Question – Two mornings ago i slept through the lecture and woke up at the end with the word ‘single-mindedness’ on my mind. so what to do?
Osho – Be single-minded. The message is so clear; what is there to ask? Your being has given you a great message.
Sometimes it happens after deep sleep that you have messages from your deepest core of being. Start listening to your first thoughts in the morning; out of sleep you are very close to your being. There is more possibility, within two or three seconds of waking, to have some glimpses of your deepest being, some messages. After two, three seconds, the contact will be lost. You will again be in the world, thrown into the world. But sometimes it happens, as it happens to a few people: listening to me they fall asleep. There are different types of people.
For example, just now Sheela is fast asleep, but her sleep is really beautiful: it is a sort of trance, not sleep. She is not just asleep; her sleep is luminous. She has simply relaxed. Listening to me deeply, she could not remain tense. All tension is gone, so she simply relaxed, relaxed into a deeper layer of her own being. To all people from the outside she will look fast asleep. When she is back, even she may not be able to understand what has happened because to her also it may look like sleep. It is not sleep; it is a certain stage: in yoga we call it TANDRA. It is a midway point between waking and sleep, and without dreams.
So there are two midway stages between deep sleep and waking. The ordinary stage is dreaming: if you are just in between, then you dream. Either you are awake, or you are fast asleep, or you are dreaming. And dreaming is just in the middle of waking and sleeping; it is the middle passage. This is ordinarily so.
But if your meditation goes deeper, or, if your love goes deeper, the first change that happens in consciousness is a change in the middle stage — dreaming stops. Now it is very difficult to say what it is. You can think about it as sleep, or you can think about it as waking; it is both together — just a balance between the two, a very balanced stage.
TANDRA is the first glimpse, the beginning of SATORI. Dreams disappear first. Then in the next step, sleep disappears; and in the third step, what you call waking, that disappears. And when all three have disappeared, then arises what we call REAL waking. Then one becomes enlightened. TANDRA is the first step; dreams are disappearing.
So sometimes it happens that people fall asleep here — they are in a state of trance. TANDRA can be translated as trance. For all practical purposes, they are asleep. They will not be able to remember my words, but after they are back they will remember that something very deep and silent has happened. Something in their energy has changed.
It is a deep relaxation. In this relaxation if some message arises, listen to it very carefully.
“Two mornings ago I slept through the lecture and woke up at the end with the word ‘single-mindedness’ on my mind.” That morning I had been talking about singlemindedness.
The question is old. The question is concerned with the series of Zen stories. I was talking that morning about single-mindedness. You may not have heard; you were in TANDRA, in trance to what I was saying. But what I wanted to deliver to you has been delivered. Your being listened, your body listened, your totality drank out of me, absorbed what I was saying, what I was being here. And when you came back, as a condensed message, a gift from your deepest core to your periphery, from your center to your circumference, the word ‘single-mindedness’ arose in your consciousness. Now you ask what to do?. — be single-minded!
And what do I mean when I say ‘be single-minded’? In fact, to say ‘be single-minded’ is almost to say ‘be without mind’ — because the mind exists only in conflict. Mind exists only as many. When the manyness has disappeared and the crowd is no more there, we call it single-minded — or you can call it no-mind because the mind has disappeared. Mind is many; single mind is no-mind. When you are one, together — no conflict inside, no division, all demons gone, you have become indivisible,,everything joined together in a deep coherence and harmony, a single orchestra — then there is no-mind.
Single-mindedness is a term from Yoga tradition. No-mind means the same, but the term belongs to another tradition, Zen. But they both mean the same: don’t be a crowd, don’t be poly-psychic. Become uni-psychic, become one.
Source – Osho Book “The Beloved, Vol 1″