Osho – The mind is a chattering box. You cannot stop it. The very effort to stop it gives it more nourishment to go on. Millions of people, for centuries have been trying to stop it, and they have all failed, for the simple reason that the desire to stop it is also part of it. It is not beyond it.

One side of the mind is desiring the other side of the mind to become silent. This is not possible. The only way few people have been able to stop it without making an effort to stop it, are the people who have disidentified themselves with the mind. There is not even a desire to stop it or to continue it, because all desires belong to it.

One simply watches it. Let it chatter. You simply become a watcher. Let the traffic of thoughts move. There is nothing to be worried. It is going to harm nobody. These thoughts are only soap bubbles. Don’t take them seriously. Don’t become tense while watching them. Be relaxed.

I will tell you a story to understand it. Gautam Buddha told one day, while they were passing into a mountainous region — it was the midday, hot sun and he was getting old — he told his disciple, Ananda, that “I am very thirsty. You should go back. Because while we had been we had passed a small current of the mountainous water, few bullock carts have passed through the current, making it muddy. Dead leaves, which may have rested in the bed, are floating over the water, It was not worth drinking. And particularly for Gautam Buddha he could not take that water.

He knew that, if he goes ahead, where he had left Gautam Buddha, then five miles ahead of that place there is a big river and he can find good crystalclear water. He came back empty-handed. Buddha was very strict. He said, “You go back and you bring that water, because I remember when we had passed, it was so pure and so crystalclear.” But Ananda said, “You should understand me. In the meantime some bullock carts have passed.”

Buddha said, “I understand, but you go sit by the side of the bank — however long it takes. You just go and sit there. Don’t get into the current, because your getting into the current will make it muddy again. You simply wait, watching, doing nothing. All those dead leaves will be taken away. The mud will settle down. Then you fill the begging bowl and come back.”

Ananda wanted to go ahead towards the river, but he could not disobey Gautam Buddha. Unwillingly, he went back — but he was for a great surprise. By the time he reached there, the miracle has already happened. The dead leaves had moved with the current, and the mud has already settled. And the water was as clean and as pure as it could be.

Taking that bottle back, he tried to figure out why Gautam Buddha insisted, because he never does anything without some purpose behind it, some meaning behind it. And then he realized on the way, that it is a message to him, that “Ananda, don’t get into the river, into the current of the mind. That’s what you have been doing all your life. Just wait on the bank, and simply watch.

It is one of the secrets of inner life, that as your watcher becomes more and more strong, the thoughts become less and less. It is exactly in proportion. When there are hundred percent thoughts in the mind, you have zero watcher. When you have ten percent consciousness involved in watching, ten percent of your thoughts will disappear — because it is the same energy that creates thoughts, that creates the watcher.

When you are hundred percent a watcher, a pure witness, a mirror, all thoughts disappear. You cannot stop them, but you can manage a situation, a device in which they get stopped. They simply disappear. And to know such a state, when you are aware and alert, fully conscious and watchful and there are no thoughts there, your whole consciousness for the first time in your life returns back on itself. Becomes aware of awareness. You become conscious of consciousness.

In the silence, when the chattering mind is no more there, one realizes oneself. Unless the mind is silent, you cannot realize yourself. You will remain involved with the thoughts and those thoughts are almost meaningless — memories, fragments of memories, imagination, dreams, daydreams, all mixed up. It is a chaos. Even if sometimes you find some beautiful thoughts moving, they are all borrowed. You have heard them, you have read them, but they are not yours. And that which is not yours is not true.

This has to be remembered. Everything borrowed is untrue. Only your own realization can give you authentic truth. You can recite the whole Bible or the Koran or Dhammapada — it does not matter. You are simply being a parrot, and sometimes even worse than a parrot.

I have heard about a bishop whose pet parrot has died, and he was missing the parrot very much. It was such a religious parrot. He used to repeat the whole sermon on the mount. And it was such a joy for anybody to come and listen to the parrot, so he went to the biggest petshop and wanted some religious kind, some spiritual parrot. The shopkeeper said, “What are you talking about? Parrots and spiritual?”

He said, “Yes. I had one, and with great effort made him learn the whole sermon on the mount, and he used to repeat it with perfection.” The shopkeeper said, “Now I ko understand what you mean by spiritual. You mean the parrot who can repeat scriptures. I have something for you you would love.”

He took him inside the shop. He said. “It is a very special parrot and I was keeping it for myself — but you are in such a desperate need and you are missing your own parrot which is dead, I will be happy to give it to you. Before you take it, let me introduce you about its qualities. Just watch and you will see one thread hanging by its right leg, another thread hanging by his left leg. The threads are very thin. Nobody can see them unless one comes very close. You have just to pull the thread of the right leg and he will repeat the sermon on the mount.”

“But sometimes you may be having a visitor, who is not a Christian. Then you have to pull the left leg. Then he repeats a beautiful portion, in pure Sanskrit, of Srimad Bhagavat Gita.”

The bishop was enchanted to find such a rare parrot. He asked the shopkeeper, “And if I pull both the threads together?” Before the shopkeeper was going to say anything, the parrot said, “You idiot. I will fall on my ass. Never do that!”

Even parrots are more intelligent that your bishops, your pandits, your rabbis. Even the parrot said, “This is absolute stupidity.”

But for centuries people have used their mind almost like a parrot, and have thought that they are spiritual, that they are religious. Now all that can be done by a computer more perfectly, but a computer is not religious, not spiritual. Neither you are, just by repeating words from scriptures. Don’t be a His Master’s gramophone record!

It is below humanity. And it good of the company that makes those records, that they have chosen a dog as their symbol! His Master’s Voice. But what millions of people are doing in the world, then repeating His Master’s Voice? Their masters may be different, but the function of the dog is the same.

The mind can stop, but not by your effort but by your effortless witnessing. That is the whole meaning of meditation. Relax. Don’t force, and just watch. Let the mind do its things. It will take a little patience, but it has always happened. It is almost a scientific law, without exception, that if you can manage a little patience you will come to a point where the watcher is nourished and the mind becomes unnourished, and the thoughts start disappearing. When the whole energy of your consciousness moves into watching, you will find there is no mind at all. And to know a state of no-mind is the greatest experience in life a man is capable of. It is ecstasy. It is superconsciousness. It is self-realization. There is nothing higher than that.

Source – Osho Book “Last Testament Vol 6″

Question – Beloved Osho, your way is the way of the heart, and the outside world is the way of the head. Will it ever be possible that man can function from a blend of both head and heart, or must the two always remain totally divorced? will it always be essential to make a conscious choice for one way or the other?

Osho – The first thing to be understood is that there is no way, either of head or of heart. Every way leads you away, away from the truth that you are.

It would have been so easy if there were a truth somewhere. Howsoever difficult the way, people would have reached. The more difficult, the more far away the truth was, the more challenging to the ego. If man’s ego challenges him to reach the highest peak in the Himalayas, Everest, where nothing is to be found; if man’s ego gives him incentive to waste billions of dollars to reach the moon, risking lives…. But man has reached the moon. And the first man who walked on the moon must have looked silly to himself – there was nothing for which so much endeavor, technology, preparation was needed.

Remember, the ego wants challenges.
It lives through challenge.

Why have so few people been able to have a glimpse of the truth? – because it is not a challenge; it is not there, it is here within you. It does not need any way, you are already it. But the question has one other implication too: Will it ever be possible for the head and heart to be married, or are they going to remain forever divorced? It all depends on you, because both are mechanisms. You are neither the head nor the heart. You can move through the head, you can move through the heart. Of course you will reach different places because the directions of the head and the heart are diametrically opposite.

The head will go round and round thinking, brooding, philosophizing; it knows only words, logic, argument. But it is very infertile; you cannot get anything out of the head as far as truth is concerned, because truth needs no logic, no argument, no philosophical research. Truth is so simple; the head makes it so complex. Down the centuries philosophers have been seeking and searching for the truth through the head. None of them has found anything, but they have created great systems of thought. I have looked into all those systems: there is no conclusion.

The heart is also a mechanism – different from the head. You can call the head the logical instrument; you can call the heart the emotional instrument. Out of the head all the philosophies, all the theologies are created; out of the heart, come all kinds of devotion, prayer, sentimentality. But the heart also goes round and round in emotions.

The word ”emotion” is good. Watch… it consists of motion, movement. So the heart moves, but the heart is blind. It moves fast, quick, because there is no reason to wait. It does not have to think, so it jumps into anything. But truth is not to be found by any emotionality. Emotion is as much a barrier as logic. The logic is the male in you, and the heart is the female in you. But truth has nothing to do with male and female. Truth is your consciousness. You can watch the head thinking, you can watch the heart throbbing with emotion. They can be in a certain relationship….

Ordinarily, the society has arranged that the head should be the master and the heart should be the servant, because society is the creation of man’s mind, psychology, and the heart is feminine. Just as man has kept the woman a slave, the head has kept the heart a slave. We can reverse the situation: the heart can become the master, the head can become the servant. If we have to choose between the two, if we are forced to choose between the two, then it is better that the heart becomes the master and the head becomes the servant.

There are things which the heart is incapable of. Exactly the same is true about the head. The head cannot love, it cannot feel, it is insensitive. The heart cannot be rational, reasonable. For the whole past they have been in conflict. That conflict only represents the conflict and struggle between men and women.

If you are talking to your wife, you must know it is impossible to talk, it is impossible to argue, it is impossible to come to a fair decision, because the woman functions through the heart. She jumps from one thing to another without bothering whether there is any relationship between the two. She cannot argue, but she can cry. She cannot be rational, but she can scream. She cannot be cooperative in coming to a conclusion. The heart cannot understand the language of the head.

The difference is not much as far as physiology is concerned, the heart and the head are just a few inches apart from each other. But as far as their existential qualities are concerned, they are poles apart.

My way has been described as that of the heart, but it is not true. The heart will give you all kinds of imaginings, hallucinations, illusions, sweet dreams – but it cannot give you the truth. The truth is behind both; it is in your consciousness, which is neither head nor heart. Just because the consciousness is separate from both, it can use both in harmony. The head is dangerous in certain fields, because it has eyes but it has no legs – it is crippled.

The heart can function in certain dimensions. It has no eyes but it has legs; it is blind but it can move tremendously, with great speed – of course, not knowing where it is going. It is not just a coincidence that in all the languages of the world love is called blind. It is not love that is blind, it is the heart that has no eyes.

As your meditation becomes deeper, as your identification with the head and the heart starts falling, you find yourself becoming a triangle. And your reality is in the third force in you: the consciousness. Consciousness can manage very easily, because the heart and the head both belong to it.

You know the story of a blind beggar and a crippled beggar…. They both lived outside the village in the forest. Of course, they were competitors to each other, enemies – begging is a business. But one day the forest was on fire. The cripple had no way to escape, because he could not move on his own. He had eyes to see which way they could get out of the fire, but what use is that if you don’t have legs? The blind man had legs, could move fast and get out of the fire, but how was he going to find the place where the fire had not reached yet?

Both were going to die in the forest, burned alive. It was such an emergency that they forgot their competition. In such emergencies only a Jew can remain a businessman, and certainly those two beggars were not Jews. In fact, to be a beggar and a Jew is a contradiction in terms. They immediately dropped their antagonism – that was the only way to survive. The blind man took the cripple on his shoulders, they found the way out of the fire. One was seeing, and the other was moving accordingly.

Something like this has to happen within you – of course, in reverse order. The head has the eyes, the heart has the guts to move into anything. You have to make a synthesis between the two. And the synthesis, I have to emphasize, should be that the heart remains the master, and the head becomes the servant.

You have as a servant a great asset – your reasoning. You cannot be befooled, you cannot be cheated and exploited. The heart has all feminine qualities: love, beauty, grace. The head is barbarous. The heart is far more civilized, far more innocent. A conscious man uses his head as a servant, and his heart as the master – just the opposite of the story I told you.

And this is so simple for the man of consciousness to do. Once you are unidentified with head or heart, and you are simply a witness of both, you can see which qualities should be higher, which qualities should be the goal. And the head as a servant can bring those qualities, but it needs to be commanded and ordered. Right now, and for centuries, just the opposite has been happening: the servant has become the master. And the master is so polite, such a gentleman, that he has not fought back, he has accepted the slavery voluntarily. The madness on the earth is the result.

We have to change the very alchemy of man.
We have to rearrange the whole inside of man.

And the most basic revolution in man will come when the heart decides the values. It cannot decide for war, it cannot go for nuclear weapons; it cannot be death-oriented. The heart is life’s juice. Once the head is in the service of the heart, it has to do what the heart decides. And the head is immensely capable of doing anything, just right guidance is needed; otherwise, it is going to go berserk, it is going to be mad. For the head there are no values. For the head there is no meaning in anything. For the head there is no love, no beauty, no grace – only reasoning.

But this miracle is possible only by disidentifying yourself from both. Watch the thoughts, because in your watching them, they disappear. Then watch your emotions, sentimentalities; by your watching, they also disappear. Then your heart is as innocent as that of a child, and your head is as great a genius as Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Aristotle.

But the trouble is far bigger than you can conceive. It is a male-dominated society; man has been creating all the rules of the game, the woman has just been following. And the conditioning has gone so deep, because it has been going on for millions of years. If in the individual the revolution happens and the heart is re-enthroned, given its right place as the master, and the head given the right place as a great servant, this will affect your whole social structure. You can see it happening in my commune.

The woman is the master; she is not longer mistress, and the man is no longer master. People go on asking me why, for all significant posts, I have chosen women? For the simple reason that the woman will not create the third world war.

It has been a historical fact that each war is created by the man, but the woman suffers most. Strange – the man is the criminal and the consequence happens to the woman! The woman loses her husband, the woman loses her children. The woman loses her dignity, because whenever a country is invaded, the soldiers are so much repressed – just like the monks…. Sexually they had no opportunity while the war was going on. When the opportunity arises – they invade a city and conquer it – their first attack is on the woman.

And the war has nothing to do with the woman, she is simply outside of the game – it is a male game, just like boxing – but she has to be raped. Those soldiers are hankering not to be victorious for their nation’s glory – that is a faraway thing – they are hankering to get the women of the enemies as quickly as possible.

I am putting women in all significant, powerful positions. It is symbolic. Man has a tremendous capacity to do things, but he should not be the guide anymore. He is hung up in his head. He can also become the master if he puts his heart above his head. That’s why I said that all of my sannyasins are women – even those who biologically, physiologically, are men. The moment they become sannyasins they have accepted a new structure, they have put something above their head – their heart.

This is what I mean: that even men around me start learning feminine qualities. And feminine qualities are the only qualities worth having. So there is a possibility, but the possibility has a basic condition to be fulfilled: you become more conscious, a witness, a watcher of all that goes on inside you. The watcher becomes immediately free from identification. Because he can see the emotions, it is an absolute certainty that ”I am not the emotions.” He can see the thoughts; the simple conclusion is, ”I am not my thought process.”

”Then who am I?” – a pure watcher, a witness. And you reach to the ultimate possibility of intelligence in you: You become a conscious man. Amongst the whole world sleeping, you become awake, and once you are awake there is no problem. Your very awakening will start shifting things to their right places. The head has to be dethroned, and the heart has to be crowned again. This change amongst many people will bring a new society, a New Man in the world. It will change so many things, you cannot conceive.

Science will have a totally different flavor. It will not serve death anymore, it will not make weapons that are going to kill the whole of life on the earth. It will make life richer, discover energies which can make man more fulfilled, which can make man live in comfort, in luxury, because the values will have completely changed. It will still be mind functioning, but under the direction of the heart. My way is the way of meditation.

I have to use language, unfortunately, that’s why I say may way is the way of meditation: Neither of head nor of heart, but of a growing consciousness which is above both mind and heart. This is the key to open the doors for a New Man to arrive on the earth.

Source – Osho Book “From the False to the Truth”

Question – Beloved Osho, my mind, the monster, distracts me even when i’m sitting in discourse. It simply takes over and thinks all sorts of silly thoughts and by the time discourse is over i get the feeling i missed another golden opportunity to be with you, drink from you, tune in with you. This leaves me very, very sad. what can i do?

Osho – Nishigandha, everybody has cultivated his mind for so long, for centuries, that it has got deep roots in you. You cannot destroy it in one day, it will take a little time. And if you become depressed that you are losing the opportunity then it will take even longer. What is missed is missed.

Never look backwards. Nothing can be done about it. If you miss a train, the second train will be coming. There is no point in crying and weeping and making a fuss because you have missed the train. One understands that what has happened, has happened: now be more alert so that you don’t miss the second train. And also be alert that you don’t catch the wrong train.

I have heard… three professors were standing on the platform and got involved in a deep philosophical discussion, and then they suddenly realized the train had left. So they ran — two of them managed to enter the last compartment. Only one was left behind, who was standing there with tears in his eyes.

A porter was watching all this. He came to the third man and he said, “Many times people miss — I work here — but there is no need to cry. Within just half an hour another train will be coming. You can catch that train.”
He said, “You don’t understand the situation. Those two fellows had come to see me off! In a hurry they got into the train — and they have taken my luggage too! What am I going to do with the train that is coming? First I have to get the luggage…

“And those two must be crying inside the train. They were not going anywhere; they had just come to see me off. But it was all such a hurry, so sudden, that everybody forgot who had come to send off and who was going… we all belong to the university’s philosophy department.”

It happens almost to everybody, so take it naturally. You say, “My mind, the monster…” Don’t call it “monster,” because that creates a hate relationship. Just as there are love relationships, there are hate relationships. People are not aware about their hate relationships.

I am reminded: In the freedom struggle of India, Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah were arch enemies. Jinnah was asking for a separate country for Mohammedans, Pakistan, and Gandhi was insistent that the country should remain one: “Mohammedans and Hindus and Christians and Jains have always lived together — there is no need for Mohammedans to have a separate country. And why cut the country into parts?”

But Jinnah was very stubborn and he said, “Unless you agree to the separation, India will never become free, because Mohammedans will not agree to that freedom.”

And finally, in 1947 Gandhi had to agree, seeing that either you remain a slave forever or you divide the country: “It is better to divide the country; at least both countries will be independent.” The country was divided and in 1948 Mahatma Gandhi was shot, assassinated — of course by a man from Poona. Poona is a fertile land for murderers.

I am telling this because Jinnah was sitting in his garden in Karachi, Pakistan, talking to his secretary about some official work and suddenly a friend came running in and told Jinnah what had happened: “Gandhi has been assassinated!”

Nobody had seen tears in the eyes of Jinnah in his whole life. He was a very strong, stubborn, very logical, very rational man. The shock… his friend and his secretary could not believe it. He should be happy; his arch-enemy is dead — but there were tears.

He stood up, went inside the house, and told the friend, “Now I will not be living much longer either. Only today I realized how much I was related with Mahatma Gandhi. Without him, the whole world seems to be empty. We have been fighting our whole lives, and I never recognized that this fighting has also created a deep relationship. Without him I am almost half dead. All my joy for living is finished.”

Up to that day Jinnah never used to have bodyguards, because he could not believe that Mohammedans, for whom he had been fighting his whole life, could make an attempt on his life. The next day, Karachi was surprised: he had four people with loaded guns around him wherever he went. And somebody asked him what happened, because he used to go alone even in the market. There was no need even for a single bodyguard. He said, “If Hindus can kill Mahatma Gandhi, who has been fighting for them his whole life, what is the difficulty? Mohammedans can kill me.”I am already half dead, and now I cannot trust Mohammedans. Gandhi, who was loved and worshiped as a great soul, as a mahatma, has been killed by Hindus themselves. I was never loved as a great soul, as a mahatma. In fact Mohammedans have never thought that I am a proper Mohammedan,” because he never used to do the five prayers every Mohammedan is supposed to do. He never used to go to the mosque. He was a very ultra-modern man.

He was never in any way a man who can be considered a Mohammedan. He was educated in the West. He was not interested in the holy KORAN — he was just born into a Mohammedan family, that was all. And strangely enough, just within one year, he died. He started dying the same day Gandhi was assassinated. Hate is also a relationship, just as love is a relationship.

And psychology is now absolutely certain that the energy of love and hate is not different. It is the same energy: standing upside down it becomes hate, standing right side up it becomes love — it is the same energy. That’s why it is not very difficult — a friend turning into an enemy, an enemy turning into a friend.

Psychology has become aware of one more very significant thing: that you hate the same person you love. So there is a constant change: in the morning you love, in the afternoon you hate, in the evening you love, in the night you hate — just like a pendulum of a clock, your mind goes on moving between love and hate.

Don’t call your mind the “monster” because you are creating a hate relationship. And relationship is relationship, whether it is love or hate. Just be a silent watcher. “The mind distracts me even when I am sitting in discourse.”

So let him distract; you simply watch. You don’t interfere. You don’t try to stop, because any kind of action on your part is going to give energy to the mind. So whenever you can manage, you listen, and whenever mind wanders and takes you away, go easily with the mind. There is no harm.

It will look strange to you that I am saying go with the mind easily. Just be watchful — without condemning the mind, without abusing the mind — just be watchful that the mind is going somewhere else. And you are in for a great surprise.

It will take a little time, but slowly, slowly the mind will not wander so much. You will have a few gaps to listen to me; then those gaps will become bigger. And because you are not creating any relationship with the mind — of love or hate — you are becoming indifferent to mind.

Gautam Buddha has made it a meditation. He called it upeksha — indifference. Just be indifferent to the mind, and it won’t be a disturbance for long. And it is worthwhile to wait and not be in a hurry, because the very hurry will make your mind more stubborn. If you want to push it away, it will come back with force. You just let it do whatever it wants to do. It is none of your concern, this way or that. Suddenly a watchfulness arises. It takes a little time. It depends on you, how much indifference you can create towards the mind, how much you can be watchful. The mind will become slowly, slowly rejected. It will stop doing its things, because now nobody is interested. For whom to do all the circus?

Just a few days before… my sister is here; her son had come. Now he is married and has children. The moment I saw him I remembered. It must be twenty years ago… they used to live in Kanva.

The chief minister of Madhya Pradesh was also from Kanva. He wanted to meet me and he invited me to have dinner with him, so my brother-in-law took me in his car. And this boy was very small, he may have been five years old. He also went with us. He was sitting on the front seat by the side of his father; I was in the back seat. My brother-in-law got out of the car and told me, “I will go and look, and make arrangements, and inform him that you are here, so he can come out and welcome you.”

It took a long time. The minister was phoning somebody in the capital of Bhopal. The little boy fell asleep and struck his head on the steering wheel. I saw it, I heard it, but I started looking out of the window. He looked at me. I did not give any attention to what had happened. He tried two or three times to look at me: whenever he would look at me, I would look out of the window, so he thought: “It is useless.”

When we went back home, after two hours, as he got out of the car he started crying. I said, “What has happened? Why are you crying?”

He said, “It happened two hours before! I had hit my head on the steering wheel. But you are strange: whenever I would look at you for some consolation, you would not look at me. So I thought, what is the point of crying? This man will not even say anything, and even if I cry or weep, my father is out. Now we are back and my mother is here. Now I can cry.” “But,” I said, “two hours ago?”

But I could see his argument, it was right. If there is nobody to pay attention to you, what is the point in crying? At home everybody is going to pay attention. Then to make a fuss and cry… although now he is not hurting; it had happened two hours before. And just a few days ago he was here, and I remembered. Now he has a child of the same age. Mind is nourished by your attention, for or against. You just be indifferent; look out of the window.

“It simply takes over and thinks all sorts of silly thoughts and by the time discourse is over I get the feeling I missed another golden opportunity to be with You.” Don’t call them “silly” thoughts. These adjectives are dangerous: “monster” mind, “silly” thoughts. You are taking great interest in it. Maybe you are against it, but the interest is there. Be utterly indifferent. It is a golden key. And slowly, slowly the mind will start remaining silent.

And afterwards you repent that “I have missed another opportunity.” Never repent about the past because that is again wasting the present. First you wasted the past; now you are wasting the present.

If you have wasted the golden opportunity to be with me, now don’t waste the golden opportunity to be with the sun, to be with the moon, to be with the trees. It is the same opportunity. The whole thing boils down to one single point: be silent. And everything becomes a golden opportunity.

But you are taking attitudes. You are saying, “This makes me very, very sad.” You are in a vicious circle. First the mind takes you away; it is a “monster,” all its thoughts are “silly.” And when you are leaving here, you become sad, and you start condemning your mind.

There is no need to be sad: it is mind’s nature, and what has gone is gone. What is available herenow, don’t make it sad for that which is dead. On the contrary, make it so joyful that you can take revenge for the past too. Dance and sing so that what has been lost in the past moments is gained in the present. By sadness you cannot gain it, but by being joyous you can gain it.

And a few days or a few months are nothing much. In the long, long eternity they are just like small seconds. Nishigandha, a Frenchman staying at an English country house for the weekend was attracted to a debutante, and without much difficulty, seduced her. Several months later they met by chance at a very select society ball. He stepped forward with outstretched hand, but she walked straight past him without acknowledgement. As soon as he could, the Frenchman
cornered her and said, “Surely you remember me?”

“Of course I do young man, but you are not to assume that in England a one-night frolic constitutes an introduction.”

In a way she is right. Just a one-night frolic cannot be an introduction. The reality is that you may be living with your wife for thirty or forty years — even then you are strangers, you are not introduced to each other yet.

You have lived with the mind for centuries, for many, many lives, yet you are not introduced to it. You don’t know its workings, you don’t know its strategies. The repentance afterwards is also part of your mind; the sadness afterwards is also part of your mind. So you are moving in a vicious circle: first you miss the opportunity, then you abuse the mind, call the mind names: it is a “monster,” the thoughts are “silly,” then you become sad. And this whole game is of the mind.

You have to detach yourself and be a witness. Let the mind do whatsoever it is doing, but don’t get identified with it. It is not you. You are pure awareness. You are just awareness.

If you can remember only this much… Gautam Buddha has used the words samma sati — right remembrance — and the mind will disappear with all its silliness, sadness, monstrosity. A single thing you have to keep: a remembering that “I am not the mind.” You are not to say to yourself, “I am not the mind.” The moment you say it, it becomes part of the mind, because language belongs to the mind. You have to remember it without any language, just a feel: I am not the mind.

I am using words because I have to tell you, but you are not to use words. You have just to be aware and remember without using language. The mind will go. It has always happened. You cannot be an exception.

Source – Osho Book “The Hidden Splendor”

Question – Beloved Osho, the other morning before lecture, i suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to touch, with great gratitude, the floor where you walk. in that moment, i heard again that voice — it still sounds like your voice: “if you can kiss in gratitude the place on earth where i have stepped… i want to tell you, that i’ve stepped everywhere on this earth. “this is really too much, for i see myself in tears, kissing every spot on the earth. and again that voice comes in me, or from me, whispering, “if you can kiss in gratitude all the earth, and all that abides on the earth, you don’t need me anymore. “please, osho, tell me that i was just imagining, that it was just a dream. you haven’t said that to me, have you?

Osho – Sarjano, the idea is Catholic. You come from the country of the pope, and that fellow goes on kissing the earth wherever he goes — even in India, where kissing the earth means kissing cow dung. When he kissed it here, that very day I said, “He has tasted something of Hindu religion.”

It is just your imagination, Sarjano. There is no need for your gratitude to be expressed in stupid gestures. Just being grateful, your eyes full of tears, your heart just melting and merging with existence, is enough. Kissing the earth is just an idiotic symbol; I could never have said anything like this to you. But you love me, and you are so full of me that even if you speak in your imagination, you may hear my voice.

But remember one thing: except for silence, everything else is your imagination — howsoever beautiful. Only your silence I can say has my support, because only in your silence are you close to the very center of existence. In absolute silence, you become the very center yourself. But remember to avoid any kind of imagination — all imagination — even beautiful imagination, apparently looking like the divine.

It happened once: I had a few Mohammedan friends and they were followers of a Sufi mystic. The mystic used to come to the city once a year to see his disciples, and they were continuously telling me, “This time when he comes, some way has to be found so that you both can meet.”

I said, “There is no problem with it. I can be his host; he can be my guest. That will be the best thing because he is going to be here three days, so for three days we can be together.”

They liked the idea. The most impressive thing to them in the Sufi mystic was that he saw God everywhere: he would see a tree and he would go and hug the tree and start talking to the tree. Almost in a trance, he would kiss the earth; he would hold your hand and kiss it and he would start talking in a trance and address you as “God! My Lord!” People were very impressed.

He came to stay with me. Before he could kiss my hand, I said, “Wait! Do you really see God in me or have you been imagining for years?” — because that is one of the traditions in the Sufis: you start imagining and slowly, slowly, the imagination becomes a reality. He was shocked. There was a moment of silence — painful silence, because his disciples were there. But he was an honest man; he said, “Ah, at least thirty years ago I started on the path, and this was the path shown by my teacher: ‘Look into everything for God.’

“In the beginning, it was difficult to see God in a camel, in a donkey, in a buffalo. But my master insisted: All these forms are gods; you don’t have to judge them — your path is just to see God in everything, so that one day you can see God everywhere. And I succeeded in three years, and I started seeing God everywhere. Now I see God everywhere.”

I said, “Just listen to me. For the three days you will be here, stop imagining. Just see things as they are: a table is a table, not God; a camel is a camel, not God; and a buffalo is a buffalo, not God — just for three days.”

He was very reluctant and afraid and nervous, but he was staying with me, so I said, “I will remind you about this kissing and hugging — don’t forget! After three days you can hug with a vengeance, because no tree can prevent how much you hug it. For three days… you can fill the quota afterwards, but for three days I will be constantly after you. You have to see things as they are.”

There was no need for three days. Within just one day, in twenty-four hours, the god that had been there for thirty years, disappeared. In the morning, he was very angry at me. He said, “What have you done? I really see a table is a table! Just now I saw a man going by on a bicycle, and I saw neither the god in the man, nor in the bicycle. You destroyed my thirty years of practice.”

I said, “Just think a little. If something that you have spent thirty years discovering was really true, then in one day it could not disappear. For thirty years you have lived in a hallucination — you created the hallucination, and the hallucination can be so strong that all doubts disappear. And thirty years is a long time.”

I told him a story of Ramakrishna which is very rare in the history of mystics. After attaining enlightenment, nobody ever tries to look into other paths to see whether they also reach to enlightenment or not — there is no point. You wanted to reach here, you have reached — now what is the point of finding out whether other roads also reach here or not? But Ramakrishna had something tremendously significant on his mind, so he gave six months to each religion that was available in his vicinity; for six months he would practice the religion and forget everything else. Of course, he was already enlightened so the path was not a problem; in six months, he would reach back to the point of consciousness.

In Bengal, there is a small local group of a very strange religion: they believe that Krishna is the only man, and those who follow him are all women. They may be men, but that is only an illusion; in reality, except for Krishna, there is no other man — all are women. He is the lover and you are the beloved. In the night, the followers of that sect, men and women both, dress alike — like women. And even men sleep with a statue of Krishna in their beds — he is their husband.

Ramakrishna followed that path also for six months. For others it was just a ritual; they were born into that religion, just as you are born into Christianity, or Hinduism, or Jainism. You don’t really care; it is just accidental that you are born into a certain religion and you follow it, but it is a formality — at the most.

But Ramakrishna was not going into those processes in a formal way: when he was following something, he was following it with totality and intensity. And almost a miracle was seen! Even in the day, he used the same clothes as women use in Bengal. Even the people of that sect told him, “In the day you can use men’s clothes; otherwise it looks very awkward.” But he said, “When I follow something, I follow it totally. I cannot divide my day from my night. And I don’t care about the world.”

His breasts started growing; his disciples became very much afraid. So much intensity of projecting that even the doctors who came to know about it when they visited Ramakrishna and saw his breasts, could not believe it — because this was a physiological miracle. But his disciples whispered in the ears of the doctor, “This is nothing — he is having monthly periods!”

For six months continuously… his voice changed, it became more like a woman’s. He started walking like a woman — which is very difficult; difficult because only a woman can walk that way. She has a womb inside her body and that womb gives a different kind of movement to the legs. Man has no womb inside; his legs have a different movement.

He started walking like a woman, speaking like a woman, his voice changed. And when the menstrual period started, then the disciples became really afraid. They said, “We have lost him. How can we get him back?” They tried to persuade him, but until six months was up, he was not going to change his path. They said, “This path is dangerous. We don’t think that these breasts and this period are going to disappear even after six months. Your whole life you will be a laughingstock — and we are going to be laughingstocks because we are your disciples.”

It took almost six months after he stopped for the change to take place again. Slowly, slowly, he became a man again — before that he had become a woman. Such a deep psychological projection… It is through such projections that people are experiencing Krishna, Jesus, Buddha — and when they experience it, they see it.

And if you say to them that it is only an illusion, how can they believe you? Their illusion looks more real than you are. Mind has a capacity to project anything and make it appear almost real; or sometimes, if the mind is very powerful, even more than real.

But my path is not the path of imagination: It is the path that does not use the mind at all. Imagination and projection and hallucination and illusion — they are all parts of the mind. My simple approach is transcendence of mind; so only when you start seeing absolute nothingness, utter silence, can you see that I am very close by.

In that silence, you have heard me; in that nothingness, you have seen me. But if you see something, if you hear something, then it is your imagination — you have fallen from the beyond, back into the mind. Only one thing has to be remembered: the mind is the world — and going beyond the mind is the beginning of God.

Source – Osho Book “The Hidden Splendor”

Osho – Being is one, the world is many…and between the two is the divided mind, the dual mind. It is just like a big tree, an ancient oak: the trunk is one, then the tree divides into two main branches, the main bifurcation, from which a thousand and one bifurcations of branches grow. The being is just like the trunk of the tree — one, non-dual — and the mind is the first bifurcation where the tree divides into two, becomes dual, becomes dialectical: thesis and antithesis, man and woman, yin and yang, day and night, God and Devil, yoga and Zen. All the dualities of the world are basically in the duality of the mind — and below the duality is oneness of being. If you slip below, underneath the duality you will find one — call it God, call it nirvana, or whatsoever you like.

If you go higher through the duality, you come to the many million-fold world. This is one of the most basic insights to be understood — that mind is not one. Hence, whatsoever you see through the mind becomes two. It is just like a white ray entering a prism; it is immediately divided into seven colors and the rainbow is created. Before it entered the prism it was one, through the prism it is divided. and the white color disappears into the seven colors of the rainbow. The world is a rainbow, the mind is a prism, and the being is the white ray.

Modern research has come to a very significant fact, one of the most significant achieved in this century, and that is that you don’t have one mind, you have two minds. Your brain is divided into two hemispheres: the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere is joined with the left hand, and the left hemisphere is joined with the right hand — crosswise. The right hemisphere is intuitive, illogical, irrational, poetic, platonic, imaginative, romantic, mythical, religious; and the left hemisphere is logical, rational, mathematical, Aristotelian, scientific, calculative. These two hemispheres are constantly in conflict — the basic politics of the world is within you, the greatest politics of the world is within you. You may not be aware of it, but once you become aware, the real thing to
be done is somewhere between these two minds.

The left hand is concerned with the right hemisphere — intuition, imagination, myth, poetry, religion — and the left hand is very much condemned. The society is of those who are right-handed — right-handed means left hemisphere. Ten per cent of children are born left-handed but they are forced to be right-handed. Children who are born left-handed are basically irrational, intuitive, non-mathematical, non-Euclidean… they are dangerous for society so it forces them in every way to become right-handed. It is not just a question of hands, it is a question of inner politics: the left-handed child functions through the right hemisphere — that society cannot allow, it is dangerous, so he has to be stopped before things go too far.

It is suspected that in the beginning the proportion must have been fifty-fifty — lefthanded children fifty per cent and right-handed children fifty per cent — but the righthanded party has ruled so long that by and by the proportion has fallen to ten per cent and ninety per cent. Even amongst you here many will be left-handed but you may not be aware of it. You may write with the right hand and do your work with the right hand but in your childhood you may have been forced to be right-handed. This is a trick because once you become right-handed your left hemisphere starts functioning. The left hemisphere is reason; the right hemisphere is beyond reason, its functioning is not mathematical. It functions in flashes, it is intuitive, very graceful — but irrational.

The left-handed minority is the most oppressed minority in the world, even more than Negroes, even more than the poor people. If you understand this division, you will understand many things. With the bourgeoisie and the proletariat the proletariat is always functioning through the right hemisphere of the brain: the poor people are more intuitive. Go to the primitive people, they are more intuitive. The poorer the person, the less intellectual — and that may be the cause of his being poor. Because he is less intellectual he cannot compete in the world of reason. He is less articulate as far as language is concerned, reason is concerned, calculation is concerned — he is almost a fool. That may be the cause of his being poor.

The rich person is functioning through the left hemisphere; he is more calculative, arithmetical in everything, cunning, clever, logical — and he plans. That may be the reason why he is rich. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat cannot disappear by communist revolutions, no, because the communist revolution is by the same people. The Czar ruled Russia; he ruled it through the left hemisphere of the mind. Then he was replaced by Lenin who was of the same type. Then Lenin was replaced by Stalin who was even more of the same type.

The revolution is false because deep down the same type of people are ruling — the ruler and the ruled mean the same, and the ruled are those of the right-sided hemisphere. So whatsoever you do in the outside world makes no difference really, it is superficial. The same applies to men and women. Women are right-hemisphere people, men are lefthemisphered.

Men have ruled women for centuries. Now a few women are revolting but the amazing thing is that these are the same type of women. In fact they are just like men — rational, argumentative, Aristotelian. It is possible that one day, just as the communist revolution has succeeded in Russia and China, somewhere, maybe in America, women can succeed and overthrow men. But by the time the women succeed, the women will no more be women, they will have become left-hemisphered. Because to fight, one has to be calculative, and to fight with men you have to be like men: aggressive.

That very aggressiveness is shown all over the world in women’s liberation. Women who have become part of that liberation movement are very aggressive, they are losing all grace, all that comes out of intuition. Because if you have to fight with men you have to learn the same trick; if you have to fight with men, you have to fight with the same techniques.

Fighting with anybody is very dangerous because you become like your enemy. That is one of the greatest problems of humanity. Once you fight with somebody, by and by you have to use the same technique and the same way. Then the enemy may be defeated but by the time he is defeated you have become your own enemy. Stalin is more Czar-like than any Czar, more violent than any Czar. Of course it has to be so: to throw Czars, very violent people are needed, more violent than the Czar himself. Only they will become the revolutionaries, will come out on top. By the time they reach there they have become Czars themselves, and the society continues on the same way. Just superficial things change, deep down the same conflict remains.

The conflict is in man. Unless it is resolved there, it cannot be resolved anywhere else. The politics is within you; it is between the two parts of the mind. A very small bridge exists. If that bridge is broken through some accident, through some physiological defect or something else, the person becomes split, the person becomes two persons — and the phenomenon of schizophrenia or split personality happens.

If the bridge is broken — and the bridge is very fragile — then you become two, you behave like two persons. In the morning you are very loving, very beautiful; in the evening you are very angry, absolutely different. You don’t remember your morning… how can you remember? Another mind was functioning — and the person becomes two persons. If this bridge is strengthened so much that the two minds disappear as two and become one, then integration, then crystallization, arises. What George Gurdjieff used to call the crystallization of being is nothing but these two minds becoming one, the meeting of the male and the female within, the meeting of yin and yang, the meeting of the left and right, the meeting of logic and illogic, the meeting of Plato and Aristotle. If you can understand this basic bifurcation in your tree of then you can understand all the conflict that goes on around and inside you.

Source – Osho Book “Ancient Music in the Pines”

Osho - Truth is all around, but your interpretations are YOUR interpretations. God is speaking all the time, but you hear not, or even if you hear, you hear something else. You hear according to you, your mind comes in, and hence you go on missing.  Unless the mind is dropped you will not be able to know what truth is. Truth cannot be discovered by mind; mind is the barrier. It is because of the mind that you have not been able to discover it. It is not a question of how to train the mind to know the truth. The more the mind is trained and becomes capable, the less is the possibility to know the truth. The more skilled a mind, the farther away you are from the truth.

Mind is the barrier. No-mind is the door. How to attain to no-mind? The only way — the ONLY way — is to be in the present. The only way is not to think of the past, not to think of the future. And you cannot think of the present. That is the whole secret: you cannot think of the present; there is not space enough for thought to move. Thought needs room to move. Can you think anything right now? If you
think it, either it will be of the past or of the future.

This moment of silence. If you think, “Yes, this is a moment of silence,” it is already past. Or you say, “How beautiful!” It is already past. Utter a word “beautiful,” and it is already past. You cannot think. Thinking stops when you are in the present. So that is the only key, and it is a master key; it unlocks all the doors of being. Immediacy, that is the whole insistence of Zen.

If you go to a Zen Master and you ask something, it is unpredictable what he will do to you. He may hit you. Or he may not hit you; he may hit himself! Or he may say something absurd, totally irrelevant to what you have asked. Somebody asks, “How to attain Buddhahood?” and the Master says, “The cypress tree in the courtyard.” Now what? How are they related? They are not, but the Master is indicating, “Please, drop all this nonsense. Look at this — THIS — cypress tree in the courtyard. What nonsense are you talking about? – Buddha, and how to become a Buddha. You are talking about the past and the future. You have heard about Buddha in the past, so you have a greed, a desire. Now you want to become a Buddha in the future, so you have come to me. All nonsense.” He simply gives something immediate; he says, “Look! The cypress tree in the courtyard.” It is not relevant if you think in terms of the mind. If you think in terms of no-mind it is the only thing relevant.

A man comes to a Zen Master and asks, “What is the way?” And the Master says, “Listen,” and everything becomes silent, and just by the side of the Master’s hut flows a fountain, and the water is making the sound, the murmur. The sound of the water, the sound of the running water. For a moment everything is silent, the seeker, the questioner, is also. The Master says, ”Listen. Hear. This is the way.” The sound of the running water? That’s all he has heard. And the Master says, “Hear! This is the way to become a Buddha, to attain to enlightenment.” He is bringing the mind to an immediacy, to a state of immediacy.

What is he saying? He is not saying anything about the sound of the running water. In that moment, when suddenly the Master shocked the inquirer — because he was asking about the way to attain to nirvana, and the Master says, “Listen”, it is so out of context, it is so unrelated to his question, that for a moment, out of the shock of it, the sheer shock of it, everything becomes silent. And when the Master says, “Hear. This is the way.” He is not saying anything about the running water or its sound. He is indicating the silent moment that has penetrated into the consciousness of the inquirer. He says, “Hear. This is the way.” If you become immediate you attain. If you live moment to moment you attain.

Source – Osho Book “The First Principle”

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”

Question – Beloved Osho, you said the other day that if you were a cab-driver nobody would be able to recognize you. I don’t agree. At lease I for one would recognize you.

Osho – Madam, I don’t believe you. You don’t know enough about yourself. I appreciate your love for me, but I cannot say that you would be able to recognize me.

I will tell you one real story. I used to stay with a family in a certain city in India for many years — a very rich family, millionaires. He was very respectful to me, he was a follower. When I used to go to his town he would touch my feet as many times as possible — at least four, five times every day.

Then after seven, eight years, he wanted to come to visit the place where I used to stay in Jabalpur. He came. Just to puzzle him, just to confuse him, I went to receive him at the station. That he had not expected — that I would come to receive him at the station.

He used to fall at my feet. That day he touched my feet, but halfheartedly — because a great ego arose in him: that I have come to receive him. He used to come to receive me for seven years and each year at least three or four times I used to visit his town. He had not expected this. He had expected that somebody would be there to take him to me. But that I myself would come to receive him? — that was not even in his dreams. He must have argued inside: “I am somebody, a millionaire…”

That day he bowed down, but very halfheartedly. How can you bow down to somebody who has come to receive you at the station, with great respect? We left the station, and when he saw that I was going to drive him back home, then all his
respect disappeared. Then he started talking like a friend. The millionaire became very ‘famillionaire’! And after three days, when he left — I had gone to say goodbye, to give him a send-off — he did not touch my feet.

And the family that I used to live with all knew that I was playing a joke on him, and the poor fellow had got hooked in it. They all laughed when the train left. I said “You wait. Next time, let him come — he will expect me to touch his feet. And it will be no wonder if he forces me to touch his feet.”

That’s how things go, that’s how mind functions. You recognize me, you love me, but you don’t know your own mind. And in that experiment I lost one of my millionaire followers. I have been losing many followers that way, but I go on experimenting.

Source – Osho Book “The Heart Sutra”

Osho – Jean Paul Sartre wrote an autobiography. He has called it WORDS. The name is very meaningful. It is the autobiography of every man – words and words and words. You are filled with words, and this process of words continues the whole day, even in the mind. When you are sleeping, you are still filled with words, thoughts.

The mind is just an accumulation of words, and everyone is too much obsessed with the mind. That is why self-knowledge becomes more and more impossible. The self is beyond the words, or behind the words, or below the words, or above the words, but never in the words. You exist not in the mind, but just below the mind, behind the mind, above the mind – never in the mind. You are focused in the mind, but you are not there. Standing out, you are focused in the mind. Because of this constant focusing, you have become identified with the mind. You think you are the mind, this is the only problem, the basic problem, and unless you are aware that you are not the mind, nothing meaningful can happen to you. You will live in misery. This identification is the misery. It is as if one is identified with a shadow. Then the whole life becomes false. Your whole life is false, and the basic error is that you are identified with the mind.

You think you are the mind: this is the ignorance. You can develop your mind, but in that way ignorance will not be dissolved. You can become very intelligent, you can become very talented, you may even become a genius. But if the identification with the mind is there, you remain basically mediocre because you remain identified with a false shadow. How does it happen? Unless you understand the mechanism of how it happens you cannot go beyond it, and all the techniques of meditation are nothing but processes to go beyond, to go beyond the mind.

Meditation techniques are not against the world, they are against the mind – and not really against the mind, but against identification. How are you identified with the mind? What is the mechanism that is working? Mind is a need – a great need, particularly for humanity. And that is the basic difference between man and the animals. Man thinks, and he has used thinking as a weapon for his struggle to survive. He could survive because he could think; otherwise he is more helpless than any animal, more weak than any animal. Physically, it was impossible for him to survive. He could survive because he could think. Because of thinking, he has become the master of the earth.

If thinking has been so deeply helpful, then it becomes easy to understand why man has become identified with the mind. You are not so much identified with the body. Of course, religions go on saying, ”Do not be identified with the body,” but no one is really identified with the body – no one! You are identified with the mind, not with the body, and this identification with the body is not so fatal as the identification with the mind – because the body is more real. The body exists, it is related to existence very deeply. Mind is just a shadow.

Identification with the mind is more subtle than identification with the body, but we are identified with the mind because mind has been such a great help to survive – not only against animals, against nature, but against other human beings also. If you have a keen, intelligent mind, you will win against other human beings as well. You will succeed, you will become more rich, because you will be more calculating and more cunning. Against other human beings also, mind is the weapon. That is why we are so much identified – remember this.

Against death, against disease, against nature, against animals, against other human beings, mind has been your protection, your security. And mind has done much, so obviously we think of ourselves as mind. If someone says that your body is ill you do not feel offended, but if someone says that your mind seems ill you do feel offended. If your body is ill, you do not feel offended. Why? You are not identified with the body. But if your mind is ill and someone says you are psychologically ill, mentally ill, insane, you feel offended. Now this is something about you, not about your body.

You behave with the body as if it is a vehicle, something you possess, but not so with the mind. With the mind, you are the mind; with the body, you are the master. The body is a slave – you possess it. This mind has created a division in your being also, and that is the second basic cause of why we are identified with it. You think not only about external things, you think about internal things also. For example, the body has many instincts. You think about your instincts also. Not only do you think, you fight against your instincts, so there is a constant internal fight. There is sex: the mind fights it, or tries to mold it in its own way. It suppresses it, perverts it, tries to control it.

The mind is fighting inside also. That fight creates a division between you and your body. And really, you start thinking that the body is something inimical, not a friend, because the body goes on doing things which the mind is against. The body is not going to listen to the mind, so the mind feels offended, defeated. It attacks the body, and then a division is created. And you are always identified with the mind, never with the body.

The mind is your ego. That is your ”I”. If the body feels sexuality, you can divide. You can say, ”This is the body, not me. I am against it. I have taken a vow of celibacy, I am against it. This is the body; this is not me.” Then who are you? The mind which has taken a vow? This mind is your ego, and you go against the body because the body is very much ego-destroying. Whatsoever you decide, it never listens.

All the ascetic nonsense was born because of this: the body will not listen. The body is nature, the body is a part of the cosmic whole, the body has its own laws. Those laws are unconscious; it functions according to them. The mind tries to create its own laws over and above the body. Then a conflict is created. Then the mind starts fighting the body. Then the mind will starve the body; it will try in every way to kill it.

That is what has happened in the past: so-called religious people have been really mad against their bodies. And whatsoever they were doing was less for God and more against the body. Really, to be in search of God became synonymous with being against the body. Religious persons took the attitude, ”Kill the body, destroy the body. The body is the enemy.” And really, this is not a religious attitude, but one of the most irreligious attitudes, because it is the most egoistical. This is the ego, the ego feels offended.

You decide not to be angry again, and then anger comes: your ego feels defeated. Your decision is thrown overboard, and the anger comes. And when the anger comes you feel this is coming from the body. You decide against sex and sex comes: you feel offended, so you try to punish the body. Asceticism is nothing but punishment – punishing your own body in order to force it to behave according to the ego.

This mind, this process of thinking, this ego, is just a fragment of your whole total being, and this fragment is trying to be the sovereign. This is not possible, the fragment cannot be the sovereign. It is going to fail; that is why there is so much frustration in life. You can never succeed – you are trying the impossible. The fragment cannot be the sovereign. The whole is bigger and the whole is more powerful.

It is just as if a branch of a tree tries to control the whole tree, even the roots. How can a branch control the whole tree, and how can it force the roots to follow it? That is impossible. Whatsoever it thinks, it is mad; the branch has gone mad. It may go on thinking and dreaming, conceiving of some future where the tree will be following it, but it is not possible; it will have to follow the tree. It is alive only because of the tree and the roots. And the roots were there before it was. The roots are the source of it also.

Your mind is just a fragment of your body; it cannot control it. The very effort to control the body will create frustration and failure. And the whole humanity has been a failure because of this. Everyone is suffering, in conflict, in anguish, in anxiety, trembling, because the impossible is being tried. But the ego always likes to try the impossible. The possible has no challenge for it; the impossible is a challenge. And if the impossible can be done, then the ego will feel very good – because this cannot be done. You can try to do it, but you will waste your life trying that which cannot be done.

Because of this inner effort to become the master, you are identified with the mind. Who would like to be identified with a slave? Who would like to be identified with the unconscious? It is useless. The unconscious is negated because it cannot be grasped. And with the unconscious there is no ego; you cannot feel ”I”.

Try to understand it in this way: when sex overpowers you, really you cannot say ”I”. It is as if something greater than you has taken possession – as if you are in a strong current. You are no more; something else is driving you. That is why these words are meaningful… that is why those who are against sex will say, ”Sex possessed me.”

Anger possesses you, hunger possesses you. They are something greater than you, and you are just taken by the current. It is fearful. It is very fearful because then you are no more. It is a sort of death. That is why you are so much against sex – it is a sort of death. Those who are against sex will always be afraid of death, and those who are not against sex and can flow in it easily, spontaneously, will never be afraid of death. See the association: those who are against sex will always be afraid of death, and those who are afraid of death will be always against sex.

Those who are afraid of death will always create theories of immortality; they will always think about life beyond death. Those who think about immortality will always be against sex – these are alternatives. Sex gives you a fear. What is the fear? You are no more in it, something greater than you possesses you. You are thrown overboard; you are no more in it.

So even those who are not against sex, they too never move really deep into sex. They never move; they are always holding back, trying to remain there, not allowing themselves, not ready for a letgo. That is why orgasm, such a natural thing, has become so impossible for man and woman. A deep orgasm means you have been in something which was greater than you. You have been in something where you were not, the ego was not.

The ego is struggling to control everything, and mind helps you. In the effort you become identified with the mind, and this identification is the misery, it is a false shadow. Mind is a very utilitarian instrument. You have to use it, but do not become identified with it. It is a good instrument – necessary. Use it! But do not feel that YOU are the mind, because once you start feeling you are the mind, you cannot use it. The mind starts using you. Then you are simply drifting with the mind. All the meditation techniques are an effort to give you a glimpse of that which is not mind. So how to go beyond it? How to leave it and look at it even for a single moment?

Source – Osho Book “Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, Vol 1″

Osho – It is one of the deep-rooted habits of the mind always to divide things. The moment you divide things you are in trouble – and mind wants you to be always in trouble; otherwise it has no function. The greatest trouble the mind can create is the longing for home. I call it the greatest trouble because you have never left home.

And mind projects homes. They may be the moon, the sun, or some faraway quasar – these are new, contemporary substitutes for a faraway God. Mind is so tricky that if you drop the old division, it immediately replaces it with a new, more refined, more contemporary-looking, more intelligent division.

In the past people were wanting to go to heaven, to paradise, to God, and to find peace. As you are, I don’t think even if you meet God, you will find peace. On the contrary, the meeting with God will create so many problems, so many inquiries, so much anger and rage against God – because he created you without your permission; he created the world full of misery and you had to live in it.

He created all kinds of desires in you which do not seem to be fulfilled; every desire goes on asking for more and more and more, and there is no end to it. Do you think meeting with God will be a peaceful meeting? It is going to be the greatest fighting encounter!

It is good that God does not exist. He cannot exist, because of you – so many people with so many problems and poor God, alone with a crackpot son and a Holy Ghost. A strange company.

Source – Osho Book “Om Mani Padme Hum”

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”