Golden flower meditation

The process is:

At least twice a day – the best times are early in the morning, just before you get out of your bed. The moment you feel you are alert, awake, do it for twenty minutes. Do it first thing in the morning! – don’t get out of the bed. Do it there, then and there, immediately! – because when you are coming out of sleep you are very very delicate, receptive.

When you are coming out of sleep you are very fresh, and the impact will go very deep. When you are just coming out of your sleep you are less in the mind than ever. Hence some gaps are there through which the method will penetrate into your innermost core.

And early in the morning, when you are awakening, and when the whole earth is awakening, there is a great tide of awakening energy all over the world. Use that tide; don’t miss that opportunity.

All ancient religions used to pray early in the morning when the sun rises, because the rising of the sun is the rising of all the energies in existence. In that moment you can simply ride on the rising energy wave; it will be easier.

By the evening it will be difficult, energies will be falling back; then you will be fighting against the current. In the morning you will be going with the current.

So the best time to begin is in the early morning, immediately, just when you are half-asleep, half-awake. And the process is so simple. It needs no posture, no yogasana, no bath is needed, nothing.

You simply lie down, as you are lying down in your bed, on your back. Keep your eyes closed.

When you breathe in, just visualize great light entering from your head into your body, as if a sun has risen just close to your head – golden light pouring into your head. You are just hollow and the golden light is pouring into your head, and going, going, going, deep, deep, and going out through your toes. When you breathe in, do it with this visualization.

And when you breathe out, visualize another thing: darkness entering through your toes, a great dark river entering through your toes, coming up, and going out through the head. Do slow, deep breathing so you can visualize. Go very slowly. And just out of sleep you can have very deep and slow breaths because the body is rested, relaxed.

Let me repeat: breathing in, let golden light come into you through your head, because it is there that the Golden Flower is waiting. That golden light will help. It will cleanse your whole body and will make it absolutely full of creativity. This is male energy.

Then when you exhale, let darkness, the darkest you can conceive, like a dark night, river-like, come from your toes upwards – this is feminine energy: it will soothe you, it will make you receptive, it will calm you, it will give you rest – and let it go out of the head. Then inhale again, and golden light enters in.

Do it for twenty minutes early in the morning.

And then the second best time is when you are going back to sleep, in the night.

Lie down on the bed, relax for a few minutes. When you start feeling that now you are wavering between sleep and waking, just in that middle, start the process again, and continue for twenty minutes. If you fall asleep doing it, it is the best, because the impact will remain in the superconscious and will go on working.

And after a three-month period you will be surprised: the energy that was constantly gathering at the muladhar, at the lowest, the sex center, is no more gathering there. It is going upwards.

Just the other day somebody had asked a question. He said that he has seen the most beautiful women around here that he has ever seen anywhere else, but they are non-erotic.

Why is it so? It is so, his observation is right. If you meditate deeply you will become non-erotic. You will have a different kind of beauty, but it will not be erotic. It will start having the flavor of spirituality. It will start having the subtleness of grace, not the grossness of sexuality.

Sex is gross because it is the lowest rung of your ladder. As energies move upwards a totally different kind of beauty and grace arises in you, which is divine. You become less and less of the body and more and more of the spirit.

If you do this simple method for three months, you will be surprised: there is no need to repress. Transformation has started happening.

A man who holds to the way of conservation all through life may reach the stage of the golden flower…

And if you can go on doing this for your whole life, one day it is going to happen.

The Master Lu-tsu says ‘your whole life’ so that you remain patient. It can happen any day, it can happen today, or tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. It depends with what intensity, with what sincerity you work for it, with what longing, what totality you go into it. And the day the Golden Flower blooms in you is the day of Buddhahood. You have attained the greatest treasure there is.

Osho, The Secret of Secrets, Vol 2, Ch 13