What is the relationship between awareness and feeling?

"daily in each of your talks, you speak of awareness -- total awareness, uninterrupted awareness, etcetera. You also said that it cannot be achieved by the mind, by repeating a thought -- that it is to be felt. But how can one feel unless one achieves it? What is that feeling which is the precursor of achievement? How to imagine or project that which has not yet happened? Does that too happen by excluding mind? What is the whole process? How can it be made feasible?"

And when I say, "feel it," I know it is difficult. How can you feel awareness without being aware? I am not saying that you can feel Buddha's enlightenment right now, but one has to start somewhere. You may not get the whole ocean, but a drop -- just a drop -- will give you the taste, and the taste is the same. If even for a single moment you become aware, you have tasted buddhahood. It is momentary, a glimpse of it, but now you know more. And this will never happen to you through thinking; it will happen only through feeling. The emphasis is on feeling because the emphasis is on a "lived" experience. Thinking is false, you can go on thinking about love and creating theories. You can even get a doctorate on the thesis of love, on what love is, and without ever being in love.…

Osho, in the context of the practice of heedfulness (apramad), please explain the similarities and differences among the practices of witnessing, awareness, and tathata.

One more thought on tathata. A Zen fakir wrote a small song: “The geese fly across the sky. They have no desire that their reflections be formed in the still lake below. Yet the reflections form. The blue lake has no desire to catch the reflections of the geese. Yet the reflections are caught. Then the geese fly on and the reflections also fly away. The geese do not know they were caught in the lake; the lake does not know that the reflections aroused any curiosity, any stir, any disturbance in its bosom.” Tathata means such a being. Things happen. He is ready for all—wants to do nothing and has no complaint. That is why one of Buddha’s names is Tathagata. He loved that name. Even speaking of himself he would say, “The Tathagata passed through a certain village.” Tathagata means one who has attained tathata—thus come, thus gone.…

and then the tree goes on becoming bigger, gathering greater foliage it can become a big tree almost whispering with the clouds it can blossom, it can become flowers, fruits and only then one is fulfilled that is the state of buddhahood the awakened state of consciousness awareness is a method a means to attain consciousness one has to become aware of the outer world when you are watching something be alert don't just behave like a zombie that's how people are behaving they are looking at a thing and not looking at all because their mind is somewhere else their eyes are empty, there is no attention they are hearing something but they are not listening their awareness is not there behind their ears so this is the first thing to be done become aware of the outside world this noise of the train or an aeroplane passing by…

Sometimes I feel in a state of non-doing, very passive, but may awareness of what is happening around me seems less. In fact, I feel detached from things around me. This somehow means false passivity, as I imagine on-doing should be synonymous with increased awareness. Can you please define this state?

Ordinarily we are in a feverish state -- active, but feverishly. If you become passive the fever will be lost. If you become passive, non-doing, if you relax within yourself, activity will be lost, fever will be lost, and the intensity that comes through fever will not be there. You will feel a little dull, you will feel as if your awareness is decreasing. It is not decreasing; only the feverish glow is decreasing. And it is good, so don't be afraid of it, and don't think that this passivity is not real. This is being said by your mind which needs and wants the feverish activity and the glow that comes through fever. Fever is not awareness, but in fever you can have a very unhealthy awareness, alertness. That is diseased; don't hanker for it. Allow it to go, fall into passivity. In the beginning it will look like…

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…