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.”
Osho, The First Principle, Talk #4
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