How to be passively alert?

How to be passively alert? How to be neither extrovert nor introvert? Al1d how to be and yet not to be? Please reply not through words but through void.

Then you will have to ask through void. If you want my silent answer, you will have to ask silently. If you cannot ask silently, I can answer silently, still, but you will not understand it. First you have to learn the language of silence. So if you want to receive something from me in silence, then prepare for yourself -- and ask the question in silence. No need to write it. Because I can give you only as much as you are capable of receiving. And don't ask crazy questions, because I can answer in a very crazy way. Let me tell you one anecdote. A mother thought her little girl should be examined for any possible abnormal tendencies, so she took the tot along to the psychologist. Among other questions the doctor asked were: "Are you a boy or a girl?" The little girl answered, "A boy." Somewhat…

Beloved Osho, yesterday you told us very clearly that we need to follow the master's word to the letter. But we cannot consult you on every detail. How can we choose the right path when the mind is always looking for the easy way?

Remember, passivity can become sleep. That's why I emphasize the word alertness -- because you can be passive and you go to sleep. Sleep is not meditation. One quality of sleep is there, one quality, that of passivity, and one quality of waking is there, that of alertness. Relaxed as if you are asleep, alert as you are awake. One thing is taken from sleep -- unconsciousness. That should not be there, because meditation cannot be unconscious, and one thing is taken from your waking state -- occupiedness; because if you are occupied then the mind is working, you are enclosed in thoughts. While you are awake there are two things: alertness and occupiedness. While you are asleep there are two things: passivity and unconsciousness. One thing from awakeness, one thing from sleep: passivity and alertness -- they make meditation. If you take the two other ingredients, occupation and unconsciousness,…

Sometimes I feel in a state of non-doing, very passive, but may awareness of what is happening around me seems less. In fact, I feel detached from things around me. This somehow means false passivity, as I imagine on-doing should be synonymous with increased awareness. Can you please define this state?

Ordinarily we are in a feverish state -- active, but feverishly. If you become passive the fever will be lost. If you become passive, non-doing, if you relax within yourself, activity will be lost, fever will be lost, and the intensity that comes through fever will not be there. You will feel a little dull, you will feel as if your awareness is decreasing. It is not decreasing; only the feverish glow is decreasing. And it is good, so don't be afraid of it, and don't think that this passivity is not real. This is being said by your mind which needs and wants the feverish activity and the glow that comes through fever. Fever is not awareness, but in fever you can have a very unhealthy awareness, alertness. That is diseased; don't hanker for it. Allow it to go, fall into passivity. In the beginning it will look like…

Please, Osho, what is receptivity?

RECEPTIVITY is a state of no-mind. When you are utterly empty of all thought, when consciousness has no content, when the mirror reflects nothing, it is receptivity. Receptivity is the door to the divine. Drop the mind and be. In the mind, you are miles away from being. The more you think, the less you are. The less you think, the more you are. And if you don't think at all, those are the moments when being asserts itself in its totality. Receptivity simply means dropping the garbage that you go on carrying in your head. And much garbage is there, utterly useless. The mind means the past. Now the past is no more of any use; it has happened, and it is never going to happen again, because in reality nothing ever repeats. Even when you think, feel, that this is the same situation, it is never the same…

Attain the utmost in passivity. Hold firm to the basis of quietude. Myriad things take shape and rise to activity, but I watch them fall back to their repose like vegetation that luxuriously grows but returns to the root (soil) from which it springs. To return to the root is repose. It is called going back to one's destiny. Going back to one's destiny is to find the eternal law. To know the eternal law is enlightenment. And not to know the eternal law is to court disaster.

The king tied the amulet on his arm. Many times he felt it was time to open the charm but then a new course of action would be opened to him. Years passed by. Then one day he was defeated by an enemy. As he fled for his life, with the enemy close on his heels, he suddenly remembered the amulet. But then he thought that he had a strong, fleet-footed horse and he could cross over into another country. So he did not waste any time and sped along. After some time, as fate would have it, he reached the top of a mountain. Before him was a deep abyss. Behind him he could hear the hoofs of the enemy horses coming closer and closer. There was nothing he could do. He opened the amulet, hoping it contained a magic mantra. To his dismay he found the fakir had…