It is good news that Bill Gates is meditating daily — for precious 10 minutes. And now for him, meditation is no longer a “woo-woo thing”, whatever that means. He might have thought that meditation is “tied somehow to reincarnation”.

Well, such misconceptions have always been there about meditation and people in the West have been ridiculing the Eastern meditators as navel-gazers, escapists and renunciates. Such fallacious assumptions discourage these intelligent people all over the world in using such a wonderful tool to raise their consciousness and transform themselves and the world at large. As we all know that when intelligent people do something remarkable and great, the ordinary people follow them, because it looks like a success story. People become followers of these great people. It makes sense to them.

If in India similar statements are given by Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, Azim Premji, Narayana Murthy, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai or Prime Minister Narendra Modi, that the secret of their success is meditation, this will create a huge impact on the minds of intelligentsia and the ordinary people. Recently, superstar Rajinikanth said in an interview that he has been meditating since he was seven years old. He explained: “From childhood, I had the Vedas, the Upanishads, meditation with me. Later, there were many gurus and I made many trips to the Himalayas. It is a deep subject. Only someone who experiences it knows about it. It is difficult to convey in words. Mainly, you get peace. When your mind is peaceful, whatever you do, you do it well.”

Rajinikanth did not renounce the world and made a tremendous contribution to the world of movies.

Osho, the enlightened mystic of modern times, made meditation the central point of his spiritual teaching. Thousands of Osho centers around the world are offering meditations on a regular basis. He has a very unique take on this subject. According to him, meditation is a way of life. It is life-affirmative. One does not have to run away from life and practice meditation in some ashrams in the Himalayas. Yes, one can take a few days off to go somewhere and learn meditation, but one has to return to the world and continue living meditatively.

He says: “Meditation cannot be a fragmented thing. It should be a continuous effort. Every moment one has to be alert, aware and meditative. But the mind has played a trick. You meditate in the morning and then you put it aside. Or you pray in the temple and then forget it. Then you come back to the world, completely unmeditative, unconscious, as if walking in a hypnotic sleep. This fragmented effort won’t do much. Consciousness is a continuum. It is like a river, flowing constantly. If you are meditative the whole day, every moment of it — and only when you are meditative the whole day — the flowering will come to you.”

There are seven points of mindfulness — awareness, benediction, creativity, devotion, ecstasy, friendliness, and Godliness. But if one starts with the first point sincerely in daily life, the other six points happen as part of natural growth. In the beginning, being in constant awareness is an effort, one has to remember to be in total awareness of everything — within and without — on physical, mental and emotional levels. This is the most arduous process, but not something impossible. Being aware of our actions on the physical level with all its sensations, being aware of our thoughts and being aware of our emotions and feelings is in itself a long process of sadhana. This one step leads us towards the state of realisation of the totality of our being.

During this process of this realisation (one can call it the inner journey), one starts having some glimpses of benediction, an inner contentment, the real happiness within — that is not dependent on others. This fills us with more energy to live our life creatively — not wasting our energy in trivial matters of the world. A new door of devotion opens in our being. A person who lives a life of devotion has a certain direction in life — will not go astray. The journey is no longer boring or tedious — it becomes juicy. One can go unhindered on the path which has become lush green with all the scenery. One can sing and dance on the path in ecstasy and celebrate the journey. The journey itself — for an ecstatic meditator — feels like the goal.

In this state of being, a seeker feels the fragrance of friendliness showering from all directions. One feels at homeness with the earth and sky, the trees, the birds, the mountains, the rivers and the waterfalls and everything in nature. One feels oneness with the whole existence. This is what is meant by Godliness. God is not some person sitting high up in the sky like an emperor giving commandments to his empire. God is this totality and the wholeness of existence — this very life that surrounds us.

Osho says: To me, when someone says that God exists, it means the same thing: Existence exists. God and existence are equivalent synonyms. Once you have become aware of what existence is, you will not call it existence. Then you will call it God. The moment one becomes aware of the total being that is, then you cannot use the word existence. You become more intimate with it, so you have to use a personal name.

The experiencing of Godliness within oneself manifests as friendliness towards all beings — the whole life that surrounds us — as Osho points out: Your life should reach to others. Your blissfulness, your benediction, your ecstasy should not be contained within you like a seed. It should open like a flower and spread its fragrance to all and sundry — not only to friends but to strangers too. This is real compassion, this is real love: Sharing your enlightenment, sharing your dance of the beyond.

Recently, on a particular website, I came across a beautiful statement by Wayne Dyer: “You can be a host to God or a hostage to your ego. It’s your choice.”

Being hostage to the ego is the case with most people — and as a matter of fact, they seem to have no choice. This is something that everybody believes to be unavoidable — they have to live with it. It is the way the whole society functions — and everybody is expected to function this way only.

It begins very early in life. The schools and the other educational institutions teach us to be competitive, and a stupid mantra is taught that to succeed in the world is to defeat others. This feeling of defeating others gives pleasure to the person who succeeds and misery to the one who cannot defeat others. In this race of ambition, everybody becomes trapped in a false sense of the self — an artificially created something that feels like the self. It is a hallucination — it is maya — about which all the enlightened sages have been warning us. And none of us has paid any heed to their warning. This unreal “self” has been created by the whole social conditioning — very unconsciously. We all have become imprisoned inside its thick concrete walls — even God cannot penetrate into such walls, forget about hosting God.

In one of the talks compiled in the Book of Life, J. Krishnamurti explains it beautifully: You know what I mean by the self? By that, I mean the idea, the memory, the conclusion, the experience, the various forms of nameable and unnameable intentions, the conscious endeavor to be or not to be, the accumulated memory of the unconscious, the racial, the group, the individual, the clan, and the whole of it all, whether it is projected outwardly in action, or projected spiritually as virtue; the striving after all this is the self. In it is included the competition, the desire to be. The whole process of that, is the self; and we know actually when we are faced with it, that it is an evil thing. I am using the word evil intentionally because the self is dividing; the self is self-enclosing; its activities, however noble, are separated and isolated. We know all this. We also know that extraordinary are the moments when the self is not there, in which there is no sense of endeavor, of effort, and which happens when there is love.

Call it love or meditation — only this can set us free. This realisation itself is the freedom from being hostage to our ego and realises the true self. Osho says: The ego is just the opposite of your real self. The ego is not you. The ego is the deception created by the society so that you can continue playing with the toy and never ask about the real thing. That’s why my insistence that unless you drop the ego, you will never come to know yourself.

Most of the scientists down the centuries have been in a doubt about the existence of God. Recently, the last book in the name of renowned physicist Stephen Hawking got published — “Brief Answers To The Big Questions”. This modern scientist proclaims that “there is no God. No one directs the universe.” And he adds that “For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God. I prefer to think that everything can be explained another way, by the laws of nature.”

These statements as answers to eternal questions by Mr. Hawking are merely logical and intellectual conclusions; not any subjective experience or the realization of consciousness. But God and Godliness cannot be tested in science-laboratories as objects. Science can examine objects as they are material things, but it cannot treat living beings the same way. The same process cannot be applicable to the spirit. And the spirit does mean the spiritual phenomenon, something alive — something that pulsates in all human beings including Mr Hawkings and other beings, and the wholeness of nature. This experience and realization of spirit pervading all beings in the cosmos and the vastness of nature is Godliness. This Godliness is not something that will curse anyone — as it is a blessing, and its realization is blissfulness. God does not inflict such curses as deformities or disabilities — God does not interfere at all. Such things do happen naturally — as one finds both healthy fruits and rotten fruits on the same tree. We all are born out of the same existence and nature — Ram and Ravana, Krishna and Kansa, Buddha and Angulimaal, and Jesus and Judas. It is an phenomenon of energy and its manifestation in various forms. Nothing good or bad — simply inclusive of all dimensions and aspects of one life. Existence at its inner core is advaita — non-duality.

In his discourses on the upanishads, Osho says: God is existence — it is not that God exists; God is simply synonymous with existence. Really, to say that God is, is to repeat. God means is. It is bad language to say God is, because the very “isness” is God. God means — “isness”. To say God exists is wrong. God is existence.

“God is not a person. That is one of the greatest misunderstandings, and it has prevailed so long that it has become almost a fact. Even if a lie is repeated continuously for centuries it is bound to appear as if it is a truth.”

Let us make God free from all concepts of personality. Osho concludes: God simply means Godliness. It is because of this fact that Buddha denied the existence of God. He wanted to emphasize that God is a quality, an experience — like love. You cannot talk to love, you can live it. You need not create temples of love, you need not make statues of love, and bowing down to those statues will be just nonsense. And that’s what has been happening in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques.

There’s a famous song from an old movie that most of us have enjoyed listening to Tora man darpan kehlaaye (Your mind is a mirror and all things good and bad get mirrored through it). There’s also a misunderstanding here — the “man” does not mean mind exactly, it means the “heart” or it would be better to call it consciousness.

Our mind is a powerful receiver of all kinds of information which becomes memory. We are always overloaded with it and when we see or receive anything new, this overloaded mind becomes choosy. It does not accept anything without comparing with the old memories that it has in its storehouse. It screens it, sorts out whatever is adjustable with our existing knowledge, allows it; and whatever is going to disturb our mind — anything new, unfamiliar or a stranger — it tends to reject.

During the past few decades, science discovered a surprising fact. Our mind used to be thought of in the past as a receiver of information from the world: our eyes, our ears, our nose, all our senses were doors from where the existence — that surrounds us — can enter into us. This has been an ancient understanding prevailing for thousands of years. But just within these last few decades, science became aware of a totally different situation. Our senses are not simple windows; our mind does not allow more than two per cent of the information to enter us and the rest of the information gets discarded right away. This mind is always on guard of what to take in and what not to. In most cases what it allows in is in tune with our prejudices, superstitions and age-old concepts. Our mind does not want to take a risk with the too much of unknown penetrating it. It wants everything to fit with what it thinks is right and not disturbing to it.

This is a certain kind of imprisonment created by the mind. The known dominates us and the unknown is blocked. That’s why the enlightened mystics like J. Krishnamurti teach us: “From the known you cannot possibly see the unknown, but when once you have understood the state of a mind that is free — which is the mind that says ‘I don’t know’ and remains unknowing, and is therefore innocent, from that state you can function, you can be a citizen, you can be married, or what you will. Then what you do has relevance, significance in life. But we remain in the field of the known, with all its conflicts, striving, disputes, agonies and from that field we try to find that which is unknown. Therefore, we are not really seeking freedom. What we want is continuation, extension of the same old thing — the known.”

Osho takes us one step further. He says: “Religion is diving deep into that which is basically unknowable — not only unknown but unknowable.”