Osho – Meditation is a process of rebirth. The first birth is only physiological, biological material. Don’t think that that’s all there is to life. Coming out of the womb of the mother is only an opportunity for a second birth, for the real birth. The day you come out of the womb of your psychology, you are really born. In India we have called the people who have known the truth, twice born, dwija. And unless one becomes twice born, one lives in vain.
Life has to be used as a jumping board for the beyond. It is an immense opportunity, but very few people have used it up to now. Once in a while a Jesus, a Buddha, a Lao Tzu, a Zarathustra, a Bahauddin — only once in a while a few people have used this life for reaching to a higher plane, to another life.
All that is needed is that you have to die to your past; only then you can be born anew. The child has to leave the womb, and he is going on an unknown journey, uncharted. He knows nothing about what is going to happen. He has no idea, no map, no guide. And for nine months he has lived very comfortably, in a cosy world, almost asleep, and his every need was fulfilled — no worry, no responsibility, no struggle, no anxiety, no anguish, no questions, no problems. He had lived the most comfortable and luxurious life that he will ever live. And it is going to be finished. But the child comes out of the mother’s womb because the womb, howsoever comfortable it is, is dark, meaningless. It is not life. There is no adventure. And without adventure. There is no possibility of life.
The child enters into the world of adventures, but that is nothing compared to the second birth. If you die to your mind… mind means the past, all that you have accumulated in the past. Mind is nothing but a memory system. If you die to the past then you enter really into the greatest adventure there is: you are reborn. That’s true resurrection, and it happens through meditation. Both things happens: dying to the past happens and birth to the present. And the present continues into the future. It contains the whole future.
The past is a barrier. Unless one is courageous enough to die to the past one cannot be rewarded by true life. And this death has to happen each moment, because each moment we are creating the past. It is not that once you have died to the past the whole thing is finished. After twenty-four hours again twenty-four hours of the past will be with you. You have to die each moment — why accumulate it? Each moment, be finished with it, so you are always fresh and new and in tune with existence. You are never lagging behind.
And when one is not lagging behind there is great celebration. You are in a dance with existence, utterly attuned, a kind of at-onement. And that makes life a festival, a love, a laughter, a song, a celebration! My sannyas is not for the sad and the dead. It is for those who love life, who love laughter, who love. It is for those who want to be fresh, young, alive to the maximum. It is for those who are ready to risk and to go on a pilgrimage to the unknown and to the unknowable.
Source – Osho Book “The Old Pond Plop”