Osho is one of the best-known and most provocative spiritual teachers of the 20th century. Beginning in the 1970s he captured the attention of young people from the West who wanted to experience meditation and transformation. More than a decade after his death in 1990, the influence of his teachings continues to expand, reaching seekers of all ages in virtually every country of the world.

What is enlightenment?

Coming to understand, coming to realize that you are not the body. you are the light within, not the lamp, but the flame. you are neither body nor mind. Mind belongs to the body, mind is not beyond body, it is part of the body. Minds is also atomic, as body is atomic.

You are neither body nor the mind - then you come to know who you are. And to know who you are is enlightenment.....

Enlightened means you have realized who you are.

"Truth is known in silence. And when truth is known through silence, it can be expressed only through silence."

Enlightened Beings

You have your own values, and you always look through those values. An enlightened person is totally in a diiferent dimension, where he lives without values, where he lives without any criteria, where he lives without any morality, where he simply lives without the ego. An enlightened person simply lives. He is not manipulating his life, he is a white cloud floating. He has nowhere to go, nothing to achieve. Nothing is good for him and nothing is bad. He does not know any God, he does not know any devil. He knows only life, and life in its totality is beautiful....

An enlightened person always appears like a madman. So the first thing to be understood is don't evaluate an enlightened person thorugh your values - very difficult, because what else can you do. ...

Second thing: an enlighened person behaves from the centerm never from the periphery. You always behave from the periphery, you live on the periphery, the circumference. To you the circumference is the most important thing. You have killed your soul and saved your body. The enlightened person can sacrifice his body, but cannot allow his soul to be lost. He is ready to die - any moment he is ready to die - that's not a problem. But it is not ready to lose his center, the very core of his being.

"Zen says the ordinary mind is the enlightened mind. You don't go anywhere; the ordinary world is paradise. Here and now, everything is there! you need not go anywhere.

For the first time you become aware of the beauty of the world...everything is young and fresh and alive and God is here! if you think your God is somewhere else you are still listening to the mind, because that is the language of the mind: "Somewhere else, somewhere else! Never here!" - and he is always here.

Meditation reveals you the here and now. And then the ordinary mind becomes the most extraodinary. And the ordinary life becomes the supreme, the ultimate. The only difference is of a closed and open mind. When thoughts are there, the clouds are not there and the mind is open. And when the mind is open the old part has fallen, the water has flowed out, the reflection disappears, no water, no moon!"

pp166

Above excerpts from
No Water, No moon, Talks on Zen Stories - Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho)

(see section on 'filtering experience' on psychology page)

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Conscience & Consciousness

"A man who lives through conscience becomes hard. A man who lives through consciousness remains soft. Why? because a man who has some ideas about how to live naturally becomes hard. He has to carry his character around himself. That character is like an armor; his protection, his security; his whole life is invested in that character. And he always reacts to situation through the character. If you ask him a question his answer is ready made."

"This is the sign of a hard person - he is dull stupid, mechanical. He may be a good computer, but he is not a man. You do something and he reacts in a well established way. His reaction is predictable; he is a robot."

"The real man acts spontaneously. If you ask him a question, your question gets a response, not a reaction. He opens his heart to your question, exposes himself to your question, responds to it..."

The whole effort of Zen is how to drop this schizophrenia, how to drop this split personality, how to drop the individual mind of man, how to become undivided, integrated, centered, crystalized.

The way you are, you cannot say that you are. You don't have a being. You are a marketplace - many voices. If you want to say 'yes', immediately the 'no' is there. You cannot even utter a simple word 'yes' with totality.....In this way happiness is not possible; unhappiness is a natural consequence of split personality.

Osho

Better to follow your heart, if you can find it. If you can't find it, just jump - your heart will start beating so fast there will be no mistake about where it is!

Osho Zen Tarot p120

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The Relationship between Consciousness and Virtues

And it was a suprise to me that as you become silent, as you become conscious, more alert, your actions start changing - but not vice versa. You can change your actions, but that will not make you more conscious. You become more conscious and your actions will change - that's absolutely simple and scientific. You were doing something stupid; as you become more alert and more conscious, you cannot do it.

It's not a question of reward or punishment. It is simply your consciousness, your silence, your peace, which makes you look so far away and so deep into everything that you do. You cannot do harm to anybody; you cannot be violent: you cannot be angry, you cannot be greedy, you cannot be ambitious. Your consciousness has given you so much blissfulness...what can greed give you except anxiety? What can ambition give you? Just a continuous struggle to reach high on some ladder.

As your consciousness becomes more settled, all your life patterns change. What religions have called sin will disappear from your life, and what they have called virtue will automatically flow from your being, from your actions. But they have been doing just vice versa: first change the acts. It is as if you are in a dark house and you are stumbling, light is not possible. What I am saying is, bring light in and stumbling will disappear, because when there is light why should you stumble over things? Every time you stumble, every time you hit your head on a wall it hurts. It is a punishment in itself - a wrong act is a punishment in itself; there is nobody recording your acts. And every beautiful action is a reward unto itself. But first bring light into your life.

Meditation is an effort to bring light nad to bring joy and to bring silence and to bring blissfulness, and out of this beautiful world of meditation it is impossible for you to do anything wrong.

'Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic' by OSHO, pp124

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Death, Love & Meditation

Death always occurs in the present. Death, love & meditation - they all occur in the present. So if you are afraid of death, you cannot love. If you are afraid of love, you cannot meditate. If you are afraid of meditation, your life will be useless. Useless not in the sense of any purpose, but usesless in the sense that you will never be able to feel any bliss in it. It will be futile.
It may seem strange to connect these three; love, meditation, death. It is not! They are similar experiences. So if you can enter one, you can enter the remaining two.

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What Is Tantra? by OSHO

Tantra is the total surrender, or letting go of all mental, emotional and cultural conditioning, so that universal life energy may flow through you like a river without any effort. It is a letting go to a universal oneness...to love. When fear is removed, Tantra remains.

The word "Tantra" has many definitions, and perhaps its real meaning has been lost to antiquity. Some say it comes from the Sanskrit or Hindi word for fabric or tapestry, meaning that it is woven into one's life. Others say that it comes from two Sanskrit words, Tanoti and Trayati - Tanoti means to expand consciousness, and Trayati means to liberate consciousness. One might then say that Tantra expands and liberates consciousness.

The highest possible synthesis between love and meditation, Tantra is also the connection between the third dimension and other planes of existence beyond mere materiality. While not a religious philosophy, Tantra embraces a deep spiritual understanding of life, and an ancient art of living in harmony with existence.

It is treating sexual energy as a friend, rather than something to be suppressed or talked about in low tones. It does not deny sex, or consider sex a hindrance to enlightenment or Heavenly Grace. To the contrary, Tantra is the only spiritual path which says that sex is sacred and not a sin.

Tantrikas are God-loving rather than God-fearing. There is a most beautiful word for sex in the Sanskrit language, and that is Kama which means sex/love together, undivided and indivisible. Most everyone is familiar with the classic Kama Sutra, the 7th Century Tantric scripture. Kama is also the name for the Hindu Goddess of love... and love is what Tantra encourages-total love, including the mind, the spirit and the body. Let It All Go!

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Deeply Refreshing Sleep

by Osho

You may not be sleeping well in the night. Very few people are sleeping well, so when you have not slept well in the night you are a little tired during the day. If that is the case, then do something with your sleep. It should be made deeper. Time is not much of a question - you can sleep for eight hours, and if it is not deep you will feel hungry for sleep, starved - depth is the question.

Every night before you go to sleep do a small technique, and that will help tremendously.

Put the lights off, sit in your bed ready to sleep, but sit for fifteen minutes. Close your eyes and then start any monotonous nonsense sound, for example: la, la, la - and wait for the mind to supply new sounds. The only thing to be remembered is those sounds or words should not be of any language that you know. If you know English, German, Italian, then they should not be of Italian, German, English. Any other language is allowed that you don't know - Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese. But if you know Japanese then it is not allowed, then Italian is wonderful.

Speak any language that you don't know. You will be in a difficulty for few seconds only for the first day, because how do you speak a language you don't know? It can be spoken, and once it starts, any sounds, nonsense words, just to put the conscious off and allow the unconscious to speak....

When the unconscious speaks, the unconscious knows no language.

It is a very, very old method. It comes from the Old Testament. It was called in those days glossolalia and a few churches in America still use it. They call it "talking in tongues". And it is a wonderful method, one of the most deep and penetrating into the unconscious. You start by saying "la, la, la," and then anything that comes you go on. Just for the first day you will feel it is a little difficult. Once it comes, you know the knack of it.

Then for fifteen minutes, use the language that is coming to you, and use it as a language; in fact you are talking in it. This will relax the conscious so deeply. Fifteen minutes - and you then just simply lie down and go to sleep. Your sleep will become deeper.

Within weeks you will feel a depth in your sleep, and in the morning you will feel completely fresh.

Meditation from "Yoga: The Science of the Soul"

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About The Author

Osho is one of the best-known and most provocative spiritual teachers of the 20th century. Beginning in the 1970s he captured the attention of young people from the West who wanted to experience meditation and transformation. More than a decade after his death in 1990, the influence of his teachings continues to expand, reaching seekers of all ages in virtually every country of the world. © Osho International Foundation. All rights reserved. For more information, visit www.osho.com

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• Meditation
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• Enlightenment
• tantra
• sexuality

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