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- Go deep into meditation.
And by meditation I mean awareness, watchfulness,
witnessing. It is only through meditation that the
inner light begins. Otherwise man lives in darkness.
Meditation enkindles something that is latent in all
of us, but needs to be provoked. We are looking
outwards. Our backs are at our inner source; hence
it is being neglected, ignored. and to ignore one's
inner being is the only ignorance. To know it is the
only knowledge. All other knowledge is worthless. It
may help you in the world but it can't help you in
eternity.
- Go deep into meditation.
and be meditation I mean silence, awareness,
witnessing. You can meditate any time of the day,
you can meditate working, walking, doing things.
Meditation is not something separate from life; it
should not be separate, otherwise it remains a
little artificial. Meditation should be spread all
over life. You should walk in meditation, you should
sit in meditation; that means silently, fully aware.
Slowly slowly it becomes your very flavour, then the
bridge is created.
And through meditation comes wisdom -- not through
studying books, not through scriptures. Through
scriptures one can become knowledgeable but no wise.
and knowledgeable people are sad, they are bound to
be sad because all their knowledge is borrowed.
There can be no song in it.
- Meditation means undoing
what the society has done to you. It has reduced you
to a machine; you have to de-automatise yourself,
you have to become a man again. You have to come out
of this state of unconsciousness, of mechanicalness.
You have to come out of this sleep. It is possible
only through meditation. There is no other way,
there has never been, there will never be. The only
way to reduce a man to a machine is take away his
consciousness force him to function unconsciously.
And just the opposite is the way of meditation: give
him back his consciousness.
- Dhyan means meditation.
Meditation means awareness, watchfulness, a silent
witnessing of all the processes of the mind. And the
magic of watching is that as your watchfulness
deepens, the mind starts evaporating. When the
watchfulness is absolute mind becomes nil, a zero.
And the disappearance of the mind gives you clarity,
absolute clarity, transparency; you can see through
and through, you become a mirror. And then life is
reflected as it is -- not according to any doctrine,
not according to the Bible or the Koran or the Gita
but as it is. And to know life as it is, is to know
god.
- this witnessing is
possible only if you slowly move into meditation.
Choose one meditation, whichever fits with you, and
then go on working on it without any desire for any
immediate result; forget all about result. Just go
on doing it, enjoying it, and one day the result
comes. But it comes only when meditation has come to
a certain intensity.
It is like water evaporating: when it comes to a
one-hundred-degree heat it evaporates. At
ninety-nine degrees it still does not evaporate, it
is still water; just one degree more and it
disappears. The same happens with meditation: you go
on working, a certain intensity comes, a certain
degree of heat is created, and the ego evaporates.
And when the ego is no more, god is.
- It is only through
meditation that purity comes. Meditation means
jumping out of the mind. There is no need to purify
the mind, it can be put aside. One can become
disidentified with the mind. To know "I am not the
mind," is real purity because then you are only
consciousness, awareness, a witnessing. To live
twenty-four hours a day as a witness is the way of
the sannyasin.
- Meditation is basically
the process of witnessing: looking from your centre
all that is happening. Many things are happening on
the outside -- the noise of the train far away;
something is happening in you body -- your knees are
hurting -- right? Your mind is churning many
thoughts, that 'What am I doing here?' Your heart is
feeling many emotions, you have waited for this
moment for so long. There is joy in the heart, a
certain ecstasy, a mood, a receptivity. All those
things have to be watched very minutely.
Watching them opens your inner being. Just watching
them opens your inner eye and that is the real eye;
the outside eyes are of not much use. You are
fortunate that you don't have them. You are blessed!
Blessed are the blind for they shall not be forced
to see this ugly world! And it is really ugly --
believe me!
And you can put your total energy for the inner eye.
The outside eyes are wasting eighty percent of
energy -- it is the major part. Man has five senses,
eighty per cent is taken away by the eyes and only
twenty per cent is left for the other four senses.
They are very poor people, those four. Eyes are very
rich, they have monopolised the whole thing; hence
it is good -- eighty per cent energy is saved -- and
that can be immediately used for witnessing, for
seeing your inner world. hence in the East we call a
person who is blind 'pragyanshakshu' -- this word is
untranslatable.
It simply means one who has the inner eye: The outer
eyes are not there but that is a great opportunity
because eighty per cent of energy is available for
the person and he can easily become a meditator,
more easily then anybody else. It is a well-known
fact that blind people have better ears than anybody
else. They become beautiful musicians, good singers,
for the simple reason, for their eighty per cent
energy is diverted towards the ears. Ears are the
closest to the eyes, so when the eyes are not using
the energy the ears start using it. But that is
again a misuse because ears will again take it
outside.
It is better to use this available energy for your
observation, inner observation. Just watch
everything -- and it is good because you have
nothing much to do. You have not to go here and
there and visit people and become a member of the
Rotary Club. You are saved from so much nonsense
that I felt really jealous of you! Enjoy it! And
feel sorry for everybody else! They are poorer and
you can become immensely rich. And the art of that
richness is witnessing. Witnessing is another name
for meditation.
- For dignity of character,
consciousness is needed, not conscience and that's
the function of meditation. Meditation does not give
you any character directly. It does not say what to
do and what not to do. It never gives you any
commandments. It simply gives you a technique for
becoming more aware, for being more alert, watchful,
witnessing.
Meditation is the art of awareness. And once you are
aware, out of your awareness your actions will arise
-- not out of conscience. Conscience is cultivated
by others, by the vested interests, by the
establishment. Consciousness is yours. It is
individual, it is not collective. Conscience is part
of the mob psychology. Consciousness gives you
dignity because it gives you individuality. It gives
you rebellion, it makes you capable of saying yes or
no of your own accord. There is no foreign agency
manipulating you in the name of religion, morality,
etcetera.
My effort here is just to help you to be more aware
so whatsoever you do comes out of that awareness.
That awareness has no ready-made answers; it is just
like a mirror: it reflects the situation, the
challenge of the situation, and you act immediately,
spontaneously. You don't look for an answer in the
memory, in the scriptures, in your parent's ideas,
in all that has been taught to you. You simply
encounter the situation immediately; in your own
light. Your action then has dignity, beauty, grace,
because it is coming out of freedom. Freedom makes
everything graceful. Freedom is the greatest value
in life.
And then certainly, whatsoever you do -- your
character, your behaviour -- is yours, authentically
yours. It has your signature on it. Then you are not
a carbon copy, you are original. The Zen people call
it finding the original face.
For that, one has to drop all the masks, one has to
risk many things, particularly respectability. That
is a bribe by the society. It will give you a Nobel
prize and it will give you many honours; it will do
everything to make you feel great, if you can fulfil
one condition: if you are obedient, obedient like a
robot, then all respect is for you. Then the society
will make you a great hero, but there will be no
grace, no beauty, no freedom, no truth, no being;
you have committed a real suicide.
Meditation opens the doors of your inner treasures,
what Jesus calls the kingdom of god. Meditation is
only a key, and keys are always small things, but
they can unlock immense treasures. Everybody is born
as a prince or a princess, but gets lost in the
blind crowd of beggars.
- The moment you become
attached to what is happening, the mind arises. The
mind is an attachment. A thought moves and you
become attached to it, you become identified with
it. You say 'I am it. I am a Christian.' This is an
attachment. 'I am a Hindu.' This is an attachment,
this is the mind. The self is neither Hindu nor
Christian. The mind is Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan
and so on, so forth. The mind is Communist, the mind
is Catholic, the mind is this and that. The self is
a pure witness. There may be a thought which is
Catholic or Hindu or Communist, but it is only a
thought; the mind is a witness to it. Knowing it,
remaining in this witnessing, the mind disappears.
Then you are no more attached, and in that
detachment is meditation. Meditation is a state of
no-mind.
- So when you become a
witness to what is happening in you, all that
society has taught you to repress will begin to
rise, because witnessing means that the weight
holding it all down is removed. Right now you are
sitting on top of it, so everything remains
suppressed. People come to me to tell me about the
strange states arising out of their meditations.
They expected meditation to bring them peace, and
instead they find themselves facing inner tempests.
They expected meditation to bring them satisfaction,
and find themselves aflame with dissatisfaction.
They thought anger would disappear, and find
themselves, to their dismay, hot with anger!
In the beginning this is bound to happen. You have
been sitting on the lid that covers your
repressions, and you have been riding on that lid a
long time, trying continuously to hold down
everything beneath it. To become a witness means
that you have finally jumped off the lid; now you
will only stand aside and will not do anything. Now
you will no longer repress, now you will just
witness. So everything suppressed will arise, all
the repressions will catch fire; you will find
flames leaping where there were only ashes.
All the anger and sex and turmoil will surge up,
will surround you, but even in these moments you
maintain your witnessing. It will not last for long,
because it is just the explosion of the repressions.
As these flames flare up, and fade, the fire below
will begin to disappear; and as the smoke is
dispelled into the vastness, you will find a clear,
smokeless space within. A day comes when you find
suddenly that you are standing alone, nothing is
left to be seen. The witness is there, but there is
nothing to be witnessed -- no anger, no sex, no
hatred, no envy, no jealousy. But this will take
time....
If you were dealing with the accumulated repressions
of only one lifetime, it would be different. But
these are the repressions of numerous lives. Nobody
knows how many times you have been born, and how
many societies have crushed you. And each time a
different society, and all these societies
destroying you in different ways... this is why you
carry so many inner contradictions.
Once you were a Hindu, and you were taught that this
is right and that is wrong. Then once you were a
Mohammedan and you were taught exactly the opposite,
that this is wrong and that is right. Once you were
a Jaina, and once a Buddhist... the number of
societies you have wandered through is endless. You
have learned so many rights and so many wrongs, and
they are so contradictory to each other that you are
in deep inner conflict and great confusion. So many
people have carved and shaped you that no single
image of you has developed. So many images have been
carved, and your stone would have looked so much
more beautiful if it had been left untouched. The
sculptors have made it deformed and ugly.
The process of witnessing will take time, and this
will depend on the effort you put into witnessing,
and also on how much is repressed within you. If
your effort is really profound, things may happen
very quickly. If the effort is only lukewarm, you
may begin to feel the effects only after a few
lives, or may never feel it at all. The time taken
will depend on how intensely, how enthusiastically
and how totally you give yourself to the effort to
become grounded in witnessing. If your witnessing
can be total, all the turmoils can come to an end in
an instant! If you become the very awareness, if in
the moment of awareness all your energy becomes
awareness itself -- no doer remains at all, only the
watcher -- then even in an instant such a seeing
will burn up everything lying suppressed within you.
Osho Meditation Quotes -
1,
2,
3, 5,
6,
7,
8
Related
Meditation Links
How to stop Thinking
Osho on what is
Meditation
What is Mind and Mind Conditioning
Any Activity
can become Meditation
Introduction to
Meditation for Beginners
Meditation
Tips for going deep in to meditation
Whatsoever you do with
awareness is meditation
Meditation is a
state of Awareness, Watchfulness, Witnessing
Osho Quotes on Mind
Conditioning - Mind1,
Mind2,
Mind3,
Mind4
Master's Quotes -
Meditation 1,
Meditation2,
Meditation3,
Meditation4
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