Why scientists need to practice meditation?
When scientists are happy to use AI for their research I feel need of using inherent powers of a human being for the research because our inner self is connected with cosmic consciousness.
It is the cosmic consciousness where experiences, documented or undocumented, of all the past lives of every human being is stored. So science education needs to be improved for tackling challenges created by/due to the AI in future.
I am sharing from an unpublished book ‘The Golden Wind’ by Osho:-
Mind is always old. Even a one-day-old child has a one-day-old mind, because mind means the past. It accumulates the past; it is accumulative it goes on accumulating experiences and everything that happens. It is always old and it goes on becoming older and older. But the heart is always young; it never accumulates, it is non-accumulative. It lives in the moment.
That's why the mind and the heart are never in agreement, they cannot be in agreement, because the mind talks about the past and the heart wants to live spontaneously, right now.
The mind always gives advice, tries to be very wise, calls the heart a fool, mad, and all kinds of names, but the heart never becomes wise in that sense; it remains a fool. And it is good that it remains a fool, it is good that it never becomes old, because that is the only hope for man. That is the only door to know reality, because reality is in the present.
Mind lives in doubt. Doubt is the climate which is absolutely necessary for the mind to exist. In the same way trust is the climate in which the heart grows; they are polar opposites. If one wants to live in the mind then one has to go on increasing one's doubt. Then the whole effort should be how to sharpen doubt, how to make it absolute so that there is no way to come to any conclusion.
Science depends on doubt because science is a project of the mind; hence science never comes to any conclusions. At the most it comes to hypothetical conclusions. And whenever a conclusion is hypothetical it is not conclusive. It simply means for the time being we will sharpen our doubt more and then we will have to change it. So science is always approximately true, never exactly true. It cannot claim truth -- that is not its territory.
Religion (means inner journey through Meditation for Osho) is just the opposite of it: it functions through trust, faith. It is a totally different approach towards life. It is an approach through love. That's why religion comes to conclusions and it helps a person to become centred, to relax, to rest. With a hypothesis you can never rest, you can never be at ease.
You know that it is only a hypothesis, tomorrow it is going to be changed -- how can you make your home on such shifting sands?
Science can never be a shelter for man. It can give you more comfort, convenience, a better standard of living, but it cannot give you a better quality of life -- that is impossible.
That can happen only through religion, because it helps you to feel at home, it gives you something certain to live for. It gives you a rock to build your temple upon -- and that rock is trust.
As your trust grows, your bliss grows; as your doubt grows, your tension grows, misery grows. Doubt ultimately ends in anguish and anxiety.
That's why the scientific approach is bound to drive people crazy; it is driving the whole world crazy.
And remember: I am not against science at all, but I would like man first to be centred in the heart and then to use science as a means. It can never be the goal, it can never be the end. It can only be a good servant, never the master.
Love has to be the master, doubt has to be its servant, then everything is in its right place. Otherwise doubt becomes the master and it starts encroaching upon the territory of love and trust and it goes on destroying everything. It is like cancer if it becomes a master. It has to be put in its place.
I am not against it, it has to be used. Science has to be used for human comforts, convenience. It can give many benefits to humanity. But it never be enshrined as a god. That is not its business but that's what science has been pretending to do.
That's why the whole of humanity feels is a desertlike situation where all meaning has been lost, he has become insignificant, worthless. At the most you can drag, but you cannot dance.
Through trust comes dance, celebration, bliss, benediction.
Sannyas means a change, a radical change from the heard to the heart, a jump from logic to love.
Just as the farmer has to work with the seeds and the soil and the water and the sun, a sannyasin (the one who became his disciple by experimenting his suggestions in life) also has to work in the same way in the inner world. His interiority, his subjectivity, is his field, his farm.
He has to sow seeds of meditation, of awareness, of consciousness. And he has to work hard. He has to work hard, only then one day can those seeds start growing and one see the inner world flowering and becoming fruitful.
Ordinarily man's inner world remains a desert. It can become a beautiful garden. All that is needed to make it a garden is provided at your birth; all that is necessary is given to you. It if you keep the seeds locked in a treasure box they don't become flowers.
If you never take any care of the inner, if you never look at the inner, nothing is going to happen there. Attention is needed.
(So every research student willing to pursue in Neuroscience/Quantum physics needs to pay attention to inner in order to be able to carry our research about connection with consciousness)
It has been found recently that attention is one of the most important ingredients for any kind of growth, outer or inner. A child needs the mother's milk, but even more than that he needs the mother's attention. If the mother only gives him nourishment for the body and takes no other care, if the child feels neglected, ignored, his growth is stopped.
He loses trust in himself, he loses confidence, he loser’s the very purpose of life.
He starts feeling he is useless, he is not needed. To be needed is the greatest need.
Without it, without its cosy atmosphere nothing can grow.
-Osho, The Golden Wind #17 (Copyright Osho International Foundation, Pune, India)
On 18th July 1980 Osho talked about way of mind and way of Heart. And it is through heart a person can know reality. So future scientists have to grow mind and heart together to know reality and correlate it with science.
Osho:-
Mind can never know anything about reality.
It can have no encounter with reality. The past is always standing in between like a wall, and the wall goes onbecoming bigger and bigger every day.
That's why children are more alive, more spontaneous, more beautiful, more joyous than old people.
Old people become too experienced and everything that is spontaneous is not possible for an old man. He has a condemnation for it; he has a thousand and one opinions about it.
The mind calls love mad. Out of its experience, observation, knowledge, it creates a false kind of love it calls marriage. Marriage is an invention the mind.
It is a very poor substitute. It is an institution. It is more utilitarian, certainly; it has more economic value, it is more marketable, it is more worldly. Love looks mad, but it is love that gives you feel of being alive, not marriage.
And it is the same about anything else.
Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism -- these are mind things.
To be with Jesus is a heart thing, but that is possible only when the master is alive.
To be with the pope is a mind thing. He has two thousand years of heritage.
Jesus was a madman; no rabbi followed him, no knowledgeable professor followed him, but simple people: carpenters, fishermen, prostitutes, gamblers, drunkards -- these type of people who are really simple and in a way more spontaneous. A prostitute is a far more alive being than a rabbi. I respect a prostitute more than a rabbi, because a rabbi is absolutely dead.
Mary Magdalene was far more alive -- she could see the beauty of Jesus.
But the head-priest of the great temple of Jerusalem could not see: he thought 'This man is simply dangerous, a madman collecting other mad young people and trying to destroy the whole social structure.'
It was mind crucifying the heart when Jesus was crucified. That has always been so and that will always be so. Only the heart can move into meditation, only the heart is the hope.
There is only one hope for man: if he moves from the head to the heart, starts listening to the heart and follows the heart.
It is risky: everybody will condemn you, everybody will think that something has gone wrong, that you have gone cuckoo.
But that has always been so: the people who had been with Buddha were thought to be cuckoos and the people who are with me are bound to be thought to be cuckoos. But to be a cuckoo with a Buddha is a blessing!
So feel blessed!
Bliss is poetry. It is not science, it is not logic, it is not mind, it is not prose. It is art, it is dance, it is music, it is love: it is poetry.
And one has to learn the ways of being poetic; they are totally different.
In the world mathematics is needed, not music; logic is needed, not love. So the world teaches you to be logical, but logic destroys your love, which is far more valuable because it is through love that you will know god.
It is through being poetic that there is a possibility of knowing the beauty of existence. It is tremendously beautiful, but we need a different perspective to see the beauty, a different vision, a different approach, a different context altogether.
Ordinarily, what we have been taught is not poetry. We have been brought up in a very calculative way. We are being made to be cunning and clever because that is what succeeds in life, that's what helps you to achieve ambitions.
You are brought up in such a way that you can go on power trips -- and reality is not a power trip, it is not an ego trip. One has to put aside the ego and all the calculating and cunning ways. One has to learn something of the aesthetic sense; one has to be more sensitive, more in tune with existence. That's what I call poetry.
I don't mean that you have to read Shakespeare and Milton and Shelley and Byron. When I say poetry, I mean that you have to be in a love affair with life; it should not be calculative. You should be more open to the wind, to the sun, to the rain. You should be more full of wonder than of knowledge; you should live in awe.
Each moment should be a moment of awe, of wonder. Looking at life with the eyes of a child, the whole world becomes god-full. If your heart is full of wonder, then the world is full of god; if your heart is calculative and cunning, god disappears from the world, god dies. Then you live in a godless world, and living in a godless world is not worth living at all. Life loses all significance altogether. It becomes absolutely mundane, a commodity -- and that is the ugliest thing that can happen to a man.
My sannyasins have to live a beautiful life; a life of grace, of poetry, of music and celebration. Dance, because it is through the dance... sing, because it is through singing... that you will become vulnerable to god, open to god. It is not a question of argument, it is not a question of proofs, of philosophy or theology.
The word 'love' defines sannyas precisely. And a heart full of love is naturally full of poetry. To live life in poetry is to be a sannyasin.
- -Osho, The Golden Wind #18 (Copyright Osho International Foundation, Pune, India)