Meditation means awareness, alertness, watchfulness, witnessing (Osho)

The last words of Gautam the Buddha to his disciples were ‘Be a lamp unto yourself.’ This is the most pregnant message ever. The whole philosophy of meditation is contained in it.

Meditation means that no outer light is going to help, no outer treasure is going to make you rich, no outer conquest is going to make you a real conqueror. The real treasure is within you and the real conquest has to be made there. 

It is such a ridiculous thing that we go on searching for something which we have already got, but we never look within. We look everywhere else we can go to the very corners of the earth or even to the moon in search of some illusory pleasure — just one territory we never enter, and that is our own being.

Meditation is a simple technique of entering it. Meditation means awareness, alertness, watchfulness, witnessing. Witness your actions, witness your thoughts witness your feelings so that slowly slow you can see you are neither the body nor the mind nor heart — that you are the witness of it all.

The moment you know that you are only a witness, a pure mirror reflecting everything, and you are not identified with any reflection, suddenly you discover your inner light. It is already there, but we have to shift our consciousness. A one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn is needed, and it happens only by witnessing, there is no other method. When you are witnessing, anything one thing becomes clear, that you are not the thing that you are witnessing, obviously; you are the witness of it.

Go on, deeper and deeper. When nothing is left to witness, you have witnessed all objects that you can witness and you have rejected them knowing ‘I am not that,’ when everything is eliminated, only you are left — just the mirror and nothing else; suddenly the shift: consciousness turns upon itself.

That moment of turning in is the greatest moment in life. In that very moment you know who you are and you know what god is, and you know what bliss is, you know what truth is, freedom is, what eternity is. All that is worth knowing is known — immediately, instantly. And then you can go on living in the world but you will be living with a totally different centre, with a totally different perspective: you will be in the world but absolutely out of it. That’s the way of sannyas: to be in the world and absolutely out of it.