How can we bring awareness into our daily tasks?

Mahavira has called apramad—vigilance, awareness, continuous wakefulness—the basis of practice. A friend asks: how can we bring this awareness into our conduct while doing our tasks—in the office, in the shop, while working? If attention remains on awareness, how will the work get done? While engaged in work, what is the place of awareness, and can this itself be a sadhana?

Take attention also as delight. Do not make it a restlessness. Let it not become a burden on your head that “I must work attentively.” Do not load it with strain and effort; let it grow lightly, support it. Whenever the remembrance arises, do it consciously. If you forget, do not worry. When remembrance returns, begin again to do it consciously. If you decide, “Now I will do my work consciously,” you will not be able to do it today itself; it may take years. To keep awareness even for a moment is difficult. You will decide to walk consciously; you will not be able to take even two steps before awareness has gone elsewhere and the feet have started walking elsewhere. Do not be anxious about that; do not repent. Heedlessness is the habit of countless lives; there is no reason to be distressed. We ourselves have cultivated unawareness—whom…

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…

Beloved Osho, you tell us to be aware of everything -- which means to be a witness to everything, every act. When I decide to be aware in work, I forget about awareness, and when I become aware that I was not aware. I feel guilty; I feel that I have made a mistake. Could you please explain?

Manish Bharti, it is one of the basic problems for anybody who is trying to be aware while at work -- because work demands that you should forget yourself completely. You should be involved in it so deeply... as if you are absent. Unless such total involvement is there, the work remains superficial. All that is great, created by man -- in painting, in poetry, in architecture, in sculpture -- in any dimension of life -- needs you to be totally involved. And if you are trying to be aware at the same time, your work will never be first rate, because you will not be in it. So awareness while you are working needs a tremendous training and discipline, and one has to start from very simple actions. For example, walking: you can walk, and you can be aware that you are walking -- each step can be full…

"daily in each of your talks, you speak of awareness -- total awareness, uninterrupted awareness, etcetera. You also said that it cannot be achieved by the mind, by repeating a thought -- that it is to be felt. But how can one feel unless one achieves it? What is that feeling which is the precursor of achievement? How to imagine or project that which has not yet happened? Does that too happen by excluding mind? What is the whole process? How can it be made feasible?"

And when I say, "feel it," I know it is difficult. How can you feel awareness without being aware? I am not saying that you can feel Buddha's enlightenment right now, but one has to start somewhere. You may not get the whole ocean, but a drop -- just a drop -- will give you the taste, and the taste is the same. If even for a single moment you become aware, you have tasted buddhahood. It is momentary, a glimpse of it, but now you know more. And this will never happen to you through thinking; it will happen only through feeling. The emphasis is on feeling because the emphasis is on a "lived" experience. Thinking is false, you can go on thinking about love and creating theories. You can even get a doctorate on the thesis of love, on what love is, and without ever being in love.…

Osho, I feel that heedlessness weighs heavily on me. What should I do to be light of it?

Awareness of heedlessness! By doing, heedlessness will not go; it can only hide. A lazy man is sitting. Ordinarily, what do we tell him so that his laziness breaks? We say, “Do something.” Remember, laziness is tamas; you can put him to work—that is rajas. So to turn a tamasic person into a rajasic one is not very difficult. He is sitting inactive; he can be pushed into activity. But the real question is not becoming rajasic from tamasic. The real question, whether you are rajasic or tamasic, is to become sattvic. And there is only one way to become sattvic: be aware. Whatever the state, be aware of it. A lazy man is sitting; we would tell him, “Become alert to your laziness. From within, know it, recognize it, watch it. Don’t hide laziness. Don’t cover it with devices and excuses. Don’t look for arguments. See laziness in its…