YOU HAVE BEEN DOING THE MEDITATIONS VERY COURAGEOUSLY HERE. Back home, you may feel alone. But don’t feel it as a loneliness. If you are ready, I can help you there also. Just remember me, feel my presence, and then meditate. Space, distance, is meaningless if there is love. You may be sitting just by my side and there may be a distance of miles, thousands of miles. You may be thousands of miles away from me, but if there is love, the distanc disappears; you are right by my side.

 

Love is nearness, love is closeness. Distance in space, or nearness in space, is physical and meaningless. Wherever you are, it makes no difference. If you have a deep love for me, and if you can remember that love and surrender to me, I will be there working with you, within you. Remember this, and then you will never be lonely or alone.

 

Secondly, when one penetrates deeply into meditation, fear grips you. Sometimes one encounters death, one feels that now one is going to die. One returns back, hurries back to the surface. That is bound to happen. Before you are reborn, you will have to pass through a death. But don’t be afraid. If a moment comes in your meditation when you feel that now this is the last moment and you will not be able to come back again to the world, to the body, feel thankful, feel a deep gratitude, and welcome the moment.

 

It is a rare moment that comes only when your meditation has gone very deep. It is a good sign; welcome it. Don’t be afraid of it because if you are afraid you can miss it; and once missed it may take a very long time to get that rare moment again. Sometimes even lives may pass before one comes to that rare moment again. Once the fear takes hold of you, you become deeply, unconsciously afraid, and you never come back to the point where death is encountered again.

 

Remember this. Many have missed many rare moments. Know well that death is going to be there. Not the death of you, but the death of the ego. But because you are identified with the ego you feel that ”I am going to die.” You are not going to die at all! You are immortal; you are deathless. There is no possibility; death is the only impossibility. You cannot die, so don’t be afraid. If you feel fear, you can remember me; and even in that moment of death, I will be there. You can feel reassured that I am there and you are not going to die; someone is there who will help you.

 

Thirdly, meditation needs tremendous effort. You have to be doing it continuously. Make it a point to do it every day. If you can choose a certain hour, and do it in that particular hour every day, it will be very good. If you can choose a particular place also, and can do it regularly in that particular place, it will be even more helpful. But if it is not possible, then do it any time, any place. If you can create a special place – a small temple or a corner in the home where you can meditate every day – then don’t use that comer for any other purpose, because every purpose has its own vibration. Use that corner only for meditation and nothing else.

 

Then the corner will become charged and it will wait for you every day. The corner will be helpful to you, the milieu will create a particular vibration, a particular atmosphere in which you can go deeper and deeper more easily. That’s the reason why temples, churches and mosques were created. Just to have a place that existed only for prayer and meditation.

 

If you can choose a regular hour to meditate, that’s also very helpful because your body, your mind, is a mechanism. If you take lunch at a particular hour every day, your body starts crying for food at that time. Sometimes you can even play tricks on it. If you take your lunch at one o’clock and the clock says that it is now one o’clock, you will be hungry – even if the clock is not right and it is only eleven or twelve. You look at the clock, it says ’one o’clock’, and suddenly you feel hunger within.

 

Your body is a mechanism. Your mind is also a mechanism. Meditate every day in the same place, at the same time, and you will create a hunger for meditation within your body and mind. Every day at that particular time your body and mind will ask you to go into meditation. It will be helpful. A space is created within you which will become a hunger, a thirst.

 

In the beginning it is very good. Unless you come to the point where meditation has become natural and you can meditate anywhere, in any place, at any time – up to that moment, use these mechanical resources of the body and the mind as a help.

 

Fourthly, this meditation is chaotic because catharsis is needed. It will be difficult for you; you will feel awkward, embarrassed. Back with your family, back in your neighborhood, you may feel, ”How can I do it? How can I scream and go mad? What will people think?”

 

Don’t be too concerned with what other people think. If you are too concerned with other people and what they will think, you can never transform yourself. Then you are just the slave of other people’s opinions. And they will not allow you to move beyond them in any way. They can only allow you to be like them, never different from them.

 

Once you think of transforming yourself, remember, now you are going beyond the crowd, beyond the society. There is no other way. If you are interested in transforming yourself, you are going beyond the mind of the crowd, beyond the collective mind. But this is only a problem in the beginning. If you go on doing the meditation without being worried about what people say…. At the most, they can say that you have gone mad. And they are not wrong! You are going mad! You are using madness as a method.

 

But if you can continue for at least three months, they will start seeing many differences in you. Something new is happening to you. Wait for three months, and they will have to change their opinion. Then they will come to you for advice, because they are also mad and now you are becoming saner; the madness is disappearing.

 

Your eyes are changing; they have become more silent. Your attitude, your approach, your relationships, everything is changing. You are less angry now, less hateful, less jealous; more loving, more compassionate, more nonviolent. They will feel it. And only this feeling will change their opinion. Wait for the right moment. Right now, at the most, they can think you are mad. Let them think it; it makes no difference. Basically, they already think that you are mad. No one thinks very good of you because no one thinks good of anyone except himself.

 

What’s your opinion about your neighbors? What’s your opinion about your wife? What’s your opinion about your husband? Deep down, everyone knows that the other is neurotic. The wife knows that the husband is a little bit crazy, neurotic, and the husband knows that the wife is mad and he is thinking of how to send her to some psychoanalyst. This is how everyone thinks about others. And everyone is right, because everyone is mad.

 

Don’t be too worried about others. You can become an individual only if you go beyond the opinions of others, if you go on in your own way, without being worried about what others think. Only then will you become an individual. This word ’individual’ is beautiful. It means ’indivisible’. If you follow the crowd you will always be fragmentary, divided. You cannot become a unity because the crowd is so big.

 

I have heard about one boy. I was staying with a family, and they brought the boy to see me. He had become a little neurotic. I asked him, ”What is the matter?”

 

He said, ”I am not neurotic, but my whole family is creating neurosis in me. My father thinks I should become a doctor. My mother thinks I should become an engineer. My uncle says that this is nonsense. ’There is no need to become a doctor or an engineer. Become a scientist.’ They are all forcing me in different directions. I don’t know what I have to become, what my destiny is. Too many people are pulling me in too many directions. That is what is creating neurosis in me.”

 

If you follow the crowd you will be neurotic, fragmentary, because the crowd is so big and everyone is pulling you in their own way, in their own direction. You have many directions in your mind, in your being, many pulls. You are fragmentary. Forget the crowd. Don’t allow anyone to pull you and push you. You are an individual, a free unit.

 

Remain authentic with yourself, and sooner or later the crowd will recognize the change, the transformation, the mutation that has happened to you. Then they will follow you. Then they will ask for your advice.

 

- Osho, "The New Alchemy: To Turn You On, #17"