Osho Buddhist Meditation of Disconnecting Relationships

 

 

So I would like to give you a special meditation that you can do before you come back again. This is a buddhist meditation; the method is to penetrate the unknowable. So each day, sit silently, close the doors, put off the phone, and tell everybody that for one hour you are dead to the world – whatsoever happens: even if the house catches fire you are not going to come out.

 

Take a shower, have loose clothes if it is too cold to have no clothes on, otherwise be naked, and sit down; this way will be perfectly good (he is sitting relaxedly with his legs crossed). If this feels a little strenuous and difficult then you can sit on a chair. To be comfortable is the point, so that you can remain in that posture for one hour at least.

 

Then close your eyes, relax the body, and start destroying your relationships. Think: if you are not the son of your father, then who are you? – disconnect it. This is part of your identity, that you are the son of a certain man; disconnect it.

 

Think: if you are not the husband of your wife, then who are you? – disconnect it. If you are not a father to your children, then who are you? – disconnect it. If you are not a friend to your acquaintances, then who are you? – disconnect it.

 

If you are not the citizen of the united states, then who are you? – disconnect it. And go on disconnecting whatsoever you can find: all kinds of connections are there, all kinds of relationships are there. You belong to a certain church, you belong to a certain country, you belong to this, you belong to that club, you are a professor, you are a therapist, doctor, this and that; go on disconnecting.

 

For twenty minutes work hard to disconnect all relationship – you are left floating in the unknown – and then ask ’who am l?’ Now those answers won’t do – that you are a son of a certain man or the husband or the father... your job, your education. We have disconnected them already... we are finished with them! Now there is no way to fall upon those relationships.

 

With those relationships has disappeared your so-called identity: the way you have come to know yourself, the way that you have become. Once that known is destroyed you are suddenly floating in an unknown ocean. Your mind will try to make this unknown ocean known again; it is still not the unknowable.

 

From the known you have moved to the unknown. Your mind says ’Yes, you are not this, you are not that – you are a soul, you are consciousness, you are awareness’, but these are again the trap of the mind. So forget all these things also, drop them! You don’t know.

 

Buddha says you are an awareness, but who knows? – he may be cheating. And these buddhas are not reliable people at all. Somebody has told you that you are a soul – you are not the body; but you don’t know that yourself. Unless you know it is not worth anything. Somebody has told you that you are an immortal soul and that when you die you will go to god, but this is all rubbish, told by others. It maybe so, it may not be so; you cannot be certain about it.... And if you cannot be certain about it, it has to be discarded.

 

We are in search of something indubitable, we are in search of something very foundational and essential which cannot be discarded by any effort. So first deny the known, then deny the unknown, and then you start entering into the emptiness of the unknown.

 

It will be frightening for a few days, it will be almost like a death – it is called in zen, ’the great death’ – but after a few days, if you go on gathering courage and entering it, within three, four weeks, one day it will suddenly be there. Suddenly all has disappeared; you are no more here. You are no more the same person: a new gestalt has arisen.

 

Nothing can be said about it; you will have to experience it. Only experience is the proof of it, and only by experience one knows it; there is no other way to know it. So continue this.

 

Even if for a few seconds that feeling of the unknowable arises, that will do... even if for a single moment in one hour’s time you enter into that world of nothingness, of nobodiness, of no-self, what zen people call anatta, non-ego. It is pure emptiness, no boundaries; the drop has simply disappeared into the ocean.

 

Sometimes it will be very hard in the beginning: you will start perspiring and your heart will palpitate and you will feel very uneasy and restless. Don’t be worried – within three weeks all that settles, and once it has settled things start becoming smooth and something starts flowering inside you.

 

And I can see, it is waiting there like a bud, ready to flower any moment. A little climate just has to be created for it. Mm? – now you have to be a very very careful gardener: this flower of being is ready to flower.... And courage will be needed, courage is the only need.

 

-Osho, "The Further Shore, #18"