Awareness: The Key to Living Book Review
An eye opener on the concepts of Thought, Words, Past, Present, Future, Meditation and most importantly Awareness.
Together with Learning to Silence the Mind and The Mind this book helps you get clarity on the workings of our Mind and makes you aware of the need for Awareness.
Must read.
Awareness: The Key to Living Book Summary
Note: This summary is made up of my notes, thoughts and highlights of important passages while reading the book. I keep updating the summary when I revisit it, and occasionally may edit it to reduce summary length. Don’t be surprised if it has changed between visits. The author’s words are in normal font, while my interpretations are in italics.
Foreword
The first thing to sink deep in your heart is that you are asleep, utterly asleep. You are dreaming, day in, day out. You are dreaming sometimes with open eyes and sometimes with closed eyes, but you are dreaming – you are a dream. You are not yet a reality.
Buddha is not interested in talking about gods. His whole interest is in waking you up.
Silence is the space in which one awakens, and the noisy mind is the space in which one remains asleep. If your mind continues chattering, you are asleep.
Sitting silently, if the mind disappears and you can hear the chattering birds and no mind inside, a silence…this whistle of the bird, the chirping, and no mind functioning in your head, utter silence…then awareness wells up in you. It does not come from the outside, it arises in you, it grows in you. Otherwise, remember: you are asleep.
THE UNDERSTANDING
Rejoice in life, in love, in meditation, in the beauties of the world, in the ecstasy of existence – rejoice in everything!
Transform the mundane into the sacred. Transform this shore into the other shore, transform the earth into paradise.
The real treasures are not in the future. The real treasures are right now, here.
OF MEN AND RATS
Wakefulness is the way to life. The fool sleeps as if he were already dead, but the master is awake and he lives forever. He watches. He is clear. How happy he is! For he sees that wakefulness is life. How happy he is, following the path of the awakened. With great perseverance he meditates, seeking freedom and happiness. – from the Dhammapada of Gautama the Buddha
Man is a highly sophisticated machine, rats are simple machines. It is easier to study rats; that’s why psychologists go on studying rats. They study rats and they conclude about man – and their conclusions are almost right.
The normal humanity is utterly asleep.
If you become a mind, you lose consciousness.
It is knowledge that keeps you asleep; hence, the more knowledgeable a person is, the more asleep.
You are alive only in the proportion that you are aware. Awareness is the difference between death and life.
Wakefulness is the way to life, says Buddha.
Life is God – there is no other God.
Life is the goal and awareness is the methodology, the technique to attain it.
Above our so-called conscious mind is the real conscious mind; that is attained only through meditation.
Beyond the real conscious mind is the superconscious mind.
Superconscious mind means samadhi – you have attained a crystal-clear perceptiveness, you have attained an integrated awareness.
Beyond the superconscious is the collective superconscious; the collective superconscious is what is known as ‘god’ in the religions.
Beyond the collective superconscious is the cosmic superconscious, which even goes beyond the gods. Buddha calls it nirvana, Mahavira calls it kaivalya, Hindu mystics have called it moksha; you can call it the truth.
Buddha is right. He says: The fool sleeps as if he were already dead, but the master is awake and he lives forever.
Awareness is eternal, it knows no death. Only unawareness dies.
Truth is always simple and always beautiful.
The only thing that has to be learned is watchfulness.
- Watch!
Watch every act that you do. - Watch every thought that passes in your mind.
- Watch every desire that takes possession of you.
- Watch even small gestures – walking, talking, eating, taking a bath.
- Go on watching everything.
Chew well and watchfully and you will be surprised how much you have been missing up to now, because each bite will give you tremendous satisfaction.
Smell, touch, feel the breeze and the sun rays. Look at the moon and become just a silent pool of watchfulness, and the moon will be reflected in you with tremendous beauty.
Never repent for the past! Live in the moment.
The more watchful you become the more all your hastiness slows down. You become more graceful. As you watch, your chattering mind chatters less, because the energy that was becoming chattering is turning and becoming watchfulness – it is the same energy!
How happy he is! For he sees that wakefulness is life.
How happy he is, following the path of the awakened. With great perseverance he meditates, seeking freedom and happiness.
Lukewarm water cannot evaporate, and lukewarm efforts to be alert are bound to fail.
Transformation happens only when you put your total energy into it.
Unconsciousness makes you interested in others – things, people, but it is always the others.
Consciousness creates interiority. It makes you introverts; it takes you inward, deeper and deeper.
THE ROOTS OF SUFFERING
Misery is a state of unconsciousness. We are miserable because we are not aware of what we are doing, of what we are thinking, of what we are feeling
We are continuously contradicting ourselves each moment. Action goes in one direction, thinking goes in another, feeling is somewhere else. We go on falling apart, we become more and more fragmented. That’s what misery is – we lose integration, we lose unity.
It is not only drugs and alcohol – the so-called religion has also functioned as opium. It drugs people. And naturally all the religions are against drugs, because they themselves deal in the same market; they are against the competitors.
The only transformation happens through meditation, because meditation is the only method that makes you aware.
To me, meditation is the only true religion. All else is hocus-pocus. And there are different brands of opium – Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Jainism, Buddhism – but they are just different brands. The container is different but the content is the same: they all help you in some way to adjust to your suffering.
There is no need to adjust to suffering; there is a possibility to be totally free of suffering. But then the path is a little arduous; then the path is a challenge.
When you are enraged, your body secretes certain intoxicating poisons, your blood becomes intoxicated. To be in a rage is to be in a temporary madness.
The first step in awareness is to be watchful of your body.
Then start becoming aware of your thoughts – the same has to be done with the thoughts.
The third step – that is, becoming aware of your feelings, emotions, moods.
The fourth is the ultimate awareness that makes one awakened. One becomes aware of one’s awareness – that is the fourth. That makes one a buddha, the awakened one.
Bliss is the goal, and awareness is the path toward it.
PRIVATE WORLDS
Men are as forgetful and heedless in their waking moments of what is going on around them as they are during their sleep.
Fools, although they hear, are like the deaf; to them the adage applies that whenever they are present they are absent.
One should not act or speak as if he were asleep. The waking have one world in common; sleepers have each a private world of his own. Whatever we see when awake is death, when asleep, dreams.
You sleep when you sleep, but you also sleep while you are awake.
Even right now you are dreaming within. A thousand and one thoughts continue and you are not conscious of what is happening, you are not aware of what you are doing, you are not aware of who you are. You move as people move in sleep.
If you are present when anger is happening, anger cannot happen. It can happen only when you are fast asleep.
Awareness means that whatsoever is happening in the moment is happening with complete consciousness; you are present there.
All that is called sin is not possible if you are aware. So, in fact, there is only one sin, and that is unawareness.
The original word sin means to miss. It doesn’t mean to commit something wrong; it simply means to miss, to be absent. The Hebrew root for the word sin means to miss.
While you are doing something, you are fully alert – what Gurdjieff calls self-remembering, what Buddha calls being rightly mindful, what Krishnamurti calls awareness, what Kabir has called surati.
If you are alert, many things simply drop; you need not drop them.
When you are aware, falling is not possible – not even in love. It is not possible; it is simply not possible. With awareness, it is impossible; you rise in love.
Falling in love is a dream state. That’s why people who are in love, you can see it from their eyes: as if they are more asleep than others, intoxicated, dreaming.
Falling in love you remain a child; rising in love you mature. And by and by love becomes not a relationship, it becomes a state of your being.
Possession … everybody goes on trying to possess the beloved, the lover. This is no longer love. In fact, when you possess a person, you hate, you destroy, you kill; you are a murderer.
Love is freedom. Love will make the beloved more and more free, love will give wings, and love will open the vast sky.
Social reformers, so-called revolutionaries, they are the most mischievous people. But it is difficult to see where their mischief lies because they are good people, they are always doing good to others – that is their way of creating an imprisonment for the other.
They have learned a trick – if you want to possess someone, do good.
Anything that tries to possess the other person, whatsoever its name or form, is irreligious, is a sin.
Your churches, your temples, your mosques, they have all committed sins toward you because they all became possessors, they all became dominations.
Priests have done so well because they converted freedom into imprisonments, they converted truth into dogmas – they converted everything from the plane of awareness to the plane of sleep.
The mind is always either in the past or in the future. It cannot be in the present,
When you are in the present, the mind is there no more – because mind means thinking.
The present is just a dividing line, that’s all. It has no space. It divides the past and the future – just a dividing line.
You can be in the present but you cannot think; for thinking, space is needed. Thoughts need space, they are just like things.
Thoughts are subtle things, they are material. Thoughts are not spiritual, because the dimension of the spiritual starts only when there are no thoughts.
You cannot be thinking in the present. The moment you start thinking, it is already the past.
You see the sun is rising; you see it and you say, ‘What a beautiful sunrise!’ – it is already the past.
A beautiful flower in the garden and you say, ‘A beautiful rose’ – now you are not with this rose, this moment; it is already a memory.
That’s why in a deep presence you are the flower and the flower has become you. When there is no thinking, who is the flower and who is the one who is observing? The observer becomes the observed. Suddenly boundaries are lost.
In the present, thinking is not possible, dreaming is not possible, because dreaming is nothing but thinking in pictures. Both are things, both are material.
Awareness means to be in the moment so totally that there is no movement toward the past, no movement toward the future – all movement stops.
If you move from one thought to another, you remain in the world of time. If you move into the moment – not into thought – you move into eternity.
A motivated movement means sleep. An unmotivated movement means awareness – you move because to move is sheer joy, you move because movement is life, you move because life is energy and energy is movement.
The whole world moves, existence moves, into eternity.
Mind moves in time.
Existence is moving into the depth and the height, and mind moves backward and forward. Mind moves horizontally – that is sleep. If you can move vertically, that is awareness.
Be in the moment. Bring your total being into the moment. Don’t allow the past to interfere and don’t allow the future to come in. The past is no more, it is dead.
The existence has its own plans, it is wiser than you – the whole has to be wiser than the part.
Tomorrow never comes.
The moment the future enters, time enters.
Time is the world and eternity is God.
When awareness becomes perfect, this world – this world that you have created out of your mind – simply disappears; another world becomes revealed to you. Maya disappears, the illusion disappears – the illusion is there because of your sleep, your unconsciousness.
This world that you see around you is not the real world. Not that it doesn’t exist – it exists – but you are seeing it through a screen of sleep.
You are taking the whole existence as a screen, and then you project your own mind on it. You see things that are not there, and you don’t see things that are there.
The mind has explanations for everything. If you raise a doubt, the mind explains. It creates theories, philosophies, systems, just to feel comfortable that nothing is wrong.
All philosophies exist to make life convenient, so that everything looks okay, nothing is wrong – but everything is wrong while you are asleep.
This is what all the philosophies are: some explanations of things, some explanation of things that cannot be explained, pretending to know about something that is not known. But they make life convenient. You can sleep better, they are like tranquilizers.
This is the difference between philosophy and religiousness: philosophy is a tranquilizer, religiousness is a shock; philosophy helps you to sleep well, religiousness brings you out of sleep.
Religiousness is not a philosophy – it is a technique to bring you out of your unconsciousness. And all philosophies are techniques to help you to sleep well; they give you dreams, Utopias.
Religiousness brings you to the truth – and the truth is possible only when you are not dreaming.
Lao Tzu says, ‘When somebody listens to my teaching without the mind, he becomes enlightened. If somebody listens to my teaching through the mind, then he finds his own explanations, which have nothing to do with me. And when somebody listens, not listening at all – there are people who listen without listening – when somebody listens as if he is listening without listening, then he laughs at my foolishness.’
Lao Tzu, ‘If the majority doesn’t laugh at you, be aware that you must be saying something wrong. If the majority laughs, only then are you saying something true. When the majority thinks you are a fool, only then is there some possibility of your being a wise man; otherwise, there is no possibility.’
Aristotle has captured all the universities, all the colleges of the whole world. Now everywhere you are taught logic, not mystery. Everywhere you are taught to be rational, not mystical.
God is a mystery, not a syllogism. Those who give proofs for God are simply doing the impossible; no proof can be given for God.
Proofs exist on the horizontal.
Wherever you are present, that is exactly the place where you are absent.
Wherever you are, there you are not.
The master is not at home. Eyes are looking, ears are hearing, but the master is not present inside.
Eyes are just windows; they can’t see unless you see through them.
The whole body is like a house and the mind is traveling; the master is always traveling somewhere else and the house remains empty.
One should not act or speak as if he were asleep.
Control is a poor substitute for awareness,
Acts don’t mean anything. Acts do not matter – you, your awareness, your being conscious, mindful, is what matters.
Once you have known awareness, nothing is worth it – you have known the greatest bliss of life.
This is the only key. The waking have one world in common; sleepers have each a private world of his own.
No dialogue is possible because there are two private worlds inside. Only conflict is possible.
Dreams are private. Whatsoever is private, remember, it must belong to the world of dreams. Truth is an open sky; it is for all, it is one.
I simply say leave your private worlds of dreams. That is sannyas for me.
The real world that has to be renounced is the mind, the private dreaming world.
Whenever you are asleep, you see dreams, illusions, mirages – your own creation, your own private world.
Heraclitus, ‘When you are awake, you see death all around.’
A man becomes religious only when he encounters death, never before.
Heraclitus says, the opposites meet and mingle; they are one. If you are trying to escape from death, remember, you will be escaping from life also.
This is the paradox: escape death and you remain dead; face, encounter death and you become alive.
Die to time so that you are resurrected into eternity.
Die to mind so you become alive in consciousness. Die to thinking so that you are born into awareness.
Heraclitus, ‘Whatever we see when awake is death.’
AWARENESS AND CENTERING
Awareness is what makes you a master – and when I say a master, I do not mean a controller. When I say be a master, I mean be a presence – a continuous presence.
Whatever you are doing, or not doing, one thing must constantly be in your consciousness, that you are.
Ego is a false sense of self. Without having any self you go on believing that you have a self – that is ego.
If suddenly there is a situation, a dangerous situation, you will begin to feel a center in you because in danger you become aware. That is why dangerous games have their appeal.
Danger has appeal only because in danger you sometimes feel centered.
War must continue because only in war is a self sometimes felt – a center is felt – because war is danger.
For the first time he was centered in himself. The target was there, but he was also there – present.
Close your eyes, go inside, and find out who the questioner is. Do not wait for me to answer. Find out who has asked.
Whatsoever you do, if you can remember yourself, then you are nearer to the center.
Act mindfully. It is a long, arduous journey, and it is difficult to be aware even for a single moment; the mind is constantly flickering. But it is not impossible.
THE ANALYST AND THE WITNESS
The Western approach is to think about a problem, to find the causes of the problem, to go into the history of the problem, into the past of the problem, to uproot the problem from the very beginning.
The problem comes from the past, so somehow it has to be tackled in the past.
Man’s mind has always been trying to do two impossible things.
- One is to reform the past – which cannot be done. The past has happened. You cannot really go into the past. When you think of going into the past, at the most you go into the memory of it; it is not the real past, it is just the memory. The past is absolute. The past means that all the potential of a thing is finished; it has become actual. Now there is no longer any potential to reform it, to undo it,
- The second impossible idea that has always dominated the human mind is to establish the future – which again, cannot be done. Future means that which is not yet; you cannot establish it. Future remains unestablished, future remains open.
Future is pure potentiality; unless it happens, you cannot be certain about it. Past is pure actuality; it has happened. Now nothing can be done about it.
The past has happened, it is a dead phenomenon. Nothing can be done about it. At the most what you can do is reinterpret it, that’s all.
The East has a totally different outlook.
- First, it says no problem is serious. The moment you say no problem is serious, the problem is almost 99 percent dead. Your whole vision changes about it.
The second thing the East says is that the problem is there because you are identified with it. It has nothing to do with the past, nothing to do with its history. You are identified with it – that is the real thing. And that is the key to solving all problems.
The whole Eastern methodology can be reduced to one word: witnessing. And the whole Western methodology can be reduced to one thing: analyzing.
WITNESSING IS THE TECHNIQUE FOR CENTERING.
In this world nothing exists as pure spirit. Everything exists embodied.
Thinking is judgment – the moment you think, you have begun to judge.
Thinking is evaluation. You cannot think without evaluation.
The moment you have categorized a thing – labeled it, named it – you have thought about it.
Thinking is impossible if you are not going to judge. If you are not going to judge, then you can just remain aware – but you cannot think.
Words cannot be used because every word has a value in it. Every word is a judgment. Language is burdened with judgment; language can never be impartial. The moment you use a word, you have judged.
Witnessing means a passive awareness.
The moment you do something, you have changed the thing.
I see a flower and I say, ‘It is beautiful!’ – I have changed it. Now I have imposed something on the flower. Now, whatsoever the flower is, to me it is a flower plus my feeling of its being beautiful.
This feeling that the flower is beautiful doesn’t belong to the flower, it belongs to me. I have entered the fact. Now the fact is not virgin, I have corrupted it. Now my mind has become part of it. Really, to say that my mind has become part of it means that my past has become part of it,
Mind means your past, your memories. The past has come upon the present.
You have interpreted – this is thinking. Thinking means bringing the past to a present fact.
The flower is present, you are present – then there is a relationship of witnessing.
What is thinking? It is the bringing of the mind into the present. You have missed the present then – you have missed it totally!
Cessation of thinking is witnessing.
Nonverbal experience is really experience. Verbalization is escaping from the experience.
Every act becomes total if you are nonverbal. So try to eat without any verbalization in the mind, with no thinking in the mind. Just eat, and then eating becomes meditation – because if you are nonverbal, you will become a witness.
So try to do anything nonverbally: walk, eat, take a bath, or just sit silently. Then just sit – then be ‘a sitting.’ Don’t think. Then even just sitting can become meditation; just walking can become meditation.
If the thinker is there, then there is ego; then you are a Bokuju or somebody else. But if only action is there with no verbalization, no thinking, there is no ego.
The ‘I’ forms itself through thoughts.
Accumulated thoughts, piled-up memories, create the feeling of ego, that you are.
The ego is just accumulated past. The ego is your thought condensed, crystallized.
If you have watched me, I was not. There was drinking of the tea, but no drinker. Walking was there in the garden, but no walker. Action was there, but no actor.’
In witnessing, there is no sense of ‘I’ – in thinking there is.
In witnessing there is no ego – but this comes only if you can transcend language.
The more thoughts you have, the greater the ego you have.
Language is the barrier. Language is needed to communicate with others; it is not needed to communicate with oneself.
Man could create a society, a world, only because of language. But because of language, man has forgotten himself.
Witnessing means moving out of language, verbalization, mind. Witnessing means a state of no-mind, no-thinking.
Buddha is reported to have said, ‘Don’t miss even a single breath. If a single breath is missed physiologically, you will be dead, and if a single breath is missed in awareness, you will be missing the center, you will be dead inside.’
Buddha said, ‘Breath is essential for the life of the body, and awareness of the breath is essential for the life of the inner center.‘
Breathe, be aware. And if you are trying to be aware of your breathing, you cannot think, because the mind cannot do two things simultaneously.
Witness anything, and thinking will stop. Thinking comes in, and witnessing disappears.
Witnessing means becoming dead to your past – memory, thought, everything.
In the old Sanskrit literature, the teacher is defined as the death – acharya mrityuh.
One has to be reborn every moment.
TENSION AND RELAXATION
WHAT IS YOUR TENSION? Your identification with all kinds of thoughts, fears.
Bodymind is a single system, so when the mind becomes tense, the body becomes tense.
There are two kinds of tension, the body tensions and the mind tensions. Both have to be released before you can start relaxation, which will bring you to awareness.
Sitting in a public bus or in a railway train, when you have nothing to do, just close your eyes. It will save your eyes from being tired from looking outside, and it will give you time enough to watch yourself.
MIND AND MEDITATION
When the mind is without thought, it is meditation.
The mind is without thought in two states – either in deep sleep or in meditation. If you are aware and thoughts disappear, it is meditation. If thoughts disappear and you become unaware, it is deep sleep.
Deep sleep and meditation have something similar and something different. One thing is similar – in both, thinking disappears. One thing is dissimilar – in deep sleep, awareness also disappears, but in meditation it remains.
Meditation is equal to deep sleep plus awareness.
WHAT IS MIND? MIND IS NOT A THING, BUT AN EVENT.
The mind is just a process. In fact, mind doesn’t exist – only thoughts, thoughts moving so fast that you think and feel that something exists there in continuity.
Two thoughts become joined, they become a continuity, and because of that continuity you think there is a mind.
Thoughts exist – mind doesn’t exist; mind is just the appearance.
When there is no mind, immediately the perception comes that you are no longer involved in the thoughts – thoughts are there, passing through you like clouds
Once you start feeling that thoughts come and go, and you are the watcher, the witness, the mastery of the mind is achieved.
Mind is nothing but the absence of your presence.
When you sit silently, when you look deep into the mind, the mind simply disappears. Thoughts will remain, they are existential, but mind will not be found.
When the mind is gone, then a second perception becomes possible: you can see that thoughts are not yours.
Not a single thought has come through your being; they always come from the outside.
Have you ever noticed that not even a single thought has arisen out of you?
How to get rid of memory? It is always there, following you. In fact, you are the memory, so how to get rid of it?
Who are you except your memories? When I ask, ‘Who are you?’ you tell me your name – that is your memory.
When I ask you, ‘Who are you?’ if really you look inside, your only answer can be ‘I don’t know.’ Whatsoever you will say will be the memory, not you. The only real, authentic answer can be ‘I don’t know,’ because to know oneself is the last thing.
If all the memory is discarded, and all the language is discarded, then who I am cannot be said.
THINKING CANNOT BE STOPPED-NOT THAT IT DOES NOT STOP, BUT IT CANNOT BE STOPPED. It stops of its own accord.
No-mind does not arise by stopping thinking. When the thinking is no more, no-mind is.
Attachment is the food for the mind to continue.
When I am not talking to you and I am alone, there is no mind – because it is a medium to relate through. When I sit alone, it is not needed.
Meditation is not an effort against the mind, it is a way of understanding the mind.
In a small nutshell, you carry the whole experience of existence. That’s what your mind is.
Your mind is not yours – it belongs to us all. Our bodies are very separate; our minds are not so separate.
Bodies are separate, minds overlapping, and souls are one.
That’s what ‘God’ is – the meeting point of all. Between the God and the world – the ‘world’ means the bodies – is mind.
Mind is a bridge, a bridge between the body and the soul, between the world and God.
If you stand on your head in shirshasan, in the headstand, you can destroy the mind very easily. Because when the blood rushes too much, like a flood, into the head … when you stand on your head, that’s what you are trying to do. The brain mechanism is delicate. You are flooding it with blood, the delicate tissues will die. That’s why you never come across an intelligent yogi.
When something happens without any violence, it has a beauty of its own; it has a natural growth.
How to stop thinking? I say just watch, be alert.
No-mind is not against mind; no-mind is beyond mind.
THE RUT AND THE WHEEL
Mind projects itself and mind is the past, so your future is not going to be anything other than the past.
Whatsoever you have done – good, bad, this, that – whatever you do creates its own repetition. That is the theory of karma.
Each action that you do, or even think about, has its own ways of persisting again and again, because it creates a channel in your being. It starts absorbing energy from you.
Every action is self-perpetuate, every thought is self-perpetuating. Once you cooperate with it, you are giving energy to it. Sooner or later it will become habitual. You will do it and you will not be the doer; you will do it just because of the force of habit.
You live through the habit – that means that the habit lives basically through you. The habit itself persists, it has an energy of its own.
The habit will become the master and you will be just a servant, a shadow.
Each action that you repeat, or each thought – because thought is also a subtle action in the mind – becomes more and more powerful. Then you are in the grip of it. Then you are imprisoned in the habit.
The imprisonment is subtle; the prison is made of your habits and conditioning and the actions that you have done. It is all around your body and you are entangled in it, but you go on thinking and fooling yourself that you are doing it.
The mastery of one’s self comes when one realizes, ‘I am absolutely responsible for whatsoever happens to me. Whatsoever happens, unconditionally – I am absolutely responsible.’
Everybody is responsible, totally responsible, for his own being and behavior.
If you go on throwing responsibility on the other, remember that you will always remain a slave because nobody can change the other.
One of the most unfulfilled wishes in the world is to change the other. Nobody has ever done that, it is impossible because the other exists in his own right – you cannot change him.
If you can consciously go backward, if you can consciously feel a wound, the wound is immediately healed. Why is it healed? – because a wound is created by unconsciousness, unawareness. A wound is part of ignorance, sleep. When you consciously go backward and look at the wound, consciousness is a healing force.
A man who goes backward releases the past.
Be finished with the past – unless you are finished with the past, you are living a ghost life.
AWARENESS IN ACTION
Be total in your acts, and if you are total, you have to be aware; nobody can be total without being aware. Being total means no other thinking. If
START FROM THE CENTER
A mind can never be silent. The very being of mind is antisilence.
If a person is really silent, then we must say that he has no mind.
Mind is sound, not silence.
A ‘silent mind’ is a contradiction in terms. If mind is there, it cannot be silent; and if it is silent, it is no more.
We see a Buddha sitting in a particular posture, we think that if this posture is followed, then the inner silence will follow. This is a wrong sequence. For Buddha the inner phenomenon happened first, and then this posture followed.
IT IS ONLY OUT OF SILENCE THAT ACTION ARISES.
If you are not silent – if you don’t know how to sit silently, or stand silently in deep meditation – whatsoever you go on doing is reaction, not action. You react. Somebody insults you, pushes a button, and you react.
I have stopped being manipulated by others. I am no longer a slave, I am my own master. I act according to myself, not according to anybody else.
When somebody insults you, you have to become a receiver; you have to accept what he says, only then can you react. But if you don’t accept, if you simply remain detached, if you keep the distance, if you remain cool, what can he do?
When you act moment to moment out of your awareness and watchfulness, great intelligence arises.
Intelligence becomes sharpened only when you act.
Watching should lead you into action,
The man of awareness responds, he is responsible – literally! He is responsive, he does not react.
The real man of understanding acts – acts tremendously, acts totally, but he acts in the moment, out of his consciousness.
Watching is the beginning of spontaneity; spontaneity is the fulfillment of watching.
Your mind functions like a camera, it goes on collecting pictures – it is an album. And then out of those pictures you go on reacting.
The watchful mind, the meditative mind, functions like a mirror. It catches no impression; it remains utterly empty, always empty.
BE SPONTANEOUS
When you act, you are always acting through the past. You are acting out of experience that you have accumulated, you are acting out of the conclusions that you have arrived at in the past – how can you be spontaneous?
Man ordinarily functions out of the past – and life goes on changing. Life has no obligation to fit with your conclusions. That’s why life is confusing – confusing to the knowledgeable person.
Life never raises the same question again; hence the knowledgeable person always falls short.
BE DECISIVE
Mind is never decisive. It is not a question of one person’s mind or another’s; mind is indecisiveness.
It is the mind of the genius that is stuck between two polarities and cannot choose. And then he feels in a limbo.
Unless you move away from the mind and become a witness to all the games of the mind, you will never be decisive.
Mind is basically indecisive, and awareness is basically decisive.
With awareness you have the clarity, totality, the let-go – existence decides within you. You don’t have to think about what is right and wrong.
COMPLETE EACH MOMENT
Live every moment as if there is no other moment to come. Then only will you complete it.
Make every moment complete.
Feel that ‘if I have to do something, I must do it here and now, completely!’
Do not postpone. Live right here and now. And the more you live in the present, the less you will need this constant ‘minding,’ this constant thinking.
We always live in the tomorrow, which never comes and which cannot come; it is impossible.
This constant tension between past and future, this constant missing of the present, is the inner noise. Unless it stops, you cannot fall into silence. So the first thing: try to be total in every moment.
The second thing: your mind is so noisy because you always go on thinking that others are creating it, that you are not responsible.
Put the responsibility on yourself. Be responsible because then something can be done. You can only do something with yourself.
You cannot change anyone else in this world, you can only change yourself. That is the only revolution possible.
The only transformation possible is one’s own.
STOP TRYING TO BE GOOD
The act that becomes a karma is the act that is not really an act but a reaction.
MY WHOLE MESSAGE IS THAT YOU NEED A CONSCIOUSNESS, NOT A CHARACTER.
Consciousness is the real thing, character the false entity.
Character means you have a certain ready-made answer for all the questions of life, so whenever a situation arises, you respond according to the set pattern. Because you respond according to the ready-made answer, it is not a true response, it is only a reaction.
The man of character reacts, the man of consciousness responds: he takes the situation in, he reflects the reality as it is, and out of that reflection he acts.
THE MOMENT YOU START SEEING YOUR FAULTS, THEY START DROPPING LIKE DRY LEAVES.
One can go on committing a certain error only if one remains unconscious of it.
You look at others, you see their reality, and about yourself you carry fictions, beautiful fictions.
Buddhas teach you consciousness not conscience.
Conscience is a trick played upon you by others – others are telling you what is right and what is wrong. They are forcing their ideas upon you,
Conscience is a strategy of society to enslave you.
The inward journey is enough – the deeper you go, the more consciousness is released.
You need inner light, a light that has its source in your very being, a light that cannot be extinguished even by death, a light that is eternal.
The inner light is eternal; it has no beginning, no end.
MORALITY IS CONCERNED WITH GOOD QUALITIES AND BAD QUALITIES. A man is good – according to morality – who is honest, truthful, authentic, trustworthy.
The moment you are conscious of your own being, goodness follows you like a shadow. Then there is no need of any effort to be good; goodness becomes your nature. Just as the trees are green, you are good.
The authentically religious man has no judgment, no condemnation. He knows one thing, that no act is good and no act is bad – awareness is good and unawareness is bad.
Religions have decided to remain only moralities. They are ethical codes; they are useful for society, but not useful for you, not useful for the individual. They are conveniences created by society.
Morality is needed by society; it is a social utility, but it is not a religious revolution.
Don’t be satisfied by just being good.
EXPERIMENTS IN WATCHING
People are watching only others; they never bother to watch themselves.
TIME YOURSELF INTO TIMELESSNESS
The Jain master Mahavira is the first man in history who has actually worked out that if a man can remember, can be aware, for forty-eight minutes continuously, that’s enough – he will become enlightened,
THE INVISIBLE TOUCH
You have known your face only in the mirror, from the without, because you are not a watcher.
VIPASSANA
Buddha’s way was vipassana – vipassana means witnessing.
Anything of the mind can never lead you beyond the mind.
Watching is not a quality of the mind; watching is the quality of the soul, of consciousness.
The world is the same, but I am not the same. And because I am no longer the same, for me the world is also no longer the same.
The transformation has to be inner. This is real renunciation: the old world is gone because the old being is gone.
THE NIGHT SHIFT
If the dreams disappear, then in the daytime your mind’s chattering will not be so much as it used to be. Secondly, you will be more in the moment – not in the future, not in the past. Thirdly, your intensity, your totality of action, will increase.
Dreaming is a disease. It is needed because man is sick. But if dreams can be completely dropped, you will attain a new kind of health, a new vision.
WHEN YOU START WATCHING YOUR DREAMS, YOU WILL FIND FIVE TYPES OF DREAMS HAPPENING.
The first type of dream is just rubbish – and many thousands of psychoanalysts are just working on that rubbish. It is simply useless. It happens because in the whole day, working the whole day, you gather much rubbish.
The unconscious knows no meaning, no purpose. The unconscious knows only one thing: what is needed for your being to become fulfilled. Then the unconscious forces its own dreaming. This is the second type of dream;
Desires are of the conscious mind, needs of the unconscious.
The unconscious is not interested in being the president of the country, the unconscious is interested only in how to be a fulfilled, organic unity.
Always remember: the unconscious is right, because it has the wisdom of the ages.
The unconscious is eternal wisdom. Listen to it.
Third type of dream is a communication from the superconscious.
There is a fourth type of dream, which comes from past lives.
Nothing is new in life; it is a wheel.
There is a fifth type of dream, and the last type – the fourth type is going backward into your past, the fifth type is going forward into the future.
The more you become aware of your dreams, the less and less will you be convinced of the reality of your waking hours. Hence, Hindus say that the world is like a dream.
Whether you dream with closed eyes or you dream with open eyes makes no difference – if the mind is there, all that happens is dream.
When the world is illusory, only the witness is real.
Afterword
HANGING BY A THREAD
If life is momentary, a soap bubble, just a pinprick and it is gone forever… how can you remain unaware? Bring awareness to each act.
THERE ARE TWO PLANES IN YOU. THE PLANE OF THE MIND, AND THE PLANE OF THE NO-MIND.
This is the meaning when Zen masters say, ‘Walk in the river, but don’t allow the water to touch your feet.’ Be in the world, but don’t be of the world. Be in the world, but don’t allow the world to be in you.
When you come home, you come home – as if the whole world has disappeared.
A man of laughter is also a man of tears – then a man is balanced. A man of bliss is also a man of silence.
Out of this togetherness of polarities a balanced being is born. And that is what the goal is.
Read More Like This
- Learning to Silence the Mind by Osho
- Freedom from the Known by J Krishnamurti
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
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Thank you this helped me how to be.