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Thats why the mystics appear to be in such difficulty to express it. Many of them have
remained silent out of the awareness that whatsoever you say goes wrong; the moment you
say it, it goes wrong. Those who have spoken, they have spoken with the condition:
Dont cling to our words.
Lao Tzu says: Tao, once described, is no more the real Tao. The moment you say
something about it you have already falsified it, you have betrayed it. It is such an intimate
knowing, incommunicable.
Who am I? functions like a sword to cut all the answers that the mind can manage. Zen
people will say it is a koan, just like other koans. There are many koans, famous koans.
One is: Find out your original face. And the disciple asks the Master, What is the
original face? And the Master says, The face that you had before your parents were
born.
And you start meditating on that: What is your original face? Naturally, you have to deny
all your faces. Many faces will start surfacing: childhood faces, when you were young,
when you became middle-aged, when you became old, when you were healthy, when you
were ill. All kinds of faces will stand in a queue. They will pass before your eyes
claiming, I am the original face. And you have to go on rejecting.
When all the faces have been rejected and emptiness is left, you have found the original
face. Emptiness is the original face. Zero is the ultimate experience. Nothingness or more
accurately NO-THINGNESS is your original face.
Or another famous koan is: The sound of one hand clapping. The Master says to the
disciple, Go and listen to the sound of one hand clapping. Now this is patent absurdity:
one hand cannot clap and without clapping there can be no sound. The Master knows it, the
disciple knows it. But when the Master says, Go and meditate on it, the disciple has to
follow.
He starts making efforts to listen to the sound of one hand clapping. Many sounds come to
his mind: the birds singing, the sound of running water. He rushes immediately to the
Master; he says, I have heard it! The sound of running water isnt that the sound of one
hand clapping?
And the Master hits him hard on the head and he says, You fool! Go back, meditate
more!
And he goes on meditating, and the mind goes on providing new answers: The sound of
wind passing through the pine trees certainly this is the answer. He is in such a hurry!
Everybody is in such a hurry. Impatiently he rushes to the door of the Master, a little bit
apprehensive, afraid too, but maybe this is the answer.
And even before he has said a single thing the Master hits him! He is very much puzzled
and he says, This is too much! I have not even uttered a single word, so how can I be
wrong? And why are you hitting me?
The Master says, It is not a question of whether you have uttered something or not. You
have come with an answer that is enough proof that you must be wrong. When you have
REALLY found it you wont come; there will be no need. I will come to you.
Sometimes years pass, and then one day it has happened, there is no answer. First the
disciple knew that there was no answer to it, but it was only an intellectual knowing. Now
he knows from his very core: There is no answer! All answers have evaporated. And the
sure sign that all answers have evaporated is only one: when the question also evaporates.
Now he is sitting silently doing nothing, not even meditating. He has forgotten the question:
What is the sound of one hand clapping? It is no more there. It is PURE silence.
And there are waysthere are inner paths which exist between a Master and a disciple.
And now the Master rushes towards the disciple. He knocks on his door. He hugs the
disciple and says, So it has happened? This is it! No answer, no question: this is it. Ah,
this!
-Osho
From Ah This!, Chapter Two
Copyright OSHO International Foundation
An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read
the entire book online at the Osho Library.
Many of Oshos books are available online from Amazon.com and in the U.S.
from OshoStore-Sedona and Osho Here and Now.
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M: Watch it, and it shall cease. Use every opportunity to remind yourself that you are in
bondage, that whatever happens to you is due to the fact of your bodily existence. Desire,
fear, trouble, joy, they cannot appear unless you are there to appear to. Yet, whatever
happens, points to your existence as a perceiving centre. Disregard the pointers and be
aware of what they are pointing to. It is quite simple, but it needs be done. What matters is
the persistence with which you keep on returning to yourself.
Q: I do get into peculiar states of deep absorption into myself, but unpredictably and
momentarily. I do not feel myself to be in control of such states.
M: The body is a material thing and needs time to change. The mind is but a set of mental
habits, of ways of thinking and feeling, and to change they must be brought to the surface
and examined. This also takes time. Just resolve and persevere, the rest will take care of
itself.
Q: I seem to have a clear idea of what needs be done, but I find myself getting tired and
depressed and seeking human company and thus wasting time that should be given to
solitude and meditation.
M: Do what you feel like doing. Dont bully yourself. Violence will make you hard and
rigid. Do not fight with what you take to be obstacles on your way. Just be interested in
them, watch them, observe, enquire. Let anything happen good or bad. But dont let
yourself be submerged by what happens.
Q: What is the purpose in reminding oneself all the time that one is the watcher?
M: The mind must learn that beyond the moving mind there is the background of
awareness, which does not change. The mind must come to know the true self and respect it
and cease covering it up, like the moon which obscures the sun during solar eclipse. Just
realise that nothing observable or experienceable is you, or binds you. Take no notice of
what is not yourself.
Q: To do what you tell me I must be ceaselessly aware.
M: To be aware is to be awake. Unaware means asleep. You are aware anyhow; you need
not try to be. What you need is to be aware of being aware. Be aware deliberately and
consciously, broaden and deepen the field of awareness. You are always conscious of the
mind, but you are not aware of yourself as being conscious.
Q: As I can make out, you give distinct meanings to the words mind, consciousness, and
awareness.
M: Look at it this way. The mind produces thoughts ceaselessly, even when you do not
look at them. When you know what is going on in your mind, you call it consciousness.
This is your waking state your consciousness shifts from sensation to sensation, from
perception to perception, from idea to idea, in endless succession. Then comes awareness,
the direct insight into the whole of consciousness, the totality of the mind. The mind is like
a river, flowing ceaselessly in the bed of the body; you identify yourself for a moment with
some particular ripple and call it: my thought. All you are conscious of is your mind;
awareness is the cognisance of consciousness as a whole.
Q: Everybody is conscious, but not everybody is aware.
M: Dont say: everybody is conscious. Say: there is consciousness, in which everything
appears and disappears. Our minds are just waves on the ocean of consciousness. As waves
they come and go. As ocean they are infinite and eternal. Know yourself as the ocean of
being, the womb of all existence. These are all metaphors of course; the reality is beyond
description. You can know it only by being it.
Q: Is the search for it worth the trouble?
M: Without it all is trouble. If you want to live sanely, creatively and happily and have
infinite riches to share, search for what you are.
While the mind is centred in the body and consciousness is centred in the mind, awareness
is free. The body has its urges and mind its pains and pleasures. Awareness is unattached
and unshaken. It is lucid, silent, peaceful, alert and unafraid, without desire and fear.
Meditate on it as your true being and try to be it in your daily life, and you shall realise it in
its fullness.
Mind is interested in what happens, while awareness is interested in the mind itself. The
child is after the toy, but the mother watches the child, not the toy.
By looking tirelessly, I became quite empty and with that emptiness all came back to me
except the mind. I find I have lost the mind irretrievably.
Q: As you talk to us just now, are you unconscious?
M: I am neither conscious nor unconscious; I am beyond the mind and its various states
and conditions. Distinctions are created by the mind and apply to the mind only. I am pure
Consciousness itself, unbroken awareness of all that is. I am in a more real state than yours.
I am undistracted by the distinctions and separations which constitute a person. As long as
the body lasts, it has its needs like any other, but my mental process has come to an end.
a body, you appear to be embodied. Without the body you are not disembodied you
Just are.
Even destiny is but an idea. Words can be put together in so many ways! Statements can
differ, but do they make any change in the actual? There are so many theories devised for
explaining things all are plausible, none is true. When you drive a car, you are subjected
to the laws of mechanics and chemistry: step out of the car and you are under the laws of
physiology and biochemistry.
Q: What is meditation and what are its uses?
M: As long as you are a beginner certain formalised meditations or prayers may be good
for you. But for a seeker for reality there is only one meditation the rigorous refusal to
harbour thoughts. To be free from thoughts is itself meditation.
Q: How is it done?
M: You begin by letting thoughts flow and watching them. The very observation slows
down the mind till it stops altogether. Once the mind is quiet, keep it quiet. Dont get bored
with peace, be in it, go deeper into it.
Q: I heard of holding on to one thought in order to keep other thoughts away. But how to
keep all thoughts away? The very idea is also a thought.
M: Experiment anew, dont go by past experience. Watch your thoughts and watch yourself
watching the thoughts. The state of freedom from all thoughts will happen suddenly and by
the bliss of it you shall recognise it.
Q: Are you not at all concerned about the state of the world? Look at the horrors in East
Pakistan [1971, now Bangladesh]. Do they not touch you at all?
M: I am reading newspapers; I know what is going on! But my reaction is not like yours.
You are looking for a cure, while I am concerned with prevention. As long as there are
causes, there must also be results. As long as people are bent on dividing and separating, as
long as they are selfish and aggressive, such things will happen. If you want peace and
harmony in the world, you must have peace and harmony in your hearts and minds. Such
change cannot be imposed; it must come from within. Those who abhor war must get war
out of their system. Without peaceful people how can you have peace in the world? As long
as people are as they are, the world must be as it is. I am doing my part in trying to help
people to know themselves as the only cause of their own misery. In that sense I am a
useful man. But what I am in myself, what is my normal state cannot be expressed in terms
of social consciousness and usefulness.
I may talk about it, use metaphors or parables, but I am acutely aware that it is just not so.
Not that it cannot be experienced. It is experiencing itself! But it cannot be described in the
terms of a mind that must separate and oppose in order to know.
The world is like a sheet of paper on which something is typed. The reading and the
meaning will vary with the reader, but the paper is the common factor, always present,
rarely perceived. When the ribbon is removed, typing leaves no trace on the paper. So is my
mind the impressions keep on coming, but no trace is left.
Q: Why do you sit here talking to people? What is your real motive?
M: No motive. You say I must have a motive. I am not sitting here, nor talking: no need to
search for motives. Dont confuse me with the body. I have no work to do, no duties to
perform. That part of me which you may call God will look after the world. This world of
yours, that so much needs looking after, lives and moves in your mind. Delve into it, you
will find your answers there and there only. Where else do you expect them to come from?
Outside your consciousness does anything exist?
Q: It may exist without my ever knowing it.
M: What kind of existence would it be? Can being be divorced from knowing? All being,
like all knowing, relates to you. A thing is because you know it to be either in your
experience or in your being. Your body and your mind exist as long as you believe so.
Cease to think that they are yours and they will just dissolve. By all means let your body
and mind function, but do not let them limit you. If you notice imperfections, just keep on
noticing: your very giving attention to them will set your heart and mind and body right.
Q: Can I cure myself of a serious illness by merely taking cognisance of it?
M: Take cognisance of the whole of it, not only of the outer symptoms. All illness begins in
the mind. Take care of the mind first, by tracing and eliminating all wrong ideas and
emotions. Then live and work disregarding illness and think no more of it. With the
removal of causes the effect is bound to depart.
Man becomes what he believes himself to be. Abandon all ideas about yourself and you
will find yourself to be the pure witness, beyond all that can happen to the body or the
mind.
Q: If I become anything I think myself to be, and I start thinking that I am the Supreme
Reality, will not my Supreme Reality remain a mere idea?
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Then I saw that the question came from the center but the replies touched only the
periphery. The question was mine, but the answers came from outside; the question arose
from my innermost being, the replies were imposed from outside. This insight became a
revolution. A new dimension was revealed.
The responses of the intellect were meaningless. They had no relevance to the problem. An
illusion had shattered. And what a relief it was!
It seemed as if a closed door had been flung open, filling the darkness with light. The
intellect had been providing the answers that was the mistake. Because of these false
answers, the real answer could not arise. Some truth was struggling to surface. In the depths
of consciousness some seed was seeking the way to break open the ground in order to reach
the light. Intellect was the obstruction.
When this was made plain, the answers began to subside. Knowledge acquired from outside
began to evaporate. The question went ever deeper. I did not do anything, only kept on
watching.
Something novel was happening. I was speechless. What was there to do? I was, at the
most, simply a witness. The reactions of the periphery were fading, perishing, becoming
nonexistent. The center now began to resonate more fully.
Who am I? My entire being was throbbing with this thirst.
What a violent storm it was! Every breath quaked and trembled in it.
Who am I? Like an arrow, the question pierced through everything and moved within.
I remember what an acute thirst it was! My very life had turned into thirst. Everything
was burning. And like a flame of fire the question stood forth, Who am I?
The surprise was that the intellect was completely silent. The incessant flow of thoughts
had stopped. What had happened? The periphery was absolutely still. There were no
thoughts, no conditioning of the past.
Only I was there and there was the question too. No, no I myself was the question.
And then the explosion. In a moment, everything was transformed. The question had
dropped.
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Who Am I?
My father is the sky in which I breathe
My mother is the earth on which I walk
I know their son but I am not he.
Then, who am I?
My heart is love
My head insight
I am both, no neither.
So, who am I?
When I close my eyes, the whole world disappears
When I open my eyes, I am reborn
I witness all of life.
But, who Is this I?
-purushottama
This post is from a collection of essays, stories, insights and poems that have occurred to
me along the Way titled Here to Now and Behind.
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Osho on Who am I?
Would you please talk about the sadhana based on holding as much as possible to the I
thought or the sense I AM and on asking oneself the questions, Who am I? or From
where does the I arise? In what way does this approach to meditation differ from that of
watching the gaps between ones in-breath and out-breath? Does it make any difference
whether one witnesses the breath focusing on the heart center or on the lower belly center?
It is an ancient method of meditation, but full of dangers. Unless you are alert, the greater
possibility is that you will be led astray by the method rather than to the right goal. The
method is simpleconcentrating yourself on the concept of I, closing your eyes and
inquiring, Who am I?
The greatest problem is that when you ask Who am I who is going to answer you?
Most probably the answer will come from your tradition, from your scriptures, from your
conditioning. You have heard that I am not the body, I am not the mind. I am the soul, I am
the ultimate, Brahma, I am God all these kinds of thoughts you have heard before.
You will ask a few times, Who am I? Who am I?And then you will say, I am ultimate,
BRAHMA. And this is not a discovery, this is simply stupid. If you want to go rightly into
the method, then the question has not to be verbally asked. Who am I? has not to be
repeated verbally. Because as long as it remains a verbal question, you will supply a verbal
answer from the head. You have to drop the verbal question. It has to remain just a vague
idea, just like a thirst. Not that I am thirsty,can you see the difference? When you are
thirsty, you feel the thirst. And if you are in a desert, you feel the thirst in every fiber of
your body. You dont say, I am thirsty, I am thirsty. It is no longer a linguistic question, it
is existential.
If Who am I? is an existential question, if you are not asking it in language but instead
the feeling of the question is settling inside your center, then there is no need for any
answer. Then it is none of the minds business. The mind will not hear that which is nonverbal, and the mind will not answer that which is non-verbal.
All your scriptures are in the mind, all your knowledge is gathered there.
Now you are entering an innocent space. You will not get the answer. You will get the feel,
you will get the taste, you will get the smell. As you go deeper, you will be filled more with
the feeling of being, of immortality, blissfulness, silence a tremendous benediction.
But there is no answer like, I am this, I am that. All that is from the scriptures. This
feeling is from you, and this feeling has a truth about it. It is a perfectly valid method.
One of the great masters of this century, Raman Maharshi, used only this method for his
disciples: Who am I? But I have come across hundreds of his disciplesthey are
nowhere near the ultimate experience. And the reason is because they know the answer
already.
I have asked them, Do you know the answer?
They said, We know the answer.
I said, If you know the answer, then why are you asking? And your asking cannot go on
very longdo it two or three times and the answer comes. The answer was already there,
before the question. So it is just a mind game. If you want to play it, you can play it. But if
you really want to go into it as it was meant by Raman Maharshi, and by all the ancient
seers, it is a nonverbal thirst.
Not knowing oneself hurts, it is a wound. Not knowing oneself makes the whole of life
meaningless. You may know everything, only you do not know yourselfand that would
be the first thing to know. So if you can avoid the danger of falling into a verbal question, it
is perfectly good, you can go ahead.
You have also asked about witnessing, watching the breath and where one should watch.
Anywherebecause the question is not where you are watching, the question is that you
are watching. The emphasis is on watching, watchfulness. All those points are just excuses.
You can watch the breath at the tip of the nose where the breath goes in, you can watch it
while it is going in, you can watch it when it returnsyou can watch it anywhere. You can
watch thoughts moving inside. The whole point is not to get lost in what you are watching,
as if that is important. That is not important. The important thing is that you are watchful,
that you have not forgotten to watch, that you are watching watching watching.
And slowly, slowly, as the watcher becomes more and more solid, stable, unwavering, a
transformation happens. The things that you were watching disappear. For the first time, the
watcher itself becomes the watched; the observer itself becomes the observed. You have
come home.
-Osho
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J. Krishnamurti Books
Difficulties for Spiritual Seekers, Before and After Enlightenment - Baba Purnanand
Bharati
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