Identification

 

 

Man ordinarily lives a very unconscious life, almost like a robot, a sleepwalker, a somnambulist. He goes on doing things but all is mechanical. He is not aware what he is doing, he is not watchful of his own acts, he is not alert about his own thoughts. He is so much identified with his feelings, emotions, moods, that he cannot watch. Watching needs a certain distance. And he is so closed that when he becomes angry he really becomes anger, not just angry. And when he is greedy he is not just greedy, he is greed.

 

And the same is the case with all his emotions, feelings, thoughts, actions. The identification is a state of unconsciousness and this identification has to be broken, hammered, so a distance can be created, so you can see what you are doing.

 

Eating you can see, walking you can see. A moment comes when even while you are sleeping you can see. Something in you remains still alert and aware, just like a small flame inside. The body is fast asleep, you may be snoring, you can hear it yourself. It is a rare phenomenon but it happen, it happens: hearing yourself snoring is something like a miracle, but it is possible. As your awareness grows slowly slowly you become capable of watching your body in all its acts, then your mind in all its activities, then your heart.

 

Of course, the hardest to watch is the heart and the easiest to watch is the body, and between the two is the mind; hence begin with the body and end on the heart. Once you can watch all the three, these three concentric circles around your centre, meditation has started growing in you, the spring has come.

 

When one is capable of watching all the three without any mistake, constantly, with no lapse, with no gaps, then the fourth happens. That fourth is called Chinmaya, the real consciousness, the enlightenment, the Buddhahood, the Christ-consciousness.

 

In the East we have only called it the fourth; we have not given it any name because names create trouble, words create trouble. Words are immediately caught by the scholars, philosophers, theologians, and they start spinning and weaving theories around them and they distort everything.

 

Hence we have decided in the East to call it only by a number, the fourth. Now you cannot do anything with the number, fourth. There is no possibility of interpretation, you cannot impose any idea on it -- the fourth is simply the fourth, it is only a number. It simply indicates only one thing, that you have passed the three concentric circles and has reached to the fourth, the centre. And that centre is the beginning of god or the experience of godliness, the beginning of eternity or the experience of timelessness, the beginning of true life which knows no death, which is beyond birth and death both. This is the search, the search of all the true seekers: to taste the eternal, the absolute, the immortal. And it is possible because it is part of us.

 

We are both, the world and the beyond. The world is those three concentric circles. Those are the three dimensions of the world and the fourth is the beyond, penetrating the world, a ray of light penetrating the layers of darkness.

 

Getting unidentified and becoming aware -- that's the whole process of sannyas.

 

-Osho, "Nirvana now or never, #15“