How should we engage with awareness as it arises and settles within us?

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…

Should we watch only up to the point where it comes, takes hold of us, and settles there?

This language we are using is our interpretation, seized from behind, after the fact. Let me give you an example: when you feel hunger—leave anger aside for a bit, because anger carries so many associations, and the mind has branded it as bad. To accept it is not easy at all. Deep down we are so certain it is bad that no matter how much we accept it on the surface, inside the sting, the thorn of its “badness,” keeps pricking. That conditioning is seated in the mind for millions of years; it cannot be erased in a day. Take hunger instead. There, we don’t have the same sense of “bad.” When hunger seizes you, if you really look, you won’t find “I am hungry”; you will find “I am hunger.” Drop the words and go a little inside the hunger, and you will discover: hunger has become your very…

Osho, what I am doing in this carries a kind of sense of awakening—I am trying, making an effort; whether it will happen or not, I don’t know. Yet it is happening—like when I do some work with my hand, I keep remembering that the hand is doing it; the legs are doing it; when I am walking, the legs are walking. This feeling is arising. In this, I separate myself, so from this that nonattachment...

Yes, this is the witness-attitude. This is exactly the third thing I have been speaking about—the witnessing. This witnessing means living each act totally, and keeping the sense of suchness (tathata), that things are as they are. There is simply no reason in anything for us to move into turmoil; there is no reason at all. If these three come together and are cared for, then slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly the present by itself... and nothing else will remain; the present will arrive of its own accord. There is no reason for anything else to remain; there is no way for it. And about suchness, what I said today needs much attention. It is very basic.

Osho, is there any practical process for being in the realm of existence beyond thoughts, in the void?

The way to thin them out is non-cooperation. Right now we are their makers—that is, we are the ones maintaining them. When we sit idle, some thought or other is running, because without our cooperation they cannot run. Withdraw your cooperation from whatever thoughts are running, and do nothing else; regard just this as samayik, as meditation. If all thoughts dissolve, you will feel no ego and no person within. You will know only being—only being will be known, in which the distinction “I am an individual” or “I am the whole” will not be felt. Only pure being will remain—pure existence. In truth, because of the thoughts accumulated upon that pure existence, we appear to be a person. This sense that I am “A,” you are “B,” you are “C”—the A, B, C we have pasted on—is our thought-power. We commonly say, “I will become liberated”—this is not quite…

Osho said that there was no need to try to still the mind, to stop the thoughts. He said that just as the traffic goes by and one remains on the sidewalk, unaffected, just a watcher, so one should simply witness the thoughts as they went by. We are not our thoughts, and recognising that we are the witness is enough. The very acceptance of the thoughts makes one more relaxed. The relaxation helps to create a distance, to separate oneself. To evaluate a thought as good or bad means that you are attached to your thoughts -- so one should not put labels on them.] ... put yourself aside, sit under a tree, and just watch the traffic. Soon, one day, the traffic disappears and the road is empty. Suddenly there is an interval and in that interval is meditation. But that interval cannot be created or cultivated.