What is Meditation?

Meditation Is a Jump

You can never go beyond the mind if you go on using it. You have to take a jump, and meditation mean that jump. That's why meditation is illogical, irrational. And it cannot be made logical; it cannot be reduced to reason. You have to experience it. If you experience, only then do you know. So try this: don't think about it, try - try to be a witness to your own thoughts. Sit down, relaxed, close your eyes, let your thoughts run just like pictures run on a screen. See them, look at them, make them your objects. One thought arises: look at it deeply. don't think about it, just look at it. If you begin to think about it then you are not a witness - you have fallen in a trap.

There is a horn outside; a thought arises, some car is passing; or a dog barks, or something happens. Don't think about it; just look at the thought. The thought has arisen, taken form. Now it is before you. Soon it will pass. Another thought will replace it. Go on looking at this thought process. Even for a single moment, if you are capable of looking at this thought process without thinking about it, you will have gained something in witnessing and you will have known something in witnessing. This is a taste, a different taste than thinking - totally different. But one has to experiment with it. Religion and science are poles apart, but in one thing they are similar and their emphasis is the same: science depends on experiment, and religion also. Only philosophy depends just on thinking. Religion and science both depend on experiment: science on objects, religion on subjectivity. Science depends on experimenting with other things than you, and religion depends on experimenting directly with you.

It is difficult, because in science the experimenter is there, the experiment is there and the object to be experimented upon is there. There are three things: the object, the subject and the experiment. In religion you are all the three simultaneously. You are the experiment upon yourself. You are the subject and you are the object and you are the lab. Don't go on thinking. Begin, start somewhere, to experiment. Then you will have a direct feeling of what thinking is and what witnessing is. And then you will come to know that you cannot do both simultaneously, just as you cannot run and sit simultaneously. If you run, then you cannot sit, then you are not sitting. And if you are sitting, then you cannot run. But sitting is not a function of the legs. Running is a function of legs. Rather, sitting is non-function of the legs. When the legs are functioning, then you are not sitting. Sitting is a non-function of the legs: running is the function. The same is with the mind: thinking is a function of the mind; witnessing is a non-function of the mind. When the mind is not functioning, you have the witnessing, then you have the awareness.

Osho - from the book What is Meditation?