Question – I have been doing all the five meditations every day regularly for three years and because of these meditations i cannot do anything else. i am feeling very happy but my family is worried. what should i do?
Osho – You are overdoing it, sir. You have to choose one meditation. One is enough. Five is too much. Of course you will feel happy because you have nothing else to do. And if the family is worried it is natural, they are right too.
A big Yorkshire farmer found it necessary to go to London for several months and decided to leave one of his best workers in charge. ‘I want you to take care of things, Harry, as if I were here myself. Understand’ Harry nodded.
Four months later the boss farmer returned to find everything in shape. Said Harry, pointing things out, “The chicks have been laying plenty of eggs, the wheat has grown double strong, the vegetables are better than they’ve ever been, and as for those monthly spells your wife used to have, I’ve even got those to stop.’
This is doing too much. This is going too far. You please come to one meditation. It will be difficult, I know, after three years. You should have asked before. It will be difficult to go back to the world and to work and you will find it a little hard, but it has to be done. I am not teaching you any escapism here — this is escapism because now you are not doing anything else.
You are dropping all your responsibilities and I am not for that. Those responsibilities have to be fulfilled — fulfilled with great joy. Your wife, your children, your parents, your old father, your old mother, need you. That is where God has put you — into a certain responsibility. Fulfill it.
I am against all those escapists who escape from the world and become twenty-four-houra-day meditators. I am against them, I am utterly against them. One hour of meditation is enough. Meditation is such a powerful thing that one hour out of twenty four hours is enough. It will illuminate your whole life.
And the test of whether your meditation is succeeding or not is in life. When you meditate and you go to the shop you will know whether you are succeeding in your meditation or not. Are you still as greedy in the shop as you used to be before? Do you still get angry when somebody says something against you? Can people still manage to push your buttons as easily as before? In the market-place is the test of all your meditations.
If you just do meditations and nothing else that is like preparing and preparing and never going to the examination. That is not right. The test has to be there every day — one hour meditation, twenty-three hours test. And you will grow strong.
Source – Osho Book “Zen: The Path of Paradox, Vol 1”