Don’t look for the dark; just switch on the light of calm, nonjudging awareness until nothing can hide.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Considering the example of sensual instinct, kindly explain what are the practical ways to encounter the unconscious mind, and how can one know that one has become free from it?
This is how concentration works. So through concentration you can never encounter the unconscious. You can encounter the unconscious only with meditation -- and this is the difference between concentration and meditation. Meditation means your mind working not as a torch but like a flame: everything is enlightened around it -- everything. It is not narrowed down, the light is diffused. It is not moving in one direction -- it is moving in all directions simultaneously so the whole is enlightened. How to do it? I said Sufis use dance as an active meditation and then they can encounter the unconscious. Zen monks in Japan use absurd problems to encounter it. You face some problem which cannot be solved -- which cannot be solved at all! Howsoever you try, the problem is such that it cannot be solved. They call such problems "koans" -- absurd problems. For example, they will…
Osho, we feel that to penetrate and transform the deeper layers of the unconscious only through awareness is difficult and not enough. What else should one do other than the practice of awareness? Please explain more about the practical dimensions on this matter.
Silence is energy. Brahmacharya is energy. Not to be angry is energy. But this is not suppression. If you suppress anger, you have used energy again. Don't suppress -- observe and follow. don't fight -- just move backwards with the anger. This is the purest method of awareness. But certain other things can be used. For beginners certain devices are possible. So I will talk about three devices. One type of device is based on body awareness. Forget anger, forget sex -- they are difficult problems. And when you are in them, you become so mad that you cannot meditate. When you are angry you cannot meditate; you cannot even think about meditation. You are just mad. So forget it; it is difficult. Then use your own body as a device for awareness. Buddha has said that when you walk, walk consciously. When you breathe, breathe consciously. The Buddhist method…
Question: OSHO, HOW DOES ONE EXPLORE THE HIGHER STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS? If you start looking... just whenever you have time, just sit silently and look at what is passing in your mind. There is no need to judge, because if you judge, the mind immediately changes its scenes according to you. The mind is very sensitive, touchy. If it feels that you are judging, then it starts showing things that are good. Then it won't show you the naked washerwoman of Bombay, that picture will be missed out. So don't judge, then that picture is bound to come. Don't judge, don't make any condemnation, don't make any appreciation. Be indifferent. You just sit silently looking at things, whatsoever is happening. And absurd things will be happening: a horse becomes a man.... Now you need not ask why, there is no need to ask, you simply see it.
Osho, I have had lots of exhilarating moments of what seemed to me to be real consciousness, but then as soon as I have felt conscious I begin to feel unconscious, and it seems more and more to me that being conscious is a state one has to just experience and not recognize. Have you anything to say on this?
THE STATE of real awareness is not exhilarating. It has no excitement in it, it is absolutely peaceful. It is neither hot nor cold. You live in a world of coldness, dullness, hence your mind is constantly seeking for something exciting, exhilarating, elevating. You live always in dark valleys so you hanker for peaks, sunlit peaks. That is your desire, but that is not the nature of consciousness itself. Consciousness is exactly in the middle. It is neither low nor high, it is neither a valley nor a peak, it is neither cold nor hot. Buddha has called it MAJJHIM NIKAYA -- the middle way. It is exactly in the middle, and it is in the middle that transcendence happens. It is neither positive nor negative, neither good nor bad, NETI NETI, neither this nor that. You have come to such a delicate point where everything is balanced. You are…
Beloved Osho, does "to become conscious" mean that something that was unconscious is raised to the level of the mind, and only when it has passed through the state of the mind can it rise to the level of superconsciousness? Does everything need to pass through the mind, or is it possible to become conscious from another place, and jump the mind stage?
Those who believe only in the mind -- for example, psychoanalysts, who are replacing the priests in the West and who are creating a substitute religion as bogus as the one they are replacing -- for them, there is nothing higher than mind. There are steps lower than mind; hence everything has to pass through your conscious mind to be released, so your unconscious becomes unburdened. But it is a very long process, because your unconscious carries the whole rubbish of this life, which is immense. Every second of your life, awake or asleep, you are collecting rubbish. The amount is so much that your remaining life will not be able to free you from it. Moreover, while you are freeing yourself from the old rubbish, every day you are collecting new rubbish. And this is not all. Deeper than this is your collective unconscious which has not even been…