Mystic Mantra: You are the axis, not the wheel

We live in an ever-changing world. Some people, and they are very few, understand this change as the nature of the world, accept it and flow with it while others complain about it, resist it, try to swim upstream and transform life into a struggle.

Those who know that the change is inevitable, they also know that the change is always happening on the periphery, the circumference, and within them they have a centre which is never changing. At that centre there is total restfulness while on the periphery life may appear to be very tiring and stressful. Real meditation means moving from the periphery to the innermost centre and settling into being.

There is a Zen saying: Don’t just do something and sit there. This statement describes the famous Zazen meditation discipline.

Osho, the modern Zen master, explains: Zazen means just sitting and doing nothing. The first thing to do is learn sitting, a deep restfulness. Become a pool of rest, not even ripples of desire, going nowhere, no ambition — not even for God, not even for nirvana. Sit… not only physically — psychologically, spiritually too. Learn to sit; that is Zazen. And rest — and fall into a deep rest, so the breathing becomes natural, the body becomes cool, all the fever of constant desire and turmoil disappears, evaporates. And then, work. That work will have a totally different quality. It won’t be out of desire; it will be creativity. It will be because you have so much energy available that you would like to share your energy with the world, that you would like to create something, that you would like to make the world a little more beautiful, a little more blissful, a little more human.

This, indeed, is the real art of meditation — the real secret. It helps us find a centre within our own being and relax into it. And just an hour of such relaxation rejuvenates us and fills us with tremendous amount of energy. Just one hour or even less time, half an hour or 15 minutes, can refresh our being and unleash so much creativity. Those who meditate know this secret.

Osho suggests: Don’t fight with shadows! And the whole life is a shadow because change is nothing but a shadow. The unchanging is the real; the changing is the unreal. So don’t ask whether the peripheral change and movement has to be forced to cease in order to realize the center. There is no need, and you cannot force it. It cannot cease! The world goes on; only it will not go on in you. You can remain in the world, and there is no need for the world to be in you. The world is not the disturbance. When you get involved in it, when you become the change, when you feel that you have become the change, then it creates problems.