Master and servant : Are you using your mind or is your mind using you?

1. The moment the person withdraws from the mind, the mind has no energy to go on into old routines. It is your identity with the mind that gives power to it. You have taken your identity back, you are no longer nursing the mind; it starts dying.  The farther you go away from it, the more and more your mind dies. And to attain a state of no-mind is what I call health. That is the goal of meditation. Then your spirit is healed, you have become whole.
2. The ordinary man is being used by his mind. When it becomes too much, when the mind starts using you completely in a totalitarian way, we call it madness.
3. There is no God, there has never been. Man has created God according to his own image because it is something that is needed by the sick mind. The healthy mind has no need for a God, the healthy mind has no need for a prayer. The healthy mind has no need for churches, temples, mosques, synagogues.
4. People are ready to throw their garbage, their advice, their wisdom, their knowledge, everybody is ready to catch hold of you and put something in your mind. You are already too much burdened. Subjective art burdens you more. Objective art unburdens you. Subjective art should be part of psychiatric hospitals only. People suffering from mental sicknesses should be allowed painting, poetry, sculpture, anything they want. And it is going to help, it is therapeutic. It will make them healthy.
5. Conscious mind is personal, unconscious mind is impersonal. The collective unconscious mind is all that has preceded you: the whole history of mind is contained in it. But this cannot be the foundation. Below it there is a cosmic unconscious mind, which is the mind of the whole existence.
6. As you go higher than the conscious no-mind, you find superconsciousness, or the superconscious mind. This superconsciousness is exactly the equivalent of the lower collective unconscious mind.
7. Conscious mind is very small: one-tenth of the Unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is nine times bigger. Nine times more powerful. And it knows no reason.
8. To call darshan Indian philosophy is basically wrong. Philosophy is a mind thing — you think about it. Darshan is a realization, a thing of your innermost being; you realize it. Philosophy needs logic; darshan needs silence — no thoughts, everything in absolute nothingness. Only then you will come to know yourself. So I don’t call darshan Indian philosophy.
9. My understanding is that religion is the ultimate luxury. You have to feed your body first; if your body is hungry, it is impossible to become a buddha. You have to train your mind first, bring it to its highest peak of intelligence. If that is not possible, you cannot become buddha. These are the steps. The body has to be completely satisfied. The mind has to be sharpened, alert, aware, able to enjoy Mozart, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Picasso, Rabindranath. Only then is there a possibility of a new flight, because all these things give you a little joy but very momentary.
10. Repress anything and your mind becomes focused on it. For example, if it said to you that, “Don’t eat apples” then your mind will start fantasizing about apples.
11. The moment you believe, inquiry stops. Keep your mind open — neither believe nor disbelieve. Just remain alert and search and doubt everything. Unless you come to a point which is indubitable, that’s what truth is. You cannot doubt it. It is not a question of believing in it, it is a totally different phenomenon and you cannot doubt it. It is so much a certainty, so overwhelming you that there is no way to doubt it.
12. It is really amazing to watch people’s mind how they work and how they make themselves miserable and they go on weaving their misery deeper and deeper and more complex and more complex, to a point from where they cannot get out. And it is all their imagination.
13. There are not many hindrances but only few. One is a repressed mind because whatever you have repressed, whenever you will sit silent to meditate, that repressed idea, the repressed energy will be the first to overflow you and your mind. If it is sex, meditation will be forgotten and you will be having a pornographic session. So first thing is: drop repressions — which is very simple because they are not natural, they have been told to you… that sex is sin. It is not. Is is nature, and if nature is sin then I don’t think what can be virtue. In fact, going against nature is sin.
14. Meditation is not focusing your mind on something, it is emptying your mind of everything — your Gods included.
15. The Eastern mind is accustomed to belief. Faith has been emphasized for centuries; to doubt is a sin and to believe is a virtue. To me the reverse is the case: to doubt is virtue and to believe is sin.

~ Osho ~

Happy Valentine's Day : The Honeymoon that never Ends.

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. You can carry it on, just to keep your promises. You can carry it on because it is comfortable, convenient, cozy. You can carry it on because there is nothing else to do. You can carry it on because if you disrupt it, it is going to create much trouble for you… 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.

And why do we reduce the beauty of relating to relationship? Why are we in such a hurry? Because to relate is insecure, and relationship is a security. Relationship has a certainty; relating is just a meeting of two strangers, maybe just an overnight stay and in the morning we say goodbye. Who knows what is going to happen tomorrow? And we are so afraid that we want to make it certain, we want to make it predictable. We would like tomorrow to be according to our ideas; we don't allow it freedom to have its own say. So we immediately reduce every verb to a noun.

You are in love with a woman or a man and immediately you start thinking of getting married. Make it a legal contract. Why? How does the law come into love? The law comes into love because love is not there. It is only a fantasy, and you know the fantasy will disappear. Before it disappears settle down, before it disappears do something so it becomes impossible to separate.

In a better world, with more meditative people, with a little more enlightenment spread over the earth, people will love, love immensely, but their love will remain a relating not a relationship. And I am not saying that their love will be only momentary. There is every possibility their love may go deeper than your love, may have a higher quality of intimacy, may have something more of poetry and more of godliness in it. And there is every possibility their love may last longer than your so-called relationship ever lasts. But it will not be guaranteed by the law, by the court, by the policeman. The guarantee will be inner. It will be a commitment from the heart, it will be a silent communion.

If you enjoy being with somebody, you would like to enjoy it more and more. If you enjoy the intimacy, you would like to explore the intimacy more and more. And there are a few flowers of love which bloom only after long intimacies. There are seasonal flowers too; within six weeks they are there, in the sun, but within six weeks again they are gone forever. There are flowers that take years to come, and there are flowers that take many years to come. The longer it takes, the deeper it goes. But it has to be a commitment from one heart to another heart. It has not even to be verbalized, because to verbalize it is to profane it. It has to be a silent commitment; eye to eye, heart to heart, being to being. It has to be understood, not said.

Forget relationships and learn how to relate.

Once you are in a relationship you start taking each other for granted– that's what destroys all love affairs. The woman thinks she knows the man, the man thinks he knows the woman. Nobody knows either! It is impossible to know the other, the other remains a mystery. And to take the other for granted is insulting, disrespectful.

To think that you know your wife is very, very ungrateful. How can you know the woman? How can you know the man? They are processes, they are not things. The woman that you knew yesterday is not there today. So much water has gone down the Ganges; she is somebody else, totally different. Relate again, start again, don't take it for granted.

And the man that you slept with last night, look at his face again in the morning. He is no more the same person, so much has changed. So much, incalculably much has changed. That is the difference between a thing and a person. The furniture in the room is the same, but the man and the woman, they are no more the same. Explore again, start again. That's what I mean by relating.

Relating means you are always starting, you are continuously trying to become acquainted. Again and again, you are introducing yourself to each other. You are trying to see the many facets of the other's personality. You are trying to penetrate deeper and deeper into his realm of inner feelings, into the deep recesses of his being. You are trying to unravel a mystery which cannot be unraveled. That is the joy of love: the exploration of consciousness.

And if you relate, and don't reduce it to a relationship, then the other will become a mirror to you. Exploring him, unawares you will be exploring yourself too. Getting deeper into the other, knowing his feelings, his thoughts, his deeper stirrings, you will be knowing your own deeper stirrings too. Lovers become mirrors to each other, and then love becomes a meditation. Relationship is ugly, relating is beautiful.

Hence I say relate. By saying relate, I mean remain continuously on a honeymoon. Go on searching and seeking each other, finding new ways of loving each other, finding new ways of being with each other. And each person is such an infinite mystery, inexhaustible, unfathomable, that it is not possible that you can ever say, "I have known her," or, "I have known him." At the most you can say, "I have tried my best, but the mystery remains a mystery."


In fact the more you get to know, the more mysterious the other becomes. Then love is a constant adventure. 

Happy Valentine's Day : Real Love doesn't make you suffer.

Love and joy are inseparable from your natural state of inner connectedness with Being. Glimpses of love and joy or brief moments of deep peace are possible whenever a gap occurs in the stream of thought.
For most people, such gaps happen rarely and only accidentally, in moments when the mind is rendered “speechless,” sometimes triggered by great beauty, extreme physical exertion, or even great danger. Suddenly, there is inner stillness. And within that stillness there is a subtle but intense joy, there is love, there is peace.


Usually, such moments are short-lived, as the mind quickly resumes its noise-making activity that we call thinking. Love, joy, and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance. But they are not what I would call emotions. They lie beyond the emotions, on a much deeper level. So you need to become fully conscious of your emotions and be able to feel them before you can feel that which lies beyond them. Emotion literally means “disturbance.” The word comes from the Latin emovere, meaning “to disturb.”

Love, joy, and peace are deep states of Being, or rather three aspects of the state of inner connectedness with Being. As such, they have no opposite. This is because they arise from beyond the mind. Emotions, on the other hand, being part of the dualistic mind, are subject to the law of opposites. This simply means that you cannot have good without bad. So in the unenlightened, mind-identified
condition, what is sometimes wrongly called joy is the usually short-lived pleasure side of the continuously alternating pain/pleasure cycle. Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within. The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain. And what is often referred to as love may be pleasurable and exciting for a while, but it is an addictive clinging, an extremely needy condition that can turn into its opposite at the flick of a switch. Many “love” relationships, after the initial euphoria has passed, actually oscillate between “love” and hate, attraction and attack.
Real love doesn’t make you suffer. How could it? It doesn’t suddenly turn into hate, nor does real joy turn into pain. As I said, even before you are enlightened — before you have freed yourself from your mind — you may get glimpses of true joy, true love, or of a deep inner peace, still but vibrantly alive. These are aspects of your true nature, which is usually obscured by the mind. Even within a “normal” addictive relationship, there can be moments when the presence of something more genuine, something incorruptible, can be felt. But they will only be glimpses, soon to be covered up again through mind interference. It may then seem that you had something very precious and lost it, or your mind may convince you that it was all an illusion anyway. The truth is that it wasn’t an illusion, and you cannot lose it. It is part of your natural state, which can be obscured but can never be destroyed by the mind. Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn’t disappeared. It’s still there on the other side of the clouds.


by Eckhart Tolle : the Power of Now

The journey within - words of wisdom

Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being.



When you become aware of silence, immediately there is that state of inner still alertness. You are present. You have stepped out of thousands of years of collective human conditioning.



The Truth is inseparable from who you are. Yes, you are the Truth. If you look for it elsewhere, you will be deceived every time.



Dogmas--religious, political, scientific--arise out of erroneous belief that thought can encapsulate reality or truth. Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of "I know."



Just as dogs love to chew bones, the mind loves to get its teeth into problems. That's why it does crossword puzzles and builds atom bombs.



Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.



What is commonly called "falling in love" is in most cases an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. You become addicted to another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever.



Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.



Wisdom comes with the ability to be still. Just look and just listen. No more is needed. Being still, looking, and listening activates the non-conceptual intelligence within you. Let stillness direct your words and actions.



Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret to life is to "die before you die"--and find that there is no death.



The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.



Religion, to a large extent, became divisive rather than unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as between different religions and even within the same religion. They became ideologies, belief systems people could identify with and so use them to enhance their false sense of self. Through them, they could make themselves "right" and others "wrong" and thus define their identity through their enemies, the "others," the "nonbelievers" or "wrong believers" who not infrequently they saw themselves justified in killing.



Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness rest upon it. How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being. Allow nature to teach you stillness.


Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.



Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion.



The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.



Neither failure nor success has the power to change your inner state of Being.



The most rigid structures, the most impervious to change, will collapse first.



To stay present in everyday life, it helps to be deeply rooted within yourself; otherwise, the mind, which has incredible momentum, will drag you along like a wild river.



Don't seek happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness.



War is a mind-set, and all action that comes out of such a mind-set will either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or, if the war is won, will create a new enemy, a new evil equal to and often worse than the one that was defeated. There is a deep interrelatedness between your state of consciousness and external reality. When you are in the grip of a mind-set such as "war," your perceptions become extremely selective as well as distorted. In other words, you will see only what you want to see and then misinterpret it. You can imagine what kind of action comes out of such a delusional system. Or instead of imagining it, watch the news on TV tonight.



The mind left to itself creates monstrosities, and not only in art galleries. Look at our urban landscapes and industrial wastelands. No civilization has ever produced so much ugliness.



When you surrender to what is and so become fully present, the past ceases to have any power. You do not need it anymore. Presence is the key. Now is the key.



Hope is what keeps you going, but hope keeps you focused on the future, and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the Now and therefore your unhappiness.



All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being.