Osho - Meditation acts in the present, out of the present
Osho - Mind concentrates: it acts out of the past. Meditation acts in the present, out of the present. It is a pure response to the present, it is not reaction. It acts not out of conclusions, it acts seeing the existential.
Watch in your life: there is a great difference when you act out of conclusions. You see a man, you feel attracted -- a beautiful man, looks very good, looks innocent. His eyes are beautiful, the vibe is beautiful. But then the man introduces himself and he says, "I am a Jew" -- and you are a Christian. Something immediately clicks and there is distance: now the man is no more innocent, the man is no more beautiful. You have certain ideas about Jews. Or, he is a Christian and you are a Jew; you have certain ideas about Christians -- what Christianity has done to Jews in the past, what other Christians have done to Jews, how they have tortured Jews down the ages... and suddenly he is a Christian -- and something immediately changes.
This is acting out of conclusions, prejudices, not looking at this man -- because this man may not be the man that you think a Jew has to be... because each Jew is a different kind of man, each Hindu is a different kind of man, so is each Mohammedan. You cannot act out of prejudices. You cannot act by categorizing people. You cannot pigeonhole people; nobody can be pigeonholed. You may have been deceived by a hundred communists, and when you meet the hundred and first communist don't go on believing in the category that you have made in your mind: that communists are deceptive -- or anything. This may be a different type of man, because no two persons are alike.
Whenever you act out of conclusions, it is mind. When you look into the present and you don't allow any idea to obstruct the reality, to obstruct the fact, you just look into the fact and act out of that look, that is meditation.
Meditation is not something you do in the morning and you are
finished with it, meditation is something that you have to go on living
every moment of your life. Walking, sleeping, sitting, talking,
listening -- it has to become a kind of climate. A relaxed person
remains in it. A person who goes on dropping the past remains
meditative. Never act out of conclusions; those conclusions are your
conditionings, your prejudices, your desires, your fears, and all the
rest of it. In short, you are there!
You means your past. You means all your experiences of the past. Don't
allow the dead to overrule the living, don't allow the past to influence
the present, don't allow death to overpower your life -- that's what
meditation is. In short, in meditation you are not there. The dead is
not controlling the living.
Meditation is a kind of experience which gives you a totally different quality to live your life. Then you don't live like a Hindu, or a Mohammedan, Indian or German; you simply live as consciousness. When you live in the moment and there is nothing interfering, attention is total because there is no distraction -- distractions come from the past and the future. When attention is total the act is total. It leaves no residue. It goes on freeing you, it never creates cages for you, it never imprisons you. And that is the ultimate goal of Buddha; that's what he calls nirvana.
'Nirvana' means freedom -- utterly, absolute, unobstructed. You become an open sky. There is no border to it, it is infinite. It is simply there... and then there is nothingness all around you, within and without. Nothingness is the function of a meditative state of consciousness. And in that nothingness is benediction. That nothingness itself is the benediction.
Source - Osho Book "The Heart Sutra"
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