Osho – Become more and more of a witness

Osho – Remember only one thing: the past is a hindrance, the greatest hindrance. It has to be completely dropped, utterly dropped. To be with me is to be in the now — no past, no future. This moment is all there is and just this moment is god. Everything else is just the mind dreaming, desiring, imagining.

Once the past and future have dropped — and they are always dropped together; if you drop one, the other disappears of its own accord. They are two aspects of the same game. The past projects itself into the future. It wants to repeat itself — in a little more modified way, but still the same. Between the two is the moment. The moment, this moment, is the only reality, and the door to reality.  So let this moment become your whole life. Live moment to moment, with no ideology, with no desire for any kind of future, with no goal. And then you need not go to god — god comes to you.

The mind is never clear and can never be. The mind is what unclarity is. And all relationship is through the mind; hence the problem. You will have to learn the ways of no-mind So it is not a question of how to be clear; it is a question of how to be a no-mind. Through the mind the same thing will go on being repeated, again and again. The mind is repetitive, it is mechanical. It moves like a wheel: the same spokes come up again and again and again.

This is the difference between the western approach and the eastern. The western approach is to bring clarity to the mind. The whole of psychoanalysis is nothing but that: how to bring a clarity to the mind. The eastern approach is how to get out of the mind, because the mind is not going to be clear ever. The mind is confusion. There is not any possibility with the mind. It is not that there are confused minds and minds which are not confused, no. All minds are confused… the mind as such is confusion.

So it is not a question of how to become clear about your relationship; that is just a by-product. You have to get out of the mind slowly, slowly; you have to learn ways of getting out of it. And that’s what meditation is all about: it is slipping out of the mind. The mind is a mechanism. There is no need to get identified with it. Use it, but remain aloof, remain separate. Know perfectly well that you are a witness. Just as you are a witness of the outside world — the trees, the moon and the people — exactly like that you are a witness to the inside world — the dreams, the imagination, the anger, love, hate, jealousy, possessiveness, and all that. But you are always a witness, and the witness is always clear. The mind is always confusion, the witness is always clear.

Become more and more of a witness. Don’t get identified with the mind. It is very close but still it is not you. So there is no point in working on the mind. The whole work now has to be not on the mind but on you. Disconnect yourself from the mind more and more. When anger comes, sit silently and watch it. You are a watcher on the hills and anger is there just like a cloud passing by. There is the hate and there is the jealousy, but you remain aloof; you just see them. Don’t judge them, don’t be against them, because the moment you judge you become entangled. That’s what Jesus means when he says ‘Judge ye not’. That is the secret key to no-mind. Don’t say ‘This is good’, don’t say ‘This is bad’; just don’t say anything. Silently see it, take note of it: anger is there — it is neutral, neither good nor bad. And you will be surprised that it comes, it surrounds you and then it goes away.

Once you have learned the knack of it — that you can remain undisturbed and undistracted by the mind stuff that is continuously moving like traffic — you will have clarity. Not only clarity about this particular problem: you will simply have clarity — clarity about your whole life, clarity about everything that you are doing. And out of that clarity is beauty and benediction. Out of that clarity religion is born. You become religious out of that clarity, but it is never of the mind.

Source – Osho Book “The Madman’s Guide to Enlightenment”