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[A sannyasin, leaving for the West, asks about meditation. Should she still keep trying or is it time to let go and drop effort, she wonders. Osho checks her energy. ]
Osho – My feeling is that for a few months more you should continue doing things. Right now, it will not be possible for you to do meditations spontaneously. A time will come, certainly, when you will be able to do meditations spontaneously, but right now it will be impossible. It will be just a trick of the mind to avoid. The mind will say ’Be spontaneous – don’t try to do’, and then nothing will happen.
There is a layer from your very childhood: you must have been disciplined too much, you must have been told to do this, not to do that, and you have learned the trick. You have forgotten the spontaneity – it is there, just a layer of learning is on top of it. That layer is also being corroded; by and by it will be broken. But right now, if you leave things to spontaneity nothing will happen.
For at least a few months continue working hard at meditation; the very work will break that layer. Once that layer is broken – and you will know immediately the day it happens – then you will see that now the meditation is happening spontaneously. Not that you are doing it – it is happening: you are just a watcher. This is going to happen but it will take a little time. Right now is not the right moment, so while you are away continue meditating as a discipline.
One has to come to a state of no-effort – that is the goal – but sometimes much effort is needed to come to that state of effortlessness. Before one can become natural one has to drop many unnatural things, and those unnatural things will not drop by themselves. You have practised them; now you will have to do something as an anti-practice, as an antidote. You have taken a poison – now you have to take the antidote, otherwise the poison will kill you. Once the antidote is there and the balance is achieved then there is no need to go on taking the antidote.
All these meditations are antidotes – they are just ways to undo your past. Once that past is undone, unconditioned, then there is no need to do anything; things bubble up. One day suddenly in the morning you feel like meditating, good! Some day it doesn’t happen then – it happens in the afternoon or in the night – but that is not a problem then.
Some days it will not happen but you will feel perfectly meditative; in fact, it will not happen because you were so perfectly meditative. That’s why there was no need – you were fully satisfied. Whenever you feel the need it will happen naturally vou Will find yourself meditating, dancing, chanting. That is the goal. But right now there is a layer between you and that goal. That layer has to be broken.
Source: from Osho Book “This is It”