Untitled Document1
| :: FORTHCOMING EVENTS ::
|
|
|
| AT OSHODHAM
|
|
44, Jhatikra Road, Pandwala Khurd, New Delhi.
|
June 27 – July 1
Meditation camp for children
and parents
Facilitated by
Ma Dev Dakshina and
Swami Chaitanya Keerti
JULY 6 – 8:
Osho bhakti shivir, facilitated
by ma dharmjyoti
JULY 27-29:
Guru purnima meditation camp,
facilitated by ma dharm jyoti and swami chaitanya keerti
JULY 30:
Guru purnima celebrations
More...
|
| OSHO WORLD GALLERIA
|
|
BG-09, Ansal Plaza Khelgaon Marg New Delhi
|
JULY 13:
Launch of an exhibition of
tea kettles
JULY 25:
Inauguration of guru vandana week
|
|
|
Untitled Document
|
:: Media ::
The Eloquence Of Absolute Silence
The Times of India, New Delhi
14th May 2007
|
Laws of science are not based on any belief system, they are rooted in existential reality which is universal. Hence one who follows a 'religion' can simply be 'religious' but not a Hindu, Muslim or Christian. The existential reality for such a religious person is beyond birth, special identity or nationality. It is universal. One may ask: If matter can exist by the same law universally, why 'God' needs so many different laws to be? Why can not God have the same universality? In order to realise this universality, this oneness, this non-divisibility of the phenomenon called 'God', one needs to learn how to be silent.
Osho makes this point through a story. A monk was once a guest in a village. The village people invited him to their temple and asked him to say something about God. The monk said, "Please forgive me, so many have tried to explain God before and yet no one seems to have heard or understood them. Please leave me alone". The people would not give up. So he agreed to meet them. He said, "Before I speak another word, tell me, do you know if God exists?" The villagers raised their hands in affirmation. The monk said, "Since you already know about God there is nothing left for me to say. You have known the ultimate".
The people were keen on hearing the monk so they went again and begged him to come to the temple and speak. They had agreed amongst themselves that if the monk asked them about God they will be honest and deny they know anything. The monk asked them the same question. Have you experienced God? The villagers said, "No, we don't know anything about God, so please speak". The monk said, "Then the matter is over. If there is no God, then where is the need to talk about Him?"
The people were at a loss, but they did not give up. They made the request once again. They said, "This time we have given a great deal of thought and now we have a third answer to your question". The monk said, "That's meaningless. Truth is not something one thinks about, only lies need a lot of thinking. So go away".
The villagers begged him again to speak to them. The monk arrived and again asked, "Is there God? Do you know? Have you seen? Have you experienced?" The villagers were prepared. So half of the congregation raised hands and said 'yes'; the remaining half raised their hands and said God does not exist. The monk said, "Since half of you know and half of you don't, why don't those of you who know tell the others who don't? Why do you need me to speak?" And he left.
Later, someone asked the monk if he would have gone to the temple the fourth time if the villagers had so requested. He said he would have. "I waited for them to come once more; and if they had given no reply to my question, if they had remained silent, I would have had to speak - for their silence would have proved they were sincere about their quest".
Osho says, one cannot say if God is or is not. All answers are borrowed, given by others - in fact, by those who themselves have never known God. Because, had they known God, they would have remained silent, too.
-Swami Satya Vedant
|
|
Back to Top...
|
The mathematics of opportunity cost
The Financial Express
03rd June 2007
|
There is an interesting story in the life of great master Hakuin. He was honoured by his neighbours as one who led a pure life. One day it was discoverd that a beautiful girl who lived near Hakuin’s hut was pregnant. The parents were very angry. At first the girl would not say who the father was, but after much harassment she named Hakuin.
In great anger the parents went to Hakuin, but all he would say was, “Is that so?” After the child was born it was taken to Hakuin, who had lost his reputation by this time. He took great care of the child. He obtained milk, food, and everything else the child needed from his neighbours.
A year later the girl-mother could stand it no longer, so she told her parents the truth — the real father was a young man who worked in the fish market. They went round at once to Hakuin to tell him the story, apologise at great length, ask his forgiveness and get the child back.
The master willingly yielded the child and said, “Is that so?” Such problems don’t happen only to Zen masters, they happen to all of us. Life is so mysterious that all of us get into misunderstandings. There’s confusion at every step and there are unavoidable situations difficult to deal with. And it happens that our choices and preferences don’t always work. Sometimes these choices and preferences lead to more complicated problems. In such a situation we are always in a dilemma about what to choose and what not to choose. We can choose one thing and very soon realise that this was a wrong choice. Then we choose something else and again realise that it was no better.
We keep oscillating between the many choices given by our mind, and our misery does not end with any choice. In this process we never realise that there’s something wrong with our mind which is always choosing the opposite. It is never satisfied with whatever it chooses; discontentment is its very nature. Give it something very precious and soon you will see that the precious thing has lost its preciousness; it has become ordinary and undesirable.
Our mind, which is always seeking something new and has strong preferences, is leading us astray. It is not in the nature of mind to be happy with whatever we get. It will complain. Soon it will find something wrong with it and start running for something else.
That’s the way we lose touch with the present moment and start imagining about the future. Our preferences destroy our Present for the Future. Our Reality is sacrificed on the alter of the Imagination.
We need to look deeply into the nature of our mind, penetrate into it without paying attention to the choices it offers to us, without swaying with its preferences. By observing our mind we will arrive on a state of consciousness — which gives us clarity and wholeness of vision.
Sosan, the great Zen master, says: “The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.”
It is very difficult for our mind to understand that one could live without preferences. It is unconceivable even though nature — trees, birds, animals, rivers, mountains, planets — is moving with the the natural flow of existence without any preference. It is only the man who has difficulty. And where does this difficulty come from? It comes from his mind.
Mind is a great divider, an arbitrator of what is good and what is bad and what is right and what is wrong. Give your mind anything and soon you will see that it has created a duality. First it divides everything and then it creates conflicts between the divided parts. And it is amazing that it tries to give solutions to all the conflicts created by itself. It becomes a vicious circle.
It is just like the disease is giving us the cure for the ailment, telling us the ways and means to be healthy. Then things become even more complicated. Talking about the Eastern approach and the Western approach, Osho explains: “Mind is a disease. This is a basic truth the East has discovered. The West says mind can become ill, can be healthy. Western psychology depends on this: the mind can be healthy or ill. But the East says mind as such is the disease, it cannot be healthy. No psychiatry will help; at the most you can make it normally ill. The East says the very nature of mind is such that it will remain unhealthy. The word ‘health’ is beautiful. It comes from the same root as the word ‘whole.’ Health, healing, whole, holy — they all come from the same root.”
The sages of the East are in agreement about this nature of mind and they have advised us to meditate and go beyond mind, to transcend it to be in the realm of witnessing consciousness — what Bhagwan Krishna and the sage Ashtavakra term as Sakshin, what the modern mystic J Krishnamurti calls it choiceless awareness, non-judgmental consciousness. Mind is a phenomenon of choice, and Osho proclaims: “You choose and you are in misery. Choose and you are in the trap, because whenever you choose you have chosen something against something else. If you are for something, you must be against something: you cannot be only for, you cannot be only against. When the ‘for’ enters, the ‘against’ follows as a shadow.”
When you choose, you divide. Then you say, “This is good, this is wrong.” And Life is a unity. Existence remains undivided, existence remains in a deep unison. This is natural Advaita, non-duality, the real health that comes from oneness and wholeness.
-Swami Chaitanya Keerti
(The editor of Osho World)
|
|
Back to Top...
|
BE Grateful to All
The Times of India, Kolkata
05th May 2007
|
Why are we always angry? The root of root anger is usually our discontentment with situations or with people. We are angry when we find that others are not fulfilling our expectations
In great anger the parents went to Hakuin, but all he would say was, “Is that so?” After the child was born it was taken to Hakuin, who had lost his reputation by this time. He took great care of the child. He obtained milk, food, and everything else the child needed from his neighbours.
A year later the girl-mother could stand it no longer, so she told her parents the truth — the real father was a young man who worked in the fish market. They went round at once to Hakuin to tell him the story, apologise at great length, ask his forgiveness and get the child back.
The master willingly yielded the child and said, “Is that so?” Such problems don’t happen only to Zen masters, they happen to all of us. Life is so mysterious that all of us get into misunderstandings. There’s confusion at every step and there are unavoidable situations difficult to deal with. And it happens that our choices and preferences don’t always work. Sometimes these choices and preferences lead to more complicated problems. In such a situation we are always in a dilemma about what to choose and what not to choose. We can choose one thing and very soon realise that this was a wrong choice. Then we choose something else and again realise that it was no better.
We keep oscillating between the many choices given by our mind, and our misery does not end with any choice. In this process we never realise that there’s something wrong with our mind which is always choosing the opposite. It is never satisfied with whatever it chooses; discontentment is its very nature. Give it something very precious and soon you will see that the precious thing has lost its preciousness; it has become ordinary and undesirable.
Our mind, which is always seeking something new and has strong preferences, is leading us astray. It is not in the nature of mind to be happy with whatever we get. It will complain. Soon it will find something wrong with it and start running for something else.
That’s the way we lose touch with the present moment and start imagining about the future. Our preferences destroy our Present for the Future. Our Reality is sacrificed on the alter of the Imagination.
We need to look deeply into the nature of our mind, penetrate into it without paying attention to the choices it offers to us, without swaying with its preferences. By observing our mind we will arrive on a state of consciousness — which gives us clarity and wholeness of vision.
Sosan, the great Zen master, says: “The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.”
It is very difficult for our mind to understand that one could live without preferences. It is unconceivable even though nature — trees, birds, animals, rivers, mountains, planets — is moving with the the natural flow of existence without any preference. It is only the man who has difficulty. And where does this difficulty come from? It comes from his mind.
Mind is a great divider, an arbitrator of what is good and what is bad and what is right and what is wrong. Give your mind anything and soon you will see that it has created a duality. First it divides everything and then it creates conflicts between the divided parts. And it is amazing that it tries to give solutions to all the conflicts created by itself. It becomes a vicious circle.
It is just like the disease is giving us the cure for the ailment, telling us the ways and means to be healthy. Then things become even more complicated. Talking about the Eastern approach and the Western approach, Osho explains: “Mind is a disease. This is a basic truth the East has discovered. The West says mind can become ill, can be healthy. Western psychology depends on this: the mind can be healthy or ill. But the East says mind as such is the disease, it cannot be healthy. No psychiatry will help; at the most you can make it normally ill. The East says the very nature of mind is such that it will remain unhealthy. The word ‘health’ is beautiful. It comes from the same root as the word ‘whole.’ Health, healing, whole, holy — they all come from the same root.”
The sages of the East are in agreement about this nature of mind and they have advised us to meditate and go beyond mind, to transcend it to be in the realm of witnessing consciousness — what Bhagwan Krishna and the sage Ashtavakra term as Sakshin, what the modern mystic J Krishnamurti calls it choiceless awareness, non-judgmental consciousness. Mind is a phenomenon of choice, and Osho proclaims: “You choose and you are in misery. Choose and you are in the trap, because whenever you choose you have chosen something against something else. If you are for something, you must be against something: you cannot be only for, you cannot be only against. When the ‘for’ enters, the ‘against’ follows as a shadow.”
When you choose, you divide. Then you say, “This is good, this is wrong.” And Life is a unity. Existence remains undivided, existence remains in a deep unison. This is natural Advaita, non-duality, the real health that comes from oneness and wholeness.
-Swami Chaitanya Keerti
(The editor of Osho World)
|
|
Back to Top...
|
Meditate, Celebrate, Don’t Vegetate
The Times of India, New Delhi
11th May 2007
|
We live in strange times. A few decades ago, we enjoyed reading great literature—classics of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gorky, Shakespeare, Kalidas. We relished the Gita, the Ramayana the Mahabharata. We spent hours listening to classical music. We had an educated young generation, culturally rich and thriving. We had time for everything great that makes life really rich. Ask any young person today about all these things and, in most cases, he will not show any interest in them.
Why? He has no time for all this as he to compete and survive in today’s world that’s moving at mind-boggling speed. He has to do all kinds of odd jobs, in odd times that are not natural for his health, his family. He has to earn a lot to live comfortably with all the attractive technological gadgets. He has very little time for anything else. Most of his time is spent n things like sending and receiving SMSes. He has no time to express tender feelings of love in long letters to his beloved. Most of his relationships are really empty, short-lived. There’s so much activity and running around but no zest in love. Today’s youth is being sucked into unhealthy mechanical jobs, day in and night out, being thus deprived of love from family and friends.
Osho reminds us: “People have forgotten the language of commitment, involvement. People don’t know the joy of dedication. They don’t know what it means to be utterly dedicated to something. It means giving birth to a soul in you. it integrates you, gives you a backbone. People who don’t have any experience of commitment—in love, in trust—are spineless and lousy. They are not really men. They have not yet arrived at that dignity of being men.”
“To be a man means to be committed, involved, ready to go to the very extreme of some experience. If it appeals to you, convinces you, converts you, then you have to be ready to go wherever it leads you into the unknown, into the uncharted. Yes, there are many fears and challenges, but this is how one grows and matures.”
“Millions of people in the world remain immature for the simple reason that they don’t know how to commit themselves. They remain rootless. And when a tree is rootless, you can well imagine what is going to happen to it. slowly, all the juice will disappear from the tree, because it is no longer connected to any source of juice. The sap will not flow in it, it will lose its greenness, it will not be young and alive any more. It will lose luster, grandeur, brilliance. It will come lose all luminosity, it will not bloom. Springs will come and go, but it will just remain dead and dry. That’s what ha happened to millions of people. They have lost their soil… man has lost one quality—zestfulness. And without zest, what is life just waiting for death? It can’t be anything else. Only with zest do you live; otherwise you simply vegetate.”
-Swami Chaitanya Keerti
(The editor of Osho World)
|
|
Back to Top...
|
Shake off Your Stress
The Times of India, New Delhi
18th May 2007
|
Living the fast-paced urban life gets on everybody’s nerves. An increasing number of young people are under tremendous stress and distress, which creates numerous physical and mental problems. Stress has been linked to hypertension, heart attacks, diabetes, asthma, chronic, pain, allergies, headaches, backaches, skin disorders, cancers and immune system weakness. Some people escape stress by drinking alcohol or consuming drugs but there are others who do not see any relief in this. As a result, many young people are turning to meditation as a solution to the stress in their lives.
Osho centres around the world offer meditation programmes to such needy young people who really want to experiment with meditation, by bringing it into their work space and thus turning it into a living temple of peace and creativity, it has shown results everywhere, from Pune to Kolkata, New York to New Delhi. In deed, meditation has been shown to be effective in reducing stress, lowering blood pressure, alleviating anxiety, reversing heart disease, curbing the desire to smoke, facilitating weight loss, combating eating disorders, countering addictions, boosting immunity, dealing with negative emotions and improving scholastic and sports performance.
Osho’s insight about stress is that we should not take it as something negative. Whenever we think ‘stress’, negative thoughts come into our minds. Most of us think that stress is akin to worry, tension, failure, sadness, pressure—everything negative.
However, what we need to do is simply shake it off in an Osho active meditation, called Kundalini. This meditation is done in the evening after office hours. It removes mental blocks and makes you come alive with showers of inner energy. It is particularly beneficial for young and middle-aged women. It has four stages.
-
Stage I: 15 minutes
Be loose. Let your entire body shake. Feel the energies move up from your feet. Let go everywhere. Become the shaking. Your eyes may be open or closed.
Says Osho, “Allow the shaking; don’t do it. Stand silently, feel it coming on. When your body starts trembling, help it but don’t do it. Enjoy it, feel blissful, allow it, receive it, welcome it—don’t will it. if you force it, it will become an exercise. Then it will be there just on the surface, it will not penetrate you. You will remain solid, stone-like. You will remain the manipulator, the doer; the body will just follow. The body is not the question –you are. When I say shake, I mean your solidity, your rock-like being should shake to its very foundation. Such that it becomes liquid, fluid, such that it melts, flows. And when the rock-like being becomes liquid, your body will follow. Then there is no shake, only shaking. Then nobody does it; it simply happens.”
-
Stage II: 15 minutes
Dance, any way you feel. Let your entire body move as it wishes to. Again, your eyes can be open or closed
-
Stage III: 15 minutes
Close your eyes. Be very still, sitting or standing. Observe and witness whatever is happening, inside and outside.
-
Stage IV: 15 minutes
Keeping your eyes closed, lie down and be still.
-Swami Chaitanya Keerti
(The editor of Osho World)
|
|
Back to Top...
|
|
|
POST YOUR COMMENT 
PRINT PAGE 
