But for that you will have to de-automatize yourself, you will have to become a man and not a machine. You will have to become a little more conscious. You are not conscious.

Once I was sitting by the side of a dying man – he was a professor in the same university where I was a professor. He was at the pinnacle of his successful career. And then came the heart attack – which always comes when you are at the pinnacle. Success is always followed by a heart attack. What else can you have after it? So he had a heart attack and he was dying. I went to see him. He was very sad – who wants to die? – and he was in great despair and anguish. I told him, “You need not worry. You’re not going to die.”

He said, “What are you saying? But the doctors . . . all the doctors say that there is no possibility of my survival. On what grounds are you saying that I am not going to die?”

I said, “You cannot die in the first place, because you never lived. You have not fulfilled the first requirement for dying. For these fifty-five years you have been sleep-walking, you have dreamt; you have not lived. I have watched you for years.”

He was shocked, he was angry – so angry that for a moment he forgot all about death. His eyes were aflame with anger and he said, “Is this the way to treat a dying man? Can’t you be a little courteous? Why are you so hard on me? I am dying and you are talking such great philosophy – ‘You never lived.’ Is this the time to say such things?”

I listened silently. I just became absolutely silent. Then the rage disappeared and he started crying, and great tears came to his eyes. He held my hand with great love, and then he said, “Maybe you are right. I never lived. Maybe you are not rude, you are just being true. And I know nobody else would have said this to me.” And then, great gratitude, and for a moment he became so conscious that one could have seen the light on the face – it was there, he was all aura. And he thanked me. That night he died. I remained with him to the last moment.

And he said, “If you had not been here, I would have missed my death too, as I have missed my life. But I am dying consciously. At least one thing I am happy about – I am not dying unconsciously. “And his death was beautiful. He died without any regret; he died in a relaxed way. He died almost with a welcoming heart; he died full of gratitude. He died prayerfully. His next life is bound to have a different quality. If death is so beautiful it brings a new life to you.

But one has to live each moment, whether it is of life, of love, of anger, of death. Whatsoever it is one has to live each moment as consciously as possible.

A peasant, carried away by his imagination, found himself in a vegetable garden stealing cucumbers.

“I’ll carry off this sack of cucumbers,” he thought, “and with the money I get for them I’ll buy a hen. The hen will lay eggs, she will sit on them and hatch a brood of chicks, and I’ll feed the chicks till they grow, then I’ll sell them and buy a suckling pig. I’ll feed the suckling pig till it grows into a sow, I’ll breed her, and she’ll have a litter of pigs and I’ll sell them. With the money I get for the pigs I’ll buy a house with a garden; I’ll plant cucumbers in the garden, and I won’t let anyone steal them – I’ll keep guard over them. I’ll hire a strong watchman, and from time to time I’ll go out to the garden and shout, ‘Hey, you! Take care!’”

The peasant was so carried away by this thought that he shouted at the top of his voice. The watchman heard him and came running. He caught the peasant and gave him a good thrashing.

But this is how man lives: in dreams, in imagination, in projections. This is how you live. And this is not the way to live this beautiful, tremendously valuable life! This is sheer wastage! You have to become more attentive to the moment, to the present. You have to gather your consciousness. Consciousness is your treasure, and all the methods that have been invented, devised, down the centuries are nothing but ways to create more consciousness in you, to create more fire in you, to make your life a passionate affair, a flame. People are living dull lives, people are living absentmindedly, people are living inattentively. How can you live with so much inattention around you? Inattention is darkness, attention is light. And this treatise will teach you how to create more light in you, so that one day . . . the Golden Flower.

Two psychiatrists met on the street. “You are feeling fine,” said one. “How am I doing?”

People are asking each other. Nobody knows how they are doing, they are looking into each other’s eyes, gathering information about themselves from others. That’s why the opinion of others has become so important. If somebody says you are a fool, you become angry. Why? Or you become sad. Why? You are shattered. You were thinking you are a wise man, because others had told you that you are wise. It was the opinion of others that you depended on. Now somebody else says you are a fool. He can easily shatter your wisdom, very easily. He has thrown a stone and you had made a palace with playing cards. Now all is shattered. That’s why one becomes so angry, so enraged, so violent, and one becomes so worried, anxious. You are continuously looking for what others are thinking, because you know only that which others think about you, you don’t know anything about yourself. Now what kind of situation is this? If I cannot know about myself, who else can know about me? From the outside nobody can watch me, I am not available that way. From the outside only my body can be watched. From the inside I can know my consciousness.

Even when you stand before a mirror you see only your body, you cannot see your consciousness in the mirror. Even you cannot see it in the mirror – your own consciousness. You have to see it directly. It is never mirrored; it is never reflected in anything; it is invisible. You have to close your eyes and be it. And that is the only way of knowing it. But people live so unconsciously. They simply live by the opinion of others. What others say becomes their soul. Others can take it away any moment. People remain beggars.

Have you known anything about yourself directly? Have you ever encountered yourself directly without bringing the opinion of others into it? If you have not done it, you have not yet lived. Life starts only by encountering oneself, by seeing oneself directly, immediately. Life exists only when you are capable of seeing yourself as you are, not as others think about you. What can they think about you? What can they say about you? They can watch your behavior, they cannot watch you. If you want to watch yourself, only you can do that, nobody else. It cannot be done by servants. It cannot be delegated to somebody else. It cannot be done by the experts either. But we are so much interested in others’ opinions because we are absolutely absent – there is nobody awake inside. Deeply asleep, we are snoring inside.

The absent-minded professor went in for a haircut. He sat down in the barber’s chair, but didn’t remove his hat.

“I’m afraid you will have to take off your hat,” said the barber. “Oh, I’m sorry!” said the professor, “I didn’t know there were ladies present.”

Watch your own absent-mindedness. Watching it will create attentiveness in you. Watch what is happening within you: thoughts passing, memories arising, a cloud of anger, a dark night of sadness, or a beautiful morning of joy. Watch all that passes in you. Become more and more watchful. Slowly, slowly you will become an integrated watchfulness. And the method taught by The Secret of the Golden Flower is how to become integrated in your inner light. This is the story of this book before we enter into the sutras.

The book comes from an esoteric circle in China. The founder of this esoteric circle is said to have been the well-known Taoist adept, Lu Yen. Where did Lu Yen get this secret teaching? He himself attributes it to Master Kuan Yiu-hsi, for whom, according to tradition, Lao Tzu wrote down his Tao Te Ching.

Lao Tzu never wrote a single word in his whole life. He declined again and again the invitation to write anything. He conveyed to his disciples what he had come to know, but he was not ready to write, because he said, “The Tao which can be said is not the true Tao.” The Tao which can be expressed is already falsified. It can be learned only in intimate contact with the Master. There is no other way of communicating it. It can only be learned in a deep communion where the disciple and the Master meet, where the disciple holds nothing back, where the disciple and the Master overlap, where their consciousnesses merge into each other. Only in such a meeting, communion, can Tao be conveyed. So he refused again and again.

He lived a long life. But when he was going to die he left China on a water buffalo. Why on a water buffalo? His whole teaching had been the teaching of the watercourse way.

He said: One should be like water – flowing, fluid, fresh, always moving towards the ocean. And one should be like water – soft, feminine, receptive, loving, non-violent. One should not be like a rock. The rock appears to be very strong but is not, and water appears to be very weak but is not. Never be deceived by appearances. Finally, the water wins over the rock and the rock is destroyed and becomes sand and is taken to the sea. The rock disappears finally – against the soft water.

The rock is masculine; it is the male mind, the aggressive mind. Water is feminine, soft, loving, not aggressive at all. But the non-aggressive wins. The water is always ready to surrender, but through surrender it conquers – that is the way of the woman. The woman always surrenders and conquers through it. And the man wants to conquer and the ultimate result is just a surrender and nothing else. Hence, he chose a water buffalo when he left the country. Where was he going? He was going to the Himalayas to die into that eternal beauty.

A real man knows how to live and how to die. A real man lives totally, dies totally. A real man lives in benediction and dies in benediction.

He was going into absolute aloneness in the Himalayas. But he was caught on the border. And the man who caught him on the border was Master Kuan Yiu-hsi. He was a guard at the last post of the Chinese border. Lao Tzu had to pass that post; there was no other way to get out of the country. And Kuan Yiu-hsi persuaded him: “You are going to die, you are leaving the country forever, and soon you will be leaving the body. Please write just a few words. And I won’t allow you to get out of the land if you don’t write them. This price you have to pay.” And Lao Tzu had to sit in Kuan Yiu-hsi’s hut for three days, and there he wrote the Tao Te Ching.

The tradition of The Secret of the Golden Flower is said to have originated with Lu Yen. Lu Yen himself attributes it to Master Kuan Yiu-hsi for whom, according to tradition, Lao Tzu wrote down his Tao Te Ching. Kuan means “the Han-ku pass”, hence he is called Master Kuan, that is “Master of the Han-ku pass.” And he must have been a great adept, otherwise it would have been impossible to persuade Lao Tzu to write. His whole life he had declined – he could not decline the invitation of this man. This man must have had something that it was impossible even for Lao Tzu to say no to.

This is how the tradition of The Golden Flower is connected with Lao Tzu. But it didn’t start with Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu himself says that whatsoever he is saying has been said before, again and again, down the centuries. He is not bringing a new truth in the world but only a new expression. It is always so. Truth is the same, only expressions differ.

What Lao Tzu said is the same as what Krishna had said before him. What Krishna said is the same as what Buddha said later on. What Buddha has said is the same as Mohammed, as Jesus, as Zarathustra have said although their expressions are so different that you will need great intelligence to see to the very core. The structure is different, the language is different, their ways of saying it are different; naturally, because they are different persons, different individuals, with their own uniqueness. But truth is neither new nor old; and wherever truth is, it is eternal.

The book, The Secret of the Golden Flower, is one of the eternal sources where one can again become alive, one can again find the door to the divine.

-Osho

From The Secret of Secrets, Discourse #1, part 1

Here you can read The Golden Flower is the Elixir of Life, which is part two of this discourse.

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.

Podcast Episode: The Awakening of the Double-Pointed Arrow

An imaginary podcast discussing a real post

Following is an A.I. generated conversation discussing Purushottama’s post: The Awakening of the Double-Pointed Arrow.

click to play or download audio file:

The Awakening of the Double-Pointed Arrow Podcast

Pip: Sat Sangha Salon — where the arrow points both ways and somehow that’s the whole point.

Mara: Today we’re working through a piece from Purushottama on the mechanics of meditative awakening — specifically what shifts when awareness turns back on itself, and what the path looks like from there.

Pip: Let’s start with the double-pointed arrow itself.

The Awakening of the Double-Pointed Arrow

Mara: The central question here is structural: what actually changes at the turning point in meditation, and why does that change matter for everything that follows?

Pip: The post names it directly. Here’s the spine of the whole argument: “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.”

Mara: So the stakes are real and practical. Until that shift happens, you are the mind watching objects. After it, there is a witness — something that knows it is not the mind. That gap is where transformation becomes possible at all.

Pip: And the post is careful to say this is not a conceptual upgrade. You do not think your way into it.

Mara: Right — the language is precise on that point. It is “not just an intellectual or conceptual understanding” but the actual experience of there being thought and simultaneously a knowingness beyond it. The double-pointed arrow is awareness that points outward at objects and inward at its own subjectivity at once.

Pip: Which is why the stabilization phase gets its own chapter. You find the witness, and then you lose it, and then you find it again — apparently that oscillation is the work, not a sign you’re doing it wrong.

Mara: The post calls the shifting back and forth “natural to the stabilization process.” And it maps a trajectory: stabilized witnessing, then witnessing the heart, then transformation gaining momentum, and finally awareness watching awareness itself — what the post calls watchingness.

Pip: At which point the arrow dissolves entirely. No observer, no observed, just oneness. The double-pointed arrow was always a transitional tool — scaffolding that the building eventually no longer needs.

Mara: That’s the arc the post traces: from body-watching, to breath-watching, to mind-watching, to the witness stabilizing, to the witness dissolving. Each stage is preparation for the next, and the awakening of the double-pointed arrow is the fulcrum the whole sequence turns on.

Pip: Awareness becoming aware of itself — and then, eventually, just awareness.

Mara: The through-line is transformation requiring a witness before it can outgrow one.

Pip: Next time, we’ll see what else is waiting on the other side of that arrow.

Here you can listen to the podcast on Youtube.

Here is the original post from Purushottama, The Awakening of the Double-Pointed Arrow.

Make the Light Move in a Circle – Osho

A great master was asked, what is the Buddha? “Mind is the Buddha,” he answered. When after many years he was asked the same question again by the same disciple, he said, “No Buddha, no mind.”

“Then why did you say before, ‘Mind is the Buddha’?”

“To stop the baby crying! Once the baby stops crying, I say, ‘No mind, no Buddha!’”

Philosophy is just a toy, a toy to stop the baby crying, and so is theology.

Religion really consists of experience, experimentation; it has nothing to do with speculation. In its essential nature it is the science of the inner; it is as scientific as any other science. The difference between religion and science is not of their methodology but only of their object. Science looks at the objective world where our energy is flowing, where our light is flowing. Religion searches into the subjective where our light is not flowing but can be turned to flow. Hence science is easier than religion. Never for a single moment think that religion is simpler than science. It is a higher science, how can it be simpler than science? It is a superior science.

First the light has to flow inward, then it falls on your being, and then your being is revealed and you can enter into your being. And to enter into one’s own being is to enter into the kingdom of God. There, you are not and God is: you exist only in the shadow. When the light flows outward you exist – but only in the shadow. You exist because you remain unaware of your real self. Your real self is the supreme self. Your real self is a “Self” with a capital S. It has nothing to do with you, it is the self of all. But for that, a great transformation has to take place.

Nature has prepared you for the outward flow. Nature’s function is finished. With man, nature has reached to its climax, now nothing else is going to happen naturally unless man makes a decision to go further than nature. Nature has brought you to the point where you are capable of standing on your own. Man is no longer a child, man has become adult. Now nature will no longer parent you; there is no need.

Natural evolution has stopped at man. This is a fact. Even scientists are becoming more and more aware of it: that for thousands of years nothing has happened to man, man has remained the same – as if nature’s work is done. Now man has to take the course of further growth into his own hands.

That’s what religion is.

Religion means: man starts standing on his own feet, becomes responsible for his own being, starts looking and searching and inquiring into what is the case – Who am I? And this should not only be curiosity.

Philosophy is out of curiosity. Religion is a very sincere, authentic search; it is inquiry. And there is a great difference between curiosity and inquiry. Curiosity is childish, just a little itching in the head. You would like to scratch and then you feel satisfied. Philosophy is that scratching; religion is a life-and-death matter. In philosophy you never become involved, you remain aloof. You play with the toys, but it is not a question of life and death. You accumulate knowledge, but you never practice it. […]

Religion is not a question of knowing but of living up to it. Religion is life, and unless you live it, you will not know anything about what it is. And to live religion one has to drop all philosophizing and one has to start experimenting. One has to become a lab. The scientist’s lab is outside; the religious person’s lab is his own being – his own body, his own soul, his own mind. The scientist has to concentrate on the object on which he is experimenting, his work has to be done with open eyes.

The work of religion has to be done with closed eyes; one has to concentrate upon oneself.

And the complexity is great because in the world of religion the experimenter and the experimented upon are the same. Hence the complexity, hence the strangeness, hence the incomprehensibility, hence the illogicality. The knower and the known are the same in the world of religion. In the world of science the knower is separate, the known is separate; things are clear-cut, demarcated. But in religion everything merges, melts into everything else – even the knower cannot remain separate.

Religion does not give you knowledge separate from the knower, it does not give you experience separate from the knower but as the very essence of the knower.

To be a religious seeker one has to drop all philosophizing. One has to drop all a priori knowledge because all a priori knowledge is a hindrance; it stops your inquiry. Inquiry becomes dishonest – from the very beginning it becomes poisoned. How can you inquire if you have already concluded?

To be a Christian and to be religious is impossible, or to be a Hindu and to be religious is impossible.

How can you be religious if you are a Hindu? Being a Hindu means that you have already concluded, you have decided what truth is. Now what is the point of inquiry? What are you going to inquire into?

All that you will be doing is finding support, arguments, for what you have already concluded. And your conclusion may be wrong – nobody knows – because your conclusion is not yours, it has been handed to you by the society.

Society is very interested in giving you conclusions, society is not interested in giving you consciousness so that you can conclude on your own. Before you become conscious, before any inquiry starts, society stuffs you with all kinds of conclusions to stop the inquiry because the inquirer is dangerous to society. The non-inquirer is convenient; the non-inquirer is obedient. He simply takes the orders, the commands, and follows them. He is conformist, he is conventional.

Once you have stuffed somebody’s mind a bit with a belief, you have drugged him. Belief is a drug. He starts believing, he goes on believing. Slowly, slowly he starts thinking that his belief is his experience.

Belief is a system of hypnosis. You go on suggesting to the child, “You are a Hindu, you are a Hindu,” you take him to the temple, you lead him through religious, so-called religious, rituals, ceremonies, and by and by he becomes conditioned to the idea that he is a Hindu, that all that is Hindu is right and all that is non-Hindu is wrong.

And the same is being done in every kind of society. You have drugged the child. His very source of consciousness has been poisoned. And if you believe something, it starts appearing to be true. If you start believing something, you will find all kinds of supports for it, all kinds of arguments to help it. Your ego becomes involved. It is not only a question of truth, deep down it is the question, “Who is right, me or you? How can I be wrong – I have to be right.” So you choose all that supports you; and life is so complex, you can find all kinds of things in life – whatsoever you choose, whatsoever you decide. If you are a pessimist, you will find all kinds of arguments in life which support pessimism. If you are an optimist, there are all kinds of arguments available to you.

Life is dual, life is paradoxical, life is multi-dimensional. Hence so many kinds of philosophies, “isms,” theologies exist in the world. And every theology lives confined by its own conclusions and feels perfectly right.

It is only in this age that the believers are finding a little difficulty. And this is a great blessing because they have become aware of other believers too. Now the Hindu is not so complacent, he cannot be; he knows that there are Christians. And the Christian cannot go on believing that he has the sole copyright for truth because he knows that there is the Mohammedan, and there is the Taoist, and there is the Buddhist. And who knows? This age is very confused – it has never been so before.

But remember, this confusion is a great blessing; something is on the way, something tremendously important is going to happen. This chaos in the mind is the beginning of a new dawn. In the future people will not be Mohammedans and Hindus and Buddhists, people will be inquirers. Belief is disappearing and the darkness of belief is disappearing. Nobody in the future is going to believe.

People will inquire, and when they find, they will trust. Belief is borrowed; trust is one’s own experience.

What I am teaching you here is that kind of religion which is going to happen more and more in the future. I am bringing the future to you in the present. I am making you pure inquirers, with no belief system, ready to go into experimentation but with no conclusion, open and ready to accept the truth whatsoever it may be – but ready only to accept the truth. […]

So the first thing to understand with The Secret of the Golden Flower is: not to be philosophic, not to be drugged by society, not to believe and not to disbelieve either. Remember, whenever I say, “Don’t believe,” I am not saying that you should disbelieve – disbelief is another kind of belief, a negative kind – when I say, “Don’t believe,” I am saying both belief and disbelief have to be dropped. You have to be simply open, with no conclusion. You have to be simply aware of your ignorance, with no knowledge hiding your ignorance. You have to be innocent, innocently ignorant, you have to say, “I don’t know.”

All right approaches begin with this “I don’t know.” If you “know” anything already without knowing, if you are knowledgeable, then that very belief will hinder, that very belief will create experiences which are not true. And when you are drugged by a belief – and belief is like LSD or marijuana or hashish – when you are drugged by a belief, it creates its own projected world, it gives your imagination free play. […]

And that’s what happens when you take LSD or marijuana or other kinds of drugs. It creates a small fantasy world in you, very colorful – at least it looks colorful when you are lost in the drug. And when you are in the drug, all that you experience appears to be ultimate truth. […] It is not. It has nothing to do with truth.

Truth is available only to those who are completely undrugged – not only chemically, but religiously too – who are completely undrugged. Only they have the capacity to know the truth. […]

That is the vision of Tao: inquire, experiment, and wait for the conclusion to come on its own.

The sutras.

Master Lu-tsu said: When the light is made to move in a circle, all the energies of heaven and earth, of the light and the dark, are crystalized.

Your consciousness is flowing outward – this is a fact; there is nothing to believe in it. When you look at an object, your consciousness flows toward the object. For example, you are looking at me. Then you forget yourself, you become focused on me. Then your energy flows toward me, then your eyes are arrowed toward me. This is extroversion. You see a flower and you are enchanted, and you become focused on the flower. You become oblivious of yourself; you are only attentive to the beauty of the flower.

This we know – every moment it is happening. A beautiful woman passes by and suddenly your energy starts following her. We know this outward flow of light. This is only half of the story. But each time the light flows out, you fall into the background, you become oblivious of yourself.

The light has to flow back so that you are both the subject and the object at the same time, simultaneously, so that you see yourself. Then self-knowledge is released. Ordinarily, we live only in this half way – half-alive, half-dead, that’s the situation. And slowly, slowly light goes on flowing outward and never returns. You become more and more empty inside, hollow. You become a black hole.

This is exactly what happens on a greater scale in the universe. Physicists have now discovered black holes. Taoists discovered black holes long before, but they were not concerned about the black holes there in the faraway space, they were concerned about the black holes inside you. A black hole is a state when all your energy is spent, exhausted, and you have become empty and you have forgotten completely how to go on nourishing this source of energy. Scientists say that sooner or later this sun will become a black hole because continuous energy is being released but nothing is returning to it. It is an immense source of energy. For millions of years it has been giving light to the solar system. For millions of years trees have been growing, flowers flowering, man living, animals moving, birds flying because of the sun’s energy. But the sun is becoming spent. Slowly, slowly, one day it will collapse; there will be no more energy left. Suddenly all light will disappear, the last rays will disappear from it. Then it will be a black hole.

And that’s how many people live their life: they become black holes because of this constant extroversion. You see this, you see that, you are continuously seeing without ever returning the energy to the seer. In the day you see the world, in the night you see dreams, but you go on remaining constantly attached to objects. This is dissipating energy.

By the time a man is thirty he is almost finished; then he is a black hole. People die nearabout thirty, although they are buried nearabout seventy – that is another matter – but they die nearabout thirty.

And I see a grain of truth in the hippie idea: don’t believe a man above thirty. There is a grain of truth in it because it is very rare to find a man beyond thirty who is alive. People become black holes, spent, utterly exhausted. They go on dragging somehow; they live without being alive, as if just the momentum of the past helps them to remain alive.

It happens: if you love bicycling, you have to pedal the bicycle. But sometimes you can just stop pedaling and, out of the momentum created by the past pedaling, the bicycle goes on for a while without pedaling. And if it is a downward slope, it can go far. And after thirty or thirty-five it is a downward slope. Thirty-five is the peak; if seventy is the average age, then thirty-five is the peak. After thirty-five you are on a downward slope; you can go on rolling down without any energy.

The Taoist experience is that this energy that you spend in your extroversion can be more and more crystallized rather than spent if you learn the secret science of turning it backward. It is possible; that is the whole science of all methods of concentration.

Just standing before a mirror someday, try one small experiment. You are looking at the mirror, your own face in the mirror, your own eyes in the mirror. This is extroversion: you are looking into the mirrored face – your own face, of course, but it is an object outside you. Then, for a moment, reverse the whole process. Start feeling that you are being looked at by the reflection in the mirror – not that you are looking at the reflection but the reflection is looking at you – and you will be in a very strange space. Just try it for a few minutes and you will be very alive, and something of immense power will start entering you. You may even become frightened because you have never known it; you have never seen the complete circle of energy.

And although it is not mentioned in Taoist scriptures this seems to me the most simple experiment anybody can do, and very easily. Just standing before the mirror in your bathroom, first look into the reflection: you are looking and the reflection is the object. Then change the whole situation, reverse the process. Start feeling that you are the reflection and the reflection is looking at you. And immediately you will see a change happening, a great energy moving toward you. In the beginning it may be frightening because you have never done it and you have never known it; it will look crazy.

You may feel shaken, a trembling may arise in you, or you may feel disorientated because your whole orientation up to now has been extroversion. Introversion has to be learned slowly, slowly. But the circle is complete. And if you do it for a few days you will be surprised how much more alive you feel the whole day. Just a few minutes standing before the mirror and letting the energy come back to you so the circle is complete . . . And whenever the circle is complete there is a great silence.

The incomplete circle creates restlessness. When the circle is complete it creates rest, it makes you centered. And to be centered is to be powerful – the power is yours. And this is just an experiment; then you can try it in many ways.

Looking at the rose flower, first look at the rose flower for a few moments, a few minutes, and then start the reverse process: the rose flower is looking at you. And you will be surprised how much energy the rose flower can give to you. And the same can be done with trees and the stars and with people. And the best way is to do it with the woman or man you love. Just look into each other’s eyes. First begin looking at the other and then start feeling the other returning the energy to you; the gift is coming back. You will feel replenished, you will feel showered, bathed, basked in a new kind of energy. You will come out of it rejuvenated, vitalized.

Master Lu-tsu said: When the light is made to move in a circle . . .

This is what they mean by moving light in a circle. Your light is moving in an arc; it simply goes out and never comes back. You become a black hole sooner or later. If the circle is complete, you will become a white hole. Now, after black holes, physics is discovering white holes too. A white hole is very pregnant with energy just the opposite of the black hole.

When the light is made to move in a circle, all the energies of heaven and earth . . .

Heaven and Earth mean inner and outer, above and below, God and the world, the invisible and the visible, the unknowable and the knowable. Heaven represents God and the Earth represents the manifested world. They become one when the circle is complete. Then you are not only dust to dust; something of the sky has penetrated you. Then you are no longer just earthly, no more just a human being; you have become divine.

Remember the root of the word “human”: it comes from “humus,” humus means the earth. Man is made of the earth, that’s why man is called human. Man is dust; hence he is called human. When the dust starts becoming luminous with the divine, then you know the splendors of life. And that is possible if the energy comes back. And it can be brought back from everywhere; there is no problem in it, you just have to practice the secret. And once you have got the knack of it, you will find it everywhere.

Looking at a green tree, you can be so alive – as if the whole sap of the tree has flown toward you, the whole juice of the tree has gone into your being. Looking at the moon, and you will be surprised: there is no need to get drunk with any alcohol or any other drug, with the moon you can become a drunkard. The moon can return so much energy if you know how to take it back.

In India, in the ancient Rig Veda, there is talk of soma. Scientists think that soma is something like LSD. Scientists think it must have been a kind of mushroom that has disappeared from the Himalayas because of the change in the climate or something. Or maybe it has not disappeared, maybe people have just forgotten about it. It may be still growing somewhere in the deep valleys of the Himalayas and we have simply forgotten what it is. Maybe the ancient seers knowingly helped humanity to forget about it; it may have proved too dangerous.

Aldous Huxley says that soma was the ultimate drug, and in the future when we have discovered the ultimate LSD, we will again call it soma. But you will be surprised to know that in Sanskrit soma is another name for moon. Hence, Monday in Hindi is called somwar, the day of the moon. Soma is another name for the moon. It is not a mushroom, it is not some kind of LSD, it is not a drug, it is a secret science of getting in communion with the moon. And just as the ocean is affected by the moon, if you can get the energy back from the moon, you will be surprised: great juice, great nectar showers on you. You can be drunk without getting drunk on any drug.

The moon can affect you to the very core of your being. And it will make you cool and calm because the moon is the feminine energy. Just as when you embrace a woman that you love and suddenly you feel great calm and quietude arising in you, exactly the same happens on a greater scale when energy returns to you from the moon.

The moon is the feminine principle, just as the sun is the masculine principle. The moon is yin; the sun is yang. The moon can mother you. There is no need to go in search to the Himalayan valleys for some mushroom, that mushroom is always there in the sky; it is the moon. You have to learn the secret of how to get energy back from the moon.

There have been secret methods to get energy from the moon and from the sun too. Sun worship was born out of a certain technique; great temples of the sun arose. The sun temple of Konarak was just an expression of gratitude to the sun. It was not just worship; it was a science – how to get yang energy in you. It is particularly good for women to get sun energy in them so that their hidden, dormant yang becomes active, and it is good for men to get moon energy so that their dormant feminine principle becomes alive, moving again. It is good for a woman to be a sun worshipper and good for a man to be a moon worshipper.

But the worship has not to be just a ritual, it has to be this method.

When the light is made to move in a circle, all the energies of heaven and earth, of the light and the dark, are crystalized.

Light and dark symbolize man/woman, light/heavy, grace/gravitation, life/death, movement/rest. All these things are represented by light and dark.

In short, if the energy can move in a circle, slowly, slowly you will not know who you are – whether a man or a woman. Extroversion is the principle of yang, introversion is the principle of yin. Man is naturally extrovert, woman is naturally introvert. Even while making love, man keeps his eyes open – he wants to see, he is a voyeur. Hence the possibility of pornography. No woman is interested in pornography – no woman sees any point in it. Even while making love to her beloved, she closes her eyes. She is an introvert, her energy moves inwardly.

But the energy has to become a circle, otherwise one remains a man, one remains a woman. And both are half, two halves of the same whole. Hence the attraction and the need for the other. The day you are able to circulate your energy in a circle you will not need another woman, you will not need another man, because your own man, your own woman will meet and merge into each other. You will be whole; and to be whole is to be holy.

This is Tao and this is Tantra too: to be whole is to be holy.

When the light is made to move in a circle, all the energies of heaven and earth, of the light and the dark, are crystalized.

This is what Carl Gustav Jung called “individuation,” crystallization. This is what George Gurdjieff used to call “the birth of the self” or “the soul.”

Ordinarily you are just fragments, ordinarily you are a crowd; you have many selves. You don’t have a single “I,” you have many “Is,” small “Is”, and all struggling and competing with each other to dominate. This is the misery of man: that he is many. How can you be at ease if you are many? One part says, “Do this,” another part says, “No,” and a third part says, “Do something else.”

Whichever you follow you will repent because the other parts which were not willing to go will create trouble. They will go on insisting that you are on the wrong path, that the other alternative would have been far better. “If you had followed me, you would have arrived by now. And look, you didn’t listen to me.” But if you had listened to that part, then the other parts would have taken revenge.

Man is never contented, he cannot be, because he is many. If you become one, contentment follows of its own accord. If you are many, discontent is natural. If you are many, you live in constant conflict. If you are one, conflict disappears; you have come home.

This is what Taoists call crystallization. And the method to achieve it is to make the light move in a circle so your yin and yang are no longer separate.

The light has to move just exactly as your breathing moves: in and out, out and in, you exhale, you inhale. Just think of a person who only exhales: he will not be able to live, his body will die. Or think of the person who only inhales: he will also die. And that’s exactly what has happened to your soul.

Your soul is dead because either you exhale light or you inhale light; you have not yet learned that exhalation and inhalation have to become a circle, one process. Exhale deeply and inhale deeply.

Just as breath is necessary for the life of the body, consciousness is necessary for the soul. So consciousness should not be left as a half, the circle should be completed. The woman has to learn how to be a man too, and the man has to learn how to be a woman too. And when the man and woman have come to an equal balance, when they are utterly balanced, that is crystallization, individuation; the soul is born.

When one begins to apply this magic . . .

And, yes, it is magic because its effects are really unbelievable.

When one begins to apply this magic it is as if, in the middle of being, there were nonbeing.

This is what I meant by “black hole.”

When one begins to apply this magic it is as if, in the middle of being, there were nonbeing.

As if you are surrounded by being, but you are an island of non-being, of nothingness – a black hole. The trees are alive, the stars are alive, the birds are alive, the Earth is alive, the sun and the moon are alive, everything is alive, and you . . . just a dead black hole. In this vast ocean of being you are a non-being. This is the situation when you begin.

When in the course of time the work is completed, and beyond the body there is a body, it is as if, in the middle of nonbeing there were being.

Then everything changes; then you become a being, a white hole. You become so integrated, so crystallized, that compared to you, all the suns and the moons and the trees and the birds and the animals look like non-being.

Just think of a buddha: he has being – the whole existence feels pale compared to him. He has life – life eternal, life abundant. The whole existence is poor, he is rich. He is an emperor; the whole existence is beggarly.

When in the course of time the work is completed, and beyond the body there is a body . . .

When this circle of light becomes stabilized in you, crystallized in you, you will start feeling another body within the body. This body is made of dust, that body is made of God, of divinity. This body has form, that body has no form. This body is gross, that body is subtle. This body will have to die, that body knows no death. This body is part of time, that body is part of eternity.

When this second body is born – and it can be born only when you have learned how to inhale and exhale light . . . Just as you are inhaling and exhaling breath, when you have learned how to inhale and exhale light – the second body, the body of light . . . This is the body of darkness, this is the body which is part of the Earth, part of gravitation. It is heavy, it is pulled downward. The other body is pulled upward, it is part of grace, it is light – light in both senses of the word – it is illumined and it is weightless. You can fly.

That’s what Zen people call “flying without wings.” Then the whole sky and the infinity of it is available to you.

. . . as if, in the middle of nonbeing, there were being. Only after concentrated work of a hundred days will the light be genuine.

In the beginning the light will look almost like imagination – in the beginning it has to be imagination. Only after a time, a hundred days, the

. . . concentrated work of a hundred days . . .

It depends on how concentrated your work is; a hundred days is not a fixed line. If your work is totally concentrated, then a hundred days, otherwise it will take a hundred years or a hundred lives, one knows not. It depends on the intensity. If your being is totally involved in it, committed to it, you are bent upon it, you are ready to risk all for it, then in one hundred days the light will become genuine. In the beginning it will be imagination.

Imagination is not wrong; imagination is wrong only when it takes you against reality, when it becomes a barrier. Imagination is not wrong when it cooperates with reality, then it is a great blessing. In the beginning you will feel it as imaginary – just looking in the mirror, you will feel, “This is all imagination, that the reflection is looking at me.” It is imagination in the beginning, but soon you will realize that it was not imagination, you were just turning the key in the lock of reality. It starts happening.

In the beginning, if you touch a tree with great love – you know the tree cannot respond – and if you feel some response from the tree, you will think it is imagination. It is not; the tree responds, but it will take a little time for you to recognize the truth of it. When you are loving, the tree responds with love – love is always responded to with love. And if love is not responded to with love, then know well your love is not love, that’s all; then something else is masquerading as love.

. . . then only will it become spirit-fire.

After a hundred days’ concentrated effort it will become spirit-fire.

After a hundred days there develops by itself in the midst of the light a point of the true light-pole.

First it is a diffused light; you just feel it very slightly there. Sometimes it is there and sometimes it is not there; it is very dim and very fragile. But slowly, slowly it becomes very centered. It becomes a light-pole.

Then suddenly there develops the seed-pearl.

Then, just at the very center of the light-pole, the seed-pearl.

It is as if a man and woman embraced and a conception took place.

And it is exactly so: the inner man and the inner woman have embraced. It is a kind of inner intercourse – it is real Tantra. Your feminine part and your masculine part are making love to each other, are joined together. And then there is no need for them to separate.

With the outer woman you will have to separate, otherwise it will become very ugly. With the outer woman you will have to separate, otherwise it will become repulsive. With the outer man you will have to separate; it can only be momentary – only for a moment can you have the glimpse of unity – but with the inner there is no need to separate.

A buddha lives in a constant orgasmic state: the inner woman and the inner man go on making love. You must have seen the shivalinga in Hindu temples; that is a symbol. Just below that linga is the yoni, the feminine part; it is a symbol of the inner man and woman meeting. It is not just phallic as Freudians will interpret it, it is symbolic; it symbolizes the inner polarity.

And once this meeting has happened, you are born anew. When Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Unless you are born again . . .” this is what he means. I don’t know what Christians say and I don’t care either, but this is what he means. “Unless you are born again . . .” This is the birth he means. And this is what Hindus call dwija, twice-born: you have given birth to yourself. If the outer man meets with the outer woman you create a child, you reproduce. If the inner man meets the inner woman you again create a child, but you are the parent and you are the child. A new life begins in you, the life of a buddha, the life of enlightenment, the life of deathlessness.

Then one must be quite still and wait . . .

When this conception has been felt inside, when you feel that the inner man has penetrated the inner woman and the woman is pregnant, then nothing is left but to wait. Just as the woman waits for nine months with great joy, with great prayer, with great hope, you wait. Nothing else has to be done – no need to do anything – the doing part is finished.

The male part is action. To make light circulate is the male part. Once the conception has taken place and the inner woman is pregnant, then the male part need not work, it has to rest. Then things grow on their own.

Meditation is the first part, then there is only prayer left. Hence I say to you that without meditation you will never know what prayer is. Prayer is the highest form of meditation. Prayer is like fragrance, meditation is like the flower. One has to go through meditation.

People ask me why, if their path is that of prayer, are they supposed to do so many meditations here in my ashram. Prayer will come; you have to pave the way for it to come. You have to go through all kinds of meditations – these are cleansing processes. This is the male part of you that has to be satisfied, and then the female part will take possession; you will be pregnant. And to be pregnant is to be prayerful because then nothing is left to be done. Effort is finished and now you are effortless. This is what Taoists call “inaction through action.”

You have been doing many experiments on moving the light in a circle, you have succeeded after a long, concentrated effort; something has crystallized in you – the man and woman are no more separate, they have become one – the child is there. Now, except for waiting, nothing is needed. Wait with hope, wait with trust. And this is what prayer is.

In the midst of the primal transformation, the radiance of the light is the determining thing.

And what will make you alert that the pregnancy has happened? You will start seeing an inner radiance. Whenever you close your eyes, you will not see darkness but radiance. And not only will you see it, those who love you – they will start seeing an aura around you.

In the midst of the primal transformation, the radiance of the light is the determining thing.

How do you know that a woman is pregnant? Have you not seen a certain aura around a pregnant woman? Have you not seen some light coming out of her eyes, her face, her very being? It is exactly the same, but on a much higher plane, when you are pregnant with God within you. You will see radiance. Whenever you close your eyes, you will be all light inside, a sourceless light, coming from nowhere, very cool light, moonlight, but immensely enchanting, magical. And others who love you and are very close to you will also start feeling it.

That’s why we draw an aura around the pictures of saints: it is not available to everybody. If you had seen Christ, you would not have seen his aura, but his disciples saw it. Certainly, the people who crucified him didn’t see that aura. They could not see; they were blind, they were closed. The aura was seen around Buddha – by the disciples. These secrets are available only to lovers. They are such intimate secrets that they are not available to all and sundry, to any Tom, Dick and Harry. They are only available to those who are intimate, those who come close, close, closer and closer, and those who are open, vulnerable.

In the midst of the primal transformation, the radiance of the light is the determining thing. In the physical world it is the sun; in man, the eye.

And when the inner radiance starts growing in you, the eyes become aflame, they look drunk. There is a dance in the eyes – a subtle light, a totally different quality comes to the eyes. Now the eyes not only see things, but they share too. Tao cannot be divided, but it can be shared. And the sharing of Tao is through the eyes.

When I initiate you into sannyas, I ask you to look at me. I want to look into your eyes, I want my eyes to dig deep into your eyes, to have a contact there, because behind your two eyes is hidden the third eye. If the third eye is contacted – and if you are open it happens within a split second, time is not needed – if the third eye is contacted, I know a disciple has come. If it is not contacted, then I only hope that you will become a disciple someday. In that hope I give you sannyas. But that is a hope; it may be fulfilled, it may not be fulfilled – it will depend on a thousand and one things. But when I see a disciple, when the third eye immediately starts responding to me, then you have come – to the place you have been seeking and searching for. Now there will be no need to go anywhere, now you will not need any Master, any teaching. You have come home.

This energy is directed outward – flows downward.

Ordinarily, the energy that is coming from the eyes flows outward. “Outward” and “downward” are synonymous.

Therefore the way of golden flower depends wholly on the backward-flowing method.

Ordinarily the energy is going outward and downward. You have to bring it backward, inward – and “inward” is synonymous with “upward.” Once it starts coming back to you and you become a circle of energy, you will be surprised: a new dimension has opened up; you start moving upward. Your life is no longer horizontal, it has taken a new route, the vertical.

God exists on the vertical route. You will not come across him in the world – not that he is not in the world, but unless you are moving vertically, you will not come across him. Just as a blind man cannot see light, the horizontal man cannot see God.

Many come to me and say, “If you show us God, we will believe.” But how can I show you God? How can I show a blind man light unless he is prepared to go through the treatment so that his eyes open? I will have to turn you from your horizontal way of life into a vertical way of life. That’s what sannyas is all about: a vertical way of being. And once the light starts moving upward, the golden flower opens up.

These are symbols; there is no flower inside you. “Flower” simply represents flowering, “golden” simply represents its lightfulness, its radiance.

The circulation of the light is not only a fantasy.

Remember: the circulation of the light is not only a fantasy. In the beginning it may appear so – you will have to be patient – soon it becomes a fact. It is a fact, it is a fact from the very beginning, but just because you have never been in contact with it, in the beginning it looks like a fantasy.

By concentrating the thoughts, one can fly; by concentrating the desires, one falls.

Desire is the Taoist name for energy moving downward, “outward,” and “thought” is the Taoist symbol for energy moving inward. So don’t misunderstand. By “thought,” Taoists don’t mean your so-called thoughts, by “thought” they mean thought-energy purified of desire. If it is purified of desire and all desire has disappeared, then there is no need to go out because you go out only because you are desirous of something. You desire a house, you desire money, you desire power, you desire a man, a woman, this and that, then you go out. If there is no desire, thought need not go out; it starts turning inward – the one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn happens.

Desireless thought is inward-moving, desireful thought is outward-moving. Hence the insistence of all the buddhas on desirelessness.

When a pupil takes little care of his thoughts and much care of his desires, he gets into the path of submersion.

When a disciple takes little care of his thought and too much care of his desires he is drowned in the world.

Only through contemplation and quietness does true intuition arise: for that the backward-flowing method is necessary.

Thought has to be purified of desire. Once thought is purified of desire it is no-thought. Mind without desires is a no-mind. It is what Patanjali calls samadhi, Zen people call satori, Taoists call crystallization: the balance of the outward and the inward. And no energy is lost; it goes into the world and comes back, like a bird flying in the morning out into the sky, and by the evening it comes back to the nest.

Let your energy come back to the nest again and again. Don’t let it go forever without turning it back to you. And you will become a reservoir, and you will become tremendously powerful inwardly. Only in that power does intuition start functioning. In that power spirit-fire is born. In that power the true light-pole arises. In that power suddenly there develops the seed-pearl.

It is as if a man and woman embraced and a conception took place. Then one must be quite still and wait.

Meditation is complete and prayer begins. To bring meditation to prayer is the whole work of Tao.

Enough for today.

-Osho

From The Secret of Secrets, Discourse #7

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

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

Podcast Episode: Meditation Involves all Three

An imaginary conversation discussing a real post

Following is an A.I. generated conversation discussing Purushottama’s post: Meditation Involves all Three.

click to play or download audio file:

Meditation Involves all Three Podcast

Pip: Sat Sangha Salon — where the questions are ancient and the answers keep arriving fresh, usually before breakfast.

Mara: Today we’re working through a piece by Purushottama on what meditation actually is — how concentration, contemplation, and dhyana relate to each other, and what it takes for awareness to find its own ground.

Pip: Let’s start with how those three stages fit together.

Meditation Involves all Three

Mara: The post opens with a distinction Osho draws between concentration, contemplation, and meditation — but the real claim here is that all three aren’t competing alternatives. They’re a sequence, a natural progression that unfolds within a single sitting.

Pip: And the writer lays out exactly where each stage lives. Here’s the spine of it: “This watching without any involvement at all is what I am referring to as dhyana, as meditation. In this watching there is more self-awareness than identification hence I am able to watch without involvement.”

Mara: So the upshot is that dhyana isn’t a separate technique you switch into — it’s what concentration and contemplation are building toward. Each stage increases self-awareness and loosens identification until the watcher can simply remain on the bank.

Pip: The river metaphor does a lot of work here — you’re not stopping the current, you’re just refusing to jump in. Which sounds effortless until you’ve spent twenty minutes narrating your own grocery list.

Mara: Right, and the post is honest about that friction. Contemplation is described as “a continual movement from being aware to being lost in thought, remembering and again lost into the stream of thought.” The re-membering — spelled out with a hyphen — is doing something deliberate there: rejoining awareness, piece by piece.

Pip: What strikes me is the practical instruction buried in the final section. You don’t start from some ideal state — you start from wherever you actually are. Chaotic and scattered? Begin with concentration. Already thinking hard about a problem? That’s contemplation — you can work with it.

Mara: And the post follows that logic all the way through. When watching becomes truly non-involved, thought doesn’t get suppressed — it subsides on its own. The interference itself, the grasping and rejecting and judging, is what keeps the stream moving. Remove that, and the witness is what remains: “awareness aware of itself.”

Pip: Three stages, one ground. The architecture was always there — the sitting just maps it.

Mara: What stays with me is the idea that you begin from wherever you are — not from some prepared, settled place.

Pip: Awareness finding its own address. We’ll keep following that thread next time.

Here you can listen to the podcast on Youtube.

and Here is the original Post from Purushottama, Meditation Inovles all three.

Podcast Episode: A Way Out

An imaginary podcast discussing a real post

Following is an A.I. generated conversation discussing Purushottama’s post: A Way Out.

click to play or download audio file:

A Way Out Podcast

Pip: Welcome to Sat Sangha Salon — where the inner landscape gets more airtime than the outer one, which honestly seems fair at this point.

Mara: Today we’re working through a piece by Purushottama that asks a question most of us quietly carry: if conditioning is everywhere and unavoidable, is there actually a way out? Let’s start with that territory.

A Way Out

Pip: The premise here is almost vertiginous — not that we have some conditioning, but that there is no version of a human life that escapes it. Political, religious, cultural, generational — the post maps the full sweep and lands somewhere uncomfortable.

Mara: The setup earns that discomfort. After cataloguing every flavor of conditioning a person might inherit, the post arrives here: “There seems to be no way out of this quagmire.”

Pip: And that’s the real stakes — not a personal complaint but a structural diagnosis. If the mind itself is built from accumulated impressions, then thinking your way out just adds another layer. You cannot use the conditioned instrument to uncondition itself.

Mara: Which is exactly where the post turns. The mystics — Buddhas, Christs, Zen masters, Krishnamurti, Ramana, Osho — are cited not as authorities to believe but as a provocation to investigate personally. The move is from received wisdom to direct experiment.

Pip: And the experiment has a specific character. This isn’t positive visualization or philosophical detachment — it’s closer to just staying put.

Mara: The post is precise about this: meditation here means “giving a little time and space to have a look at what presents itself, what arises in my inner landscape and to stay with it totally, not by thinking about it, analyzing it, judging it, but by being with unconditionally.” No rejection of the uncomfortable, no clinging to the pleasant.

Pip: So the way out is in — which sounds like a bumper sticker until you sit with what it’s actually asking. It’s asking you to watch the machinery without touching the controls.

Mara: And the reported result is that the stream of conditioning slowly loses momentum. Not through suppression but through witnessing — dense matter, as the post puts it, becoming spaciousness.

Mara: There’s also a candid acknowledgment that most people have no interest in this project, because the end of conditioning is, in a real sense, the end of the self built around it.

Pip: That honesty is what keeps the whole thing from tipping into prescription. It’s offered as a personal discovery, not a mandate.

Mara: Exactly — the closing note is that intellectual understanding alone isn’t enough. It has to become lived experience, which is the whole point of the experiment.

Pip: And if spaciousness is what’s on the other side, the question becomes what we do with the quiet once we find it.

Pip: Conditioning as the water we swim in — and meditation as the first moment you notice you’re wet.

Mara: That’s the thread. Next time, we’ll see where the inquiry goes from here.

Here you can listen to the podcast on Youtube.

and Here is the original Post from Purushottama, A Way Out.

Watching Without Involvement

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

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

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

-purushottama

Responsibility for My Own Meditativeness

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is as the Sufis say:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have to be Like a Thief – Osho

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A Map from Mind to No-Mind

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The Awakening of the Double-Pointed Arrow

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Meditation Involves all Three

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and Here is the original Post from Purushottama, Meditation Inovles all three.

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An imaginary podcast discussing a real post

A Way Out

Here you can listen to the podcast on Youtube.

and Here is the original Post from Purushottama, A Way Out.

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