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

by Osho

The man of awareness is not only a good man, he is much more. For the good man, goodness is all; for the man of awareness, goodness is just a by-product. The moment you are conscious of your own being, goodness follows you like a shadow. Then there is no need of any effort to be good; goodness becomes your nature. Just as the trees are green, you are good.

The good man is always serious, because he is afraid of all the bad qualities he has repressed. And he is serious because deep down he desires to be honored for his goodness, to be rewarded. His longing is to be respectable. Your so-called saints are mostly just “good men.”

There is only one way to transcend the “good man,” and that is by bringing more awareness to your being. Awareness is not something to be cultivated; it is already there, it has just to be awakened. When you are totally awakened, whatever you do is good, and whatever you do not do is bad.

The good man has to make immense efforts to do good and to avoid the bad; the bad is a constant temptation for him. It is a choice: every moment he has to choose the good, and not to choose the bad. For example, a man like Mahatma Gandhi—he is a good man; he tried hard his whole life to be on the side of good. But even at the age of seventy he was having sexual dreams, and he was very much in anguish: “As far as my waking hours are concerned, I can...

It shows one thing, that it has not gone anywhere; it has been inside you, just waiting. The moment you relax, the moment you remove the effort—and asleep you have at least to relax and remove the effort to be good—all the bad qualities that you have been repressing w...

Awareness grows slowly, but it grows. One just has to be patient.

As it grows, you will start feeling many things that you have never felt before. For example, you will start feeling that you are carrying many tensions in your body of which you have never been aware because they are subtle tensions. Now your awareness is there, you can feel those subtle, delicate tensions. So wherever you feel any tension in the body, relax that part. If your whole body is relaxed, your awareness will grow faster because those tensions are hindrances.

You can try an experiment: somebody is sleeping and you can sit by their side, just watching yourself, and the person will suddenly wake up, open his eyes, and look all around as if somebody has touched him.

The phenomena of dreaming and watchfulness are totally different things. Just try one thing: every night, going to sleep, while you are just half-awake, half-asleep, slowly going deeper into sleep, repeat to yourself, “I will be able to remember that it is a dream.”

Go on repeating it till you fall asleep. It will take a few days, but one day you will be surprised: once this idea sinks deep into the unconscious, you can watch the dream as a dream. Then

So go on doing the same exercise, and you can get rid of dreams. And you will be surprised: getting rid of dreams has many implications. If the dreams disappear, then in the daytime your mind’s chattering will not be so much as it used to be. Secondly, you will be more in the moment—not in the future, not in the past. Thirdly, your intensity, your totality of action, will increase.

Dreaming is a disease. It is needed because man is sick. But if dreams can be completely dropped, you will attain a new kind of health, a new vision. And part of your unconscious mind will become conscious, so you will have a stronger individuality. Whatever you do, you will never repent, because you will have done it with such consciousness that repentance has no relevance.

Watchfulness is the greatest magic that one can learn, because it can begin the transform...

It is simple once you know the knack of it. Otherwise, it looks difficult, almost impossible—how to be awake while dreaming? It looks impossible but it is not. Three to nine months it will take, if every night when you go to sleep, while falling into sleep, you are trying to be alert and watching it.

you are in the world—in the mind, in dreams, in desires, in anxieties, in a thousand and one games. And you are both.

But by and by, you will become capable of moving from the periphery to the center and from the center to the periphery very smoothly—just as you walk into your house and out of your house. You don’t create any dichotomy You don’t say, “I am outside the house so how can I go inside the house?” You don’t say, “I am inside the house so how can I come outside the house?” It is sunny outside, it is warm, pleasant— you sit outside in the garden. Then it is becoming hotter and hotter, and you start perspiring. Now it is no longer pleasant, it is becoming uncomfortable—you simply get up and move inside the house. There it is cool; there it is not uncomfortable. Now, it is inside the house that is pleasant. You go on moving in and out.