With mouth slightly open,
keep mind in the middle of the tongue.
Or, as breath comes silently in,
feel the sound “HH.”

This technique is concerned with focusing on the tongue, in the middle of the tongue. With mouth slightly open – as if you are going to speak. Not closed, but slightly open as if you are going to speak; not like when you are speaking, but like when you are just going to speak.

Then keep the mind in the middle of the tongue.

Meditation starts by being separate from the mind, by being a witness. That is the only way of separating yourself from anything. If you are looking at the light, naturally one thing is certain: you are not the light, you are the one who is looking at it. If you are watching the flowers, one thing is certain: you are not the flower, you are the watcher.

Watching is the key of meditation.

Watch your mind.

Whatsoever you do, do it with deep alertness; then even small things become sacred. Then cooking or cleaning become sacred; they become worship. It is not a question of what you are doing, the question is how you are doing it. You can clean the floor like a robot, a mechanical thing; you have to clean it, so you clean it. Then you miss something beautiful. Then you waste those moments in only cleaning the floor. Cleaning the floor could have been a great experience; you missed it. The floor is cleaned but something that could have happened within you has not happened.

You can never go beyond the mind if you go on using it. You have to take a jump, and meditation mean that jump. That's why meditation is illogical, irrational. And it cannot be made logical; it cannot be reduced to reason. You have to experience it. If you experience, only then do you know. So try this: don't think about it, try - try to be a witness to your own thoughts. Sit down, relaxed, close your eyes, let your thoughts run just like pictures run on a screen. See them, look at them, make them your objects. One thought arises: look at it deeply. don't think about it, just look at it.

This active centering meditation is based on Sufi techniques, further developed and expanded by Osho. Using the breath and a series of coordinated body movements followed by whirling, your energy becomes centered in the hara, the “life energy” center below the navel. From there you can watch the mind and experience awareness and wholeness – the body moving in all directions, the center unmoving.

The meditation is to be done with its specific OSHO No-Dimensions Meditation music, which indicates and energetically supports the different stages.

This is a simple method of transforming your energy and leading it upward.
It is best done at least twice a day, for twenty minutes each: in the morning just before getting out of bed and in the evening just before going to sleep.

The meditation can be done with its specific OSHO Golden Light Meditation music, which indicates and energetically supports it.
For the music availability, see below. 

Instructions:
The meditation lasts 20 minutes. The meditation is over when you hear three bells.

Every circle contains a center. In the first three stages of this energetic and powerful technique, centering is the aim, through the creation of a circle of energy. Then, in the fourth stage, the relaxation.

The meditation is to be done with its specific OSHO Mandala Meditation music, which indicates and energetically supports the different stages.
For the music availability, see below.

Instructions:
The meditation lasts one hour and has four stages. The meditation is over when you hear three gong beats.

Every night before you go to sleep, sit in your bed and start making faces – just as small children enjoy doing. Make all kinds of faces – good, bad, ugly, beautiful, so the whole face and the musculature start moving. Make sounds, nonsense sounds will do, and sway, just for ten to fifteen minutes and then go to sleep.

In the morning, before you take your bath, again stand before the mirror and for ten minutes make faces. Standing before the mirror will help: you will be able to see and you will be able to respond.
 

Just as you have the impulse to do something, stop.

You can try it anywhere. You are taking your bath – suddenly order yourself to 'Stop!' and stop. Even if it is only for a single moment, you will feel a different phenomenon happening within you. You are thrown to the center and suddenly everything stops – not only the body. When the body stops totally, your mind stops also.

When people come to me and they ask, "How to meditate?" I tell them, "There is no need to ask how to meditate, just ask how to remain unoccupied. Meditation happens spontaneously. Just ask how to remain unoccupied, that's all. That's the whole trick of meditation - how to remain unoccupied. Then you cannot do anything. The meditation will flower.

Nataraj is the energy of dance. This is dance as a total meditation, where all inner division disappears and a subtle, relaxed awareness remains.

The meditation is to be done with its specific OSHO Nataraj Meditation music, which indicates and energetically supports the different stages.
For the music availability, see below. 

Instructions:
The meditation lasts 65 minutes and has three stages.

We look at things always with old eyes. You come to your home; you look at it without looking at it. You know it – there is no need to look at it. You have entered it again and again for years together. You go to the door, you enter the door; you may unlock the door. But there is no need to look.

You are sitting in the garden, the traffic is passing by and there are many noises and many sounds. You just close your eyes and try to find the subtlest sound there is around you. A crow is cawing: just concentrate yourself on that crow’s noise. The whole traffic noise is going on. The sound is such, it is so subtle, that you cannot be aware of it unless you focus your awareness towards it. But if you focus your awareness, the whole traffic noise will go far away and the noise of the crow will become the center.

Look into the blue sky and go on looking.

Do not think about it; do not say it is beautiful. Do not say, "How lovely!" Do not appreciate the color; do not start thinking. If you start thinking, you have stopped. Now your eyes are not moving into the blue, the infinite blue. Just move, just look – do not think. Do not create words; they will become barriers. Not even 'blue sky' should be said. Do not verbalize.

This technique is based on inner sensitivity. First grow in sensitivity. Just close your doors, make the room dark, and light a small candle. Sit near the candle with a very loving attitude – rather, with a prayerful attitude.... Take a bath, throw cold water on your eyes, then sit in a very prayerful mood before the candle. Look at it and forget everything else. Just look at the small candle – the flame and the candle. Go on looking at it. After five minutes you will feel that many things are changing in the candle. They are not changing in the candle, remember; your eyes are changing.

Noticing that his father was growing old, the son of a burglar asked his father to teach him the trade so that he could carry on the family business after his father had retired.

The father agreed, and that night they broke into a house together.
Opening a large chest the father told his son to go in and pick out the clothing. As soon as the boy was inside, the father locked the chest and then made a lot of noise so that the whole house was aroused. Then he slipped quietly away.

We eat very unconsciously, automatically, robotlike. If the taste is not lived, you are just stuffing. Go slow, and be aware of the taste. Do not just go on swallowing things. Taste them unhurriedly and become the taste. When you feel sweetness, become that sweetness. And then it can be felt all over the body – not just in the mouth, not just on the tongue, it can be felt all over the body spreading in ripples.

Meditation is rest, absolute rest, a full stop to all activity - physical, mental, emotional. When you are in such a deep rest that nothing stirs in you, when all action as such ceases, as if you are fast asleep yet awake, you come to know who you are. Suddenly the window opens. It cannot be opened by effort, because effort creates tension, and tension is the cause of our whole misery. Hence this is something very fundamental to be understood that meditation is not effort.

When I say, "Drop the ego, drop the mind," I don't mean that you cannot use the mind any more. In fact, when you don't cling to the mind you can use it in a far better, far more efficient way, because the energy that was involved in clinging becomes available. And when you are not continuously in the mind, twenty-four hours a day in the mind, the mind also gets a little time to rest.

Meditation is rest, absolute rest, a full stop to all activity - physical, mental, emotional. When you are in such a deep rest that nothing stirs in you, when all action as such ceases, as if you are fast asleep yet awake, you come to know who you are. Suddenly the window opens. It cannot be opened by effort, because effort creates tension, and tension is the cause of our whole misery. Hence this is something very fundamental to be understood that meditation is not effort.

Whirling is an ancient Sufi technique. While your whole body is moving, you become aware of your very being, the watcher at the center, which is unmoving. You learn to be an unidentified witness at the center of the cyclone.
Whirling is best done on an empty stomach and wearing loose clothing.

The meditation is to be done with its specific OSHO Whirling Meditation music, which indicates and energetically supports the different stages.
For the music availability, see below.

And remember each situation has to become an opportunity to meditate. What is meditation? Becoming aware of what you are doing, becoming aware of what is happening to you. Somebody insults you: become aware. What is happening to you when the insult reaches you? Meditate over it; this is changing the whole gestalt. When somebody insults you, you concentrate on the person - "Why is he insulting me? Who does he think he is? How can I take revenge?" If he is very powerful you surrender, you start wagging your tail. If he is not very powerful and you see that he is weak, you pounce on him.

The man who lives in the future, lives a counterfeit life. He does not really live, he only pretends to live. He hopes to live, he desires to live, but he never lives. And the tomorrow never comes, it is always today. And whatsoever comes is always now and here, and he does not know how to live here-now. The way to escape is called "desire."

Tanha - that is Buddha's word for what is an escape from the present, from the real into the unreal.

The man who desires is an escapist.

It is the simplest art in the world, to be silent. It is not a doing, it is a non-doing. How can it be difficult.

I am showing you the way of enlightenment through laziness! Nothing has to be done to attain it, because it is your nature. You have already got it. You are just so busy with outer business that you cannot see your own nature.

Deep within you is exactly the same as outside you: the beauty, the silence, the ecstasy, the blissfulness. But please, sometimes to be kind to yourself: just sit down and don't do anything, either physically or mentally.

Wherever you are remember yourself, that you are: this consciousness that you are should become a continuity. Not your name, your caste, your nationality - those are futile things, absolutely useless. Just remember that "I am." This must not be forgotten. This is what Hindus call self-remembrance, what the Buddha called right-mindfulness, what Gurdjieff used to call self-remembering, what Krishnamurti calls awareness.

Meditation is a natural state - which we have lost. It is a paradise lost, but the paradise can be regained. Look into the child's eyes...look and you will see tremendous silence, innocence. Each child comes with a meditative state, but he has to be taught how to think, how to calculate, how to reason, how to argue; he has to be taught words, language, concepts. And, slowly slowly, he loses contact with his own innocence. He becomes contaminated, polluted by the society. He becomes an efficient mechanism; he is no more a man.

Mind means words: self means silence. Mind is nothing but all the words that you have accumulated; silence is that which has always been with you, it is not an accumulation. That is the meaning of self. It is your intrinsic quality. On the background of silence you go on accumulating words, and the words in total are known as the mind. Silence is meditation. It is a question of changing the gestalt, shifting the attention from words into silence - which is always there.

Excerpts from Osho's book

You don't believe in God? That is not a hindrance to meditation. You don't believe in soul? That is not a hindrance in meditation. You don't believe at all? That is not an obstacle. You can meditate, because meditation simply says how to go withinwards: whether there is a soul or not doesn't matter; whether there is a God or not doesn't matter.

You will have to understand one of the most fundamental things about meditation - that no technique leads to meditation. The old so-called techniques and the new scientific bio-feedback techniques are the same as far as meditation is concerned.

Meditation is not a byproduct of any technique. Meditation happens beyond mind. No technique can go beyond mind.

But there is going to be a great misunderstanding in scientific circles and it has a certain basis.

This meditation helps you to start enjoying the small things of life – childlike, liquid, mirrorlike. The first stage is of giggling and laughing, in the second stage you earth yourself; energized by this, your dance in the last stage will have a different quality.

The meditation can be done with its specific OSHO Laughter Meditation recording, which indicates and energetically supports the different stages.
For availability details, see below.

This meditation is a meeting between you and the cosmos, between you and the whole of existence. It helps you to merge, melt and let-go on the deepest level possible.
There are two stages, with no precise timing for each. The format given below is one that works well to start with. You can do this meditation any time during the day or just before you go to sleep. If you choose to do it during the day, make sure you have some free time afterward before resuming your normal activities.

Osho says that if the breathing is done correctly in the first stage of this meditation, the carbon dioxide formed in the bloodstream will make you feel as high as Gourishankar, Mt. Everest. This “high” is carried into the subsequent stages of soft gazing, soft and spontaneous movement, and silent stillness.

The meditation is to be done with its specific OSHO Gourishankar Meditation music, which indicates and energetically supports the different stages.
For the music availability, see below. 

In life, nothing is certain except death.

Secondly: death is not going to happen in the end; it is already happening. It is a process. Just as life is a process, death is a process. We create the now, but life and death are just like your two feet, your two legs. Life and death are both one process. You are dying every moment.

Let me put it in this way: whenever you inhale, it is life, and whenever you exhale, it is death.

Millions of people miss meditation because meditation has taken on a wrong connotation. It looks very serious, looks gloomy, has something of the church in it, looks as if it is only for people who are dead, or almost dead, who are gloomy, serious, have long faces, who have lost festivity, fun, playfulness, celebration. These are the qualities of meditation. A really meditative person is playful; life is fun for him, life is a leela, a play. He enjoys it tremendously. He is not serious. He is relaxed.

Excerpts from Osho's book

TAO TE KING

excerpt:

The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Read one of the most beautiful and most significant Zen story.
Transcribed by Nyogen Sensaki and Paul Reps - Illustrated by Tomikichiro Tokuriki

The bull is the eternal principle of life, truth in action. The ten bulls represent sequent steps in the realization of one's true nature. This sequence is as potent today as it was when Kakuan (1100-1200) developed it from earlier works and made his paintings of the bull.

Taken from the book: Zen Flesh, Zen bones compiled by Paul Reps, Anchor books, NY

I am not against sex, and I am not saying drop sex. I am just saying understand it, meditate over it - don't just go on making love in an unconscious way - and that will become your greatest meditation. Be more conscious, alert, aware and see what is actually happening. Is this moment of bliss coming through sex or because there is no sex any more for a few moments and the desire has disappeared? For a few hours after sex you don't think about sex, hence the peace, the calm, the quiet.

This meditation uses vocal sounds to open and harmonize the chakras or energy centers while bringing awareness to them. It can bring you into a deep, peaceful, inner silence either through making your own vocal sounds, or by just listening to the music and feeling the sounds within you.
The meditation can be done at any time of the day.

This active meditation uses deep, rapid breathing and body movement to open and bring awareness, vitality and silence to each of the seven chakras and thus into your life.
The accompanying music and bells energetically support the process and indicate the beginning of each stage. The meditation is best done on an empty stomach.

If you meditate on open unclouded sky, suddenly you will feel that the mind is disappearing, the mind is dropping away. There will be gaps. Suddenly you will become aware that it is as if the clear sky has entered in you also. There will be intervals. For a time being, thoughts will cease – as if the traffic has ceased and there is no one moving. In the beginning it will be only for moments, but even those moments are transforming. By and by the mind will slow down, bigger gaps will appear. For minutes together there will be no thought, no cloud.

You may not be sleeping well in the night. Very few people are sleeping well, so when you have not slept well in the night you are a little tired.... If that is the case, then do something with your sleep. It should be made deeper. Time is not much of a question – you can sleep for eight hours, and if it is not deep you will feel hungry for sleep, starved – depth is the question. 

Close your eyes and visualize your backbone. Let the backbone be straight, erect. Visualize it, see it, and just in the middle of it visualize a nerve, delicate as the lotus thread, running in the center of your spinal column...

In the spine, just in the center, there is a silver cord – a very delicate nerve. It is not really a nerve in the physiological sense. If you operate to find it; it will not be there. But in deep meditation it is seen. Through that thread you are related to the body, and through that thread also you are related to your soul.

Just sit under a tree. The breeze is blowing and the leaves of the tree are rustling. The wind touches you, it moves around you, it passes. But don’t allow it just to pass you; allow it to move within you and pass through you. Just close your eyes, and as it is passing through the tree and there is a rustling of the leaves, feel that you are also like a tree, open, and the wind is blowing through you – not by your side but right through you.

Thinking, you are separated from existence. Thinking is not a relation, it is not a bridge, it is not a communication – it is a barrier. Non-thinking you are related, bridged; you are in communion. When you are talking to someone, you are not related. The very talk becomes a barrier. The more you talk, the further away you move. If you are with someone in silence, you are related. If the silence is really deep and there are no thoughts in your mind and both the minds are totally silent, you are one.

In this meditation, based on a small fragment from Atisha, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, you allow all the suffering – of yourself and of all the beings in the world – to ride on your incoming breath and reach your heart. The heart can do miracles, it immediately transforms the energy. You drink in misery, and it is transformed into blissfulness. Then, on your outgoing breath you pour that blissfulness into the whole existence.
The meditation has no fixed format; the format given below is one that works well to start with and you can adapt it as you like later on.

This meditation is a fast, intense and thorough way to break old, ingrained patterns in the bodymind that keep one imprisoned in the past, and to experience the freedom, the witnessing, silence and peace that are hidden behind those prison walls.

The meditation is meant to be done in the early morning, when “the whole of nature becomes alive, the night has gone, the sun is coming up and everything becomes conscious and alert.”

Love is always new. It never becomes old because it is non-accumulative, non-hoarding.

It knows no past; it is always fresh, as fresh as the dewdrops. It lives moment to moment, it is atomic. It has no continuity, it knows no tradition. Each moment it dies and each moment it is born again. It is like breath: you breathe in, you breathe out; again you breathe in and you breathe out. You don’t hoard it inside.

Mind concentrates: it acts out of the past. Meditation acts in the present, out of the present. It is a pure response to the present, it is not reaction. It acts not out of conclusions, it acts seeing the existential.

Watch in your life: there is a great difference when you act out of conclusions.

This meditation is best done at sunset or in the late afternoon. Being fully immersed in the shaking and dancing of the first two stages helps to “melt” the rocklike being, wherever the energy flow has been repressed and blocked. Then that energy can flow, dance and be transformed into bliss and joy. The last two stages enable all this energy to flow vertically, to move upward into silence. It is a highly effective way of unwinding and letting go at the end of the day.

Close your eyes and feel the whole universe filled with sound. Feel as if every sound is moving toward you and you are the center. This feeling that you are the center will give you a very deep peace. The whole universe becomes the circumference and you are the center, and everything is moving toward you, falling toward you.

The center is without sound, that is why you can hear sounds – a sound cannot hear another sound. The center is absolute silence. That is why you can hear sounds entering you, coming to you, penetrating you, encircling you.

Every night sit comfortably in a chair and rest your head back, like you do at the dentist. You can use a pillow. Then release your lower jaw. Just relax it so the mouth opens slightly, and start breathing from the mouth, not from the nose. Don’t change your breathing – let it be natural.

The first few breaths will be a little hectic. By and by your breathing will settle down and become very shallow. It will go in and out very slightly. Keep your mouth open, eyes closed, and rest.

Nadabrahma is the humming meditation – through humming and hand movements, conflicting parts of you start falling in tune, and you bring harmony to your whole being. Then, with body and mind totally together, you “slip out of their hold” and become a witness to both. This watching from the outside is what brings peace, silence and bliss.

The meditation is to be done with its specific OSHO Nadabrahma Meditation music, which indicates and energetically supports the different stages.
For the music availability, see below.

First thing in the morning, imagine yourself tremendously happy. Get out of bed in a very happy mood – radiant, bubbling, expectant – as if something perfect, of infinite value, is going to happen today. Get out of the bed in a very positive and hopeful mood, with the feeling that this day is not going to be an ordinary day – that something exceptional, extraordinary, is waiting for you; something is very close by. Try and remember it again and again for the whole day. Within seven days you will see that your whole pattern, your whole style, your whole vibration, has changed.

In this meditation you can experience prayer as an energy phenomenon, not a devotion to God but a merging, an opening. This merging with energy is prayer. It changes you. A new élan, a new life will start penetrating you.
It is best to do the meditation at night, in a darkened room, and going to sleep immediately afterward; or it can be done in the morning, but it must then be followed by fifteen minutes rest. This rest is necessary, otherwise you will feel as if you are drunk, in a stupor.

You are sitting here. Just feel that you have become weightless, there is no weight. You will feel that somewhere or other there is weight, but go on feeling the weightlessness. It comes. A moment comes when you feel that you are weightless, that there is no weight. When there is no weight you are no more a body, because the weight is of the body – not of you. You are weightless….

Raman used to give a technique to his disciples: they were just to enquire, “Who am I?” In Tibet they use a similar technique, but better than Raman’s. They don’t ask, “Who am I?” They ask, “Where am I?” – because the who can create a problem. When you enquire, “Who am I?” you take it for granted that you are; the only question is to know who you are. You have presupposed that you are. That is not contested. It is taken for granted that you are. Now the only question is who you are.

In this meditation a gentle, unfamiliar language moves and speaks through the meditator, who becomes an empty vessel.
It deeply relaxes the mind and creates inner peace. It can be done at any time of the day. If done last thing at night, it also creates a profound sleep.

The meditation is to be done with its specific OSHO Devavani Meditation music, which energetically supports the first stage and which marks the beginning and end of the other stages.
For the music availability, see below.

When you feel anxious, anxiety-ridden, what is one to do? What do you ordinarily do when anxiety is there? You try to solve it. You try alternatives, and you get more and more into it. You will create a bigger mess because anxiety cannot be solved through thinking. It cannot be dissolved through thinking because thinking itself is a sort of anxiety.

This technique says don’t do anything with anxiety. Just be alert!

Wherever your attention alights,
At this very point,
Experience.

In this technique, firstly you have to develop attention. You have to develop a sort of attentive attitude, only then will this technique become possible, so then wherever your attention alights you can experience – you can experience yourself. Just by looking at a flower you can experience yourself. Then looking at a flower is not looking at the flower only, but at the looker also – but only if you know the secret of attention.

Always remember, no matter what you are doing, observe whether your center is involved in it or not, because if it is not involved it is better not to do a thing. Don't do it! No one is forcing you to do anything.

Preserve your energy for the moment when something real happens to you; then do it. Don't smile, preserve the energy. The smile will come, and then it will change you completely. Then it will be total. Then every cell of your body will smile. Then it will be an explosion – nothing painted.