The modern man, who has to adjust with city-life, with all its maddening speed, traffic and noise, has become unnatural.

Off late, the people in the Western world are increasingly adopting mindfulness and meditation as part of their daily routine to acquire peace of mind.

But most of the people who meditate regularly wonder why they start falling sleep during such a process of self-exploration. As soon as their body and mind relax, some sort of sleepiness begins to possess their being. This is quite natural.

The modern man, who has to adjust with city-life, with all its maddening speed, traffic and noise, has become unnatural. So the first thing that the meditation does, in the moments of relaxation, is to give him some good sleep that his body needs urgently. The environment we live in is not so conducive to meditation — not enough oxygen and prana-energy to keep us fully awake while we meditate. And to meditate in air-conditioned rooms, may be suitable to most people, is not equal to meditating in a forest or gardens.

So the first requirement for meditation is to let our body regain its naturalness with letting it fall into sleep. The body will keep asserting and asking for more sleep. Be kind to your body. For a few days, you cooperate with it and it will cooperate with you. In the beginning, the body may be fidgety also. Don’t worry, continue with meditation. ultimately, it would be a rewarding experience. Recently, ABC news anchor Dan Harris has written a book, named Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, in which he shared his own experience to highlight the benefits of meditation, which has become popular as Mindfulness.

Another neuroscientist Davidson suggests that one needs to part from his/her favourite gadgets and technology in order to achieve the benefits of meditation. Also, as one starts practising meditation, he would be easily able to manage things in spite of being busy. Today, meditation is being fully supported by the scientific researches highlighting the benefits of practising mindfulness to maintain a healthy body and mind.

Says Osho on this subject: “The world can come to a harmony if meditation is spread far and wide, and people are brought to one consciousness within themselves… My effort is to make meditation almost a science, so it is not something to do with religion, so anybody can practice it — whether he is a Hindu or a Christian or a Jew or a Mohammedan, it doesn’t matter. What his religion is, is irrelevant: he can still meditate. He may not even believe in any religion. He may be an atheist; still he can meditate. Meditation has to become almost like a wildfire. Then there is some hope….. It should be ecstatic. It should be enjoyable. It should bring a dance to people’s hearts.”

Spiritual discourses are often very serious and profound, and majority of people do not find it easy to grasp the essence.

First of April is universally celebrated as the day of pranks and jokes to lighten up the atmosphere of seriousness of friendship and relationships. We are living in an era of “fake news” and instant social media circulation, which is not fun but irritation to many people. April Fool day is pure fun which is harmless and should be observed that way.

Osho lovers around the world have chosen this day to be dedicated to Mulla Nasruddin, a Sufi and also one of the oldest figures of Sufi anecdotes. Osho made him alive again by telling thousands of jokes in his name.

Spiritual discourses are often very serious and profound, and majority of people do not find it easy to grasp the essence. The enlightened ones and mystic masters create anecdotes, some times very funny and hilarious, weave them in their discourses, to make the profound  things easy to understand. For Mulla Nasruddin, the world is a cosmic joke — and he himself is part of that. Hindus call this world God’s Leela, a divine play.

Down the centuries the religion has been very serious affair for most of the believers. It has been too ritualistic and too grim. Being pious or holy became synonymous with seriousness. Hence, the so-called religion deprived people of their natural innocent laughter. By performing so many rituals people became egoistic, the priests and the religious followers started feeling holier than others. Others who were not doing the routine rituals became condemned as unholy or un-spiritual. So not to be condemned by the so-called holy people the ordinary people started performing their religious affairs just not to feel guilty. This conduct made them hypocrites and serious. The whole affair of religion became heavy and serious and most of the people have been living with that burden on their heart. They forgot to laugh and celebrate.

Osho changed it all. He says: Religion cannot be anything other than a celebration of life. And the serious person becomes handicapped: he creates barriers. He cannot dance, he cannot sing, he cannot celebrate. The very dimension of celebration disappears from his life. He becomes desert-like. And if you are a desert, you can go on thinking and pretending that you are religious but you are not. You may be a sectarian, but not religious. You can be a Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Jain, a Mohammedan, but you cannot be religious. You believe in something, but you don’t know anything. You believe in theories. A man too much burdened by theories becomes serious. A man who is unburdened, has no burden of theories over his being, starts laughing.

According to Osho: Laughter is far more sacred than prayer, because prayer can be done by any stupid person; it does not require much intelligence. And Sufis are very playful; they created Mulla Nasruddin. And Mulla Nasruddin is an alive figure, you can go on adding to him — I go on adding.

Osho disciple Vinod Khanna was a multi-dimensional personality–better to say that he was a man of individuality. Personality means persona–which is not the real self, but what you show to the world. It can be totally false also. Politicians have a personality which is not a real face that they show to world–it is a mask. They make this mask very colourful and appealing and finally become fully identified with the mask.

Vinod Khanna was a wonderful and colourful personality–with one great difference, that he was a great meditator who did not get identified with any colour of personality. At the feet of his beloved master Osho, he learned the art of becoming a pure witness–Sakshin, in the words of Lord Krishna. A witnessing consciousness is transcendental to all worldly identifications. In the earlier days of his filmy life, he had asked Osho how to be a successful movie-star, and Osho gave him a wonderful life-sutra: Act as if it is your life and live your life as if it is just an acting in a movie–and you would succeed in both the dimensions. And Vinod did succeed in both. And at the same time, he remained unidentified with all this success. He remained untouched–like a lotus in the mud. He was in politics–and he was not politician. He was simply a friendly human being without the ego that poisons relationships. He was always approachable who would share whatever he could, with anybody who came to see him. Ultimately he was sharing his enlightened master Osho’s vision with all.

Vinod started living in Rajneesh Ashram in seventies as a very simple human being and meditating in the presence of his master, when he had attained to the peak of his career, and later in eighties, he followed Osho to Rajneeshpuram where he worked as his gardener.

Five years later he returned  and  decides to end the sabbatical, Vinod not just bounced back with romantic outings like  Chandni and Jurm. He emerged as one of the most successful actor politicians during his multiple Lok Sabha re-elections. By that time he got married again and started his family life. From the second marriage, he was blessed with a son and daughter.

Based on the vision of his master, he gave a name Sakshi to his son from the second wife, and later his daughter got the name Shraddha. He distributed the cassette of Osho Hindi discourse–on the topic of Witnessing (Sakshi) and  Trust ( Shraddha) to his friends in Bollywood. Vinod was always a trustworthy friend.

Recently Vinod Khanna has received the Dadasaheb Phalke award for outstanding contribution to Indian cinema. This award catapults him into the league of personalities like Dilip Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, Raj Kapoor and Satyajit Ray. Lata Jha writes about him in Mint newspaper:  For a star who possibly never looked to awards functions to validate his popularity, the Dadasaheb Phalke recognition may have come as a surprise to Vinod Khanna, were he alive. The legendary actor, who died at the age of 70 this time last year, was conferred the highest film honour by the Directorate of Film Festivals for his outstanding contribution to Indian cinema, catapulting him into the league of personalities like Dilip Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, Raj Kapoor and Satyajit Ray, recipients in the past.

During all such happening, Vinod shines as a sannyasin star all along who has a very different understanding of life and career. Osho concludes: Understanding is not of the mind: understanding is of the heart. You will have to fall in love. That’s what sannyas is all about. Falling in love with a Master, for NO reason at all – just for the sheer joy of falling in love with someone who has disappeared, who is no more, who has become a great nothing. Who has become a silence.

Ego represents our mind, and this mind does not want to lose control on our being.

It happens often to so many people in the moments of deep meditation that a meditator comes face to face with some kind of psychological death. His or her mind starts dissolving like a tiny drop disappears into an vast ocean and loses its own existence forever. The same happens in the moments of deepest prayer also. It is the dissolution of ego.

Osho explains this phenomenon with a wonderful poem of Rabindranath Tagore: The poet has been searching for god for millions of lives. He has seen him sometimes, far away, near a star, and he started moving that way, but by the time he reached that star, God has moved to some other place. But he went on searching and searching — he was determined to find God’s home — and the surprise of surprises was, one day he actually reached a house where on the door was written: “God’s Home”.

You can understand his ecstasy, you can understand his joy. He runs up the steps, and just as he is going to knock on the door, suddenly his hand freezes. An idea arises in him: “If by chance this is really the home of god, then I am finished, my seeking is finished. I have become identified with my search. I don’t know anything else. If the door opens and I face god, I am finished — the search is over. Then what? Then there is an eternity of boredom — no excitement, no discovery, no new challenge, because there cannot be any challenge greater than god.”

He starts trembling with fear, takes his shoes off his feet, and descends back down the beautiful marble steps. He took the shoes off so that no noise was made, for his fear was that even a noise on the steps… God may open the door, although he has not knocked. And then he runs as fast as he has never run before. He used to think that he had been running after god as fast as he can, but today, suddenly, he finds energy which was never available to him before. He runs as he has never run before, not looking back.

The poem ends, “I am still searching for god. I know his home, so I avoid it and search everywhere else. The excitement is great, the challenge is great, and in my search I continue, I continue to exist. God is a danger — I will be annihilated. But now I am not afraid even of God, because I know His home. So, leaving His home aside, I go on searching for Him all around the universe.

And deep down I know my search is not for God; my search is to nourish my ego.”

Ego represents our mind, and this mind does not want to lose control on our being. So it creates all kinds of seemingly rational excuses against going deep into the mysteries of life that exist beyond its boundaries. And the experience of godliness does not happen within the confines of mind-it is totally beyond the realm of mind.