OSHO ON LORD KRISHNA

 
There are thousand statements about who Krishna is and Krishna belies all the statements. How does one understand a man with so many sides to him? No statement however severe and astute can wholly encompass Krishna's wholeness. It lies in the fact that he has no personality of his own, that he is not a person, an individual – he is existence itself.

You can say that he is like a mirror; he just mirrors everything that comes before him…and when you see yourself mirrored in him, you think Krishna is like you. But the moment you move away from him, he is empty again. That's leadership. One wants to see in Krishna what one wants to see in him. Nothing more nothing less.

OSHO

Osho Stories ~ Trust

"A man just got married and was returning home with his wife. They were crossing a lake in a boat when suddenly a great storm arose. The man was a warrior, but the woman became very much afraid because it seemed almost hopeless -- THE BOAT WAS SMALL AND THE STORM WAS REALLY HUGE, AND ANY MOMENT THEY WERE GOING TO BE DROWNED. But the man sat silently, calm and quiet, as if nothing was happening.

The woman was trembling and she said, "Are you not afraid? This may be our last moment of life! IT DOESN'T SEEM THAT WE WILL BE ABLE TO REACH THE OTHER SHORE. Only some miracle can save us, otherwise death is certain. Are you not afraid? Are you mad or something? Are you a stone or something?"

THE MAN LAUGHED AND TOOK THE SWORD OUT OF ITS SHEATH. The woman was even more puzzled -- what he is doing? Then he brought the naked sword close to the woman's neck -- so close that just a small gap was there, it was almost touching her neck.

He said, "ARE YOU AFRAID?"

She started to giggle and laugh and said, "WHY SHOULD I BE AFRAID? If the sword is in your hands, why should I be afraid? I know you love me."

He put the sword back and said, "This is my answer. I know God loves me, and the sword is in His hands, and the storm is in His hands -- so WHATSOEVER IS GOING TO HAPPEN IS GOING TO BE GOOD. If we survive, good; if we don't survive, good -- because EVERYTHING IS IN HIS HANDS, AND HE CANNOT DO ANYTHING WRONG."

This is the trust one needs to imbibe. SUCH TREMENDOUS TRUST IS CAPABLE OF TRANSFORMING YOUR WHOLE LIFE! And ONLY such tremendous trust is capable of transforming your life -- less than that won't do."

~ Osho

Osho on psychotherapy and meditation – Meditation has nothing to do with psychotherapy

Question – Beloved Osho, does psychological therapy help to go beyond the mind?
Osho – Vijen, psychological therapy can help you to understand the mind, but it cannot lead you beyond the mind. Only one thing leads you beyond the mind and that is meditation. Meditation has nothing to do with psychotherapy, but psychotherapy can create a ground by giving you a better understanding of your mind to go into meditation. It cannot lead you directly into the transcendental, but it can be a help, just the way you prepare a garden. First, you prepare the soil, but that is not the garden. And just preparing the ground, removing the weeds, the grass, any wild growth, stones, roots, still it is not the garden — this much psychotherapy can do.
Now you will have to put seeds, give nourishment to those seeds, care and love and protection. And slowly, slowly the bare ground will start becoming greener. One day there will be flowers and fruits.
Psychotherapy is only a cleansing process, but it is like all cleansing processes. You have to clean your house every day; it is not as if once you have cleaned it you have cleaned it forever. Within twenty-four hours again dust gathers. You have to take a bath every day, or twice; otherwise you will start getting dirty.
Psychotherapy is good as a cleaning method, but it does not go beyond that. And if you remain addicted to psychotherapies you will have to clean yourself again and again. You will have a better understanding of the mind but just that much is not enough to create the world of the beyond. For that, seeds of meditation, awareness, watchfulness are absolutely necessary.
And once you have gone beyond the mind, psychotherapy becomes meaningless. Going beyond the mind simply means you have realized your own being. Now mind is left far behind. Going beyond the mind also means that now mind is going to function as a servant and you are the master. So whenever you need to, you can use it. Right now the situation is just the reverse. You are not the master, and the mind uses you. The mind is almost blind and it directs your life and sooner or later you are going to fall into a ditch. All minds lead finally to misery, to suffering.
Meditation is the only possibility for creating a space where blessings shower. I am not against psychotherapies. I am simply telling you they can be used as a foothold to jump into meditation. You can jump into meditation directly too, but you will find it a little difficult because you don’t have a clean mind and a clean understanding. The mind
will put every weight on you and drag you backwards. Psychotherapy is instrumental, helpful, but alone it is meaningless. I am using psychotherapy in this commune as a means towards meditation, as a help, as a preparation.
But in the West psychotherapy is used as an end to itself; hence psychotherapy in the West is not of much use. Unless it becomes a stepping-stone for meditation, you are moving in a circle. Every day you will have to clean. Once in a while you will have to go to a psychotherapist. People become addicted because it gives you a clean feeling, but that clean feeling remains only for a few days; again you have gathered all the rubbish.
Psychoanalysts ordinarily give their patients two sessions per week, for years, ten years, fifteen years, and still nobody is beyond the mind. After fifteen years of psychoanalysis one simply becomes addicted to psychoanalysis; now it has become a necessity. If you don’t go twice a week to a psychoanalyst you gather too much tension, too much dust,
you feel too dirty, too heavy. Now you have created a new problem. Psychology rather than giving you freedom has given you new chains. It is as addictive as any alcohol or any drug. Nothing is wrong in it; in itself it is helpful and beautiful, but you should use it for something better.
Psychoanalysis is good but the good is the enemy of the best. You should not get addicted to the good. You should use the good as a stepping-stone for the best; otherwise it turns into an enemy. Even psychoanalysts are very embarrassed by the fact that there is not a single man in the whole world who has been perfectly psychoanalyzed. And I am amazed at their stupidity. Hoping that some day some man will be perfectly psychoanalyzed is exactly like hoping that some day some house will be perfectly clean and there will be no need to clean it again. It is absolutely absurd. The house will need cleaning continually, because as time passes dirt gathers.
Even the cleanest mirror needs cleaning once in a while because dirt gathers on it, vapor gathers on it; it does not reflect clearly, it starts reflecting distortions. There will never be any man perfectly psychoanalyzed, because the process in itself is only of cleaning. Can you get your clothes cleaned forever, perfectly cleaned? They will again become ready to go into the laundry. So the people who are going continuously into psychotherapies are going into a kind of laundry, dry cleaning. It is good, but good is not enough. Vijen, in a sense it can help if you use it as a means and you don’t forget that it is not all. In another sense it can be a disturbance, a barrier, if you think that this is all and there is nothing else beyond it.
That’s what is happening in the West. Psychotherapists think this is the ultimate, but they have not produced a single buddha. Even their founders, Freud or Jung or Adler are not awakened people. They are living in the same misery, in the same suffering as you are living. They are full of fear. They don’t know anything about death, that it is a fiction.
They have not experienced their own being. They are just scratching on the surface. Mind is your surface; your being is in the center. How much you clean your surface does not matter, it is not going to lead you to the center. If you can use psychotherapy as a means it is good. If you think it is the end it is the enemy of your transcendence. It all depends on your intelligence.
A Jew asks his rabbi, “I have two problems. I have asked my boss a dozen times already, but he is determined to fire me at the end of the month.”
“And what is the other problem?” asks the rabbi.
“Ah well, my wife does not get pregnant, although she stays home and prays all day,” answers the Jew.
“You are doing it wrong,” suggests the rabbi. “Next time you stay at home to pray and send your wife to ask the boss.”
Three months later the happy Jew thanks the rabbi: “Your help has worked! The boss has rehired me and my wife is pregnant!”
The rabbi was certainly a great psychoanalyst and did help the poor fellow. If you need
this kind of help then psychotherapy is good, but don’t ask for more.
Source – Osho Book “The Invitation”

Osho on Mind – Mind’s nature is to move from one extreme to another

Osho – The most difficult thing, the almost impossible thing for the mind, is to remain in the middle, is to remain balanced. And to move from one thing to its opposite is the easiest. To move from one polarity to the opposite polarity is the nature of the mind. This has to be understood very deeply, because unless you understand this, nothing can lead you to meditation.
Mind’s nature is to move from one extreme to another. It depends on imbalance. If you are balanced, mind disappears. Mind is like a disease: when you are imbalanced it is there, when you are balanced, it is not there. That is why it is easy for a person who overeats to go on a fast. It looks illogical, because we think that a person who is obsessed with food cannot go on a fast. But you are wrong. Only a person who is obsessed with food can fast, because fasting is the same obsession in the opposite direction. It is not really changing yourself. You are still obsessed with food. Before you were overeating; now you are hungry – but the mind remains focused on food from the opposite extreme.
A man who has been overindulging in sex can become a celibate very easily. There is no problem. But it is difficult for the mind to come to the right diet, difficult for the mind to stay in the middle. Why is it difficult to stay in the middle? It is just like the pendulum of a clock. The pendulum goes to the right, then it moves to the left, then again to the right, then again to the left; the whole clock depends on this movement. If the pendulum stays in the middle, the clock stops. And when the pendulum moves to the right, you think it is only going to the right, but at the same time it is gathering momentum to go to the left. The more it moves to the right, the more energy it gathers to move to the left, to the opposite. When it is moving to the left it is again gathering momentum to move to the right.
Whenever you overeat, you are gathering momentum to go on a fast. Whenever you overindulge in sex, sooner or later, BRAHMACHARYA, celibacy, will appeal to you. And the same is happening from the opposite pole. Go and ask your so-called SADHUS, your BHIKKUS, sannyasins. They have made it a point to remain celibate, now their minds are gathering momentum to move into sex. They have made a point of being hungry and starving, and their minds are constantly thinking about food. When you are thinking about food too much it shows that you are gathering momentum for it. Thinking means momentum. The mind starts arranging for the opposite. One thing: whenever you move, you are also moving to the opposite. The opposite is hidden, it is not apparent.
When you love a person you are gathering momentum to hate him. That’s why only friends can become enemies. You cannot suddenly become an enemy unless you have first become a friend. Lovers quarrel, fight. Only lovers can quarrel and fight, because unless you love, how can you hate? Unless you have moved far to the extreme left, how can you move to the right? Modern research says that so-called love is a relationship of intimate enmity. Your wife is your intimate enemy, your husband is your intimate enemy – both intimate and inimical. They appear opposites, illogical, because we wonder how one who is intimate can be the enemy; one who is a friend, how can he also be the foe?
Logic is superficial, life goes deeper, and in life all opposites are joined together, they exist together. Remember this, because then meditation becomes balancing. Buddha taught eight disciplines, and with each discipline he used the word right. He said: Right effort, because it is very easy to move from action to inaction, from waking to sleep, but to remain in the middle is difficult. When Buddha used the word right he was saying: Don’t move to the opposite, just stay in the middle. Right food – he never said to fast. Don’t indulge in too much eating and don’t indulge in fasting. He said: Right food. Right food means standing in the middle. When you are standing in the middle you are not gathering any momentum. And this is the beauty of it – a man who is not gathering any momentum to move anywhere, can be at ease with himself, can be at home.
You can never be at home, because whatsoever you do you will immediately have to do the opposite to balance. And the opposite never balances, it simply gives you the impression that you are becoming balanced, but you will have to move to the opposite again. A buddha is neither a friend to anyone nor an enemy. He has simply stopped in the middle – the
clock is not functioning.
It is said about one Hassid mystic, Muzheed, that when he attained enlightenment suddenly the clock on his wall stopped. It may or may not have happened, because it is possible, but the symbolism is clear: when your mind stops, time stops; when the pendulum stops, the clock stops. From then on the clock never moved, from then on it always showed the same time.
Time is created by the movement of the mind, just like the movement of the pendulum. Mind moves, you feel time. When mind is nonmoving, how can you feel time? When there is no movement, time cannot be felt. Scientists and mystics agree on this point: that movement creates the phenomenon of time. If you are not moving, if you are still, time disappears, eternity comes into existence. Your clock is moving fast, and its mechanism is movement from one extreme to another.
The second thing to be understood about mind is that the mind always longs for the distant, never for the near. The near gives you boredom, you are fed up with it; the distant gives you dreams, hopes, possibility of pleasure. So the mind always thinks of the distant. It is always somebody else’s wife who is attractive, beautiful; it is always somebody else’s house which obsesses you; it is always somebody else’s car which fascinates you. It is always the distant. You are blind to the near. The mind cannot see that which is very near. It can only see that which is very far.
And what is the furthest, the most distant? The opposite is the most distant. You love a person – now hatred is the most distant phenomenon; you are overeating – now fasting is the most distant phenomenon; you are celibate – now sex is the most distant phenomenon; you are a king – now to be a monk is the most distant phenomenon.
The most distant is the most dreamy. It attracts, it obsesses, it goes on calling, inviting you, and then when you have reached the other pole, this place from where you have traveled will become beautiful again. Divorce your wife, and after a few years the wife has again gained beauty.
A film actress came to me. She had divorced her husband fifteen years ago. Now she is old, less beautiful than she was when she and her husband were separated. Their son was married last year, so at the marriage she met her husband again, and they had to travel together. The husband fell in love with her again, so she came to me and asked, ”What should I do? Now he is proposing again, he wants to get married to me again.”
She was also fascinated. She was just waiting for me to say yes. I said, ”But you lived together, there was always conflict and nothing else. I know the whole story – how you were fighting, quarreling, how you created hell and misery for each other. Now again…?”
For the mind the opposite is magnetic, and unless through understanding you transcend this, the mind will go on moving from left to right, from right to left, and the clock will continue. It has continued for many lives, and this is how you have been deceiving yourself – because you don’t understand the mechanism. Again the distant becomes appealing, again you start traveling. The moment you reach your goal that which you used to know is now distant, now has appeal, now becomes a star, something worthwhile.
I was reading about a pilot who was flying over California with a friend. He told the friend, ”Look down at that beautiful lake. I was born near it, that is my village.”
He pointed to a small village just perched in the hills near the lake, and he said, ”I was born there. When I was a child I used to sit near the lake and fish; fishing was my hobby. But at that time, when I was a child fishing near the lake, always airplanes used to fly in the sky, passing overhead, and I would dream of the day when I would become a pilot myself, I would be piloting an airplane. That was my only dream. Now it is fulfilled, and what misery! Now I am continuously looking down at the lake and thinking about when I will retire and go fishing again. That lake is so beautiful….”
This is how things are happening. This is how things are happening to you. In childhood, you long to grow up fast because older people are more powerful. A child longs to grow up immediately. Old people are wise, and the child feels that whatsoever he does, it is always wrong. And then ask the old man – he always thinks that when childhood was lost, everything was lost; paradise was there in childhood. And all the old men die thinking of childhood, the innocence, the beauty, the dreamland. Whatsoever you have looks useless, whatsoever you don’t have looks useful. Remember this, otherwise meditation cannot happen, because meditation means this understanding of the mind, the working of the mind, the very process of the mind.
The mind is dialectical, it makes you move again and again towards the opposite. And this is an infinite process, it never ends unless you suddenly drop out of it, unless you suddenly become aware of the game, unless you suddenly become aware of the trick of the mind, and you stop in the middle. Stopping in the middle is meditation.
Thirdly, because mind consists of polarities, you are never whole. The mind cannot be whole; it is always half. When you love someone have you observed that you are suppressing your hatred? The love is not total, it is not whole; just behind it all the dark forces are hidden and they may erupt any moment. You are sitting on a volcano.
When you love someone, you simply forget that you have anger, you have hate, you have jealousy. You simply drop them as if they never existed. But how can you drop them? You can simply hide them in the unconscious. Just on the surface you can become loving, deep down the turmoil is hidden. Sooner or later you will be fed up, the beloved will become familiar. They say that familiarity breeds contempt, but it is not that familiarity breeds contempt – familiarity makes you bored, contempt has always been there, hidden. It comes up, it was waiting for the right moment; the seed was there.
The mind always has the opposite within it, and that opposite goes into the unconscious and waits for its moment to come up. If you observe minutely, you will feel it every moment. When you say to someone, I love you, close your eyes, be meditative, and feel – is there any hatred hidden? You will feel it. But because you want to deceive yourself, because the truth is so ugly – the truth that you hate a person that you love – you don’t want to face it. You want to escape from real-ity, so you hide it. But hiding won’t help, because it is not deceiving somebody else, it is deceiving yourself.
So whenever you feel something, just close the eyes and go into yourself to find the opposite somewhere. It is there. And if you can see the opposite, that will give you a balance, then you will not say, ”I love you.” If you are truthful you will say, ”My relationship with you is of love and hate.”
All relationships are love/hate relationships. No relationship is of pure love, and no relationship is of pure hate. It is both love and hate. If you are truthful you will be in difficulty. If you say to a girl, ”My relationship with you is of both love and hate. I love you as I have never loved anybody and I hate you as I have never hated anybody,” it will be difficult for you to get married unless you find a meditative girl who can understand the reality; unless you can find a friend who can understand the complexity of the mind.
Mind is not a simple mechanism, it is very complex, and through mind you can never become simple because mind goes on creating deceptions. To be meditative means to be aware of the fact that mind is hiding something from you, you are closing your eyes to some facts which are disturbing. Sooner or later those disturbing facts will erupt, overpower you, and you will move to the opposite. And the opposite is not there in a distant faraway place, in some star; the opposite is hidden behind you, in you, in your mind, in the very functioning of the mind. If you can understand this, you will
stop in the middle.
If you can see I love and I hate, suddenly both will disappear, because both cannot exist together in the consciousness. You have to create a barrier: one has to exist in the unconscious and one in the conscious. Both cannot exist in the conscious, they will negate each other. The love will destroy hate, the hate will destroy love; they will balance each other, and they will simply disappear. The same amount of hate and the same amount of love will negate each other. Suddenly they will evaporate – you will be there, but no love and no hate. Then you are balanced.
When you are balanced, mind is not there – then you are whole. When you are whole, you are holy, but mind is not there. So meditation is a state of no-mind. Through mind it is not achieved. Through mind, whatever you do, it can never be achieved. Then what are you doing when you are meditating?
Because you have created so much tension in your life, you are now meditating. But this is the opposite of tension, not real meditation. You are so tense that meditation has become attractive. That is why in the West meditation appeals more than in the East, because more tension exists there than in the East. The East is still relaxed, people are not so tense, they don’t go mad so easily, they don’t commit suicide so easily. They are not so violent, not so aggressive, not so scared, not so fearful – no, they are not so tense. They are not living at such a mad speed where nothing but
tension is accumulated.
So if Mahesh Yogi comes to India, nobody listens. But in America, people are mad about him. When there is much tension, meditation will appeal. But this appeal is again falling into the same trap. This is not real meditation, this is again a trick. You meditate for a few days, you become relaxed; when you become relaxed, again the need for activity arises, and the mind starts thinking of doing something, of moving. You get bored with it.
People come to me and say, ”We meditated for a few years, then it became boring, then there was no more fun.”
Just the other day a girl came to me and said, ”Now meditation is not fun anymore, what should I do?”
Now the mind is seeking something else, now it has had enough of meditation. Now that she is at ease, the mind is asking for more tensions – something to get disturbed about. When she says that now meditation is no more fun, she means that now the tension is not there, so how can the meditation be fun? She will have to move into tension again, then meditation will again become something worthwhile.
Look at the absurdity of the mind: you have to go away to come near, you have to become tense to be meditative. But then this is not meditation, then again this is a trick of the same mind; on a new level the same game continues. When I say meditation, I mean going beyond the game of the polar opposites; dropping out of the whole game, looking at the absurdity of it and transcending it. The very understanding becomes transcendence.
The mind will force you to move to the opposite – don’t move to the opposite. Stop in the middle and see that this has always been the trick of the mind. This is how mind has dominated you – through the opposite. Have you felt it? After making love to a woman you suddenly start thinking of brahmacharya, and brahmacharya has such an alluring fascination at that moment that you feel as if there is nothing else to achieve. You feel frustrated, deceived, you feel that there was nothing in this sex, only brahmacharya has the bliss. But after twenty-four hours, sex again becomes important, significant, and again you have to move into it.
What is the mind doing? After the sex act it started thinking about the opposite, which again creates the taste for sex. A violent man starts thinking about nonviolence, then he can be violent again easily. A man who gets angry again and again always thinks of non-anger, always decides not to be angry again. This decision helps him to be angry again.
If you really want not to be angry again don’t decide against anger. Just look into the anger and just look at the shadow of the anger which you think is non-anger. Look into sex, and at the shadow of sex, which you think is brahmacharya, celibacy. It is just negativity, absence. Look at overeating, and the shadow of it – fasting. Fasting always follows overeating; overindulgence is always followed by vows of celibacy; tension is always followed by some techniques of meditation. Look at them together, feel how they are related; they are part of one process.
If you can understand this, meditation will happen to you. Really, it is not something to be done, it is a point of understanding. It is not an effort, it is nothing to be cultivated. It is something to be deeply understood. Understanding gives freedom. Knowledge of the whole mechanism of the mind is transformation. Then suddenly the clock stops, time disappears: and with the stopping of the clock, there is no mind. With the stopping of time, where are you? The boat is empty.
Source – Osho Book “The Empty Boat”

Osho – there are as many worlds as there are minds, because every mind lives in his own world

Osho – How you look at things depends on you, not on things. Unless you come to a point where you drop the interpreting mind and look direct, look immediate, mind is your mediator. It brings you things distorted, it brings you things mixed with interpretations. They are not pure.
So the only way to reach to truth is: how to learn to be immediate in your vision, how to drop the help of the mind… This agency of the mind is the problem, because mind can create only dreams. But beautiful dreams mind can create, and you can get so excited. Through your excitement the dream starts looking like reality.
If you are too excited then you are intoxicated, then you are not in your senses. Then whatsoever you see is just your projection. And there are as many worlds as there are minds, because every mind lives in his own world. You can laugh at others’ foolishnesses, but unless you start laughing at your own you will not be able to become a man of Tao, the man of nature, the man of truth. So what to do?
Try in small things not to bring the mind in. You look at a flower – you simply look. You don’t say, ”Beautiful! Ugly!” You don’t say anything! Don’t bring words, don’t verbalize. Simply look. The mind will feel uncomfortable, uneasy. The mind would like to say something. You simply say to the mind, ”Be silent! Let me see. I will just look.”
In the beginning it will be difficult, but start with things in which you are not too much involved. It will be difficult to look at your wife without bringing words in. You are too much involved, too much emotionally attached. Angry or in love, but too much involved.
Look at things which are neutral – a rock, a flower, a tree, the sun rising, a bird in flight, a cloud moving in the sky. Just look at things with which you are not much involved, with which you can remain detached, with which you can remain indifferent. Start from neutral things and only then move towards emotionally loaded situations.
People start from the loaded situations; they fail, because it is almost impossible. Either you love your wife or you hate, there is no in between. If you love you are mad, if you hate you are mad – and both ways the words will come. It is almost impossible not to allow the words, difficult, because of so much practice in saying something continuously.
One day I was at Mulla Nasruddin’s house in the morning. They were taking tea when I arrived. The wife said, ”Darling, in the night while you were asleep, you were saying many nasty things about me.”
Nasruddin looked at me and said, ”Who says I was asleep? I cannot say things while awake, that’s why I was pretending sleep.”
Even in sleep, or awake, when you are emotionally too much involved, it is difficult to put the mind aside. It will come in. So look at unloaded situations first. When you HAVE the feeling that, yes, you can look at certain things without the mind coming in, then try with loaded relationships.
By and by one becomes efficient. It is just like swimming: in the beginning you feel afraid and in the beginning you cannot believe how you will survive. And you have been working with the mind so long you cannot think that without the mind you can exist for a single moment. But try!
And the more you put the mind aside, the more light will happen to you, because when there are no dreams, doors are open, windows are open, and the sky reaches to you, and the sun rises and it comes to the very heart, the light reaches you. You become more and more filled with truth as you are less and less filled with dreaming.
And if while you are awake dreaming stops, by and by when you are asleep dreaming will stop there also, because it can exist only as a continuous circle. If it is broken anywhere, by and by the whole house disappears. You take out one brick and the whole house is already on the way towards being a ruin.
If during the day you can look at things without dreaming, then in the night less and less dreams will be there, because your night is nothing but a reflection of the day, a continuity of the same. When the day is different the night is different. When you are awake – and by ’awake’ is meant when you are not dreaming, not that you are sitting with open eyes…
Jesus goes on saying to his disciples, ”Be awake!” Were they sleeping before him always, continuously? Because he is every day saying, ”Be awake!” Buddha teaching his disciples every day, ”Be awake!”
Why? They were with open eyes, as alert as you are, but Buddha and Jesus go on saying, ”Be awake!” They mean, ”Don’t dream, just be here! Don’t go anywhere else!” In the memories, in the past, and you dream; in the future, in imagination, and you dream. Be herenow – only then is there no dream.
In the present there is no dream. In the present there is no mind. In the present YOU are there and the truth is there. And then there is no gap between you and truth – -because both are true and there is no boundary. You melt into truth and truth melts into you. You become BRAHMA, BRAHMA becomes you. Dreaming is creating a fence around you, very invisible but subtle, powerful.
Source – Osho Book “Hsin Hsin Ming: The Book of Nothing”

Osho – To live in the mind is to live in the mundane. Mind belongs to the marketplace

Osho – Meditation is the door to the divine. To live in the mind is to live in the mundane. Mind belongs to the marketplace; in fact it is prepared for the market-place — for competition, for ego trips, for politics, for money, power, prestige. From the kindergarten, school to the university we create the mind so that a man can succeed in the world.
Mind is basically mundane — that’s its purpose. It has no divine quality in it. And there are fools who go on reading the scriptures and they think they are doing some divine work. You read the scripture through the mind, you understand the scripture through the mind. And there are fools who go on praying to god and whatsoever they are praying for is nothing but the desires of their mind. They are asking for some desires to be fulfilled.
Neither the scriptures nor the prayers are divine. The only divine phenomenon is when you fall into utter silence, when the mind stops functioning, when the mind ceases and you are no longer with any thought, any memory, any fantasy, any desire. When there is not even a ripple of any kind in you — when you are simply a no-mind — you experience for the first time what god is, you experience godliness. That is the world of the sacred.
So move from the mind to meditation. There is no other proof for god, the only proof is your own experience. There is no argument which can prove or disprove god, but one can experience. But the experience remains individual. Those who have known, they have known, and others only go on believing. Beliefs belong to the mind, experience belongs to meditation — and these are worlds apart. The sannyasin should remember again and again that he has to pull himself out of his mental traps, he has to bring all his energies out of the mind, he has to stop cooperating with the mind and enter into silence, thoughtlessness. And then the kingdom of god is yours!
The mind functions as a wall it separates you from the whole, it is a divorce from the whole. And of course, the whole is not at a loss, we are at a loss. We could have been oceanic and we remain just small drops of water. We could have been as vast as the universe and we become confined to a small body-mind structure, it is imprisonment.
Mind basically is ego. To get out of the mind means to get in tune with the whole. Attunement or at-onement — that’s yoga. It is a marriage with the whole, melting and merging, disappearing as a separate entity and becoming one with the whole.
The mind is a wall, meditation is a bridge. The mind disconnects, meditation reconnects. And once you are one with the whole that means you are one with the trees and the mountains and the rivers and the stars and the sun and the moon. Then this infinity is yours and all its joys are yours. Life starts having freedom for the first time because all limitations disappear — and that is the ultimate desire of the human heart. We are searching continuously for the union, knowingly or unknowingly. We want to merge with the whole, because only with the whole does life come to its ultimate peak. Ecstasy attains its Everest.
Source – Osho Book “The Old Pond Plop”

Osho on reality and desire – Reality is here and now

Osho – If the mind is filled with dreams you cannot see rightly. If the heart is filled with desires you cannot feel rightly. Desires, dreams and hopes – the future disturbs you and divides you. But whatsoever is, is in the present. Desire leads you into the future, and life is here and now. Reality is here and now,and desire leads you into the future. Then you are not here. You see, but still you don’t see; you hear, but still you miss; you feel, but the feeling is dim, it cannot go deep, it cannot be penetrating.That is how truth is missed.
People keep on asking: Where is the divine, where is the truth? It is not a question of finding the divine or the truth. It is always here, it has never been anywhere else, it cannot be. It is there where you are, but you are not there, your mind is somewhere else. Your eyes are filled with dreams, your heart is filled with desires. You move into the future, and what is the future but illusion? Or, you move into the past, and the past is already dead. The past is no more and the future has yet tobe. Between these two is the present moment. That moment is very short, it is atomic, you cannot divide it, it is indivisible. That moment passes in the flicker of an eye. If a desire enters, you have missed it; if a dream is there, you are missing it.
The whole of religion consists of not leading you somewhere, but bringing you to the here and now, bringing you back to the whole, back where you have always been. But the head has gone away, very far away. This head has to be brought back. So God is not to be sought somewhere – because you are searching somewhere, that is why you are missing him. He has been here all the timewaiting for you.
Once it happened that Mulla Nasruddin came staggering home totally drunk, and knocked many times at his own door. It was already half past midnight. The wife answered and he asked her, ”Can you tell me, madam, where Mulla Nasruddin lives?”
The wife said, ”This is too much. You are Mulla Nasruddin.”
He said, ”That’s right, that I know, but it doesn’t answer my question. Where does he live?”
This is the situation. Drunk with desires, staggering along, you knock at your own door and ask where your home is. Really, you ask who you are. This is home, and you have never left it, it is impossible to leave it. It is not something outside you which you can go away and leave; it is your within, it is your very being. Asking where God is, is foolish, because you cannot lose God. It is your within, your innermost being, your very core. It is your existence: you breathe in him, you live in him, and it cannot be otherwise. What has happened is that you have become so drunk that you cannot recognize your own face. And unless you come back and get sober you will go on searching and seeking and you will go on missing.
Tao, Zen, Yoga, Sufism, Hassidism, these are all methods for bringing you back, to make you sober again, to destroy your drunkenness. Why are you so drunk? What makes you so drunk? Why are your eyes so sleepy? Why aren’t you alert? What is the root cause of it all? The root cause is that you desire.Try to understand the nature of desire. Desire is alcoholic, desire is the greatest drug possible. Marijuana is nothing, lsd is nothing. Desire is the greatest lsd possible – the ultimate in drugs.
What is the nature of desire? When you desire, what happens? When you desire, you are creating an illusion in the mind; when you desire, you have already moved from here. Now you are nothere, you are absent from here, because the mind is creating a dream. This absentness is your drunkenness. Be present! This very moment the doors of heaven are open. There is no need even to knock because you arenot outside heaven, you are already inside. Just be alert and look around without eyes filled with desire, and you will have a belly laugh. You will laugh at the whole joke, at what has been happening. It is just like a man dreaming at night.
Source – Osho Book “The Empty Boat”

Osho – Meditation means how to create the state of no-mindedness

Osho – Mind is just a disturbance. Mind is just a disturbance in consciousness. It is not your nature; it is just a disturbance. The moment there is no disturbance, there is no mind. And this state of no-mindedness is the state of consciousness – the expansion of consciousness. You drop into yourself: not into dreaming, not into projections, into yourself. Consciously, with full alertness, you come to your center the moment mind is not there.
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.
With mind one goes on being disturbed more and more, and then this whole process of disturbance is self-perpetuating. One disturbance creates ten more, and those ten create a hundred more. This is self-perpetuating, and then you are in a vicious circle. With this mind something can be done.
That is, you can travel outwardly, you can go more into the world. But the more you go into the world the farther you are from yourself. And the farther you have gone, the more the track back is lost. Then you only remember that there is a home, but there is no way to get back. And we continue to remember there is a home; there is a homesickness always somewhere present. There is a home and one has to go back.
But there is no way, and we continually try to find the home with the mind itself, which has lead us astray. Then we go into scriptures, then we go into words, then we go into philosophies, metaphysical systems. And then we are lost even more in it, even more deeply, and the track is not found at all. The track can be found only if you begin to feel and understand that mind is the disease, so you cannot go back with the mind; the mind cannot be used as a vehicle, it cannot be used as a passage. It is not a door towards consciousness. It is a door towards the world, towards objects – not towards the subjectivity. That’s why it is said to be a disease, a complex.
Source – Osho Book “That Art Thou”

Osho – the second birth becomes possible only through meditation

Osho – Man is a potentiality, a possibility. We can miss it millions miss it, and the reason why we miss is very simple: we think that we have already attained life. We make birth synonymous with life — that is our fundamental misunderstanding. Birth is only an opportunity to be alive, it is not synonymous with life. One can live a very unalive life. One can go on dragging; one can go on moving through life in deep sleep, one can be a somnabulist.
In fact that’s how man is: a machine. Man is not yet alive, has not yet been touched by God, has not allowed God to touch him, has not been available to God. Hence we carry great seeds which can become trees and can blossom, and a great fragrance can be released into existence. We can beautify existence, we can be a grace and a blessing to existence, but that rarely happens — only once in a while is there a Jesus, a Buddha, a Zarathustra. But millions and millions of people are born and die without living at all.
To be a sannyasin means being aware of this basic misunderstanding. Once you are aware you start seeking and searching for a second birth; and the second birth becomes possible only through meditation; hence in old, ancient scriptures, meditation is called the real mother.
Jesus says to his disciples: Unless you are born again you will not enter into my kingdom of God. In the East, the person who has attained to God is called dwija, twice-born. The second birth releases the fragrance.
And by meditation, concentration is not what is meant. Concentration is of the mind. It has its own utility: it is needed in scientific work, in accumulating knowledge. It is useful — I am not against concentration — but it has its own limitations. It cannot take you beyond the mind; it is a mind effort.
Meditation is not contemplation either. Contemplation is a little higher than concentration. If concentration is at the very center of the mind, contemplation is at the very circumference of the mind. It is more subtle. One has to be more artful, more intelligent, to be contemplative. Concentration is a little crude. It is needed by the beginner, in the schools, colleges, universities. But when one has become capable of concentrating one starts moving towards contemplation. Contemplation means an effortless awareness; concentration is great effort, it is almost forced, violent. Contemplation is nonviolent, more fluid, less enforced, more relaxed.
But meditation is still higher. It goes beyond the mind. Meditation is a state of no-mind; it is neither at the center of the mind nor at the circumference. It is simply not of the mind — it is watching the mind from the outside.
That is exactly the meaning of the English word “ecstasy” — to stand out. To stand out of the mind is ecstasy, and that’s what meditation is. Just be a watcher from the outside, no more a participant, no more identified with the mind — just as one watches the traffic on the road, sitting silently by the side under a tree: who passes is not the concern. One simply watches whatsoever is happening, with no like, no dislike, no justification, no condemnation, with no prejudice at all.
When one can watch the mind without condemning it, without appreciating it, without saying “This is good” and “This is bad,” and “This I don’t want” and “That I want,” without uttering a single statement about the mind, when one can watch it in deep silence, that is meditation. A miracle happens with meditation, and it happens only with meditation: when you are simply standing out, not participating, no longer active in any way, utterly inactive and silent, the mind disappears. Slowly slowly it goes farther and farther away, slowly slowly you hear only noises coming from a distance; and suddenly a moment comes: there is no mind. It has faded out, it has withered away.
And when the mind is not there and you are left alone without the mind, the fragrance is released. You have come home, you have become fulfilled. The onethousand-petaled lotus of your being has opened. You have offered your fragrance to existence. That is prayer. That’s the only gift we can give to God, and that is the only gift which can be accepted by God.
Source – Osho Book “Source – Osho Book “Even Bein’ Gawd Ain’t A Bed of Roses”

Osho on Stupid Mind – Is all Mind made out of the same material – Stupidity?

Question – Is all Mind made out of the same material – Stupidity?
Osho - Yes. Mind is stupid. There is no mind which is intelligent. Mind cannot be intelligent; mind is stupidity. To say “stupid mind” is not right; it is repetitive because “stupidity” and “mind” both mean the same thing.
Why is mind stupidity? Because mind is nothing but the past. the collected dust that you have gathered on the way — layers and layers of dust. That hinders your intelligence. It is just like a mirror covered with dust: mind is dust; mirror is consciousness. When all dust is washed away, intelligence arises: when there is no mind you are intelligent; when there is mind you are stupid.
Of course, there are two types of “stupid” — ignorant stupids, knowledgeable stupids: people who don’t know anything that are stupid and people who know too much and are stupid. And remember, the second type is more dangerous than the first because the second type has more dust on the mirror than the first. An ignorant man can evolve more easily than a pundit, the man who thinks he knows. The very thinking that he knows becomes the hindrance. Mind is not intelligence; intelligence is of the no-mind. Mind is a block.
Try to understand this. Mind is all that you have experienced, all that you have gone through, all that is already dead — mind is the dead part of your being. Then you go on carrying it. It does not allow you to be here; it does not allow you to be present. It does not allow you to be intelligent. Before you respond, it starts reacting.
For example, if I ask a person, “Is there God? Does God exist?” — if he answers from the mind he will be stupid. If he says, “Yes, God exists,” because he has been brought up in such a way — taught, cultivated, conditioned, that God exists — he says, “Yes, God exists”; but this is not an intelligent response. He does not know; somebody else, others, have told him. They also didn’t know; somebody else, others, had told them. He has heard a rumor, and he believes in the rumor. No, he is not intelligent. He is not even intelligent enough to understand what he is saying. Or the man can say, “No, God doesn’t exist,” because he was brought up in a communist family or in Russia or China. That too is the same stupid mind — conditioning changed, but the stupidity is the same: he knows that God doesn’t exist, without knowing. He has not searched; he has not investigated. He has not gone into the matter at all.
But if an intelligent person is asked…. Intelligent person: I mean a man who does not look through the mind, puts aside the mind. You ask him, “Does God exist?” — there will be no answer. At the most an intelligent man can say, “I don’t know.” When you say, “I don’t know,” you show a certain intelligence, the possibility. It is very small, but it can grow and can become a big phenomenon. Or the person will say, “I have not investigated. I have heard people saying this and that, but I don’t know. As far as I am concerned I am not aware either this way or that, yes or no. Both are impossible; I cannot say.”
This is intelligence, and this man can know someday because with this intelligence discovery is possible. If you are clogged with theories, burdened with scriptures, you will never be intelligent; you will always remain stupid.
Mind is the past — the dead hovering over the living. It is like a cloud surounding you: through it you cannot see, the vision is not clear, everything is distorted. Let this cloud disappear. Remain with no answers, no conclusions, no philosophies, no religions. Remain open, just open; remain vulnerable, and the truth can happen to you. To be vulnerable is to be intelligent. To know that you don’t know is to be intelligent. To know that through mind you miss is to be intelligent. To know that through no-mind the door opens is to be intelligent. Otherwise, mind is the stupidity.
Source – Osho Book “Osho Book “Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol5″