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Overview
One of the greatest spiritual teachers of the twentieth century will show you how to develop your sense of being in the now—and avoid the distractions of both your busy environment and your wandering mind.
When the mind disappears and thoughts disappear, you become mindful. What is mindfulness? It is awareness. It is perfect awareness.
In Mindfulness in the Modern World: How Do I Make Meditation Part of Everyday Life?, Osho helps us explore both the inner and the outer obstacles that prevent us from bringing more awareness to all our daily activities. He emphasizes that while techniques can be useful in pointing the way, in themselves they are not meditation. Rather, meditation—or mindfulness—is ultimately a state of being in which we are capable of both action and stillness, work and play, and able to be fully present to each moment of life as it comes. Osho’s insights into the nature of the modern mind, with its tendency to judge and compare, provides a helpful entry point for longtime meditators as well as beginners.
Mindfulness in the Modern World covers a wide range of topics, including five experiential techniques that will help you bring awareness to your everyday life.
Osho challenges readers to examine and break free of the conditioned belief systems and prejudices that limit their capacity to enjoy life in all its richness. He has been described by the Sunday Times of London as one of the “1000 Makers of the 20th Century” and by Sunday Mid-Day(India) as one of the ten people—along with Gandhi, Nehru, and Buddha—who have changed the destiny of India. Since his death in 1990, the influence of his teachings continues to expand, reaching seekers of all ages in virtually every country of the world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466847323 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/08/2014 |
| Series: | Osho Life Essentials |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 832 KB |
About the Author
Osho is one of the most provocative and inspiring spiritual teachers of the twentieth century. Known for his revolutionary contribution to the science of inner transformation, the influence of his teachings continues to grow, reaching seekers of all ages in virtually every country of the world. He is the author of many books, including Love, Freedom, Aloneness; The Book of Secrets; and Innocence, Knowledge, and Wonder.
Read an Excerpt
Mindfulness in the Modern World
How Do I Make Meditation Part of Everyday Life?
By Osho
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2014 OSHO International Foundation, New YorkAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-4732-3
CHAPTER 1
Many Diseases, Only One Medicine
What is meditation? It is just putting the mind aside. Being without the mind for a few moments is meditation. And once you know for a few moments, you have the key. Then whenever you need, you can move withinward. It is just like ingoing breath, outgoing breath: you go out in the world, it is outgoing breath; you come in, it is ingoing breath. Meditation is ingoing breath.
So forget about your problems, just move into meditation. And the deeper you will move, the more the false things will disappear.
What is meditation?
It is the most important question as far as I am concerned. Meditation is the very center of my whole effort. It is the very womb out of which a new religiousness is going to be born. But it is very difficult to verbalize it: to say something about meditation is a contradiction in terms.
It is something that you can have, that you can be, but by its very nature you cannot say what it is. Still, efforts have been made to convey it in some way. Even if only a fragmentary, partial understanding arises out of it, that is more than one can expect. Even that partial understanding of meditation can become a seed. Much depends on how you listen. If you only hear, then not even a fragment can be conveyed to you. But if you listen ... Try to understand the difference between the two.
Hearing is mechanical. You have ears, you can hear. If you are going deaf then a mechanical aid can help you to hear. Your ears are nothing but a certain mechanism to receive sounds. Hearing is very simple: animals hear, anybody who has ears is capable of hearing — but listening is a far higher stage.
Listening means that when you are hearing, you are only hearing and not doing anything else — there are no other thoughts in your mind, no clouds passing in your inner sky, so whatever is being said reaches as it is being said. It is not interfered with by your mind; it is not interpreted by you, by your prejudices — not clouded by anything that, right now, is passing within you, because all these are distortions.
Ordinarily it is not difficult; you go on managing just by hearing, because the things that you are hearing are common objects. If I say something about the house, the door, the tree, the bird, there is no problem. These are common objects; there is no need of listening. But there is a need to listen when we are talking about something like meditation, which is not an object at all; it is a subjective state. We can only indicate it; you have to be very attentive and alert — then there is a possibility that some meaning reaches you.
Even if a little understanding arises in you it is more than enough, because understanding has its own way of growing. If just a little bit of understanding falls in the right place, in the heart, it starts growing of its own accord.
First try to understand the word meditation. It is not the right word for the state about which any authentic seeker is bound to be concerned. So I would like to tell you something about a few words. In Sanskrit we have a special word for meditation; the word is dhyana. In no other language does a parallel word exist; that word is untranslatable. It has been recognized for two thousand years that this word is untranslatable for the simple reason that in no other language have people tried it or experienced the state that it denotes; so those languages don't have that word. A word is needed only when there is something to say, something to designate.
In English there are three words. The first is concentration. I have seen many books written by very well-meaning people but not people who have experienced meditation. They go on using the word concentration for dhyana — dhyana is not concentration. Concentration simply means your mind focused on one point; it is a state of mind. Ordinarily the mind is continuously moving, but if it continuously moves you cannot work with the mind on a certain subject. For example, in science concentration is needed; without concentration there is no possibility of science. It is not surprising that science has not evolved in the East — I see these deep inner connections — because concentration was never valued. For religion something else is needed, not concentration.
Concentration is mind focused on one point. It has its utility because then you can go deeper and deeper into a certain object. That's what science goes on doing: finding out more and more about the objective world. A man with a mind that is continuously roaming around cannot be a scientist. The whole art of the scientist is that he is capable of forgetting the whole world and putting his whole consciousness on one thing. And when the whole consciousness is poured into one thing then it is almost like concentrating sun rays through a lens: then you can create fire. Those rays themselves cannot create fire because they are diffused; they are spreading out, moving farther away from each other. Their movement is just the opposite of concentration. Concentration means rays coming together and meeting on one point, and when so many rays meet on one point they have enough energy to create fire.
Consciousness has the same quality: concentrate it and you can penetrate deeper into the mysteries of objects.
I am reminded of Thomas Edison — one of the great scientists of America. He was working on something so concentratedly that when his wife came with his breakfast, she saw that he was so involved that he had not even heard her coming. He had not even looked at her, he was not aware that she was there, and she knew that this was not the right time to disturb him: "Of course the breakfast will get cold, but he will be really angry if I disturb him — one never knows where he is." So she simply put the breakfast by his side so that whenever he came back from his journey of concentration he would see the breakfast and take it. But what happened? In the meantime a friend dropped by — he also saw Edison so concentrated. He looked at the breakfast getting cold and said, "Better let him do his work. I should eat the breakfast, it is getting cold." He finished the breakfast and Edison was not even aware that this friend was there and had eaten his breakfast.
When he returned from his concentration, he looked around and saw the friend and saw the empty plates. He told the friend, "Please forgive me. You came a little late and I have already taken my breakfast." Obviously because the plates were empty, somebody had eaten breakfast, and who else could have eaten it? He must have! The poor friend could not figure out what to do. He was thinking to give him a surprise but this man had given him a bigger surprise: he said, "You came a little late ..."
But the wife was watching the whole thing. She came in and she said, "He has not come late, you have come late! He has finished your breakfast. I was watching, but I saw that it was getting cold anyway; at least somebody ate it. You are some scientist! How you manage your science I cannot understand." The wife said, "You don't even know who has eaten your breakfast, and you are asking his forgiveness!"
Concentration is always the narrowing of your consciousness. The narrower it becomes, the more powerful it is. It is like a sword that cuts into any secret of nature; you have to become oblivious of everything. But this is not meditation. Many people have misunderstood — not only in the West, but in the East, too. They think that concentration is meditation. It gives you tremendous powers, but those powers are of the mind.
For example, the king of Varanasi in India went through an operation in 1920 — just in this century — and created news all over the world because of his surgery. He refused to take any anesthetic. He said, "I have taken a vow not to take anything that makes me unconscious, so I cannot be put under anesthesia; but you need not be worried." It was an operation to remove his appendix. Now, to take out somebody's appendix without giving him anesthetics is really dangerous; you may kill the man. He may not be able to bear the pain, because the pain is going to be terrible. You have to cut into his stomach; you have to cut out his appendix, you have to remove it. It will take an hour, two hours — and one never knows in what condition his appendix is.
But he was no ordinary man either; otherwise they could have forced him — he was the king of Varanasi. But he said to the doctors, "Don't be worried" — and the best doctors available in India were there; an expert from England was there. They all consulted, and nobody was ready to do this operation but the surgery had to be done; otherwise any moment the appendix could kill the man. The situation was serious, and both the alternatives seemed to be serious: if you left him without the operation he might die; if you did the operation without making him unconscious ... which had never been done, there was no precedent.
But the king said, "You don't understand me. There has never been any precedent because you have never operated on a man like the man you are going to operate upon. Just give me my religious book, Shrimad Bhagavad Gita. I will read it, and after five minutes you can start your work. Once I am involved in the Gita then you can cut any part of my body and I will not be even aware of it; there is no question of pain."
When he insisted ... and anyway he was going to die, so there was no harm in trying. Perhaps he was right — he was well known for his religious practices. So this was done. He read the Gita for five minutes and closed his eyes; the Gita dropped from his hands, and they did the operation. It took one and a half hours. It was really serious; only a few hours more and the appendix may have exploded and killed the man. They removed the appendix and the man was completely conscious, silent — not even a flicker of his eyes. He was somewhere else.
That was his lifelong practice: just to read for five minutes, then he was on the track. He knew the Gita verbally, he could repeat it without the book. Once he started going into the Gita then he was really in the Gita. His mind was there — it left his body totally.
That operation made news all over the world; it was a rare operation. But the same mistake was committed again. Every newspaper had it that the rajah, the king of Varanasi, was a man of great meditation.
He was a man of great concentration, not of meditation.
He also was in the same confusion; he also thought that he had reached to the state of meditation. It was not. It is just that your mind is so focused that everything else falls out of its focus; you are unaware of it. It is not a state of awareness, it is a state of narrowed consciousness — so narrowed that it becomes one-pointed and the rest of existence falls out of it.
So before I answer your question, "What is meditation?" you have to understand what it is not. First, it is not concentration. Second, it is not contemplation.
Concentration is one-pointed; contemplation has a wider field. You are contemplating beauty. ... There are thousands of things that are beautiful; you can go on moving from one beautiful thing to another. You have many experiences of beauty; you can go from one experience to another. You remain confined to the subject matter. Contemplation is a wider concentration — not one-pointed, but confined to one subject. You will be moving, your mind will be moving, but it will remain within the subject matter.
Philosophy uses contemplation as its method; science uses concentration as its method. In contemplation also you are forgetting everything else other than your subject matter. The subject matter is bigger, and you have more space to move. In concentration there is no space to move: you can go deeper and deeper, narrower and narrower; you can become more and more pointed, but you don't have space to move around. Hence scientists are very narrow-minded people. You will be surprised when I say this.
One would think that scientists would be very open-minded. That is not the case. As far as their subject is concerned, they are absolutely open-minded: they are ready to listen to anything contrary to their theory, and with absolute fairness. But except in that particular matter, they are more prejudiced, more bigoted than the ordinary, common man, for the simple reason that they have never bothered about anything else: they have simply accepted whatsoever society believes in.
Many religious people brag about it: "Look, he is such a great scientist, a Nobel Prize winner," and this and that, "and yet he comes to church every day." They forget completely that it is not the Nobel Prize–winning scientist who comes to the church. It is not the scientist who comes to the church, it is the man without his scientific part who comes to the church. And that man, except for the scientific part, is far more gullible than anybody else — because everybody is open, available, thinks about things; compares to see what religion is good, sometimes reads also about other religions; and has some common sense, which scientists don't have.
To be a scientist you have to sacrifice a few things — for example, common sense. Common sense is a common quality of common people. A scientist is an uncommon person, he has an uncommon sense. With common sense you cannot discover the theory of relativity or the law of gravitation. With common sense you can do everything else.
For example, Albert Einstein dealt with such big figures that only one figure would take up the whole page — hundreds of zeros following it. But he became so involved with big figures — which is uncommon, but he was thinking only of stars, light years, millions, billions, trillions of stars, and counting them — that about small things he became oblivious.
One day he entered a bus and gave the conductor the money. The conductor returned some change; Einstein counted it and said, "This is not right, you are cheating me. Give me the full change."
The driver took the change, counted it again, and said, "Mister, it seems you don't know figures."
Einstein remembers: "When he said to me, 'Mister, you don't know figures,' then I simply took the change. I said to myself, 'It is better to keep silent. If somebody else hears that I don't know figures, and that too from a conductor of a bus ...' What have I been doing my whole life? Figures and figures — I don't dream about anything else. No women appear, no men appear — only figures. I think in figures, I dream in figures, and this idiot says to me, 'You don't know figures.'"
When he came back home, he told his wife, "Just count this change. How much is it?" She counted it and said, "It is the right change."
He said, "My God! This means the conductor was right: perhaps I don't know figures. Perhaps I can only deal with immense figures; small figures have fallen out of my mind completely."
A scientist is bound to lose his common sense. The same happens to the philosopher. Contemplation is wider, but still confined to a certain subject. For example, one night Socrates was thinking about something — one never knows what he was thinking about — standing by the side of a tree, and he became so absorbed in his contemplation that he became completely oblivious that snow was falling; and in the morning he was found almost frozen. Up to his knees there was snow, and he was standing there with closed eyes. He was almost on the verge of death; even his blood might have started freezing.
He was brought home; a massage was given to him, alcohol was given to him, and somehow he was brought to his common senses. They asked him, "What were you doing there, standing outside in the open?"
He said, "I had no idea whether I was standing or sitting, or where I was. The subject was so absorbing that I went totally with it. I don't know when the snow started falling or when the whole night passed. I would have died, but I would not have come to my senses because the subject was so absorbing. I was still unfinished; it was a whole theory, and you have awakened me in the middle. Now I don't know whether I will be able to get hold of the unfinished theory."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mindfulness in the Modern World by Osho. Copyright © 2014 OSHO International Foundation, New York. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Introduction,
1. Many Diseases, Only One Medicine,
2. Be Ready to Be Surprised,
3. Mindfulness in the Modern World,
4. The Watcher Is Never Part of the Mind,
5. Bitter in the Beginning, Sweet in the End,
Epilogue,
Appendix: Five Techniques to Support Mindfulness,
OSHO International Meditation Resort,
About OSHO,
For More Information,
Also by Osho,
Copyright,