Osho Abhinav Dhyan Centre
Address "Dipesh Hall" Panjarapole Road
Porbandar 360575 Gujarat India
Phone: +91 (0)286 245-501
or: +91 (0)281 461-357.
“Osho does not teach any
religion and does not belong to any particular religion. What he really teaches
is religiousness - the real fragrance of all the flowers of existence, the Buddha’s,
the mystics and sages that this world has known. Osho has given thousands of
discourses on all the well-known and not so known mystics of the world—from
Ashtavakra to Zarathustra.
Osho is a modern day mystic whose wisdom, clarity and humour have touched the
lives of millions of people around the world. His insights are creating the
conducive atmosphere or ‘ Atma-Sphere ” for the emergence of what he calls the
‘New Man’ or Zorba , the Buddha – the combination of celebration, dance and
song of Zorba and the silence, stillness and meditation of the Buddha, the
meditation of the East and the materialism of the West. Zorba the Buddha is a
totally new human being who is an awakened one, and he is life-affirmative and
free. When someone asked Osho the definition of religion, Osho replied: To be
in romance with life is religion.
Amongst all the Enlightened Ones, Gautama the Buddha is very special to Osho.
He says: “I love Gautama the Buddha because he represents to
me the essential core of religion. He is the beginner of a totally different
kind of religion in the world. He has propounded not religion but
religiousness. And this is a great radical change in the history of human
consciousness.”
“When a Buddha moves the wheel of dharma, it takes two thousand five hundred
years for it to stop completely….” says Osho. “The wheel that Buddha moved has
stopped. The wheel has to be moved again. And that is going to be my and your
life’s work – that wheel has to be moved again. Once it starts revolving it
will again have twenty-five centuries’ life.”
Osho teaches meditation for our inner transformation. Love and compassion are
the natural expression of this transformation. We can meditate with Buddha,
dance with Krishna and celebrate our love with Sufis.”
Osho,
Not "keeping the mind still," but mindlessness.
Though you may not fully know whether the teachers of
the various localities are wrong or right, if your own basis is solid and
genuine, the poisons of wrong doctrines will not be able to harm you,
"keeping the mind still" and "forgetting concerns" included.
If you always "forget concerns" and "keep the mind still,"
without smashing the mind of birth and death, then the delusive influences of
form, sensation, perception, volition, and consciousness will get their way,
and you'll inevitably be dividing emptiness into two.
Let go and make yourself vast and expansive. When old habits suddenly
arise, don't use mind to repress them. At just such a time, it's like a
snowflake on a red-hot stove. For those with a discerning eye and a familiar
hand, one leap and they leap clear.
Only then do they know lazy Jung's saying: right when using mind,
there's no mental activity. Crooked talk defiled with names and forms, straight
talk without complications. Without mind but functioning, always functioning
but non-existent -- the mindlessness I speak of now is not separate from having
mind. These aren't words to deceive people.
There has been a long misunderstanding
about these two things: keeping the mind still and mindlessness. There have been
many people who have thought that they are synonymous. They appear to be
synonymous, but in reality they are as far apart as two things can be, and
there is no way to bridge them.
The difference is very delicate. A man who is keeping his
mind still and a man who has no mind will look exactly alike from the outside,
because the man who is keeping his mind still is also silent. Underneath his
silence there is great turmoil, but he is not allowing it to surface. He is in
great control.
The man
with no mind, or mindlessness, has nothing to control. He is just pure silence
with nothing repressed, with nothing disciplined -- just a pure empty sky.
Surfaces
can be very deceptive. One has to be very alert about appearances, because they
both look the same from the outside -- both are silent. The problem would not
have arisen if the still mind was not easy to achieve. It is easy to achieve.
Mindlessness is not so easy to achieve; it is not cheap, it is the greatest
treasure in the world.
The New Man
Osho,
Not
"keeping the mind still," but mindlessness.
Though
you may not fully know whether the teachers of the various localities are wrong
or right, if your own basis is solid and genuine, the poisons of wrong
doctrines will not be able to harm you, "keeping the mind still" and
"forgetting concerns" included. If you always "forget
concerns" and "keep the mind still," without smashing the mind
of birth and death, then the delusive influences of form, sensation,
perception, volition, and consciousness will get their way, and you'll
inevitably be dividing emptiness into two.
Let
go and make yourself vast and expansive. When old habits suddenly arise, don't
use mind to repress them. At just such a time, it's like a snowflake on a
red-hot stove. For those with a discerning eye and a familiar hand, one leap
and they leap clear.
Only
then do they know lazy Jung's saying: right when using mind, there's no mental
activity. Crooked talk defiled with names and forms, straight talk without
complications. Without mind but functioning, always functioning but
non-existent -- the mindlessness I speak of now is not separate from having
mind. These aren't words to deceive people.
There has
been a long misunderstanding about these two things: keeping the mind still and mindlessness. There have been many people who have thought that
they are synonymous. They appear to be synonymous, but in reality they are as
far apart as two things can be, and there is no way to bridge them.
Mind can play the game of
being silent; it can play the game of being without any thoughts, any emotions,
but they are just repressed, fully alive, ready to jump out any moment. The
so-called religions and their saints have fallen into the fallacy of stilling
the mind. If you go on sitting silently, trying to control your thoughts, not
allowing your emotions, not allowing any movement within you, slowly slowly it
will become your habit. This is the greatest deception in the world you can
give to yourself, because everything is exactly the same, nothing has changed,
but it appears as if you have gone through a transformation.
The Third Quantum Leap
Osho,
With
Gautama Buddha religion took a quantum leap. God became meaningless and only
meditation was important. Now, twenty-five centuries after Buddha, again
religion is taking the quantum leap in your presence and becoming
religiousness. Please talk about this phenomenon.
The
credit of bringing a quantum leap in religion goes back twenty-five centuries
before Gautama Buddha to Adinatha, who for the first time preached a religion
without God. It was a tremendous revolution because nowhere in the whole world
had it ever been conceived that religion could exist without God.
God has
been an essential part -- the centre -- of all the religions: Christianity,
Judaism, and Mohammedanism. But to make God the centre of religion makes man
just the periphery. To conceive of God as the creator of the world makes man
only a puppet.
That's
why in Hebrew, which is the language of Judaism, man is called Adam. 'Adam'
means mud. In Arabic man is called 'admi' it is from Adam, again it means mud.
In English, which has become the language of Christianity by and large, the
word human comes from 'humus' and humus means mud.
According to Christianity he created man only four
thousand and four years before Jesus Christ. So what was he doing all along
through eternity? So it seems whimsical. There cannot be any cause, because to
have a cause for which God had to create existence means there are powers
higher than God, there are causes which can make him create. Or there is a
possibility that suddenly desire arose in him. That too is not very philosophically
sound, because for eternity he was desire less. And to be desire less is so
blissful that it is impossible to conceive that out of an experience of eternal
blissfulness a desire arises in him to create the world. Desire is desire,
whether you want to make a house or become the prime minister or create the
world. And God cannot be conceived as having desires. So the only thing that
remains is that he is whimsical, eccentric. Then there is no need for cause and
no need for desire -- just a whim.
But if
this whole existence is just out of a whim it loses all meaning, all
significance. And tomorrow another whim may arise in him to destroy, to
dissolve the whole universe. So we are simply puppets in the hands of a
dictatorial god who has all the powers but who has not a sane mind, who is
whimsical.
Creating a Conscious World
Osho,
The
other day I heard you mention the idea of an academy for meditation, and an
academy for bringing the body into one, organic whole. Could you say more about
this, and how you see two such academies complementing each other?
Prem
Anubuddha, it is one of the most complicated questions. It does not appear to
be so because you are not aware that for centuries man has been told all kinds
of life-negative things. Even to torture your body has been a spiritual
discipline.
My idea
of having an academy is for science to become for the first time intentional
and not accidental. Up to now science has been accidental. People have stumbled
upon some discoveries, inventions. Even discoveries were made for which they
were not looking, but just groping in the dark with no sense of direction. And
obviously the politicians of the world -- who liked more and more destructive
power in their hands -- immediately, got the idea to enslave scientists. Now
every scientist is a slave to some nation, to some government and he functions
only for purposes which are anti-life, destructive. The more destructive things
he can find, the more he is praised by the governments, the more he is awarded.
What is meditation?
"Meditation
is a single lesson of awareness, of no-thought, of spontaneity, of being total
in your action, alert, aware. It is not a technique, it is a knack. Either you
get it or you don't." -
Osho
Osho has spoken volumes on the subject of
meditation. Virtually all his talks include the importance of meditation in
everyday life. And despite the fact that he says meditation is not a technique,
he has invented dozens of them, and spoken on dozens more from other traditions.
Ultimately, meditation is an experience which is
not easily described, like the taste of cheese or falling in love -- you have
to try it to find out. But for sure anyone interested in meditation will find
something in what Osho has to say about this topic that "clicks" for
them, just like a "knack" -- including his insistence that he can be
helpful to you, but ultimately each individual has to create his path by
walking it.
Meditation is not concentration
MEDITATION is not concentration. In concentration
there is a self concentrating and there is an object being concentrated upon.
There is duality. In meditation there is nobody inside and nothing outside. It
is not concentration. There is no division between the in and the out. The in
goes on flowing into the out, the out goes on flowing into the in. The
demarcation, the boundary, the border, no longer exists. The in is out, the out
is in; it is a no-dual consciousness.
Concentration is a dual consciousness; that's why concentration creates
tiredness; that's why when you concentrate you feel exhausted. And you cannot
concentrate for twenty-four hours, you will have to take holidays to rest.
Concentration can never become your nature. Meditation does not tire,
meditation does not exhaust you. Meditation can become a twenty-four hour thing
- day in, day out, year in, year out. It can become eternity. It is relaxation
itself.
