Massage is the Message

You might study something like massage because you like working with hands, and you know it’s a job where one can be open and receptive.

It’s very good. To do something with the hands is always good.

Rather than to be a head, it is always good to be hands.

It will make you more alive and more in contact with life. It will make you more grounded. Massage is perfectly good. It is better than to be a diplomat! It is very very good to forget all about that nonsense.

Get more into your body. Make your senses more alive. See more lovingly, taste more lovingly, touch more lovingly, smell more lovingly. Let your senses function more and more. Then suddenly you will see the energy that was moving too much in the head is now well-divided in the body.

The head is very dictatorial. It goes on taking energy from everywhere and is a monopolist. It has killed the senses.

The head is taking almost eighty percent of the energy, and only twenty percent is left for the whole body. Of course the whole body suffers, and when the whole body suffers, you suffer, because you can only be happy when you are functioning as a whole, as an organic unity, and every part of your body and being is getting its proportion; not more than that, not less than that. Then you function in a rhythm. You have a harmony.

Harmony, happiness, health — they are all part of one phenomenon, and that is wholeness. If you are whole, you are happy, healthy, harmonious.

The head is creating a disturbance. People have lost many things. People cannot smell. They have lost the capacity to smell. They have lost the capacity to taste. They can only hear a few things. They have lost their ears. People don’t know what touch really is. Their skin has become dead. It has lost the softness and receptivity. So the head thrives like an Adolf Hitler, crushing the whole body. The head becomes bigger and bigger. It is very ridiculous.

Man is almost like a caricature — a very big head and just very small limbs, hanging.

So bring back your senses. Do anything with the hands, with the earth, with the trees, with the rocks, with bodies, with people.

Do anything that needs not much thinking, not much intellectualization.

And enjoy. Then your head will by and by be unburdened. It will be good for the head too, because when the head is burdened too much, it thinks — but it cannot think. How can a worrying mind think? For thinking you need clarity. For thinking you need a non-tense mind.

It will look like a paradox, but for thinking you need a thoughtless mind.

Then you can think very easily, very directly, intensely. Just put any problem before yourself and your non-thinking mind starts solving it. Then you have intuition. It is not worry — just insight.

When the mind is burdened too much with thoughts, you think too much but to no purpose. It comes to nothing; there is nothing in the head. You go round about, round about; you make much noise, but the end result is zero. So it is not against the head to disperse the energy into all the senses. It is in favor of it, because when the head is balanced, in its right place, it functions better; otherwise it is jammed. It is such great traffic. It is almost a rush hour; for twenty-four hours a rush hour.

So start doing something…whatsoever you feel. Massage is very good. The body is beautiful…anything to do with the body is beautiful.

The Passion For the Impossible

What is meditation?

Meditation is not concentration. In concentration there is a self concentrating and there is an object being concentrated upon. There is duality. In meditation there is nobody inside and nothing outside. It is not concentration. There is no division between the in and the out. The in goes on flowing into the out, the out goes on flowing into the in. The demarcation, the boundary, the border, no longer exists. The in is out, the out is in; it is a nondual consciousness.

Concentration is a dual consciousness: that’s why concentration creates tiredness; that’s why when you concentrate you feel exhausted. And you cannot concentrate for twenty-four hours, you will have to take holidays to rest. Concentration can never become your nature. Meditation does not tire, meditation does not exhaust you. Meditation can become a twenty-four hour thing — day in, day out, year in, year out. It can become eternity. It is relaxation itself.

Concentration is an act, a willed act. Meditation is a state of no will, a state of inaction. It is relaxation. One has simply dropped into one’s own being, and that being is the same as the being of all. In concentration there is a plan, a projection, an idea. In concentration the mind functions out of a conclusion: you are doing something. Concentration comes out of the past.

In meditation there is no conclusion behind it. You are not doing anything in particular, you are simply being. It has no past to it, it is uncontaminated by the past. It has no future to it, it is pure of all future. It is what Lao Tzu has called wei-wu-wei, action through inaction. This is what Zen masters have been saying: Sitting silently doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. Remember, ‘by itself’ — nothing is being done. You are not pulling the grass upwards; the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. That state — when you allow life to go on its own way, when you don’t want to direct it, when you don’t want to give any control to it, when you are not manipulating, when you are not enforcing any discipline on it — that state of pure undisciplined spontaneity, is what meditation is.

Meditation is in the present, pure present. Meditation is immediacy. You cannot meditate, but you can be in meditation; you cannot be in concentration, but you can concentrate. Concentration is human, meditation is divine.

Source: OSHO