A Buddha is not a man of concentration, he is a man of awareness. He has not been trying to narrow down his consciousness; on the contrary, he has been trying to drop all barriers so that he becomes totally available to existence.
Watch…existence is simultaneous. I am speaking here and the traffic noise is simultaneous. The train, the birds the wind blowing through the trees — in this moment the whole of existence converges. You listening to me, I speaking to you, and millions of things going on — it is tremendously rich.
Concentration makes you one-pointed at a very great cost: ninety-nine per cent of life is discarded. If you are solving a mathematical problem, you cannot listen to the birds — they will be a distraction. Children playing around, dogs barking in the street — they will be a distraction. Because of concentration, people have tried to escape from life — to go to the Himalayas, to go to a cave, to remain isolated, so that you can concentrate on God.
But God is not an object. God is this wholeness of existence, this moment; God is the totality. That's why science will never be able to know God. The very method of science is concentration and because of that method, science can never know God.
It can know more and more minute details. First the molecule was thought to be the last particle, then it was divided.
Then an even tinier part, the atom, was known, then concentration divided that also. Now there are electrons, protons, neutrons — sooner or later they are also going to be divided. Science goes on from the smaller to the smaller, and the bigger, the vast, is completely forgotten.
The whole is completely forgotten for the part. Science can never know God because of concentration. So when people come to me and they say, 'Osho, teach us concentration, we want to know God,: I'm simply puzzled. They have not understood the basics of the search.
Science is one-pointed; the search is objective. Religion is simultaneity; the object is the whole, the total. To know the total, that is, to know God, you will have to have a consciousness which is open from everywhere — not confined, not standing in a window. Otherwise the frame of the window will become the frame of existence.
Just standing under the sun in the open sky — that is what meditation is. Meditation has no frame: it is not a window, it is not a door. Meditation is not concentration, it is not attention — meditation is awareness.
So what to do? Repeating a mantra, doing transcendental meditation, is not going to help. Transcendental meditation has become very important in America because of the objective approach, because of the scientific mind. Now it is the only meditation on which scientific work can be done. It is exactly concentration and not meditation, so it is comprehensible for the scientific mind.
In the universities, in the science laboratories, in psychological research work, much is being done about TM, because it is not meditation. It is concentration, a method of concentration; it falls under the same category as scientific concentration; there is a link between the two. But it has nothing to do with meditation. Meditation is so vast, so tremendously infinite, that no scientific research is possible.
Only compassion will show whether the man has achieved or not. Alpha waves won't be of much help because they are still of the mind and meditation is not of the mind — it is something beyond.
So, let me tell you a few basic things. One, meditation is not concentration but relaxation — one simply relaxes into oneself. The more you relax, the more you feel yourself open, vulnerable, the more you are less rigid, you are more flexible — and suddenly existence starts penetrating you. You are no longer like a rock, you have openings. Relaxation means allowing yourself to fall into a state where you are not doing anything, because if you are doing something, tension will continue. It is a state of non-doing.
You simply relax and you enjoy the feeling of relaxation. Relax into yourself, just close your eyes, and listen to all that is happening all around. No need to feel anything as distraction. The moment you feel it is a distraction, you are denying God. This moment God has come to you as a bird. Don't deny. He has knocked at your door as a bird.
The next moment he has come as a dog — barking, or as a child crying and weeping, or as a madman laughing. Don't deny; don't reject; accept — because if you deny you will become tense. All denials create tension. Accept. If you want to relax, acceptance is the way. Accept whatsoever is happening all around; let it become an organic whole. It is — you may know it or you may not know it.
Everything is inter-related. These birds, these trees, this sky, this sun, this earth, you, me — all are related. It is an organic unity. If the sun disappears, the trees will disappear; if the trees disappear, the birds will disappear; if the birds and trees disappear, you cannot be here, you will disappear. It is an ecology. Everything is deeply related with each other.
So don't deny anything, because the moment you deny, you are denying something in you.
OSHO
