Introduction
Everyone knows that feeling: you arrive home and realize you have no memory of the journey. You made it back perfectly, on automatic pilot, while you were also engrossed in a kind of daydream or trance, like you were transported into an imaginary movie happening somewhere else.
Research suggests that we humans spend about half our waking hours in such “absent” spaces. Even stranger is that the same research shows we consistently report that we are happier when present than absent, irrespective of how much our minds tell us we dislike the task we are involved with.
Half our waking hours? That’s half a lifetime! Imagine going to the doctor and being told that your current condition is cutting your life span in half. And you are worried about your salt intake?
Isn’t it interesting how often in our lives people remind us to turn up for this meeting, or that event, or how we shouldn’t miss this movie or that book. It’s been going on forever: reminders to turn up for school, for work, for church, for the friend’s wedding … Yet no one ever reminds us to turn up for our own lives.
It would be okay to miss the odd friend’s wedding, but our life? And be less happy in the process? Now that is a bizarre situation for an otherwise pretty smart species like ours. Perhaps it is not so surprising that the planet Earth is such a mess, when we realize that there are seven billion of us running around on automatic pilot half the time.
Do any of us really doubt that things tend to go better when we turn up? Whether it is struggling with our tax returns or going for a walk with our best friend—it kind of helps to be there!
You have to wonder what this is all about. Seems we are operating on a version of hardware/software that was designed for one world, while trying to live in another. Maybe that’s just it. We have just emerged from a fairly rough few million years since we came down from the trees. Forget the salt intake—for most of that time we were happy just to avoid being some wild animal’s intake! And for almost all this time we have had to hunt for our best meals. Now the only hunting we do is to scratch around for our credit card.
So we seven billion, part-time sleepwalkers are messing up ourselves, each other, and the planet. And because we are half-asleep, we don’t even notice what is happening, let alone realize that we are not even enjoying it!
Eventually someone had to notice. And when people looked into it, they discovered that the essence of being present and awake is what meditation is all about.
For the contemporary, postmodern people, it was a natural. They are already more interested in the quality of their lives rather than the quantity of stuff in their lives. They are more open to the feminine, to patience, and regard the old patriarchal values as primitive. They are already less interested in outer authority, whether it is religion or science, but look inside for what is right for them. They want to customize their lives for themselves; they are not mass-produced sheep looking for a shepherd. For these people, life is an art in itself, not a means to some who-knows-what.
Then the academics noticed. All the best schools in the US have departments discovering that meditators age more slowly, have less stress, are healthier, are more considerate of others, make better leaders, are more creative, more productive … On top of that, they also discovered that the brain is a plastic organ. It is like a computer that changes depending how you use it. It is up to you!
Then the people who pay the bills noticed. “More productive,” did you say? If you are paying someone to turn up to work, and he or she is off in a daydream for half the day, that can get your attention. And what about my own productivity? Wouldn’t it make sense to actually be present for whatever I am trying to do? And did you mention stress and health? Two-thirds of visits to doctors are for stress-related complaints. Then all the days missed at work … That’s a cool $300 billion right there. Not to mention the suffering.
Or put another way: would an engaged, enthusiastic, healthy workforce be good for them and good for the company, and good for the community in general? It is not surprising that companies everywhere are moving in this direction: already a quarter of US companies are offering some kind of stress reduction program. They are beginning to realize that companies that don’t do well by their employees are not doing well. Period.
So whether you care about you, your neighbors, or the world around you, meditation would be the place to start. Okay, so at least give it a shot.
Before you rush off into “meditation,” there are one or two other major points to consider. Modern people are not the same as the people for whom “just sitting” worked well in the past. We are starting from a very different place. We live in a supercomplex, sophisticated world of interacting ideas and emotions—a different planet from the simple village life of the early meditators. Fact is, we are emotionally loaded. No wonder the main mindfulness meditation teachers are noticing that just sitting doesn’t work for many people and may not work totally for anyone. Simply put: you cannot expect to relax if you are sitting on a volcano.
That is why you will find in this book a wide variety of active meditations that give you the opportunity to really let go, to let off steam. Then sit still and see the difference.
Finally, you will also notice that the Osho approach to meditation includes many body-based or movement-based meditations, often incorporating dancing. We all pay lip service these days to the unitary nature of the mind and body. Deep down we usually mean that the mind is really the boss, but the body shouldn’t be ignored. The latest scientific approach suggests that, rather than the body being mainly there to provide room service for the mind—so it can do all those wonderful things like thinking and dreaming and being anywhere but present—it may be the opposite. The function of the mind is now said to ensure that the body moves in the most intelligent way possible—the mind as a servant of the body.
What that means is that instead of having to struggle with the mind because it just won’t change and keeps up the same old routine, start with the body. You know how easy it is to tell from someone’s body language whether they are happy or depressed, for example. Well, in exactly the same way, when the body changes, the mind will change too. Moving the body is so much easier than moving the mind! And much more fun too.
As Osho puts it:
“Meditation has become something absolutely needed, the only hope for humanity to be saved, for the earth to still remain alive. Meditation simply means the capacity to get involved yet remain unattached. It looks paradoxical—all great truths are paradoxical. You have to experience the paradox; that is the only way to understand it. You can do a thing joyously and yet just be a witness that you are doing it, that you are not the doer.
“Try with small things, and you will understand. Tomorrow when you go for a morning walk, enjoy the walk—the birds in the trees and the sunrays and the clouds and the wind. Enjoy, and still remember that you are a mirror; you are reflecting the clouds and the trees and the birds and the people.
“This self-remembering, Buddha calls sammasati, right mindfulness. Krishnamurti calls it choiceless awareness, the Upanishads call it witnessing, Gurdjieff calls it self-remembering, but they all mean the same. But it does not mean that you have to become indifferent; if you become indifferent you lose the opportunity to self-remember.
“Go on a morning walk and still remember that you are not it—you are not the walker but the watcher. And slowly, slowly you will have the taste of it—it is a taste, it comes slowly. And it is the most delicate phenomenon in the world; you cannot get it in a hurry. Patience is needed.
“Eat, taste the food, and still remember that you are the watcher. In the beginning it will create a little trouble in you because you have not done these two things together. In the beginning, I know if you start watching, you will feel like stopping eating, or if you start eating you will forget watching.
“Our consciousness is one-way—right now, as it is—it goes only toward the target. But it can become two-way—it can eat and yet watch. You can remain settled in your center and you can see the storm around you; you can become the center of the cyclone. And that is the greatest miracle that can happen to a human being, because that brings freedom, liberation, truth, godliness, bliss, benediction.”
John Andrews M.D. M.R.C.P.
Copyright © 1988, 2022 by OSHO International Foundation, www.osho.com/copyrights
