OSHO - On Meditation

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My whole life I have been talking about meditation. There are one hundred and twelve methods of meditation; I have gone through all those methods—and not intellectually. It took me years to go through
each method and to find out its very essence, and after going through one hundred and twelve methods I was amazed that the essence is witnessing. The methods' non-essentials are different, but the center of each method is witnessing. Hence I can say to you, there is only one meditation in the whole world and that is the art of witnessing. It will do everything—the whole transformation of your being.

Whatever I am doing, my meditation continues. It is not something that I have to do it separately; it is just an art of witnessing. Speaking to you, I'm also witnessing myself speaking to you. So here are three persons: you are listening, one person is speaking, and there is one behind who is watching and that is my real me. And to keep constant contact with it is meditation.

So whatever you do does not matter, you just keep contact with your witness. I have reduced religion to its very fundamental essence. Now everything else is just ritual. This much is enough. And this does not need you to become a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan or anybody, and this can be done by an atheist, by a communist, by anybody, because it needs no kind of theology, no kind of belief system. It is simply a scientific method of slowly moving inwards. A point comes when you reach to your innermost core, the very center of the cyclone.

The basic element running through all the methods of meditation is witnessing. You ask me: What is witnessing? Whatever you are doing. For example, right now you are writing. You can write in two ways. The ordinary way that you always write. You can try another method: you can write it and you can also inside witness that you are writing it. And you ask: Does that mean some kind of detachment? A detachment. You are a little distant, away, watching yourself writing. So any act, just moving my whatever you are doing, just remain a witness. If you have any ego, it will destroy it, because this watching is very much poisonous to the ego. It is not ego that watches. The ego is absolutely blind. It cannot watch anything. You can watch your ego. For example, somebody insults you and you feel hurt, and your ego feels hurt. You can watch it. You can watch that you are feeling hurt, your ego is feeling hurt, that you are angry. And you can still remain aloof, detached, just a watcher on the hills. Whatever goes on in the valley you can see.

So all the methods are basically different ways of witnessing. I have condensed them in a very simple way: First, watch your actions of the body. Second, watch your actions of the mind: thoughts, imaginations. And if you can succeed in watching all these three, and as your witnessing grows deeper and deeper, a moment comes that there is only witnessing but nothing to witness. The mind is empty, the heart is empty, the body is relaxed. In that moment happens something like a quantum leap. Your whole witnessing jumps upon itself. It witnesses itself, because there is nothing else to witness. And this is the revolution which I call enlightenment, self-realization. Or you can give it any name, but this is the ultimate experience of bliss. You cannot go beyond it.

This is the simplest. And because it can be done without in any way interfering with your everyday life, because it is something that you can go on doing the whole day. Any other method you have to take some time apart for it. And any method that needs one hour or half an hour to sit and do it is not going to help much, because twenty-three hours you will be doing just the opposite. And whatever you have gained in one hour will be washed away in twenty-three hours. This is the only method that you can continue around the clock. While falling asleep you can go on witnessing, witnessing, that the sleep is coming, coming, coming, that it is getting darker and the body is relaxing. And a moment comes when you can watch that you are asleep. And still there is a corner, a space in you which is awake.

When you can watch yourself twenty-four hours, you have arrived. Now there is nothing to be done. Then witnessing has become natural to you. You don't have to do it. It will be simply like breathing, happening to you.

This is my basic method. But there are other methods. If people feel that this is difficult for them, they can try other methods. All are available. I have returned from a movie show. It is surprising to see how much the light and shade photos projected on the screen captivate people. Where there is really nothing, everything happens! I watched the audience there and it felt as if they had forgotten themselves, as if they were not there, but the flow of electrically projected pictures was everything. A blank screen is in front and from the back the pictures are being projected. Those who are watching it have their eyes fixed in front, and no
one is aware of what is happening behind their backs. This is how leela, the play, is born. This is what happens within and without. There is a projector at the back of the human mind. Psychology calls this back side the unconscious. The longings, the passions, the conditionings accumulated in this unconscious are being continuously projected onto the mind's screen. This flow of mental projections goes on every moment, non-stop. The consciousness is a seer, a witness, and it forgets itself in this flow of the pictures of desires. This forgetfulness is ignorance. This ignorance is the root cause of maya, illusions, and the endless cycle of birth and death. Waking up from this ignorance happens in the cessation of the mind. When the mind is devoid of thoughts, when the flow of pictures on the screen stops, only then the onlooker remembers himself and returns to his home.

Patanjali calls this cessation of the activities of the mind Yoga. If this is achieved, all is achieved. To understand the mind, there are the three points: The first thing is tremendous fearlessness in encountering the mind; the second thing is no restrictions, no conditions on the mind; the third point is no judgments about whatever thoughts and longings arise in the mind, no feelings of good or bad. Your attitude should simply be indifferent. These three points are necessary to understand the perversions of the mind. Then we will talk about what can be done to get rid of these perversions, and go further. But these three basic points have to be kept in mind.

This is my observation of thousands of people: I see them carrying such great psychological luggage, and for no reason at all. They go on gathering anything they come across. They read the newspaper and they will gather some crap from it. They will talk to people and they will gather some crap. And they go on gathering. And if they start stinking, no wonder!

I used to live with a man for a few years. His house was so full of unnecessary luggage that I had to tell him "Now, where are you going to live?" And he would go on collecting any kind of thing. Somebody would be
selling his old furniture, and he would purchase it, and he already had enough. He had no time to use that furniture, and he had no friends to call. His whole house was full of furniture: old radio sets, and all kinds
of things. And I said "But, I don't see the point why you collect all this." He said "Who knows, any time it may be useful." One day we went for a walk and on the road. By the side of the road, somebody had thrown a cycle handle. He picked it up. I said "What are you doing?" He said "But, it must be worth twenty rupees at least, and I have picked up a few other things also—sooner or later I am going to make a bicycle!" And he showed me. He had one wheel, one pedal, that he had picked up from the roads. And he said "What are you saying? Soon you will see!" This man died. The cycle remained incomplete. And when he died, everybody who came to look was puzzled by what he was doing in this house—there was no space even to move.

But this is the situation of your head. I see cycle-handles, and pedals, and strange things that you have gathered from everywhere. Such a small head, and no space to live in! And that rubbish goes on moving in your head; your head goes on spinning and weaving—it keeps you occupied. Just think what kind of thoughts go on inside your mind.

Sometimes, sitting under the stars, you feel a bliss arising within your heart. It seems not of this world. You are surprised. You cannot believe it. I have come across simple people who have known many moments in their life which are Buddha-like, which belong to Christ consciousness, but they have never talked about them to anybody because they themselves don't believe that they were possible. They have in fact suppressed them. They have been thinking that they must have imagined them: How can it happen without any effort of my own? How is it possible that suddenly one becomes blissful? You can remember them in your own life—and in such moments when you were never expecting them—just going to the office, in the daily routine, the sun is high and you are perspiring, and suddenly something strikes home, and for a moment you are not the old you. Paradise is regained. And then it is lost again. You forget about it because it is not part of your style of life. You don't even talk about it, you think 'I must have imagined it. How are these things possible? And I have not done anything so how can it happen? It must have been hallucinatory, an illusion or a dream.' You don't talk about it. As I have observed thousands of people deeply I have not come across many people who have not found such certain moments in their life. But they have never talked of them to anybody. Even if they tried to, people laughed and they thought: You are foolish, stupid. They don't believe, they repress.

Not only has humanity repressed sex, has humanity repressed death, humanity has repressed all that is beautiful in life. Man has been forced to become like an automaton, a robot. All clues, all doors, have been closed towards the unknown. It is my continual experience of thousands of people that when they come for the first time to meditate, meditation happens so easily because they don't have any idea what it is. Once it has happened, then the real problem arises—then they want it, they know what it is, they desire it. They are greedy for it; it is happening to others and it is not happening to them. Then jealousy, envy, all kinds of wrong things surround them.

The inner world is a new world where you have not even looked, where you have never taken a single step. So I have to teach you how, slowly, you can step inwards. Even when I say to people to go inwards, immediately they ask questions which show how focused on the outside things they are. I say to them, "Sit silently." And they will ask me, "Can I do gayatri mantra?" Whether you do gayatri mantra or you read the newspaper does not matter, both are outside. I am telling you, "Sit silently." They say, "That is right, but at least I can repeat omkar…" It is pitiable. I feel sad for them, that I am telling them to be silent but they are asking me to fill their silence with something. They don't want to be silent. If nothing else, then omkar will do—anything will do.

In India people go on doing all kinds of things. They concentrate, they chant mantras, they fast, they torture their bodies, and they hope that through all these masochistic practices they will realize God. As if God is a sadist! As if God loves you to torture yourself! As if he demands that the more you torture yourself, the more worthy you become. God is not a sadist; you need not be a masochist. I have come across people who think
that without long fasting there is no possibility of meditation. Now, fasting has nothing to do with meditation. Fasting will only make you obsessed with food. And there are people who think celibacy will help them into meditation. Meditation brings a kind of celibacy, but not vice versa. A celibacy without meditation is nothing but sexual repression. And your mind will become more and more sexual, so whenever you sit to meditate your mind will become full of fantasies, sexual fantasies. These two things have been the greatest problems for the so-called meditators: fasting and celibacy. They think these two things are going to help—they are the
greatest disturbances!

Eat in right proportions. Buddha calls it "the middle way": neither too much nor too little. He is against fasting, and he knows it through hard experience. For six years he fasted and could not attain to anything. So when he says, "Be in the middle," he means it. About celibacy also: don't enforce it upon yourself. It is a by-product of meditation, hence it cannot be enforced before meditation. Be in the middle there too, neither too much indulgence nor too much renunciation. Just keep a balance. A balanced person will be more healthy, at ease, at home. And when you are at home, meditation is easier.

What then is meditation? Just sitting silently doing nothing, witnessing whatsoever is happening all around; just watching it with no prejudice, no conclusion, no idea what is wrong and what is right.

~ Osho

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