What are the benefits of meditation?

Meditation sharpens your brilliance. Ordinarily your sword is rusty. You have never cared about it, you have not even taken it out of its sheath. And it needs constant sharpening, otherwise it is not even useful in cutting vegetables' And it has great work to do -- it has to kill you! That's what sannyas is all about: cutting your head-off with your own hands. It is real suicide. It is not of the body, it is the suicide of the ego -- and the ego is very subtle and very cunning. Unless you are sharp enough it will go deceiving you. You throw it out from one door and it will enter from another. And it is so cunning that it can even come in the name of humbleness. You can watch the so-called humble people and you can see their egos.

I am not saying to do anything. Meditation is not a doing at all, it is pure awareness. But a miracle happens, the greatest miracle in life. If you go on watching, tremendous and incredible things start happening. Your body becomes graceful, your body is no more restless, tense; your body starts becoming light, unburdened; you can see great weights, mountainous weights, falling from your body. Your body starts becoming pure of all kinds of toxins and poisons. You will see your mind is no more as active as before; its activity starts becoming less and less and gaps arise, gaps in which there are no thoughts. Those gaps are the most beautiful experiences because through those gaps you start seeing things as they are without any interference of the mind. Slowly slowly your moods start disappearing. You are no more very joyous and no more very sad.

Meditation gives you unbounded space. It makes you as vast as the ocean. Without it one is only a dewdrop, confined into a very small space, imprisoned. And that's our misery, that wherever we try to move there is a limitation. The body limits us, the mind limits us, even the heart limits us. One has to go beyond the body, beyond the mind, beyond the heart. Only then, these three concentric circles transcended, you become as vast as existence itself. You are no more in that vastness. You cannot be the way you have always been; there is no ego. The ego can exist only in the dewdrop. The ocean means egolessness. The moment you are infinite, you taste the truth for the first time; otherwise whatsoever we go on thinking about truth is not truth. Thinking about truth can never be truth.

For example, it brings you the experience that not the body, so clearly, so solidly, so categorically, that even if the whole world denies it, it cannot make any difference: you know from your innermost core you are not the body. It brings you the experience that you are not the mind either. And the moment you know you are neither the body nor the mind, suddenly a door opens. You have never been born and you are never going to die because only that which is born can die. The body was born, the mind was born -- they will die -- but you were before your birth and you will be after your death. Once this reality is revealed to you all fears and all miseries disappear. You become part of eternity. Only one thing remains and that is pure consciousness. And pure consciousness is nothing but godliness.

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.] (Siggi, a therapist from Germany, received the name Dhyan Anutoshen -- then Osho took off from there.) Meditation means a state of no-mind -- where all the functioning of the mind has ceased. The moment the functioning of the mind ceases you have a profound silence such that you have never known before, such clarity, such transparency -- because all the clouds are gone, all the smoke is gone, there is nothing to hinder your insight. All is absolutely clear. Meditation gives you innocence, clarity, insight into your own being and into the very being of the existence that surrounds you. Suddenly all misery disappears, all desires disappear.