Question 1
Beloved Osho,
What are the roots and what are the wings of a meditator?
Meditation is a way of settling in oneself, at the innermost core of your being. Once you have found the center of your existence, you will have found both your roots and your wings.
The roots are in existence, making you a more integrated human being, an individual. And the wings are in the fragrance that is released by being in contact with existence. The fragrance consists of freedom, love, compassion, authenticity, sincerity, a sense of humor, and a tremendous feeling of blissfulness.
The roots make you an individual, and the wings give you the freedom to love, to be creative, to share unconditionally the joy that you have found. The roots and wings come together.
They are two sides of one experience, and that experience is finding the center of your being.
We are continuously moving on the circumference, always somewhere else far away from our own being, always directed towards others. When all this is dropped, when all objects are dropped, when you close your eyes to all that is not you –even your mind, your heartbeats are left far behind – only a silence remains.
In this silence you will settle slowly into the center of your being, and then the roots will grow on their own accord, and the wings too. You need not worry about them. You cannot do anything about them. They come on their own.
You simply fulfill one condition: that is, to be at home – and the whole existence becomes a bliss to you, a benediction.
-Osho, "The Osho Upanishad, #9, Q1"
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A man without meditation lives in a dark night of the soul. The moment you start meditating the sung already starts rising on the eastern horizon. The colour that I have chosen for my sannyasins is the colour of the dawn, when the sung is just rising. All the shades of red are there on the horizon, projected on the clouds.
The colour of the dawn is the colour of revolution. Communists have chosen it for the outer revolution; I have chosen it for the inner revolution. And the outer revolution is nothing compared to the inner revolution. The outer revolution proves only a reform; it never proves to be really a revolution, because the man remains the same. You only go on changing the structures around him. The prison is changed but the prisoner remains the same, and still imprisoned -- maybe in a more comfortable prison, more convenient, with television sets and football grounds and utter facilities which are available to the free people -- but still he is in the prison, the freedom is not there.
The inner revolution brings freedom and the only way to make oneself go through the inner revolution is meditation. Meditation simply means learning to forget all that you have learned. It is a process of deconditioning, a process of dehypnosis.
The society has burdened everybody with thousands of thoughts. Meditation simply helps you to come out of that world of thoughts, into a state of silence. It is a process of cleaning your slate completely, it is emptying all that has been forced and stuffed inside you.
Once you are empty, spacious, silent, clean, the revolution has happened, the sun has risen; then you live in its light! And to live in the light of your inner sun is to live rightly. In fact that is the only way to live. Others are only dying, just dying slowly, moving in a queue that goes on becoming shorter and shorter every moment, and any moment you may be the first in the queue. In fact everybody is trying to be first in the queue; a great desire to be the first everywhere.
The ordinary life is only called life – it is not. It is only so-called life. It is a process of gradual death or to be more accurate, a process of gradual suicide.
The moment you become silent and aware and clear and your inner sky is full of delight, you know the first taste of true life. One can call it god, one can call it enlightenment, one can call it liberation; the experience of truth, love, freedom, bliss – different names but the phenomenon is the same.
-Osho, "Nirvana Now or Never, #14"