Everyone has experienced moments of awakening when time seems to stop and you are suddenly aware of every movement, every sound, every thought. Awareness, says Osho, is the key to being self-directed, centered, and free in every aspect of our lives.

How to attain to this prayer, to this silence? How to be in this prayer, in this silence? Whatsoever you can do will be useless; that is the greatest problem. For a religious seeker this is the greatest problem, because whatsoever he can do will lead nowhere -- because doing is not relevant. You can sit in a particular posture: that is your doing. You must have seen Buddha's posture. You can sit in Buddha's posture: that will be a doing. For Buddha himself this posture happened. It was not a cause for his silence; rather, it was a by-product.

When the mind is not, when the being is totally silent, the body follows like a shadow. The body takes a particular posture -- the most relaxed possible, the most passive possible. But you cannot do otherwise. You cannot take a posture first and then make silence follow. Because we see a Buddha sitting in a particular posture, we think that if this posture is followed then the inner silence will follow. This is a wrong sequence. For Buddha the inner phenomenon happened first, and then this posture followed.

Look at it through your own experience: when you get angry, the body takes a particular posture, your eyes become blood-red, your face takes a particular expression. Anger is inside, and then the body follows. Not only outwardly: inwardly also, the whole chemistry of the body changes. Your blood runs fast, you breathe in a different way, you are ready to fight or take flight. But anger happens first, then the body follows.

Start from the other pole: make your eyes red, create fast breathing, do whatsoever you feel is done by the body when anger is there. You can act, but you cannot create anger inside. An actor is doing the same every moment. When he is acting a role of love, he is doing whatsoever is done by the body when love happens inside -- but there is no love. The actor may be doing better than you, but love will not follow. He will be more apparently angry than you in real anger, but it is just false. Nothing is happening inside.

Whenever you start from without, you will create a false state. The real always happens first in the center, and then the waves reach to the periphery. That is why this sutra says that prayer is silence. The innermost center is in prayer. Start from there.

Even to keep awareness continuous for one minute is difficult, so one has to be aware that it is not child's play. So when you are trying to be aware of the small things of life, you have to remember that many times you will forget. You will go far away into something else. The moment you remember, don't feel guilty -- that is one of the traps.

If you start feeling guilty, then you cannot come back to the awareness that you were practicing. There is no need to feel guilty, it is natural. Don't feel repentance. It is simple, and it happens to every seeker. Accept it as natural; otherwise you will be caught in repentance, in the guilt that you cannot remember even for a few moments and you go on forgetting.

Mahavira is the first man in history who has actually worked out that if a man can remember, be aware for forty-eight minutes continuously, that's enough -- he will become enlightened, nobody can prevent him. Just forty-eight minutes... but it is difficult even for forty-eight seconds -- so many distractions.

My emphasis is: simply come back. Don't cry and weep for the spilled milk, that is stupid.

Don't think that you have attained something. That will become a barrier. These are patterns where one is lost. Just a little gain and one thinks one has come home. Go on working slowly, patiently. There is no hurry -- you have eternity at your disposal.

Don't try to be speedy. That impatience will not help. Awareness is not like seasonal flowers that grow in six weeks' time and are then gone. Awareness is like the cedars of Lebanon which take hundreds of years to grow; but they remain for thousands of years and rise to one hundred and fifty feet, two hundred feet high in the sky. They are really very proud people.

Awareness grows very slowly, but it grows. One has to just be patient.

As it grows you will start feeling many things which you have never felt before. For example, you will start feeling that you are carrying many tensions in your body of which you have never been aware because they are subtle tensions. Now your awareness is there you can feel those very subtle, very delicate tensions.