Why is effort required to know God through meditation when it seems to be the most natural thing?

No effort is required to be born. No effort is required to die. No effort is required to fall in love why is such effort required to know god (through meditation) when this seems to be the most natural thing? Is god trying to test us in some way?

First thing: no effort is required in meditation either. Meditation also comes on its own accord. Through effort it never comes. To whom has meditation happened through effort? It will be almost like making an effort to love somebody. How can you make any effort to love somebody? The more effort you make, the more the love will be false, pseudo, just a pretension. Love has to arise naturally. So arises meditation. But all meditators are not spontaneously in it -- and neither are all lovers spontaneously in it. In fact, psychologists say -- a tremendous discovery -- that if love is not talked about, ninety-nine percent of people will never know anything about it. If love is not talked about, if poets don't go on praising it, and if traditional literature is not available about love, ninety-nine percent of people will never be aware that anything like love exists.…

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.] Meditation is not achieved through effort, it is achieved through surrender. All the effort that is made, is made to make surrender possible. Once surrender becomes possible then you are ready to receive the gift. Effort is needed, but not for meditation; effort is needed only to prepare you to receive the gift. Meditation always comes as a gift; hence it is never food for the ego, it cannot be because it is not your achievement at all. On the contrary, it happens only when the ego has been totally surrendered. You cannot say 'I have found it,' you can only say, 'God has found me.

In 1969 followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi invited Osho to talk to them. This was the first occasion on which Osho addressed a western audience, and the first time he talked publicly at length in English. The discourse has been published in OTI January 1 & 16, 1991; and February 1, 1991. Osho: Really, there can be no method as far as meditation is concerned. Meditation is not a method. Through technique, through method, you cannot go beyond mind. When you leave all methods, all techniques, you transcend mind. So meditation itself is not a method. Truth cannot be achieved through method. Method is our own invention. We, who are ignorant, have achieved knowledge through methods constructed, created, projected, in our ignorance. Through method you can achieve a sort of self-hypnosis, a sort of auto-hypnosis. Any method, whatsoever it's name, can only give you an illusory kind of peace.

When your consciousness starts reflecting your mind with all its ugliness and all its beauties, with all its pleasures and with all its pains; with no choice... when your mind is reflected in your consciousness in a choiceless way, you have started meditation. Choiceless awareness is meditation. And then you have to go on doing the same, slowly slowly deepening the process. And one day, the ultimate flowering happens: the inner lotus opens up. That's the state of the awakened one, the state of a Buddha, Christ, Lao Tzu. Unless we achieve it there is no possibility of rest. something inside will go on goading us. And it is good that something inside goes on goading us. If it stops goading us we will remain unfulfilled, immature, ungrown-up. There is an inner guide who goes on goading, who says 'This is not enough -- something has to be done.

Isn't it true that all meditation techniques are really doings which lead the seeker to his being?

I will tell you one anecdote. In Burma, one Buddhist monk was ordered to make a design for the new temple, particularly for the gate. So he was making many designs. He had one very talented disciple, so he told that disciple to be near him. While he made the design the disciple was simply to watch, and if he liked it he had to say that it was okay, it was right. If he didn't like it then he had to say no. And the master said, `When you say yes, only then will I send the design. If you go on saying no, I will discard the design and will create a new one.' Hundreds of designs were discarded in this way. Three months passed. Even the master became afraid, but he had given his word so he had to keep it. The disciple was there, the master…