Osho on Zen approach to Meditation – Meditation has to become something like your breathing

Osho – Perhaps there is no other religion that has made your whole life, twenty-four hours a day, a meditative experience. Zen does not believe in meditating one hour in the morning, or one hour in the night. It does not make meditation a separate, particular act. It wants meditation to become a quality of your being.

So whatever you are doing — walking, sitting, standing, lying down, chopping wood, carrying water from the well, it does not matter. Whatever you are doing, you are doing it so silently, so peacefully, without any stirring of thoughts in your mind. Then your whole life has become meditation. You go to bed silently, you wake up silently, and one day you will realize that you also sleep silently — as thoughts disappear, dreams also disappear. Then the circle is complete.

For Zen, meditation has to be a twenty-four-hour affair. It is not some extra act that you have to do. It is not a Sunday religion — for six days do everything you want to do, but at least on the seventh day, on Sunday, go to the church for one hour and you are a great Christian. It is absolutely illogical, and absurd. Just going to the church for one hour, and then living your mundane life with greed, with anger, with delusion, is not going to transform you. And no Jesus can save you.

My people in the commune made a small placard for cars. It said, “Jesus saves, Moses invests, Osho spends.” I like that. What is the point of saving? Jesus seems to be like a banker. And of course, Moses invests. For Moses, everything is business. And for me, certainly, everything is going to be taken away. Before it is taken away, use it, spend it, enjoy it. Why wait for death to snatch it away? Certainly it is absolutely right. A one-hour religion, or even a Mohammedan who prays five times a day, is not going to help.

Religion has to become something like your heartbeat. Meditation has to become something like your breathing. Whatever you are doing, you are breathing; it is not a separate action. And only then are you saturated, in every fiber of your being, with meditativeness.

Source – Osho Book “Bodhidharma: The Greatest Zen Master”

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