Question: Beloved Osho, Meditation is the key. Why is it so difficult to live a meditative life without your physical presence?
Osho: It is difficult because you have not yet been able to find your own source of meditation. Being in my presence you need not meditate. Just being in my presence, a silence descends on you. Your heart has a different rhythm, your being feels a tremendous contentment. But this is just a reflection. You should not be deceived by the reflection. Enjoy the reflection, let it penetrate as deeply in you as possible. But this is only an example, that if it can happen in my presence, why cannot it happen in my absence? — because it is happening in you. I may be functioning as a catalytic agent, but the source is within you; you just have to start trying it.
For example, you are in my presence and you feel meditation comes so easily; in fact you need not think about it, it is there. Just try sitting in your room. If it helps, remember me, visualize me, that I am sitting in front of you, and allow the same experience to happen again. You will be surprised; you don’t know how capable your consciousness is. Just think: you had enjoyed a certain perfume….
Sufi mystics have even used it as part of their strategy; you will enjoy this certain perfume. Perhaps twenty years have passed: you can sit silently remembering it, bringing that experience of the perfume closer to you, bypassing the twenty years. And you will be surprised that suddenly the perfume is there. You can still smell it; twenty years have not been able to destroy it. It has remained somewhere deep in your consciousness, you can never forget it.
Sufi mystics have used it, although no Sufi has ever said so. Why? When you go to a Sufi master the first thing offered to you is perfume, and each Sufi master has his own perfume. He associates himself with that perfume because he knows the functioning of the consciousness: that a perfume cannot be forgotten. And whenever you remember the perfume you will have to remember the master; they become associated. And every day it happens: you come to the master and the first thing is that he offers you the perfume. His place is full of the same perfume. The moment you enter you are engulfed in the perfume. Month by month, year by year, you live with the master. The perfume goes on penetrating into the deepest layers of your consciousness — and with the perfume, the master is also entering you.
Whenever you will be far away the instructions are: remember the perfume. And you will be surprised that whenever you remember the perfume, suddenly the presence of the master is there. And all that has been happening in the presence of the master starts happening in his absence. The source is within you. These are just strategies. I have not been using anything like that, for the simple reason that I trust more in your love than in any association with something mundane. If you love me, you can materialize me anywhere you want.
And no perfume is higher than the perfume of love. No music is more musical than the music of love.
I have not used anything. In a few schools of mystics, music is used — the same tune, so that whenever you hear the tune or remember the tune, you will be transported from your actual surroundings into those surroundings that you always wanted to be in.
But these are very mundane strategies. I would like to be more straightforward. I would not like anything to stand between me and you — even to remind you. I want immediate contact. I want, categorically, immediacy, no mediator, because nothing works more miraculously than love.
All those old masters had to use other things because about love, they were afraid. Their own fear of love made them choose third-rate things to help you. I am not afraid of anything — particularly of love. So in my presence remember: meditation is easy because in my presence love is easy. So wherever you are, be loving.
Be loving to the people you are with, be loving to the sky you see. Be loving to the trees you move by. Just be loving — and whenever you are thrilled with love you will find I am walking by your side, sitting by your side, that my hand is in your hand — who says that I am far away? And you will immediately have the proof because mediation will be coming from all sides running, flooding you. And once you have found it, that it can happen anywhere, then the last dependence has ended. Then my presence is no longer a need for you. That does not mean that you don’t love me anymore; in fact, just the contrary. How can you love totally when there is some kind of dependence? You can love totally only when there is no dependence.
One of Buddha’s intimate disciples, Sariputta, became enlightened in Buddha’s lifetime. But he would not say it to Buddha, he was trying hard to hide it. He was doing things which only an unenlightened person can do.
Finally Buddha had to call him, and say, “Sariputta, you can’t deceive me. You stop all this nonsense of doing things, saying things just to hide the fact that you have become enlightened. Why are you so afraid? Why don’t you simply say what has happened?”
Sariputta said, “I am truly afraid. I was postponing this enlightenment as much as possible because I knew when I became enlightened you would say, `Sariputta, now you go, reach the people, help the people. Now you don’t need me, so why do you go on hanging around?’ I did everything to avoid it but what was to happen, has happened, and now you have found out — please don’t send me away.”
Buddha said, “But you don’t need me anymore. Your excuse to be with me for so many years was that without me you cannot become enlightened; now you have become enlightened, your excuse is no longer valid.”
Sariputta’s statement is very significant. He said, “Yes, my excuse is no longer valid, and I don’t need you. But I am going to stay with you because it is you and your love that has made me so independent — even independent of my own master. Just to show my gratitude, just to touch your feet every day…. I refuse to go anywhere else.
“I was with you up to now with a need; now I am going to be with you without any need. For the first time my love is simply pure — no motivation, no desire… just pure gratitude.”
When the need disappears, the gratitude arises. When dependence disappears, a tremendous feeling, that what you were and what you have become… the distance is so vast that unless the presence of the master was a miracle, it is not explainable.
So whenever you feel that it is difficult to meditate without me, remember my love for you, remember your love for me. Love immediately destroys distances. And you will find me as much present as I am here — or even more. And once you have found it, then there is no problem: wherever you are, meditation is your own, it is your own energy. Still you can go on coming.
I am not so hard as Gautam Buddha. You must have seen Gautam Buddha’s marble statues. He was just like that — cold as a marble statue, even when he was alive. A beautiful man, an immensely miraculous man, but he was very cold.
I am a totally different person. My compassion is not of somebody who is higher than you; my compassion is very human, because I understand the days of the dark nights. I have been through those dark nights — I know how you must be suffering in those dark nights. But it is all up to you: you can prolong the dark night, or you can end it and bring the sunrise immediately into your life.
I have called you my friend. Remember that word.
I promise you to be with you whenever you need me. Just need me!
Source: Osho Book “Light on the Path”
Great Osho!!!