Nothingness

You
have to
disappear.
The world has
to be left behind,
the body has to be
left behind, the mind
has to be left behind, and
then you have only one thing
to lose -- yourself. You have enjoyed
everything. You have enjoyed the purity of
individuality; now you have to enjoy the disappearing
of individuality. You have seen the beauty of
individuality; now you have to see the
disappearance and its beauty, and
the silence that follows, that
abysmal serenity that
follows.

This way,
each individual will
go on moving into nothingness.
And one day, the whole existence moves
into nothingness and a great peace, a great night,
a deep, dark womb, a great awaiting for the dawn...
And it has been happening always, and
each time you are always born
on a higher level of
consciousness.

Try
to be so
wakeful that
you don't fall asleep
again. Remain so alert that
the future is not allowed to deceive
you again as you had allowed it before.
What has become past is nothing, but once
it is your future then you get deceived by it. Now
it is past; now another future is arriving. Every moment
future is arriving, and future can deceive you only if you are
asleep. Then again it will become past. Now let me tell you
one thing: if you remain alert and you don't allow
the future to deceive you in the present, the
past disappears. Then there is no memory
left of it, no trace of it. Then one is just
a clean slate, a sky without any
clouds, a flame without
smoke.

That's
what the state
of enlightenment is --
so alert that only the witness is
real and everything else is nothing but ripples
on the surface of the water. Everything is passing,
everything is a flux. Only one thing remains
and remains and remains, and that is
your consciousness, your
awareness.

...You
have to
understand
one thing: that
enlightenment is not
an escape from pain but
an understanding of pain, an
understanding of your anguish, an
understanding of your misery -- not a cover-up,
not a substitute, but a deep insight: "Why am I miserable,
why is there so much anxiety, why is there so much anguish,
what are the causes in me that are creating it?" And to see those
causes clearly is to be free from them. Just an insight into your
misery brings a freedom from misery. And what remains is
enlightenment. Enlightenment is not something that
comes to you. It is when pain and misery and
anguish and anxiety have been understood
perfectly well and they have evaporated
because now they have no cause to
exist in you -- that state is
enlightenment.

Enlightenment
is the ultimate peak of
sanity -- when one becomes
perfectly sane, has come to a point
where silence, serenity, consciousness
are twenty-four hours his, waking or sleeping.
There runs a current of tranquility, blissfulness,
benediction which is a nourishment, food from the
beyond. Eastern psychology accepts mind as the lowest
part of human consciousness - dismal and dark. You have
to go beyond it. And enlightenment is not the end, because
it is only individual consciousness. Individuality is still
like two banks of a river. The moment the river
moves into the ocean, all banks disappear,
all boundaries are annihilated.
You have gone beyond
enlightenment.

With
thought the
mind has boundaries.
But without thought the mind
is just infinite space. That is why in
thoughtless awareness one stops to be a
drop and becomes oceanic. And then there is
great energy. This energy wipes out everything
which is dead. It wipes out the whole karmic
past, and with no effort at all.
The greater absorbs the
lesser and remains
untouched.

Osho