Osho : Sanai calls his path ”the path of the garden.” The path of the meditator is a kind of desert. The desert has its own beauty: if you have been in the desert in the night, it has a coolness you will never find anywhere else, and it has an immense silence, a huge enormous silence, and it has infinity. It has a taste of its own. Under the starry sky, of you have been in a desert alone, you will never find that aloneness anywhere else.
No other place on the earth is as full of solitude as a desert. And there is no variety, so you cannot be distracted. It is the same for miles and miles – as far as you can see up to the horizon it is the same. There is nothing to see; if you have seen one desert you have seen all. It is the same: the same scene goes on stretching farther and farther away. There is no distraction.
That’s why many meditators have moved to the desert. Down the ages, many people have moved to the desert. The attraction has been the silence and the beauty of a non-distracting situation. Nothing distracts, nothing moves, all is utterly quiet. Death can only be as quiet as the desert. It has a beauty of its own – but it lacks in richness and variety.
The garden has variety: many trees, much green foliage, many flowers, many colors, birds singing, streams flowing by, the sound of running water and the wind passing through the pines. And there are a thousand and one things happening together. The garden is full, the desert is empty. The inner being of a meditator becomes like a desert, and the inner being of a lover becomes like a garden. Hence, Sanai has called these sutras THE HADIQA: the Garden.
Still, it depends on you. One may like the desert more than the garden, then that is his path. Nothing is wrong in it, one should go on that path. One has to look within oneself and see one’s potential, one’s possibilities, one’s leanings. It is possible the desert may be a garden to you or the garden may be a desert to you, because one man’s food is another man’s poison. It is Sanai who says the lover’s world is far richer – it is a lover talking about his world, remember it.