Osho Quotes on Choiceless Awareness

Osho Quotes on Awareness

1. Religion is concerned with beings, consciousness, awareness.
2. I teach you choiceless awareness. Stop choosing and conflict disappears.
3. Life certainly is an art, the greatest art. And the shortest formula is choiceless awareness — applicable to all situations, all problems.
4. Vipassana simply means witnessing. And that has been my whole life’s effort: to teach you awareness, witnessing, alertness, consciousness. I am using contemporary words.
5. Buddha says: Attain to choiceless awareness — don’t choose at all. Just watch and be aware without choosing, and you will attain to bliss, you will attain to the lotus paradise.
6. When you don’t choose, things are as they are. That is suchness — that is TATHATA. ‘Witnessing’ comes from the Upanishads — SAKSHI. That is the word used by the seers of the Upanishads. ‘Choiceless awareness’ comes from J. Krishnamurti — a new word for the same old thing. ‘Suchness’ is a Buddhist word — TATHATA. It comes from Buddha. But they all mean the same thing! Don’t be caught in words. And don’t start becoming knowledgeable through words.
7. A choiceless awareness simply means whatever happens to you is perfectly the right thing to have happened. You don’t have any judgment about it. It does not mean that you will stop doing things; you will continue doing things but your doing things will be more like a man flowing in the current of the river, not swimming, not swimming against the current.
8. Awareness must be choiceless. You must be aware of your total thought process, the total confusion. The moment you become aware of it, you will know that it is all confusion. Nothing is to be chosen; the whole house must be discarded. Once you know it is just a confusion, the house can be discarded at any time; there is no difficulty in discarding it.
9. That’s what Krishnamurti goes on saying: Be choiceless, be in a state of choiceless awareness — but it cannot happen unless you have seen the togetherness of things. Once realized, that all things are together, then the choice becomes impossible. Then there is nothing to choose, because whatsoever you choose comes with the opposite. Then what is the point? You choose love and hate comes; you choose friendship and the enemy comes; you choose ANYTHING, and immediately the opposite comes as a shadow. One stops choosing. One remains choiceless. And when one is choiceless one has transcended all contradictions.
10. If you can watch your sinner side, your saint side, your darkness, your light — without any judgment — the miracle happens. And this is the only miracle that transforms a man into a religious being. The saint and sinner both disappear. Choose one, and the other remains — because they are together, they are not separate. They are inseparable. So don’t choose. I say unto you: Become a choiceless awareness. Then you have gone beyond both, beyond the duality of good and bad, of God and evil. And this transcendence brings you all the flowers that you have not even dreamt about, the music that no instrument can create, and the poetry that cannot be contained in words.
11. Awareness of your actions, your body, your mind, your heart. Walking, you should walk with awareness. Moving your hand, you should move with awareness, knowing perfectly that you are moving the hand. You can move it without any consciousness, like a mechanical thing. You are on a morning walk; you can go on walking without being aware of your feet. Be alert of the movements of your body. While eating, be alert of the movements that are needed for eating. Taking a shower, be alert of the coolness that is coming to you, the water falling on you and the tremendous joy of it …. Just be alert. It should not go on happening in an unconscious state. And the same about your mind: whatever thought passes on the screen of your mind, just be a watcher. Whatever emotion passes on the screen of your heart, just remain a witness — don’t get involved, don’t get identified, don’t evaluate what is good, what is bad; that is not part of your meditation. Your meditation has to be choiceless awareness.
12. There is only one secret which is not part of the mind, and that is witnessing, watching. Thoughts are passing, desires are moving, memories are coming and going like clouds in the sky and you are sitting silently simply watching, not doing anything. If you do anything immediately the mind starts functioning. What you do does not matter — doing is part of mind. A non-doing witnessing, just witnessing, as if a mirror goes on witnessing whatsoever passes by — that is awareness. And that awareness takes you beyond the mind. It is true meditation.
13. My effort here is just to help you to be more aware so whatsoever you do comes out of that awareness. That awareness has no ready-made answers; it is just like a mirror: it reflects the situation, the challenge of the situation, and you act immediately, spontaneously. You don’t look for an answer in the memory, in the scriptures, in your parent’s ideas, in all that has been taught to you. You simply encounter the situation immediately; in your own light. Your action then has dignity, beauty, grace, because it is coming out of freedom. Freedom makes everything graceful. Freedom is the greatest value in life.
14. By meditation I mean a state of no-mind, a state of no-thought, of pure awareness, of a mirror reflecting nothing, just an empty mirror. The empty mirror is exactly the right symbol for meditation. One can become an empty mirror if by watching one’s thoughts, one slowly slowly drops them. In fact the more efficient you become in watching your thoughts, the more and more they disappear of their own accord. One day it happens that there is no thought inside you, there is utter silence: no ripples, no waves in your consciousness, nothing is reflected and you are fully alert, no asleep either. That is the day when one becomes the crowned one. Let that be the goal from now onwards. That is the target. It has to be fulfilled in this life, and it can be fulfilled. It is our birthright, we just have not claimed it.
15. When mind disappears, mind disappears in a choiceless awareness, when you stop choosing, when you are neither for nor against — that is stopping in the middle. One choice leads to the left, one extreme; another choice leads to the right, the other extreme. If you don’t choose, you are exactly in the middle. That is relaxation, that is rest. That is TRUE renunciation. It is not opposed to the world, it is not opposed to the body, it has nothing to do with the body. It is sheer awakening of consciousness. You become choiceless, unobsessed, and in that state of unobsessed, choiceless consciousness, intelligence arises which has been lying deep, dormant in your being. You become a light unto yourself. You are no longer a fool.
16. Dhyan means meditation. Meditation means awareness, watchfulness, a silent witnessing of all the processes of the mind. And the magic of watching is that as your watchfulness deepens, the mind starts evaporating. When the watchfulness is absolute mind becomes nil, a zero. And the disappearance of the mind gives you clarity, absolute clarity, transparency; you can see through and through, you become a mirror. And then life is reflected as it is — not according to any doctrine, not according to the Bible or the Koran or the Gita but as it is. And to know life as it is, is to know god.
17. One must not judge good or bad, one must not label or have any kind of desire or goal in regard to what arises in consciousness. There must be no sense of avoidance, resistance, condemnation, justification, distortion or attachment in regard to what arises but only a choiceless awareness, and self-communion is established. A choiceless awareness: that is the ultimate key to open the innermost mystery of your being. Don’t say it is good, don’t say it is bad. When you say something is good, attachment arises, attraction arises. When you say something is bad, repulsion arises. Fear is fear, neither good nor bad. Don’t evaluate, just let it be. Let it be so. When without condemnation or justification you are there, then in that choiceless awareness all psychological pain simply evaporates like dewdrops in the early morning sun. And left behind is a pure space, left behind is virgin space.
18. For the wise man, evil and good are both exceedingly good. For the wise man, one who knows that all is one, how can there be a distinction between good and bad, between the saint and the sinner? There is no possibility of any distinction. The moment you make the distinction you have already become a chooser, you have fallen back into the world of choice. You are no more a choiceless awareness — and that’s what wisdom is all about.
19. The moment you drop choosing between these duals, the moment you become a non-chooser, the moment you remain in a choiceless awareness, suddenly a great illumination happens. Then it doesn’t matter whether you live or die, because all is one. It does not matter what happens to you, because your deepest core always remains beyond all happenings. You are neither a sinner nor a saint then.
20. The truth is indivisible. So drop all ways of seeing, all attitudes, beliefs, disbeliefs, notions, concepts, philosophies. Just see. Be a mirror, so that whatsoever is, is reflected in you. That is God, that is truth. It is not a question of your choice. It reflects only when you are in a choiceless state of awareness.
21. Meditation is a non-focussed awareness. Meditation is more like a mirror: you simply watch whatsoever goes on happening in the mind. A thought comes, a thought arises, stays there for a time being, then moves, goes out, comes in from this door, goes out from another door; even another thought arises. There is a constant procession, a traffic of thoughts, desires, memories, imagination. And you are just a watcher, cool, unconcerned, indifferent.
22. Witnessing means no choice, choiceless awareness. This is one of the most fundamental keys for all the diseases of the human mind. If you can become a witness, the opposites fight against each other, kill each other, and both are dead, both disappear. But if you choose one thing over the other, you cannot be a witness.
23. Be watchful, be awake, be alert, be nonjudgmental. Don’t be a moralist: create a religious consciousness. And by “religious consciousness” is meant a choiceless awareness. Let this phrase sink deep in your heart: choiceless awareness. This is the very essence of Buddha’s teaching — AES DHAMMO SANANTANO.
24. Dualities depend on each other. You cannot define love without bringing hate in. What type of love is this which needs hate to be defined? You cannot define life without bringing death in. This life cannot be much of a life. What type of life is this which needs death to define it? There is a life beyond life and death, and there is a love beyond love and hate. That love, that life, is Buddhahood — transcending all the opposites. So don’t choose. If you choose, you will be in the quagmire. Don’t choose! A choiceless awareness is the goal. Just remain aloof; don’t choose. The moment you choose, you have fallen into the trap of the world, or into the trap of the mind.
25. The true freedom certainly comes after choiceless awareness, but after choiceless awareness the freedom is neither dependent on things nor dependent on doing something. The freedom that follows choiceless awareness is the freedom just to be yourself. And you are yourself already, you are born with it; hence it is not dependent on anything else. Nobody can give it to you and nobody can take it from you. A sword can cut your head but it cannot cut your freedom, your being.
26. If you want to remain totally free, then don’t choose. That’s where the teaching of choiceless awareness comes in. Why the insistence of the great masters just to be aware and not to choose? Because the moment you choose, you have lost your total freedom, you are left with only a part. But if you remain choiceless, your freedom remains total. So there is only one thing which is totally free and that is choiceless awareness. Everything else is limited.
27. Whatever you choose you will repent because the other will remain and haunt you. If one needs absolute freedom then choiceless awareness is the only thing.
28. A man of awareness is independent. He does things because he feels like doing them. He enjoys doing them because it is coming out of his natural spontaneity.
29. A man of awareness is conscious in his life; that’s why at the moment of death he becomes fully conscious.
30. A man of awareness needs neither duties nor responsibilities nor choices. Yet only he is capable of doing the right thing in the right moment.
31. Awareness will make you aware of what is good and what is not good. And awareness will give you the direction to move towards the good and not towards the bad.
32. Meditation changes not your mind, but you, your consciousness. And the change comes by your own awareness. Nobody can fall from awareness. The greater the awareness, the less is the possibility of falling. When awareness is complete, entire, then there is no way you can fall. You have arrived.
33. To live in the moment needs a thoughtless awareness, because even a small thought is bigger than the smallest atom of time — the moment. Hence my insistence on meditation. It is nothing but a method to drop thoughts and to be available to the present moment. Live it as deeply as possible. The next moment will be born out of this moment. If you have lived this moment totally, intensely, your next moment is going to be still more golden. And that’s how life goes on growing — otherwise people only grow old.
34. What is the difference between witnessing and choiceless awareness? Witnessing is choiceless awareness. If you choose, you are not witnessing. You have liked, disliked. You have chosen, you have become identified. For example, in your mind there are a few thoughts moving. Witnessing means you simply stand there seeing that they are moving, like clouds moving in the sky or the traffic moving on the road. You don’t have any choice. You don’t say, “This is good — let me keep it. And that is bad — let it go.” If you talk this Way you are not witnessing. You are getting involved, you are getting identified. You are creating love-hate relationships. And when you relate, you cannot be a witness. Witnessing means choiceless awareness!
35. Intelligence has no choice. That’s why Krishnamurti goes on defining intelligence as choiceless awareness. And sometimes you can find it. You can find a non-intellectual person who is absolutely uneducated, he may be a primitive man living in a village, but he is of immense intelligence. In his eyes you can see intelligence, radiance; in his acts you can see intelligence. And you can see a university professor behaving very unintelligently, but he may be a great intellectual.
36. The technique of positive thinking is not a technique that transforms you. It is simply repressing the negative aspects of your personality. It is a method of choice. It cannot help awareness; it goes against awareness. Awareness is always choiceless. Positive thinking simply means forcing the negative into the unconscious and conditioning the conscious mind with positive thoughts. But the trouble is that the unconscious is far more powerful, nine times more powerful, than the conscious mind. So once a thing becomes unconscious, it becomes nine times more powerful than it was before. It may not show in the old fashion, but it will find new ways of expression. So positive thinking is a very poor method, without any deep understanding, and it goes on giving you wrong ideas about yourself.
37. I am absolutely against positive thinking. You will be surprised that if you don’t choose, if you remain in a choiceless awareness, your life will start expressing something which is beyond both positive and negative, which is higher than both. So you are not going to be a loser. It is not going to be negative, it is not going to be positive, it is going to be existential.
38. A meditator neither feels inferior nor superior, he simply feels he is no more, only the vast existence is, the whole space is. He becomes part of it, he is immersed in it, he becomes oceanic. And to feel that vastness is the greatest bliss in life. It is also freedom from fear, it is also the ultimate truth. So put all your energies into meditation, into awareness, so that you are able to look at yourself from the inside. Meditation is the mirror, the real mirror which will give you your original face.
39. Dhyan means meditation. Meditation means awareness, watchfulness, a silent witnessing of all the processes of the mind. And the magic of watching is that as your watchfulness deepens, the mind starts evaporating. When the watchfulness is absolute mind becomes nil, a zero. And the disappearance of the mind gives you clarity, absolute clarity, transparency; you can see through and through, you become a mirror. And then life is reflected as it is — not according to any doctrine, not according to the Bible or the Koran or the Gita but as it is. And to know life as it is, is to know god.
40. The dreaming stops only when we become so alert that thinking disappears. And that moment is of true enlightenment: a state of consciousness without any content, just pure awareness, nothing to see, no thought, no dream, no memory. The mirror is completely empty, nothing is reflected in it. That is the ultimate goal of sannyas. And once you have known that you have known all that is worth knowing. Once you have known that you have known love, you have known bliss; you have known God, you have known freedom. You have known all that is worth knowing. And that knowledge is not ordinary knowledge, it is not just information. It is your own realization, it is a revelation.