Can a person meditating an hour a day gain enlightenment in this life?

Beloved master, can a person meditating an hour a day gain enlightenment in this life?

It has been found by all the great meditators of the world that just forty-eight minutes, exactly forty-eight minutes, are enough to make you enlightened. But to meditate for forty-eight minutes - I'm not even making it sixty, I'm giving you the exact time - is not an easy thing. Even to meditate for a single minute, a whole single minute, sixty seconds, is a difficult thing - but not impossible. You can try it to check. Just put a small watch in front of you with a second hand, and start looking at the second hand the moment it moves from twelve. Just keep watching the second hand and see how long you can manage watching it. At the most, somewhere between ten to twelve seconds you will have missed, you will have gone somewhere else. And by the time you come back, a few seconds are lost, the…

A friend has asked: Osho, monks, renunciates, yogis have attained meditation by sitting in caves for years. And you say that meditation is possible even in forty minutes. Is meditation really that simple?

After the three stages, the last ten minutes are only waiting. We can do nothing more. A man can only leave himself open for the divine. Can we drag “Him” in? How? Can we grasp “Him” in our fist? At most we can send an invitation and wait. The sun rises outside the door; we can leave our door open and say, “Come in”—we cannot bring the sun in. If the door is open, the sun comes. Note a strange fact. We cannot bring the sun in—but we can keep it out. Close the door. Not only that; we carry a small pair of doors in our pocket—our eyelids. The door may be open, but if we close our eyes, what can the sun do? Close these tiny shutters and the sun is helpless. Negativity we have in abundance. Negatively, we can block the divine; positively, we cannot compel it.…

But one hour meditation and twenty-three hours of non-meditation you cannot conceive how you will be able to win in entering into a meditative consciousness. What you gain in one hour is wasted in twenty-three hours. Again you start from the scratch. Every day you will do it, every life you will do it, and you will remain the same. So to me, meditation has to be something more like breathing. Not that you sit one hour.... I'm not against sitting -- what I am saying is: that meditation should be something that goes with you the whole day just like a shadow, a peace, a silence, a relaxedness, working you are totally into it. So totally that there is no energy left for mind to spin thoughts.

Beloved Osho, not counting the discourses, is twenty minutes of meditation a day enough to see me along the path and lead me to experience the satyam, shivam, sundram you are pointing us towards?

Vimal, first you cannot be allowed not to count the discourses, because your meditations cannot happen without these discourses. These discourses are the foundations of your meditation. I am crazy but not that crazy that I should go on speaking four hours a day if it does not help you in meditation! Do you think I am trying to distract you from meditation? And then you are such a miser, Vimal. I never thought you were so miserly that just twenty minutes in twenty-four hours... not even twenty-four minutes! You have missed my basic standpoint completely. I don't want you to think of meditation within limits; I want meditation to become your very life. In the past this has been one of the fallacies: you meditate twenty minutes, or you meditate three times a day, you meditate five times a day -- different religions, but the basic idea is that…

How is it possible that by simply becoming aware at a particular point in the breathing process one can attain enlightenment? How it is possible to become free from the unconscious by just being aware of such a small and momentary gap in the breathing?

After meditating on death, after seeing every day, night and day, dead bodies being burned, dissolved into ashes -- just a smoke remains and then disappears -- after meditating for months together, a certainty will arise: the certainty that death is inevitable. It is the only certainty really. The only thing certain in life is death. Everything else is uncertain: it may be or it may not be. But you cannot say that it may be or it may not be for death. It is; it is going to be. It has already occurred. The moment you entered life, you entered death. Now nothing can be done about it. When death is certain there is no fear. Fear is always with things which can be changed. If death is to be, fear disappears. If you can change, if you can do something about death, then fear will remain. If nothing…