Osho on difference in Awareness and Attention Osho : Between ‘awareness’ and ‘attention’ there is a difference. When you pay attention to anything it is exclusive; you have to withdraw your attention from everywhere else. So it is a tension really. That is why it is called attention. You pay attention to one thing at the cost of everything else. If you pay attention to your breathing, you cannot pay attention to your walking or to your driving. Do not try it while you are driving because you cannot pay attention to both. Attention means one thing exclusively. Awareness is a very different thing; it is not exclusive. It is not paying attention, it is being attentive; it is just being conscious. You are conscious when you are inclusively conscious. Your breathing is in your consciousness. You are walking and someone is passing, and you are also conscious of him. Someone is making noise on the road, some train passes by, some airplane flies by – everything is included. Awareness is inclusive, attention exclusive. But in the beginning it will be attention. So first try in selected periods. For one hour just be attentive to your breathing. By and by you will be able to change your attention into awareness. Then do simple things – for example, walking, walk attentively with full awareness of walking and also of breathing. Do not create any opposition between the two actions of walking and breathing. Be a watcher of both. It is not difficult. Look! For example, I can pay attention to one face here. If I pay attention to one face, all the faces will not be here for me. If I pay my attention to one face, then all the rest are bracketed out. If I pay attention only to the nose on that face, then the whole face, the remaining face, is bracketed out. I can go on narrowing down my attention to a single point. The reverse is also possible. I pay attention to the whole face; then eyes and nose and every thing are there. Then I have made my focus wider. I look at you not as individuals, but as a group. Then the whole group is in my attention. If I take you as different from the noise that is going on the street, then I am bracketing out the street. But I can look at you and the street as one whole. Then I can be aware of both you and the street. I can be aware of the whole cosmos. It depends on your focus – on its becoming greater and greater. But first start from attention and remember that you have to grow into awareness. So choose a small period. The morning is good because you are fresh, energies are vital, everything is rising; you are more alive in the morning. Physiologists say that not only are you more alive, but your height is a little more in the morning than in the evening. If you are six feet tall, then in the morning you are six feet and one half inch and in the evening you go back to six feet. Half an inch is lost because your spine settles down when it is tired. So in the morning you are fresh, young, alive with energy. Do this: do not make meditation the last thing on your schedule. Make it the first. Then when you feel that now it is not an effort, when you can sit for an hour together completely immersed in breathing – aware, attentive – when you only know this, that you have achieved attention of breathing without any effort; when you are relaxed and enjoying it without any forcing, then you have attained it.

Osho : The East is concerned with the witness, not with what it witnesses. You may be seeing a real tree or you may be seeing a dream tree – it makes no difference. For the Eastern approach it makes no difference whether the tree is real or just a dream tree. In both the cases it is the object, in both the cases you are not it. So what difference does it make whether it is there really or you have just imagined it?
The only thing that makes any difference is the one, the mirror, in which the tree is reflected – true or untrue, that is irrelevant. But the pool of pure water in you where it is reflected… pay attention, emphasize the witness, go deeper into the witness.
And that’s my purpose here in order to help you – not to analyze your dreams. That you can do in the West in a far more scientific way. The West has become very very skillful in analyzing dreams. But the East was never worried because the East says ALL IS DREAM, SO what is the point of analyzing?
And there is no end. If you go on analyzing and the source that creates the dreams is there, it will go on creating new dreams. They will be coming and coming and coming…. That’s why nobody is ever totally psychoanalyzed; there exists not a single person on the earth who is really and totally psychoanalyzed, because the goal of total psychoanalysis is that dreams should disappear. That docs not happen. It didn’t happen even to Freud or Jung.
They continued to dream. That means they continued to remain suppressed; that means they continued to remain the same as they were before. Dreams were still coming, because the source had not been radically changed. The projector is working and you go on analyzing the film on the screen, and you go on thinking how to analyze it. And then you differ, your analysis differs; and then there are schools of psychoanalysis.
Freud says something, Jung says another thing, Adler still another, and so on and so forth. Now there are as many psychoanalyses as there are psychoanalysts, and everybody has his own opinion, and nobody can really be refuted – because all is dream work, Whatsoever you say, if you can say it loudly, convincingly, with authority, with argument, with logic, it appeals TO people – it must be true. And they all seem to be true.
ALL those interpretations seem to be true, because no interpretation is of any worth. All interpretations are wrong! The East has a totally different kind of approach: witness – don’t analyze. In analysis you become too much interested, focussed on the dream. Forget the dream: just look at the watcher. That watcher is constant. In the night IT sees dreams; in the day it sees dreams.
First you see the dream, Savita, and then you are awakened abruptly and you see horror. Then you fall asleep again and you may see a sweet dream, a beautiful dream, a happy dream, or a nightmare again… and this goes on and on. One thing is constant: the seer, the watcher, the witness. Turn upon the witness.