OSHO RAJNEESH
on MUSIC:
Music comes closest to meditation. Music is a way
towards meditation and the most beautiful way. Meditation is the art of
hearing the soundless sound, the art of hearing the music of silence—what
the Zen people call the sound of one hand clapping. When you are utterly
silent, not a single thought passes your mind, there is not even a ripple
of any feeling in your heart. Then you start, for the first time, hearing
silence.
Silence has a music of its own. It is not dead; it is
tremendously alive. In fact, nothing is more alive than silence. Music
helps you from the outside to fall in tune with the inner. Music is a
device; it was invented by the buddhas. All that is beautiful in the
world, all that is valuable in the world has always been discovered by the
buddhas. Only they can discover because they have travelled the inner
country—the inner, immeasurable universe. Whatsoever they have found and
experienced in the inner world, they have tried to make something similar
on the outside for those who can only understand that which is objective,
who are not yet able to enter the interior of their own being, who are not
yet even aware that there is an inner world. Devices can be created on the
outside which can help. Listening to great music you suddenly become
silent—with no effort. Falling in tune with the music you lose your ego
with no effort. You become relaxed, you fall into a deep rest. You are
alert, awake, and yet in a subtle way drunk.
Whenever any art is
perfect it ends in meditation—it has to end in meditation. If it is not
leading you towards meditation then something has gone wrong. That's why
much of modern art is not art. Much modern music is not music; it simply
makes you sexually excited. It is just the opposite of real music. Real
music helps you to transcend your biology, your physiology, your
psychology. Real music takes you to the world of the beyond—what Buddha
calls the farther shore, even beyond the beyond.
To me, music and
meditation are two aspects of the same phenomenon. And without music,
meditation lacks something; without music, meditation is a little dull,
unalive. Without meditation, music is simply noise—harmonious, but noise.
Without meditation, music is an entertainment. And without music,
meditation becomes more and more negative, tends to be
death-oriented.
Hence my insistence that music and meditation
should go together. That adds a new dimension—to both. Both are enriched
by it. Remember the three Ms just as you remember the three Rs. The first
M is mathematics, the purest science. The second M is music, pure art. And
the third M is meditation, pure religion. Where all these three meet, you
attain the trinity. My approach is scientific. Even if I make illogical
statements, I make them very logically. Even if I assert paradoxes, they
are asserted in a logical way. Whatsoever I am saying has a mathematics
behind it, a method, a certain scientific approach. I am not an
unscientific person. My science serves my religion; the science is not the
end but it is a beautiful beginning.
And my approach is artistic,
aesthetic. I cannot help you unless this energy field becomes musical.
Music is pure art. And if it is joined with mathematics, it becomes a
tremendously powerful instrument to penetrate into your interior. Of
course, it will not be complete unless meditation is the highest peak, the
purest religion. And we are trying to create the ultimate synthesis. This
is my trinity: mathematics, music, meditation. This is my trimurti—three
faces of God. You can attain to God through one face, but then your
experience of God will not be so rich as it will be when you attain two
faces. But it will still lack something unless you attain all the three
faces. When you know God as a trinity, when you have come through all the
three dimensions, your experience, your nirvana, your enlightenment, will
be the richest. My effort here is to give you a total religion, which
contains all the three Ms in it...The journey is not going to be dull, it
is going to be very alive. We are going to move towards God in such a
multidimensional way that each moment of the journey is going to be
precious.
(Sourced from The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha,
Vol 1 chapter 2 and Vol 12 chapter 4, Courtesy: Osho World Foundation).
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