Osho on Anapansati Yoga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This works in a double way: when you consciously breathe in and out, by and by you come to your center, because your breath touches the center of your being. Every moment that the breath goes in, it touches your center of being. Physiologically you think that breath is just for the purification of the blood, that it is just a function of your heart, that it is bodily. You think that it is a function of your heart -- just a pumping system to refresh your blood-circulation, to give to your blood more oxygen which is needed, and to throw out carbon dioxide which is excreta, used stuff: to throw it out, to remove it and replace it.

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

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

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

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

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

When you breathe in, your chest expands. When you breathe out, your chest shrinks. Now theoretical scientists say that it seems that the whole universe breathes. When the whole universe is breathing in, it expands. When the whole universe breathes out, it shrinks. In the old Hindu Puranas -- mythological scriptures -- it is said that creation is Brahma's one breath, the incoming breath; and destruction -- PRALAYA -- the end of the world, is the outgoing breath: one breath, one creation.

In a very miniature way, in a very atomic way, the same is happening in you. When your awareness becomes so one with breathing, then your breathing takes your awareness to the very cells. Rays now penetrate, and the whole body becomes a Buddhabody. Really, then you have no material body at all. You have a body of awareness.

Source: from Osho Book "The Ultimate Alchemy, Vol 2"

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