Breath

A friend has asked whether the breath should be both deep and intense at the same time?

If both are together, the result will be greater. Let it be deep and also intense—deep and also fast. What I want is that all your energy be put into the breath itself, so that the mind has no other work left to do. Not even a trace of mind should be left over; let it be wholly engaged in the breath. Whatever little still remains—this is why later we put even that onto the inquiry, “Who am I?”

How is one to watch breath when it is not seen but felt?

Watching need not be a seeing, it can be a feeling. In fact it has to be a feeling because how can you see your breath? You feel it, the touch of it. When the breath moves through the passage, you feel the touch of it. The whole thing is not a question of seeing. The thing is to be alert that it is going in, that it has reached to the very innermost core of your being, that now it has stopped; that now it is coming back. The ebb and the tide: now it has gone out, moved completely out, stopped; then again moving back. The whole circle of it -- coming in, going out, coming in, going out -- one has to be aware. If you feel it, that is awareness -- but one should not miss feeling it. If you can do it every day for…

Why do you advise us to observe the breathing process?

I do so because breathing, inhaling and exhaling, is the bridge between the body and the soul. The soul resides in the body through breathing and because of breathing. By becoming aware of one's breath, by direct knowledge of breathing, a person gradually experiences that he is not the body. I am the body but I am not the body alone. It is my abode but not my foundation. As the direct realization of breathing goes deeper, one experiences the presence, the proximity of the one who is not the body. For a moment one sees clearly that the self is not the body. Then you will see the three layers, the three sheaths of your personality -- the body, the breath and the soul. The body is the shell; the breath is the bridge, the connecting link; the soul, the self, is the foundation. The role of the breath…

That friend has also asked: Osho, if you say we should bid farewell to old cows, then tomorrow might it not come to having to bid farewell to an old father or an old mother as well!

It can happen. And if you keep producing too many children, it will happen. This is a very harsh truth. It is very sad. But perhaps no other path will remain. Just as today we retire a man at fifty-five or fifty-eight from his job. Why do we do that? So that the children coming up behind can get work; otherwise they won’t. It is not necessary that a fifty-five-year-old is no longer fit to work. In truth, removing an experienced fifty-five-year-old from work and giving that work to an inexperienced twenty-year-old is economically a loss, not a gain. But it is a compulsion. The fifty-five-year-old has to be set aside; otherwise how will the children get work? As the situation worsens further, it may not be only retirement from jobs; we may have to decide that a person of sixty-five or seventy must retire from life. The responsibility for…