According to Osho, being 'in a gap' is the state created by taking the present for granted, postponing and dozing in awareness, until what is available is gone. Then the mind swings to the opposite pole: urgency, longing, chaos. The gap is the distance between presence and remembrance, opportunity and action, born of sleepiness, habit, and delay.
It’s when you ignore what’s here now and only want it badly after it’s gone.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
An end whose end itself arrives... that which becomes final, atomic, ionic—so that it can no longer be divided. That indivisible fragment of the moment which is in our hand is all that is truly in our hand. And if we delay by even a hair’s breadth, we miss it. It doesn’t take any time to miss it—because it is rushing past. And if you are absent, it keeps rushing past. And we get into the habit of remaining absent continuously.
Then gradually that habit stays with us. Whenever the moment comes, it slips away. When it has slipped away, then we think about it. Or we think before it has come. But when it is, we are not. So how can we ever be in tune—with Existence, with being? What, then, is man’s suffering? What is his whole difficulty? There is only one difficulty: he cannot come into harmony with Existence. Whatever Existence is, in one way or another he keeps missing it. And the formula of this missing is to be in the past or in the future. I am not saying: think; nor am I saying: don’t think. I am saying: if you are ever to enter the realization of Existence; if you are ever to know Truth; if you are ever to experience Bliss—then there is only one way. And that way is to somehow stop the…
The door to the divine is spontaneity. To be spontaneous is to be in god. Mind is never spontaneous. It is either in the past or in the future, either in that which is no more or in that which is not yet. Between these two it goes on missing that which is, and that is the door. The present moment is not part of time, hence the present moment is not available to mind either. Mind and time are synonymous. You can say that mind is time inside your being, and time is mind outside you, but they are one phenomenon. The present moment is neither part of time nor part of mind. When you are in the present moment you are in god. What is the true meaning of meditation, the true meaning of prayer, the true meaning of love.
And sometimes unawares it happens. Seeing a beautiful sunset and you are not your past. Just the present is so much, the intensity of the present is such, that without your knowing you have slipped out of the past. You have not a single problem in that moment because you don't have any mind in that moment. Mind means the past because mind means the memory. Seeing a beautiful sunset you become so absorbed in the reality of the moment, in the truth of the moment, that there is no observer and no observed. The observer becomes the observed. It is not that you are seeing the sunset, you are the sunset. That merging, that melting, that dissolution into the moment, and you are healed.
Osho, the stream of the timeless is what Lord Buddha called a muhurta for a fleeting instant, and you call the same thing the present. This too makes sense to me, and yet it remains beyond my understanding. But even from this little understanding the joy that arises fills me with gratitude. Osho, I come to your refuge.
All those who have known, all who have awakened, have said one thing with certainty: truth is outside the stream of time—timeless, beyond time. The world is within time—or say, whatever is within time is the world; whatever is outside time is liberation. You can gather a few glimpses of this in your own life now and then. Consider: when you are unhappy, time seems long. When pain becomes intense and your very life writhes in suffering, time grows lengthy. The clock’s pace remains the same; the clock does not see your pleasure and pain, it knows nothing of them. It moves at its own rhythm, yet an hour passes as if centuries are passing. Whoever has known sorrow has known the long stretch of time; time becomes longer and longer. A loved one is dying, and you sit by their cot through the night; the night becomes so long…
Osho, you say that if there is awareness, then how are the two to be brought into harmony?
That is precisely the practice of active meditation: awareness. Awareness is the very means of going into emptiness in relation to all actions, to the movements of the mind as well. For example, if you lie there for half an hour—what will you do? In that half hour, whatever thoughts are moving in your mind, you are to be simply aware of them. Simply a witness—what else will you do? Just become a witness. Keep silently watching; let them move. But obstacles arise in our seeing. We become absorbed. We fail to remain a witness. We don’t even notice when we have become one with those very thoughts. That sense of awareness fades; a kind of stupor, a moorchha, comes in. A thought comes, a memory arises, and we stop being the watcher. We become part of that thought and of its flow. That is moorchha. And the opposite is…