Osho Quotes on Regularity in Meditation
- Choose one meditation and then put all your effort in it. That effort has to be very regular because will is created only out of regularity. It has to be very persistent and a continuity has to be maintained. Even to miss for one day is to destroy much — and at least one hour every day has to be given to it.
- Even if you have to give up a meal, do it… but do not give up meditation. The more regular you are, the greater depth you will attain. And meditation is such a delicate thing that it takes months to grow but just a day or two to wither away. A delicate thing needs much regularity, continuity. Meditation is the highest; everything else is secondary. You will not miss much by missing a day’s sleep. One can do without sleeping for five to seven days. It is okay if you miss a meal; man can survive without food for three months. You can go without drinking water for a day; you will not die. But usually, people give much more importance to such petty things and think that for a day or two they can do without the things that are really significant. But let it be remembered that nothing will go wrong if you do not fulfil the petty things of your routine. You will not gain anything by doing them, neither will you be a loser by not doing them. But meditation is of the highest, and through it god is attained. If you do not meditate, you will not know what you were to gain and what you have missed; you will really not know what you have lost.
- Remember, this is the case with you, and with everybody. You can miss a meditation just because in the morning you are feeling a little too lazy and too sleepy. And who knows? — that meditation could have been a conversion. Nobody knows. You may have missed something, and you will never become aware that you missed. Your sleep is really deep. You live an almost unconscious life.
- The whole world is non-meditative. The people you will be meeting, working with, talking to, are all non-meditative. When you carry a high energy, people who are not that high simply suck you — unknowingly. It is just as if there is water — it will start flowing downwards. All energies move downward. People are just like valleys. It is natural that your energy starts flowing towards them. Their level is lower than yours. Hence regularity is very very significant. Otherwise you create something and if you think ‘Now I have created enough; I am feeling very good’, for a few days you will feel good, but then again the energy will be lost. If you continue regularly, by and by your level goes higher and higher and higher. One day it suddenly happens that you evaporate. Then meditation is just a natural thing. Whether you do it or not does not matter. Non-doing, you are still in it. WaLking, you are in it; eating, you are in it; working, you are in it; sleeping, you are in it. Then meditation becomes your whole life. Before that happens, regularity has to be maintained.
- Regularity of meditativeness. Remember, it is very difficult to create meditation, it is very easy to lose it. Anything higher takes much arduous effort to create, but it can disappear within a moment. To lose contact with it is very easy. That is one of the qualities of the higher. It is like growing a roseflower — just a little hard wind and the rose has withered and the petals have fallen, or some animal has entered the garden and the rose is eaten. It is very easy to lose it, and it was so long a journey to create it. And whenever there is a conflict between the higher and the lower, always remember, the lower wins easily. If you clash a roseflower with a rock, the roseflower is going to die, not the rock. The rock may not even become aware that there has been a clash, that it has killed something beautiful.
- All knowing becomes knowledge. The moment it becomes knowledge, drop it. It is just like dust gathers on the mirror; every day you have to clean it. On the mirror of your mind dust gathers, dust of experience: it becomes knowledge. Clean it. That’s why every day meditation is needed. Meditation is nothing but cleaning the mirror of your mind. Clean it continuously! If you can clean it every moment of your life, then there is no need to sit separately for meditation.
- The teaching of the buddhas is: Find time and a place to remain unoccupied. That’s what meditation is all about. Find at least one hour every day to sit silently doing nothing, utterly unoccupied, just watching whatsoever passes by inside. In the beginning you will be very sad, looking at things inside you; you will feel only darkness and nothing else, and ugly things and all kinds of black holes appearing. You will feel agony, no ecstasy at all. But if you persist, persevere, the day comes when all these agonies disappear, and behind the agonies is the ecstasy.
- Thoughts are like dirt, clinging to the mirror of the mind. Thoughts, desires, imaginations, memories — all are forms of dirt. Because of them, the purity of the mind is lost. Because of them, the capacity to reflect, the mirror-like quality of the mind is lost. A continuous cleaning is needed. So, meditation is not something that you do once and forget about, because each moment of life you go on gathering dust. It is just like a traveller who is travelling. Each day he goes on gathering dust on his clothes, on his body. Every day he has to take a bath to cleanse his body. Again the next day he will be gathering. Meditation is like a daily bath. It is not something that once you have done it, you are finished. It should become like a natural thing, matter of fact. As you eat, as you go to sleep, as you take a bath, meditation should become a natural part of your life. At least twice a day you should cleanse your mind. The best times are the morning, when you are getting ready for the day, the workaday world…. Cleanse your mind so you have clarity, so you have transparency, so you don’t commit errors, mistakes, so you don’t have any evil thoughts, so you don’t have any egoistic thoughts… you go in a purer way to the world. You don’t go with corrupting seeds. And the next best time is before you go to sleep, again meditate. The whole day the dust collects. Clean the mind again… fall asleep.
- Millions of people miss meditation because meditation has taken on a wrong connotation. It looks very serious, looks gloomy, has something of the church in it, looks as if it is only for people who are dead, or almost dead, who are gloomy, serious, have long faces, who have lost festivity, fun, playfulness, celebration. These are the qualities of meditation. A really meditative person is playful: life is fun for him, life is a LEELA, a play. He enjoys it tremendously. He is not serious. He is relaxed. Sit silently, relaxed, loose, and just allow your attention to flow towards the gaps. Slip from the edges of words into the intervals. Let intervals become more prominent and allow words to fade away. It is just as if you are looking at a blackboard, and I put a small white dot on it: you can see either the dot, then the blackboard goes far away. or you can see the blackboard, then the dot becomes secondary, a shadow phenomenon. You can go on changing your attention between the figure and the background. Words are figures; silence is the background. Words come and go; silence remains. When you were born you were born as a silence — just intervals and intervals, gaps and gaps. Infinite emptiness you came with, unbounded emptiness you brought with you in life — then you started collecting words.
- You are not the mind, just as you are not the body. You are part of an immortal life. Your body, your mind are all centered on a false self. As you go beyond the self, you suddenly discover a sky that has no limits. A few have called it God, a few have called it Brahma, but the best word is used by Mahavira and Gautam Buddha: they have called it moksha. Moksha means “total freedom” — freedom from all that binds you, freedom from all that is false, freedom from all that is going to die. And as you become free from all that is false and mortal, immediately doors of immortality open for you. The VEDAS have declared you amritasya putrah: sons and daughters of immortality. And except meditation, there has never been any way and there will never be any way. Those who miss meditation miss the whole dance of life. I hope that none of you misses that dance, that song, that music of eternity.
- Meditation has become almost non-existential. You don’t have time to meditate, because meditation means sitting silently without doing anything and the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. Sitting silently for a few moments is impossible. The television — you cannot miss this football match! And people become so much involved and identified that they shout, they jump up and down in front of their television sets because their side is winning and they have to give moral support.
- In the morning when you feel the sleep has left you, don’t open your eyes immediately. The mind has the tendency to open the eyes immediately. You miss a great opportunity… because when sleep leaves you and life energies are wakening inside, you can watch them, and that watching will be very helpful for going into deeper meditation.
