What Is
Meditation?
Excerpt 11. Meditation Is Creative
You have lived in a certain way
up to now – don't you want to live in a different way? You have thought in a
certain way up to now – don't you want some new glimpses in your being? Then be
alert and don't listen to the mind. Mind is your past constantly trying to
control your present and your future. It is the dead past which goes on
controlling the alive present. Just become alert about it.
But what is the way? How does
the mind go on doing it? The mind does it with this method: it says, "If
you don't listen to me, you will not be as efficient as I am." If you do
an old thing you can be more efficient because you have done it before. If you
do a new thing you cannot be efficient. The mind goes on talking like an
economist, an efficiency expert; it goes on saying, 'This is easier to do. Why
do it the hard way? This is the way of least resistance.'
Remember, whenever you have two
things, two alternatives, choose the new one. Choose the harder, choose the one
in which more awareness will be needed. At the cost of efficiency always choose
awareness, and you will create the situation in which meditation will become
possible. These are all just situations. Meditation will happen – I am not
saying that just by doing them you will get to meditation, but they will be
helpful. They will create the necessary situation in you, without which
meditation cannot happen.
Be less efficient but more
creative. Let that be the motive. Don't be bothered too much about utilitarian
ends. Rather, constantly remember that you are not here in life to become a
commodity. You are not here to become a utility, that is below dignity. Your
are not here just to become more and more efficient. You are here to become
more and more alive; you are here to become more and more intelligent; you are
here to become more and more happy, ecstatically happy. But that is totally
different from the ways of the mind.
Excerpted from 'Ancient
Music in the Pines' by Osho
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