So the eastern emphasis is not on thinking, but on seeing. You cannot think about God, but you can see. You cannot come to any conclusion about God, but you can realize. It can become an experience. You cannot get to it through information, through knowledge, through scriptures, through theories and philosophies; no, you cannot get to it. You can get into it only if you throw all knowledge. All that you have heard and read and collected, all the dust that your mind has collected, the whole past, must be put aside. Then your eyes are fresh, then your consciousness is unclouded, and then you can see it.

It is here and now – you are clouded. You have not to go somewhere else to find the divine or the truth – it is here. It is right there where you are. And it has always been so – only you are clouded, your eyes are closed. So the question is not to think more; the question is how to come to a non-thinking consciousness. That’s why I say that meditation and philosophy are anti each other. Philosophy thinks, meditation comes to a no-thinking consciousness. And eastern philosophies are not really philosophies. In the West, philosophies exist; in the East, only religious realizations.

Of course, when a master happens, or a Kanad or a Patanjali happens, when someone comes to realize the absolute, he makes statements about it. Those statements are different from the Aristotelian statements, from western philosophical conclusions. The difference is this: a Kanad, a master, first comes to realize – the realization is the first thing – and then he makes statements about it. Experience is primary, and then he expresses it. Aristotle, Hegel and Kant, they think, and then through thinking and logical argument and dialectics, they reach particular conclusions. These conclusions are reached through thinking, through mind, not through any practice of meditation. Then they make assertions, then they make statements. The source is different.

For a master, his statements are only as a vehicle to communicate. He never says that through his communication you will achieve the truth. If you can understand Buddha, that doesn’t mean you have achieved the truth; that simply means you have gathered knowledge. You will have to pass through meditations, deep ecstasies, deep pools of the mind, only then will you come to the truth.

So truth is reached through a certain existential experience. It is existential, it is not mental. You must change to know it and to be it. If you remain the same and go on collecting information, you will become a great scholar, a philosopher, but you will not be enlightened. You will remain the same man; there will have been no mutation.

That’s why I said that philosophy is one dimension Meditation is quite the contrary, the very opposite, the polar-opposite dimension. So don’t think about life; rather, live it in depth. And don’t think about ultimate problems; rather, enter this very moment in the ultimate. And the ultimate is not in the future. It is always there, timelessly there.

Someone else has also asked a similar question. He has asked:

Osho,
Can problems be solved through thinking?