According to Osho, awareness in meditation is not forced doing but effortless simplicity: stop mixing techniques, relax first, and let listening and silence reveal natural alertness. Use the right stance for the moment—watch reactivity (like insults), merge with beauty, drop anger—and avoid mental rehearsals. Trust consciousness to respond freshly; from ease, awareness sustains itself.
Sit quietly, relax, stop trying to do awareness, and let it show up by itself—watch when there’s upset, enjoy beauty without effort, and drop anger.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, you say that if there is awareness, then how are the two to be brought into harmony?
That is precisely the practice of active meditation: awareness. Awareness is the very means of going into emptiness in relation to all actions, to the movements of the mind as well. For example, if you lie there for half an hour—what will you do? In that half hour, whatever thoughts are moving in your mind, you are to be simply aware of them. Simply a witness—what else will you do? Just become a witness. Keep silently watching; let them move. But obstacles arise in our seeing. We become absorbed. We fail to remain a witness. We don’t even notice when we have become one with those very thoughts. That sense of awareness fades; a kind of stupor, a moorchha, comes in. A thought comes, a memory arises, and we stop being the watcher. We become part of that thought and of its flow. That is moorchha. And the opposite is…
A: Hm mm. To be meditation means an effort to be aware. To be aware of the whole process of life, but in the beginning one can chose some object like breathing. It is a very natural object to be aware: The ingoing and the outgoing of the breath. Be aware constantly: the breath has gone out, it has come in; and the rhythm and the process and the in and out going phenomena, be aware of it. The moment you will be aware, you feel a certain change, a certain chemical change within your mind. Because when you become aware of the breathing process, mind becomes silent. The silence is automatically created. Because your total mind is engaged in seeing, in witnessing the breathing. And the rhythmic circle of breath creates an inner music. That inner music too leads you to more and more silent and sweeter moments within.
Osho, please explain how I can meditate over something without using my mind.
Meditation has nothing to do with mind; meditation simply means a state of no-mind. The functioning of the mind is the only disturbance in meditation. If you are trying to achieve meditation THROUGH mind you are bound to fail, doomed to fail. You are trying to achieve the impossible. A Zen initiate was meditating for years and whenever he would come to his Master, whatsoever experience he would bring to the Master, the Master would simply reject: "It is all nonsense. You go back and meditate again." One day the Master came to the but of the disciple -- he was sitting in a Buddha posture. The Master shook him and told him, "What are you doing here? If we needed stone Buddhas we have many in the temple! Just by sitting like a stone Buddha you will not attain to meditation. Do what I have been telling you to…
I am not saying to do anything. Meditation is not a doing at all, it is pure awareness. But a miracle happens, the greatest miracle in life. If you go on watching, tremendous and incredible things start happening. Your body becomes graceful, your body is no more restless, tense; your body starts becoming light, unburdened; you can see great weights, mountainous weights, falling from your body. Your body starts becoming pure of all kinds of toxins and poisons. You will see your mind is no more as active as before; its activity starts becoming less and less and gaps arise, gaps in which there are no thoughts. Those gaps are the most beautiful experiences because through those gaps you start seeing things as they are without any interference of the mind. Slowly slowly your moods start disappearing. You are no more very joyous and no more very sad.
Meditation is always passive; the very essence of it is passive. It cannot be active because the very nature of it is non-doing. If you are doing something, your very doing disturbs the whole thing; your very doing, your very "activeness," creates the disturbance. Non-doing is meditation, but when I say non-doing is meditation I do not mean that you need not do anything. Even to achieve this non-doing, one has to do much. But this doing is not meditation. It is only a stepping stone, only a jumping board. All "doing" is just a jumping board, not meditation. You are just on the door, on the steps.... The door is non-doing, but to reach the non-doing state of mind one has to do much. But one should not confuse this doing with meditation. Life energy works in contradictions. Life exists as a dialectic: it is not a simple movement.