Osho Quotes on Meditation
Any action in which you can be total becomes meditation.
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Choose one meditation and then put all your effort in it. That effort has to be very regular because will is created only out of regularity. It has to be very persistent and a continuity has to be maintained. Even to miss for one day is to destroy much -- and at least one hour every day has to be given to it.
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Remember always that the ultimate value is meditation, so anything you do, do meditatively; and all things can be done in a meditative way.
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Once work becomes meditation, then there is naturally great joy. Meditation should never be against work, otherwise there is a conflict, then life is not harmonious. When everything fits together in one pattern there is beauty and balance. So the man who can find meditation in his work is the most fortunate man. Whatever you are doing is not the point -- you may be a woodchopper, that will do; you may may be a brick-maker, that will do. The point is that whatsoever you are doing is not against your being, and that your being and your doing go together hand in hand, in a dance. Then each experience is a growth experience, and out of each experience it is not only that your work grows, you grow. And it is not only that your work succeeds -- you succeed... and that is the real value.
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Meditation simply means a state of no-thought, awareness without the process of thought, just pure, mirror-like awareness, with no thoughts passing in the mind.
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Compassion is a shadow of meditation; a meditative mind is a compassionate mind. So learn meditation and forget about compassion, otherwise you can become a do-gooder, and that is a dangerous thing. Just think about one thing -- how to cultivate a more silent mood... and that is possible through many things. Through dance it is possible, through music, through meditation, through running, through swimming it is possible -- anything that can take total possession of you, in which you are utterly lost, and out of which there arises that meditative state. Then you will see that out of that meditation suddenly you have become full of compassion. So my whole emphasis is on meditation and on nothing else.
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Meditation means cleansing the mirror, dropping thoughts, letting thoughts disappear, attaining to moments when thinking ceases. And those are the most blissful moments in life. Once you have tasted a single moment of no-thought, you have taken a great leap into truth; then things will become more and more easy every day.
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Meditation is nothing but a bridge between you and light. Then darkness is just a river, it goes flowing underneath the bridge; you can move to the world of light. And the essential core of meditation is very simple: it is to be a witness of your mind process, not to be identified with the mind processes -- thoughts, desires, imaginations, projections, dreams, memories and so on and so forth -- not to be identified with anything that passes in the mind but to remain aloof, watching, seeing it, knowing, tacitly knowing 'I am separate, I am not it. I am just a mirror reflecting it all but I don't become the reflection.
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Meditation means: remain as relaxed as you are in deep sleep and yet alert. Keep awareness there; let thoughts disappear but awareness has to be retained. And this is not difficult: it is just that we have not tried it, that's all. It is like swimming: if you have not tried it, it looks very difficult; it looks very dangerous too. And you cannot believe how people can swim because you simply drown! But once you have tried a little bit it comes easily; it is very natural.
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Meditation simply means getting out of this illusory state -- of dreams, desires, past, future -- and just being in the moment that surrounds you. Just to be utterly in the moment, with no thought, is to be in reality. It takes a little effort to drop out of the illusions because we have lived in those illusions for so long; it has become almost habitual, a second nature. It also takes a little effort to get out of those illusions because we have invested in them very much. They are our hopes: it is through them that we go on living, prolonging. To drop them means to drop the future, to drop all hopes; and we don't know how to live in the present without hope.
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Meditation means how to be not a mind. How to be not a mind! Meditation means how to create the state of no-mindedness. It doesn't mean unconsciousness. It means conscious and still, without any disturbance in the consciousness; conscious with no ripples, with no waves, with no vibrations; conscious as a deep, calm, silent pool with no ripples on it, with no disturbances on the surface; just a calm silent pool with no breeze to disturb, just mirrorlike.
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By meditation we try to slow down the mechanism of projections. If the mechanism is slowed down and even for a single moment you begin to be aware of the gap -- imageless gap of the screen -- you have the glimpse. Suddenly you know that you have lived in the dreams of your own creation; and whatsoever you have known as the world was not the world really, it was YOUR world.
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So silently, peacefully, without hurry, without any tension, without any anguish, move into yourself instantly. It is urgent. Unless meditation becomes urgent to you, it will never happen; you will die before it. Put meditation on your laundry list as the most important, urgent… number one. But meditation in your life is just at the very end of your laundry list — and the laundry list goes on becoming bigger and bigger. And before you finish your laundry list, you are finished, so the time for meditation never comes.
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Thoughts can create such a barrier that even if you are standing before a beautiful flower, you will not be able to see it. Your eyes are covered with layers of thought. To experience the beauty of the flower you have to be in a state of meditation, not in a state of mentation. You have to be silent, utterly silent — not even a flicker of thought — and the beauty explodes, reaches to you from all directions. You are drowned in the beauty of a sunrise, of a starry night, of beautiful trees.
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Don't move outward and you will find yourself in the heart, in the cave of the heart. Mind moves with desires, outwards. Then it can continue, continue, and go on and on -- to the very end of the world it can go. Don't move with any desires. Desirelessness is the method to come in, and desirelessness is meditation. Do not desire anything. Even for a single moment, if you are in a desireless moment, you will find yourself in. And then you can encounter the flame of life which is immortality, which is non-dying, which has never been born and will not die. Once known, there will be no fear of death. And when there is no fear of death, only then you can live authentically. Then your life will have a different quality altogether. It will be aware, it will be alive, it will be fresh. It will be blissful, it will be a deep ecstasy, a continuous ecstasy.
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This is what meditation means: how to be not identified with the mind -- how to create a space between yourself and your own mind. It is difficult because we never make any separation. We go on thinking in terms that the mind means me: mind and me are totally identified. If they are totally identified, then you will never be at peace; then you will never be able to enter the divine, because the divine can be entered only when the social has been left behind.
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There are six senses: five are outer; they tell you about the world. I say something about the light; without eyes you will not know light. Ears say something about the sound; without ears you will not know anything about the sound. There is a sixth sense, the inner sense, that shows and tells you something about yourself and the ultimate source of things. That sense has to be discovered.
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To live moment to moment is the life of meditation. Then life becomes spontaneous without any effort; then nobody can make you miserable, nobody can disappoint you, nobody can make you a failure because in the first place you were not trying to be a success; you were not asking the future to be in a certain way. So whatever happens, the next moment you can rejoice. It is always your victory.
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If you were only to listen, it becomes meditation. Without meditation you cannot hear. What is the meaning of meditation? Meditation exists only where mind is not; where the internal dialogue is gone.
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If you meditate, meditation is so beautiful, who bothers about the result? And if you bother about the result, meditation is not possible. This result oriented mind is the only barrier, the only block. There are not many blocks, the only block is that of the result oriented mind: never here-now, always somewhere else thinking of the result; while making love, thinking about the result.
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Real music will help you move towards meditation, beyond the mind needs, towards spiritual needs. Real poetry will give you a glimpse of the minds of the sages -- a glimpse of course. It will open a window so you can see the faraway distant Himalayas. And then an urge arises in you, and you start travelling.
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Use the head, use the heart, and if you can use both a tremendous revolution will happen. If you can use both you will become aware that you are the third force -- neither; you are neither head nor heart; because if you can move so easily from one to another you cannot be either; you must be separate from both -- then the witnessing arises; then the identification is broken. And that witnessing is what meditation is all about.
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Be aware, and wine becomes water. Be aware -- sex becomes love. Be aware -- love becomes prayer. Be aware -- prayer becomes meditation. Simply one thing has to be remembered: do whatsoever you like, but do it with full consciousness, and then you will not go astray.
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Meditation will drop all the masks. It is a search for the original face.
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Dhyan means meditation. Meditation means awareness, watchfulness, a silent witnessing of all the processes of the mind. And the magic of watching is that as your watchfulness deepens, the mind starts evaporating. When the watchfulness is absolute mind becomes nil, a zero. And the disappearance of the mind gives you clarity, absolute clarity, transparency; you can see through and through, you become a mirror. And then life is reflected as it is -- not according to any doctrine, not according to the Bible or the Koran or the Gita but as it is. And to know life as it is, is to know god.
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Meditation opens the doors of your inner treasures, what Jesus calls the kingdom of god. Meditation is only a key, and keys are always small things, but they can unlock immense treasures. Everybody is born as a prince or a princess, but gets lost in the blind crowd of beggars.
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The moment you become attached to what is happening, the mind arises. The mind is an attachment. A thought moves and you become attached to it, you become identified with it. You say 'I am it. I am a Christian.' This is an attachment. 'I am a Hindu.' This is an attachment, this is the mind. The self is neither Hindu nor Christian. The mind is Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan and so on, so forth. The mind is Communist, the mind is Catholic, the mind is this and that. The self is a pure witness. There may be a thought which is Catholic or Hindu or Communist, but it is only a thought; the mind is a witness to it. Knowing it, remaining in this witnessing, the mind disappears. Then you are no more attached, and in that detachment is meditation. Meditation is a state of no-mind.
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So when you become a witness to what is happening in you, all that society has taught you to repress will begin to rise, because witnessing means that the weight holding it all down is removed. Right now you are sitting on top of it, so everything remains suppressed. People come to me to tell me about the strange states arising out of their meditations. They expected meditation to bring them peace, and instead they find themselves facing inner tempests. They expected meditation to bring them satisfaction, and find themselves aflame with dissatisfaction. They thought anger would disappear, and find themselves, to their dismay, hot with anger!
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In the beginning this is bound to happen. You have been sitting on the lid that covers your repressions, and you have been riding on that lid a long time, trying continuously to hold down everything beneath it. To become a witness means that you have finally jumped off the lid; now you will only stand aside and will not do anything. Now you will no longer repress, now you will just witness. So everything suppressed will arise, all the repressions will catch fire; you will find flames leaping where there were only ashes.
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All the anger and sex and turmoil will surge up, will surround you, but even in these moments you maintain your witnessing. It will not last for long, because it is just the explosion of the repressions. As these flames flare up, and fade, the fire below will begin to disappear; and as the smoke is dispelled into the vastness, you will find a clear, smokeless space within. A day comes when you find suddenly that you are standing alone, nothing is left to be seen. The witness is there, but there is nothing to be witnessed -- no anger, no sex, no hatred, no envy, no jealousy. But this will take time....
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If you were dealing with the accumulated repressions of only one lifetime, it would be different. But these are the repressions of numerous lives. Nobody knows how many times you have been born, and how many societies have crushed you. And each time a different society, and all these societies destroying you in different ways... this is why you carry so many inner contradictions.
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Once you were a Hindu, and you were taught that this is right and that is wrong. Then once you were a Mohammedan and you were taught exactly the opposite, that this is wrong and that is right. Once you were a Jaina, and once a Buddhist... the number of societies you have wandered through is endless. You have learned so many rights and so many wrongs, and they are so contradictory to each other that you are in deep inner conflict and great confusion. So many people have carved and shaped you that no single image of you has developed. So many images have been carved, and your stone would have looked so much more beautiful if it had been left untouched. The sculptors have made it deformed and ugly.
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The process of witnessing will take time, and this will depend on the effort you put into witnessing, and also on how much is repressed within you. If your effort is really profound, things may happen very quickly. If the effort is only lukewarm, you may begin to feel the effects only after a few lives, or may never feel it at all. The time taken will depend on how intensely, how enthusiastically and how totally you give yourself to the effort to become grounded in witnessing. If your witnessing can be total, all the turmoils can come to an end in an instant! If you become the very awareness, if in the moment of awareness all your energy becomes awareness itself -- no doer remains at all, only the watcher -- then even in an instant such a seeing will burn up everything lying suppressed within you.
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This witnessing is possible only if you slowly move into meditation. Choose one meditation, whichever fits with you, and then go on working on it without any desire for any immediate result; forget all about result. Just go on doing it, enjoying it, and one day the result comes. But it comes only when meditation has come to a certain intensity. It is like water evaporating: when it comes to a one-hundred-degree heat it evaporates. At ninety-nine degrees it still does not evaporate, it is still water; just one degree more and it disappears. The same happens with meditation: you go on working, a certain intensity comes, a certain degree of heat is created, and the ego evaporates. And when the ego is no more, god is.
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It is only through meditation that purity comes. Meditation means jumping out of the mind. There is no need to purify the mind, it can be put aside. One can become disidentified with the mind. To know "I am not the mind," is real purity because then you are only consciousness, awareness, a witnessing. To live twenty-four hours a day as a witness is the way of the sannyasin.
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Meditation is basically the process of witnessing: looking from your centre all that is happening. Many things are happening on the outside -- the noise of the train far away; something is happening in you body -- your knees are hurting -- right? Your mind is churning many thoughts, that 'What am I doing here?' Your heart is feeling many emotions, you have waited for this moment for so long. There is joy in the heart, a certain ecstasy, a mood, a receptivity. All those things have to be watched very minutely.
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Watching them opens your inner being. Just watching them opens your inner eye and that is the real eye; the outside eyes are of not much use. You are fortunate that you don't have them. You are blessed! Blessed are the blind for they shall not be forced to see this ugly world! And it is really ugly -- believe me!
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And you can put your total energy for the inner eye. The outside eyes are wasting eighty percent of energy -- it is the major part. Man has five senses, eighty per cent is taken away by the eyes and only twenty per cent is left for the other four senses. They are very poor people, those four. Eyes are very rich, they have monopolised the whole thing; hence it is good -- eighty per cent energy is saved -- and that can be immediately used for witnessing, for seeing your inner world. hence in the East we call a person who is blind 'pragyanshakshu' -- this word is untranslatable.
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It simply means one who has the inner eye: The outer eyes are not there but that is a great opportunity because eighty per cent of energy is available for the person and he can easily become a meditator, more easily then anybody else. It is a well-known fact that blind people have better ears than anybody else. They become beautiful musicians, good singers, for the simple reason, for their eighty per cent energy is diverted towards the ears. Ears are the closest to the eyes, so when the eyes are not using the energy the ears start using it. But that is again a misuse because ears will again take it outside.
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It is better to use this available energy for your observation, inner observation. Just watch everything -- and it is good because you have nothing much to do. You have not to go here and there and visit people and become a member of the Rotary Club. You are saved from so much nonsense that I felt really jealous of you! Enjoy it! And feel sorry for everybody else! They are poorer and you can become immensely rich. And the art of that richness is witnessing. Witnessing is another name for meditation.
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For dignity of character, consciousness is needed, not conscience and that's the function of meditation. Meditation does not give you any character directly. It does not say what to do and what not to do. It never gives you any commandments. It simply gives you a technique for becoming more aware, for being more alert, watchful, witnessing.
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Meditation is the art of awareness. And once you are aware, out of your awareness your actions will arise -- not out of conscience. Conscience is cultivated by others, by the vested interests, by the establishment. Consciousness is yours. It is individual, it is not collective. Conscience is part of the mob psychology. Consciousness gives you dignity because it gives you individuality. It gives you rebellion, it makes you capable of saying yes or no of your own accord. There is no foreign agency manipulating you in the name of religion, morality, etcetera.
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My effort here is just to help you to be more aware so whatsoever you do comes out of that awareness. That awareness has no ready-made answers; it is just like a mirror: it reflects the situation, the challenge of the situation, and you act immediately, spontaneously. You don't look for an answer in the memory, in the scriptures, in your parent's ideas, in all that has been taught to you. You simply encounter the situation immediately; in your own light. Your action then has dignity, beauty, grace, because it is coming out of freedom. Freedom makes everything graceful. Freedom is the greatest value in life.
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And then certainly, whatsoever you do -- your character, your behaviour -- is yours, authentically yours. It has your signature on it. Then you are not a carbon copy, you are original. The Zen people call it finding the original face.
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For that, one has to drop all the masks, one has to risk many things, particularly respectability. That is a bribe by the society. It will give you a Nobel prize and it will give you many honours; it will do everything to make you feel great, if you can fulfil one condition: if you are obedient, obedient like a robot, then all respect is for you. Then the society will make you a great hero, but there will be no grace, no beauty, no freedom, no truth, no being; you have committed a real suicide.
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The secret of meditation is the art of unlearning. Mind is learning; meditation is unlearning: that is — die constantly to your experience; let it not imprison you; experience becomes a dead weight in the living and flowing, riverlike consciousness.
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Meditation is unlearning. Peel your onion. It is difficult, because you have become identified with the onion, you think these layers are YOU so to peel them is difficult, it is painful also, because it is not like just throwing your clothes, rather it is like peeling your skin; you have become too much attached to them. But once you know, once you drop one layer, you feel freshness arising. You become new. Then courage increases. Then hope. Then you feel more confident. Then you can peel another layer. The more you peel, the more silent, the more happy, the more blissful you become. Now you are on the right track. Now it is not very far off until you will throw the whole onion.
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I would like the whole world to be full with authentic art, throbbing with it, living with it, because that is the only way: through authentic art, real art, you transcend it. If the music is real, soon you will move into meditation, because the music will only give you a little glimpse of meditation, nothing more.
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Put your whole energy into meditation. Once you are centered in your being, once you know the inner path, then wherever you are you can manage to go to the center without any difficulty. Even when you are dying, it will not make any difference. You may be sick, it will not make any difference.
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Meditation cannot be taught, it can only be caught. I am meditation. If you are available you can catch it.
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Meditation cannot be purchased and no one can give it to you. You have to achieve it. It is not something outer, it is something inner, a growth, and that growth comes through awareness.
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Objects must cease, mind must become just a pure mirror -- a mirroring, not mirroring anything -- just a mirror without any object in it, a pure mirror. By dhyan, this purity of the mind is indicated. So first, no object should be in the mind. Mind must remain alone without thinking about anything -- with no thought, just a consciousness, just an awareness, just an alertness. This alertness without any object is meditation.
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You cannot force meditation, you can only create the situation. And if the situation is created rightly, then meditation happens automatically.
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Meditation is object-less. If you use any object, then it is not meditation; it becomes thinking. It becomes contemplation; it becomes reflection, but not meditation. This is the most essential point to be understood. This is the essence of a meditative state: that it is object-less. Only consciousness is there, but not conscious ABOUT anything. Consciousness without being conscious of anything -- this is the nature of meditation.
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Meditation is not doing something. But you cannot take a jump immediately into non-doing. So I suggest that you make your doing total. Move into it so deeply, and so totally that suddenly the doing drops, and you alone are left, just existing.
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Begin with dhyana, with meditation, and end in samadhi, in ecstasy, and you will know what God is. It is not a hypothesis, it is an experience. You have to LIVE it -- that is the only way to know it.
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Meditation is the art of living with yourself. It is nothing else than that, simply that: the art of being joyously alone. A meditator can sit joyously alone for months, for years. He does not hanker for the other, because his own inner ecstasy is so much, is so overpowering, that who bothers about the other?
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Just one quality of the buddha has to be remembered. He consists only of one quality: witnessing.
This small word `witnessing` contains the whole of spirituality.
Witness that you are not the body.
Witness that you are not the mind.
Witness that you are only a witness.
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As the witnessing deepens, you start becoming drunk with the divine. This is what is called ecstasy.
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Existence is only in the present. Mind is never in the present. In fact, the moment you are in the present, there is no mind in you, there is great silence. The whole sky of your inner being is without thoughts, without clouds. I call this the state of no-mind. Only in this state of no-mind do you meet existence. And that meeting is the ultimate ecstasy. Once you have tasted it, you will never bother about the future.
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Awareness, beholding the mind, is the most essential method to have a breakthrough. And once you have gone just a step beyond the mind, you have entered the world of nirvana, you have entered the world of light and eternal life. You have attained to spiritual integrity, freedom, and tremendous ecstasy which the mind cannot even dream about.
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Unless you come out of your mind and become a no-mind you will not know what life is all about, you will live in vain. You will not have your honeymoon, it is impossible. You will not know the sweetness that existence is full of and the ecstasy.
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Meditation has to spread all over your life. Whatsoever you do, do meditatively. Walk meditatively, eat meditatively. If you are making love, make love meditatively. Meditation has to become your life twenty-four hours a day; then only the transformation. Then you go beyond sex, you go beyond body, you go beyond mind. And for the first time you become aware of godliness, of ecstasy, of bliss, of truth, of liberation.
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It is better not to call anything to anybody — just remain centered in yourself. Look at the world and drop judgments, and you will have such a pure atmosphere around you — no appreciation, no condemnation, just a pure watchfulness. This watchfulness, I call meditation.
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The West is concentration of the mind: the East is meditation of the mind. The West is thinking: the East is non-thinking. The West is mind: the East is no-mind.
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Meditation is unfocussed mind, you simply listen silently, not with a tension in the mind, not with an urge to know and learn, no, with total relaxedness, in a let go, in an opening of your being. You listen, not to know, you simply listen to understand.
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Real music will make you more and more refined. It will become more and more silent. In fact, real music will help you to listen to silence, where all notes disappear, where only gaps remain. One note comes, disappears, and another has not come, and there is a gap. In that gap meditation flows in you.
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All methods of meditation are nothing but methods to help you to remember the art of let-go.
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Meditation should not be a thing apart from life; it should be amidst life, it should be a part of life an organic part, nothing ‘put separate’. The temple should exist exactly in the middle of the market, and all distinctions between the sacred and the secular should be dissolved.
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Children can be taught meditation more easily because they are not yet spoiled. When you have been spoiled the hard work is to help you to unlearn.
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Meditation means you don’t have anything, any object to think about. You are just in a state of absolute aloneness. You don’t have anything on which you can focus yourself — not a sutra, not a mantra, not any great value of life, just pure space all around you. Then you are in meditation. Meditation is never about something. Meditation is a state.
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Drop dreaming and you are there where you have really been always, but you were never aware. All meditation techniques are just antidream efforts, just dream-negating devices.
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When you are in deep meditation you don't feel meditation, you feel bliss. When you are deep in meditation, when you are deep in awareness, you don't feel awareness, you feel bliss. When you begin to feel bliss, that means now you have begun to be aware. Awareness creates the situation in which bliss is felt.