Should one continue to meditate at home after meditating in a group?

No, take the challenge to stay with the every-day activity. Vipassana should not become a style of life. These are just techniques to be learned and immediately forgotten, so only the quality is carried with you. The flavour, the fragrance, not the flower, has to be carried into day-to-day activity. so by and by you don't know what is meditation and what is ordinary activity -- they become one. Learn the technique -- and for learning, of course, one needs to be in a particular place. Once you have known the technique, then unlearn it. Then just move into ordinary life -- eat, drink, sleep. Just be ordinary, and carry the sense of silence that has come to you. Again and again remember it, again and again remind yourself. Again and again move into that feeling and catch hold of it in ordinary life.

The whole vision, the darwinian vision, is a very very inhuman meditation about life, an undivine vision of life. If you go into the forest and look through darwinian eyes, you will see conflict everywhere: each animal killing other animals, species destroying other species, trees destroying animals, animals destroying trees. Everybody is in conflict, it is a nightmare. And if you go to the same forest and look through the eyes of Kropotkin, there is tremendous cooperation. These species have been living in deep cooperation too, otherwise nobody would have survived. If there were only violence, and violence were the only law, nobody would have survived; it would not have been possible for even the victors to survive. If killing is the only rule, then who can survive? First you destroy somebody else, then you destroy... you go on destroying.

You have to be alone and alone and alone. You have to seek a point, a virgin point within your being which has never been travelled before. Nobody can enter there, except you. And you too can only enter up to a certain extent. A point comes when you are also left outside. Something enters -- but not you. The I is left out at the door. You enter as energy, nameless, formless, but not as you have known yourself. Your whole identity is lost. Your whole address is no more there. You don't know who you are. You enter only when you don't know who you are. Then suddenly you are inside the shrine and you know who you are. But this has nothing to do with your previous identity.

Now try to go deep into meditation. Sannyas needs nothing, nothing external; its need is just internal, and that is that you should be deeply involved in meditation and all your energy should flow into it. It is only a matter of effort for a few days in the beginning. Once the rock is broken and the stream starts flowing, there is no difficulty. Once the stream starts flowing, then the stream itself will carry you to the ocean. Effort is needed only in the beginning. If you do it for the first four to six months with determination, without wavering and without relaxing your efforts, then meditation will happen by itself; you will not be required to do it. Try all the meditation techniques here, and then regularly continue one of them that suits you. [The new sannyasin says: I do Vipassana.] Vipassana is good. Concentrate on Vipassana....

Beloved Osho, in the west, most of our growth methods tend to be group-oriented -- like encounter groups and psychodrama. In the east, although there are ashrams where seekers live together, the stress seems to be on the individual. Would you tell us about the two approaches?

In the East, people are in the community too much. So whenever they want to be religious, they want to go to the Himalayas. Society is too much around. They are not fed up with themselves, they are fed up with the society. This is the difference. In the West, you are fed up with yourself and you want some bridge, how to be communicative with the society, with others; how to create a bridge, how to move to the other, so you can forget yourself. In the East, people are fed up with the society. They have lived with it so long, and the society is all around so much that they don't feel any freedom. So whenever somebody wants to be free, to be silent, he runs to the Himalayas. In the West, you run to the society; in the East, people run from the society. That's why…