What Is
Meditation?
Excerpt 14. Meditation Is Freedom
If life goes naturally,
beautifully, if there are no life-negative teachers, if there are no
politicians and priests to distract you – then nearabout the age of forty-two,
exactly as sexual maturity comes, comes meditation maturity. Nearabout the age
of forty-two, one starts feeling to fall inwards. Near the age of fourteen, one
starts falling towards the other, becomes extrovert. Love is extroversion;
relationship is to think of the other. Meditation is introversion; meditation
is to think of one's own self, of one's own center.
Between the age of fourteen and
the age of forty-two there comes a change. By and by one lives life, knows what
love is, knows its fulfillment and its frustration, knows its joys and its
sadness, knows its beauty and its ugliness, knows that there are moments of
great ecstasy and then great valleys of darkness. Then one starts by and by
moving towards his own self, because to depend on the other can never be really
ecstatic. If your joy depends on the other, that joy can never have the quality
of freedom in it. And a joy which does not have the quality of freedom is not
much joy. If your are dependent on the other, then there is a limitation.
And the joy that comes through
love is momentary. You can meet with the other only for moments, and then again
you are separate and you fall apart. Just in the middle of it you fall apart.
Just for a moment you become joined together. Then one starts thinking.
"Is there a way to become one with existence and never to fall apart
again?" That's what meditation is. Love is joining with existence through
another person for only moments. Meditation is getting joined together with
existence eternally. "Yoga" means to join together.
This has to happen somewhere in
the deepest core. And then there is joy and then there is freedom. And then
there is bliss and there is no dark valley following it. Then happiness is
eternal, then celebration is eternal.
Excerpted from 'The
First Principle' by Osho
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