Tag Archives: vipassana

Vipassana Technique

Vipassana can be done in three ways ¯ you can choose which one suits you the best. The first is: Awareness of your actions, your body, your mind, your heart. Walking, you should walk with awareness. Moving your hand, you should move with awareness, knowing perfectly that you are moving the hand. You can move it without any consciousness, like a mechanical thing. You are on a morning walk; you can go on walking without being aware of your feet. Be alert of the movements of your body. While eating, be alert of the movements that are needed for eating. Taking a shower, be alert of the coolness that is coming to you, the water falling on you and the tremendous joy of it…. Just be alert. It should not go on happening in an unconscious state.
And the same about your mind: whatever thought passes on the screen of your mind, just be a watcher. Whatever emotion passes on the screen of your heart, just remain a witness ¯ don’t get involved, don’t get identified, don’t evaluate what is good, what is bad; that is not part of your meditation. Your meditation has to be choiceless awareness.
You will be able one day even to see very subtle moods: how sadness settles in you just like the night is slowly, slowly settling around the world, how suddenly a small thing makes you joyous.
Just be a witness. Don’t think, ‘I am sad.’ Just know, ‘There is sadness around me, there is joy around me. I am confronting a certain emotion or a certain mood.’ But you are always far away: a watcher on the hills, and everything else is going on in the valley. This is one of the ways Vipassana can be done.

~ Osho, The New Dawn, Talk #16

Vipassana the way of the Buddha !

Buddha’s way was VIPASSANA – vipassana means witnessing. And he found one of the greatest devices ever: the device of watching your breath, just watching your breath.

Breathing is such a simple and natural phenomenon and it is there twenty-four hours a day. You need not make any effort.

Buddha discovered a totally different angle: just watch your breath – the breath coming in, the breath going out. There are four points to be watched. Sitting silently just start seeing the breath, feeling the breath. The breath going in is the first point. Then for a moment when the breath is in it stops – a very small moment it is – for a split second it stops; that is the second point to watch. Then the breath turns and goes out; this is the third point to watch. Then again when the breath is completely out, for a split second it stops; that is the fourth point to watch. Then the breath starts coming in again… this is the circle of breath.

If you can watch all these four points you will be surprised, amazed at the miracle of such a simple process – because mind is not involved. Watching is not a quality of the mind; watching is the quality of the soul, of consciousness; watching is not a mental process at all. When you watch, the mind stops, ceases to be. Yes, in the beginning many times you will forget and the mind will come in and start playing its old games.

But whenever you remember that you had forgotten, there is no need to feel repentant, guilty – just go back to watching, again and again go back to watching your breath.

Slowly slowly, less and less mind interferes.

And when you can watch your breath for forty-eight minutes as a continuum, you will become enlightened.

~ OSHO

Excerpted from : The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 5.Chapter#1