Technique:Zen Meditation

Be silent...

Close your eyes... and feel your bodies to be completely frozen.

This is the right moment to enter in.

With a deep urgency, gather all your energies and consciousness, and rush towards your inner center of being which is just two inches below the navel, inside you.

Faster and faster...

Deeper and deeper...

As you are coming closer to the center, a great silence descends over you, a peace that passeth understanding.

And inside, at the center, you encounter your very self, your very buddha, for the first time. It is only a presence, a light, a flame. This flame is rooted in the eternal fire of existence.

You have been here always, and you will be here always. Only forms change, but the existential truth remains without any change. It is your ultimate being. In this ultimateness you are no more there, but the whole is. The dewdrop has disappeared in the ocean, or the ocean has disappeared in the dewdrop. This is one of the greatest moments to become a witness.

Witness that you are not the body...

Witness that you are not the mind...

Witness that you are only a pure witnessing consciousness....

The deeper this consciousness goes, the closer you are coming to your ultimate nature, the buddha.

Relax into witnessing.

(Drumbeat)

Just a silent witnessing, and all boundaries disappear. And suddenly, Gautama the Buddha Auditorium becomes an ocean of consciousness. Ten thousand buddhas are no longer there, only a single pure fire of awareness. This is your very nature.

Zen is not a religion, it is a manifesto of your very nature.

It is a freedom from all social structures.

It is a freedom even from yourself.

It is pure freedom.

In this freedom, all that is creative arises.

All that is beautiful blossoms... all that is significant.

A grace that you have never been aware of surrounds you.

An aura of light follows you.

Collect all these experiences before Nivedano calls you back.

You are not to become anyone, you have just to dissolve into the totality of existence. In this annihilation, you reach to the highest peak of consciousness. In that peak there is light and there is joy, and there is song and there is dance – but there is no ”I” at all.

Persuade the buddha, the flame, to come behind you. It has been hiding inside your being since eternity. You have never explored the inner space, otherwise there is no need of any religion, and no need of any temple.

This very body becomes the temple.

And this very consciousness becomes the buddha.

These are the three small steps....

First, request the buddha, the internal and the eternal flame to follow you, to become part of your ordinary day-to-day life.

In the second step, you start becoming a shadow to the buddha. He takes you over; you start disappearing.

In the third step, even your shadow is no longer there, only a pure presence of the buddha.

This is not an achievement, you are already it – you have forgotten the language.

The Zen Manifesto is simply to remind you.

The last words of Gautam Buddha were: sammasati – ”remember.”

In a single word, everything significant is contained: sammasati.

(Drumbeat)

Come back, but come back as buddhas – peaceful, silent, relaxed.

Just for a few seconds sit down with closed eyes to remember, to make a note of where you have been, to what depth you have been able to reach; what is the taste of silence, peace, what is the taste of disappearing into the ultimate...

The last words of Gautam Buddha contain the Zen Manifesto: sammasati. Remember what is your inner space. Just remember.

There is nothing to achieve, and there is nothing to become. You are already that which you have been seeking in all your lives in different ways, on different paths. But you have never looked inwards.

Look in. And whenever you have time, you know the path. Just go again and again to the inner space so that your fear of disappearing is dropped, you start enjoying being nobody, and you start remembering the forgotten language.

Sammasati...
-Osho, Zen Manifesto