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Osho - Meditation is a state of awareness
Osho : Meditation is a state
of awareness, watchfulness, witnessing. Ordinarily we
live just like a robot: we go through all the gestures
of living, but they are only gestures; there is no
consciousness behind it. We are functioning like a
mechanism. And that's what the society wants us to do.
The society needs machines, not men.
Machines are good in a way; they are very obedient.
Nobody has ever heard of any machine being rebellious,
of any machine saying no.
They are always at your disposals push the button and
they start functioning, and whenever you want. They
don't even need a coffee break; day in, day out, they
can go on working for you. Hence slowly slowly society
bas tried to reduce man to a machine. It has almost
succeeded. Fortunately it has only almost succeeded.
With a few persons it has failed -- and those few are
the salt of the earth. Moise is a form of Moses. Moses
is one of those few people who can be called the salt of
the earth. Existence is beautiful because there have
been people like Moses.
They function consciously; they create great rebellions.
The whole evolution has depended on these few people.
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. That's my work here: to help you
to become conscious again so you can be rid of all
structures that have been imposed upon you, which are
keeping you in slavery, in a mental slavery. The slavery
is so subtle that one is not ordinarily even aware of
it, that it exists. People take it for granted that they
are Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, Indians, Japanese,
French.
They never think, even for a single moment, that each
child is born without any religion, without any nation,
without any race; he is simply born as a conscious
being. But we take away his consciousness, and instead
of it we give him poor substitutes. We take away his
real identity and give him false ideas; 'You are this,
you are that,' and then he goes on living according to
those ideas. His whole life becomes a falsification. One
has to wake up from this sleep. The meaning of Moise is
very beautiful.
It has two meanings. Those two meaning are like two
sides of the same coin. The first meaning is servant of
god. It simply means one who is surrendered to tao, to
existence, to nature. God is just a metaphor for the
ultimate law of existence. And the second meaning is one
who is saved by god. The first has to precede, then the
second succeeds of its own accords if you surrender to
the ultimate law of existence you are saved; to
surrender is to be saved. Sannyas is nothing but a
discipline of surrendering, and the outcome is
deliverance.
You have to disappear as an ego and then you are
suddenly born as the very ocean. You have to disappear
as a person, as a separate entity, and then you appear
as the whole. And to be the whole is to be holy. The
discipline that is imposed from the outside is always
ugly because it is destructive, it is paralysing, It
cripples you. Rather than cutting the cloth according to
you and then making a dress out of it, it does just the
opposite: the dress is already there, made by somebody
maybe thousands of years before, and you have to fit
into it.
If you don't fit into it then You have to be cut, not
the dress. Then something is wrong with you, not with
the dress.
That is the moralistic attitude, the puritan attitude,
that the moral rules are always right. If something is
wrong it is always you, so you have to fit with the
moral rules. If you don't fit it creates guilt; if you
try to fit, it creates discomfort. If you are stupid you
try to fit, but then your whole life becomes a misery.
If you are clever, cunning, then you become a hypocrite.
You pretend 'Yes, everything is okay.
I am fitting in perfectly -- the dress is beautiful, it
is lovely!' But then you have to live a double life: one
life in your drawing room, the other life, which is your
real life, from the backdoor. And then there is a split;
then you are constantly in a kind of inner struggle, an
inner tension, and you can never be at ease. You are
pulled apart: if you try to be real you start feeling
you are being oral; if you try to be moral you start
feeling you are being unnatural. And both prove to be
tense states. My approach is totally different; it is
not moralistic at all.
And I make a clear-cut distinction between morality and
religion. Morality is discipline imposed from the
outside, religion is an inner discipline. It arises out
of your own consciousness. Morality depends on creating
a conscience, and very conscience is bound to create
problem for you because it is against you somewhere. It
may look right basically, but nature knows no logic. You
may have to agree intellectually, but existence is far
bigger than the intellect. You cannot manage to force
existence into intellectual patterns.
Moreover, the patterns were created long ago. Manu, the
Indian law-maker, the Hindu founder, prescribed certain
rules. Five thousand years have passed and the Hindu
still has to follow them. Now, the whole world has
changed, man bas changed; nothing is the same. If Manu
comes back he will not even be able to recognise
anything. But his rules are still there. If the Hindu
follows those rules, in one sense he feels good that he
is following the right path.
But then there is repression, and then the whole
situation is against him and he looks silly and stupid
-- to himself, to others too. He does not look
contemporary. He becomes a mess. Morality is for man --
man is not for morality. And morality has to change with
the times. Peoples' needs change, requirements change;
you cannot continue with old rules. Ten commandments
were given three thousand years ago; now everything is
different -- they are absolutely irrelevant. You have to
find new ways to live, new ways to be.
The only possibility is that we drop the whole idea of
conscience. Instead of conscience we should depend on
consciousness. Conscience is always created by others.
It is a manipulation, it is a subtle slavery.
Consciousness is created by you. It is your own effort
to stand on your own two feet, to look at life and to
gather enough courage to live according to your light.
Of course when you live according to your light you may
commit many mistakes, but there is nothing wrong in
committing mistakes because that's the only way to
learn.
The more mistakes one commits, the more one learns. He
only thing to be remembered is: don't commit the same
mistake again and again, because that is stupid' Commit
new mistakes, find out ways to commit new mistakes.
As you grow, as you learn, as you become conscious, as
you become more and more alert, a certain inner
discipline arises without any imposition, because you
can see what is right and what is wrong. And when you
see it, there is no split; then you are not of a double
mind, then it does not create a kind of schizophrenia.
Otherwise the whole humanity has lived a schizophrenic
life up to now, because of the moralistic past.
We have to free religion from morality. Once religion is
freed from morality, then religion gives you a totally
new kind of morality, but it will not be of Manu and it
will not be of Moses and it will not be of Jesus, and it
will not be of Buddha, it will not be mine -- it will be
yours. And when it is yours there is a joy in living it,
there is great growth through it.
You don't feel crippled, paralysed, hampered,
obstructed, manipulated; you become more and more
natural, simple, spontaneous. You become more and more
attuned to the universe. That's the way of sannyas: it
is non-moralistic but absolutely religious. I teach an
amoral religion: not immoral, not moral, but amoral -- a
religion that transcends morality. Then it brings
freedom to you, and freedom is the ultimate value. There
is nothing higher than that. Freedom is the highest
truth. It is another name for god.
Bliss is not something philosophical, something
intellectual. It is existential, it is an experience --
like love, like light, like life. You cannot teach a
blind man what light is. You can tell him about the
physics of light, you can tell him about the mathematics
of light, you can tell him all the theories about light,
but even all those theories, physics and mathematics,
will not give him a single glimpse of light. He will not
know even a single ray of light: he is blind. In fact he
does not even know darkness -- what to say about light?
People ordinarily think that blind people live in
darkness. That is absolutely wrong. That is just our
idea, because we close our eyes and there is darkness,
so we think blind people must be living in darkness. The
blind person cannot see at all, how can he see darkness?
To see darkness eyes are needed as much as eyes are
needed to see light. You cannot even explain darkness to
a blind man, what to say about light? Impossible! The
only possible tray is to help him so that his eyes are
cured, so that he can also see.
Then he may not know the physics -- who knows the
physics of light. I don't know, but I know what light
is. Who knows the mathematics of light? Millions of
people use light without knowing anything about it. It
is said that once it happened that Thomas Alva Edison,
who was the inventor of the electric bulb, went to a
village, a hill station, for a holiday. The hill station
had a small school and the school was celebrating its
hundredth anniversary, so they had many functions; many
celebrations were going on.
He had nothing to do so he went to see what was going on
there. The school children had arranged a small
exhibition and they had made a few electrical things. A
boy was showing him: 'Push this button and the light
comes on, push this button and the fan starts moving,'
and the villagers were very enchanted, amused. It was so
new; they had never seen electricity.
Edison also showed much interest, and nobody knew that
he was Edison, the inventor. Humorously he asked the
young boy, 'What is electricity?' The boy said, 'What is
electricity? Wait. I don't know -- I will call my
teacher, my science teacher.' So the science teacher was
called and Edison asked, 'What is electricity?' The
science teacher was almost at a loss for an answer. He
said, 'Wait. I am not very educated, just a B.Sc., but
our principal holds a doctorate in science; I will call
him.'
The principal came and Edison asked, 'What is
electricity?' The principal looked very puzzled and
said, 'You have asked such a great question.'
Seeing the difficulty, Edison laughed and said, 'Don't
be worried -- I am Thomas Alva Edison. I myself don't
know what electricity is. Not that we know is how to use
it. So don't get worried about it. I am the inventor of
all these things that you are showing here. I was just
joking. I myself don't know what electricity is exactly
-- it is indefinable. But we are using it, are using
light, we are using air, we are using water.
People were drinking water even before they came to know
that water means H2O. It was not needed. Without knowing
what water consists of, people have been drinking and
surviving perfectly well... The blind man needs eyes and
then he will know light. He does not need theories about
it. Exactly is the case with bliss: you don't need
theories about it. I am not a theoretician and I don't
encourage my sannyasins to be philosophical. I
discourage them as much as I can.
I destroy all their philosophical curiosity in order to
emphasise the existential, because once you start moving
into the philosophic direction, there is no end to it;
you will never come to know what bliss is. You will go
on thinking and thinking and thinking; and one thought
leads to another thought, ad infinitum. Bliss is an
experience. I can teach you how to experience it, I
cannot tell you what it is. If you become silent, still,
calm and quiet and collected, you will experience it.
Bliss is the experience of a silent state of mind,
because in a silent state of mind, mind disappears. It
is no more mind; it becomes no-mind.
And with the disappearance of the mind all desires
disappear, all tensions disappear, all anxieties
disappear. And these are the barriers which do not allow
the flow of bliss in you, otherwise bliss is your
nature. If all the rocks are beloved, suddenly it with
great force -- your bliss starts flowing like a stream.
A sannyasin has to remember it continuously because mind
always distracts you towards philosophy. And it is very
easy to talk about, to thing about, to read about; the
real problem is to experience. That is arduous, because
for that you will have to go through, an inner
transformation, from mind to no-mind, from thought to
no-thought, from desire to no-desire.
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
Osho
- I don't teach concentration; I teach meditation
Osho Quotes on Mind
Conditioning - Mind1,
Mind2,
Mind3,
Mind4
Osho Meditation Quotes
-
Meditation1,
Meditation2,
Meditation3,
Meditation4
Master's
Quotes - Meditation 1,
Meditation2,
Meditation3,
Meditation4
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