Focus on the gap during your daily activities

What the Method Is

The core instruction for this meditation technique, as given by Shiva, is: “When in worldly activity, keep attentive between the two breaths, and so practicing, in a few days, be born anew.”. This method builds upon the earlier breath-awareness techniques by integrating them into one’s daily life.

How It Is Done

To practice this method, you should:

  • Identify the gap between breaths: Observe the fleeting moment when the incoming breath stops just before turning out, and again when the outgoing breath stops just before turning in. This is a very short duration, requiring keen observation.
  • Practice continuously during activity: Unlike practices done in isolation, this technique must be done while engaged in worldly activities. This means keeping your attention fixed on the gap between breaths while you are eating, walking, or even going to sleep.
  • Do not stop the activity: Let your daily activities continue as normal. The goal is not to cease action but to remain focused on the breath gap amidst your doing.
  • Avoid distraction: Be fixed at the gap, even as worldly activities demand your attention. This trains your mind not to be distracted.
Commentaries and Insights
  • Creation of Two Layers of Existence: This practice allows you to develop two simultaneous layers of existence: doing (activity) and being (inner awareness). You are actively engaged in the world while remaining rooted in your inner self.
  • Life as a Psychodrama: By consistently practicing this method, your entire life can become like a “long drama”. You become an actor playing roles, consciously performing actions on the periphery while your attention remains centered in the breath gap. This breaks your identification with the roles you play, helping you to realize that you are not the role, but merely acting it out. If you forget the gap, you become identified with the role, mistaking it for your true life.
  • Becoming the Witness: Focusing your attention at the third eye, which can be implicitly involved through breath awareness, immediately allows you to become a witness to thoughts. Thoughts appear to run before you like a film, and you observe them without identification. This technique, by maintaining inner focus during external activity, helps in finding this witnessing self.
  • Shift from Attention to Awareness: Initially, attention is exclusive, meaning you withdraw focus from other things to concentrate on one. With practice, attention can transform into awareness, allowing you to simultaneously be conscious of multiple things (e.g., walking and breathing) without creating opposition between them. This deepens your ability to be a watcher of both your inner state and outer actions.
  • Inner Rebirth and Transcendence of Dreaming: By keeping attentive to the breath gap during worldly activity, the sutra promises that “in a few days, be born anew”. This signifies a profound inner transformation. Relatedly, Osho explains that if one can become aware of the subtle, invisible “prana” or breath essence (often through third-eye focus) and feel it filling the heart at the moment of sleep, they will become aware in dreams and gain “direction over dreams and over death itself”. This suggests that constant awareness during waking activity can penetrate sleep, reducing dreams and revealing deeper states of consciousness. Dreams are seen as a “completion” of incomplete daytime acts; an enlightened person lives totally, leaving nothing incomplete, thus having no need for dreams.
  • Preparation for Samadhi: The clarity and inner stillness developed through such practices are glimpses of a “lessening disease” (of the mind), preparing one for the sudden, non-gradual experience of samadhi or enlightenment. These techniques help cultivate the “alertness” necessary for this spiritual “explosion”.
  • Tantric Principles: This method aligns with Tantra’s emphasis on total acceptance of life as it is, rather than trying to suppress or deny any part of it. It is about transforming your quality of consciousness in the midst of life, rather than escaping from it. This allows one to find the unmoving center amidst the constantly changing periphery of life.
  • Simplicity and Ego: Osho notes that while the technique itself is simple, the mind often resists such simplicity because the ego is drawn to difficult challenges for validation. However, true transformation often comes from embracing these seemingly “simple” but profound methods.