How do I balance my inclination towards meditation and love?

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.

Meditation fulfils something, love fulfils something else. It is like telling a person 'Either you can eat or you can drink. If you eat, then you cannot be allowed to drink anything; if you want to drink anything then you cannot eat. Choose one -- whatsoever you want.' Now, you will drive that man crazy! He needs both. You tell somebody 'Either you can remain awake or you can go to sleep -- choose.' These are opposite activities, and you cannot choose opposite things because that will create troubles for you, so either be awake or be asleep.' Now, nobody can choose one. You will need a certain rhythm between waking and sleeping; you will have to move from one to the other. Waking you will create the necessity for sleep, sleep will create the necessity for waking.

Osho, sometimes you speak on spirituality, sometimes on society; sometimes on politics, then on science; sometimes you support the scriptures, and at other times you talk of consigning them to the Holi bonfire. This creates all kinds of contradictions, which makes it difficult to understand you. You seem revolutionary, yet your traditional side also shows, because you insist on ochre robes and the mala. Is revolution not possible without sannyas? Can a person not be healthy without the label of sannyas? Is it not enough to be human—just human? This vast organization you are building—what is th

Melaram Asrani! I understand your difficulty. Your difficulty is the difficulty of many; therefore it is worth considering—worth considering seriously.

Question: Osho, you have spoken of two paths to reach the Divine—love and meditation. My situation is that a feeling of love does not well up in my heart. It isn’t that I don’t want to love anyone; it just isn’t my temperament. I like to be quiet and sit in silence. So I chose the path of meditation and began the practice of witnessing. Now the difficulty is this: the moment I become aware that I am watching my thoughts, the thoughts stop and there is a momentary experience of bliss; then a stream of thoughts starts again. And then again I watch them—and again and again the same thing. In my situation I don’t see any progress. Am I making some mistake somewhere? Or is my choice of the path of meditation wrong?

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;…