Osho - Three Levels Of Sleep

Osho - Three Levels Of Sleep

How deep is your slumber, asks OSHO

Buddha’s path is the negative path, his assertions are negative. That’s why Hindus called him a nastik; they called him an atheist, an absolute nihilist. But he is not. When things disappear, thoughts disappear, and the witnessing disappears — that which remains is truth. It liberates. It is nirvana, enlightenment.

Deny & Transcend

Buddha is very deep. He never asserts a single positive. If you ask about any positive, he simply remains silent. He never says God is, he never says the soul is; in fact he never uses the word is. You ask and he will use the word ‘not’. ‘No’ is his answer for everything. And if you can understand, if you can feel a rapport, you will see that he is right. When you deny everything, that doesn’t mean you have destroyed everything. That only means you have destroyed the world that you had created. The real remains because the real cannot be denied. But you cannot assert it. You can know it, but you cannot state it. When you deny all this, when you transcend all this, you become a buddha. You are enlightened.

Deep Sleep

Buddha says you are awakened only when three sleeps are broken. One sleep is the sleep with things: many people are asleep there; that is the grossest sleep. Millions of people, 98 per cent of them are asleep there. One goes on thinking about his bank balance, one goes on thinking about the house, about clothes, about this and that — and one lives in that. There are people who only study catalogues for things. Then, there is the second sleep, the sleep of the mind. There are people who are not concerned with things — only one per cent of people — who are concerned with the mind. They don’t bother about what type of clothes they use — artists, novelists, poets, painters; they are not worried about things in general, they live in the mind. They can go hungry, or they can go naked, they can live in a slum, but they go on working in the mind. The novel they are writing...they go on thinking, ‘I may not be immortal but the novel that I am going to write is going to be immortal; the painting that I am doing is going to be immortal.’ But when you cannot be immortal, how can your painting be immortal? When you are to perish or die, everything that you create will die, because how is it possible that from death something immortal can be born?

The Subtle Ego

Then there are people who go on thinking of philosophy, thoughts, oblivious of things, not worried much about them. And then there is a third sleep: monks, those who have renounced the world, and also the mind, who have been meditating for many years and they have stopped the thought process. Now no thoughts move in their inner sky, now no things are there; they are not concerned with things, not concerned with thoughts. But a subtle ego, the ‘I’ — now they call it Atman, the soul, the self, the Self with a capital ‘S’ — is their sleep; they are asleep there.

Becoming Mindful

Buddha says sleep has to be broken on these three layers, and when all the sleeps are broken, nobody is awake, only awakening is there; nobody is enlightened, only enlightenment is there — just the phenomenon of awareness, without any centre....
When the mind disappears, thoughts disappear. It is not that you become mindless; on the contrary, you become mindful. Buddha uses this word ‘right mindfulness’ millions of times. When the mind disappears and thoughts disappear, you become mindful. You do things — you move, you work, you eat, you sleep, but you are always mindful…. What is mindfulness? It is awareness. It is perfect awareness.