Ancient Music in The Pines: In Zen, Mind Suddenly Stops

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Although these Zen anecdotes are delightful and fascinating in themselves, Osho's profound, stimulating and highly original commentaries uncover the hidden mysteries behind these unique and exquisite exchanges between Zen masters and the people around them, so that their meaning and significance become crystal clear.

Each of the commentaries is followed by Osho's answers to the many questions facing seekers as they explored their own inner worlds in his presence. He is quite merciless yet equally compassionate and humorous as he exposes people's illusions, delusions and hypocrisies. Like the Zen masters in these stories, he provokes the reader into a direct experience of the present moment.

Zen is the way of the spontaneous - the effortless effort, the way of intuition. A Zen Master, Ikkyu, a great poet, has said: "I can see clouds a thousand miles away, hear ancient music in the pines." This is what Zen is all about.

Osho's unique contribution to the understanding of who we are defies categorization. Mystic and scientist, a rebellious spirit whose sole interest is to alert humanity to the urgent need to dis- cover a new way of living. To continue as before is to invite threats to our very survival on this unique and beautiful planet.

His essential point is that only by changing ourselves, one individual at a time, can the outcome of all our "selves" - our societies, our cultures, our beliefs, our world - also change. The doorway to that change is meditation.

Osho the scientist has experimented and scrutinized all the approaches of the past and examined their effects on the modern human being and responded to their shortcomings by creating a new starting point for the hyperactive 21" Century mind: OSHO Active Meditations.

Once the agitation of a modern lifetime has started to settle. "activity" can melt into "passivity," a key starting point of real meditation. To support this next step, Osho has transformed the ancient "art of listening" into a subtle contemporary method- ology: the OSHO Talks. Here words become music, the listener discovers who is listening, and the awareness moves from what is being heard to the individual doing the listening. Magically, as silence arises, what needs to be heard is understood directly, free from the distraction of a mind that can only interrupt and interfere with this delicate process.

You may not know that the word meditation comes from the same root as medicine, medical, and the original meaning of the word was a technique to become whole, a technique to become healthy. Medicine is medicinal, just like that, meditation is also medicinal. It makes you whole, integrated, healthy. .

Pay attention, listen to it as meditatively as possible. When you listen meditatively you understand, when you listen concentratedly you learn. If you listen with concentration, you will gain knowledge, if you listen meditatively, you will lose knowledge. And the difference is very subtle. .

When you listen attentively, attention means a tension, it means you are tense, too eager to learn, to absorb, to know. You are interested in knowledge, concentration is the way towards knowledge; mind focused on one thing of course, learns more. .

Meditation is unfocused mind, you simply listen silently, not with a tension in the mind, not with an urge to know and learn, no, with total relaxedness, in a let go, in an opening of your being. You listen, not to know, you simply listen to understand. These are different ways of listening. If If you are trying to know, then you are trying to memorize what I am saying, deep down you are repeating it, you are taking notes inside the mind, you are writing it in the world of your memories, you are interested in letting it become deeply rooted in you so you don't forget. Then it will become knowledge. .

And the same seed could have become unlearning, understanding. Then you simply listen, you are not interested in accumulating it, you are not interested in writing it in your memory, in your mind. You simply listen open, as you listen to music, as you listen to birds singing in the trees, as you listen to wind passing through ancient pines, as you listen to the sound of water in a waterfall - there is nothing to remember, nothing to memorize, you don't listen with a parrot mind, you simply listen without any mind the listening is beautiful, it is ecstatic, there is no goal in it, in itself it is ecstatic, it is blissful.

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