Relaxing the Body & Mind - the Death-Meditation

The day the book arrived was one of these days... overfull with work, and more over not really energy moving easily. So by the end of the day I sat down and started the CD - more out of curiosity, than thinking of ´doing` a meditation. A gentle voice asks me to relax, to relax, to relax... further it guides me deeper and deeper to a deep relaxation it asks me to relax the mind, thoughts are slowing down it relaxes it relaxes breath relaxes. The time the voice stops is of deep suchness.   It is a wonderful beginning of a relaxed evening, an evening where nothing needs to happen, but everything what happens is right.

Excerpt from And Now and Here 
The more a man lives in security, the more unconscious he will be. In security everything is known, familiar. The more one lives in insecurity, the more alert and conscious one will be. So ordinarily, except for the moments of danger, we are never alert, we are always asleep. If I suddenly point a dagger at your chest, you will become alert in many ways that you are not right now. With the dagger being pointed at your chest, there will be such a state of emergency, such a critical situation, that you cannot afford to be sleepy. No, at such a moment you cannot remain unalert. If you remain unalert in such a dangerous situation you will be risking death.

In that threatening moment your whole being will come to the point of crystallization, your whole attention will become condensed. Your whole attention will remain fixed on the dagger, you will become fully aware of it. It is possible this situation may last only for a second; nevertheless the fact is, your attention ordinarily becomes crystallized only in critical moments. Once the danger is over, you go back to your previous state, you go again into an unconscious state.

That seems to be the reason danger has an attraction. We love to take risks. A man gambles, for example. You may have hardly given a thought as to what makes him gamble. It is the element of danger that draws him to gambling. At the moment of placing his bet, he is more attentive than ever. A gambler has placed a bet of a hundred thousand dollars and is about to throw the dice. It is a very critical moment. In the blink of an eye, a hundred thousand dollars can go this way or that. In this moment he cannot afford to be sleepy; he will have to be aware. That moment of betting is certain to crystallize his attention. Now this may intrigue you, but in my view a gambler is also in search of meditation.
Whether he knows it or not is another matter.

A man brings a wife home. Then, as the days go by and she becomes more and more familiar, he becomes less and less attentive toward her. She becomes as well known to him as the street he crosses every day – and suddenly the woman next door looks more attractive. The reason is nothing more than the fact that her unfamiliarity excites his attention. Looking at her, his attention has to become condensed; the focus of his eye changes immediately. Actually, the eyes of husbands and wives don’t change focus when they look at each other. In fact, a husband hardly ever looks at his wife; he avoids her. The way he lives and moves around her does not require him to pay any attention to her. Hence, in my view, the attraction for another woman or another man is really the attraction of attention.
In that one moment, in that moment of thrill, the mind becomes fully alert.
It has to – because only then is it possible to see somebody.

There is a chase going on – to have a new house instead of the old, new clothes instead of the old, a new position instead of the old. Deep down, all this chasing indicates a profound desire to experience crystallized attention – meditation. And all the joys in one’s life depend on how crystallized one’s attention is. The moments of bliss are the moments of crystallized attention. Hence those who wish to attain bliss must awaken. You cannot attain bliss in a sleepy state.

Religion is a search for alertness – meditation – and so is gambling. One who goes to battle, sword in hand, is in search of meditation too. One who goes hunting a tiger in the forest is also searching for meditation. And the one who is sitting in the cave with his eyes closed, working hard on his agya chakra, his third eye center, is searching for meditation as well. The search can be in a good or bad direction, in a desirable or undesirable direction, but the search is one and the same.
A search may succeed or a search may fail, but the desire for searching is one and the same.

Meditation means the faculty of knowing, which is within me, coming to its total manifestation; so that no part of it remains dormant within – in seed form – so that the whole potential that I have for knowing does not remain just a potential. It becomes actual.

Chapter 10, Question1
from Osho: and NOW and HERE - Beyond the Duality of Life and Death

Pareltjes / Notities

Meditatie

Music

Home

Pearls / Notes

Meditation

GiftShop

OSHO PUBLIKATIES
Churchillstraat 11, 7091 XL Dinxperlo
tel. +31-(0)315 – 654 737
e-mail: info@osho.nl
© Copyright teksten, foto’s en illustraties van Osho: Osho International Foundation
© Copyright Nederlandse teksten van Osho: Osho Publikaties
Voor informatie over kopiëren/publiceren van teksten van Osho, zie: www.osho.com/copyrights