Osho – Man can come to truth only through meditation. Truth is not something that mind can know. Mind can theorise about it, but ‘about’ means around — and mind goes about and about, around and around. It moves in a circle, it never reaches the centre. Its very nature is not to reach to the centre, it exists for the circumference.
Mind is needed only to relate with others. It is a method of communication. Truth is your very being. It is not a question of relating to it. It happens only when you fall into deep silence, when you forget the whole world, when the other is completely forgotten as if the other does not exist at all. In those moments of solitude and aloneness truth is revealed. It is not a conclusion of the mind but a revelation of no-mind.
Meditation simply means turning in. Mind is always turning out, mind is basically extroversion. It has its utility — I am not against utilising it, but I am certainly against being utilised by it. Use it as a servant, use it as a beautiful mechanism, but don’t let it become your master. It is a good slave, take every care of it, but don’t allow it to enslave you.
Remember that the real master is not on the circumference, the real master is at the centre. And at the centre there is only consciousness: no thoughts, no desires, no imagination. All the faculties of the mind stop functioning. You are simply alert, aware, watchful, you simply are. In that state you are truth. That is the meaning of Verity — it is one of the most beautiful names: the state of being true.
And once it is experienced it starts changing your whole life style. If you know your truth you cannot be untrue in any way. It becomes impossible. Even to be untrue to others becomes impossible. The joy of being truthful is such that who would like to fall into the darkness of being untrue? The simplicity of being truthful is such that who would like to create unnecessary complexities, complications, by being untruthful?
One lie brings in its wake a thousand and one other lies, because you have to defend it, you have to support it — and it cannot be defended by truth, it can only be defended by other lies. And every other lie will need in its own turn more lies. A single lie, and your whole life starts becoming untruthful, inauthentic.
Truth needs no defence. It is very simple, it is simply so. And the man who lives in truth need not bother what he has said, what he has done. We need not go on remembering all that he has said and all that he has done. The lying person has to be continuously calculating, watching. he may say something; which goes against something else which he said before, he may do something, that may undo something else. His life becomes more and more complicated, more and more entangled. It becomes a riddle, it becomes a problem; he becomes a problem to himself and to others. And a problematic life cannot know what bliss is.
Bliss is known only by the simple, the innocent. But the way to find it is to put the mind aside and to go in a state of no-mind. Slowly slowly a few glimpses will arise, and then those gaps start becoming bigger, then those beautiful intervals become vaster. And then sooner or later such a state arises that even if you are in the marketplace doing the ordinary things of life which are needed, your silence continues like an undercurrent; it goes on flowing. You can hear its melody, you can feel its beauty, you can taste its sweetness.
Truth brings many gifts, but one has to open the door of meditation. Nobody can give you the truth; truth is already given to you from god himself. It is not something that has to be found anywhere else; it is already the case, it is your suchness, verity! You just have to take a few steps inwards… Sannyas simply means this: a decision to find one’s truth, a commitment that ‘From this moment my life will be devoted to finding mY truth.’
And remember: the truth of Buddha, the truth of Jesus or the truth of Zarathustra cannot be your truth. If you repeat Jesus or Buddha you will be living in the mind. And when you put the mind aside, naturally you put your Christianity, your Hinduism, your Mohammedanism aside because they are all part of the mind. The moment you put the mind aside you have put the whole of history aside, the whole world aside. Then you are moving into your own being with no history, no past, with no society, as if you are alone on the earth, as if you are the first being on the earth, in existence.
Once this decision becomes a commitment… That’s why I insist on sannyas, otherwise people can simply listen to me and they can meditate and they can go on living ordinarily — there is no need to become sannyasins. And many people think ‘What is the need of becoming a sannyasin? We can meditate, we can listen, we can try to understand what is happening, we can go through therapy groups…’
But there is a very fundamental reason; the reason is: it is a deliberate commitment, a conscious decision, so from this moment it becomes your focus of life. You have to put all that is unessential aside, and you have to put more and more energy into the inward journey. The truth is not very far. It needs only one step, hence it is better not to call it a step: it is a quantum leap, a jump from mind to no-mind.
Source – Osho Book “The Golden Wind”