Silence: When silence comes, mind disappears, Osho

Mind means the turmoil, the illness, the disease; mind means the tense, the anguished state. The mind cannot be silent; when there is silence there is no mind. When silence comes, mind disappears; when mind is there, silence is no more. So there cannot be any silent mind, just as there cannot be any healthy disease.

Silence is the inner health; mind is the inner disease, inner disturbance.

To be total is a basic thing for any seeker, for anyone in search of silence and truth.

What is the difference between a real silence and a false silence? A false silence is always forced; through effort it is achieved. It is not spontaneous, it has not happened to you. You have made it happen. You are sitting silently and there is much inner turmoil. You suppress it and then you cannot laugh. You will become sad because laughter will be dangerous — if you laugh you will lose silence, because in laughter you cannot suppress. Laughter is against suppression. If you want to suppress you should not laugh; if you laugh everything will come out. The real will come out in laughter, and the unreal will be lost. So whenever you see a saint sad, know well the silence is false. He cannot laugh, he cannot enjoy, because he is afraid. If he laughs everything will be broken, the suppression will come out, and then he will not be able to suppress.

Nothing can disturb if real silence has happened. Then everything helps it to grow. If you are really silent you can sit in a market, and even the market cannot disturb it. Rather, you feed on the noise of the market and that noise becomes more silence in you. Really, to feel silence a market is needed — because if you have real silence, then the market becomes the background and the silence becomes perfect in contrast. You can feel the inner silence bubbling against the market.

Meditation doesn't lead you to silence; meditation only creates the situation in which the silence happens. And this should be the criterion — that whenever silence happens laughter will come into your life. A vital celebration will happen all around. You will not become sad, you will not become depressed, you will not escape from the world. You will be here in this world, but taking the whole thing as a game, enjoying the whole thing as a beautiful game, a big drama, no longer serious about it. Seriousness is a disease.

Your enlightenment is perfect only when silence has come to be a celebration. Hence my insistence that after you meditate you must celebrate. After you have been silent you must enjoy it, you must have a thanksgiving. A deep gratitude must be shown towards the whole just for the opportunity that you are, that you can meditate, that you can be silent, that you can laugh.

THINKING cannot be stopped. Not that it does not stop, but it cannot be stopped. It stops of its own accord. This distinction has to be understood, otherwise you can go mad chasing your mind. No-mind does not arise by stopping thinking. When the thinking is no more, no-mind is. The very effort to stop will create more anxiety, it will create conflict, it will make you split. You will be in a constant turmoil within. This is not going to help. And even if you succeed in stopping it forcibly for a few moments, it is not an achievement at all — because those few moments will be almost dead, they will not be alive. You may feel a sort of stillness, but not silence, because a forced stillness is not silence. Underneath it, deep in the unconscious, the repressed mind goes on working.

When silence happens in the marketplace then it is true, then it is yours — now nobody can take it away. Now no distraction can be a distraction to you. You can remain anywhere; whatsoever the situation, your silence will remain there as a deep substratum to your being. It is inner.

If you escape to the Himalayas you will start feeling a little still, but at the same time a little stupid also. You will start feeling more silent, but that silence belongs to the Himalayas, not to you. Come back and your silence will be left behind — you will come alone. And back in the world you will be even more disturbed than before, because you will have become more vulnerable, soft. And you will come with a prejudice, with this idea that you have attained to silence. You will have become more egoistic. That's why people who have escaped to the monasteries become afraid of coming back to the world. The world is the test. The world is the criterion. And it is easier to be in the world and, by and by, grow into a silence, then the Himalayan silence comes into your being. You don't go to the Himalayas: the Himalayas themselves come to you. Then it is something of your own, then you are the master of it.

Words are figures; silence is the background. Words come and go; silence remains. When you were born you were born as a silence — just intervals and intervals, gaps and gaps. Infinite emptiness you came with, unbounded emptiness you brought with you in life — then you started collecting words.

Mind means words; self means silence. Mind is nothing but all the words that you have accumulated; silence is that which has always been with you, it is not an accumulation. That is the meaning of self. It is your intrinsic quality. On the background of silence you go on accumulating words, and the words in total are known as the mind. Silence is meditation. It is a question of changing the gestalt, shifting the attention from words into silence — which is always there.

Only silence is beyond negation and affirmation; only silence is neither atheistic nor theistic; only silence is religious; only silence is sacred.

A master is to help you to go to your inner emptiness, the inner silence, the inner temple; and the master has to devise methods. Only zen masters beat; sometimes they throw a person out of the window, or they jump on him. Because you have become so false, such drastic methods are needed.

A silence is needed before death, before life, before love. If you love a person you sit silently with the person. You would not like to chatter, you would like to just hold their hand and live and be silent in that moment. If you chatter, that means you are avoiding the person — love is not really there. If you love life, chattering will drop, because every moment is so filled with life that there is no way, no space to chatter. Each moment life is flooding you so vitally — where is the time to gossip and chatter? Each moment you live totally, mind becomes silent. Eat, and eat so totally — because life is entering you through food — that mind becomes silent. Drink, and drink totally: life is entering through water, it will quench your thirst; move with it as it touches your thirst, as the thirst disappears. Be silent and watch. How can you chatter when you are drinking a cup of tea? Warm life is flowing within you. Be filled with it. Be respectful.