Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi
These seven steps to enlightenment are keys of wisdom, step-by-step instructions handed down from the unnamed ancient seers. In this series of nine discourses Osho discusses these timeless sutras from the Akshyupanishad, transforming their archaic language into the language and context of the 20th-century seeker.
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Excerpt from Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi
These eyes which can look only outwards, which can only look into the without, are blind unless they also become capable of seeing within. If you cannot see yourself you are blind, and one who cannot see himself, what else can he see? And whatsoever he sees, whatsoever his knowledge, it remains based on a deep blindness. Unless you become self-seeing, unless you turn within, unless you can have a look at the reality that you are, whatsoever you encounter in the world is going to be just the appearance. The same will be the proportion: the more you penetrate within the more you can penetrate without, because reality is one.
If you are not acquainted with yourself, all your acquaintance, all your knowledge is just false. Without self-knowledge there is no possibility of any knowledge. You can go on knowing and knowing; you can go on collecting more and more information, but that information will remain information: dead, borrowed. It will never become a knowing eye.
How to attain those eyes which can penetrate the illusory and can encounter the real? This is going to be the base of this whole Upanishad. In the old days it was called chakshusmati vidya, the wisdom through which eyes are attained. But the first thing to be constantly remembered is that as we are, we are blind; as we are, we are dead; as we are, we are illusory, the stuff dreams are made of.
Why cannot our eyes see the real? They are so much filled with dreams, so much filled with thoughts, that whatsoever you see, you are not seeing that which is; you project your ideas, your thoughts, your dreams upon it. The whole world becomes just a projection screen, and you go on projecting things. Whatsoever you see outside, you have put it there. You live in a man-created world, and everyone lives in his own world. That world consists of his own projections.
Unless your eyes are completely vacant, unless there is no content within your eyes, no thoughts, no clouds; unless you become mirrorlike, pure, innocent, contentless, you cannot encounter the real. The real can be seen only through naked, empty eyes; it cannot be seen through filled eyes.
This is all the art or the science of meditation consists of: how to make your eyes mirrorlike, nonprojecting ? just looking at that which is, not creating it, not imagining it, not adding anything to it, just encountering it as it is. You never see things as they are, you always see through your mind; you color them.
