Can one travel a path that combines meditation and the path of the heart?

Yesterday in your discourse you said that one has to choose the path best suited to one's temperament -- either the path of meditation or the path of the heart -- but I do not feel both paths to be totally separate. Can one travel a path that is somehow a fusion of the two?

Never heard of it. A fusion is not possible and in the name of fusion only a dead compromise will happen. The directions are so totally, diametrically, opposite. If you love, you will have to use imagination, dreams, all the faculties of dreaming, of auto-hypnosis. If you meditate, you will have to drop all the dreaming faculties, auto-hypnosis, imagination, love -- everything you have to drop. But don't be afraid. If meditation happens, in the end you will find that love simply follows. And then that love is totally different from that love that you were trying to fuse with in the beginning. It is totally different. It comes out of your meditation, out of your silence. It has no desire in it, no passion in it. It is cool. It is not a disturbance, it is not an excitement, it has no madness in it. And if you follow…

Meditation is the only phenomenon where there is no possibility of meeting anybody, where you have to go alone, totally alone. Hence only very courageous people can enter into the world of meditation. That's why so few people have ever entered, Why so few people have ever become enlightened. Secondly: when you move inwards you move without any maps. Even if you go to the moon you have a certain map, a certain route. There have been people before you, their footprints are there, there are milestones everywhere. Even in the sea you are not totally lost, in the sky you are not totally lost: you can communicate with people, you can give messages -- even from the moon! You can remain in some kind of relationship; it may be just through radio waves, but you can remain connected.

Osho, you have said there are two opposite paths: meditation and love—intelligence or feeling. So tell us, what is the difference between the practice of meditation and the practice of love? Is a meditator not loving before samadhi?

These paths are opposite; where they lead is one. You can arrive from either side. Erase one of the pair, and the other will vanish by itself. Which one you choose to erase depends on your personal inclination. It is the art of erasing one of a pair. The other will vanish because it was the inevitable counterpart. If from existence we remove light itself, darkness will also be gone. It sounds difficult only because in your house, if you blow out a lamp, darkness doesn’t disappear—it increases. But you haven’t removed light from existence. If light were eradicated from existence, darkness would vanish. If darkness were erased, light would vanish. If we remove death from the world, life will disappear that very day. We think the opposite: that death destroys life. You do not know; they are two parts of one thing. Without death there can be no life;…

A friend has asked, Osho, is it not possible to develop intelligence and feeling together? Can a healthy person not practice meditation and devotion at the same time? A person is whole—intelligence, feeling, and action—then why should the path of practice be one-sided?

A person is indeed whole—but that person is an ideal. That is not you who are already whole. When a person’s wholeness is revealed, attained, then everything in them becomes complete. Their intelligence is as sharp as their feeling is deep. Their action, their intelligence, their heart, all come together—like a threefold confluence. But that is the final goal. You are not yet like that. You have a journey to make. So you will only be able to travel from the side toward which you lean more, the dimension for which you have greater interest and inclination. Right now you are fragmented, incomplete. One person has abundant feeling but little intelligence. Another is skilled and attached to action, with little intelligence or feeling by comparison. Another has deep intelligence but a barren heart and no bent for action. In this way we are incomplete, each in our own way. Wholeness…

Love is a path unto itself, and so is meditation. One can follow either love or meditation; both lead to the same goal. But there are a few people who can follow both, and of course their journey is far richer. And that is going to be the work for you: love as deeply as possible and meditate as deeply as possible and go on moving between the two. Remain fluid, flexible. The lover finds it difficult to meditate because he needs the other and meditation means to be alone. The meditator finds it difficult to love because he becomes accustomed to being alone and the freedom of being alone. The very presence of the other seems to be a transgression, an interference, a disturbance. So ordinarily it is simple to follow one, but if you can manage both then your life will have more richness.