The Door to Meditation by Osho
In the fourth step there is nothing to do. There is no question of doing anything because you will be completely exhausted; your whole being will be tired. Now let-go becomes an automatic process.
The technique is a sequence of stages, each following automatically from the preceding stage. If you continue the technique and do not add the fourth stage it will come by itself as a natural consequence of what has gone before.
The fourth stage is the moment of non-doing. That is what I call dhyana, meditation.
The first three stages are only steps; the fourth stage is the door. Then you are. There is nothing to do, neither breathing nor movement nor sound, just silence.
The three previous stages must be “done,” in a sense, but the fourth stage comes of its own accord. Then something happens that is not your doing. It comes as a grace: you have become a vacuum, an emptiness, and something fills you. Something spiritual pours into you when you are not.
You are not there because there is no doing; the ego disappears when there is no doer. The doer is the ego. So you can be in the first three steps because you are doing something — breathing, moving, shouting — but now, in the fourth stage, you cannot be, because there is no doing.
The ego is nothing but an accumulation of your memories of past actions, so the more a person has done, the more egocentric he is. Even if your doing has been in social service or religious work, whatsoever you have done becomes part of the ego. Ego is not an entity but the memory of your doings, so in those moments when there is no doing, you are not. Then something happens. Even though you are not doing anything you are totally conscious — silent, but conscious… exhausted, but conscious. Only consciousness is there: a consciousness of your deep let-go, a consciousness that now everything has disappeared.
When the fourth stage has ended, when it becomes a memory, then you can recollect it. But in the moment itself there is nothing, there is only consciousness. Because only nothingness is there, you cannot be conscious of anything. Afterwards you recognize that there has been a gap. Your mind functioned until a particular moment; then there was a gap, and then it began again. You feel this gap afterwards: the gap, the interval, becomes a part of your memory.
Our memory records events and this gap is a great event, it is a great phenomenon. Mind is a mechanism. It records everything; it is just like the tape recorder that we are using here. The recorder will record two things: when we speak, the words are recorded; and when we are not speaking, the silence, the gap, is also recorded. Even when we are not speaking, something is being recorded — the silence, the gap. In the same way, the mechanism of the mind is always there recording everything. In fact, it is even keener, more sensitive, when there is a gap. The tape recorder can blur what I am saying, but it cannot blur my silence. The gap will be recorded more intensely; there is no possibility of error.
So the gap is remembered… and the gap is blissful. In a way a memorable event is a burden, a tension, while the gap is a calm, blissful interval. This gap is dhyana, meditation.
Osho, “The Great Challenge”