Consider any area of your present form as limitlessly spacious. Mind creates limits. If you don't think, you move into the unlimited. Or, from a different door, you can try with the unlimited and you will fall from the mind. The mind cannot co-exist with the unlimited, with the undefined, unbordered, infinite.

The mind cannot exist with the unbordered, so if you can try something limitless, the mind will disappear. This technique says: consider any area of your present form as limitlessly spacious. Any area. You can just close your eyes and imagine that your head has become infinite. Now there are no boundaries to it. It goes on and on and on and there is no boundary to it. Your head has become the whole cosmos, without any boundaries. If you can imagine this, suddenly thoughts will stop. If you can imagine your head as infinite, thinking will not be there.

Thinking can exist only in a very narrow mind. The narrower it is, the better for thinking. The greater the mind, the less the thinking, and when the mind becomes total space, there is no thinking at all.

What is Buddha Thinking?

Buddha is sitting under his Bodhi tree. Can you imagine what he is thinking? He is not thinking at all. His head is the whole cosmos. He has become spacious, infinitely spacious.

This technique is good for those who can imagine, it will not be good for all. For those who can imagine, and for whom the imagination becomes so real that you cannot really say whether it is imagination or real, it will work. Otherwise it will not be of much use.

But don't be worried, because at least thirty per cent of people are capable of such imagination. These people are very powerful. If your mind is not very educated, it will be easy for you to imagine. If it is educated, then the creativity is lost, then your mind is just a storage space, a bank.

And the whole education system is a banking system. They go on banking and dumping stuff onto you. Whatsoever they feel has to be dumped onto you, they do. They use your mind for storage -- then you cannot imagine. Then whatsoever you do is just repeating that which has been taught to you.

So those who are uneducated, they can use this technique very easily. And those who have come out of university without being distorted by it, they can also use it. Those who are really still alive, even after so much education, they can do it. Women can do it more easily than men. All those who are imaginative, dreamers, they can do it very easily.

Is This Technique For You?

But how to know whether you can do it or not? You can do a small experiment. Just lock both your hands together and close your eyes. For five minutes, any time, relax in a chair, lock both your hands together, and just imagine that the hands are so locked that even if you try, you cannot open them. It will look absurd to you because they are not locked but you just go on imagining that they are. For five minutes go on thinking, and then say three times in your mind, "Now I will try to open my hands but I know it is impossible. They are locked and they cannot be opened." Then try to open them.

Thirty per cent of you will not be able to open your hands. They will be really locked, and the more you try, the more you will feel that it is impossible. You will start perspiring -- you cannot open your own hands. Then this method is for you. Then you can try this method. If you can easily open your hands and nothing has happened, this method is not for you. You will not be able to do it.

But don't get scared if your hands do not open, and don't try too much, because the more you try, the more difficult it will be. Just close your eyes again and imagine that now your hands are unlocked. You will need five minutes again to go on imagining that when you try to open them, they will open immediately. Unlock the same way as you locked them, just through imagination. And if this is possible, that your hands become locked just by imagination and you yourself cannot open them, then this technique will work miracles for you.

And in these one hundred and twelve techniques [of The Book of Secrets] there are many which work with imagination. For all those techniques this hand-locking experiment will be good. Just remember, experiment whether or not the technique is for you.

Consider any area of your present form as limitlessly spacious. Any area.... You can consider the whole body. Just close your eyes and consider that the whole body is spreading, spreading, spreading, and then the boundaries are lost. It has become infinite.

What will happen? You cannot even conceive of what will happen. If you can conceive that you have become the cosmos -- that is the meaning, the infinite -- all that is bound up with your ego will not be found there. Your name, your identity, all will be lost. Your poorness or richness, your health or your disease, your miseries -- all will be lost, because they are part of the finite body. With an infinite body they cannot exist.

And once you know this, come back to your finite body. But now you can laugh. And even in the finite you can have the sense, the feel of the infinite. Then you can carry it.

Try. And it will be good if you try from the head, because that is the base of all illness. Close your eyes, lie down on the ground or sit on a chair and relax. Just look within the head. Feel the walls of the head spreading, expanding. If you feel that it will be very staggering, then try it slowly. First think that your head has come to occupy the whole room. You will actually feel your skin touching the walls. If you can lock your hands, this will happen. You will feel the coolness of the walls which your skin is touching. You will feel the pressure. Go on moving. Your head has gone beyond -- now the house has come within your head, then the whole town has come within your head.

Go on spreading. Within three months, slowly, you can come to the point where the sun rises in your head, it starts moving in your head. Your head has become infinite. This will give you a deep freedom such as you have never known. And all the misery that belongs to this narrow mind will disappear.

In such a state, Upanishadic seers could say, Aham Brahmasmi -- "I am the Divine, I am the Absolute." In such ecstasy AnalaHak was uttered. Mansoor cried in ecstasy, "AnalaHak, AnalaHak -- I am God." Mohammedans couldn't understand him. Really, no sectarian will be able to understand such things. They thought he had gone mad, but he was not mad, he was the sanest person possible. They thought he had become an egoist. He said, "I am the God." So they killed him.

While he was being killed, with his hands cut off, he was laughing and he was saying, "AnalaHak, Aham Brahmasmi -- I am God." Someone asked, "Mansoor, why are you laughing? You are being murdered."

He said, "You cannot murder me. I am the whole." You can murder only a part. How can you murder the whole? Whatsoever you do to it cannot make any difference. Mansoor is reported to have said, "If you really wanted to kill me, you should have come at least ten years before. Then I was. Then you could have killed me, but now you cannot kill me, because I am no more. I myself have killed the ego which you could have killed and murdered."

Mansoor was practicing certain Sufi methods of this type, the type in which one goes on expanding until the expanse becomes so infinite that one is no more. Then the whole is and the individual is not.

Expansion vs. Limitation

In these past few decades, these past two or three decades in the West, psychedelic drugs have become very significant. And the attraction is really one of expansion, because under the influence of the drug your narrowness, your limitations, are lost.

But it is a chemical change, nothing spiritual happens out of it. It is just a forced violence on the system -- you force the system to break. You can have a glimpse that you are no longer confined to anything, that you have become infinite, liberated.

But this is because of the chemical enforcement. Once back, you will be again in the narrow body, and now this body will feel more narrow than before. Again you will be confined to the same imprisonment, but now the imprisonment will be more intolerable because you have had a glimpse. And because that glimpse was through a chemical, you are not master of it -- you will become a slave, you will become addicted. Now you will need it more and more.

This technique is a spiritual psychedelic. If you practice it, a spiritual change will take place which will not be chemical and of which you will be the master.

Master or Slave?

Take it as a criterion: if you are the master, then the thing is spiritual. If you are the slave, then beware -- the thing may appear to be spiritual, but it cannot be. Anything that becomes addictive, powerful, enslaving, imprisoning, is leading you towards more slavery, more unfreedom -- whatsoever the appearance.

So take it as a criterion that whatsoever you do, your mastery must grow through it. You must become more and more the master of it. It is said, and I repeat it again and again, that when meditation has really happened to you, you will not need to do it. If you still need to do it, it has not yet really happened. Because that too has become a slavery.

Even meditation must disappear. A moment must come when you need not do anything. Then just as you are, you are Divine; just as you are, you are the bliss, the ecstasy.

But this technique is good for expansion, for expanding the consciousness. Before trying it, try the hand-locking experiment, so that you can feel. If your hands become locked, you have a very creative imagination -- it is not impotent. Then you can work miracles through it.

Article Source

The Book of Secrets: 112 Meditations to Discover the Mystery Within
by Osho.

For more information visit www.osho.org where there is an "Ask Osho" section where people can write their question. The web editors will find the nearest answer to the question from Osho who has answered thousands of questions from seekers over the years.

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About The Author

Osho is one of the best-known and most provocative spiritual teachers of the 20th century. Beginning in the 1970s he captured the attention of young people from the West who wanted to experience meditation and transformation. Even since his death in 1990, the influence of his teachings continues to expand, reaching seekers of all ages in virtually every country of the world. For more information, visit https://www.osho.com/