Osho Quotes on Meditation

Osho Quotes on Meditation

1. If tea-drinking can become a meditation, then anything can become a meditation — cooking or washing your clothes, any activity can be transformed into meditation. And the real sannyasin, the real seeker, will transform all his acts into meditation. Only then, when meditation spreads over all your life, not only when you are awake in the day — slowly slowly it starts penetrating and permeating your being in sleep too — when it becomes just part of you, like breathing, like your heartbeat, then, only, have you attained to the discipline, to the essential discipline of Zen.
2. Meditation means: drop all thoughts, drop all ideologies, drop all knowledge. Drop the mind itself.
3. The mind is constantly talking. If the inner talk can drop even for a single moment you will be able to have a glimpse of no-mind. That’s what meditation is all about. The state of no-mind is the right state. It is your state.
4. Millions of people miss meditation because meditation has taken on a wrong connotation. It looks very serious, looks gloomy, has something of the church in it, looks as if it is only for people who are dead, or almost dead, who are gloomy, serious, have long faces, who have lost festivity, fun, playfulness, celebration. These are the qualities of meditation. A really meditative person is playful: life is fun for him, life is a LEELA, a play. He enjoys it tremendously. He is not serious. He is relaxed.
5. Sit silently, relaxed, loose, and just allow your attention to flow towards the gaps. Slip from the edges of words into the intervals. Let intervals become more prominent and allow words to fade away. It is just as if you are looking at a blackboard, and I put a small white dot on it: you can see either the dot, then the blackboard goes far away. or you can see the blackboard, then the dot becomes secondary, a shadow phenomenon. You can go on changing your attention between the figure and the background.
6. Meditation will bring you more and more intelligence, infinite intelligence, a radiant intelligence. Meditation will make you more alive and sensitive; your life will become richer.
7. Creative persons get more easily into-meditation and go deeper. Poets, painter, musicians, dancers, can get into meditation more easily than businessmen — they live a routine life, absolutely uncreative.
8. Remember, whenever you have two things, two alternatives, choose the new one, choose the harder, choose the one in which more awareness will be needed. At the cost of efficiency always choose awareness, and you will create the situation in which meditation will become possible. These are all just situations. Meditation will happen. I am not saying that just by doing them you will get to meditation — but they will be helpful. They will create the necessary situation in you without which meditation cannot happen.
9. It is better not to call anything to anybody — just remain centered in yourself. Look at the world and drop judgments, and you will have such a pure atmosphere around you — no appreciation, no condemnation, just a pure watchfulness. This watchfulness, I call meditation.
10. Meditation is the only way to discover your deathlessness.
11. Meditation is a way of settling in oneself, at the innermost core of your being. Once you have found the center of your existence, you will have found both the roots and the wings.
12. Your mind is a constant traffic of thoughts, and it is always rush hour, day in, day out. Meditation means to watch the movement of thoughts in the mind.
13. Meditation was not something arduous or difficult, but to the Western mind or even to the Eastern mind today — which is absolutely overtaken by the Western ideology — watching the mind is not an easy job. So much garbage and so much crap has been forced into the mind that you go almost crazy just watching it. It is a film which begins, but never ends. You can go on watching day in, day out, year in, year out and the mind is always ready to supply new images, new dreams. It is because of this I had to create a few other devices — Dynamic, Kundalini, and others — before you could enter into a silent witnessing meditation like Vipassana. I have made devices to help you cathart, throw out your garbage rather than waste time in watching it. It can be thrown out by Latihan — tremendously beautiful — but it is not a meditation; it is only a clearance. It can be done by Dynamic Meditation even better than by Latihan — because Latihan has some dangers, which I have cut out of the meditation. Sometimes Latihan people go mad, because they cannot stop.
14. If you want to do Vipassana, or any silent meditation, Dynamic Meditation becomes absolutely essential, because Christianity having poisoned your mind, that poison has to be thrown out. You have to go completely crazy to throw it out; otherwise that craziness remains inside you, and won’t allow you to get into a silent, watching, witnessing meditation.
15. Meditation needs patience.
16. Bring these two things together — consciousness and thoughtlessness. When they meet, meditation happens, meditation is born. And you can try with very small things because nothing is really small. Even a sneeze is a cosmic phenomenon. In existence, nothing is great and nothing is small. Even a minute atom can destroy the whole world, and even a sneeze, a very atomic phenomenon, can transform you.
17. What is meditation? It is not your character, it is not what you do. It is what you are. It is not the character, it is the consciousness that you bring to whatsoever you do. The doing is irrelevant. Whether you are doing it consciously or not is the question, whether moral or immoral. Are you alert? If you are alert, meditation happens. If you are not alert, you live in sleep.
18. Only through a deep tantric awareness does the sex act completely disappear, and a deep ecstasy is revealed. So tantra says it is you: if you can bring meditation to your love, to your sex, the sex is transformed.
19. Whenever you are doing meditation, the very effort that you are doing it, the very idea of succeeding in it, is the barrier. Be conscious of it. Go on doing, and be conscious of it. A day will come… just through patience a day comes when effort is not there. Really, you are not there, only meditation is. It may take a long time. It cannot be predicted, no one can say when it will happen. Because if something is to be achieved by effort, it can be predicted — that if you do this much effort you will succeed — but meditation is going to succeed only when you become effortless. That’s why nothing can be predicted. Nothing can be said about when you will succeed. You may succeed this very moment, and you may not succeed for lives. The whole thing hinges on one thing — when your effort drops and you become spontaneous, when your meditation is not an act but becomes your being, when your meditation is just like love….
20. The third state of meditation means your mind is as silent as a deep sleep, and as alert and aware as in thinking — both these must be present. You must be alert, completely alert, and as silent as if deep in sleep. So Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras say that meditation is a sort of deep sleep, with only one difference — that you are alert. Patanjali equates sushupti and samadhi: deep sleep and ultimate meditation. The difference is only that in deep sleep you are not aware, and in meditation you are aware, but the quality of both is deep silence — unrippled, unwavering silence, unmoving silence.
21. You cannot desire meditation, because meditation happens only when there is no desire.