Tag: witnessing

Podcast Episode: Be a Light unto Yourself

An imaginary podcast discussing a real post

Following is an A.I. generated conversation discussing Purushottama’s post: Be A Light Unto Yourself

click to play or download audio file:

Be a Light unto Yourself Podcast

Pip: Sat Sangha Salon — where the beach walk leads somewhere you didn’t expect.

Mara: Today we’re following a single insight from Purushottama: what it means to stop seeking attention from the outside world and turn it inward. Let’s start with that realization on the beach.

Be a Light unto Yourself

Pip: The setup here is deceptively ordinary — a working holiday in Mexico, walks on the beach, swimming in cenotes. But something lands mid-stroll that reframes a pretty fundamental human habit: the need to be seen.

Mara: The post traces it back to a specific moment of noticing. The observation is that “we seek attention in many ways and that it is natural to seek attention until we are ourselves giving attention to our true being in self-remembering or right-remembering.”

Pip: So the hunger for outside attention isn’t a character flaw — it’s a placeholder. It fills the space until something else does. That’s a meaningful distinction, because it shifts the question from “what’s wrong with me” to “what am I actually missing.”

Mara: And the post names what replaces it. Once you begin nourishing your being with your own attention, the need for external validation doesn’t get managed or suppressed — it simply evaporates. That’s the word used: evaporates.

Pip: Evaporates is doing a lot of work there. Not “diminishes,” not “becomes manageable.” Gone. Which is either very reassuring or a very high bar, depending on where you’re standing.

Mara: The post ties this directly to the Buddha’s instruction “Be a light unto yourself” — reading it as at least one answer to why that phrase matters. Self-remembering isn’t a spiritual luxury; it’s the actual source that makes external approval unnecessary.

Pip: What I find interesting is the framing of attention as nourishment. You’re not fighting the craving — you’re feeding the thing that was hungry all along, just from a different direction.

Mara: Right, and the setting isn’t incidental. The observation arrives mid-walk, surrounded by suntans and tattoos and what the post calls “undulating buttocks” — all of it display, all of it a bid for eyes. The insight emerges from inside the phenomenon it’s describing.

Mara: The idea that self-remembering makes external attention unnecessary — that’s not a small claim.

Pip: No. It’s the kind of thing that sounds simple until you actually try it. More from Sat Sangha Salon next time.

Here you can listen to the podcast on Youtube.

Here is the original post from Purushottama, Be a Light Unto Yourself

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.

This False One is a Pretender – Osho

Why do I want to wake up when, as you say, awakening only happens when I am not? This seems very paradoxical.

The ego is not your real self; the ego is a false entity, arbitrary. It is the ego that is your sleep, that surrounds you like a darkness, like a cloud. Hidden behind this darkness is your real self, your real being, which wants to wake up, which wants to get out of all this smoke, out of all this darkness, which wants to get out of the prison of the ego.

There is really no paradox, it only appears so. It appears paradoxical. Your question seems relevant . . . but you have two selves. One is the real: the one that you were born with, the one that was even before your birth, the one that will be there even when death has happened, the one that is running underneath like a hidden current. And the other is created by you, by your family, by your church, by your society, by your state, by the crowd.

This false one is a pretender: it pretends to be the real self. And the real self wants to come out of this unreal one surrounding it. It is a constant suffering for the real self because the real is being suffocated by the unreal; the real feels imprisoned in a dark cell. The real self is vast and has become confined in a very small space. It is crippling and paralyzing.

So when I say awakening happens only when you are not, I mean when your false ego is no more. And that is the only “I” you are aware of right now – that is the “I” you are identified with. Hence, I say whatsoever you know of yourself will not be there when awakening happens. That does not mean you will not be there. You will be there, but that “you” will be so new, so utterly discontinuous with This “you” that you are living right now, that it is better not to mention it at all.

Hence Buddha is silent about it. Not only that . . . if you insist, he calls your real self, anatta, a no-self, for the simple reason that to call it also a self may be confusing. The false is known as the self; if the real is also called a self, you may get confused. You are already too much confused! Buddha calls it a no-self.

But don’t lose heart. Don’t be worried, don’t be afraid that you will die completely. As you are, you will not be there, but you will be there as you should be. Your natural, your spontaneous, being will be there.

And Buddha is also right in calling it a no-self because when the real self is there you don’t have any idea of “I.” The “I” is also a thought. The real self has no idea of “I”; the real self is one with the universal self. It is not separate from existence; it is not an island. The unreal self is separate, the unreal self creates separation, hence, the unreal self creates misery. To be separate from the whole is to be miserable. To be one with the whole is bliss.

And the paradox is only apparent; there is no paradox in reality.

One Sunday morning at the parish of St. Mary’s, Little Wakefield, the signboard announcing the subject of the day’s sermon read: “And forgive us our trespasses.” A few yards away, stuck into the grass, was another sign which read: “Trespassers will be prosecuted.”

Just like that: there is no real contradiction, but it appears to be there. On the one hand, a sign says: “And forgive us our trespasses,” and on the other hand another sign says: “Trespassers will be prosecuted.” But they are not concerned with the same object; their meaning is totally different. When I say you will not be there, I am talking about the artificial self – which you are not but which you have come to believe that you are. Your real self will be there – which you are but which you have forgotten completely.

-Osho

From Walking in Zen, Sitting in Zen, Discourse #6, Q1

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

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

Only the Heart Knows the Answer – Osho

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

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

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

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

In the world of the mind there are only questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are few significant questions.

And there is only one really fundamental question.

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

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

The heart knows no questions.

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

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

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

Mind wants to occupy the whole space.

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

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

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

The throne belongs to the heart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indifference to the mind is meditation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mind’s whole expertise is to create complications.

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

-Osho

From Beyond Enlightenment, Discourse #8, Q1

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

Trance is Always Unconscious – Osho

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Osho

From The Path of the Mystic, Discourse #13

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

Witnessing where Mindfulness and Self-Inquiry Meet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-purushottama

See all 0f Prem’s notes.

The Double-Pointed Arrow of Watchingness

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

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

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

-purushottama

See all 0f Prem’s notes.

That One Technique is Witnessing – Osho

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

Beloved Osho, do you agree with Paul Reps?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Osho

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

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