Osho - The Ultimate Sharpening of Intelligence is Meditation

Osho - Meditation is a beginning of a new life. It is a resurrection. We love through the mind -- that is one way of life: dull, sterile, unoriginal, imitative, mechanical, repetitive, because mind is a machine. To function through the mind is to become a routine, a rut; hence living through the mind brings boredom. As one grows older one becomes more and more bored. And the more intelligent you are, the sooner you feel the shadow of boredom. It is only the idiots who are never bored. Animals are not bored. A certain intelligence is needed to see the futility of what you are doing.

The moment meditation starts you start living directly, you bypass the mind -- that's the whole art of meditation: mind remains there but it is no more your door to existence. It is used as a computer, as a memory system, you can always refer to it, it is your past, it contains all the files of the past, but there is no need to live through those files. They can be piled by the side and you can relate to existence directly, through awareness, not through thought. That's what meditation is all about.

And the moment you relate with existence directly, immediately, without the interference of the past, when you relate to existence now and here, it is a resurrection. It is a beginning of a life which is eternal, which is infinite, which is divine.

(Osho to a Sannyasin) This is your name: Ma Dhyan Lena.
Dhyan means meditation. Lena means light. It also means the bright one, the intelligent one.

The inner light consists of intelligence. The more intelligent you are, the more light-full. The more unintelligent, the more dark. People are living lives in darkness, because they don't apply their intelligence at all. Meditation means applying intelligence to each of your act, to each of your thought, to each of your feeling. These are the three dimensions of your life: the body, the mind and the heart. And the moment you start applying intelligence, your intelligence becomes more and more sharpened.

The ultimate sharpening of intelligence is meditation. These three -- the body, the mind and the heart -- are three schools to learn meditation. Once you have learned you can go beyond the school; there is no need to remain inside the school any more. You have passed, you have learned the art.

People go on living repetitively -- that's a way of destroying one's intelligence. One should try in every possible way to be original, to be one's own self, not an imitation. A Christian is trying to imitate Christ -- that is an unintelligent way of life. Christ never tried to imitate anybody. He was not imitating Abraham or Moses, the old prophets; he was not imitating anybody, he was not imitating even his own master, John the Baptist. He was living according to his own intelligence, that's what brought him to the ultimate peak of consciousness. And the same is true about Buddha, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu, Kabir, Nanak, to all the awakened ones.

But the strange thing is that the people who never imitated anybody are being imitated by millions! There are Hindus, there are Mohammedans, there Christians, there are Jews, there are Buddhists -- all imitators!

My sannyasins have not to imitate ANYbody, including me. They have to be just themselves, totally, utterly.
Live your life as if you are the first person on the earth, live as if you are Adam or Eve -- nobody has there been before so there of no way to imitate. Once you start living your life according to your own light without any fear of committing mistakes -- mistakes are bound to be committed, they are natural, inevitable and beneficial too. Unless one commits mistakes one never learns. Of course one should not commit the same mistake again, because that is stupid. Go on finding new mistakes, mew errors, new ways of going astray.

It is better to go astray on a new path than to follow the crowd on the right path, because it is not a question of right and wrong; the question is of authenticity, sincerity to oneself, responsibility towards one's own being. Meditation is application of intelligence into whatsoever you are doing, and then slowly slowly you intelligence becomes a light unto itself. Last words of Buddha to the world were "Be a light unto yourself."

Source - Nirvana Now or Never

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