How to meditate on physical pain while it is happening?

In meditation the distraction is often physical pain. Would you talk about meditating on pain while pain is happening?

This is what I was talking about. If you feel pain, be attentive to it, don't do anything. Attention is the great sword -- it cuts everything. You simply pay attention to the pain. For example, you are sitting in the last part of the meditation silently, unmoving, and you feel many problems in the body. You feel the leg is going dead, there is some itching in the hand, you feel ants are creeping on the body and many times you have looked -- there are no ants. The creeping is inside, not outside. What you should do? You feel the leg is going dead -- be watchful just give your total attention to it. You feel itching -- don't itch. That will not help. You just pay your attention. Don't open even your eyes. Just pay your attention inwardly, and just wait and watch, and within seconds the…

A friend has asked: Osho, if events happen in nature and feelings in man, then when one attains siddhi and experiences one’s separateness, do bodily pain and mental anguish stop?

This needs a little understanding. First, understand the difference between pain and suffering. If a thorn pricks your foot, two things happen. One is pain. Pain means you experience that there is hurt in the foot. I know there is hurt in the foot. You are the knower. The pain happens in the foot; you are the seer of it. You are the witness. This does not mean that if you are a witness and someone pricks your foot you will feel no pain. Do not fall into that illusion. There will be pain, because the prick of a thorn is an event. But there will be no suffering. Keep this distinction in mind. Suffering happens when I become one with the pain. When I say, “A thorn is pricking me,” then suffering happens. When I say, “A thorn is pricking the foot—and I am seeing it,” then there is…

I have glimpses of how psychological, existential pain is created by the ego. It is homemade, and it can be unmade. But what about physical pain: why is it there? Is it a necessary part of dying? I do not feel I am afraid of death as much as I am afraid of physical pain, senility, old age.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PAIN can be dissolved; and only psychological pain can be dissolved. The other pain, the physical pain, is part of life and death; there is no way to dissolve it. But it never creates a problem. Have you ever observed? -- the problem is only when you are thinking about it. If you think of old age you become afraid, but old people are not trembling. If you think of illness you become afraid, but when the illness has already happened, there is no fear, there is no problem. One accepts it as a fact. The real problem is always psychological. The physical pain is part of life. When you start thinking about it, it is not physical pain at all; it has become psychological. You think about death; there is fear. But when death actually happens there is no fear. Fear is always about something in the future.…

Osho, to remain awake even in death—or to successfully orchestrate a conscious death in meditation—what preparations should a seeker make concerning the body-system, the breath-system, the state of the breath, the state of prana, celibacy, willpower, etc.? Kindly shed detailed light on this.

But even in a cinema hall, where it is easier because it is all shadows, we do not remain witnesses. If we inspected the handkerchiefs of those exiting, we would know how many cried. We all know nothing is on the screen—only light and shadow. Yet everything “happens” there, and we become participants. Do not be mistaken that while watching a film you are merely a viewer—you become a participant. Someone pleases you, someone repels you; you identify. If we cannot be witnesses even to a film, how will we be witnesses in life? Life, too, is not much more than a film. At depth, like the play of rays on the screen, life is the play of electrical particles. If you reduce the body or a wall to its ultimate component, you find only electric particles. The difference between the screen and this is not great—two-dimensional there, three-dimensional here.…

In order for one to stay awake at the time of death, or in order for one to successfully experience a conscious death in meditation, please explain in detail how a seeker should work on the following: the body system, the breathing system, the state of breathing, the state of one's being, celibacy, the state of one's mind.

Recently, a well-known scientist conducted many experiments in this area. He took twenty patients suffering from the same illness. Ten of them he treated with medicine, while he kept the other ten only on water. The interesting thing was that the patients in both categories recovered together. Now what does this mean? What it means is simply that it is neither a question of medicine nor of water. The big question is that of persuading a man to drop his illness. If water does this work, then the patient can be cured by water. If homeopathic sugar pills succeed, then he is cured by the pills. If a charm proves effective, then it can cure too. If a patient has faith in a pinch of ash given by a fakir, then it can cure him too. Faith in the water of the Ganges also does the trick. Everything works. Even…