Meditation is easy
January 29, 2009
Taking things lightly
Taking things easily
and without forcing
after some time
the rush of thought
outward and inward
subsides naturally
and the true face
shows itself
Bukko
To be a buddha is not a difficult job. It is not some achievement for which you need a Nobel Prize. It is the easiest thing in the world, because it has already happened without your knowing. The buddha is already breathing in you. Just a little recognition, just a little turning inwards… and that has not to be done forcibly. If you do it forcibly you will miss the point. It is very delicate. You have to look inward playfully, not seriously. That’s what he means by “taking things easily.” Don’t take anything seriously.
Existence is easy with you
Existence is very easy. You have got your life without any effort, you are living your life without any effort. You are breathing perfectly well without being reminded; your heartbeat continues even in your sleep — so easy is existence with you! But you are not so easy with existence. You are very close-fisted. You want everything to be turned into an achievement.
Enlightenment cannot be an achievement. That which you have already — how can it be an achievement? The authentic master simply takes away things which you don’t have and you believe you have, and he gives you that which you already have. You are having many things which you don’t have at all, you just believe that you have them. The master’s function is that of a surgeon, to cut all that is not you and leave behind just the essential core — the eternal being.
Life is a game
It is a very easy phenomenon; you can do it on your own. There are no problems and no risk in taking things easily, but people take things very tensely. They take things very seriously, and that spoils the whole game. And remember, life is a game. Once you understand it as a game, a deep playfulness arises on its own accord. The victory is not the point; the point is to play totally, joyously, dancingly.
Osho, excerpts from The Buddha: The Emptiness of the Heart #1
No time to meditate?
Subscribe Meditation Seconds
Osho book recommendations on meditation
The Book of Secrets: Keys to Love and Meditation
Awareness: The Key to Living in Balance (Osho, Insights for a New Way of Living)
Meditation: The First and Last Freedom
Everyday Osho: 365 Daily Meditations for the Here and Now
Meditation For Busy People: Stress-Beating Strategies To Calm Your Life
Discover the Buddha: 53 Meditations to Meet the Buddha Within
Death and Life Meditation
January 12, 2009
15 minutes dying before sleep
15 minutes vitality after waking up
In the night before you go to sleep, do this fifteen-minute meditation. It is a death meditation. Lie down and relax your body. Just feel like dying and that you cannot move your body because you are dead. Just create the feeling that you are disappearing from the body. Do it for ten, fifteen minutes, and you will start feeling it within a week. Meditating that way, fall asleep. Don’t break it. Let the meditation turn into sleep, and if sleep overcomes you, go into it.
In the morning, the moment you feel you are awake — don’t open your eyes — do the life meditation. Feel that you are becoming more wholly alive, that life is coming back and the whole body is full of vitality and energy. Start moving, swaying in the bed with eyes closed. Just feel that life is flowing in you. Feel that the body has a great flowing energy — just the opposite of the death meditation. So do the death meditation in the night before falling asleep and the life meditation just before getting up.
With the life meditation you can take deep breaths. Just feel full of energy… life entering with breathing. Feel full and very happy, alive. Then after fifteen minutes, get up. These two — the life and death meditation — are going to help you tremendously.
Osho, excerpts from A Rose is a Rose #12
Osho book recommendations on meditation
Meditation: The First and Last Freedom
Everyday Osho: 365 Daily Meditations for the Here and Now
Meditation For Busy People: Stress-Beating Strategies To Calm Your Life
Discover the Buddha: 53 Meditations to Meet the Buddha Within
Meditation for Holy Days
January 2, 2009
Only do what you enjoy
Try this rebellious celebration – meditation!
Only do that which you enjoy. If you don’t enjoy, don’t do it. Try it — because enjoyment comes only from your center. If you are doing something and you enjoy it, you start getting reconnected with the center. If you do something which you don’t enjoy, you are disconnected from the center. Joy arises from the center, and from nowhere else. So let it be a criterion, and be a fanatic about it.
You are walking on the road; suddenly you recognize that you are not enjoying the walk. Stop. Finished — this is not to be done.
Enjoyment is just the sound of being centered. Whenever you are not enjoying something, you are off-center. Then don’t force it; there is no need. If people think you crazy, let them think you crazy. Within a few days you will, by your own experience, find how you were missing yourself. You were doing a thousand and one things which you never enjoyed, and still you were doing them because you were taught to. You were just fulfilling your duties.
The center is available when you are warm, when you are flowing, melting, in love, in joy, in dance, in delight. It is up to you. Just go on doing only those things which you REALLY love to do and you enjoy. If you don’t enjoy, stop.
Find something else that you will enjoy. There is bound to be something that you will enjoy. I have never come across a person who cannot enjoy anything. There are persons who may not enjoy one thing, then another, then another, but life is vast. Don’t remain engaged; become floating. Let there be more streaming of energy. Let it flow, let it meet with other energies that surround you.
Osho, excerpts from The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol.4 #4
No time to meditate?
Subscribe Meditation Seconds
Osho card decks to play with
Osho Zen Tarot: The Transcendental Game Of Zen
Tarot in the Spirit of Zen: The Game of Life
The Osho Transformation Tarot: Insights and Parables for Renewal in Everyday Life
Buddha Discovery Deck: 53 Sutras and Meditation Cards to Create a Silent Space Within
What Lovemaking Teaches
December 30, 2008
We unify while making love and never consider the possibility of experiencing similar kinds of ecstasy in daily life. It takes a little practice, yet it is possible to unify with anything living. This is what is called meditation.
Union with life
While making love, think of prayer, meditation, godliness. While making love, care for a beautiful fragrance, chant, sing, dance. Your bedroom should be a temple, a sacred place. And lovemaking should not be a hurried thing. Go deeper into it; savor it as slowly and as gracefully as possible. You will be surprised. You have the key.
You have not been sent into the world without keys. But those keys have to be used, you have to put them into the lock and turn them.
The very way of life
Love is a phenomenon, one of the most potential, where the ego disappears and you are conscious, fully conscious, pulsating, vibrating. You are no more an individual, you are lost into the energy of the whole. Then, slowly slowly, let this become your very way of life. What happens at the peak of love has to become your discipline — not just an experience but a discipline. Then whatsoever you are doing and wherever you are walking… early in the morning with the sun rising, have the same feeling, the same merger with existence. Lying down on the ground, the sky full of stars, have the same merger again. Lying down on the earth, feel one with the earth.
Slowly slowly, lovemaking should give you the clue for how to be in love with existence itself. And then the ego is known as a fiction, is used as a fiction. And if you use it as a fiction, there is no danger.
Osho, The Book of Wisdom #16
No time to meditate?
Subscribe Meditation Seconds
Osho book recommendations on love and relationship
Love, Freedom, Aloneness: The Koan of Relationships
Being in Love: How to Love with Awareness and Relate Without Fear
Gratefulness and Retrospection
December 24, 2008
Blessings of a new day
In the morning remember one thing, says Atisha, that a new day, a new opportunity, has again been given to you. Feel grateful. Existence is so generous. You have wasted so many days, and again one day has been given to you. In the morning remember it is a new day, a new beginning. Have a decision deep in your heart that “Today I am not going to waste this opportunity. Enough is enough! Today I am going to be aware, today I am going to be alert, today I am going to devote as much energy as possible to the single cause, the cause of meditation. I will meditate in all my acts. I will do all the activities, the usual day-to-day activities, but with a new quality: I will bring the quality of awareness to them.”
Welcome the new day. Feel grateful, happy that existence still trusts in you; there is still a possibility, the transformation can still happen. Start the day with a great decisiveness.
Even failure supports
In the evening again feel gratitude that the day was given to you, and feel gratitude for all that happened — good and bad both, happiness and unhappiness both, because they are all teachers. Everything is an opportunity. Taken rightly, every moment is a stepping-stone. Failure as much helps you to become alert as success; sometimes in fact failure helps you to become more aware than success. Success helps you to fall asleep. In happiness people forget; in happiness nobody remembers godliness. In unhappiness suddenly the remembrance comes.
So in the evening feel grateful for whatsoever happened during the day. Thank the whole existence. Remember when you failed in the day in being aware and being compassionate — just remember. Just watch again, take note when you failed in awareness — that will help you tomorrow, it will enhance your awareness. And take note when you failed in compassion — that will help you tomorrow to be more compassionate. And also take note when you succeeded in being aware and compassionate. Don’t feel any pride for it either — no guilt, no pride. It is not a question of guilt and pride. Nothing of the sort — just noticing back, what happened from the morning to the evening.
Osho, The Book of Wisdom #17
No time to meditate?
Subscribe Meditation Seconds
Osho book recommendations on meditation
Meditation: The First and Last Freedom
Everyday Osho: 365 Daily Meditations for the Here and Now
Meditation For Busy People: Stress-Beating Strategies To Calm Your Life
Discover the Buddha: 53 Meditations to Meet the Buddha Within
