Osho – From Unconsciousness to Consciousness

Meditation – the Science of Awareness

Question 1:

BELOVED OSHO,

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SCIENCE, ART AND RELIGION?

Science discovers, art invents, religion does both. The true religion discovers; the pseudo-religion invents.

And down the ages it is the pseudo-religion that has prevailed over the human mind. It is nothing but fiction. It is closer to art, and absolutely against science. That’s why there has never been a conflict between art and religion. They were, deep down, doing the same thing.

Art was inventing objectively, and the so-called religion was inventing subjectively. They could join together very easily because their game was the same. And they joined hands all over the world.

Art served the so-called religion for centuries. The beautiful churches, synagogues, temples – for thousands of years art was doing nothing but serving religion.

If you see the temples of Khajuraho in India…. Once there were one thousand temples in that place; now only ruins are there, but twenty or thirty temples are still intact, have survived. Just to see one temple you will need the whole day. It is so full of art, every nook and corner. It must have taken hundreds of years for thousands of sculptors to make one temple.

You cannot find a single inch of space in the whole temple which has not been artistically created.

One temple has thousands of statues on the outside of the temple, and that is the same about the remaining other thirty, and the same must have been true about the ruins of one thousand temples.

Even in the ruins you can find treasures of art. I don’t think there has ever been such beauty created out of stone anywhere else in the world.

The structure of every temple is almost the same. On the outer side of the temple, the outer wall, there are what are called mithun statues – men and women naked, loving, making love, in all the possible postures one can imagine or dream of. The only posture that is missing is known in India as the missionary posture – man on top of woman: only that is missing – that was brought by Christian missionaries. Otherwise the whole idea, to the Indian mind, looked ugly – that the man should be on top of the woman. Seems to be unfair. The woman is more fragile, and this beast is on top of the beauty. No, Indians have never thought of that posture as human. In India it is known as the missionary posture because the first time they saw it, it was Christian missionaries in that posture; otherwise they had no idea that this could be done.

But, except that, you will find all kinds of postures, because in India sexology has existed at least for five thousand years. The oldest sexual scripture is five thousand years old – Vatsyayana’s Kamasutras. And in the time of Vatsyayana, writing sutras on sex – kama means sex – maxims for sex, guidelines for sex, was not thought to be a bad act; Vatsyayana is respected as one of the great seers of India, and it is said that only a seer like Vatsyayana could have given those beautiful sutras. They reveal the intricacies and the mysteries of the energy of sex, and how it can be transformed.

These temples in Khajuraho have, on the outer side, beautiful women, beautiful men, and all in love postures. Inside there are no love postures. Inside you will find the temple empty, not even a statue of God. The idea is that unless you pass through your sexuality with full awareness, in all its phases, in all its dimensions – unless you come to a point when sex has no meaning for you… only then you enter the temple. Otherwise you are outside the temple, your interest is there.

So that was a symbol that if you are still interested in sex, then the temple is not for you. But the message is not against sex; it is the outer wall of the temple, the temple is made of it, and you have to pass through the door and go beyond. And the beyond is nothing but utter emptiness.

How many artists, craftsmen, sculptors, were employed to create one thousand temples, a whole city of temples, how many years it took! – and this is not only one place: there is Ajanta, a group of caves which Buddhists created. The whole mountain… for miles they have carved caves inside the mountain. And inside the caves you will find tremendous work of art, everything is beautiful.

Buddha’s whole life in stone…. The first cave you enter, you find the birth of Buddha. And those are not small caves; each cave is at least four times bigger than this room. They have been carved in solid stone.

The whole life of Buddha slowly unfolds in each cave, and in the last cave Buddha is sleeping. The statue must be as long as this room. It is the last moment of his life, when he asked his disciples, “If you have to ask any questions, ask me; otherwise I am going into eternal sleep – forever.” He has not even a pillow, just his hand used as a pillow. But such a huge statue, and so beautiful!

There are the Ellora caves, again carved into the mountains. There are Hindu temples in Jagganath Puri, in Konarak. You cannot imagine for centuries what art has been doing. The beautiful cathedrals of Europe, and all the great artists… Michelangelo – what were these people doing? They were serving religion.

There was never a conflict anywhere in the world between religion and art. To me that signifies that the religion was pseudo; both were fictitious. There was no intrinsic opposition, they were moving in the same line of invention. Of course the artist was doing a far more authentic job, far more sincere than the priest, because what he was inventing was absolute fiction. There was no ground for it. His God was fiction, his heaven and hell were fiction. And these fictions have to be according to different people, where the religion existed.

For example, in Tibet you can’t have the same kind of heaven as in India, obviously. India is a hot country, so hot that the heaven has to be air-conditioned. Of course the word was not available at the time, but the description is absolutely of air-conditioning. It says, “Twenty-four hours a day cool air, fresh, fragrant, like spring. It is never summer, it is never the rainy season. It is never cold winter; just a cool – not cold, but cool – atmosphere all the year round. And it is always spring.”

But the Tibetan priest cannot accept it. They are so tortured by cold, their heaven is warm, heated – it is never cold. They don’t even mention cool, because to the people of Tibet even cool is not acceptable. It has to be warm.

In Tibetan scriptures it says, “You must take at least one bath per year.” When the Dalai Lama and his people started escaping from Tibet to India, many of them came to see me. Habits die hard:

they were not taking baths or showers, even in India, and they were using the same kind of clothes that they were using in Tibet. I had to tell them, “I am very allergic to smells, so you sit in the other corner of the room, unless you learn how to clean your body and change your clothes every day.”

They said, “Every day! But the religious scriptures say once a year is enough!”

It is going to be a different fiction in different countries. In Mohammedan countries, homosexuality was very prevalent – is still prevalent. Strange, but it shows a significant fact about the human mind.

The greatest punishment also is for a homosexual act if you are found out. You just have to be beheaded; there is no lesser punishment for it. Still it is the most prevalent thing, so prevalent that in the Koran the provision is made in heaven for the great religious sages: beautiful women are available, beautiful boys are also available. These are all fictions suiting the particular mind, climate, country, having no foundation in reality.

Reality has not to be invented, it has to be discovered. It is already there. Hence science discovers, and true religion also discovers.

But up to now, the religions that have been in existence in the world – Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, Hinduism – they never felt any conflict with art, but they all felt tremendous antagonism towards science. Nobody has noted the fact. Why are they not against art, and why are they against science? – because with art they can find some similarity. They can use art but they cannot use science, and they don’t find the basic similarity. In fact they find science is doing just the opposite. They are inventing, they are creating something imaginary; science’s whole work is to uncover the true, the real, that which is.

Now, if science goes on succeeding, then the pseudo-religion becomes afraid, because the fiction will not be able to stand in front of truth. There will be no possibility of its winning – even standing before truth is impossible.

I have loved this story very much. One day darkness approached God and said, “I have never done any wrong to the sun, but it goes on torturing me. Wherever I go, it reaches, and I have to escape from there. I cannot even rest. I don’t want to complain, but enough is enough. How long is it going to go on? And I am absolutely innocent. I have not done anything against the sun, I have not said anything against the sun. This is for the first time I am talking about it.”

God immediately ordered that the sun should be called. The sun was called, and God asked him, “Why are you torturing and bothering darkness?”

The sun said, “What are you talking about? I have never met anything called darkness.” And God looked around: where had the darkness gone? It had disappeared. The sun said, “Whenever you can manage to bring darkness in front of me, I am ready to apologize or whatsoever you say. But I don’t know… perhaps without knowing, in unawareness I may have hurt him. But at least let me see the person – the person who is complaining against me.”

The story says that the file of the case against the sun by darkness is still lying there. God has not been able to bring both sides together in front of him. Sometimes he succeeds and darkness comes; sometimes he succeeds and sun comes; but he has not been able to bring both together, and unless both are present the case cannot be decided.

How can darkness come to face the sun? – because darkness has no existence, it is just absence of light. So where the presence of light is, the absence cannot exist, cannot stand. And that is what pseudo-religion has been doing: creating fictions, exploiting people – their imagination, their fear, their greed, their misery, their suffering, their poverty, everything. But the moment science started discovering things every religion became very alert, and ready to stop science in every possible way, because if truth is revealed, the untruth dies by itself; there is no need to kill it. It simply disappears.

Hence I say to you that now is the time for the first religion to happen.

For three hundred years the pseudo-religions have been fighting against science. Now they are tired, fed up, and know perfectly well that science is going to win; it has already won.

So the old religions have lost their ground. You have to understand it. What you see in the churches and in the synagogues and in the mosques and in the temples, is the dead body of the religion that once was alive. It is only a corpse. But they are pretending that it is alive, hoping against hope that some miracle is going to happen. But no miracle ever happens. And no miracle is going to happen.

Science has taken firm roots.

Now, if you want anything in the world to be called religion, then you have to start from ABC, from the very scratch: a religion which is a science, and not a fiction.

Just as science discovers in the objective world, outside, religion discovers in the inner world.

What science is to the objective existence, religion is to the subjectivity.

Their methods are exactly the same. Science calls it observation, religion calls it awareness.

Science calls it experiment, religion calls it experience. Science wants you to go into the experiment without any prejudice in your mind, without any belief. You have to be open, available. You are not going to impose anything on reality. You are just going to be available to the reality whatsoever it is, even if it goes against all your ideas. You have to drop those ideas – but the reality cannot be denied.

The scientific endeavor is risking your mind for reality, putting your mind aside for reality. Reality counts, not what you think about it. Your thinking may be right or may be wrong, but the reality will decide it. Your mind is not going to decide what is right and what is wrong.

The same is the situation of an authentic religion, a scientific religion.

If I am allowed, I would like to describe science as two dimensions, the outer and the inner. The word religion can be dropped. You have two sciences: one, objective science; another, subjective science.

And that’s what is going to happen; whether you call it a religion or science does not matter – names don’t matter, but the methodology is exactly the same: you should not go in with a belief. No believer is ever going to know the truth. To believe is to miss.

You have to put aside your ideology. Howsoever beautiful it looks, howsoever systematic it looks, howsoever philosophical you have made and decorated it, you have to put it aside and see within.

That’s the whole method of meditation, awareness, watchfulness.

Meditation, in short, is putting your mind aside. So the people who say that meditation is a discipline of the mind are absolutely wrong. It is not a discipline of the mind, because if you discipline the mind, it is going to become stronger. It is better to put it aside when it is weaker, undisciplined. Once it is disciplined it is going to give you a tough fight.

So it is more difficult for somebody who has been practicing concentration, because concentration is a mind phenomenon. Yes, it gives you a better mind, a disciplined mind, more penetrating. But to put aside this mind will be very difficult. First, you have given it strength, you have given it a certain crystallization. That’s what happened to Gurdjieff and his whole school. It was a discipline of the mind. He called it crystallization, a very right word.

The ordinary mind is a mess, a chaos. Gurdjieff’s discipline gives you a crystallized mind, together, centered. And he was thinking that the more your mind is crystallized, the more you are coming closer to home. There he was wrong. A crystallized mind starts having certain powers. For example, it can read somebody’s thoughts, which the ordinary mind cannot do. It cannot read its own thought – how to read somebody else’s thoughts!

But crystallization is not easy. It is a difficult and long process – years of work, work which will look absolutely unnecessary to you, but you have to do it because the teacher says so. For example, Gurdjieff’s disciples will be told to dig a trench one mile long, and all the disciples are digging the trench the whole day, and by the evening, Gurdjieff comes to look at it and he says, “Fill it up. Only then will you get food. I should not find it there when I come for my morning walk.”

Now, absurd…! This man is mad, you will think. He was not mad; he was working very accurately, mathematically. The disciples started filling the trench. The whole day they were digging, the whole day they were thinking, “Why is this being dug?” Now they are thinking, “Why is it being filled again?”

And nobody knows – tomorrow morning he may say, “Dig it again.” That man was known to do that.

What he is trying to do is to make you not the ordinary weak mind, who needs all kinds of argument, convictions to go into anything… then too, it never goes. He is trying to teach you that you need not bother about why. That is the teacher’s job, to think; your job is to do. And if a person goes on this way, year in year out, he strangely finds things happening in himself which have never happened before. For example, you are passing by his side and suddenly he reads your thought.

It happened: One of my students, when I was teaching in the university, was very interested in Gurdjieff. So he asked me, “I am not asking whether Gurdjieff is right or wrong. Please just explain to me what the methodology is that Gurdjieff was using, and how I can use it.”

I said, “If that is so, I can explain to you the method. But I am not responsible for what happens to you then….”

He said, “Of course you are not responsible.”

“… Because you are not giving me even a chance to say whether it is right or wrong; you simply want to know.” I said, “Just as a professor, I am telling you this is the method. You practice it. The method is simple. Do anything, for example jogging…. There comes a moment when you feel you cannot jog any more; now, that is the moment you have to jog. And suddenly you will be surprised that if you continue jogging there is a new release of energy… and you were feeling that it was impossible to jog any more.”

There are three layers of energy. One: the ordinary energy which you use in daily work: eating, walking, working, typing, this and that, just the superficial layer. Underneath is a bigger layer of energy. If, doing anything, you come to the point where the thin top layer is finished, that does not mean that your energy is finished; only the top layer is finished. Then the top layer is saying, “Stop.”

Don’t stop, continue. Soon the second layer is broken open, and becomes available. You were thinking you cannot jog, and now you can jog for hours!

Then again a point comes when you feel, “If I go on jogging now, I am going to fall down and die.” It is not just tiredness – it is almost death. First it was tiredness, now it is almost like death. This is the third layer in you, which is vast. If you continue and you say, “Okay, if death comes it is okay, but I am not going to stop,” the third layer opens up, and you have never seen such energy in you.

That sometimes accidentally happens to you. You are tired. The whole day’s work and everything…

and suddenly your house catches fire! You were thinking to just jump into bed and forget the whole world… and the house is burning! You forget all about your tiredness. Suddenly you are fresh, young – as fresh and as young as you have never been, and you are running here and there, and doing all kinds of things – perhaps it will take the whole night to put the fire out. And you will do it, and you will not feel tired.

What has happened? The same thing that Gurdjieff was trying to do methodologically. But once your mind becomes aware of these three layers, with each layer new powers are attached. With the ordinary layer you cannot do much. Scientists say that even the most talented person uses only fifteen percent of his energy – the most talented, it is not about everybody. An Albert Einstein uses perhaps fifteen percent of his energy.

The average, ordinary person never goes above seven percent. Einstein, using fifteen percent, becomes aware of many things which you are not aware of. He lives in a different universe than you live in. His universe is so vast you cannot even imagine it. It was said that while he was alive there were only twelve people in the whole world who understood exactly what the theory of relativity means – only twelve persons all over the world who understood exactly what he means! But if you use thirty percent of your energy, fifty percent of your energy… who knows what is in store?

So this student of mine…. He was a Mohammedan, and Mohammedans are fanatic people, very stubborn; trustworthy, but idiotic. Idiots are always trustworthy because they cannot doubt, they cannot suspect. So what I told him to work upon, he started working on it. He was a woodcutter’s son, so I said, “You go with your father and cut wood as much as you can. And when you feel you are going to fall down, you cannot raise the axe again, that is the moment that you have to raise it.

Then is the right time to begin work. Up to then it was only superficial. From there Gurdjieff comes in.” He did it.

One day he came running to me, very much shaken and afraid. He said, “What is happening? I was going in the bus and I just thought… a strange thought, I had never thought such thoughts before. A man was sitting in front of me with his back towards me and I just thought: just by my thinking can he be made to fall from his seat onto the floor of the bus? And the man fell!”

He was just thinking this: “Can it happen?” and it happened. He became very frightened, but he thought perhaps it may be a coincidence, so he tried it on another man – and the other man fell!

The driver said, “What is going on?” One man falls for no reason at all, because there is no jerk, no turn. Then another man sitting just falls down, and he is not asleep; his eyes are open.

And my student asked those two persons what happened. They said, “We don’t know.” But he thought that before he came to me, he should try one time more, and better to try on the driver. He tried it on the driver, and he caused a whole accident of the bus in which two persons died and many were injured. Then he came running to me. He said, “What is happening?”

Now, unknowingly he had got that energy by which he could project ideas into somebody’s head, and they would work. Now his mind was becoming crystallized, coming closer. It was only the second layer. I told him, “Do you want to enter into the third layer? – because in the third layer you can cause the death of somebody. If you trust yourself, I can give you the method to go into the third. But then, that power – are you capable of not misusing it?”

He said, “No. I am capable of misusing it. And forgive me, I was wrong when from the very beginning I said to you, ‘Don’t say to me whether Gurdjieff is right or wrong, just give me the method’ – because I was reading the book and I was so impressed. I don’t want to go into it. This is dangerous.”

Concentration, discipline, yoga discipline, other methods of chanting mantras – they all reinforce your mind and make it stronger, capable of using the powers that are in your subconscious, in your unconscious, in your collective unconscious. If you are not aware – and you are not aware – this is like giving a sword, a naked sword to a child to play with. Either he is going to hurt himself or kill somebody, but something wrong is going to happen. You cannot conceive that anything good is going to happen out of it.

The brahmins in India have used the discipline of the mind for thousands of years to keep the whole country enslaved under them. In India, in five thousand years no revolution has happened. And there were all the possibilities for revolution to happen thousands of times in these years. The brahmins have made one fourth of India untouchable…. Those people cannot touch you. Not only can’t the people touch you, they are so dirty – they are suffering from their bad, evil karmas of past life – that even their shadow falling on you is enough to disturb your existence. You have to take a bath immediately. Do you see the stupid idea? The shadow of a person passing over you has made you dirty. A shadow has no existence! A shadow cannot touch you. A shadow cannot carry any contamination.

In India, for thousands of years, one fourth of the country has lived in such slavery that they have to walk with a bell around their neck, just like you put a bell around the neck of a cow or a buffalo, so you know when the cow is coming because the bell goes on ringing. So they had to keep a bell continually ringing, so anybody hearing it can escape, even from their shadow. And at the back they had to attach a long brush, like a tail. That was to go on cleaning the path on which they are traveling, because the shadow is falling there, and the shadow has to be cleaned because some brahmin may come afterwards and walk on the earth where some untouchable, some achhoot – that is their word – has passed.

Now, what power had these brahmins? They were not kings, they had no armies; they had no temporal power of any kind. But they had a tremendously disciplined mind, which became more and more disciplined with every generation. Alexander the Great remembers it in his memoirs…. He came to India before Jesus Christ, and this was the thing that impressed him the most – of course he came across thousands of things which impressed him, but this was the thing that impressed him most.

He was the disciple of Aristotle. Socrates’ disciple was Plato, Plato’s disciple was Aristotle, Aristotle’s disciple was Alexander the Great. When he was returning after invading India, he remembered that Aristotle had asked him, “When you come back bring the four Vedas, which Hindus think are the only God-written books. And of course they are the ancientmost books in the world, so, God-written or not, they are the ancientmost treasure. Bring the four Vedas with you, I don’t want anything else.”

So he inquired, “Can I find a person who has all the four Vedas?”

People said, “Yes, in our village there is a great brahmin scholar – ancient, very old, perhaps two hundred years old – and he has all the four Vedas. They are inherited, so there’s no fear that anything can be wrong in them. They are thousands of years old – you can get them from him.”

Alexander went to the brahmin, asked the old man – he had never seen such an old man. In fact, he had never seen such a man. The old man looked into his eyes and said, “Okay. Tomorrow morning, as the sun rises, I will give you the four Vedas.”

Alexander was immensely happy. He said, “Whatsoever you want me to do for you, you have done such a great favor for me… because I was told that ‘no brahmin will give you the Vedas. Even if you give your whole empire, no brahmin is going to give you the whole Vedas.’ And you have not asked anything.”

He said, “No. No brahmin asks anything. Whatsoever he wants, he gets. Those who beg, they are not brahmins. You come tomorrow morning and you will see.”

The whole night Alexander could not sleep. What is going to happen tomorrow morning? What kind of man is he? And what the old man did…. He had four sons: he called all four sons, sat around the home fire, which had been kept alive for thousands of years, burning twenty-four hours a day, day in, day out, year in, year out – they all sat around that fire, and the father said, “You take, each of you, one Veda. Read one page and drop it into the fire; read another page and drop it into the fire.

Before the morning rises you have to finish all the four Vedas.”

They did what the father said, and by the morning, when Alexander reached there – and he reached a little early, he was so curious – he could not understand what he saw. What was happening? They were throwing the last pages into the fire.

Alexander said, “What is going on?”

He said, “Nothing. You take these, my four sons. These are the four Vedas. This is Rig Veda, this is Yajur Veda, this is Sam Veda, this is Athrva Veda.”

Alexander said, “But I was asking about the books.”

He said, “They remember every word. That’s what we have been doing the whole night.”

He asked, “How can a person remember the whole book in one night?”

The old brahmin said, “You don’t know brahmins. This is our discipline. Our whole discipline is to sharpen the memory to such a stage that once you have read anything, there is no way to forget it.”

This story came into the hands of another great king, Akbar, a Mohammedan. He could not believe it, because the Vedas are big, voluminous collections. He inquired in his court: “Find somebody who can repeat this incident in front of me.”

One man stood up and said, “This is nothing. I know a brahmin in my village who can do a thousand times more. This is nothing.” The man was called to the court of the great Akbar. And in his court there were scholars of Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Prakrit, Pali – other ancient languages – because he was very scholarly himself and he wanted the topmost scholars to be around him. There were thirty people who knew thirty different languages.

And this was the arrangement that was made: this man who was brought from the village looked like a villager, a simple brahmin…. This was the arrangement, that everybody should keep in his mind one sentence in his own language. So there would be thirty sentences in thirty languages – and this man knows only one language, Sanskrit, so in those thirty languages Sanskrit was not included.

This man will go to the first man; the first man will say the first word of his sentence, and a gong will be struck. Then he will go to the second man who will say his first word, and there will again be a gong. He will go to the thirty people again and again: second round, second word, a gong; third round… until all the sentences are complete. And then he will repeat all the thirty sentences… and he did it.

Must have been a great computer! But if computers can do it, why not mind? If mind can create computers… and I have not heard about any computer yet creating a mind. The mind has much more power. You can discipline it in many ways, and the pseudo-religions have developed these methods of concentration.

Remember, concentration is not meditation, because concentration is a discipline of the mind and meditation is putting the mind aside.

In fact the English word meditation is not the right word, because in the West nothing like meditation has ever happened. The Sanskrit word is dhyana. The problem was the same when Buddhist monks went to China; they could not find the right word to translate dhyana into Chinese, so they wrote dhyana, which to the Chinese sounded like ‘zana’. Hence the Japanese Zen; it is a transfiguration of the word dhyana.

‘Meditation’ gives again the wrong idea, as if you are meditating upon something – as if it is an activity – not much different from concentration. You are concentrating on something, you are contemplating on something, you are meditating on something, but you are always concerned with something. And what dhyana is, is dropping all objects, dropping anything on which you can concentrate, contemplate, meditate; dropping everything, nothing is left – only the one who was concentrating, only the one who was contemplating.

That pure awareness is dhyana.

In English there is no right word, so you have to understand that we are using ‘meditation’ for dhyana.

Dhyana means a state of being where there is no thought, no object, no dream, no desire, nothing – just emptiness. In that emptiness you come to know your self. You discover the truth. You discover your subjectivity. It is perfect silence.

There are methods to put aside the mind, just as there are methods to discipline the mind. But in the West, and more so in America… because if the West is bad, America is worse. I have been looking at American books – not now; for four years I have not touched a book. All the books that are best sellers in America are somehow concerned with how to increase your willpower, how to influence people and win friends, how to grow rich, mind over matter… but they are all talking about the discipline of the mind.

Certainly if you discipline the mind you are a better competitor, you can fulfill your ambition more easily. You can manipulate people more easily, you can exploit people more easily, you can use others as a means to your end. Friedrich Nietzsche has written a book, Will to Power. That is the very essence of the whole Western effort: will-to-power.

Will-to-power needs first you should have willpower. And willpower is another name for your mind discipline, crystallized. No, these methods won’t do. You have to learn methods to put the mind aside. It is already too powerful; don’t make it more powerful, because you are feeding your own enemy. It is already crystallized. Your school, your college, your university, they are all doing that.

After remaining nine years a professor in university, I resigned. I said to the vice-chancellor, “I cannot do this work because this is destroying people.”

He said, “What do you mean, that this means destroying people? Students love you. They won’t allow you to leave. And I don’t see on what grounds you are saying that you cannot continue to destroy people.”

I said, “You will not understand, because although you are born in India, you don’t know India. You have been educated in the West” – he had remained his whole life in the West. “All these books, all these psychologies that I have to teach, I am teaching against myself. I know these are going to do harm to these people. Their minds are already in a bad shape, and now they will become stronger.

Their chains will be far stronger, their slavery of the mind will be far stronger.”

The pseudo-religions depend upon disciplining the mind. The real religion’s first work is to put the mind aside. And it is, in a way, very simple. Those disciplines are very difficult. To train the mind for concentration is very difficult, because it goes on revolting, it goes on falling back into its old habits.

You pull it again, and it escapes. You bring it again to the subject you were concentrating on and suddenly you find you are thinking of something else, you have forgotten what you are concentrating upon. It is not an easy job.

But to put it aside is a very simple thing – not difficult at all. All that you have to do is to watch.

Whatsoever is going on in your mind, don’t interfere, don’t try to stop it. Do not do anything, because whatsoever you do will become a discipline.

So do not do anything at all. Just watch.

Watching is not a doing. Just as you watch the sunset or the clouds in the sky or the people passing on the street, watch the traffic of thoughts and dreams, nightmares – relevant, irrelevant, consistent, inconsistent, anything that is going on. And it is always rush hour. You simply watch; you stand by the side unconcerned.

The pseudo-religions don’t allow you to remain unconcerned, because, they say, greed is bad. So if a thought of greed comes you jump to prevent it; otherwise you will become greedy. Anger is bad; if an angry thought passes by, you immediately jump – you have to change it, you have to be kind and compassionate, and you have to love your enemy just like yourself. If something against your neighbor comes up… no, you have to love your neighbor just like yourself. So all the old religions have given you ideas of what is right and what is wrong – and if the wrong thing is passing by, you certainly have to stop it. You have to interfere, you have to jump in and pull that thing out. You miss the point.

That’s why I don’t say to you what is right and what is wrong. All that I say is: to watch is right; not to watch is wrong.

I make it absolutely simplified: Be watchful.

It is none of your business – if greed is passing by, let it pass; if anger is passing by, let it pass. Who are you to interfere? Why are you so much identified with your mind? Why do you start thinking, “I am greedy… I am angry”? There is only a thought of anger passing by. Let it pass; you just watch.

There is an ancient story…. A man who has gone out of his town comes back and finds that his house is on fire. It was one of the most beautiful houses in the town, and the man loved the house.

Many people were ready to give double price for the house, but he had never agreed for any price, and now it is just burning before his eyes. And thousands of people have gathered, but nothing can be done.

The fire has spread so far that even if you try to put it out, nothing will be saved. So he becomes very sad. His son comes running, and whispers something in his ear: “Don’t be worried. I sold it yesterday, and at a very good price – three times…. The offer was so good I could not wait for you.

Forgive me.”

But the father said, “Good, if you have sold it for three times more than the original price of the house.” Then the father is also a watcher, with other watchers. Just a moment before he was not a watcher, he was identified. It is the same house, the same fire, everything is the same – but now he is not concerned. He is enjoying it just as everybody else is enjoying.

Then the second son comes running, and he says to the father, “What are you doing? You are smiling – and the house is on fire?”

The father said, “Don’t you know, your brother has sold it.”

He said, “He had talked about selling it, but nothing has been settled yet, and the man is not going to purchase it now.” Again, everything changes. Tears which had disappeared, have come back to the father’s eyes, his smile is no more there, his heart is beating fast. But the watcher is gone. He is again identified.

And then the third son comes, and he says, “That man is a man of his word. I have just come from him. He said, ‘It doesn’t matter whether the house is burned or not, it is mine. And I am going to pay the price that I have settled for. Neither you knew, nor I knew that the house would catch on fire.'” Again the father is a watcher. The identity is no more there. Actually nothing is changing; just the idea that “I am the owner, I am identified somehow with the house,” makes the whole difference.

The next moment he feels, “I am not identified. Somebody else has purchased it, I have nothing to do with it; let the house burn.”

This simple methodology of watching the mind, that you have nothing to do with it…. Most of its thoughts are not yours but from your parents, your teachers, your friends, the books, the movies, the television, the newspapers. Just count how many thoughts are your own, and you will be surprised that not a single thought is your own. All are from other sources, all are borrowed – either dumped by others on you, or foolishly dumped by yourself upon yourself, but nothing is yours.

The mind is there, functioning like a computer; literally it is a biocomputer. You will not get identified with a computer. If the computer gets hot, you won’t get hot. If the computer gets angry and starts giving signals in four letter words, you will not be worried. You will see what is wrong, where something is wrong. But you remain detached.

Just a small knack… I cannot even call it a method because that makes it heavy; I call it a knack.

Just by doing it, one day suddenly you are able to do it. Many times you will fail; it’s nothing to be worried about… no loss, it is natural. But just doing it, one day it happens.

Once it has happened, once you have even for a single moment become the watcher, you know now how to become the watcher – the watcher on the hills, far away. And the whole mind is there deep down in the dark valley, and you are not to do anything about it.

The most strange thing about the mind is, if you become a watcher it starts disappearing. Just like the light disperses darkness, watchfulness disperses the mind, its thoughts, its whole paraphernalia.

So meditation is simply watchfulness, awareness. And that reveals – it is nothing to do with inventing.

It invents nothing; it simply discovers that which is there.

And what is there? You enter and you find infinite emptiness, so tremendously beautiful, so silent, so full of light, so fragrant, that you have entered into the kingdom of God.

In my words, you have entered into godliness.

And once you have been in this space, you come out and you are a totally new person, a new man.

Now you have your original face. All masks have disappeared. You will live in the same world, but not in the same way. You will be among the same people but not with the same attitude, and the same approach. You will live like a lotus in water: in the water, but absolutely untouched by water.

Religion is the discovery of this lotus flower within.

Okay Sheela?