Osho Quotes on Sammasati, Sammasati means right remembrance

Osho Quotes on Sammasati

1. This self-remembering Buddha calls sammasati — right mindfulness. Krishnamurti calls it ‘choiceless awareness’, the Upanishads call it ‘witnessing’, Gurdjieff calls it ‘self-remembering’, but they all mean the same. But it does not mean that you have to become indifferent; if you become indifferent you lose the opportunity to self-remember. Go on a morning walk and still remember that you are not it You are not the walker but the watcher And slowly slowly you will have the taste of it — it is a taste, it comes slowly. And it is the most delicate phenomenon in the world; you cannot get it in a hurry. Patience is needed.
2. Self-remembering is needed. Buddha used to call it right-mindfulness, sammasati; Mahavira used to call it vivek, awareness; George Gurdjieff used to call it self-remembering, Kabir used to call it SURATI. But they all mean the same thing. You don’t know who you are. You are — that much is certain. In fact only that is certain, and nothing else. The existence of others is not certain.
3. Only one thing has to be remembered, and that is the very quality the buddha is made of. Buddha used to call it remembering, sammasati.
   I call it witnessing, to be more correct.
   Witness that you are not the body …
   Witness that you are not the mind …
   Witness that, except being a witness, you are nobody else, just a pure witness, a mirror which reflects.
4. Sammasati means: consciousness is, but without any content. There is no thought, no desire, nothing is stirred in you. You are not contemplating about God or about great things…nature and its beauty, the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas, and their immensely significant statements. You are not contemplating! You are not concentrating on any special object either. You are not chanting a mantra, because those are all things of the mind, those are all contents of the mind. You are not doing anything! The mind is utterly empty, and you are simply there in that emptiness. A kind of presence, a pure presence, with nowhere to go — utterly relaxed into oneself, at rest, at home. That is the meaning of Buddha’s meditation.
5. Buddha’s whole methodology is that of self-remembering: SAMMASATI. It has been translated as right-mindfulness or right awareness. What is RIGHT awareness? Can awareness also be wrong? Yes, there is a possibility: if awareness becomes too much focused on the object it is wrong awareness. Awareness has to be aware of itself, then it is right awareness. When you look at a tree, at a mountain, at a star, you can be conscious — conscious of the tree, conscious of the mountain, conscious of the star — but you are not conscious of the one who is conscious of all these things. This is wrong awareness, focused on the object. You have to unfocus it from the object, you have to help it turn inwards. You have to bring it to your own interiority, you have to fill your subjectivity with its light. When one is full of light, not showing other things in the light but only showing the light itself, then it is right awareness and that is the door to nirvana, to God — to self-actualization.
6. Buddha used to call this witness, sammasati, right remembering. You have remembered you are a buddha. You are not the body, you are not the mind. You are only a pure consciousness.
7. Just remember one thing, and that is witnessing. That constitutes Buddha’s whole being. Call it awareness, call it total consciousness, call it what Buddha used to call sammasati, right remembering, but witnessing is the most important word out of all these. Just be a witness that you are not the body. Be a witness that you are not the mind. And finally, be a witness that you are only a witness, nothing else.
8. Right remembrance is concerned with your own being, when you remember yourself. When you are aware of yourself that is sammasati. When you remember other things that is not right remembrance. You may remember a thousand and one things, but if you don’t remember yourself, your remembrance is wrong.
9. The word that Buddha uses for this experience is sammasati — `right remembrance’. You are just full of a remembrance of your own eternal being. The moment you have renounced dualities, you have entered the path of the eternal, you have become an immortal.
10. Gautam Buddha emphasized one single word continually for forty-two years, morning and evening; the word is sammasati — it means “right remembering.” You remember many things — you can become an ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA; your mind is capable of remembering all the libraries of the world — but that is not the right remembering. There is only one right remembering — the moment you remember yourself.
11. You are life, eternal life.
    You are existence, infinite existence.
    You are pure no-mind.
    Just misguided, misdirected, you have forgotten yourself. All that is needed is, in the words of Gautam Buddha, “Sammasati — just remember your self.” You don’t have to go anywhere, just a remembering of a forgotten language, a remembering what you already are. It is not a realization because you have never been otherwise.