Osho – If you can love, meditation will be very easy. The world will be more religious if love is accepted, helped along, and love becomes a natural milieu around you. Then meditation will be very easy because you will know a taste through love of what it means to be dissolved, even if only for a single moment. Then you can dare to be dissolved for longer moments.
And if you can love, you will not be afraid of death. Lovers are never afraid of death. And if a person is afraid of death, you can be certain that he has not loved and he has not been loved. The fear of love shows that the life has been without love. Lovers are ready to die very easily. They can die for each other. They do not care much about so-called life because they have known a higher quality of life; they have known a higher life. They do not care about this life very much.
But look at persons who have never loved. They will always be afraid of death. Look at misers: they will always be afraid of death. And misers are those persons who have not loved anyone because if you can love a person you will never love money. Money is a substitute. When you cannot love an individual, when you cannot love a live person, you love dead money.
Misers, those who go on clinging to their possessions, are not even acquainted with what love is. Their whole love has gone to dead money. And why has it gone? There are deeper connections. A person who is too much attached to money will be afraid of death. Really, a person who is afraid of death will love money too much because money seems to be a protection against death. If you have money you feel protected. If you do not have any money you feel unprotected. Death can occur and you cannot do anything. With money you feel that you can do something. Money will be helpful.
A person who loves will not love money because a person who loves will not be afraid of death. And if a person is not afraid of death, there cannot be any clinging, attachment, mad obsession with money. It is impossible. If you can love, then you will accept death very easily. It will be a deep relaxation, a long sleep, a beautiful dissolution into the existence. And if you can be receptive to death, then meditation can be as easy as anything. The problem arises because love is not there. When death has become a fear, then meditation will be difficult because it is both love plus death. It is death as far as your ego is concerned; it is love as far as the divine existence is concerned.
I define meditation in a mathematical formula: meditation is equal to love plus death – love to the existence, to the total, and death to the ego. They are both two aspects of the same coin because you can love the total only if you are ready to lose the individual. If you are ready to die, only then can you be reborn as the existence, as the Brahman.
Jesus says, ”Only if you lose can you survive. And those who try to survive will be lost.” It is hard because you have not loved; it is hard because you have not lived. It is not hard by itself. Meditation by itself is very easy – a spontaneous phenomenon. If a human being evolves naturally, falls into love, knows what love is, knows what type of death and what type of life love is, comes out of it, knows the taste of moving into and being in death, then he will love death – not as being against life. Death changes the quality then. Then it becomes the last point in life, the highest peak, the climax of life. Then meditation is very easy.
Those of you who are ready to lose can understand it; it is very easy. Those of you who are not ready to lose cannot understand it.
Source – Osho Book “The Supreme Doctrine”