Space

 

 

To be solitary is negative, to be in solitude is positive. They are not synonymous. Solitude is sacred. Solitariness is nothing but misery; one feels that one is missing others.

 

The person imprisoned in jail lives in solitariness, not in solitude. Sometimes they punish prisoners with three weeks' solitary confinement. Then he is left in a dark cell with nobody to relate to, with nothing to see. In those three weeks it seems as if three lives have passed; he loses all sense of time. And slowly, slowly he starts becoming crazy. After the second week he starts talking to himself - loudly!

 

If he is kept in this way for three months he will go really mad, maybe irrevocably mad. This is solitariness. He has been forced into a negative darkness.

 

Only a meditator can transform solitariness into solitude. Then when he is totally alone he is not lonely, not at all. He is full of his own being, overflowing; in fact more overflowing than ever, because when others are there they encroach on your space. In life it is really a continuous struggle to keep your space intact. Everybody is treading on everybody else's space; nobody is respectful of anybody's space.

 

This is one of the greatest problems humanity is facing today, because the earth has become overcrowded and people are really suffering from an immense confinement. The crowd is coming closer and closer; you are in a crowd everywhere and everybody is interfering with your space. Your privacy is lost - and when privacy is lost all is lost.

 

The people who have been studying animals have come to know that there is a territorial imperative. For example, if you see a monkey and you start moving slowly towards the monkey, up to a certain point he will not take any notice of you, but only up to a certain point. Beyond that he will immediately start getting angry -- maybe at ten feet, twenty feet. You will be surprised that every monkey behaves in the same way: they get angry always when you are at a certain distance. It is as if the monkey has a certain sense of territory and he wants nobody to come into his space.

 

In zoos animals go berserk, mad. Only in zoos do animals go mad, not in the woods -- never. Nobody has heard of any lion going mad in the jungle or any elephant going mad in the jungle. But in a circus they do, in a zoo they do because they are confined. If you go to the zoo you will see the lion continuously walking around the cage, confined, enraged, angry because his space has been taken away -- and in the jungle he has a vast space. And all animals respect each other's spaces, none of them interfere in the others' realms. The moment you enter their space you are in danger; if you don't enter their space there is no danger to you. The snake will not bite you if you don't enter his space.

 

Now they have measured how much space every animal has for himself. But man has no sense of that; he has completely forgotten the language, he does not know it, he has lost the very sense. And that's why humanity is almost in a state of insanity. It needs methods to create space again.

 

Meditation is a method to create your own space. If it is not available on the outside then create it inside. Perhaps it is no longer available on the outside, perhaps it will never be available on the outside again; on this earth it does not seem to be possible. Then find space within. That's the whole alchemy of meditation: finding space within. Then even in the crowd you remain in solitude because now you know how to create an inner space.

 

You remain centered. Nobody can interfere with your inner space. People can interfere with your outer space; the wife can interfere, the husband can interfere, the children can interfere -- everybody. And it is so crowded that they are not at fault. There is no more space left on the outside.

 

Meditation becomes something of absolute value when the earth is so overcrowded. Meditation has never been of such importance before. Only a few very intelligent people -- a Buddha, a Jesus, a Zarathustra -- had the sense to create some inner space. The other people lived outside. There was enough space outside; there was no reason to find it inside.

 

But now, everybody has to become a buddha in some way or other; otherwise life will not have any meaning. It will not have any salt, it will not have any taste at all.

 

So work in the inner world to create a space there. And infinite space can be created there because you can throw out all the junk that is inside. You can throw out the thoughts, the desires, the memories, the past, the future, the dreams, the imagination. You can go on throwing out all this junk and you can create great space. That's what meditation is all about: throwing out all the contents that we are carrying inside so that the room is empty, so that you can feel yourself surrounded by infinite vastness. And that vastness is divine. That is solitude.

 

The outer solitude is nothing compared to the inner solitude, because the outer can always be taken by others. It is never absolutely yours, you have to depend on others for it; anybody can interfere with it. Hence the man who has no meditativeness is a dependent person, he has to depend on others. For love he is dependent, for space he is dependent; for everything he is just dependent.

 

The meditator becomes independent. Only the meditator knows what freedom is... the freedom of a bird on the wing in the infinite sky. Meditation is an effort to attain inner emptiness, inner nothingness.

 

-Osho, "Just the Tip of the Iceberg, #10"