Right-Mindfulness

 

 

Remember, human happiness is not worth much. It is momentary; it is more or less a kind of forgetfulness. Life is full of miseries: in the moment of happiness you forget those miseries, but they don't go away. Once the moment of happiness has passed they will be back again, and with a vengeance, and the moment of happiness will leave you in a kind of deep frustration. You cannot hold onto it, there is no way to keep it forever. By the very nature of things human happiness can only be momentary, because in life everything is a flux, nothing ever abides in time.

 

Divine happiness is that happiness which comes but never goes. It is not of time, it is part of eternity. And when you are really happy, not in a momentary way, the blessing has happened. Now one can feel the blessing of being alive, and because of that feeling one can bless the whole existence too.

 

Let sannyas become a search for divine happiness and blessing. Sannyas is nothing else but that search.

 

Subhoda means right-mindfulness. It is the fundamental technique that Buddha gave to the world.

 

Right-mindfulness means not doing anything mechanically, but doing it with full awareness. Walking, walk with alertness. You can walk without alertness. Alertness is not needed; there is a robot part in the head which goes on doing it. You can eat without awareness, it can become just a habit. You can listen, you can talk, you can live your whole life without awareness, but that is a life of utter meaninglessness. You will never come to know who you are. You will do many things but you will never know who this doer is. Many things will come and pass in your life but you will never know in front of whom all these games are played. You will know the film that is on the screen but you will never know the person who is looking at the film; and to miss that person is to miss all.

 

The only way not to miss it is to act with awareness, alertness, watchfulness, to always be in a kind of witnessing. Walking, you are still witnessing, deep down in the heart, like a mirror reflecting what is happening. Eating, you are a mirror. Right now listening to me, you can listen in two ways. One is the mechanical way: because you have ears you can listen. but that will be only hearing, not listening. You can listen in a conscious way: your whole consciousness can be there behind the ears. All the past is gone, there is no future: you are just here in this moment, totally alert of what is being said to you, drinking it, with total absorption.

 

That is mindfulness, and that is the key for you. Use it as much as you can; you cannot use it in excess. And the more you use it, the more you will find a great integrity arising in you. Something almost starts centering at the deepest core of your being; you become crystallised.

 

Gurdjieff used to say that only the alert person has a soul; others only think that they have souls, they don't. He is right. In the majority of people the soul is so fast asleep that it is almost as if it were not. It has to be provoked into awakening; and that is the meaning of subhoda.

 

-Osho, “Zorba the Buddha, #4”