Enlightenment is your Nature

In this lucid exposition of the nature of mind and consciousness, Osho takes the reader through a process of peeling the onion of personality and understanding our mind as conditioning or ideology so that we can wake up to our true unconditioned nature through a process of meditation and awareness. While Western psychology studies the mind as an object from the outside, the Eastern approach aims to go beyond the mind from within in what he calls the psychology of the Buddhas. We gradually move to the perspective of the witness, which is one with the ocean, what David Hawkins would call the ultimate context (see my review of his book elsewhere in this issue). It is only in the West that we have had to develop psychotherapy, and in this case we are trying to integrate the mind rather than go beyond it. The Eastern psychology is one of transcendence, perhaps of being rather than becoming. Enlightenment is recognising the eternity of your being, living from moment to moment – Osho subtly expresses this in evocative words (pp. 224-5) with an emphasis on growth rather than perfection. In the process, we transcend not only Western psychology but also Western philosophy in moving from thinking to seeing. One should also remember, however, that no matter how many books we read on enlightenment, practice is more important, however good the book….