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

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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)

Lunchtime Enlightenment: Modern Meditations to Free the Mind and Unleash the Spirit – at Work, at Home, at Play

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

The Everyday Meditator: A Practical Guide

Letting go of shock-absorbers

Man has created many psychological shock-absorbers around himself. Unless you drop all shock-absorbers you are never going to be free.

Only truth liberates. In the beginning, truth shocks very much — but that’s how it is, that’s how things are, that’s how nature functions. You have to open yourself, you have to be vulnerable to all the shocks of life. It will hurt, it will wound, you will cry, you will weep, you will be in a rage against life. But slowly slowly you will start seeing that truth is truth, and it is pointless to be in a rage against truth. And once the rage has subsided, the truth has a beauty of its own. Truth liberates.

It frightens, it scares, but that is the only way you can grow. Growth has to be with reality, not against reality. And once you have tasted something of reality as it is, you will never gather any other buffers, shock-absorbers, around you again.
Osho, excerpts from The Book of Wisdom #12

Osho book recommendations

The Zen Manifesto; Freedom from Oneself

The Book of Wisdom: The Heart of Tibetan Buddhism. Commentaries on Atisha’s Seven Points of Mind Training

No Water No Moon: Talks on Zen Stories

Gold Nuggets: Messages from Existence

The Heart Sutra: Talks on Buddha

The Empty Boat: Talks on the Sayings of Chuang Tzu

Find your ego, I will kill it

Bodhidharma was asked by Emperor Wu, “I am very much disturbed by my ego, by this self. And I have tried everything, but I cannot get rid of it. Help me!” Bodhidharma said, “Come early in the morning tomorrow, three o’clock in the morning. And come alone, and don’t forget to bring your self with you — and I will finish it forever.” The emperor was afraid. This man looked mad. “How can anybody finish the self? And what does he mean when he says, ‘Don’t forget to bring it’?”

The whole night he could not sleep, tossed and turned. Many times he decided not to go, and he had said, “Come alone” — and he was a very dangerous looking man. In China he was known as the Barbarian Buddha. He had very dangerous eyes. If he looked into your eyes, then for months you would not be able to sleep. And he looked murderous — and he WAS a murderer. He murdered many disciples. Many people became enlightened through him. And he was really a hard taskmaster.

Three o’clock, in the dark, alone, to be with this man… and one never knows — he was unpredictable. When he had entered China, he had come with one shoe on one foot, the other shoe on his head. The emperor was puzzled and he said, “What are you doing?”

He said, “I am trying to show you — this is the way I am. Just to give you a taste of what type of man I am, so you know from the very beginning with whom you are dealing.” Now, to go to this man in his mountain cave in the dark…. M any times he decided not to go, but the attraction was also great — because this man was no ordinary man. Yes, on the surface he looked very hard, but deep down there was the kindest heart possible. He was all compassion. Even if he was hard, it was because of his compassion.

Finally, he had to go. And the moment he reached in front of Bodhidharma… he was sitting there with his staff, and he said, “You have come?.Where is your ego? Where is your self? Have you brought it with you? I am going to finish it forever.”

The emperor said, “What are you talking about? Is the self a thing that I can bring with me?” Bodhidharma said, “Then what is it?” The emperor said, “Of course, it is something inside.” Bodhidharma said, “Okay, inside or outside, it makes no difference. My staff can reach anywhere! You just sit in front of me, close your eyes, and try to find it. And the moment you have found it, just tell me that ‘I have found,’ and I will kill it.”
Look inside and find it!

Shaking and trembling, the emperor sat before Bodhidharma. Hours passed. The sun started rising. He looked and looked… he had to look! because this man was sitting there with his staff. He could hit hard. And by the morning when the sun was rising, he was totally a different man. Bodhidharma said, “Now you can open your eyes. Where is it? For three hours you have been looking.”

The emperor touched Bodhidharma’s feet and said, “I cannot find it. I looked hard — I have never looked so hard. Your presence made me look hard. I searched with all my energy possible. I was not holding anything back, but I did not find it.” And Bodhidharma laughed and he said, “So you see? I have finished it forever.”
The ego is not

It is not! When you don’t look it is. When you look, it is not. Go in… and you will not find any ego, any self, anything. What you will find is eternal, infinite life, and then there is really respect for it. But it has nothing to do with you or me — it is reverence for life.
Osho, excerpts from The Perfect Master Vol. 2 #4

Osho book recommendations on masters of meditation

The Buddha Said…: Meeting the Challenge of Life’s Difficulties

Discover the Buddha: 53 Meditations to Meet the Buddha Within

A Cup of Tea

When the Shoe Fits: Stories of the Taoist Mystic Chuang Tzu

No Water No Moon: Talks on Zen Stories

The Mustard Seed: The Revolutionary Teachings of Jesus

Unio Mystica

Meditations on Sufism by Osho

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

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Osho book recommendations on meditation

Meditation: The First and Last Freedom

Lunchtime Enlightenment: Modern Meditations to Free the Mind and Unleash the Spirit – at Work, at Home, at Play

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

The Everyday Meditator: A Practical Guide

Meditation directs power

Any kind of power is bound to become destructive if there is no
 meditation involved in it. Lord Acton’s famous statement is basically true, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, 
because power means energy. What is one going to do with energy if one 
has not the understanding to use it rightly, if one has not the 
perspective to see clearly where to go, what to do, what not to do?
 Then power gives a certain intoxication.

The unconscious person
 becomes even more unconscious, the mad person becomes even more mad. 
Latest researchers into psychiatry have come to a very significant 
conclusion: that many people who are insane are really insane because 
they have so much power that it is beyond their control. They cannot 
cope with it. Basically they are not bad people, not evil, but their
 power is like a sword, a naked sword in the hands of a child. What is the child going to do with a sword? Either he will harm somebody or he
 will harm himself; hence power either becomes murderous or it becomes suicidal.

These are the only two possibilities without meditation. But
 once meditation becomes the foundation, then power is creative, then
 it brings great poetry and great music and great dance in your life.
 And not only in just your life; it starts overflowing you, it starts 
reaching others.
Osho, excerpts from The Old Pond – Plop!

Osho book recommendations on meditation

Pharmacy For the Soul: A Comprehensive Collection of Meditations, Relaxation and Awareness Exercises, and Other Practices for Physical and Emotional Well-Being

From Medication to Meditation

Awareness: The Key to Living in Balance (Osho, Insights for a New Way of Living)

Maturity: The Responsibility of Being Oneself (Osho, Insights for a New Way of Living.)

The Everyday Meditator: A Practical Guide

Meditations on Zen by Osho (Osho Meditations)

Buddha Discovery Deck: 53 Sutras and Meditation Cards to Create a Silent Space Within

Meditations on Yoga by Osho (Osho Meditations)

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

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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

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

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Osho book recommendations on love and relationship

Love, Freedom, Aloneness: The Koan of Relationships

Sex Matters

Being in Love: How to Love with Awareness and Relate Without Fear

Love Is a Free Bird

Rising in Love…

Once you have arrived you will see the whole logicalness of each step that you had taken, but not before it. You will see why you had to jump, why you had to take a certain step. When you were taking that step, nothing was clear, nothing was absolutely certain or guaranteed. You were taking that step according to your feeling, not according to your thinking. But later on, recapitulating, looking back, thinking can be revived. Now you can search for the undercurrent of logic.

Those who have arrived are very logical. But those who are on the path, if they try to be logical, they will never survive. This is one of the paradoxes to be understood. Hence the statements of Buddha, Tilopa, Saraha and Atisha are really very logical, but only for those who have arrived. The logic can be felt only backwards. When you are progressing towards the goal, the ultimate, everything is vague, hidden behind a cloud. It is like the early morning mist. In the afternoon, in the full noontide, the mist will have disappeared. But that full noontide has yet to happen.

The individual vision is different to others’

So think, meditate, feel the instructions the masters give, but don’t take them in dead seriousness. There are bound to be a few differences. A few things are going to happen on your way which did not happen on Atisha’s way. A few things are going to happen on your way which have not happened on my way. There are as many ways in the world as there are people. Nobody can stand in your place; even those who are standing very close to you are not standing in exactly the same place. Your angle of vision is bound to be a little bit different from the angle of vision of somebody who is standing just by your side holding your hand. No two persons can see the world in exactly the same way, it is impossible. Everybody has to move from his own place, his own space.
Osho, excerpt from The Book of Wisdom #5

Osho book recommendations on zen

Osho on Zen: A Stream of Consciousness Reader (A stream of consciousness reader)

Meditations on Zen by Osho (Osho Meditations)

Zen and the Art of Living

Zen: The Path of Paradox

Walk Without Feet, Fly Without Wings and Think Without Mind

No Water No Moon: Talks on Zen Stories

The Zen Manifesto; Freedom from Oneself

Zen: Its History and Teachings

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

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Osho book recommendations on meditation

Meditation: The First and Last Freedom

Lunchtime Enlightenment: Modern Meditations to Free the Mind and Unleash the Spirit – at Work, at Home, at Play

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

The Everyday Meditator: A Practical Guide

Consciousness continues the journey

Death is impossible in the very nature of things — only life is. Yes, life goes on changing forms; one day you are this, another day you are something else. Where is the child you once were? Has the child died? Can you say that the child has died? The child has not died, but then where is the child? The form has changed. The child is still there in its essentiality, but now you have become a young man or a young woman. The child is there with all its beauty; it has been superimposed by new riches.

One day you will become old. Then where is your youth? Died? No, again something more has happened. Old age has brought its own crop, old age has brought its own wisdom, old age has brought its own beauties.

The child is innocent, that is his core. The youth is overflowing with energy, that is his core. And the old man has seen all, lived all, known all; wisdom has arisen, that is his core. But his wisdom contains something of his youth; it is also overflowing, it is radiant, it is vibrant, it is pulsating, it is alive. And it also has something of the child; it is innocent.

If the old man is not young also, then he has only aged, he is not old. He has grown in time, in age, but he is not grown-up. He has missed. If the old man is not innocent like the child, if his eyes don’t show that crystal clarity of innocence, then he has not yet lived.

If you live totally, cunningness and cleverness disappear, and trust arises. These are the criteria to know whether one has lived or not. The child never dies but only is metamorphosed. The youth never dies, there is only a new mutation again. And do you think the old man dies? Yes, the body disappears because it has served its purpose, but the consciousness continues the journey.
Osho, excerpt from The Book of Wisdom #14

Osho book recommendations

And Now, And Here: On Death, Dying and Past Lives

Death the Greatest Fiction

From Death to Deathlessness: Answers to the Seekers of the Path