Feel, Don’t think

What the Method Is

The core instruction is to prioritise and cultivate direct feeling and sensation over mental thought, verbalisation, or intellectual analysis. It is a call to move beyond the mind’s tendency to divide, interpret, and create an unreal sense of self, towards a unifying, holistic experience of reality.

Specifically, this method instructs:

  • Feeling “I-ness”: To cultivate the pure sensation or feeling of your own being rather than verbalising “I am” or associating it with external identities. This is about knowing oneself as pure presence.
  • Feeling “My Thought”: While “thoughts” are primarily processes of the mind, the instruction to “feel” here implies a conscious awareness of emotions, moods, and the underlying energy of mental activity, moving to their source rather than suppressing or outwardly projecting them. It’s about witnessing mental phenomena from a deeper, non-identified place.
  • Feeling “Internal Organs – Me”: To develop deep sensitivity to the physical body and its sensations, not as a separate entity but as an extension of one’s being, or even as the vehicle for direct experience. This involves focusing on and experiencing various bodily phenomena directly.
How it is done

This “method” is an attitude and quality of awareness to be integrated into various meditation techniques and daily activities. Practical guidance can be drawn from numerous examples and principles:

  • Self-Remembering (“I-ness”):

    • Cultivate the pure sensation of your own being by feeling “I am,” without using words or thoughts, while performing any action such as walking, eating, or bathing.
    • Strip away external identities: Forget your name, family, religion, country, or social roles, and simply feel your “you-areness” as a pure, simple awareness.
    • Develop double-arrowed consciousness: When interacting with the world or your body, feel not only the external object (e.g., the touch of water) but also the internal “touched one” or “sensing one” – your own presence behind the senses.

  • Engaging with Emotions and Thoughts (My Thought):

    • When strong moods like anger, hate, love, or desire arise, do not project them onto others or suppress them.
    • Instead, move inward to the source from where these feelings are emerging. Use the energy of the mood as a pathway to your inner centre, feeling it intensely without judgment or externalisation. This allows the energy to return to its source, leading to release and clarity.
    • Be undisturbed in desire: When extreme desire grips you, consciously choose to remain undisturbed, witnessing the desire from a point within you that is separate from the disturbance.
    • Unminding Mind: Learn to remain in the middle between polar opposites (e.g., hate/love, anger/repentance). This continuous effort to stay in the middle, without choosing or intellectualising, allows the mind to cease its extremes and eventually dissolve, leaving no-mind.

  • Direct Body Sensation (Internal Organs – Me):

    • General Sensitivity Cultivation: Make a conscious effort to feel your own body and its sensations throughout the day. This includes the feel of your bed, the water while showering, or simply your breath. Lovingly touch yourself or others (e.g., through massage) to enhance sensitivity.
    • Weightlessness: While sitting or lying, feel yourself becoming weightless. Go on feeling this lack of weight until you realise you are not the body. This helps to break identification with the physical form.
    • Observing Pain/Sensations: If there is pain in the body, concentrate on the painful part, shrinking the perceived area of pain until it disappears, revealing a state of bliss. This trains you to observe the body without identifying with its sensations. You can even pierce a sensitive spot with a pin and gently enter the piercing, observing the sensation without identification.
    • Spinal Awareness: Focus your attention on the subtle, non-material nerve within the spinal column, visualising it as a delicate, silver thread. This can be done by first visualising the physical spine and then moving to the subtle nerve.
    • Feeling Inner Sound: Close ears and contract the rectum, then remain with what is happening inside, feeling the body filled with sound, which helps dissolve thoughts and reveals an inner pillar of sound.

  • Transitioning from Sound to Pure Feeling: In practices involving sound or mantras (e.g., “Aum”), progress from audible intonation to less and less audibility, as feeling deepens. The aim is to move beyond the sound itself to the “most subtle feeling” that underlies it, eventually “leaving them aside” to be free. This requires deep alertness as the sound becomes more subtle.

Commentaries and Insights
  • Mind as a Barrier: Osho fundamentally distinguishes between the “mind” and “feeling”. The mind is analytical, discursive, and constantly divides, interprets, and creates problems through words, concepts, and thoughts. It leads to an unreal, superficial existence. Conversely, feeling is unifying, existential, and leads to direct experience of reality. The aim is to transcend the mind, as true reality lies beyond its reach.
  • Existential Knowing: Tantra is not a philosophy concerned with “why,” but a science focused on “how”. True understanding and transformation come through doing and direct experience (feeling), not through intellectual understanding or accumulating knowledge. Simply thinking about a technique or its results is futile; one must do it.
  • The Path to No-Mind: The cultivation of feeling over thinking is a direct path to the “no-mind” state, where thoughts cease and one is fully present in the moment. This state is the “highest possibility” and leads to the “buddha-mind”.
  • Total Acceptance and Non-Division: Tantra is a path of total acceptance. It advocates accepting oneself in totality, including all “animal instincts” and desires like anger, greed, and sex, without judgment or suppression. By truly understanding and feeling these energies at their source, without fighting them, they are transformed and dissolved, leading to inner unity and awareness.
  • Transformation of Energy: By refusing to dissipate energy through external projection or suppression of emotions, and instead feeling them at their source, this energy returns inward and leads to a profound transformation of one’s being. This is an effort of awareness, allowing energy to return to its source, making one a “magnetic centre”.
  • Subtlety and Indirectness: Spiritual happenings are delicate by-products that cannot be directly forced. The mind’s aggression or haste can destroy this delicate process. True results emerge indirectly when one is totally absorbed in the feeling of the act, without craving a specific outcome.
  • Truth is Already Present: The ultimate truth, enlightenment, or buddhahood is not something to be attained in the future, but is already present in your being. Meditation techniques are simply tools to make you alert and bring you back to the awareness of this inherent reality.
  • Simplicity vs. Depth: The techniques often appear surprisingly simple, leading the ego to dismiss them in favour of more arduous challenges. However, these “simple” methods are powerful because they touch fundamental realities directly.
  • Effort and Spontaneity: While initial effort is needed to cultivate awareness and sensitivity, particularly to overcome conditioning, the ultimate goal is to achieve an effortless, spontaneous state of being and feeling. Over-straining or forcing can be counterproductive.
  • Warnings and Obstacles:
    • The mind is cunning and deceptive, constantly rationalising reasons not to engage in authentic practice or to postpone it. It prefers intellectual understanding over direct experience.
    • Intellectual understanding alone is insufficient and can be a barrier to actual transformation.
    • Trying to imagine a result without truly feeling it is self-deception. Sensitising the body is crucial for genuine feeling.
    • If any technique creates undue discomfort or feels “unbearable,” it is advised to stop and try another method that feels more harmonious.
    • Total presence is key: If you are not present and aware, whatever you do will bring suffering. This method aims to make you more present and real.