When you get truly quiet inside, it’s like being with the master anywhere, and that real closeness helps your own inner light switch on.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, sitting in your presence, meditation is really at its best. If asked why, I would say that it is because your blissful presence is contagious and somehow motivates me to be as total as possible. Beloved Osho, would you please explain again how it is possible to be in such a nice meditation when not being in your presence?
My presence has to be only a lesson. Once you have learned the art of opening, the art of being silent, it does not matter whether I am present or not. If you have really learned it, it will happen anywhere. It may be a little difficult in the beginning, but soon you will get the knack of it. It is almost like swimming. The teacher who teaches swimming just gives you courage and trust, and is there so that nothing goes wrong. Just in three or four days' time, one hour each day, you start swimming. And the moment you start swimming you are surprised -- why didn't you start it from the very beginning? There is nothing to it. It's just that in the beginning you were not moving your arms artfully, it was haphazard. Just in three or four days you have learned to move your arms…Read the full discourse →
Beloved Osho, in all the years with you I felt meditations simply `happened' to me. Then in the last time when I was away from you I felt this was not me, but your grace overflowing towards me. For the first time I saw that I needed to give meditation a priority in my life or it would not happen. Now, melting in your presence again, everything I could ever desire is here. Osho, what happens to the disciple when one is without the master?
There are only two possibilities when the disciple is not with the master. One is that he goes back to the zero where he had been before he met the master. The second is, seeing that if without the master things that were happening in his presence are not happening, it simply means that his presence has not become an intrinsic part of your being. The master need not be outside you. In fact, he is always inside you, and if you can remember it -- "The master is inside me".... And the master is not asking much, just a small place, a small bedroom with an attached bathroom. Once you start feeling yourself as carrying the master within yourself, everything that was happening in the presence of the master not only continues but grows a thousandfold. Because it was the master outside, there was a distance. Now there is…Read the full discourse →
Osho, in our village we who are your sannyasins sit together in meditation. Sometimes in meditation it seems as if you are present there and are drawing us inward. And it is not the experience of any one friend—almost all of us feel it. What is this? Do you actually come there?
What we have just completed is the other side of the same question. You can be near me and yet far if the mind comes in between. You can be far and yet near if the mind steps aside. If you truly meditate, if you become absorbed, the distances of time and space dissolve. The body knows the distance of time and space, the mind knows it; the soul does not. Your body may be far away there in Balsar—the question is from friends in Balsar—but the moment you meditate, the moment the mind falls silent, its waves subside, you are freed—freed from Balsar. Then you are nowhere bound. The bird has flown into the sky—into that same open sky where I am; you too are there. What for me is a natural state twenty‑four hours a day, you too can sometimes manage for a moment; then your leap will…Read the full discourse →
Osho, what happened in a split second—the “I” is gone, the mind is gone! My veil says, listen, O breeze, the monsoon has come this time, beloved. Again and again, thank you, Osho!
Hansa, in this world everything else takes time to happen, but meditation is timeless. It doesn’t even take a moment. The gap between two moments—that is the realm of meditation. When meditation happens, it happens in such a way that not even a moment is needed. Meditation is not a process in time. Meditation has no steps. Meditation is revolution, not evolution. And why is it so? Because the whole arrangement of the mind is fundamentally an arrangement of time. Mind means: past and future—with a tiny present squeezed in between. The mind lives in the past, in what has already happened; it keeps digging there, searching there, rummaging through memories. Or it lives in their reflections, the echoes projected into the future: what happened yesterday should happen again tomorrow—it was sweet, it was delightful; or what happened yesterday was very bitter—let it never happen again. The mind wants to…Read the full discourse →
Osho! You were just here, you were just here. The fragrance of your breath is in these breezes. The whisper of your lovely footsteps is in the air. The earth and sky that beheld you… you were just here, you were just here. When I saw you, my breath simply stopped, my Master! These eyes would not lower. The moment I came to my senses, where did you hide? You were just here, you were just here.
Meera! If you want to know the divine, to attain it, you must sustain a very paradoxical kind of awareness. Paradoxical because from one side it is awareness, and from the other it is a kind of unawareness too—an ecstasy, a divine drunkenness that is not stupor but awakening; in which within, a lamp of meditation is lit, a flame of alertness burns. Love knows this art of paradox. Love is the key that opens the lock on that door. Love knows how to sway and yet remain centered within. Love knows how to close the eyes and still come to vision. Love knows how to move not even an inch, and yet complete a journey of a thousand miles. Reason will not grasp it. For thought it is inaccessible. But for love it is natural and easy. What is needed is an awareness colored by ecstasy; and an ecstasy…Read the full discourse →