Ninety-nine percent of people start meditating because meditation is talked about

Question

NO EFFORT IS REQUIRED TO BE BORN.

NO EFFORT IS REQUIRED TO DIE.

NO EFFORT IS REQUIRED TO FALL IN LOVE

WHY IS SUCH EFFORT REQUIRED TO KNOW GOD (THROUGH MEDITATION)

WHEN THIS SEEMS TO BE THE MOST NATURAL THING?

IS GOD TRYING TO TEST US IN SOME WAY?

First thing: no effort is required in meditation either. Meditation also comes on its own accord. Through effort it never comes. To whom has meditation happened through effort? It will be almost like making an effort to love somebody. How can you make any effort to love somebody? The more effort you make, the more the love will be false, pseudo, just a pretension. Love has to arise naturally. So arises meditation.

But all meditators are not spontaneously in it — and neither are all lovers spontaneously in it. In fact, psychologists say — a tremendous discovery — that if love is not talked about, ninety-nine percent of people will never know anything about it. If love is not talked about, if poets don’t go on praising it, and if traditional literature is not available about love, ninety-nine percent of people will never be aware that anything like love exists. They will know about sex, but not about love. But because of the poets and because of the novelists and because of the films and the TV, love is talked so much about that everybody starts thinking that he is in love. That love is also false.

And the same is the case with meditation. Ninety-nine percent of people start meditating because meditation is talked about. There are times when it becomes fashionable. If you are not doing it you must be missing something. You don’t feel any need for it, it has not arisen in your being, you have not come to that point of evolution where meditation happens on its own accord; but everybody is doing it and everybody is going to the Masters and everybody is sitting silently. Somebody is doing Vipassana and somebody is doing Nirvana and somebody is doing Dynamic. You must be missing something. So greed arises; out of greed you start making effort.

That effort is not for meditation. That effort is to gain something which you think will be gained out of meditation.

These phases come and go. These cults arise and disappear. These are just like fashions. The real meditator has not come to meditate because others are meditating, but a deep need has arisen in him, has become a knocking in his heart, a continuous knocking. The whole world seems to be meaningless; he wants to go in. He wants to know who he is. Not because others have known! If there is nobody propagating meditation and no books are available and all books are destroyed and all Masters go and hide in the caves in the Himalayas, then too there will be a few people who will meditate, who will find out how to meditate on their own accord. Those will be the real meditators. And for them meditation will be just as easy as anything. It will be just like breathing.

Source: OSHO The First Principle
Chapter 4 – Go with the River

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