Is the desire for awareness antithetical to awareness itself?

Beloved master, listening to you, a desire arises for awareness; but is not this very desire antithetical to awareness?

Prem Sunderam, if listening to me a desire arises for awareness, then you have missed the point. Listening to me you will become aware. If you are rightly listening, then awareness will happen through listening. If you are not listening, then a desire will arise to be aware. Desire means tomorrow you will be aware -- you want to be aware tomorrow. And if you are really listening to me, who bothers about tomorrow? This moment is all that is -- you ARE aware. See right now.... This is awareness: the birds chirping, the silence, three thousand people lost into one organic, oceanic unity, as if there is nobody. This is awareness, and the taste of it will transform you. And then wherever you want to be aware you can be aware. It is something that is happening in you. Listening to me is only a device. I am not…

Osho, “If there is awareness, the other is always beneficial.” Is this what you mean by a buddha, an awakened one?

If there is awareness, the other is neither beneficial nor harmful; if there is awareness, you draw your well-being from everywhere. Without awareness, you draw your ill-being from everywhere. If there is awakening, wherever you are, heaven begins to be created—because of your awakening. If there is no awakening, wherever you are, the stench of hell begins to rise—because of you. Understand it this way: to live in stupor builds hell; to live awake builds heaven. No one has ever suffered while awake. No one has ever known happiness while asleep. In sleep, at most you can hope for happiness; happiness never arrives. In the hope of happiness you can bear a great deal of suffering, but happiness never arrives. What comes with wakefulness—that alone is happiness. There is no relation to the other at all. If you understand rightly, there is no other; it is you. Your idea about…

Osho, is choiceless awareness also a kind of choice? It seems to come down to a paradox.

No, choiceless awareness is not a choice. Choiceless means we do not make any choice, we do not select any option; we simply awaken. In that awakening we do not decide, “This is right, that is wrong; this should be accepted, that should be dropped.” We make no decision. We simply look, awake. In this awakened seeing there is no choice at all. And as long as there is choice, we cannot see with awareness. “Awareness with choice”—there is no such thing. Awareness, as such, is without choice. Awareness by its very nature is choiceless. So awareness can never be together with choice, because choice means bias has begun; sleep has begun. There are so many people sitting here: if I say, “Bacchu-bhai is a fine man,” then I cannot be aware in relation to Bacchu-bhai either, because my attachment has begun. Nor can I be aware in relation to…

Osho, yesterday you said that when anger is watched consciously, it dissolves. But why is it that when sexual desire arises, even in awareness its intensity persists? Why is it so?

There is no entanglement in the breath. If you try to practice on anger… Anger is not happening every moment; it happens sometimes. And when it happens, it happens with such intensity that you are already going deep into it; so much is at stake in those moments that you may think, “We will look into awareness later; first let’s settle this now.” Lust is very deep, because existence has made it so deep; life depends on it. If lust were so easy that you decided and were freed, perhaps you would not even have been born—because many before you would have become free, and the possibility of your being would have been almost nil. But your parents, and their parents, did not become free; therefore you are. You too will not get free so easily, because your children are also to be—they are waiting: “Do not run away midway.”…

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…