Meditation happens to simple people very easily. It may take a long time to happen to those people who are too restless and too ambitious. Meditation requires us to sit for some time and settle into our being, experiencing pure consciousness beyond the constant chatter of our mind which is very monkeyish.

Osho tells a profound Zen story that a monkey came to Buddha. The monkey represents our mind. Charles Darwin came to know it very very late, but we have always been aware that man must have come from monkeys because he is still monkeyish. You just watch the mind, it’s constant chattering, and then watch a monkey in the tree. You will feel a similarity. The monkey said to Buddha, “I would like to become a Buddha.” Buddha said, “I have never heard of anybody having ever become a Buddha while remaining a monkey.

The monkey said, “You don’t know my powers. I am no ordinary monkey. “No monkey thinks that he is ordinary, all monkeys think that they are extraordinary; that is part of their monkey-ness. He said, “I am no ordinary monkey. What are you talking about? I am a king of monkeys.”

So Buddha asked, “What exceptional or extraordinary powers do you have? Can you show me?”

The monkey said, “I can jump to the very end of the world.” He had been jumping all along in the trees. He knew how to jump.So Buddha said, “Okay. Come onto the palm of my hand and jump to the other end of the world.”

The monkey tried and tried, and he was really a very powerful monkey, a very intense monkey. He went like an arrow, and he went and he went… he went. Months and —the story says — years passed. And then the monkey came to the very end of the world.

He laughed; he said, “Look! The very end!” He looked down. It was an abyss: five pillars were standing there to mark the boundary. Now he had to come back. But how would he prove that he had been to these five pillars? So he pissed near a pillar — a monkey! — to mark it! Years passed and he came back. When he reached Buddha he said, “I have been to the very end of the world, and I have left a mark.” But Buddha said, “Just look around.” He had not moved at all. Those five pillars were the five fingers of Buddha. And they were stinking. He had been there with closed eyes… must have been dreaming.

Osho says: The mind is a monkey with closed eyes, dreaming. You have never gone anywhere, you have always been here and now — because nothing else exists. Just open the eyes. Just open the eyes and have a look around, and suddenly you will laugh. You have always been rooted in the ultimate being, there is no need to merge. The only need is to become alert to where you are, who you are.

A man who lives a natural and a meditative life may not need any of the therapies available in the modern world.

A man who lives a natural and a meditative life may not need any of the therapies available in the modern world. Nature is therapeutic and so is meditation. Medicine and meditation have something in common, that is “Medi” and it is healing element. There are trees in India, especially the Peepal tree and Banyan tree, that provide the meditators abundant prana energy day and night.

The Peepal is well-known for its therapeutic properties and is considered to be the largest oxygen provider as it releases oxygen even at night. And it is antibacterial. That’s the reason our ancient sages always chose these trees to meditate under them. And whenever in deep meditation, the seekers attained to enlightenment, such trees became more blessed and divine.

People started worshipping these trees like living temples. They became more significant than the stone idols of deities in the temples. Sometimes the temples are meant only for certain sects of believers and they are not open for all, and some temples were not open for the women, half of the population of this country. But there have been no restrictions about meditatting under the trees or worshipping them.

In the time of Gautama, the Buddha, one village woman called Sujata used to worship a Peepal tree. One day she came to give an offering of kheer ( the sweet rice-pudding) to the tree. Suddenly, to her amazement, she saw a person sitting there in deep relaxation.

The tree was mysteriously glowing with his glow. She felt blessed that her prayers have been heard, the tree deity has manifested himself. It was Gautama the Buddha who accepted her kheer.

In Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna declares “of all the trees, I am the Peepal tree”. Another popular belief is that Lord Krishna attained to nirvana under this tree.

Osho is an exception. He attained enlightenment under a Maulshri tree. So even if the meditator does not find any Peepal or Banyan tree, meditating under any tree or near many trees, or in a forest is also beneficial. All you need to do is to first create an empathy with the tree. Share your love and be caring and then you get much more in return. Just hug a tree. Hugging a tree is an ancient technique of meditation, cited in the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, one of the oldest spiritual manuals in existence.

Osho says: Hug a tree, and a day will come soon when you will feel that it was not only you who was hugging the tree — the tree was responding, you were also hugged by the tree, although the tree has no hands. But it has its own way of expressing its joy, its sadness, its anger, its fear.

Hug a tree and relax into it.

While conducting meditation retreats around the world, it has been my experience that the participants went deep into meditation in places where there were more trees or where we felt that we were in a forest. More than a decade ago, a meditation camp was organised for us in Kanha National Park in Madhya Pradesh, but the hotel where we stayed did not have a proper meditation hall. So the reception courtyard was temporarily turned into a space for the group of meditators. There were about 30 participants. This courtyard did not feel the right space, suitable to settle into oneself in meditation. Suddenly, on the first morning, when I looked outside the hotel area, I saw one huge Banyan Tree. There was a gentle intuitively feeling that there we could do our meditations–Osho Dynamic, Tantra Prana, Vipassana, Nataraj, Naadbrahma, Kundalini, Kirtan and Evening Satsang–and it was a right decision. After the first session of meditation, the participants got so much rejuvenated that they themselves did not want to leave the tree area. There was some kind of magical prana energy which kept us all there every day from 7am to 8pm. The 3 day camp seemed to be a very short time. The participants did not want the retreat under this benevolent tree to end.

In ancient India, the sages who went deep into meditation and attained enlightenment, most of the credit goes to the forests. Their ashrams were also situated in the forests.

And now we hear about a new concept of “healing forests” in Japan and Korea. The researchers are informing us:  Forests are known to have great healing properties. As humans, we have evolved in nature. It’s where we feel most comfortable. It has been scientifically proven that when we spend time in nature, our brain behaves differently. It affects how we feel and think, which has a direct impact on our immunity and healing powers.

The ted.com tells us that the establishment of dozens of healing forests has become now a part of South Korea’s surprising  prescription to improve the health of its citizens. It is attracting large number of health conscious people. It has been reported that Mr. Park Hyun-Soo, a cancer patient, didn’t look like a man on chemotherapy. Forty-one and with a full head of black hair, he can hike the socks off anyone, but he prefers to take his time. Not exactly a forest ranger, Park is is part of a new breed of Korean Forest Agency employee known as a forest healing instructor. He’d actually gone to graduate school for this, passing rigorous entrance qualifications. Although he began his career in a competitive corporate job, he received a diagnosis of chronic myeloid leukemia at age 34. He decided to seek peace and recovery in the woods, and it worked so well he decided to orient his entire life to the cypress trees.

Mr Park says: Between 2,000 and 3,000 visitors come through here every month, including three to four groups per day geared to some kind of healing, from cancer patients to kids with allergies to prenatal groups and everything in between. Depending on the program, participants may do activities like guided meditation, woodcrafts and tea ceremonies. But the heart of it all is walking in the Hinoki forest.

“Park is at the forefront of South Korea’s ambitious National Forest Plan. Its goal is “to realize a green welfare state, where the entire nation enjoys well-being.” The scope of all this is, true to Korean form, ambitious. In the same way Samsung is trying to outmaneuver Apple and K-Pop intends to dominate Asia, Korea is on a path to outdo the world in forest therapy trails and science.” (Courtesy ted.com)

The other Asian country, Japan also woke up to this phenomenon in 1980.  There they use certain term Shinrin-yoku that means “taking in the forest atmosphere” or “forest bathing.” It was developed in Japan during the 1980s and has become a cornerstone of preventive health care and healing in Japanese medicine. Researchers primarily in Japan and South Korea have established a robust body of scientific literature on the health benefits of spending time under the canopy of a living forest. Now their research is helping to establish Shinrin-yoku and forest therapy throughout the world.  The idea is simple: if a person simply visits a natural area and walks in a relaxed way there are calming, rejuvenating and restorative benefits to be achieved.

(Swami Chaitanya Keerti is the author of Mindfulness: the Master Key. He facilitates Osho Meditation Retreats around the world)

Each time I hear the word “follower”–as in follower of this guru or that guru; follower of this leader or that leader–I feel that this person, the follower,  has no dignity of his own. To me, the dignity means being essentially original, and not a copy or an imitation. And the strange thing is that most of the people we see in the world are followers and imitators, though they may be feeling proud to be followers, just because they believe in a certain great man, such as Buddha or Jesus, Gandhi or Ambedkar; or in an ideology, such as Hindutva or Islamic State. Now in USA, they are discussing a new ideology Trumpism as in India they discuss Moditva. They are discussing something that a certain mob believes in and not seeking something about being an integrated individual. And the strange thing is that even an idiotic ideology such as Nazi propagated in the past by Hitler had influenced most of common Germans and also the intellectuals.  Often the psychologists have often been wondering why Adolf Hitler was able to dominate a great intelligent race like Germans. It appears a paradox that a man like Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest thinkers of this age became a believer and supporter of Hitler.

This tendency of being influenced and following at the cost of one’s own wisdom seems to be deeply in most of the people. May be it comes from our past lives unconscious conditioning of being the sheep. This conditioning is persisting even after evolving as human beings.

And it is not just a conditioning continuing from past life, it has become our restlessness also. Everybody seems to be looking for some leader to show him the path or lead him to a certain direction.

Osho contemplates: People live accidentally. They don’t have any sense of direction, they don’t have an inner discipline for growing, they don’t have a certain target. They simply go on, not knowing why. Maybe just because they are restless they go on doing this and that. Restlessness needs some kind of occupation, any kind of occupation will do. But any kind of occupation is not going to help you to grow. Growth needs a very selective life.

It happened once that two drunkards were sitting in a car and the car was going as far as it could. One drunkard said to the other, ‘Now from the next cross-road you have to turn left and then you have to turn right.’ And the other said, ‘Why do you go on telling these things to me — you are driving!’

Such unconscious people become the followers. Nobody knows who is driving but everybody is being driven to this direction or that direction. When you run after money, power or prestige or fame, it is because all others doing the same. Why is everybody interested in fame? — because all other fools are interested. And you have to be in tune with the fools because you are surrounded by them. You are the follower–a blind follower. You are burning the buses and damaging other things because you are part of the certain crowd that believes in certain ideology or certain mad leader. You are not doing anything original–and you have grown to be an intelligent human being who has an original insight to live his life in his own unique way.

An intelligent person moves consciously moment to moment. Whatsoever he is doing he is doing for a certain reason. He has an intrinsic value system. He lives according to a certain inner discipline — not imposed by others but by his own awareness.

Ideologically speaking, India and the rest of the world has become so miserable. Osho points out that this misery is an indicator, so is bliss. They are real indicators: if people are miserable that simply shows they are upside-down; if they are blissful they flow into an organic unity. They are no more a crowd. They have created a certain integration. They now have a centre, they are rooted, grounded… And then bliss starts happening, naturally, simply. It does not come from anywhere else, it simply arises out of your own inner being in an accord.