Happy in the morning

…Every night just before going to sleep, lie down on the bed and for five minutes simply repeat that in the morning you are going to feel incredibly happy. You have just to create a climate, that’s all.

It happens to many people, that the morning is depressing. It should not be so because the morning is the most alive time in twenty-four hours. One should be really more flowing, ecstatic, in the morning than at any other time, but it doesn’t happen. Many more people are very dull, sad, depressed – it takes many hours for them to come out of it; near about the time the afternoon is passing they become alert and awake. That creates another problem….

By the evening you become alert and awake, you would like to stay awake longer in the night, so people are very very happy in the night, which is a time to rest, but they are excited and happy so they cannot rest. If they go to sleep, sleep is not easy; thoughts continue because they are excited.

Now this is a very topsy-turvy state of affairs. In the morning you should be excited, full of energy, just bursting forth – that’s how it should be naturally – and by the evening you should become slow, ready to go into sleep, no thought, no excitement.

But that is not happening … and particularly in the West, not at all. The morning is the dullest time – the night and the club and the dance and this and that is the exciting time. So it is a vicious circle: when you are too excited in the night you cannot sleep well, when you cannot sleep well, in the morning you feel depressed. When you are depressed in the morning, again by the time you are awake and alert and alive the day has passed. So the vicious circle goes on; it has to be broken.

The most precious time is the morning. God is closer than ever in the morning, prayer is easier than ever in the morning; meditation simply happens without much effort in the morning. At other times you will have to make much effort and you will have to fight, will will be needed; in the morning surrender will do. But this is happening … the whole society is neurotic, not natural; everything has gone unnatural.

[When she makes the suggestion, she should simply feel that it is going to happen, not command that it should, Osho stresses, otherwise she will create a split inside herself and will be divided into the one who orders and the one being ordered. She should simply give herself the suggestion with the trust that it is going to happen… should just gently persuade herself….]

With this climate in the mind, that it is going to happen, you will be happy in the morning, very happy.

The second thing: in the morning, the moment you feel that you are awake, don’t open the eyes; first create the climate again that you are happy. Don’t say ‘I should be’, just ‘I am happy. I am happy’ ….Create that climate. Turn over this side and that and let it surround you. The earliest moment in the morning when you are just awake is the most potential moment, if you suggest anything it goes deep into your unconscious; just as in the night the last moment you are awake is the deepest-going moment.

These two moments are the most potential moments because you are very close to the unconscious. When you are falling into sleep you are leaving the territory of the conscious and coming closer to the unconscious. Soon the curtain will drop and you will go inside the unconscious, so you are very close. If by the time the curtain is falling you go on feeling that you are going to be happy, it is going to happen, because once the unconscious has heard it, it works. It is in the unconscious that it works.

And it is exactly the same in the morning: you are again coming out of the curtain – the curtain opens, you will be coming out. At that moment if you again feel that you are happy and the unconscious hears it, it becomes a seed-thought: you will feel that way. Just try it for seven days and if it starts working, continue it, because it costs nothing!

It takes only four, five minutes in the night and one minute in the morning but it can change the total quality of your life.

Osho, Far Beyond the Stars, Ch 10 (darshan diary)

Featured image credit to Natalia Blauth via Unsplash