Swami Chaitanya Keerti

Our mind is full of information, which becomes our memory. We are overloaded with it and when we receive anything new, this overloaded mind becomes choosy. It does not accept anything without comparing with the old memories that it has in its storehouse. It screens the new, sorts out whatever is adjustable with our existing knowledge, allows it; and whatever is going to disturb our mind — anything unfamiliar, or a stranger — it rejects automatically.
During the past few decades, some Western scientists have discovered that our mind allows two to three per cent of information to enter into it and the rest gets discarded. The mind is always on guard of what to take in and what not to. In most cases, what it allows in is in tune with our prejudices, superstitions and age-old concepts. Our mind does not want to take a risk with too much of the unknown penetrating it. It wants everything to fit with what it thinks is right and not alien to it.
This is the greatest bondage — an imprisonment of mind. The known dominates us and most of the unknown gets blocked. That’s why enlightened mystics like J. Krishnamurti teach us “Freedom from the Known.” He says, “From the known you cannot possibly see the unknown; but once you have understood the state of a mind that is free, which is the mind that says, ‘I don’t know’ and remains unknowing, and is therefore innocent — from that state you can function.”
The real art of meditation simply means stepping out of the known and being pure observer. Only in the state of pure observation when there are no thoughts interfering or clouding it, our mind can function as consciousness mirroring the existence. Then we see things as they are and we don’t add any colour to them from our memories — watching, observing here without the past and the future. This gives our consciousness an extraordinary alertness and we discover the new, in the present, from moment to moment in the eternal now.
Osho says, “In this moment, you can see things with clarity, with transparency. But when your mind starts, covered with your own thoughts, they protect you: they protect the dead against the living, they protect the static against the dynamic, they protect what has been given to you as knowledge against existential experience. If you are silent and your eyes are without any dust and your heart is just a pure mirror, this will be the experience of everyone. Only a state of no-mind is an open door. Without any judgment it allows you to see things as they are, not as they should be, not as you would like them to be, not to fit with you. Existence has no obligation to fit with your mind. But every mind is struggling somehow to make the existence fit with it. It is impossible; hence the misery, the frustration, the deep despair, the feeling of failure.”
This is the real joy, the bliss that a meditator experiences in deep meditation. In other words it is called the choiceless awareness.
Once you become aware of this dimension of life, this mysterious quality of life, you will stop choosing. When choice disappears, the world has disappeared. When choosing falls, you have entered the absolute. But that is possible only when the choosing mind disappears completely. A choiceless awareness is needed and then you will be in bliss. Enter this space and you have entered the kingdom of God.

Swami Chaitanya Keerti, editor of Osho World, is the author of Osho Fragrance