Mystic Mantra: Generate your own energy

How do you wake up in the morning? Is there a conscious way of phasing from sleep to wakefulness or just the unconscious rush we’ve all experienced? Maybe you have never thought about it. If you want to know, try this: in the morning, while bidding goodbye to sleep, don’t open your eyes, just register all the sounds you hear around you. The first buzz will likely be of a message from your mobile. Then ever-increasing traffic, the banging of bathroom doors, whirring of machines — the external world has entered the privacy of your inner sanctum — before you know it, you’ve once again lost yourself in the noisy world.

And this is only one way of losing your energy. Apart from losing energy by indiscriminately observing external phenomena, people also lose a great deal of energy by putting lots of emotion into talk. Talking agitatedly, with greed or anger or jealousy depletes accumulated energy. Do you realise that when you complain about something you are draining your energy drastically?

The less energy we lose, the more there is left for the immune system to ensure the health of our body, for inner reflection and for strong will-power. But how? Is it possible to keep pace with a hectic lifestyle and still retain energy?

Osho has suggested some meditation techniques for using our senses without losing energy. Let the world out there take care of itself: You can be in it without belonging to it. This means not attaching your mind to the senses. Instead perceive the outside world through the heart, be like an empty mirror.

Here’s an example: “Sometimes, lying on the ground, just look at the sky. Don’t think, and if there are clouds, don’t look for images in them. Don’t find horses and elephants in the clouds, don’t think about anything; just look, as though your eye is simply the lens of a camera — it can see but not think. You are lying there like a mirror, available to whatever is happening. All that happens in front of the mirror is reflected in it, but the mirror does not think about it; it does not think whether it is a black cloud or a white cloud, or whether it should have been like this or like that, why there are clouds at all, or if it is going to rain. No, don’t think! Just look, just gaze, open-eyed. In a short while, you will find that the sky outside has entered you, that the sky outside and the sky within you have merged to become one great sky. The thin wall that separates the two has disappeared and now you will find no one inside. You will not even be able to find where is the within, where is the without. Where does within end and where does without begin? All boundaries have disappeared. You too are the sky.”

You can apply this same technique to the other senses too — to hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting — and gradually you will find that you have become a reservoir full of energy.

Amrit Sadhana is editor Osho Times International. She facilitates meditation workshops based on Osho insights around the country and abroad.