Awareness of attachment

Experiments with being aware of attachments

The Meditation Second for now:

Becoming aware of what I want to hold on to

Benefits:

This meditation can go very deep. Being friendly and unattached while looking at attachments... Observing obvious and subtle things I want to hold on to. It can be people, thoughts, emotions, the body, the feeling of "I"...? It is alright to find many things, the technique is about becoming aware, no judgement necessary. Then, the realization of who is aware...

Osho on attachment to the body

Toss attachment for body aside,

realizing I am everywhere.

One who is everywhere is joyous.

Sutra from the Book of Secrets

The body, a companion for life times

"There is a deep attachment to the body – bound to be, it is natural. You have been living in the body for many, many lives, from the very beginning. Bodies have changed, but you were always with a body, you were always embodied.

Who are you without the body?

There have been certain moments and times when you were not embodied, but then you were not conscious. When you die from one body, you die in unconsciousness and then you remain unconscious. Then you are born again in a new body, but then too you are unconscious. The gap between one death and another birth is unconscious, so you don’t know how you will feel when not embodied. You don’t know who you are when you are not in a body. You know only one phenomenon, and that is of embodiment; you have always known yourself in the body.

You feel you are the body

This has been so long, so continuous, that you have forgotten that you are different from it. This is a forgetfulness – natural, bound to happen in the circumstances – hence the attachment. You feel you are the body – this is the attachment. You feel that you are not anything other than the body, not anything more than the body. You may not agree with me at this point, because many times you think that you are not the body, you are the soul, the self. But this is not your knowing; this is simply what you have heard, what you have read, and what you have believed without knowing."

Osho, excerpted from The Book of Secrets, Chapter 57

Osho: You don't know what attachment is

You will jump out of hell if you know

"Your attachment has not proved a hell yet. Whatsoever Buddha says and Mahavira says is irrelevant. They may go on saying that attachment is hell, but this is not your feeling. That’s why you again and again ask how to be detached, how to be not attached, how to go beyond attachment. You go on asking this “how” only because you don’t know what attachment is. If you know what attachment is, you will simply jump out of it. You will not ask “how.”"

Osho, excerpted from The Book of Secrets, Chapter 57

Becoming courageous

Falling within

"You go on clinging to the surface, afraid that if you leave the surface you will be lost. Really, clinging to the surface you are lost. But deep down there is darkness and you cannot see any ground; you cannot see anything else than the surface. All these techniques are to make you courageous, strong, adventurous, so that you can stop the holding on and fall within yourself. That which looks like an abyss, dark, bottomless, is the very ground of your being. Once you leave the surface, the periphery, you will be centered. This centering is the aim.

Doing is the problem

You are always tense, that is the holding, the clinging. You are never relaxed, never in a state of let-go. You are always doing something: that doing is the problem. You are never in a state of non-doing, when things are happening and you are just there not doing anything. Breath comes in and goes out, the blood circulates, the body is alive and throbbing, the breeze blows, the world goes on spinning around – and you are not doing anything. You are not a doer. You are simply relaxed and things are happening. When things are happening and you are not a doer, you are totally relaxed. When you are a doer and things are not happening but are being manipulated by you, you are tense."

Osho, excerpted from The Book of Secrets, Chapter 71