7 day Meditation Therapy
INTRODUCTION OF NO MIND MEDITATION
The first part is gibberish. The word ‘gibberish’ comes from a Sufi mystic, Jabbar. Jabbar never spoke any language, he just uttered nonsense. Still he had thousands of disciples because what he was saying was, ”Your mind is nothing but gibberish. Put it aside and you will have a taste of your own being.”
To use gibberish, don’t say things which are meaningful, don’t use the language that you know. Use Chinese, if you don’t know Chinese. Use Japanese if you don’t know Japanese. Don’t use German if you know German. For the first time have a freedom – the same as all the birds have. Simply allow whatever comes to your mind without bothering about its rationality, reasonability, meaning, significance – just the way the birds are doing.
For the first part, leave language and mind aside. Out of this will arise the second part, a great silence in which you have to close your eyes and freeze your body, all its movements, gather your energy within yourself.
Remain here and now. Zen cannot be understood in any other way.
Live Zen, Chapter 17 " - Osho
WHAT IS MEDITATION?Meditation is a state of no-mind. Meditation is a state of pure consciousness with no content. Ordinarily, your consciousness is too much full of rubbish, just like a mirror covered with dust. The mind is a constant traffic: thoughts are moving, desires are moving, memories are moving, ambitions are moving — it is a constant traffic! day in, day out. Even when you are asleep the mind is functioning, it is dreaming. It is still thinking; it is still in worries and anxieties. It is preparing for the next day; an underground preparation is going on.
This is the state of no meditation — just the opposite is meditation. When there is no traffic and thinking has ceased, no thought moves, no desire stirs, you are utterly silent — that silence is meditation. And in that silence truth is known, and never otherwise. Meditation is a state of no-mind.
And you cannot find meditation through the mind because mind will perpetuate itself. You can find meditation only by putting the mind aside, by being cool, indifferent, unidentified with the mind; by seeing the mind pass, but not getting identified with it, not thinking that “I am it.”
Meditation is the awareness that “I am not the mind.” When the awareness goes deeper and deeper in you, slowly slowly, a few moments arrive — moments of silence, moments of pure space, moments of transparency, moments when nothing stirs in you and everything is still. In those still moments you will know who you are, and you will know what the mystery of this existence is.
And once you have tasted those few dewdrops of nectar, great longing will arise in you to go deeper and deeper into it. Irresistible longing will arise in you, a great thirst. You will become afire!
That’s what sannyas is all about. When you have tasted a few moments of silence, of joy, of meditativeness, you will like this state to become your CONSTANT state, a continuum. The desire to make meditation your whole lifestyle is what sannyas is all about.
And if a few moments are possible, then there is no problem. Slowly slowly, more and more moments will be coming. As you become skillful, as you learn the knack of not getting involved in the mind, as you learn the art of remaining aloof, away from the mind, as you learn the science of creating a distance between you and your own thoughts, more and more meditation will be showering on you. And the more it showers, the more it transforms you.
A day comes, a day of great blessings, when meditation becomes your natural state. Mind is something unnatural; it never becomes your natural state. But meditation is a natural state — which we have lost. It is a paradise lost, but the paradise can be regained. Look into the child’s eyes, look and you will see tremendous silence, innocence. Each child comes with a meditative state, but he has to be initiated into the ways of the society — he has to be taught how to think, how to calculate, how to reason. how to argue; he has to be taught words, language, concepts. And, slowly slowly, he loses contact with his own innocence. He becomes contaminated, polluted by the society. He becomes an efficient mechanism; he is no more a man.
All that is needed is to regain that space once more. You had known it before, so when for the first time you know meditation, you will be surprised — because a great feeling will arise in you as if you have known it before. And that feeling is true: YOU HAVE known it before. You have forgotten. The diamond is lost in piles of rubbish. But if you can uncover it, you will find the diamond again — it is yours.
It cannot really be lost: it can only be forgotten. We are born as meditators, then we learn the ways of the mind. But our real nature remains hidden somewhere deep down like an undercurrent. Any day, a little digging, and you will find the source still flowing, the source of fresh waters. And the greatest joy in life is to find it.
“Philosophia Perennis, Vol 2″ - Osho
QUOTES ON NO-MIND
INTRODUCTION OF NO MIND MEDITATION
The first part is gibberish. The word ‘gibberish’ comes from a Sufi mystic, Jabbar. Jabbar never spoke any language, he just uttered nonsense. Still he had thousands of disciples because what he was saying was, ”Your mind is nothing but gibberish. Put it aside and you will have a taste of your own being.”
To use gibberish, don’t say things which are meaningful, don’t use the language that you know. Use Chinese, if you don’t know Chinese. Use Japanese if you don’t know Japanese. Don’t use German if you know German. For the first time have a freedom – the same as all the birds have. Simply allow whatever comes to your mind without bothering about its rationality, reasonability, meaning, significance – just the way the birds are doing.
For the first part, leave language and mind aside. Out of this will arise the second part, a great silence in which you have to close your eyes and freeze your body, all its movements, gather your energy within yourself.
Remain here and now. Zen cannot be understood in any other way.
Live Zen, Chapter 17 " - Osho
WHAT IS MEDITATION?Meditation is a state of no-mind. Meditation is a state of pure consciousness with no content. Ordinarily, your consciousness is too much full of rubbish, just like a mirror covered with dust. The mind is a constant traffic: thoughts are moving, desires are moving, memories are moving, ambitions are moving — it is a constant traffic! day in, day out. Even when you are asleep the mind is functioning, it is dreaming. It is still thinking; it is still in worries and anxieties. It is preparing for the next day; an underground preparation is going on.
This is the state of no meditation — just the opposite is meditation. When there is no traffic and thinking has ceased, no thought moves, no desire stirs, you are utterly silent — that silence is meditation. And in that silence truth is known, and never otherwise. Meditation is a state of no-mind.
And you cannot find meditation through the mind because mind will perpetuate itself. You can find meditation only by putting the mind aside, by being cool, indifferent, unidentified with the mind; by seeing the mind pass, but not getting identified with it, not thinking that “I am it.”
Meditation is the awareness that “I am not the mind.” When the awareness goes deeper and deeper in you, slowly slowly, a few moments arrive — moments of silence, moments of pure space, moments of transparency, moments when nothing stirs in you and everything is still. In those still moments you will know who you are, and you will know what the mystery of this existence is.
And once you have tasted those few dewdrops of nectar, great longing will arise in you to go deeper and deeper into it. Irresistible longing will arise in you, a great thirst. You will become afire!
That’s what sannyas is all about. When you have tasted a few moments of silence, of joy, of meditativeness, you will like this state to become your CONSTANT state, a continuum. The desire to make meditation your whole lifestyle is what sannyas is all about.
And if a few moments are possible, then there is no problem. Slowly slowly, more and more moments will be coming. As you become skillful, as you learn the knack of not getting involved in the mind, as you learn the art of remaining aloof, away from the mind, as you learn the science of creating a distance between you and your own thoughts, more and more meditation will be showering on you. And the more it showers, the more it transforms you.
A day comes, a day of great blessings, when meditation becomes your natural state. Mind is something unnatural; it never becomes your natural state. But meditation is a natural state — which we have lost. It is a paradise lost, but the paradise can be regained. Look into the child’s eyes, look and you will see tremendous silence, innocence. Each child comes with a meditative state, but he has to be initiated into the ways of the society — he has to be taught how to think, how to calculate, how to reason. how to argue; he has to be taught words, language, concepts. And, slowly slowly, he loses contact with his own innocence. He becomes contaminated, polluted by the society. He becomes an efficient mechanism; he is no more a man.
All that is needed is to regain that space once more. You had known it before, so when for the first time you know meditation, you will be surprised — because a great feeling will arise in you as if you have known it before. And that feeling is true: YOU HAVE known it before. You have forgotten. The diamond is lost in piles of rubbish. But if you can uncover it, you will find the diamond again — it is yours.
It cannot really be lost: it can only be forgotten. We are born as meditators, then we learn the ways of the mind. But our real nature remains hidden somewhere deep down like an undercurrent. Any day, a little digging, and you will find the source still flowing, the source of fresh waters. And the greatest joy in life is to find it.
“Philosophia Perennis, Vol 2″ - Osho
QUOTES ON NO-MIND
- Meditation is a state of no-mind
- 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.
- If you really want to live and not to vegetate, meditation is the only way; and meditation means no-mind… just silence.
- Meditation is when mind is no more at all.
- You have to stand out of your mind, as a watcher. Whatever is going on in the mind, you don’t even interfere. You simply watch. You simply go on seeing it, as if it is somebody else’s mind, and you have nothing to do with it — it is none of your business. In this indifferent aloofness, all thoughts disappear. And with thoughts disappearing there is no mind, because mind is nothing but a collective name of thoughts.
- Truth happens to you in a wordless silence, in deep, deep meditation. When there is no thought. no desire, no ambition, in that state of no-mind truth descends in you — or ascends in you. As far as the dimension of truth is concerned both are the same, because in the world of the innermost subjectivity height and depth mean the same. It is one dimension: the vertical dimension. Mind moves horizontally, no-mind exists vertically. The moment the mind ceases to function — that’s what meditation is all about: cessation of the mind, total cessation of the mind — your consciousness becomes vertical; depth and height are yours.
- Stopping the world is the whole art of meditation. And to live in the moment is to live in eternity. To taste the moment with no idea, with no mind, is to taste immortality.
- A person can use his mind when working on matter; then logic is a great instrument. And the same person can put aside the mind when he moves into his meditation chamber and moves into the no-mind. Because mind is not you — it is just an instrument just like my hand, just like my legs. If I want to walk I use my legs, if I don’t want to walk I don’t use my legs. Exactly in the same way you can use the mind logically if you are trying to know about matter. It is perfectly right, it fits there. And when you are moving inwards, put it aside. Now legs are not needed; thinking is not needed. Now you need a deep silent state of no-thought.
- To be aflame with silence, with joy, is wisdom. It is not through logic but through love. It is not through words but through a wordless state called meditation or a state of no-mind, satori, samadhi.
- If you want to see that which is, then you have to disappear completely. You have to be utterly empty, a nobody, a no-mind, just an empty space. Then life bursts forth with all its splendor.
- Mind is your world. If we take out the mind, your whole world disappears. Meditation is an effort that the world you have known through the mind, disappears, and a new perception of no-mind arises in you. What you cannot see with the mind, you can see with the no-mind. Birth and death have no influence on the no-mind. It simply floats away above birth and death. It has seen many births and many deaths. It does not matter to it, it simply goes on reflecting whatsoever is happening. Nothing leaves a trace on your witnessing. I would like to call this witnessing the buddha. It becomes more understandable, closer.
- Each person has to come back to the Garden of Eden again. The doors are not closed. ‘Knock, and they shall be opened unto you. Ask, and it shall be given.’ But one has to turn back. The path is from doing towards happening, from the ego towards no-ego, from mind towards no-mind. No-mind is what meditation is all about. That different world is nirvana. That different world is God.
- Those who have known the being … and it is not necessary for it that you should die and then you know; you can just go inside. That’s what I call meditation — just go inside and find out what is your center, and at your center there is no breathing, there is no heartbeat, there is no thought, no mind, no heart, no body, and still you are.
- For Gautam Buddha, for Mahavira, for the long tradition of Zen Masters and the Taoists, nothingness simply means no-thingness. All things have disappeared, and because things have disappeared there is pure consciousness left behind. The mirror is empty of any reflection, but the MIRROR IS there. Consciousness is empty of content, but CONSCIOUSNESS IS there. And when it was full of content, so many things were inside you could not have known what it is. When the consciousness is full of contents, that’s what we call mind. When consciousness is empty of all contents, that’s what we call no-mind or meditation.
- Go deeper into meditation, because all these things are part of the mind, and meditation means going into no-mind. Just become aware of your mind, whatsoever it is — Indian male chauvinistic or Russian communistic or Catholic or Protestant. Just become aware. Awareness is neither communist nor socialist nor fascist nor capitalist. Awareness is just awareness. Whatsoever is in the mind, leave it there as an object and be aware. And you shift your identity from the content to the consciousness.
- A real seeker has to be in the state that Dionysius calls AGNOSIA — a state of not-knowing. Socrates said at the very end of his life, “I know only one thing, that I know nothing.” This is the state of a true seeker. In the East we call this state meditation: no belief, no thought, no desire, no prejudice, no conditioning — in fact, no mind at all. A state of no-mind is meditation. When you can look without any mind interfering, distorting, interpreting, then you see the truth. The truth is already all around; just you have to put your mind aside.
- When you get deeper into meditation and leave the world of words and speech, you suddenly find there is an empty mind beyond them which is your real mind. To distinguish it, we call it the empty heart. Either to call it no-mind, real-mind, empty heart… they are all synonymous. But ordinarily, you are so close to thinking, emotions, words, that you cannot conceive there is a sky beyond the clouds, that there is a full moon beyond the clouds. You will have to go beyond the clouds to see the moon.
- The mind is very fertile about questions; about answers it is impotent. The mind has no answers, it has only questions. Meditation has only answers and no questions, and meditation is a state of no-mind.
- There have been people who stopped all those mind-games, but the only way to stop those mind-games is meditation; there has never been any other way. Meditation means entering into a state of no-mind.
- Meditation covers a very long pilgrimage. When I say “meditation is witnessing”, it is the beginning of meditation. And when I say “meditation is no-mind,” it is the completion of the pilgrimage. Witnessing is the beginning, and no-mind is the fulfillment. Witnessing is the method to reach the no-mind.
- Meditation simply means that you are silent; that there are not thoughts in the mind; that there is an immense space with no clouds, thoughts. And in that space, there is only one thing left, which is the witness, or the consciousness.
- The distinction between the subjective and the objective art is basically based on meditation. Anything that comes out of the mind will remain subjective art, and anything that comes out of no-mind, out of silence, out of meditation, will be objective art.
- Just try to understand, just try to understand, and the very understanding becomes meditation. Just try to understand the nature of the mind, that it goes right and left, past and future, moves from one thought to another. It is a monkey. Just try to understand, just try to watch what mind is. And just in watching what mind is, suddenly one day you will feel something has clicked, something has changed gear; you are no longer the same. Something unknown has entered into you. There is no mind; meditation has come in. just by trying to understand.
- It is certainly difficult in the harsh environment of the West to grow into meditation. But it is not impossible. It is certainly arduous, because the whole surrounding is against meditation. Everything is mind-oriented and meditation is a state of no-mind. The whole education, the culture, the society, the people, they are all believers that there is nothing beyond mind. Mind is their whole world.
- No-mind is a simple word, but it exactly means enlightenment, liberation, freedom from all bondage, experience of deathlessness and immortality.
- You will have to shift your emphasis from mind to meditation, and all fear will disappear. You will have to shift your attention from your comfortable, cozy, but old and dirty and rotten state towards something new, fresh, young — from the body to the consciousness, from mind to no-mind. Then every moment you are confronting the new.
- Concentration is objective. Meditation has no object to it. And in this choiceless awareness, mind disappears — because mind can remain only if consciousness is narrow. If the consciousness is wide, wide open, the mind cannot exist. Mind can exist only with choice.
- Drugs like Ecstasy cannot reach your consciousness. They can only reach your mind. They have nothing parallel to meditation. Meditation reaches your consciousness. It is a state of no-mind. And drugs like Ecstasy reach only to the mind, and give you a euphoria, beautiful dreams, fantasies which appear to be real. So when people tell you that they have experienced so many beautiful things, you feel sad. You have been meditating and you have not felt anything and these people are feeling things through an ordinary, chemical drug. Their experiences will not happen to you. The path of the drug and the path of meditation are totally different. On the path of meditation, you will experience silence; you will experience a joy without any reason; you will experience immense light, a luminosity arising from your very center — as if you have become a star. But these things only happen in the beginning part of meditation. As meditation grows, all experiences start going. The ultimate in meditation is a state of no experience. Just pure nothingness — because that is the source of existence and that is the place where existence goes again and again to renew itself.
- Once you know how to slip out of your mind, a totally different psychology will be founded on the art of slipping out of the mind. A person who can get out of his mind helps the mind to cool down. The mind is getting no more energy — it cools, calms down on its own accord. That’s why I have said meditation is a medicine too — and both words come from the same root.
- We go on discriminating, we say ‘This is bad, that is good. This is sin, and that is virtue. This should be done and that should not be done.’ We are continuously discriminating, and through discrimination we go on feeding the mind; the mind becomes more and more strong. All discrimination is of the mind, and helps the mind. When discrimination disappears, mind disappears. And to be in a state of no-mind is meditation.
- Mind never meets the truth, never encounters the truth. The ways of the mind and the ways of the truth are absolutely separate. It is a separate reality. Hence the insistence of all the mystics of the world to attain to a state of no-mind. That’s what meditation is all about: a state of no-mind, a state of non-thinking — yet fully aware, luminous with awareness. When there is not a single thought, your sky is clean of all clouds, and then the sun shines bright.
- Meditation has nothing to do with mind; meditation simply means a state of no-mind. The functioning of the mind is the only disturbance in meditation. If you are trying to achieve meditation THROUGH mind you are bound to fail, doomed to fail. You are trying to achieve the impossible.
- You can do only one thing and that is to learn the art of watching, watching without any judgment. Then one day you simply relax, and in that total relaxation there is pure awareness. All thoughts disappear, all desires disappear; the mind is found no more. When mind is not found, this is meditation. A state of no-mind is meditation.
