Osho explains Meditation

At this time, Osho often leads a period of meditation, silent sitting, at the end
of his discourse.

My whole life I have been talking about meditation. /isay206

There are one hundred and twelve methods of meditation; I have gone through all
those methods�and not intellectually. It took me years to go through each method
and to find out its very essence, and after going through one hundred and twelve
methods I was amazed that the essence is witnessing. The methods' non-essentials
are different, but the center of each method is witnessing.
Hence I can say to you, there is only one meditation in the whole world and that is
the art of witnessing. It will do everything�the whole transformation of your
being. /satyam22

Whatever I am doing, my meditation continues. It is not something that I have to do

it separately; it is just an art of witnessing. Speaking to you, I'm also
witnessing myself speaking to you. So here are three persons: you are listening,
one person is speaking, and there is one behind who is watching and that is my real
me. And to keep constant contact with it is meditation.
So whatever you do does not matter, you just keep contact with your witness. I have
reduced religion to its very fundamental essence. Now everything else is just
ritual. This much is enough. And this does not need you to become a Christian or a
Hindu or a Mohammedan or anybody, and this can be done by an atheist, by a
communist, by anybody, because it needs no kind of theology, no kind of belief
system. It is simply a scientific method of slowly moving inwards. A point comes
when you reach to your innermost core, the very center of the cyclone. /last302

The basic element running through all the methods of meditation is witnessing.
You ask me: What is witnessing?
Whatever you are doing. For example, right now you are writing. You can write in
two ways. The ordinary way that you always write. You can try another method: you
can write it and you can also inside witness that you are writing it.
And you ask: Does that mean some kind of detachment?
A detachment. You are a little distant, away, watching yourself writing. So any
act, just moving my hand, I can watch. Walking on the road, I can watch myself
walking. Eating, I can watch. So whatever you are doing, just remain a witness.
If you have any ego, it will destroy it, because this watching is very much
poisonous to the ego. It is not ego that watches. The ego is absolutely blind. It
cannot watch anything. You can watch your ego. For example, somebody insults you
and you feel hurt, and your ego feels hurt. You can watch it. You can watch that
you are feeling hurt, your ego is feeling hurt, that you are angry. And you can
still remain aloof, detached, just a watcher on the hills. Whatever goes on in the
valley you can see.
So all the methods are basically different ways of witnessing. I have condensed
them in a very simple way:
First, watch your actions of the body.
Second, watch your actions of the mind: thoughts, imaginations.
Third, watch your actions of the heart: feelings, love, hate, moods, sadness,
happiness.
And if you can succeed in watching all these three, and as your witnessing grows
deeper and deeper, a moment comes that there is only witnessing but nothing to
witness. The mind is empty, the heart is empty, the body is relaxed.
In that moment happens something like a quantum leap. Your whole witnessing jumps
upon itself. It witnesses itself, because there is nothing else to witness. And
this is the revolution which I call enlightenment, self-realization. Or you can
give it any name, but this is the ultimate experience of bliss. You cannot go
beyond it.
This is the simplest. And because it can be done without in any way interfering
with your everyday life, because it is something that you can go on doing the whole
day. Any other method you have to take some time apart for it. And any method that
needs one hour or half an hour to sit and do it is not going to help much, because
twenty-three hours you will be doing just the opposite. And whatever you have
gained in one hour will be washed away in twenty-three hours.
This is the only method that you can continue around the clock. While falling
asleep you can go on witnessing, witnessing, that the sleep is coming, coming,
coming, that it is getting darker and the body is relaxing. And a moment comes when
you can watch that you are asleep. And still there is a corner, a space in you
which is awake.
When you can watch yourself twenty-four hours, you have arrived. Now there is
nothing to be done. Then witnessing has become natural to you. You don't have to do
it. It will be simply like breathing, happening to you.
This is my basic method. But there are other methods. If people feel that this is
difficult for them, they can try other methods. All are available. /last318

I have returned from a movie show. It is surprising to see how much the light and
shade photos projected on the screen captivate people. Where there is really
nothing, everything happens! I watched the audience there and it felt as if they
had forgotten themselves, as if they were not there, but the flow of electrically
projected pictures was everything.
A blank screen is in front and from the back the pictures are being projected.
Those who are watching it have their eyes fixed in front, and no one is aware of
what is happening behind their backs.
This is how leela, the play, is born.
This is what happens within and without.
There is a projector at the back of the human mind. Psychology calls this back side
the unconscious. The longings, the passions, the conditionings accumulated in this
unconscious are being continuously projected onto the mind's screen. This flow of
mental projections goes on every moment, non-stop.
The consciousness is a seer, a witness, and it forgets itself in this flow of the
pictures of desires. This forgetfulness is ignorance. This ignorance is the root
cause of maya, illusions, and the endless cycle of birth and death. Waking up from
this ignorance happens in the cessation of the mind. When the mind is devoid of
thoughts, when the flow of pictures on the screen stops, only then the onlooker
remembers himself and returns to his home.
Patanjali calls this cessation of the activities of the mind Yoga. If this is
achieved, all is achieved. /sdwisd04

To understand the mind, there are the three points: The first thing is tremendous
fearlessness in encountering the mind; the second thing is no restrictions, no
conditions on the mind; the third point is no judgments about whatever thoughts and
longings arise in the mind, no feelings of good or bad. Your attitude should simply
be indifferent. These three points are necessary to understand the perversions of
the mind. Then we will talk about what can be done to get rid of these perversions,
and go further. But these three basic points have to be kept in mind. /journy04

This is my observation of thousands of people: I see them carrying such great

psychological luggage, and for no reason at all. They go on gathering anything they
come across. They read the newspaper and they will gather some crap from it. They
will talk to people and they will gather some crap. And they go on gathering. And
if they start stinking, no wonder!
I used to live with a man for a few years. His house was so full of unnecessary
luggage that I had to tell him "Now, where are you going to live?" And he would go
on collecting any kind of thing. Somebody would be selling his old furniture, and
he would purchase it, and he already had enough. He had no time to use that
furniture, and he had no friends to call. His whole house was full of furniture:
old radio sets, and all kinds of things. And I said "But, I don't see the point why
you collect all this." He said "Who knows, any time it may be useful."
One day we went for a walk and on the road. By the side of the road, somebody had
thrown a cycle handle. He picked it up. I said "What are you doing?"
He said "But, it must be worth twenty rupees at least, and I have picked up a few
other things also�sooner or later I am going to make a bicycle!" And he showed me.
He had one wheel, one pedal, that he had picked up from the roads. And he said
"What are you saying? Soon you will see!"
This man died. The cycle remained incomplete. And when he died, everybody who came
to look was puzzled by what he was doing in this house�there was no space even to
move.
But this is the situation of your head. I see cycle-handles, and pedals, and
strange things that you have gathered from everywhere. Such a small head, and no
space to live in! And that rubbish goes on moving in your head; your head goes on
spinning and weaving�it keeps you occupied. Just think what kind of thoughts go on
inside your mind. /sunris09

Sometimes, sitting under the stars, you feel a bliss arising within your heart. It
seems not of this world. You are surprised. You cannot believe it.
I have come across simple people who have known many moments in their life which
are Buddha-like, which belong to Christ consciousness, but they have never talked
about them to anybody because they themselves don't believe that they were
possible. They have in fact suppressed them. They have been thinking that they must
have imagined them: How can it happen without any effort of my own? How is it
possible that suddenly one becomes blissful?
You can remember them in your own life�and in such moments when you were never
expecting them�just going to the office, in the daily routine, the sun is high and
you are perspiring, and suddenly something strikes home, and for a moment you are
not the old you. Paradise is regained.
And then it is lost again. You forget about it because it is not part of your style
of life. You don't even talk about it, you think 'I must have imagined it. How are
these things possible? And I have not done anything so how can it happen? It must
have been hallucinatory, an illusion or a dream.' You don't talk about it.
As I have observed thousands of people deeply I have not come across many people
who have not found such certain moments in their life. But they have never talked
of them to anybody. Even if they tried to, people laughed and they thought: You are
foolish, stupid. They don't believe, they repress.
Not only has humanity repressed sex, has humanity repressed death, humanity has
repressed all that is beautiful in life.
Man has been forced to become like an automaton, a robot. All clues, all doors,
have been closed towards the unknown. /treas303

It is my continual experience of thousands of people that when they come for the
first time to meditate, meditation happens so easily because they don't have any
idea what it is. Once it has happened, then the real problem arises�then they want
it, they know what it is, they desire it. They are greedy for it; it is happening
to others and it is not happening to them. Then jealousy, envy, all kinds of wrong
things surround them. /golden03

The inner world is a new world where you have not even looked, where you have never
taken a single step. So I have to teach you how, slowly, you can step inwards.
Even when I say to people to go inwards, immediately they ask questions which show
how focused on the outside things they are.
I say to them, "Sit silently."
And they will ask me, "Can I do gayatri mantra?"
Whether you do gayatri mantra or you read the newspaper does not matter, both are
outside. I am telling you, "Sit silently."
They say, "That is right, but at least I can repeat omkar�" It is pitiable. I feel
sad for them, that I am telling them to be silent but they are asking me to fill
their silence with something. They don't want to be silent. If nothing else, then
omkar will do�anything will do. /upan02

In India people go on doing all kinds of things. They concentrate, they chant
mantras, they fast, they torture their bodies, and they hope that through all these
masochistic practices they will realize God. As if God is a sadist! As if God loves
you to torture yourself! As if he demands that the more you torture yourself, the
more worthy you become. God is not a sadist; you need not be a masochist.
I have come across people who think that without long fasting there is no
possibility of meditation. Now, fasting has nothing to do with meditation. Fasting
will only make you obsessed with food. And there are people who think celibacy will
help them into meditation. Meditation brings a kind of celibacy, but not vice
versa. A celibacy without meditation is nothing but sexual repression. And your
mind will become more and more sexual, so whenever you sit to meditate your mind
will become full of fantasies, sexual fantasies.
These two things have been the greatest problems for the so-called meditators:
fasting and celibacy. They think these two things are going to help�they are the
greatest disturbances!
Eat in right proportions. Buddha calls it "the middle way": neither too much nor
too little. He is against fasting, and he knows it through hard experience. For six
years he fasted and could not attain to anything. So when he says, "Be in the
middle," he means it. About celibacy also: don't enforce it upon yourself. It is a
by-product of meditation, hence it cannot be enforced before meditation. Be in the
middle there too, neither too much indulgence nor too much renunciation. Just keep
a balance. A balanced person will be more healthy, at ease, at home. And when you
are at home, meditation is easier.
What then is meditation? Just sitting silently doing nothing, witnessing whatsoever
is happening all around; just watching it with no prejudice, no conclusion, no idea
what is wrong and what is right. /dh0802