OSHO Unclutter your mind

                                                      
Unclutter your mind

   The modern mind is overloaded, and that which remains unassimilated creates neurosis. It is as if, you go on eating and stuffing your body: that which is not digested by the body will prove to be poisonous. And what you eat is less important than what you hear and see. From your eyes, from your ears, from all your senses, you go on receiving a thousand and one things each moment. And there is no extra assimilation time. It is as if one were constantly sitting at the dining table, eating, eating, 24 hours a day. 

                                              

   This is the situation of the modern mind: it is overloaded; so many things are burdening it. It is no surprise that it breaks down. There is a limit to every mechanism. And the mind is one of the most subtle and delicate of mechanisms. 

                                

   The world was very different in the past, obviously. About six weeks’ worth of sensory stimuli six hundred years ago is what we now get in a day. Six weeks’ worth of information, we are getting in a single day — about 40 times the pressure to learn and adapt. The modern man has to be capable of learning more than ever been before, because there is more to learn now. The modern man has to become capable of adapting to new situations every day because the world is changing so fast. It is a great challenge. 

   A great challenge, if accepted, will help tremendously in the expansion of cons c i o u s n e s s. E i t h e r modern man is going to be utterly neurotic or going to be transformed by the very pressure. It depends on how you take it. One thing is certain: there is no going back. Sensory stimuli will go on increasing more and more. You will be getting more and more information, and life will change, with faster and faster rhythms. 
                                                 

   Meditation is needed today more than ever before; it is almost a question of life and death. In the past, it was a luxury; few people — a Buddha, a Mahavira, a Krishna — were interested in it. Others were naturally silent, naturally happy, sane. Life was moving so silently, so slowly, that even the most stupid people were capable of adapting to it. Now the change is so tremendously fast, that even the most intelligent people feel incapable of adapting to it. Every day life is different, and the pressure is great — 40 times greater.

    

                                                       

   How to relax this pressure? You will have to go deliberately into meditative moments. If a person is not meditating at least one hour a day, then his neurosis will not be accidental; he will create it himself. For one hour, he should disappear from the world into his own being. That will release new sources of energy in him and he will be back in the world, younger, fresher, more able to learn, with more wonder in his eyes, and with more awe in his heart. 

         

   Sleep cannot help you anymore because sleep itself is becoming overburdened. Your day is so overloaded that when you go to sleep only the body falls limp on the bed, but the mind continues to sort things out. That’s what you call dreaming: it is nothing but a desperate effort of the mind to sort things out because you won’t give any time to it.

                                
    You have to relax consciously into meditation. A few minutes of deep meditation will  keep you non-neurotic. In   meditation, the mind de-clutters, experiences are digested,and the overload disappears, leaving the mind  fresh, young, clear and    clean.

Excerpted from The Secret of Secrets/ courtesy Osho International Foundation/ www.osho.com

Shared by Praveen and Kinnari Shah