https://oshofriends.com/dictionary/57887Alertness
Be mindful and alert. If you are alert, if your actions become more and more aware, whatsoever you do will not be done sleepily. The whole effort of society is to make you automatic, is to make you an automaton, is to make you a perfect efficient mechanism.
When you start learning to drive you are alert but not efficient, because alertness takes energy, and you have to be alert to many things – the gears, the wheel, the brake, accelerator, clutch. There are so many things you have to be aware of that you cannot be efficient, you cannot go fast. But by and by, when you become efficient, you need not be aware. You can go on humming a song or thinking inside or solving a puzzle, and the car goes by itself. The body takes it automatically. The more automatic you become the more efficient.
Society needs efficiency, so it makes you more and more automatic: In everything you do, be automatic. Society doesn’t bother about your awareness; your awareness is a problem for society. You are asked to be more efficient, more productive. Machines are more productive than you. The society doesn’t want you to be as men, it needs you as mechanical devices, so it makes you more efficient and less aware. This is automatization. This is how the society fools you. You become efficient, but your soul is lost.
If you can understand me, then the whole effort of meditative techniques is to deautomatize you, to make you again alert, to make you again a man, not a machine.
-Osho, "A Bird on the Wing, #11"
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If you start learning to drive, in the beginning you have to be very alert – alert about many things: the wheel, and the accelerator, and the brake and the clutch, and the people on the road. You have to be conscious of all these things. Slowly slowly, once you have learnt to drive, you need not think of anything at all. Everything has become automatized. Now you can sing a song, smoke a cigarette, listen to the radio, talk to the friend – you can do anything! Now, that part, the driving part, needs no attention, your attention is free.
This is a necessity of life; otherwise you will not be able to do many things. So whatsoever you have learnt is always transferred to the robot. Then the robot does it and you are free to learn something else. This is perfectly okay in ordinary life, but, slowly slowly, the robot becomes bigger and bigger. And your tiny consciousness remains tiny.
The work that one has to do upon oneself consists in taking back from the robot, deautomatizing processes. And you will be surprised: if you deautomatize any process, great awareness is released.
Just walk consciously for half an hour and you will be surprised how quiet, how peaceful and serene you look and you feel. Just sitting in your chair, watch your ingoing, outgoing breath, silently – the breath goes in, and you know, you watch, it is going in. Each step of the breath: it has touched your nostrils, the inner side of the nose, it is moving, it has touched your throat, it has moved, it has gone deep into your lungs; you can feel the belly coming up. And then you feel for a moment it has stopped. No movement. And then the return journey: the belly falls back, the air is going out; again you feel the same route. It leaves your nostrils... and again a moment’s gap. And then again new fresh air moves in.
If you simply watch such a simple process, you will be surprised: one hour’s watching of breath will bring you so much silence and so much alertness, as you have never felt in your life. And that makes a difference. That is the difference that makes the difference, that transforms your whole life, slowly slowly. Then you can change everything: eating, walking, breathing – even making love can become a very conscious, alert phenomenon.
-Osho, "The Perfect Master, Vol 1, #7"
