Question :

I am a lawyer. I don’t know how to meditate, and I seem to be occupied all of the time. Please suggest what to do.

 

 

It is important to understand, because all the teachers of meditation in the world have been telling you that you have to keep a separate time for meditation. Mohammedans have to meditate five times in the day. Five times they have to close their shops, their businesses if they are real Mohammedans. But this is absolutely impractical. If the man is driving a railway train, or flying an aeroplane, and he has to stop five times, this is not going to be meditation, this is going to be a massacre!

 

My approach about meditation is totally different. I do not say to you that you have to have a separate time for meditation. Meditation has to be just like breathing – you don’t have a separate time for it, that in the morning you breathe and then you go to your business and forget breathing. You go on doing your things, and breathing continues.

 

Meditation has to be something like that, that it runs like an undercurrent in your all activities of the day. I will suggest you a very simple meditation. Whatever you are doing – you may be digging a hole in the earth, planting new rosebushes in your garden, working in your shop, or fighting a case in the court – it does not matter what you are doing. Do it consciously, do it with full awareness.

 

I will tell you what I mean by it. Once Buddha was passing in Shrivasti with his dearest disciple, Ananda. A fly came and sat on his forehead. Just as we will do, he simply waved his hand and the fly was gone. Then he stopped, and took his hand very carefully, very consciously. The fly was no more there, and he waved his hand with great grace. Ananda could not understand what is happening. He said, “You have the fly few minutes before, and it is gone. Now what are you doing?”

 

And Buddha said, “That time I did it wrong. I did it without awareness. I continued to talk to you, and mechanically I simply waved my hand without being conscious of what I am doing. Now I am doing it as I should have done in the first place, to remind me that it does not happen again.” Any action done with awareness becomes meditation.

 

In the beginning it will be difficult, you will go on forgetting again and again. But don’t be discouraged. Even if in twenty-four hours you can manage for twenty-four seconds, that is more than enough. Because the secret is the same. If you can manage it for one second, you know the key. You know the knack. Then it is only a question of time. Slowly, slowly, you will be having bigger gaps when you are aware. The action continues; not only it continues, it becomes better than ever before; because now you are doing with such consciousness.

 

Its quality changes, because you are conscious, you are totally there. Your intensity changes, your insight, your understanding; and the action that you are doing starts having a grace of its own. Meditation should be slowly spread all over your life. Even while going to sleep, lying down on your bed, it will take few minutes for you to go to sleep. Those few minutes be alert, of the silence, of the darkness, of the relaxed body.

 

Remain alert as sleep starts descending on you, till you are completely overwhelmed by the sleep, and you will be surprised that if you had continued to the very last moment when sleep took over you, in the morning the first thought will be again of awareness; because whatever is the last thought before you go to sleep is always the first thought in the morning when you wake up. Because it continues as an undercurrent in your sleep.

 

You cannot find time, nobody has time. The day is so full. But six or eight hours in the night can be transformed into meditation. Even a Buddha will feel jealous of you. Even he cannot meditate eight hours. It is simply an intelligent effort to transform your sleep. You are taking a shower. Why not take it with awareness. Why take it mechanically? Just doing like a robot, because you have been doing it every day, so you go on doing it and it becomes mechanical. Do everything non-mechanically, and slowly, slowly meditation will not be a question that it needs separate time. It becomes spread all over your day, twenty four hours. Then only you are on the right track.

 

The people who meditate ten minutes in the morning, are not going to gain much. Because ten minutes of meditation, and twenty-four hours against it, how you are going to win? You have to put twenty-four hours of meditation against twenty-four hours of ordinary life. Then there is absolute guarantee that success is going to be yours.

 

- Osho, “The Last Testament, Vol 5, #22”