Is the feeling of remaining the same as a child a sign of my witness or something else?

Beloved Osho, since being with you so much growth and maturity has happened in me -- I have changed in every aspect. At the same time, when I look into myself, I feel the same as I did when I was a little child. Is this my witness, or something else?

It is your witness. Just remember one thing, that the feeling of being a child can be experienced in two ways. You can be a witness and the experience of childhood can be an object. Then one more step is needed: You have to become the purity, the innocence of the child... not separate -- you are it. It will come. This is how it comes: first it comes as an object; you are still separate and watching it. This is beautiful and a great experience -- that all rubbish is thrown out and you are feeling a very pure, innocent state -- but you are still separate from it. Just go on witnessing it, and soon even the childhood will disappear, and there will be only the witness, the subjectivity. There will be only the mirror without mirroring anything. Then you have arrived home. You can mirror beautiful things,…

Witnessing, awareness, meditation, suddenly seem distant and sterile adult ideas in the face of the flood of wild and childish adoration which fills me while I am listening to you talk about jesus. My adult self says, "beware; don't indulge in sloppy, sleepy sentimentality -- this is just the mind, childhood christian conditioning." but the impulsive, yearning seven-year-old feels like sticking out her tongue at the twenty-eight-year-old seriously spiritual seeker. Which is the real me?

Neither -- but the one who is watching both, the one who has asked the question. You are neither a seven-year-old nor a seventy-year-old. Oldness is irrelevant to you, age does not belong to you. You are eternal -- neither the child, nor the young man, nor the old man. Always fall back to the witness, go deeper and deeper into witnessing. Never allow any other identification to settle: of the child or the adult -- no. All identifications are bondages. Total freedom is not in identification; total freedom is in non-identification with each and every thing. Someday, when all identifications are broken and they fall down -- like clothes drop -- and you are absolutely nude in your freedom, then you will know who you are. You are gods in exile. Only by witnessing will you remember who you are. Then all misery disappears, all poverty disappears. You are…

Drik swaroop awasthanam akshataha to be established in one's own witnessing nature is akshat -- the unpolished and unbroken rice used for the worship.

Breathe, be aware. And if you are trying to be aware of your breathing, you cannot think, because the mind cannot do two things simultaneously -- thinking and witnessing. The very phenomenon of witnessing is absolutely, diametrically opposite to thinking, so you cannot do both. Just as you cannot be both alive and dead, as you cannot be both asleep and awake, you cannot be both thinking and witnessing. Witness anything, and thinking will stop. Thinking comes in, and witnessing disappears. Witnessing is a passive awareness with no action inside. Awareness itself is not an action. One day Mulla Nasrudin was very much worried, in deep brooding. Anyone could look at his face and feel that he was lost somewhere in thoughts, very tense, in anguish. His wife became alarmed. She asked, "What are you doing, Nasrudin? What are you thinking? What is the problem? Why are you so worried?"…

For years I am most of the time witnessing and I feel it like a disease. So is it that there are two kinds of witnessing and mine is wrong? Tell me.

And only then can the third step be taken, which will bring you close to what Gurdjieff calls self-remembering, or Krishnamurti calls awareness, or the Upanishads call witnessing. But first the two steps have to be fulfilled; then the third comes easy. Don't start doing the third immediately. First the object, then the consciousness, then the subject. Once the object is dropped and the emphasis on the consciousness is no longer a strain, the subject is there but there is no subjectivity in it. You are there but there is no "I" in it, just being. You are, but there is no feeling that "I am." That confinement of "I" has disappeared; only amness exists. That amness is divine. Drop the "I" and just be that amness. And if you have been working too long on witnessing, then for a few months, at least for three months, drop it completely,…

Beloved master, how do I come to know when I am really witnessing my body, feelings and thoughts, or when it is only my mind pretending to be a witness?

The question is only intellectual; you have not even tried to pretend. When you are witnessing and you start feeling that it may be just the pretense of the mind, then it is certainly a pretense of the mind... because who is thinking about it as pretense of the mind? -- something behind the pretense. You can never get confused about witnessing, because behind witnessing there is nothing. You cannot witness witnessing. Anything that you can witness is part of the mind. So if you witness that it is a pretense, it is a pretense. Witness the pretense, don't get identified with it. Witnessing has a beauty: it cannot be reduced to an object, you cannot witness it. It is irreducible, it always slips back; it remains only witnessing. So whatever you feel, that means you are getting identified with the mind. You have not tried it -- the question…