Awareness: The Key to Living in Balance (Osho Insights for a New Way of Living)

by Osho

Nietzsche somewhere says that war must continue because only in war is a self sometimes felt—a center is felt—because war is danger. And when death becomes a reality, life becomes intense. When death is just near, life becomes intense and you are centered. In any moment when you become aware of yourself there is a centering. But if it is situational, then when the situation is over, it will disappear.

The Western approach is to think about a problem, to find the causes of the problem, to go into the history of the problem, into the past of the problem, to uproot the problem from the very beginning. To uncondition the mind, or to recondition the mind, to recondition the body, to take out all those imprints that have been left on the brain—this is the Western approach. Psychoanalysis goes into the memory; it works there. It goes into your childhood, into your past; it moves backward. It finds out from where a problem has arisen—maybe fifty years before, when you were a child the problem arose in your relationship with your mother, then psychoanalysis will go back. Fifty years of history! It is a long, dragging affair. And even then it doesn’t help much because there are millions of problems; it is not only a question of one problem. You can go into one problem’s history; you can look into your autobiography and find out the causes. Maybe you can eliminate one problem, but there are millions of problems. If you start going into each problem to solve one life’s problems, you will need millions of lives! Let me repeat it: to solve one life’s problems you will have to be born again and again, millions of times. This is almost impractical. This cannot be done. And all those millions of lives when you will be solving the problems of this life, those lives will create their own problems … and so on and so forth. You will be dragged more and more into the problems. This is absurd!

Analysis will always remain half, so analysis never helps anybody really. It cannot help. It makes you a little more adjusted to your reality, that’s all. It is a sort of adjustment, it helps you to attain a little bit of understanding about your problems, their genesis, how they have arisen. And that little intellectual understanding helps you to adjust to the society better, but you remain the same person. There is no transformation through it, there is no radical change through it.

WHAT IS MIND? MIND IS NOT A THING, BUT AN EVENT. A thing has substance in it, an event is just a process. A thing is like a rock, an event is like a wave—it exists, but is not substantial. It is just the event between the wind and the ocean, a process, a phenomenon. This is the first thing to be understood, that mind is a process like a wave or like a river, but it has no substance in it. If it has substance, then it cannot be dissolved. If it has no substance, it can disappear without leaving a single trace behind.

How to get rid of memory? It is always there, following you. In fact, you are the memory, so how to get rid of it? Who are you except your memories? When I ask, “Who are you?” you tell me your name—that is your memory. Your parents gave you that name some time back. I ask you, “Who are you?” and you tell about your family, your father, your mother—that is a memory. I ask you, “Who are you?” and you tell me about your education, your degrees, that you have a master of arts, or you are a Ph.D., or you are an engineer or an architect. That is a memory. When I ask you, “Who are you?” if really you look inside, your only answer can be “I don’t know.” Whatsoever you will say will be the memory, not you. The only real, authentic answer can be “I don’t know,” because to know oneself is the last thing. I can answer who I am, but I will not answer. You cannot answer who you are, but you are ready with the answer. Those who know, they keep silent about this. Because if all the memory is discarded, and all the language is discarded, then who I am cannot be said. I can look into you, I can give you a gesture; I can be with you, with my total being— that is my answer. But the answer cannot be given in words because whatsoever is given in words will be part of memory, part of mind, not of consciousness.

Your mind is not yours—it belongs to us all. Our bodies are very separate; our minds are not so separate. Our bodies are clearly separate, our minds overlap—and our souls are one. Bodies are separate, minds overlapping, and souls are one. I don’t have a different soul and you don’t have a different soul. At the very center of existence we meet and are one.

If you just put a watch with a second hand in front of you and keep your eyes on the second hand, you will be surprised—you cannot continue to remember even for one minute completely Perhaps fifteen seconds, twenty seconds, at the most thirty seconds, and you will forget. You will get lost in some other idea—and then suddenly you will remember that you were trying to remember. Even to keep awareness continuous for one minute is difficult, so one has to be aware that it is not child’s play. When you are trying to be aware of the small things of life, you have to remember that many times you will forget. You will go far away into something else. The moment you remember, don’t feel guilty—that is one of the traps.

And if you can watch your breath, then you can start watching other things too. Walking you can watch that you are walking, eating you can watch that you are eating. And ultimately, finally, you can watch that you are sleeping. The day you can watch that you are sleeping, you are transported into another world. The body goes on sleeping, and inside a light goes on burning brightly. Your watchfulness remains undisturbed. Then twenty-four hours a day there is an undercurrent of watching. You go on doing things … for the outside world nothing has changed, but for you everything has changed.