19 Oct It is very rarely that you are conscious. (OSHO)
Man as he is is utterly unconscious. He is nothing but his habits, the sum total of his habits.
Man is a robot. Man is not yet man.
Unless consciousness enters into your being, you will remain a machine.
That’s why the Sufis say man is a machine. It is from the Sufis that Gurdjieff introduced the idea to the West that man is a machine.
It is very rarely that you are conscious.
In your whole seventy years’ life, if you live the ordinary so-called life then you will not know even seven moments of awareness in your whole life.
And even if you know those seven moments or less, they will be only accidental.
For example, you may know a moment of awareness if somebody suddenly comes and puts a revolver on your heart. In that moment, your thinking, your habitual thinking, stops. For a moment you become aware, because it is so dangerous, you cannot remain ordinarily asleep.
In some dangerous situation you become aware. Otherwise you remain fast asleep. You are perfectly skillful at doing your things mechanically.
Just stand by the side of the road and watch people, and you will be able to see that they are all walking in their sleep. All are sleep-walkers, somnambulists.
And so are you.
Just watch yourself. The things that you are doing, you have done so many times. The ways you react, you have been reacting always. In the same situation you always do the same thing.
You are feeling nervous and you take out your cigarette and you start smoking.
It is a reaction; whenever you have felt nervous you have done it.
You are a machine. It is just a built-in program in you now.
You feel nervous, your hand goes into the pocket, the packet comes out.
It is almost like a machine doing things.
You take the cigarette out, you put the cigarette in your mouth, you light the cigarette, and this is all going on mechanically.
This has been done millions of times, and you are doing it again.
And each time you do this it is strengthened.
The machine becomes more mechanical, the machine becomes more skillful.
The more you do it, the less awareness is needed to do it.
Unio Mystica
Osho
