Osho Quotes on Unconsciousness and Unawareness

Osho Quotes on Unconsciousness and Unawareness

1. Unconsciousness, unawareness, is the cause of attachment.
2. Buddha calls a man foolish, not because he is ignorant, not because he is not knowledgeable. According to Buddha, a man is a fool if he is unconscious, if he behaves unconsciously, if he lives in sleep, if he is a somnambulist. If he goes on behaving without any mindfulness, then he is a fool. The word has a special meaning, remember: unconsciousness, unawareness, unmindfulness — that’s Buddha’s definition of the fool.
3. The really religious questions are concerned with YOU, with your unconsciousness and how to transform your unconsciousness into consciousness. Real religion is not metaphysical; it is rooted in psychology, it is psychological, because real religion means a way to transcend the mind. Unless you understand the mind you cannot transcend it.
4. The greatest complication, the source of all complications is unawareness, unconsciousness. We are focused on the objective world and we are totally unaware who we are. The whole message of Gautama the Buddha is to turn in.
5. Buddha’s whole message is concerned with consciousness: how to raise consciousness in humanity, how to make him more alert, more capable of seeing things as they are, how to make him capable of becoming more spontaneous and functioning out of awareness and not out of unawareness. We function out of unconsciousness.
6. What is needed is: Move from sleep to awakening. The journey is inward; not from this place to that place, not from here to the Himalayas — but from unconsciousness to consciousness, from unawareness to awareness.
7. In meditation, when you are witnessing, you are by and by, without your knowing it, dispelling unconsciousness. You are becoming more and more conscious. The thin layer of consciousness becomes thicker and thicker and thicker, and a moment comes when your whole being is full of consciousness. This is witnessing. So when death comes, you witness death. When life was there, you witnessed life. It is nothing new: death is only an object, just as life was an object. If you have learned how to witness, there is no question of being afraid. You will be a witness in your death too.
8. Desire is a state of turmoil, desire is a state of unconsciousness, desire is mad. When you are silent, madness disappears.
9. Hell is not something geographical; it is something psychological. Hell is another name of a diseased mind, of a mind in anguish, turmoil, of a mind suffering nightmares, of a mind living basically in unconsciousness. The unconscious mind is what hell is all about, and the conscious mind is going beyond the hell.
10. To be aware is to be virtuous. And to remain in unawareness is the only sin. You may be doing good things without awareness. But those good things are no longer good, because they come out of darkness, unconsciousness, blindness. And as far as awareness is concerned, a man who is full of awareness, alert, cannot do anything wrong. It is intrinsically impossible. Awareness brings so much clarity, so much perception, so much understanding that it is impossible to do anything that can be harmful to anyone. It is impossible to interfere with somebody’s freedom or somebody’s life. You can only be a blessing to existence, nothing else.
11. The fool goes on creating ditches for himself. You create your own misery, because you act out of unconsciousness, you act out of a noisy, cloudy mind. You don’t act out of clarity; your action is not out of spontaneity; your action is not out of meditative silence. It creates fire. You may be thinking you are creating it for others, but everything rebounds on you. There is no hellfire anywhere else unless you create it. Everybody has to carry his heaven or hell within himself — it is your own creation.
12. Misery is the shadow of the mind: mind means sleep, mind means unconsciousness, mind means unawareness. Mind means not knowing who you are and still pretending that you know. Mind means not knowing where you are going and still pretending that you know the goal, that you know what life is meant for — not knowing anything about life and still believing that you know.
13. The people who want to be blissful have to seek light, they have to find their inner flame; they have to find their inner awareness. Light represents awareness, darkness represents unawareness. Light means consciousness, darkness means unconsciousness — and we are all living in unconsciousness. We have to move towards the dawn, towards light, towards awareness.
14. I say over and over again that ignorance, unconsciousness and unawareness are a fire in which life is being consumed, and that understanding, consciousness and awareness bring about a totality in which one’s life is transformed into bliss. The very energy that consumes a life of ignorance is transformed into bliss through awareness. There is nothing worse than ignorance and unawareness, but if a man lives in awareness every power he has becomes blissful. Energy is neutral, impartial. How energy is used depends totally on the individual.
15. Keep it as a key and transform each act of your life from unawareness into awareness. Reclaim yourself from the darkness of unconsciousness as much as you can; become more and more conscious. This is what sannyas is all about. Nothing else has to be changed: only something in the inner world, the inner approach, the inner light. The whole world remains the same. I don’t teach renunciation, that you have to leave this and that. You live the same life, you live in the same life, you live in the same world, but if you bring awareness to your acts your world is transformed. It is not the same world, although it is the same.
16. Witnessing is the key of my sannyas, the master key. I don’t give you any other discipline, because giving you any discipline will not help. Your unconsciousness will be there, and the discipline will only cover it. You can look like a saint but you will be as unconscious as before. Your saintliness will be as unconscious as your sinfulness was; there will be no qualitative difference in it.
17. You cannot hide your unconsciousness; it surfaces. Your reality goes on expressing itself — you may not be able to see it, but everybody else can see it. This is a strange world! You may not see your unconsciousness, but everybody knows about it, just as YOU know about everybody else’s. Because we pay more attention to people than we do to our own mind, we are capable of knowing their faults, their reasons for misery, their causes of hell. We are very wise as far as others are concerned and we are very unwise as far as we are concerned — with our own inner being.
18. If you witness, anything that has been repressed in the unconscious will disappear, will evaporate.
19. A wound is created by unconsciousness, unawareness. A wound is part of ignorance, sleep. When you consciously go backwards and look at the wound, consciousness is a healing force. In the past, when the wound happened, it happened in unconsciousness. You were angry, you were possessed by anger, you did something: you killed a man and you have been hiding the fact from the world. You can hide it from the police, you can hide it from the court and the law, but how can you hide it from yourself? — you know, it hurts. And whenever somebody gives you an opportunity to be angry you become afraid because it could happen again, you could kill the wife. Go back, because at that moment when you murdered a man or you behaved in a very angry and mad way, you were unconscious. In the unconscious those wounds have been preserved. Now go consciously. Prati-prasav, going back, means going consciously to things which you have done in unconsciousness. Go back — just the light of consciousness heals. It is a healing force. Whatsoever you can make conscious will be healed, and then it will hurt no more.
20. To be alert and awake is to be true. So, let us define. Untruth is unconsciousness, and truth is consciousness. Untruth is living like a somnambulist; truth is living like a Buddha, alert, watchful, witnessing.
21. Just look at your mind, the mind is a beggar. Drop the mind and you will be surprised: your consciousness is the master. But the mind lives through division, it always lives through the polar opposites: it puts that against this, and then goes on choosing. Mind means choice, choice means unconsciousness. Consciousness means choicelessness, and to be choiceless is to be free from all desire, is to be free from all projection, is to be free from all imagination, is to be free from future. And the moment you are free from the future, the present suddenly bursts forth in all its splendor before you; its glory is infinite, its joy is unbounded, its ecstasy is inexpressible. It transforms your beggar into a master.
22. The real fight is in, not there on the outside, and the real fight is not with others. The real fight is with your own unconsciousness, with your own unawareness.
23. If you commit a sin… The word `sin’ has been contaminated by the religions; otherwise it simply means in its roots, forgetfulness, unawareness. It means exactly what I am saying to you. Sin is your unawareness. Any action done in unconsciousness is sin. But religions have completely destroyed the original meaning of the word. Whatever you are doing consciously is virtue and there is no ready-made list of what are virtues, because in a different situation, the same thing may become sin. The thing that was virtue in one condition, in one context, may not be virtue in another context; it all depends. But how are you going to know whether in this context it is virtue or sin.
24. Buddha says: When you become aware, all that you have done in your unawareness, in your unconsciousness, in your sleep, in your metaphysical sleep, is nothing but a dream. And remember: bad deeds are dreams, good deeds are dreams. Your being a sinner in a dream is a dream as much as your being a saint. When you wake up you are neither a sinner nor a saint. You are simply awareness.
25. This desiring creates a drunkenness in man. It creates unawareness, it creates unconsciousness, you become alcoholic. Because you are not here — so how can you be rooted? how can you be grounded? how can you be centered? You are roaming all around the world, all over the world — to be this, to be that, to be there, to be somewhere else…. Except THIS place where you find yourself, you want to be everywhere else. Except this moment that you are in, you want to be in every other moment. You think of life beyond death — but you never live the life that is before death.
26. Nostalgia means non-meditativeness, unawareness, unconsciousness, and it is an utterly futile exercise, an absolutely futile exercise. You cannot be nourished by the past, there is no way to live it again, but you can live in memories. Living in memories is an empty gesture.
27. Presence of mind is a state of thoughtlessness, but not of sleep, not of unconsciousness. Thoughtless consciousness, contentless consciousness — a mirror utterly empty, ready to mirror anything.
28. As far as buddhas are concerned, as far as I am concerned, consciousness cannot be attained by any chemical. Unconsciousness can be produced by chemicals, because unconsciousness is a very gross, lower phenomenon. Consciousness is the highest peak of growth, of opening, of coming home; it is not possible through the chemicals. It is possible only if you go on sharpening your intelligence; if you go on working on your witnessing soul; if you become more and more a witness of all that you do, of all that you think, of all that you feel. If you are miserable — as everybody is — then remember, it simply shows you are unconscious.
29. One has to go beyond unawareness; only then one is. Remaining unaware, we are not yet born. Just as the child in the mother’s womb is alive but unborn, so we are alive as far as our souls are concerned, but unborn. We are in a kind of womb, a dark womb of unconsciousness. Real life starts only with the second birth. The first birth only gives you a physical life, the life of the body. The second birth gives you a spiritual birth, then you are born as a soul. And when body and soul are both there great music is created out of their meeting. Something of the beyond immediately starts happening. Just as when a man and a woman meet in deep love and there is orgasmic joy, exactly like that but a millionfold more when the body and the soul meet there is an orgasmic joy which is infinite, which is unbounded. But we live as the body and we have completely forgotten that another birth is needed. That’s what Jesus means when he says to Nicodemus: You will not enter into my kingdom of god unless you are born again. All the initiative processes of religion are nothing but processes of rebirth. Nobody can give you this rebirth except yourself. Help can be given, support can be given, a supportive atmosphere can be given, but still the central thing has to be done by you. It can only be done by you; it cannot be done by anybody else on your behalf. The master functions as a midwife. That’s what Socrates used to say to his disciples: I am a midwife. The midwife can help, can make it easier, but still the birth has to be given by you. It has to happen at the innermost core of your being, in the recesses of your being. And the gestalt that has to be changed is from unawareness to awareness.
30.  Bear in mind, unconsciousness or unawareness will not do. If you go on remaining unaware and insensible to the workings of the mind, then your mind will repeat what it did yesterday.
31. Your sins were committed in unconsciousness, your good deeds also! Therefore there is hardly any difference between your good deeds and your bad deeds; the quality is the same. Whether you are a householder or a sannyasin is all the same, for you are unconscious. You are unconscious in your shop; you are unconscious in your temple; you are unconscious in your office; you are unconscious in your monastery. There is no difference if you put on your clothes or discard them; you are still unconscious. The real question is of breaking this unawareness, not of changing your mode of action, for that is very easy. If you are unconscious in one form of action, you are bound to be unconscious in another form of action also.
32. Witnessing becomes your very base of transformation. The more you see your mind, the more you witness it, the less you will find it. It needs unconsciousness to be there. It is an animal that exists only in darkness. As you bring the light in, the mind with its thoughts starts disappearing.