CATHARTIC MEDITATION METHODS

Cathartic methods are modern inventions

MIND is very serious, and meditation is absolutely nonserious. When I say this you may be bewildered, because people go on talking about meditation very seriously. But meditation is not a serious thing. It is just like play – nonserious. Sincere, but nonserious. It is not something like work; it is more like play. Play is not an activity. Even when it is active, it is not an activity. Play is just pleasure. The activity is not going anywhere; it is not motivated. Rather, it is just pure, flowing energy.

But it is difficult, because we are so involved in activity. We have always been so active that activity has become a deep-rooted obsession. Even while asleep we are active. Even when we are thinking about relaxing we are active. We even make relaxation an activity; we make an effort to relax. This is absurd! But it happens because of the robotlike habits of the mind.
So what to do? Only nonactivity leads you to your inner centre, but the mind cannot conceive of how to be nonactive. So what to do?

I have devised a means. And the means is to be active to such an extreme that activity simply ceases; to be so madly active that the mind that is hankering to be active is thrown out of your system. Only then, after a deep catharsis, can you fall down into inactivity and have a glimpse of the world that is not the world of effort.

Once you know this world, you can move into it without any effort. Once you have the feeling of it – how to be just here and now, without doing anything – you can move into it at any moment; you can remain in it anywhere. Ultimately, you can be outwardly active and inwardly deeply inactive.

Cathartic methods are modern inventions. In Buddha’s time they were not needed because people were not so repressed. People were natural, people lived primitive lives – uncivilised, spontaneous lives. So Vipassana – vipassana means insight – was given by Buddha directly to people. But now you cannot go into Vipassana directly. And the teachers who go on teaching Vipassana directly don’t belong to this century; they are two thousand years backward. Yes, sometimes they may help one or two persons out of one hundred persons, but that can’t do much. I am introducing cathartic methods, so that first what the civilisation has done to you can be undone, so that you become primitive again. From that primitiveness, from primal innocence, insight becomes easily available.

RUNNING, JOGGING AND SWIMMING CAN BE MEDITATION

Running, Jogging and Swimming

IT is natural and easy to keep alert while you are in movement. When you are just sitting silently the natural thing is to just fall asleep. When you are lying on your bed it is very difficult to keep alert because the whole situation helps you to fall asleep. But in movement naturally you cannot fall asleep, you function in a more alert way. The only problem is that the movement can become mechanical.

Learn to melt your body, mind and soul. Find out ways where you can function as a unity.
It happens many times to runners. You might not think of running as a meditation, but runners sometimes have felt a tremendous experience of meditation. And they were surprised, because they were not looking for it – who thinks that a runner is going to experience God? But it has happened. And now, more and more, running is becoming a new kind of meditation.

It can happen when running. If you have ever been a runner, if you have enjoyed running in the early morning when the air is fresh and young and the whole world is coming back from sleep, awakening – you were running and your body was functioning beautifully, the fresh air, the new world born again out of the darkness of the night, everything singing all around, you were feeling so alive ... a moment comes when the runner disappears, and there is only running. The body, mind and soul start functioning together: suddenly an inner orgasm is released.

Runners have sometimes come accidentally on the experience of the fourth, turiya, although they will miss it – they will think it was just because of running that they enjoyed the moment: that it was a beautiful day, the body was healthy and the world was beautiful, and it was just a certain mood. They will not take note of it – but if they do take note of it, my own observation is that a runner can come close to meditation more easily than anybody else.

Jogging can be of immense help, swimming can be of immense help. All these things have to be transformed into meditations.

Drop the old ideas of meditations, that just sitting underneath a tree in a yoga posture is meditation. That is only one of the ways, and it may be suitable for a few people but it is not suitable for all. For a small child it is not meditation, it is torture. For a young man who is alive and vibrant it is repression, it is not meditation.

Start running in the morning on the road. Start with half a mile and then one mile and come eventually to at least three miles. While running use the whole body. Don’t run as if you are in a straitjacket. Run like a small child, using the whole body – hands and feet – and run. Breathe deeply and from the belly. Then sit under a tree, rest, perspire and let the cool breeze come; feel peaceful. This will help very deeply.

Sometimes just stand on the earth without shoes and feel the coolness, the softness, the warmth. Whatsoever the earth is ready to give in that moment, just feel it and let it flow through you. And allow your energy to flow into the earth. Be connected with the earth.
If you are connected with the earth, you are connected with life. If you are connected with the earth, you are connected with your body. If you are connected with the earth, you will become very sensitive and centered – and that’s what is needed.

Never become an expert in running; remain an amateur so that alertness may be kept. If you feel sometime that running has become automatic, drop it; try swimming. If that becomes automatic, then dancing. The point to remember is that the movement is just a situation to create awareness. While it creates awareness it is good. If it stops creating awareness, then it is no more of any use, change to another movement where you will have to be alert again, never allow any activity to become automatic

MEDITATION IS RELAXATION

Meditation is Relaxation

"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.

"One has to be very playful about meditation, one has to learn to enjoy it as fun. One has not to be serious about it – be serious and you miss. One has to go into it very joyously. And one has to keep aware that it is falling into deeper and deeper rest. It is not concentration, just the contrary, it is relaxation. When you are utterly relaxed, for the first time you start feeling your reality; you come face to face with your being. When you are engaged in activity you are so occupied that you cannot see yourself. Activity creates much smoke around you, it raises much dust around you; hence all activity has to be dropped, at least for a few hours per day.

"That is only so in the beginning. When you have learnt the art of being at rest you can be both active and restful together, because then you know that rest is something so inner that it cannot be disturbed by anything outer. The activity goes on at the circumference, at the center you remain restful. So it is only in the beginning that activity has to be dropped for a few hours. When one has learned the art, then there is no question: for twenty-four hours a day one can be meditative and one can continue all the activities of ordinary life.

"But remember, the key word is rest, relaxation. Never go against rest and relaxation. Arrange your life in such a way, drop all futile activity because ninety per cent is futile; it is just for killing time and remaining occupied. Do only the essential and devote your energies more and more to the inner journey. Then that miracle happens when you can remain at rest and in action together, simultaneously. That is the meeting of the sacred and the mundane, the meeting of this world and that, the meeting of materialism and spiritualism."

Osho, The Golden Wind, Talk #15

WAITING FOR THE SUNRISE CAN BE MEDITATION

Waiting for the sunrise

JUST fifteen minutes before the sun rises, when the sky is becoming a little lighter, just wait and watch as one waits for a beloved: so tense, so deeply awaiting, so hopeful and excited – and yet silent. And just let the sun rise and go on watching. No need to stare; you can blink your eyes. Have the feeling that simultaneously inside something is also rising.

When the sun comes on the horizon, start feeling that it is just near the navel. It comes up over there; and here, inside the navel, it comes up, comes up, slowly. The sun is rising there, and here an inner point of light is rising. Just ten minutes will do. Then close your eyes. When you first see the sun with open eyes it creates a negative, so when you close your eyes, you can see the sun dazzling inside.

And this is going to change you tremendously.

Praise for the rising sun

GET up at five o’clock before the sunrise and for half an hour just sing, hum, moan, groan. These sounds need not be meaningful; they have to be existential, not meaningful. You should enjoy them, that’s all – that is the meaning. You should sway. Let it be a praise for the rising sun and stop only when the sun has risen.
That will keep a certain rhythm in you the whole day. You will be attuned from the very morning and you will see that the day has a different quality; you are more loving, more caring, more compassionate, more friendly – less violent, less angry, less ambitious, less egoistic.

THE GOLDEN LIGHT MEDITATION

The Golden Light Meditation

THIS is a simple method of transforming your energy and leading it upwards. The process is to be done at least twice a day.

The best time is early in the morning, just before you get up from your bed. The moment you feel you are alert, awake, do it for twenty minutes. Do it then and there, immediately, because when you are coming out of sleep you are very, very delicate, receptive. When you are coming out of sleep you are very fresh and the impact will go very deep. When you are just coming out of sleep you are less in the mind than ever, hence some gaps are there through which the method will penetrate into your innermost core. And early in the morning when you are awakening and when the whole earth is awakening, there is a great tide of awakening energy all over the world – use that tiddon’t miss that opportunity.

All ancient religions used to pray early in the morning when the sun rose, because the rising of the sun is the rising of all the energies in existence. In that moment you can simply ride on the rising energy wave; it will be easier. By the evening it will be difficult, energies will be falling back; then you will be fighting against the current. In the morning you will be going with the current.

You simply lie down as you are lying down in your bed, on your back. Keep your eyes closed. When you breathe in, just visualize great light entering through your head into your body, as if a sun has risen just close to your head. You are just hollow, and the golden light is pouring into your head, and going, going, deep, deep, and going out through your toes. When you breathe in, do it with this visualization. That golden light will help. It will cleanse your whole body and will make it absolutely full of creativity. This is male energy.

And when you breathe out visualize another thing: darkness entering through your toes, a great dark river entering through your toes, coming up and going out from the head. Do slow, deep breathing so you can visualize. This is feminine energy. It will soothe you, it will make you receptive, it will calm you, it will give you rest. Go very slowly, and just out of sleep you can have very deep and slow breaths, because the body is rested, relaxed.

The second best time is when you are going back to sleep, in the night. Lie down on the bed, relax for a few minutes. When you start feeling that now you are wavering between sleep and waking, just in that middle, start the process again. Do it for twenty minutes. If you fall asleep doing it, it is the best, because the impact will remain in the subconscious and will go on working,
If you do this simple method for three months, you will be surprised – there is no need to repress, transformation has started happening.  

LAUGHING MEDITATION

Laughing Meditation

EVERY morning upon waking, before opening your eyes, stretch like a cat. Stretch every fibre of your body. After three or four minutes, with eyes still closed, begin to laugh. For five minutes just laugh. At first you will be doing it, but soon the sound of your attempt will cause genuine laughter. Lose yourself in laughter. It may take several days before it really happens, for we are so unaccustomed to the phenomenon. But before long it will be spontaneous and will change the whole nature of your day.

For those who have difficulty laughing totally or who feel their laughter is false, Osho has suggested this simple technique.
In the morning, early, before you have eaten anything, drink almost a bucketful of water – lukewarm with salt in it. Go on drinking it and do it fast, otherwise you will not be able to drink much. Then just bend down and gargle so the water will flow back. It will be a vomiting of the water – and it will clean your passage. Nothing else is needed. There is a block in the passage so that whenever you want to laugh, that stops it.

In Yoga, this is a necessary procedure to be followed. They call it a ‘necessary purification’. It purifies tremendously, and it gives a very clean passage – all the blocks dissolve. You will enjoy it and you will feel the cleanness all day. The laughter and the tears, and even your speaking, will come from the very deep centre.
Do it for ten days and you will have the best laugh around!

BE LOOSE AND NATURAL QUALITY OF MEDITATION

Be loose and natural

ONE can be obsessed with meditation. And obsession is the problem: you were obsessed with money and now you are obsessed with meditation. Money is not the problem, obsession is the problem. You were obsessed with the market, now you are obsessed with God. The market is not the problem but obsession. One should be loose and natural and not obsessed with anything, neither mind nor meditation. Only then, unoccupied, unobsessed, when you are simply flowing, the ultimate happens to you.All meditations are subtle ways to make you drunk – to make you drunkards of the divine.

CREATING SPACE FOR MEDITATION

Creating a space for meditation

IF you can create a special place – a small temple or a corner in the home where you can meditate every day – then don’t use that corner for any other purpose, because every purpose has its own vibration. Use that corner only for meditation and nothing else. 

Then the corner will become charged and it will wait for you every day. The corner will be helpful to you, the milieu will create a particular vibration, a particular atmosphere in which you can go deeper and deeper more easily. That’s the reason why temples, churches and mosques were created – just to have a place that existed only for prayer and meditation.

If you can choose a regular hour to meditate, that’s also very helpful because your body, your mind, is a mechanism. If you take lunch at a particular hour every day, your body starts crying for food at that time. Sometimes you can even play tricks on it. If you take your lunch at one o’clock and the clock says that it is now one o’clock, you will be hungry – even if the clock is not right and it is only eleven or twelve. You look at the clock, it says one o’clock, and suddenly you feel hunger within. Your body is a mechanism.

Your mind is also a mechanism. Meditate every day in the same place, at the same time, and you will create a hunger for meditation within your body and mind. Every day at that particular time your body and mind will ask you to go into meditation. It will be helpful. A space is created in you which will become a hunger, a thirst.
In the beginning it is very good. Unless you come to the point where meditation has become natural and you can meditate anywhere, in any place, at any time – up to that moment, use these mechanical resources of the body and the mind as a help.

It gives you a climate: you put off the light, you have a certain incense burning in the room, you have certain clothes, a certain height, a certain softness, you have a certain type of rug, you have a certain posture. This all helps but this does not cause it. If somebody else follows it, this may become a hindrance. One has to find one’s own ritual. A ritual is simply to help you to be at ease and wait. And when you are at ease and waiting, the thing happens; just like sleep, God comes to you. Just like love, God comes to you. You cannot will it, you cannot force it.

HOW TO CHOOSE MEDITATION

Choosing a meditation

FROM the very beginning find something which appeals to you.
Meditation should not be a forced effort. If it is forced, it is doomed from the very beginning. A forced thing will never make you natural. There is no need to create unnecessary conflict. This is to be understood because mind has a natural capacity to meditate if you give it objects which are appealing to it.

If you are body oriented, there are ways you can reach towards God through the body because the body also belongs to God. If you feel you are heart oriented, then prayer. If you feel you are intellect oriented, then meditation. But my meditations are different in a way. I have tried to devise methods which can be used by all three types. Much of the body is used in them, much of the heart and much of the intelligence. All the three are joined together and they work on different people in a different way.

Body heart mind – all my meditations move in the same way. They start from the body, they move through the heart, they reach to the mind and then they go beyond.

Always remember, whatsoever you enjoy can go deep in you; only that can go deep in you. Enjoying it simply means it fits with you. The rhythm of it falls in tune with you: there is a subtle harmony between you and the method. Once you enjoy a method then don’t become greedy; go into that method as much as you can. You can do it once or, if possible, twice a day. 

The more you do it, the more you will enjoy it. Only drop a method when the joy has disappeared; then its work is finished. Search for another method. No method can lead you to the very end. On the journey you will have to change trains many times. A certain method takes you to a certain state. Beyond that it is of no more use, it is spent.

So two things have to be remembered: when you are enjoying a method go into it as deeply as possible, but never become addicted to it because one day you will have to drop it too. If you become too much addicted to it then it is like a drug; you cannot leave it. You no more enjoy it – it is not giving you anything – but it has become a habit. Then one can continue it, but one is moving in circles; it cannot lead beyond that.

So let joy be the criterion. If joy is there, continue, to the last bit of joy go on. It has to be squeezed totally. No juice should be left behind ... not even a single drop. And then be capable of dropping it. Choose some other method that again brings the joy. Many times a person has to change. It varies with different people but it is very rare that one method will do the whole journey.

There is no need to do many meditations because you can do confusing things, contradictory things, and then pain will arise.
Choose two meditations and stick to them. In fact I would like you to choose one; that would be the best. It is better to repeat one that suits you, many times. Then it will go deeper and deeper. You try many things – one day one thing, another day another thing. And you invent your own, so you can create many confusions. In the book of Tantra there are one hundred and twelve meditations. You can go crazy. You are already crazy!

Meditations are not fun. They can sometimes be dangerous. You are playing with a subtle, a very subtle mechanism of the mind. Sometimes a small thing that you were not aware you were doing cabecome dangerous. So never try to invent, and don’t make your own hotch-potch meditation. Choose two and just try them for a few weeks.

Meditation is not concentration

Meditation is not concentration

MEDITATION is not concentration. In concentration there is a self concentrating and there is an object being concentrated upon. There is duality. In meditation there is nobody inside and nothing outside. It is not concentration. There is no division between the in and the out. The in goes on flowing into the out, the out goes on flowing into the in. The demarcation, the boundary, the border, no longer exists. The in is out, the out is in; it is a non-dual consciousness.

Concentration is a dual consciousness: that’s why concentration creates tiredness; that’s why when you concentrate you feel exhausted. And you cannot concentrate for twenty-four hours, you will have to take holidays to rest. Concentration can never become your nature. Meditation does not tire, meditation does not exhaust you. Meditation can become a twenty-four hour thing – day in, day out, year in, year out. It can become eternity. It is relaxation itself.
Concentration is an act, a willed act. Meditation is a state of no will, a state of inaction. It is relaxation. One has simply dropped into one’s own being, and that being is the same as the being of All. In concentration the mind functions out of a conclusion: you are doing something. Concentration comes out of the past.

 In meditation there is no conclusion behind it. You are not doing anything in particular, you are simply being. It has no past to it, it is uncontaminated by the past. It has no future to it, it is pure of all future. It is what Lao Tzu has called wei-wu-wei, action through inaction. It is what Zen masters have been saying: Sitting silently doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. 

Remember, ‘by itself' – nothing is being done. You are not pulling the grass upwards; the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. That state – when you allow life to go on its own way, when you don't want to direct it, when you don’t want to give any control to it, when you are not manipulating, when you are not enforcing any discipline on it – that state of pure undisciplined spontaneity, is what meditation is.

Meditation is in the present, pure present. Meditation is immediacy. You cannot meditate, you can be in meditation. You cannot be in concentration, but you can concentrate. Concentration is human, meditation is divine.

OM MANI PADME HUM MANTRA, TIBETAN MANTRA FOR MEDITATION

TIBETAN MANTRA FOR MEDITATION

   
OM MANI PADME HUM MANTRA:THE MEANING OF MANTRA



“The jewel is in the lotus or praise to the jewel in the lotus”

Om Mani Padme Hum" first known description of the mantra .It was stated inside the sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha said, "This is the most beneficial mantra, to eliminate all the suffering from body, mind and soul become conscious and integrated.

Gen Rinpoche, in his commentary on the Meaning of said:
"The mantra Om Mani Pädme Hum is easy to say yet quite powerful, because it contains the essence of the entire teaching.

HOW TO RECITE MANTRA
Silently repeating a mantra as you meditate is a powerful way to enter the silence of the mind.

As you repeat the mantra, it creates a mental vibration that allows the mind to experience deeper levels of awareness.

As you meditate, the mantra becomes increasingly abstract and indistinct, until you’re finally led into the field of pure consciousness from which the vibration arose.

It is very good to  mantra.
While you are reciting you should be thinking on its meaning.

It has six syllables.

The meaning of the six syllables is great and vast.

OM , is composed of three pure letters, A, U, and M.


These symbolize the practitioner’s impure body, speech, and mind.

MANI, meaning jewel, it represents inner knowing.

PADME, meaning lotus, symbolize wisdom.

ABOUT LOTUS

Lotus grows from mud but is not the mud, A person can be very ordinary, when he recognize is inner Jewel he is not the part of crowd, he become like a lotus flower.
In this world, from this world but not from this world. Something different than ordinary , something extra ordinary is happening through him because of the inner Jewel.


A person come to know his inner jewel, become pure, loving, kindness and compassionate.

All the love and wisdom flows through him through his gesture, through voice, through talking, through walking.

He become living example of love and light on the earth.

HUM represents the consciousness.

A person who is love and light, is become pure consciousness, pure love, pure emptiness, pure silence from inside. This state of consciousness is unaffected by any outer circumstances.

Thus OM MANI PADME HUM, meaning is transforming the impure body, mind and soul by inner Jewel (Mani) become like lotus and disappear in to vast ocean on consciousness.

Each person is capable of being Buddha, each person having seed of wisdom in him or her.It is said that you should not seek for Buddhahood outside of yourself; the substances for the
achievement of Buddhahood are within your self.



HOW TO USE MANTRA MEDITATION

Silently repeating a mantra as you meditate is a powerful way to enter the silence of the mind.

As you repeat the mantra, it creates a mental vibration that allows the mind to experience deeper levels of awareness.

As you meditate, the mantra becomes increasingly abstract and indistinct, until you’re finally led into the field of pure consciousness from which the vibration arose.



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What is meditation?

What is meditation?

MEDITATION is a state of no-mind. Meditation is a state of pure consciousness with no content. Ordinarily, your consciousness is too full of rubbish, just like a mirror covered with dust. The mind is a constant traffic: thoughts are moving, desires are moving, memories are moving, ambitions are moving – it is a constant traffic! Day in, day out. Even when you are asleep the mind is functioning, it is dreaming. It is still thinking; it is still in worries and anxieties. It is preparing for the next day; an underground preparation is going on.

This is the state of no meditation. Just the opposite is meditation. When there is no traffic and thinking has ceased, no thoughts move, no desire stirs, you are utterly silent – that silence is meditation. And in that silence truth is known, and never otherwise. Meditation is a state of no-mind.

And you cannot find meditation through the mind, because mind will perpetuate itself. You can find meditation only by putting the mind aside, by being cool, indifferent, unidentified with the mind; by seeing the mind pass, but not getting identified with it, not thinking that I am it.

Meditation is the awareness that I am not the mind. When the awareness goes deeper and deeper in you, slowly slowly, a few moments arrive – moments of silence, moments of pure space, moments of transparency, moments when nothing stirs in you and everything is still. In those still moments you will know who you are, and you will know the mystery of this existence.   

A day comes, a day of great blessings, when meditation becomes your natural state.
Mind is something unnatural; it never becomes your natural state. But 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 initiated into the ways of the society – 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.

All that is needed is to regain that space once more. You have known it before, so when for the first time you know meditation, you will be surprised – because a great feeling will arise in you as if you have known it before. And that feeling is true: you have known it before. You have forgotten. The diamond is lost in piles of rubbish. But if you can uncover it, you will find the diamond again – it is yours.

It cannot really be lost: it can only be forgotten. We are born as meditators, then we learn the ways of the mind. But our real nature remains hidden somewhere deep down like an undercurrent. Any day, a little digging, and you will find the source stillflowing, the source of fresh waters. And the greatest joy in life is to find it.