A Course in Meditation Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Osho International Foundation, www.osho.com/copyrights

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  harmonybooks.com

  Harmony Books is a registered trademark, and the Circle colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  OSHO® and OSHO MEDITATION® are registered trademarks of Osho International Foundation.

  This book is compiled from multiple original talks by Osho, all published in full as books and also available as original audio recordings. See www.osho.com/library.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBN 9781984825964

  Ebook ISBN 9781984825971

  Cover design by Sarah Horgan

  v5.4

  prh

  Contents

  Introduction

  DAY 1: What Is Meditation?

  THE MEDITATION: Everyday Awareness

  DAY 2: Meditations on Love and Relating

  THE MEDITATIONS: Loving Yourself, Oneness Meditation for Partners

  DAY 3: Meditations on Anger

  THE MEDITATION: Changing the Pattern of Anger

  DAY 4: Living in Balance

  THE MEDITATION: Accept the Negative and the Positive

  DAY 5: Love and Meditation Hand in Hand

  THE MEDITATION: Allowing the Heart to Open Like a Flower

  DAY 6: Living Dangerously

  THE MEDITATION: Dissolving the Armor

  DAY 7: Watching the Mind

  THE MEDITATIONS: Enjoy the Mind, and…Stop!

  DAY 8: It Needs Intelligence to Be Happy

  THE MEDITATION: Inner Smile

  DAY 9: Integration of Body, Mind, and Soul

  THE MEDITATION: Imagine Running

  DAY 10: Slowing Down

  THE MEDITATION: Surround Yourself with a Climate of Joy

  DAY 11: Everybody Is Creative

  THE MEDITATION: From Gibberish to Silence

  DAY 12: Intuition—Tuition from Within

  THE MEDITATION: Finding the Witness

  DAY 13: Meditation and Conditioning

  THE MEDITATION: Throwing Things Out

  DAY 14: How to Drop Judging People

  THE MEDITATION: Transforming Judgments

  DAY 15: The Art of Listening

  THE MEDITATION: Find Your Center in the Middle of Sound

  DAY 16: Relaxation Through Awareness

  THE MEDITATION: Learning the Art of Let-Go

  DAY 17: Accepting Every Part of Me

  THE MEDITATION: Look at an Object as a Whole

  DAY 18: Sex, Love, and Meditation

  THE MEDITATION: Transforming Sexual Energy

  DAY 19: Living in Joy

  THE MEDITATION: Make Room for Joy

  DAY 20: Maturity and the Responsibility of Being Oneself

  THE MEDITATION: Complete the Day

  DAY 21: Zorba the Buddha

  THE MEDITATION: Become the Taste of the Food or the Drink

  Recommended Reading by Topic

  Osho International Meditation Resort

  If you want to live a more fulfilled life, first you will want to know your potential, who you really are. Meditation is the route to that knowing. It is the methodology of the science of awareness. The beauty of this inner science is that it enables whoever wants to explore and to experiment within, to do so alone. This eliminates dependence on an outer authority, the need to be affiliated with any organization, and the obligation to accept a certain ideology. Once you understand the steps, you walk the walk in your own, individual way.

  Many meditative techniques require one to sit still and be silent—which, for most of us with accumulated stress in the body and mind, can be difficult.

  But what is meditation exactly? And how can you get started?

  This 21-day experiential course is designed to give you a taste of meditation as it is taught by the contemporary mystic Osho. You might already know him from his books, translated and published in more than sixty languages. Osho is a mystic and a scientist, a rebellious spirit whose unique contribution to the understanding of who we are defies categorization. His only interest is to alert humanity to the urgent need to discover a new way of living. Osho’s understanding is that only by changing ourselves—one individual at a time—can the outcome of all our “selves”—our societies, our cultures, our beliefs, our world—also change. The doorway to that change is meditation.

  For beginning meditators, this is a step-by-step guide to learn meditation, being mindful and still. For experienced meditators, it is the key to taking your practice to a new level. As part of this 21-day program, each day you will be introduced to a different aspect of meditative living, reading (or listening to, through the audiobook) excerpts from Osho’s talks as an experience of meditation. Then you will be introduced to simple, practical meditation and awareness exercises related to the subject of the day, as tools to experiment with.

  In the suggested reading section at the back of the book, for each day and topic we suggest a book by Osho that goes more deeply into the subject matter addressed in the day’s program.

  Just as science investigates the outer world, Osho uses a scientific approach to the inner world of meditation and self-discovery. He has experimented with all the meditation techniques developed in the past and has examined their effects on the modern human being. He has seen how difficult it is for the hyperactive 21st-century mind to just sit silently, for example, and watch the breath. Or how easy it is for an ancient sacred mantra to be used just as a replacement for a modern-day sleeping pill. Out of this understanding, he has created new meditations for the people of today. He suggests starting with the body—to become aware of what we can observe in the thoughts and sensations of the body-mind complex. Many of the Osho meditations begin with physical activity to first release the tensions and stress of body and mind. Then, it is easier to relax into an experience of still and silent watchfulness, awareness.

  Osho also transformed the “art of listening” into a doorway to meditation. Speaking each day to the people gathered around him—people of all ages, nationalities, and cultural backgrounds—his talks respond to their questions and concerns and lay out his proposal for a saner and more inner-directed way of living. Those talks have been published in the many Osho books now available in the market. Osho emphasized again and again that the talks are not “lectures” to convey information. He says, “My speaking is not oratory; it is not a doctrine that I am preaching to you. It is simply an arbitrary device to give you a taste of what silence is.”

  In other words, the Osho talks are, in themselves, a meditation. Here, words become music, the listener discovers who is listening, and the awareness moves from what is being heard to the individual doing the hearing.

  An audio edition of this guide is also available if you would like to experience Osho’s talks as a “listening meditation.” Each day you will have the opportunity to hear an original recording, excerpted from an Osho talk that is related to the program of the day. Following the excerpt, you can then also choose to listen to a facilitator who will guide you through each day’s meditation technique. Whenever you like, you can come back to the printed text and use the provided pages to create a journal of your experiences.

  Today we start with a basic question: What is meditation?

  Osho’s response suggests that meditation is a quality we are born with, and that our task is simply to r
emember and reconnect with that quality we had as a child.

  After each Insight section there will be a meditation and awareness exercise by Osho.

  You can experiment with it in your own time, perhaps before you go to sleep tonight.

  OSHO’S INSIGHT

  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. 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!

  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. 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.

  A child is born; the child comes ready with great energy. The child is nothing but pure energy embodied. And the first thing the child has to seek and search for is the mother’s breast, obviously. The child is hungry. For nine months in the mother’s womb the child was fed automatically; the child lived as part of the mother. Now he is cut from the mother; he has become a separate entity in himself—and the first thing, the first necessity, is to search for food. That’s how the outward journey begins.

  The entry into the world is through the breast. And the breast did two things: it nourished the child—and the first thing was to survive. And the breast was the food, the breast was life. And the second thing: the breast gave warmth to the child, shelter to the child, love to the child. That’s why food and love have become so much associated.

  That’s why whenever you are not feeling loved, you start eating too much. The people who become addicted to food are the people who are missing love. They start substituting with food. If you are really loved, you cannot eat too much.

  Meditation means becoming aware that the source of life is inside. The body depends on the outside, true—but you are not the body alone. You don’t depend on the outside. You depend on the inner world. These are the two directions: to move outwards or to move inwards. Meditation is the recognition that “There is an inner world too, and I have to search for it.”

  Meditation is mind turning towards its own source.

  Mind is a way to understand the object: meditation is a way to understand the subject. Mind is a concern with the contents, and meditation is a concern with the container, the consciousness. Mind becomes obsessed with the clouds, and meditation searches for the sky. Clouds come and go: the sky remains, abides.

  Search for the inner sky. And if you have found it, then you will never die.

  THE MEDITATION:

  EVERYDAY AWARENESS

  The following is adapted from The Book of Secrets by Osho. It is a simple technique to give you a taste and experience of bringing awareness to activities you do every day. As you experiment with this technique, you can start to reclaim your natural meditative state from all the noise and traffic of the mind.

  Osho says:

  When I say that awareness cannot be attained by mind, I mean that you cannot attain it by thinking about it. It can be attained only by doing, not by thinking.

  So don’t go on thinking about what awareness is, how to achieve it or what will be the result. Don’t go on thinking—start doing it.

  When walking on the street, walk with awareness. It is difficult, and you will go on forgetting, but don’t be discouraged. Whenever you remember again, be alert.

  Take every step with full alertness, knowingly.

  Remaining with the step, not allowing the mind to move somewhere else.

  While eating, eat. Chew your food with awareness.

  Whatever you are doing, don’t do it mechanically. For example, I can move my hand mechanically. But then I can also move my hand with full alertness. My mind is conscious that my hand is being moved.

  The Technique

  Do it, try it—right now. Reach for an object nearby, and pick it up as you would normally do, mechanically. Now put it back again.

  And now…become aware of your hand, feel it from the inside out. If there is any tension in the hand, in the fingers, let the tension go.

  Remaining with the awareness of your hand, with your full attention on your hand, reach for the object again. Pick it up. Feel the texture of it, the weight of it. How it feels in your hand. See how your hand wants to respond to this object…to turn it over, to weigh it, to play with it…or simply to hold it still. With alertness, awareness of each movement.

  Now put it down, staying alert and aware of the movement of your hand.

  You will feel the change. The quality of the action changes immediately.

  Osho says:

  For example, if you eat with awareness, then you cannot eat more than is needed by the body.

  The quality changes. If you eat with awareness, you will chew more. With unconscious, me
chanical habits, you simply go on pushing things into your stomach. You are not chewing at all, you are just stuffing yourself. Then there is no pleasure. And because there is no pleasure, you need more food in order to get the pleasure. There is no taste, so you need more food.

  Just be alert and see what happens. If you are alert, you will chew more, you will feel the taste more, you will feel the pleasure of eating. And when the body enjoys, it tells you when to stop.

  Experiment with this awareness technique today and in the coming days, in different situations—no need to set extra time aside for this meditation. The point is to just meditate, in a relaxed and playful way, while doing these normal, everyday activities. Ordinary things that you normally do without thinking, this time do them in a space of awareness.

  Quote of the Day

  When mind knows, we call it knowledge.

  When heart knows, we call it love.

  And when being knows, we call it meditation.

  —Osho

  To download, go to http://prhlink.com/9781984825971a001

  It is one thing to bring awareness to our physical actions and the sensations of the body while walking, eating, cleaning the floor, and so on. Or even to become aware of our thoughts and emotions when we are alone, and take a little distance from them. But it’s quite another thing to bring that same quality of awareness to our interactions with other people, particularly with our intimate partners. Today’s program is about that part of our lives.

  OSHO’S INSIGHT

  Love is not a relationship. Love relates, but it is not a relationship. A relationship is something finished. A relationship is a noun; the full stop has come, the honeymoon is over. Now there is no joy, no enthusiasm; now all is finished. Relationship means something complete, finished, closed.

  Love is never a relationship—love is relating. It is always a river, flowing, unending. Love knows no full stop; the honeymoon begins but never ends. It is not like a novel that starts at a certain point and ends at a certain point; it is an ongoing phenomenon. Lovers end, love continues. It is a continuum. It is a verb, not a noun.