Now I understand why nothing was happening. The very effort was the barrier, the very ladder was preventing, the very urge to seek was the obstacle. Not that one can reach without seeking. Seeking is needed, but then comes a point when seeking has to be dropped. The boat is needed to cross the river but then comes a moment when you have to get out of the boat and forget all about it and leave it behind. Effort is needed, without effort nothing is possible. And also only with effort, nothing is possible.

Just before twenty-first March, 1953, seven days before, I stopped working on myself. A moment comes when you see the whole futility of effort. You have done all that you can do and nothing is happening. You have done all that is humanly possible. Then what else can you do? In sheer helplessness one drops all search.

And the day the search stopped, the day I was not seeking for something, the day I was not expecting something to happen, it started happening. A new energy arose – out of nowhere. It was not coming from any source. It was coming from nowhere and everywhere. It was in the trees and in the rocks and the sky and the sun and the air – it was everywhere. And I was seeking so hard, and I was thinking it is very far away. And it was so near and so close.

(Read more on this link: https://www.oshonews.com/2016/03/21/a-date-with-death-and-god-march-21-1953/)

In another discourse of the Last Testament, Osho explains this phenomenon in simple words: Enlightenment simply means an experience of your consciousness unclouded by thoughts, emotions, sentiments. When the consciousness is totally empty, there is something like an explosion, an atomic explosion. Your whole insight becomes full of a light which has no source and no cause. And once it has happened, it remains. It never leaves you for a single moment..

Osho’s Enlightenment is a great reminder to all of us…and millions of Osho lovers around the world will be celebrating this day, the real spring of consciousness, as a reminder to themselves and others. All are welcome to join in this celebration.

There has been a rare enlightened master, one can say “the rarest”, who went from India to Tibet and illumined the whole of the Himalayas with his inner light. It is said about him that he meditated deeply under the guidance of three enlightened masters — Dharmakirti, Dharmarakshita, and Yogin Maitreya — that when he became known to people, he was lovingly called: Atisha, the Thrice Great. The first master Dharmakirti taught him the first principle of meditation. And for the second he was sent to Dharmarakshita, and for the third to Yogin Maitreya.

In his world-famous book, The Book of Wisdom, Osho talks about him: Atisha was born in India, but the moment his love became active he started moving towards Tibet, as if a great magnet were pulling him there. In the Himalayas he attained; then he never came back to India. He moved towards Tibet, his love showered on Tibet. He transformed the whole quality of Tibetan consciousness. He was a miracle-worker; whatsoever he touched was transformed into gold. He was one of the greatest alchemists the world has ever known.

Atisha learnt from three great masters and he offered three general points of mindfulness. The first is: regularity of meditativeness. Remember, it is very difficult to create meditation, it is very easy to lose it. Anything higher takes much arduous effort to create, but it can disappear within a moment. To lose contact with it is very easy.

Osho elaborates: It is like growing a rose flower — just a little hard wind and the rose has withered and the petals have fallen, or some animal has entered the garden and the rose is eaten. And whenever there is a conflict between the higher and the lower, always remember, the lower wins easily. If you clash a rose flower with a rock, the rose flower is going to die, not the rock. Your whole past is full of rocks, and when you start growing a rose of awareness in you, there are a thousand and one possibilities of it being destroyed by your old rocks — habits, mechanical habits. You will have to be very watchful and careful.

The second general point is: don’t waste your time with the non-essential. Don’t fool around.

Osho suggests: Take a look at your life — how many non-essential things you are doing — and for what? And how long have you done them, and what have you gained? Are you going to repeat the same stupid pattern for the whole of your life?

And the third general point is: Don’t rationalise your errors and mistakes. The mind tends to rationalise. If you commit some mistake, the mind says “It had to be so, there were reasons for it. I am not responsible, the very situation made this happen.” And the mind is very clever at rationalising everything.

Be in the present moment with total awareness. Let your consciousness be unburdened by your mind that dwells in the past and the future — and observe reality as it is.

It is often said that you become what you think. Thinking is thought to be so powerful that it can transform anybody. Though this is a hypnotic belief, not everybody believes in it, the majority of people doubt it. But the motivational thinkers and writers keep motivating people: You truly become what you think about. Have positive, joyous thoughts and you will attract more joy and love in your life. Thoughts do become actions. So the more you think about what you want as opposed to what you don’t want, the more you will attract what you want.

So, it all depends on your thoughts — but the trouble is that you don’t have your own thoughts. You do have thoughts, thoughts in abundance — but they are not yours. You are filled with them — inundated with thoughts, you cannot contain them. It is such a mess — this mind of yours. Bringing one more thought of being successful in life, thoughts of being younger than what you are — a 70-year-old person thinking that he is 35 will not make him 35 years younger. An idiot (a buddhu person) thinking that he is the Buddha, the enlightened one, will not make him the Buddha, the awakened one. Such auto-suggestive thinking will lead him to a futile imagination, a hallucination.

But the successful authors of motivational books, the so-called bestsellers, keep alluring common people — “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” And then one thinks: So by changing your thoughts to the best case scenario, you start changing your world to become what you think about.

This kind of thinking, based on the idea of success, ambition, and greed may change you — but this change is worthless. You may even become cruel and violent more than what you were before you thought about all this. This is what the whole world is today. Everybody is thinking furiously to achieve something and ruining the wonderful gift of life in hollow pursuits. All these thoughts are desires — a jungle of desires.

No, forget all sorts of thinking — rather, drop all thinking, have a holiday from it. Go into feeling. Enter your heart and transform your energy. Do something with your energy and consciousness. In one word, we can say: meditate. Meditation is not thinking or desiring. It is much closer to feeling.

Osho reminds us: Remember, this shift has to happen — from thinking you have to go to feeling. Feeling is closer, closer to something in you that is called intuition. Thinking is the farthest point from intuition. Thinking is a kind of tuition. You have been taught by others — that is tuition. Something that has not been taught to you and blooms in you, that is intuition. Nobody has taught you — no school, no university, no college. Nobody has said anything about it to you. It explodes in you — that is intuition. You need not go anywhere, you only need to go inside yourself. Feeling is closer to intuition.

Zen is the purest form of meditation — better to use the original Sanskrit word, dhyana. When Gautama Buddha started teaching meditation, he used the Pali language word, jhana. Many centuries later, Bodhidharma, an enlightened mystic travelled to China, and jhana became chan. Later, when chan reached Japan, it became Zen. Often the people of different countries pronounce the same word differently in their local language. Since the last century, Zen has become very famous all over the world, but it is the same Sanskrit word, dhyana, though Zen is the distilled form of it. Dhyana in India got corrupted, but in Japan it went through a total transformation. The whole credit goes to the long tradition of Zen Masters. In hundreds of his discourses, Osho spoke on such wonderful Zen Masters and their unique contributions. In one of his books, Notes of a Mad Man, Osho talks about this journey of transformation — and also in his book titled: The Search.

Osho says: There is an ancient story, the famous Zen story, The Ten Bulls of Zen. It is a pictorial story with ten picture cards, each card containing a phase of man and his evolution. The original pack consisted of only nine cards; and the tenth was added by a madman like me. Everybody opposed him and everybody denounced him. He had to leave his country. He added the tenth picture, and the tenth picture is the most beautiful, the very culmination — the culmination of culmination itself.

In the first picture, the bull is lost and the owner is searching for it. In the second, he is looking everywhere and he cannot find it. In the third, far, far away he can infer: “Perhaps that is my bull.” In the fourth, he has actually seen the bull — not the whole bull but just its tail. In the fifth, he has seen the whole bull. In the sixth, he has caught hold of the bull by its tail. In the seventh the man has learned a lesson; he is holding the bull by the horns. In the eighth, he is riding on the bull. In the ninth, they have arrived home. The ninth has no picture, neither the bull nor its owner. That was the old pack. A madman like me added the tenth to those nine cards. In the tenth the man is seen in the marketplace — not only seen but with a bottle of wine. Now, no Buddhist can forgive it! Nobody thinking himself religious can forgive it!

Osho adds: That madman was thrown out of his country, but miraculously the tenth card has remained. Whatsoever is done by men like me… you may throw them out, you may kill them, you may crucify them, but what they do remains. You cannot destroy it. The man — nobody even knows his name, they even erased his name from the books; nobody knows who he was, but he has done a tremendous service to humanity.

This unique journey is the process of one’s own transformation through meditation — and then celebration — coming back to the world.