If you go outwards it is mind, if you go inwards it is no-mind. If you want to know the world then you have to use the mind, if your enquiry is scientific or philosophic, then the mind is a must. But if your enquiry is mystical, spiritual, religious, if you want to know yourself, if you are trying to explore your own interiority, then no-mind is a must.
Be life-affirmative. Rejoice in being alive and help others to rejoice. That’s the true work of God. That is the new light: life-affirmation, a tremendous love for life, so much so that ‘life’ replaces the word ‘God’; only then will we be able to bring spring to millions of people.
Man’s greatest need is to be needed, and to be needed by god, by existence itself is to become meaningful. Then you are not just dust. Then you are not just the body, you are far more. And the feeling of that ‘far more’ fulfills one, gives tremendous contentment, makes one feel at home with existence.
Searchers never find him; only the people who invite him have found him, because invitation means a great task: you have to transform yourself totally to be worthy to receive. You have to be loving, you have to be alert, you have to be sensitive, you have to be creative. You have to cleanse your being; you have to become silent, spacious. You have to make your being a small shrine, worthy for God to abide in. He comes to you only when you are absolutely restful, relaxed, calm, quiet, when there is no desire, no thought, when you are not asking for anything, not praying for anything. When you are simply there, in that simplicity god arrives. And because you are saying something you are not silent even with god. Prayer is a dialogue, and one thing has to be very deeply understood — that god understands no language except the language of silence.
God understands only silence. Prayer is the last function of the mind. Where prayer ends meditation begins, you drop saying anything to god. What can we say? What have we got to say? Prayer is saying something, meditation is listening. Rather than saying something to god it is better to be silent and to listen. And in silence the message comes, in silence not only the message but god himself comes. God does not come like a person. He does not come shouting, knocking on your doors. He comes very silently, like a fragrance, making no noise. no fuss. God is not a person but a presence. So god is not a person but only a presence, a feeling. And that feeling wells up from your innermost core when you are utterly silent, when the mind has gone into complete cessation.
Concentration is a state when you are focussing your mind upon an object, meditation is a state of no-mind. Concentration includes only one object and excludes everything else. Meditation is just silence — inclusive of all, excluding nothing. You are simply available to existence and that availability creates the ultimate peak of consciousness.
The story of Gautam the Buddha is that when after his death he reached the doors of heaven, the doors were opened and the angels celebrated his coming, but he didn’t enter. He stood on the door, his back towards heaven, and looked towards the world which he had left far behind. The angels were disturbed. They asked ‘What is the matter? For whom are you waiting? Enter! We have never given such a welcome to anybody.’ And in the story Buddha is reported to have said ‘I will not enter unless every being, every suffering being in the world has entered. I will be the last one. So please keep your doors closed; it is not time for me to enter yet. I am going to be the last person. I will wait for everybody else to enter first, I will help people, I will show them the way, because I love, because I feel immense compassion. Heaven is not for me yet. I can see millions of souls struggling in darkness, in suffering, in pain, and I am in a situation to help them. I am not obliging them, it is just my joy.’ But he refused to enter heaven.
We arealive but we are unaware of the source of our life, from where it comes. And unless we know the source we remain unacquainted with ourselves. Then whatsoever we do is going to be wrong, inevitably wrong, because it comes out of self-ignorance. It is like a blind man groping: he will stumble here and fall there. And ordinarily that is our whole life — stumbling, falling, getting up, stumbling, falling again. It is a tragedy, and the reason is simple: we are not aware of ourselves, we don’t know who we are — and it can be known, it is not far away.
The source is within us and the method to know the source is meditation. It is a method of digging a well within your being so that you can reach to the very centre of it, to where life juices are flowing. And once you are acquainted with your centre you are simultaneously acquainted with the centre of the whole — because it is the same; we are separate only on the circumference, not at the centre. At the centre we are one, at the circumference we are many. To live on the circumference is to be worldly and to live through the centre, at the centre, is to be a sannyasin.
Osho – Going All The Way (Meditation really digging yourself)
If you are in a certain kind of suffering you will find many people sympathizing with you and if you look into their eyes you will be puzzled; they are saying one thing — they are very sympathetic towards you — but their eyes are showing something else; they are enjoying it. And there is a subtle mechanism in it. When you sympathize with somebody you are higher and the person you are sympathizing with is lower, and everybody enjoys feeling higher in some way.
So sympathy to me is ugly if it is not rooted in love. It is beautiful if it is rooted in love. So love to me is a revolutionary phenomenon; it changes sympathy into something totally different to what it is. Sympathy should not be because people are in sorrow, sympathy should be because you are too full of love and you want to share it. Then there will be a great difference, you will rejoice when they are happy and you will feel sad when they are unhappy. You will not feel happy when they are sad and you will not feel jealous
when they are happy; their happiness will be your happiness and their sadness will be your sadness.
Once Gautam the Buddha was asked, “What is more difficult? — to feel sad when somebody is sad or to feel happy when somebody is happy.” And Buddha said the second thing is more difficult; the first thing is not difficult. One can feel sad when others are sad because deep down one can enjoy it, but when others are happy, to celebrate, to really celebrate, is very difficult — it goes against our ego. Hence my emphasis is on love because love basically requires that you drop the ego. Love kills the ego, and when there is no ego then love can blossom in many flowers; sympathy is one of those flowers. But it is no more plastic then, it has its source in love.
Osho – Going All The Way (Sympathy)
Miserable person becomes mean, cunning, untrusting, dishonest, insincere, inauthentic. Simply because he is miserable he is angry at existence, he wants to take revenge. We cannot have a noble character, he cannot have nobleness around him. Nobleness is a by-product of gratitude and he has nothing to be grateful for. He is just a complaint, a wound, and how can the wound give fragrance? – it can only stink.
Only the blissful person is noble. Nobility has nothing to do with birth, it has something to do with the art of living. Certainly one can become an aristocrat if one knows how to live. One may not possess anything but still one will live like a king because kingliness has nothing to do with possessions; it has something to do with how you approach life. Is it with complaint or with gratitude? And one can be grateful only if one is blissful because then one feels that existence has given one so much, how can one repay it? There is no way to repay it — hence gratitude arises. If there were a way to repay there would be no need to be grateful. But there are things which cannot be repaid — then the only possible way is to feel thankful. In that thankfulness, meanness, deceptiveness, cunningness, all disappear; one becomes simply innocent, trusting.
And the moment you trust existence you start feeling the presence of god. God is not a belief. It is trusting existence that makes you feel the presence of god — it is an experience. But everything begins in blissfulness.
Osho – Going All The Way (Thankful)