A Mega Thread Of Osho - The Spiritually Incorrect Mystic

[Shanmugam]

This is going to be a thread dedicated to Osho.. I will be posting excerpts and answers by Osho to specific questions that will shock your mind, blow your concepts off, silence your mind, turn your look inwards, hit your ego and more... 

Let me start with an excerpt that I enjoyed reading today.

OSHO, I KEEP MEETING PEOPLE WHO CAN SEE AURAS, AND I FEEL I AM MISSING. WHAT CAN I DO TO SHARE THIS SIGHT?

Anand Buddha, God is not an experience. No experience as such is spiritual; all experiences are mind games. Beware of it. Whatsoever can be seen will be part of the illusory world. The seer is the truth, not the seen. You can see auras and you can see angels and you can see kundalini rising and you can see inner lights — but they are all seen. They are not you.

The seer is the witness, and only the witness is the truth. All else is a dream. And there are worldly dreams and there are other-worldly dreams; there are materialistic dreams and there are spiritualistic dreams. One thing has to be remembered always, that whatsoever is seen is worthless — even if it is God. The God that is seen is worthless.

When all experiences disappear and you are left utterly alone, nothing to see, only emptiness in the hands, no experience at all, then suddenly you realize yourself. Then you turn upon yourself, then you fall into your source. And that is not an experience, it is a realization. That is the difference between the words “experience” and “realization”. It is not that you have seen something, experienced something. Now you know who you are.

The great Sufi mystic Maghrebi says,

Don’t speak to us of visions and miracles, for we have long ago transcended such things.

We saw them all to be illusion and dreams, and dauntlessly we passed beyond them.

Anand Buddha, you will meet many people here who will go on playing these games. They are simply wasting their time. Avoid their company. I am going to attract all kinds of people, and particularly the people who are interested in spiritualism. They will bring all their diseases here. They will talk nonsense — they will talk about miracles, psychic experiences. And naturally, when somebody talks about such things, you start feeling as if you are missing. You are not missing a thing, because he is only dreaming.

But he can create this feeling in you, that you are lacking something, that your growth is not going well, that you are not growing as fast as you should grow. He will create in you the feeling of inferiority, and that is dangerous. Once you start feeling inferior you become sad, depressed, you carry a heavy weight on your chest; and that will become a hindrance in your growth.

And every possibility is there that if you desire you will start seeing these things. Desire creates dreams. If you start thinking that you are missing, soon your mind will project. The mind is always ready to give you anything that you desire, and particularly such things. If you desire money it will be difficult because it is not only a question of your own mind. If you desire to become the president of a country it may not be easy because there may be much competition. But if you want to see auras there is no competition, and nobody can hinder you, and you are not taking somebody else’s auras; you are creating your own. It is a private, idiotic world. This is the meaning of the word “idiot”: it means having a private world of one’s own experiences which do not collaborate with reality.

I know a few people are here; they enjoy a kind of leadership because they can gather a few people around themselves. They start talking about esoteric things. And whenever somebody talks about esoteric things, hidden truths that you are not aware of, he enjoys being a knower and he reduces you to an ignorant person. It hurts. Soon you will also start talking and reading such nonsense books, and they are available in abundance.

Here, you are not to be with me to see auras, or to see lights, or to see kundalini energy rising, or the chakras opening. I am trying to hammer this truth into your heart continuously, that the only thing worth attaining is enlightenment, is nirvana, is the realization of who you are. Everything else has to be bypassed. And these things come on the way.

The mind tries to allure you to the very end. It gives beautiful psychedelic experiences, very colorful, enchanting. One can get stuck with them. LSD is nothing. If you go on working on your being you will find far deeper, far profounder-appearing experiences happening to you which no LSD can release.

And then the desire is to cling to them, and that very desire keeps you away from the ultimate truth. For the ultimate truth, everything has to be sacrificed, all so-called spiritual experiences, esoteric knowledge, miracles. Everything has to be dropped. One has to come to the ultimate experience — which is not an experience….

Language is inadequate to express it; that’s why it is called an “experience”. It is not an experience, because in experience there is a division of the experiencer and the experienced, and in this experience, the ultimate, there is no division. You are the knower, you are the known, you are the seer, you are the seen, you are the experiencer, you are the experienced — only you are.

That absolute, still point of pure existence, that is the goal. All else has to be sacrificed for it. Beware of such things.

- The Secret - 14

[Voyager]

3 hours ago, Shanmugam said:

I am trying to hammer this truth into your heart continuously, that the only thing worth attaining is enlightenment, is nirvana, is the realization of who you are. Everything else has to be bypassed. And these things come on the way.

I feel like my question of what to do with my life is becoming more and more clear

3 hours ago, Shanmugam said:

That absolute, still point of pure existence, that is the goal. All else has to be sacrificed for it.

 

[LaucherJunge]

Osho is definitely my favourite, the most beautiful being i have ever heard.

[Harikrishnan]

@Prabhaker @Shanmugam

please post list of best osho's books you read

[Shanmugam]

@Harikrishnan Here are some of the books that I liked very much:

1) My way - The way of white clouds

2) Empty boat

3) Krishna - The man and his philosophy

4) I say unto you - Vol 1 and 2

[Shanmugam]

It is said again and again that being aware is enough for transformation. How does it work?

It is a significant question, because if you are aware of your cancer, the cancer will not be cured by just being aware of it – that is true. But as far as psychological transformations are concerned, the moment you are aware of them they disappear – because they do not exist as realities, they exist only as illusions.

You have seen a ghost standing in the dark: now you bring light, and you say there is nobody. Just the shape of the tree was giving you the false impression that somebody was standing there. The ghost has disappeared, because in the first place the ghost was not there.

Awareness helps, brings transformation, because the illusions that you are suffering from are not realities. If you become aware of a rock, the rock is not going to disappear. But if you become aware of the ego, the ego is going to disappear, because the ego is not a reality.

If you become aware, fear is going to disappear, because fear is not a reality. If you become aware, death is going to disappear, because death is a lie, it is not a reality.

Awareness functions in two ways. One: if something is real and you become aware of it, it becomes tremendously beautiful, it becomes psychedelic, it becomes very colorful. If it is unreal, it disappears. If it is real, it becomes more real; if it is unreal, it becomes absolutely unreal.

Awareness is a light. If you bring light into the dark room, darkness will disappear, but the paintings on the wall will appear. When the room was dark, the paintings were not there; although they were there, you could not have seen them – for you they were not there and darkness was there. When you bring light, darkness is there no more and the paintings have appeared.

Something disappears when you become aware, and something appears. Death disappears, deathlessness appears. The ego disappears, egolessness appears. You disappear as a separate entity: God appears. God means, “I am no longer separate.”

“Was you ever in love, Dusty?” asked Walker Long of old Dusty Rhodes one day as they were picking up and putting them down on a railroad right-of-way.

“Yeah, once when I was a young squirt, I was in love,” answered old Dusty.

“Well, you never did get married, did you?” pursued Walker Long.

“Nope, I never did marry,” vouchsafed old Dusty.

“How did that happen?”

“Well, it was like this. The gal I was in love with wouldn’t marry me when I was drunk, and I wouldn’t marry her when I was sober.”

Awareness has its own ways. If you are aware, you will not be able to do many things you have been doing up till now, and you will be able to do many things you have never thought of doing before. If you are aware, you cannot be angry, because anger can exist only in a state of unawareness: that is a prerequisite for anger to exist.

If you are aware, anger is impossible and compassion becomes a natural outcome: the same energy that was becoming anger becomes compassion. If you are aware, sex disappears and love arises: the same energy that was becoming sexuality through unawareness takes on a new manifestation of love through awareness.

As far as psychological transformation is concerned, awareness is enough, analysis is not needed.

That is the difference between Eastern and Western psychology: Western psychology is too concerned with analysis. In the East, for five thousand years psychology has existed; it is the most ancient science in the East. But its concern is totally different; it is not at all interested in analyzing, the whole thing seems to be unnecessary.

And now Western psychology is also becoming aware of the fact that analysis leads nowhere. Have you ever come across a person who is totally analyzed? Even Sigmund Freud was not. Nobody can be totally analyzed. You can analyze one dream, but another day another dream arises. You can go on analyzing – people go to the analyst for years, but dreams don’t disappear, they go on coming; analysis does not make them disappear.

But in the East we know the art of making them disappear. So who bothers? It is as if you see a ghost in the dark – there is no ghost, just the form of the tree – and you start analyzing. You never come close to the tree, you never bring light; you start analyzing the form from far away. You can go on analyzing: nothing is going to happen out of that analysis.

Eastern psychology says: Light a candle, bring the candle to the place, and first see whether the ghost exists at all. If the ghost does not exist, then why bother? Why many, many years of analysis? The analyzed goes on pouring out rubbish, and the analyst goes on dissecting, analyzing, labeling and categorizing the rubbish. Much work goes on, and all futile, much ado about nothing.

Western psychology is based on analysis, Eastern psychology is based on awareness.

Just watch. There is no need to analyze. Become more and more intensely alert. And if you are aware of a problem, half the problem is already solved just by becoming aware of it. Just a slight awareness of the problem, and half the problem is already solved, because you have taken some energy out of it: that energy has become awareness. Become more aware, and the problem becomes dissolved.

Chunk by chunk, the problem disappears as you become aware, because you are pulling back energy which you had been pouring into the problem – that was creating the problem. You are taking your energy back, you are not cooperating any more. You were the creator of the problem: you have taken your energy back.

-OSHO

From Unio Mystica, V.2, chapter 15

[Shanmugam]

Being with you I feel so blissful and liberated, and there seems to be no end to it. You must have tricked me. What is your secret?

I am a simple man without any secret. I am just an open book, and a book in which nothing is written. If you like to call it a secret it is your choice, but it is a very open secret.

If you want to be, learn the art of being: Not to be.

Let me repeat it, because I know you are deaf. If you want really to be, the only way is to learn not to be. Disappear. Just as God disappears from existence, you have to disappear from your life. Let life flow of its own accord.

It is the simplest art in the world, to be silent. It is not a doing, it is a non-doing. How can it be difficult?

I am showing you the way of enlightenment through laziness. Nothing has to be done to attain it, because it is your nature. You have already got it. You are just so busy with outer business that you cannot see your own nature.

Deep within you is exactly the same as outside you: the beauty, the silence, the ecstasy, the blissfulness. But please, sometimes be kind to yourself: just sit down and don’t do anything, either physically or mentally. Relax, not in an American way… because I have seen so many American books titled How to Relax. The very title says that the man knows nothing about relaxation. There is no “how.”

Yes, it is okay – “How to Repair a Car”; you will have to do something. But there is no doing as such as far as relaxation is concerned. Just don’t do anything. I know you will find it a little difficult in the beginning. That is not because relaxation is difficult, it is because you have become addicted to doing something. That addiction will take a little time to disappear.

Just be, and watch. Being is not doing, and watching is also not doing. You sit silently doing nothing, witnessing whatsoever is happening. Thoughts will be moving in your mind; your body may be feeling some tension somewhere, you may have a migraine. Just be a witness. Don’t be identified with it. Watch, be a watcher on the hills, and everything else is happening in the valley. It is a knack, not an art.

Meditation is not a science. It is not an art, it is a knack – just that way. All that you need is a little patience.

The old habits will continue; the thoughts will go on rushing. And your mind is always in a rush hour, the traffic is always jammed. Your body is not accustomed to sitting silently – you will be tossing and turning. Nothing to be worried about. Just watch that the body is tossing and turning, that the mind is whirling, is full of thoughts – consistent, inconsistent, useless – fantasies, dreams. You remain in the center, just watching.

All the religions of the world have taught people to do something: stop the process of thought, force the body into a still posture. That’s what yoga is – a long practice of forcing the body to be still. But a forced body is not still. And all the prayers, concentrations, contemplations of all the religions do the same with the mind: they force it, they don’t allow the thoughts to move. Yes, you have the capacity to do it. And if you persist you may be able to stop the thought process. But this is not the real thing, it is absolutely fake.

When stillness comes on its own, when silence descends without your effort, when you watch thoughts and a moment comes when thoughts start disappearing and silence starts happening, that is beautiful. The thoughts stop of their own accord if you don’t identify, if you remain a witness and you don’t say, “This is my thought.”

You don’t say, “This is bad, this is good,” “This should be there….” and “This should not be there….” Then you are not a watcher; you have prejudices, you have certain attitudes. A watcher has no prejudice, he has no judgment. He simply sees like a mirror.

When you bring something in front of a mirror it reflects, simply reflects. There is no judgment that the man is ugly, that the man is beautiful, that, “Aha! What a good nose you have got.” The mirror has nothing to say. Its nature is to mirror; it mirrors. This is what I call meditation: you simply mirror everything within or without.

And I guarantee you…. I can guarantee because it has happened to me and to many of my people; just watching patiently – maybe a few days will pass, maybe a few months, maybe a few years. There is no way of saying because each individual has a different collection.

You must have seen people collecting antiques, postal stamps. Everybody has a different collection; the quantity may be different, hence the time it takes will be different – but go on remaining a witness as much as you can. And this meditation needs no special time. You can wash the floor and remain silently watching yourself washing the floor.

I can move my hand unconsciously, without watching, or I can move it with full awareness. And there is a qualitative difference. When you move it unconsciously it is mechanical. When you move it with consciousness there is grace. Even in the hand, which is part of your body, you will feel silence, coolness – what to say about the mind?

With your watching and watching, slowly the rush of thoughts starts getting less and less. Moments of silence start appearing; a thought comes, and then there is silence before another thought appears. These gaps will give you the first glimpse of meditation and the first joy that you are arriving home.

Soon the gaps will be bigger, and finally the gap is always with you. You may be doing something, the silence is there. You may not be doing anything, the silence is there. Even in sleep the silence is there.

For a meditator there are no dreams; dreams and thoughts are cousin-brothers, there is not much difference. If thoughts disappear, dreams disappear. And if for twenty-four hours a day you are surrounded by silence you will come to know what my secret is.

If you go near a lake, you start feeling cool. There is no secret in it – it is the milieu. You go to the forest and you feel the difference in the atmosphere. You are the same but the atmosphere around you is different.

When you come closer to me… and to come closer to me you are not to walk and sit by my side. To come closer to me is to be not a Christian, not a Hindu, not a Mohammedan, not a Buddhist, not a communist. To come close to me means that you don’t cling to any ideology, you don’t go on holding onto the past. To come close to me means you start living moment to moment.

Neither the past means anything to you, nor are you worried about the future. This very moment becomes the only reality. In fact it is the only reality. And if you can be in this moment, you can be on a faraway star but you will be close to me and you will feel a serenity, a silence, a lovingness such as you have never known.

I am not doing anything, remember, so don’t be grateful to me. I am a non-doer – I am just being available. That is not much of a doing. I am available, like the trees in the forest and the lakes and the ocean, and the sun and the moon. I am available. Now it is up to you to come close to me, or go away from me.

If you can come close to me you will start feeling things that have been unknown to you, and soon you will realize that what you are feeling close to me you can feel yourself wherever you are. That is the greatest moment of happiness for a master, when his disciple can be on his own.

You must know the meaning of being a disciple, people have forgotten; it comes from “discipline.”

And all the religions have corrupted the meaning of discipline; its root meaning is learning.

Coming close is learning.

What I have got, you have got.

I am aware of it, you are not aware of it.

-OSHO

Excerpt from From the False to the Truth, Chapter Three

[Shanmugam]

                                          Meditation Is Non-doing

When people come to me and they ask, "How to meditate?" I tell them, "There is no need to ask how to meditate, just ask how to remain unoccupied. Meditation happens spontaneously. Just ask how to remain unoccupied, that's all. That's the whole trick of meditation - how to remain unoccupied. Then you cannot do anything. The meditation will flower.

When you are not doing anything the energy moves towards the center, it settles down towards the center. When you are doing something the energy moves out. Doing is a way of moving out. Non-doing is a way of moving in. Occupation is an escape. You can read the Bible, you can make it an occupation. There is no difference between religious occupation and secular occupation: all occupations are occupations, and they help you to cling outside your being. They are excuses to remain outside.

Man is ignorant and blind, and he wants to remain ignorant and blind, because to come inwards looks like entering a chaos. And it is so; inside you have created a chaos. You have to encounter it and go through it. Courage is needed - courage to be oneself, and courage to move inwards. I have not come across a greater courage than that - the courage to be meditative.

But people who are engaged outside - with worldly things or nonworldly things, but occupied all the same, they think ....and they have created a rumor around it, they have their own philosophers. They say that if you are introvert you are somehow morbid, something is wrong with you. And they are in the majority. If you meditate, if you sit silently, they will joke about you: "What are you doing? - gazing at your navel? What are you doing? - opening the third eye? Where are you going? Are you morbid?...because what is there to do inside? There is nothing inside."

Inside doesn't exist for the majority of people, only the outside exists. And just the opposite is the case - only inside is real; outside is nothing but a dream. But they call introverts morbid, they call meditators morbid. In the West they think that the East is little morbid. What is the point of sitting alone and looking inwards? What are you going to get there? There is nothing.

David Hume, one of the great British philosophers, tried once... because he was studying the Upanishads and they go on saying: Go in, go in, go in - that is their only message. So he tried it. He closed his eyes one day - a totally secular man, very logical, empirical, but not meditative at all - he closed his eyes and he said, "It is so boring! It is a boredom to look in. Thoughts move, sometimes a few emotions, and they go on racing in the mind, and you go on looking at them - what is the point of it? It is useless. It has no utility."

And this is the understanding of many people. Hume's standpoint is that of the majority: What are going to get inside? There is darkness, thoughts floating here and there. What will you do? What will come out of it? If Hume had waited a little longer - and that is difficult for such people - if he had been a little more patient, by and by thought disappear, emotions subside. But if it had happened to him he would have said, "That is even worse, because emptiness comes. At least first there were thoughts, something to be occupied with, to look at, to think about. Now even thoughts have disappeared; only emptiness....What to do with emptiness? It is absolutely useless."

But if he had waited a little more, then darkness also disappears. It is just like when you come from the hot sun and you enter your house: everything looks dark because your eyes need a little attunement. They are fixed on the hot sun outside; comparatively, your house looks dark. You cannot see, you feel as if it is night. But you wait, you sit, you rest in a chair, and after few seconds the eyes get attuned. Now it is not dark, a little more light........You rest for an hour, and everything is light, there is no darkness at all.

If Hume had waited a little longer, then darkness also disappears. Because you have lived in the hot sun outside for many lives your eyes have become fixed, they have lost flexibility. They need tuning. When one comes inside the house it takes a little while, a little time, a patience. Don't be in a hurry.

In haste nobody can come to know himself. It is a very very deep awaiting. Infinite patience is needed. By and by darkness disappears. There comes a light with no source There is no flame in it, no lamp is burning, no sun is there. A light, just like it is morning: the night has disappeared, and the sun has not risen.... Or in the evening - the twilight, when the sun has set and night has not yet descended. That's why Hindus call their prayer time sandhya. Sandhya means twilight, light without any source.

When you move inwards you will come to the light without any source. In that light, for the first time you start understanding yourself, who you are, because you are that light. You are that twilight, that sandhya, that pure clarity, that perception, where the observer and the observed disappear, and only the light remains.

Osho - excerpts from the book What is Meditation?

[Shanmugam]

                                                                            Cause of Suffering

 

WE VERY OFTEN FEEL THAT WE CREATE OUR OWN SUFFERINGS. IN SPITE OF THIS, WHY DO WE CONTINUE CREATING THEM? AND WHEN AND HOW DOES ONE STOP CREATING ONE'S OWN SUFFERING?

The first thing, and very basic to be understood, is that whenever you say WE VERY OFTEN FEEL THAT WE CREATE OUR OWN SUFFERING, this is not the case. You never really feel that you are the creator of your own suffering. You may think so, because you have been taught so; because for centuries and centuries teachers have been teaching that you are the creator of your own suffering and no one else is responsible.

You have heard these things, you have read these things. They have become your blood and bone, they have become your unconscious conditionings, so sometimes you repeat like a parrot WE CREATE OUR OWN SUFFERING. But this is not your feeling, this is not your realization, because if you realize it, then the other thing is impossible. Then you cannot say, IN SPITE OF THIS, WHY DO WE CONTINUE CREATING IT?

If you really feel, and if it is your own feeling that you are the creator of your own suffering, any moment you can stop -- unless you want to create it, unless you enjoy it, unless you are a masochist. Then everything is okay, then there is no question. If you say, `I enjoy my suffering,' then it is okay; you can go on creating it. But if you say, `I suffer and I want to go beyond it. I want to stop it completely -- and I understand that I am the creator,' then you are wrong. You don't understand it.

Socrates is reported to have said that knowledge is virtue. And there has been a long discussion for these two thousand years over whether Socrates is right or wrong -- knowledge is virtue. Socrates says that once you know something, you cannot do contrary to it. If you know that anger is suffering, you cannot be angry. This is what Socrates means -- knowledge is virtue. You cannot say, `I know anger is bad; still I move in it. What to do about it now?' Socrates says that the first thing is wrong. You don't know that anger is bad; that's why you go on moving in it. If you know, you cannot move in it. How can you move against your own knowledge?

I know that if I put my hand in the fire it is going to be painful. If I know, I cannot put my hand in. But if somebody else has told me, if I have heard through the tradition, if I have read in the scriptures that fire burns, and I have not known fire, and I have not known any similar experience, only then can I put my hand into fire -- and that too only once.

Can you conceive it? That you have put your hand into fire and you have been burned and you have suffered, and again you go and ask, `I know that fire burns, but in spite of it I go on putting my hand into the fire. What to do about it?' Who will believe that you know? And what type of knowledge is this? If your own experience of suffering and burning cannot stop you, nothing is going to stop you. Now there is no possibility, because the last possibility has been missed. But no one can miss it; that is impossible.

Socrates is right, and all those who have know, they will agree with Socrates -- that agreement has a very deep point in it. Once you know.... But remember -- the knowledge must be yours. A borrowed knowledge won't do; borrowed knowledge is useless. Unless it is your own experience, it is not going to change you. Others' experiences are of no help.

You have heard that you are the creator of your own suffering, but this is just in the mind. It has not entered your being, it is not your own knowledge. So when you are discussing, you can discuss about it cerebrally, but when the actual phenomenon happens, you will forget, and you will behave in the way you know, not in the way others know.

When you are at ease, cool, collected, silently discussing anger, you can say it is poison, it is a disease, evil. But when someone makes you angry then a complete change occurs. Not it is not an intellectual discussion, now you are involved. And the moment you are involved, you become angry. Later on again, retrospectively, when you again get cool, the memory will come back, your mind will again start functioning, and you will say, `That was wrong. It was not good of me to do that. I know anger is wrong.'

Who is this `I'? -- just intellect, just the superficial mind. You don't know -- because when someone pushes you into anger, you throw this mind away. It is useful as far as discussion is concerned, but when a real situation arises, only the real knowledge will help. When there is no situation, you can go on. Even in a discussion the real situation can arise. The other can go on contradicting you so much that you become angry and then you will forget.

Real knowledge means that which has happened to you. You have not heard about it, not read about it, you have not collected information about it -- it is your own experience. And then there is no question, because after that you cannot go against it. Not that you will have to make an effort not to go against it; simply you cannot go against it.

How can I? When I know this is a wall and I want to go out of this room, how can I try to pass through the wall? I know this is a wall, so I will search for the door. Only a blink man will try to go out through the wall. I have got eyes. I see what is a wall and what is a door.

But if I try to enter the wall and tell you, `I know very well where the door is, and I know this to be a wall, but in spite of this, how can I stop myself from trying to enter the wall?' then that means that as far as I am concerned that door looks false. Others have told me that it is the door, but as far as I am concerned, I know that door is false. And others have told me that this is a wall, but as far as I see, I see the door here in this wall, and that is why I try.

In this situation you have to make a clearcut distinction between what you know and what you have gathered as knowledge. Don't rely on information. From the greatest source -- even if you collect from the greatest source -- information is information. Even if a Buddha says it to you, it is not your own, and it is not going to help you in any way. But you can remain thinking that it is your knowledge, and this misunderstanding will waste your energy, time and life.

The basic thing is not to ask what to do so that suffering is not created. The basic thing is to know that you are the creator of your suffering. Next time whenever a real situation arises and you are in suffering, remember to find out whether you are the cause of it. And if you can find out that you are the cause of it, the suffering will disappear, and the same suffering will not appear again -- impossible.

But don't deceive yourself. You can -- that's why I say it. When you are suffering you can say, `Yes, I know I have created this suffering,' but deep down you know that someone else has created it. Your wife has created it, your husband has created it, someone else has created it, and this is simply a consolation because you cannot do anything. You console yourself: `No one has created it, I have created it myself, and by and by I will stop it.'

But knowledge is instant transformation; there is no `by and by.' If you understand that you have created it, it will drop immediately. And it is not going to come up again. If it comes again, it means the understanding has not gone deep.

So there is no need to find out what to do, and how to stop. The only need is to go deep and to find out who is really the cause of it. If others are the cause then it cannot be stopped, because you cannot change the whole world. If you are the cause, only then can it be stopped.

That's why I insist that only religion can lead humanity towards non-suffering. Nothing else can lead, because everyone else believes that the suffering is caused by others; only religion says that suffering is caused by you. So religion makes you the master of your destiny. You are the cause of your suffering, hence you can be the cause of your bliss.

- Osho - The Book of Secrets, discourses on Vigyan Bhairav Tantra

[Shanmugam]

Osho, How to sacrifice the ego?

It is impossible. The ego cannot be sacrificed because the ego exists not. The ego is just all idea: it has no substance in it. It is not something – it is just pure nothing. You give it reality by believing in it. You can withdraw belief and the reality disappears, evaporates.

The ego is a kind of absence. Because you don’t know yourself, hence the ego. The moment you know yourself, no ego is found. The ego is like darkness; darkness has no positive existence of its own; it is simply the absence of light. You cannot fight with darkness, or can you? You cannot throw darkness out of the room; you cannot take it out, you cannot take it in. You cannot do anything with darkness directly. If you want to do anything with darkness, you will have to do something with light. If you put the light on, there is no darkness; if you put the light off, there is darkness.

Darkness is only the absence of light, so is ego: absence of self-knowledge. You cannot sacrifice it.

It has been told to you again and again: “Sacrifice your ego” – and the statement is patently absurd, because something that does not exist cannot be sacrificed. And if you try to sacrifice it, something which is not there in the first place at all, you will be creating a new ego – the ego of the humble, the ego of the egoless, the ego of the person who thinks he has sacrificed his ego. It will be a new kind of darkness again.

No, I don’t say to you sacrifice the ego. On the contrary, I say try to see where the ego is. Look deep into it; try to locate it, where it exists, whether it exists at all or not. Before one can sacrifice anything one must be certain about its existence.

But don’t be against it from the very beginning. If you are against it, you cannot look deep into it. There is no need to be against anything. The ego is your experience – maybe it is just apparent, but it is still your experience. Your whole life moves around the phenomenon of the ego. It may be a dream, but to you it is so true.

There is no need to be against it. Dive deep into it, go into it. Going into it means bringing awareness into your house, bringing light into darkness. Be alert, watchful. Watch the ways of the ego, how it functions, how it manages at all. And you will be surprised: the deeper you go into it, the less it is found. And when you have penetrated to the very core of your being, you will find something totally different which is not ego, which is egolessness. It is self, supreme self – it is godliness. You have disappeared as a separate entity; you are no more an island. Now you are part of the whole.

- Osho, The Fish in the Sea is Not Thirsty, Talk #12

Edited August 7, 2017 by Shanmugam

[Shanmugam]

                                                              The Power of Consciousness

Question: How is it that going into something consciously has such a power to reveal all the threads which make up the tangle?

Osho:  Devageet, the reality is just the opposite. All our tangles in life are created by our unconsciousness, so the moment you become conscious those tangles disappear. It is not the power of consciousness that makes them disappear. It is the power of unconsciousness that creates them.

All the tangles of life, of love, of relationship, are created by our unconsciousness. We don’t know what we are doing, and by the time we become aware it is too late. What has been done cannot be undone. Our unconsciousness is very supportive to the ego — they have a co-existence. Coming of consciousness will not only disperse all the tangles, it will also disperse you as an ego. […]

Devageet, it is true consciousness has tremendous power, but it is not used in revealing and dispersing the tangles of your life; they simply disappear as you become conscious.

Gautam Buddha used to say that when the lights are on and from the windows people can see that the master is awake, thieves don’t come close. When the lights are put off, only then do thieves come close to the house to see whether the master has gone to sleep and it is the right time to enter. He was saying this about consciousness. He used to call sex, greed, lust for power, position, respectability all thieves. They come to you only when they see that there is no light in the man; inside it is all dark.

Once you are radiating consciousness and light, those thieves don’t come close to you. But consciousness has its own power. It is simply in the presence of consciousness that tangles disappear. The power is not used for dispersing the tangles and problems; the power is to bring blissfulness. The power is to bring peace, silence, at homeness, at easeness and a tremendous ecstasy, a divine drunkenness. Life becomes for the first time self-oriented; you don’t have to beg from others for anything. Nobody can give you blissfulness; nobody can give you ecstasy. Nobody can give you the sense of immortality and the dance that comes with it. Nobody can give you the silence, which becomes a song in your heart.

What can people give to you? In fact, the power of consciousness gives you so much that you become capable of sharing with people. For the first time, you can give to people. They are living in darkness; they haven’t seen any light. They don’t have any idea what a conscious being is. They don’t have any conception, comprehension of the power of consciousness, how many flowers shower, how much fragrance becomes natural to you.

You CAN give, and you can give them a taste and you can give them a direction, so they can also find the same power which is dormant in them.

A conscious man awakened can help millions of people to move towards the source of joy, real and authentic life, to pure love which knows nothing of hate, which knows nothing of jealousy, which has nothing to do with body and biology — which is just a spiritual communion, a feeling of deep compassion for your innermost being.

Yes, the power of consciousness gives you many things. The treasure is inexhaustible, but your problems and tangles have been created by unconsciousness — for them no power is needed, just the presence of consciousness is enough.

-OSHO

From The Invitation, Chapter 24

[Shin]

Why playfulness and humor is important:

 

[Faceless]

3 hours ago, Shin said:

Why playfulness and humor is important:

 

Truth is in perception, intelligence, free of the limits of thought ??

Edited February 11, 2018 by Faceless

[Faceless]

On 8/3/2017 at 11:47 AM, Shanmugam said:

This is going to be a thread dedicated to Osho.. I will be posting excerpts and answers by Osho to specific questions that will shock your mind, blow your concepts off, silence your mind, turn your look inwards, hit your ego and more... 

Let me start with an excerpt that I enjoyed reading today.

OSHO, I KEEP MEETING PEOPLE WHO CAN SEE AURAS, AND I FEEL I AM MISSING. WHAT CAN I DO TO SHARE THIS SIGHT?

Anand Buddha, God is not an experience. No experience as such is spiritual; all experiences are mind games. Beware of it. Whatsoever can be seen will be part of the illusory world. The seer is the truth, not the seen. You can see auras and you can see angels and you can see kundalini rising and you can see inner lights — but they are all seen. They are not you.

The seer is the witness, and only the witness is the truth. All else is a dream. And there are worldly dreams and there are other-worldly dreams; there are materialistic dreams and there are spiritualistic dreams. One thing has to be remembered always, that whatsoever is seen is worthless — even if it is God. The God that is seen is worthless.

When all experiences disappear and you are left utterly alone, nothing to see, only emptiness in the hands, no experience at all, then suddenly you realize yourself. Then you turn upon yourself, then you fall into your source. And that is not an experience, it is a realization. That is the difference between the words “experience” and “realization”. It is not that you have seen something, experienced something. Now you know who you are.

The great Sufi mystic Maghrebi says,

Don’t speak to us of visions and miracles, for we have long ago transcended such things.

We saw them all to be illusion and dreams, and dauntlessly we passed beyond them.

Anand Buddha, you will meet many people here who will go on playing these games. They are simply wasting their time. Avoid their company. I am going to attract all kinds of people, and particularly the people who are interested in spiritualism. They will bring all their diseases here. They will talk nonsense — they will talk about miracles, psychic experiences. And naturally, when somebody talks about such things, you start feeling as if you are missing. You are not missing a thing, because he is only dreaming.

But he can create this feeling in you, that you are lacking something, that your growth is not going well, that you are not growing as fast as you should grow. He will create in you the feeling of inferiority, and that is dangerous. Once you start feeling inferior you become sad, depressed, you carry a heavy weight on your chest; and that will become a hindrance in your growth.

And every possibility is there that if you desire you will start seeing these things. Desire creates dreams. If you start thinking that you are missing, soon your mind will project. The mind is always ready to give you anything that you desire, and particularly such things. If you desire money it will be difficult because it is not only a question of your own mind. If you desire to become the president of a country it may not be easy because there may be much competition. But if you want to see auras there is no competition, and nobody can hinder you, and you are not taking somebody else’s auras; you are creating your own. It is a private, idiotic world. This is the meaning of the word “idiot”: it means having a private world of one’s own experiences which do not collaborate with reality.

I know a few people are here; they enjoy a kind of leadership because they can gather a few people around themselves. They start talking about esoteric things. And whenever somebody talks about esoteric things, hidden truths that you are not aware of, he enjoys being a knower and he reduces you to an ignorant person. It hurts. Soon you will also start talking and reading such nonsense books, and they are available in abundance.

Here, you are not to be with me to see auras, or to see lights, or to see kundalini energy rising, or the chakras opening. I am trying to hammer this truth into your heart continuously, that the only thing worth attaining is enlightenment, is nirvana, is the realization of who you are. Everything else has to be bypassed. And these things come on the way.

The mind tries to allure you to the very end. It gives beautiful psychedelic experiences, very colorful, enchanting. One can get stuck with them. LSD is nothing. If you go on working on your being you will find far deeper, far profounder-appearing experiences happening to you which no LSD can release.

And then the desire is to cling to them, and that very desire keeps you away from the ultimate truth. For the ultimate truth, everything has to be sacrificed, all so-called spiritual experiences, esoteric knowledge, miracles. Everything has to be dropped. One has to come to the ultimate experience — which is not an experience….

Language is inadequate to express it; that’s why it is called an “experience”. It is not an experience, because in experience there is a division of the experiencer and the experienced, and in this experience, the ultimate, there is no division. You are the knower, you are the known, you are the seer, you are the seen, you are the experiencer, you are the experienced — only you are.

That absolute, still point of pure existence, that is the goal. All else has to be sacrificed for it. Beware of such things.

- The Secret - 14

Whats said about experience is right on??

Edited February 11, 2018 by Faceless

[Vingger]

"Life is not a problem to be solved, it is a mystery to be lived." -OSHO

[Faceless]

On 8/5/2017 at 9:02 AM, Shanmugam said:

                                          Meditation Is Non-doing

When people come to me and they ask, "How to meditate?" I tell them, "There is no need to ask how to meditate, just ask how to remain unoccupied. Meditation happens spontaneously. Just ask how to remain unoccupied, that's all. That's the whole trick of meditation - how to remain unoccupied. Then you cannot do anything. The meditation will flower.

When you are not doing anything the energy moves towards the center, it settles down towards the center. When you are doing something the energy moves out. Doing is a way of moving out. Non-doing is a way of moving in. Occupation is an escape. You can read the Bible, you can make it an occupation. There is no difference between religious occupation and secular occupation: all occupations are occupations, and they help you to cling outside your being. They are excuses to remain outside.

Man is ignorant and blind, and he wants to remain ignorant and blind, because to come inwards looks like entering a chaos. And it is so; inside you have created a chaos. You have to encounter it and go through it. Courage is needed - courage to be oneself, and courage to move inwards. I have not come across a greater courage than that - the courage to be meditative.

But people who are engaged outside - with worldly things or nonworldly things, but occupied all the same, they think ....and they have created a rumor around it, they have their own philosophers. They say that if you are introvert you are somehow morbid, something is wrong with you. And they are in the majority. If you meditate, if you sit silently, they will joke about you: "What are you doing? - gazing at your navel? What are you doing? - opening the third eye? Where are you going? Are you morbid?...because what is there to do inside? There is nothing inside."

Inside doesn't exist for the majority of people, only the outside exists. And just the opposite is the case - only inside is real; outside is nothing but a dream. But they call introverts morbid, they call meditators morbid. In the West they think that the East is little morbid. What is the point of sitting alone and looking inwards? What are you going to get there? There is nothing.

David Hume, one of the great British philosophers, tried once... because he was studying the Upanishads and they go on saying: Go in, go in, go in - that is their only message. So he tried it. He closed his eyes one day - a totally secular man, very logical, empirical, but not meditative at all - he closed his eyes and he said, "It is so boring! It is a boredom to look in. Thoughts move, sometimes a few emotions, and they go on racing in the mind, and you go on looking at them - what is the point of it? It is useless. It has no utility."

And this is the understanding of many people. Hume's standpoint is that of the majority: What are going to get inside? There is darkness, thoughts floating here and there. What will you do? What will come out of it? If Hume had waited a little longer - and that is difficult for such people - if he had been a little more patient, by and by thought disappear, emotions subside. But if it had happened to him he would have said, "That is even worse, because emptiness comes. At least first there were thoughts, something to be occupied with, to look at, to think about. Now even thoughts have disappeared; only emptiness....What to do with emptiness? It is absolutely useless."

But if he had waited a little more, then darkness also disappears. It is just like when you come from the hot sun and you enter your house: everything looks dark because your eyes need a little attunement. They are fixed on the hot sun outside; comparatively, your house looks dark. You cannot see, you feel as if it is night. But you wait, you sit, you rest in a chair, and after few seconds the eyes get attuned. Now it is not dark, a little more light........You rest for an hour, and everything is light, there is no darkness at all.

If Hume had waited a little longer, then darkness also disappears. Because you have lived in the hot sun outside for many lives your eyes have become fixed, they have lost flexibility. They need tuning. When one comes inside the house it takes a little while, a little time, a patience. Don't be in a hurry.

In haste nobody can come to know himself. It is a very very deep awaiting. Infinite patience is needed. By and by darkness disappears. There comes a light with no source There is no flame in it, no lamp is burning, no sun is there. A light, just like it is morning: the night has disappeared, and the sun has not risen.... Or in the evening - the twilight, when the sun has set and night has not yet descended. That's why Hindus call their prayer time sandhya. Sandhya means twilight, light without any source.

When you move inwards you will come to the light without any source. In that light, for the first time you start understanding yourself, who you are, because you are that light. You are that twilight, that sandhya, that pure clarity, that perception, where the observer and the observed disappear, and only the light remains.

Osho - excerpts from the book What is Meditation?

?? This is meditation. 

[Shin]

8 hours ago, Faceless said:

Truth is in perception, intelligence, free of the limits of thought ??

And isn't it how you perceive life as a child ?

[Faceless]

Yes it is very similar. The known being the accumulation of ones past, knowledge, experience, really seems to crowd the perception. 

This is usually how it works as a process if you watch closely. First there is perception, a direct seeing before thought enters. So there’s perception ‘seeing’, then contact, then sensation, then thought comes along, creates an image, then the movement of desire which breeds further mechanical compulsion for thought to enter in habitually...For a baby before a certain age or before self awarness sets in it goes through this constant state of perception without the perceiver. I have observed it in my 2 year old. I observerd this in him from the age of 15 months to 24 months and it’s so apparent that that is what happens. The self awarness, the increased capacity of identification to or with memory, knowledge, experience begins to approach each moment ‘the now’ with that of thought ‘memory, knowledge, and experience. So after this process starts perception ‘without thought’ becomes mechanicaly overriden by thought ‘the mechanical response to memory. The baby goes from constant perception without the perceiver to the perception according to the perceiver. Which is how adults are but adults are worse because they have built up quite a bit of conditioning ‘identifications and associations of relationships between themselves and there surroundings’ over the years. 

So that is why it’s very important to become coherent of thought. In this coherence we know when thought is useful and not. 

This is beginning of real meditation to me. This is how headlessness is able to flower. 

Can you see this in your own experiences. Can you see this process from your own experience of living?? 

Edited February 11, 2018 by Faceless

[Shanmugam]

 

[Shanmugam]

                                                   A BRIDGE WITH EXISTENCE

Just try to walk a few steps consciously and you will see the difference - and the beauty and the joy and the relaxation of walking consciously. Your whole body is in tune with existence. 

Consciousness bridges you with existence.

Unconsciousness closes you into yourself. In unconsciousness you don't have any connection with existence.

In consciousness you are related to the whole - from the smallest blade of grass to the biggest star millions of light-years away.

Osho