Osho

The Dubious Power of Positive Thinking

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Positive thinking seems much like optimism, in that events and situations are viewed in the best light. The event or situation itself remains as it is, and by thinking positively about it aren’t we fooling ourselves by forcing the negative into the unconscious? Isn’t it more honest to see things just as they are, with the negative as essential as the positive?

“The technique of positive thinking is not a technique that transforms you. It is simply repressing the negative aspects of your personality. It is a method of choice. It cannot help awareness; it goes against awareness.

“Awareness is always choiceless.

“Positive thinking simply means forcing the negative into the unconscious and conditioning the conscious mind with positive thoughts. But the trouble is that the unconscious is far more powerful, nine times more powerful, than the conscious mind. So once a thing becomes unconscious, it becomes nine times more powerful than it was before. It may not show in the old fashion, but it will find new ways of expression.

“So positive thinking is a very poor method, without any deep understanding, and it goes on giving you wrong ideas about yourself.”

Osho, The Transmission of the Lamp, Talk #36

Sometimes it’s just too painful to look at what’s wrong, so I take the easy way out.

“I am absolutely against positive thinking. You will be surprised that if you don’t choose, if you remain in a choiceless awareness, your life will start expressing something which is beyond both positive and negative, which is higher than both. So you are not going to be a loser. It is not going to be negative, it is not going to be positive, it is going to be existential.”

Osho, The Transmission of the Lamp, Talk #36

You ask me if I am against positive philosophy. Yes, because I am also against negative philosophy. I have to be against both because both choose only half the fact, and both try to ignore the other half.

“The philosophy of positive thinking says: ‘Take everything positively. The negative should not have any space in your approach, there should be no negative part.’ This is making a part, the positive part, almost the whole.”

Osho, From Ignorance to Innocence, Talk #29

I don’t know if I have the courage to drop the positive.

“To drop the positive means to drop the happiness; to drop the positive means to drop all that looks like flowers, all that is beautiful. The negative is the ugly, the positive is the beautiful. The negative is death, the positive is life. But you can drop the negative, so take the first step. First feel the misery, how much it is given to you by the negative. Watch how the misery arises out of it, just watch and feel. The very feeling that the negative is creating the misery will become the dropping.”

Osho, Yoga: The Supreme Science, Talk #10

“Life is absolutely balanced between the positive and the negative. Now it is your choice which side you want to be, in heaven or in hell. Wherever you want to be, try to find it in your life, every moment. And whenever you have found something positive, pour all your attention and all your love on it. That will make it grow; that will make it more and more important in your life, more and more taking the space of your being.”

Osho, Satyam Shivam Sunderam: Truth Godliness Beauty, Talk #15

It always seems more polite to be positive, people seldom want a real answer.

“When you meet somebody and ask, ‘How are you?’ he says, ‘I am perfectly well.’ Now, if you are a negative philosopher you have to find out what this man is hiding: ‘How can he be perfectly well? Have you ever heard of anybody in the world being perfectly well? He is lying!’ But nobody will listen to a negative philosopher. You also say, ‘I am perfectly well. You are perfectly well? – good.’ And you depart in good spirits. What is the point of showing one’s wounds to each other and making each other more miserable than before?…

“In fact, all these believers in positive philosophy are basically negative. To hide that negativity they believe firmly in the positive philosophy.

“I am not in support of either side. I am in favor of taking the whole truth, and that’s what I would like you to do too: take the whole truth, because the negative is as essential as the positive.

“You cannot create electricity with only the positive pole; you will need the negative pole too. Only with both the negative and the positive pole can you create electricity. Is the negative absolutely negative? It is complementary, so it is not against the positive.”

Osho, From Ignorance to Innocence, Talk #29

So I need to find my own balance?

“Just as both sides of a coin are bound to each other, the positive and negative aspects of everything are bound to each other. Love and hatred, anger and compassion, attachment and aversion – all are bound to each other. If someone says, ‘I am giving up all desires,’ he will outwardly seem to be giving up everything, but the desires will hide in some corner within, ready to pop out at some opportune moment. This is why the sages have devised a word that expresses a third possibility: veetrag. It means the condition of being beyond the duality of attachment and aversion. Attachment and aversion are two poles of the same thing, so the sage says that whosoever wants to go beyond duality should develop the attitude of the sky within – the spirit of being simply a witness.”

Osho, Behind a Thousand Names, Talk #12

“Positive and negative are not real opposites. They are like the chicken and egg, mother and child. They help each other and come from each other. But this understanding is possible only when the negative has been dropped. You can then drop the positive. And you can stay in that transitory moment, which is the greatest moment in existence. You will never feel another moment so long – as if years are passing, because the vacuum…. You lose all bearing; the whole of the past is lost, suddenly empty, not knowing where you are, who you are, what is happening.”

Osho, Yoga: The Supreme Science, Talk #10

“Don’t be identified with either the positive or the negative; don’t be identified with pleasure or pain, with attachment or aversion. Just adopt the attitude of the sky toward both; just be a space. Let attachment come and go, let aversion also come and go. You should remain outside both – just space, emptiness, a witness.

“And this witnessing state is samadhi.”

Osho, Behind a Thousand Names, Talk #12

“Meditation leads you to all. But never define it as positive, always define it as nothingness. So meditation has two parts: the creative part as positive, the expressive part as negative.”

Self-love Is Utterly Selfless

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Sixty years ago, Erich Fromm proposed a re-evaluation of self-love, arguing that in order to be able to truly love someone else, we first need to love ourselves, as in respecting and knowing ourselves. Not surprisingly, the Internet is awash with advice on how to be more self-loving, but what really is the difference between a healthy love of oneself and egoistical pride?

“There is a great difference between the two, although they both look very alike. The healthy love of oneself is a great religious value. The person who does not love himself will not be able to love anybody else, ever. The first ripple of love has to rise in your heart. If it has not risen for yourself it cannot rise for anybody else, because everybody else is farther away from you.

“It is like throwing a stone in the silent lake – the first ripples will arise around the stone and then they will go on spreading to the further shores. The first ripple of love has to be around yourself. One has to love one’s body, one has to love one’s soul, one has to love one’s totality.

“And this is natural; otherwise you would not be able to survive at all. And it is beautiful because it beautifies you. The person who loves himself becomes graceful, elegant. The person who loves himself is bound to become more silent, more meditative more prayerful than the person who does not love himself.

“If you don’t love your house you will not clean it; if you don’t love your house you will not paint it; if you don’t love you will not surround it with a beautiful garden with a lotus pond. If you love yourself you will create a garden around yourself. You will try to grow your potential, you will try to bring out all that is in you to be expressed. If you love, you will go on showering yourself, you will go on nourishing yourself.

“And if you love yourself you will be surprised: others will love you. Nobody loves a person who does not love himself. If you cannot even love yourself, who else is going to take the trouble? And the person who does not love himself cannot remain neutral. Remember, in life there is no neutrality.

“The man who does not love himself hates, will have to hate – life knows no neutrality. Life is always a choice. If you don’t love that does not mean that you can simply remain in that not loving state. No, you will hate.

“And the person who hates himself becomes destructive. And the person who hates himself will hate everybody else – he will be so angry and violent and continuously in rage. The person who hates himself, how can he hope that others will love him? His whole life will be destroyed. To love oneself is a great religious value.

“I teach you self-love. But remember, self-love does not mean egotistical pride, not at all. In fact it means just the opposite. The person who loves himself finds there is no self in him. Love always melts the self: that is one of the alchemical secrets to be learned, understood, experienced. Love always melts the self. Whenever you love, the self disappears. You love a woman and at least in the few moments when there is real love for the woman, there is no self in you, no ego.

“Ego and love cannot exist together. They are like light and darkness: when light comes, darkness disappears. If you love yourself you will be surprised – self-love means the self disappears. In self-love there is no self ever found. That is the paradox: self-love is utterly selfless. It is not selfish – because whenever there is light there is no darkness, and whenever there is love there is no self.”

Osho, The Secret, Talk #18

A spiritual master explains why you can’t meditate properly (and what to do instead)

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What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do this? I’m so bad at it. My mind is a scattered mess. I can’t meditate! How can these other people do it?!

Everyone who has ever tried meditating has had thoughts like these running through their head. It happens all the time, and usually leads to the inevitable “I’m just not cut out for this.”

We have this idea about what meditation must be like. We think that as soon as we start meditating, we must be free of thought, utterly focused with complete inner peace.

But meditation isn’t like that.

And according to Zen Master Osho, our thoughts about mindfulness and meditation are hurting us more than helping.

Osho Explains Why You Think You Can’t Meditate Properly

Many people come to Osho and ask him how can they achieve a “peaceful state of mind”. But Osho says that this just isn’t possible:

“People come to me and they ask, “How to attain a peaceful mind?” I say to them, “There exists nothing like that: peaceful mind. Never heard of it.”Mind is never peaceful; no-mind is peace. Mind itself can never be peaceful, silent. The very nature of the mind is to be tense, to be in confusion. Mind can never be clear, it cannot have clarity, because mind is by nature confusion, cloudiness. Clarity is possible without mind, peace is possible without mind; silence is possible without mind, so never try to attain a silent mind. If you do, from the very beginning you are moving in an impossible dimension.”

The problem, according to Osho, is that we think we are the mind. In truth, the mind is simply a tool. Once we realize that we aren’t the mind, we’ll have more opportunity to experience real inner peace.

“But there is one problem, because you think you are the mind. So how can you drop it? So you feel you can drop everything, change everything, repaint, redecorate, rearrange, but how can you drop yourself. That is the root of all trouble.

You are not the mind, you are beyond mind. You have become identified, that’s true, but you are not the mind…

When all identity with the mind is dropped, when you are a watcher on the hills and the mind is left deep down in the darkness of the valleys, when you are on the sunlit peaks, just a pure witness, seeing, watching, but not getting identified with anything – good or bad, sinner or saint, this or that – in that witnessing all questions dissolve. The mind melts, evaporates. You are left as a pure being, just a pure existence – a breathing, a beating of the heart, utterly in the moment, no past, no future, hence no present either.”

You are not the mind – but how do you actually practice that?

While the key to inner peace is to realize that you aren’t the mind, how do you actually do it in meditation?

Osho says that instead of struggling against the mind by trying to forcibly calm it, we instead need to become an observer of the mind:

“Just like someone sitting by the side of a river watching the river flow by, sit by the side of your mind and watch….Or the way someone watches the rainy sky and the moving clouds, you just watch the clouds of thoughts moving in the sky of your mind…Don’t do anything, don’t interfere, don’t stop them in any way. Don’t repress in any way. If there is a thought coming don’t stop it, if it is not coming don’t try to force it to come. You are simply to be an observer….”

“In that simple observation you will see and experience that your thoughts and you are separate – because you can see that the one who is watching the thoughts is separate from the the thoughts, different from them. And you become aware of this, a strange peace will envelop you because you will not have any more worries. You can be in the midst of all kinds of worries but the worries will not be yours….”

“And if you become aware that you are not your thoughts, the life of these thoughts will begin to grow weaker, they will begin to become more and more lifeless. The power of your thoughts lies in the fact that you think they are yours. When you are arguing with someone you say, “My thought is”. No thought is yours. All thoughts are different from you, separate from you. You just be a witness to them.”

 

Hara Centering.

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“Concentrate the energy on the Hara, the point two inches below the navel. That is the center from where one enters life and that is the center from where one dies and goes out of life. So that is the contact center between the body and the soul. If you feel a sort of wavering left and right and you don’t know where your center is, that simply shows that you are no longer in contact with your Hara, so you have to create that contact.”

When: In the night, when you go to sleep/first thing in the morning.
Duration: 10-5 minutes.

Step 1: Locate the Hara
“Lie down on the bed and put both your hands two inches below the navel and press a little.

Step 2: Take a Deep Breath!
“Start breathing, deep breathing. You will feel that center coming up and down with the breathing. Feel your whole energy there as if you are shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and you are just existing there as a small center, very concentrated energy.

Step 3: Center While U Sleep!
“Fall asleep doing it — that will be helpful. Then the whole night that centering persists. Again and again the unconscious goes and centers there. So the whole night without your knowing, you will be coming in many ways in deep contact with the center.

Step 4: Reconnect with the Hara
“In the morning, the moment that you feel that sleep has gone, don’t open your eyes first. Again put your hands there, push a little, start breathing; again feel the Hara. Do this for 10-5 minutes and then get up.

“Do this every night, every morning. Within three months you will start feeling centered.

“It is very essential to have a centering otherwise one feels fragmentary; then one is not together. One is just like a jigsaw — all fragments and not a gestalt, not a whole. It is a bad shape, because without a center a man can drag but cannot love. Without a center you can go on doing routine things in your life, but you can never be creative. You will live the minimum. The maximum will not be possible for you. Only by centering does one live at the maximum, at the zenith, at the peak, at the climax, and that is the only living, a real life.

“For example, there will be less thinking because energy will not move to the head, it will go to the Hara. The more you think of the Hara, the more you concentrate there, the more you will find a discipline arising in you. That comes naturally, it has not to be forced.

“The more you are aware of the Hara, the less you will become afraid of life and death — because that is the center of life and death. Once you become attuned to the Hara center, you can live courageously. Courage arises out of it: less thinking, more silence, less uncontrolled moments, natural discipline, courage and rootedness, a groundedness.”

Osho, A Rose is a Rose is a Rose, Talk #18
Osho, This Is It!, Talk #8

Source: Osho.com