Alchemy

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up.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.] Meditation is a process of alchemy. It is a very wrong notion, but very prevalent all over the world, that alchemy was just primitive chemistry. Alchemy had nothing to do with chemistry at all. Chemistry is part of science, alchemy is part of religion. Chemistry belongs to the world of matter, alchemy belongs to the world of consciousness. But this wrong notion has arisen because of a certain historical necessity. The Christian church was so repressive that all mystic schools in the West had to function under disguise; they had to go underground. And the only way to go underground was to pretend that they were doing something else. So on the periphery they pretended that they were trying to change baser metals into gold.

Gold has been an ancient symbol in alchemy, it represents the highest peak of consciousness, the most precious in man. Ordinarily man lives a very meaningless, valueless life, but this whole meaninglessness can be transformed into a great golden aura. One just needs a certain chemical process, a bridge, to transform all that is ordinary, mundane, into something sacred. And meditation does exactly that, as you become more and more silent, you start seeing great miracles happening in your inner being, you start seeing stones turning into diamonds, the baser metal turning into gold. And suddenly you know now that you have found the key to the infinite treasure of your being. And that treasure of your being is what I call the truth. To me truth is not some dry philosophical concept it is a lived experience.

The moment you know that you are only a witness, a pure mirror reflecting everything, and you are not identified with any reflection, suddenly you discover your inner light. It is already there, but we have to shift our consciousness. A one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn is needed, and it happens only by witnessing, there is no other method. When you are witnessing, anything one thing becomes clear, that you are not the thing that you are witnessing, obviously; you are the witness of it. Go on, deeper and deeper. When nothing is left to witness, you have witnessed all objects that you can witness and you have rejected them knowing 'I am not that,' when everything is eliminated, only you are left -- just the mirror and nothing else; suddenly the shift: consciousness turns upon itself. That moment of turning in is the greatest moment in life.

Osho, how can I become a light unto myself?

Shraddho Yannis, THESE WERE THE LAST WORDS of Gautam the Buddha, his parting message to his disciples: "Be a light unto yourself." But when he says, "Be a light unto yourself," he does not mean become a light unto yourself. There is a great difference between being and becoming. Becoming is a process, being is a discovery. The seed only appears to become the tree, that is an appearance. The seed already had the tree within itself, it was its very being. The seed does not become the flowers. The flowers were there unmanifest, now they are manifest. It is not a question of becoming, otherwise a pebble could become a flower. But that doesn't happen. A rock cannot become a rose; that doesn't happen because the rock has no potential for being a rose. The seed simply discovers itself through dying into the soil: dropping its outer shell, it…