Intimacy with one woman or one man is better than having many superficial relationships. Love is not a seasonal flower, it takes years to grow. And only when it grows does it go beyond biology, and start having something of the spiritual in it. Just being with many women or many men will keep you superficial — entertained maybe, but superficial; occupied certainly, but that occupation is not going to help in inward growth.
To me, music and meditation are two aspects of the same phenomenon. And without music, meditation lacks something; without music, meditation is a little dull, unalive. Without meditation, music is simply noise — harmonious, but noise. Without meditation, music is an entertainment. And without music, meditation becomes more and more negative, tends to be death-oriented. Hence my insistence that music and meditation should go together. That adds a new dimension — to both. Both are enriched by it.
Watch anything in the mind, and you are cut off. Watching is a sword. If a thought is moving in your mind, just watch it — and suddenly you will see the thought is there, you are here, and there is no bridge left. Don’t watch, and you become identified with the thought, you become it; watch, and you are not it. Mind possesses you because you have forgotten how to watch. Learn it.
When you encounter death, when you see it face to face, when you don’t avoid, when you don’t dodge, when you don’t escape, when you don’t create a cloud around you, when you face it, encounter it, the fact of death, suddenly you become aware that death is life. The deeper you move into death, the deeper you move in life because, Heraclitus says, the opposites meet and mingle, they are one.
Zen lives in the present. The whole teaching is: how to be in the present, how to get out of the past which is no more and how not to get involved in the future which is not yet, and just to be rooted, centered, in that which is. The whole approach of Zen is of immediacy, but because of that it can bridge the past and the future. It can bridge many things: it can bridge the past and the future, it can bridge the East and the West, it can bridge body and soul. It can bridge the unbridgeable worlds: this world and that, the mundane and the sacred.
In my vision, education is nothing but another form of meditation. All that usually goes on in the name of education is secondary. The priority should be given to meditation — education of the inner. Unless you become acquainted with yourself, all your knowledge is useless.
In samadhi the ego is dropped. Now you don’t have any limitation, no definition, you are merged with the whole — but merged with the whole in a tremendous awareness. You are not asleep. Worries have disappeared, because worries exist only with the ego. So there are two ways to drop the worries — either become part of a group, or become part of the superconscious plane.
That is one of the great secrets of life, that life is a movement. And if you are stuck somewhere you lose contact with life.
My sannyas is not a character that will confine you. My sannyas is an awareness that will give you more and more freedom. And if one day you feel that my sannyas is making a prison for you, then drop out of it — that will be the true sannyas spirit. But never allow it to become an imprisonment.
We think we love. And if you think that you love, then there is no possibility for love to happen — because if this is love, then everything is closed. Make fresh efforts. Try to find in the other the real being that is hidden. Don’t take anybody for granted. Every individual is such a mystery that if you go on and on into him it is endless. But we get bored with the other — because just the periphery, and always the periphery.
Osho Quotes on Meditation Meditation is going beyond the mind. It has nothing to do with the mind — except going beyond it. It is not a faculty of the mind, it is transcendental to mind. When you can see...
