Millions of people miss meditation because meditation has taken on a wrong connotation. It looks very serious, looks gloomy, has something of the church in it, looks as if it is only for people who are dead, or almost dead, who are gloomy, serious, have long faces, who have lost festivity, fun, playfulness, celebration. These are the qualities of meditation. A really meditative person is playful; life is fun for him, life is a leela, a play. He enjoys it tremendously. He is not serious. He is relaxed.

Excerpts from Osho's book

Read one of the most beautiful and most significant Zen story.
Transcribed by Nyogen Sensaki and Paul Reps - Illustrated by Tomikichiro Tokuriki

The bull is the eternal principle of life, truth in action. The ten bulls represent sequent steps in the realization of one's true nature. This sequence is as potent today as it was when Kakuan (1100-1200) developed it from earlier works and made his paintings of the bull.

Taken from the book: Zen Flesh, Zen bones compiled by Paul Reps, Anchor books, NY

TAO TE KING

excerpt:

The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Noticing that his father was growing old, the son of a burglar asked his father to teach him the trade so that he could carry on the family business after his father had retired.

The father agreed, and that night they broke into a house together.
Opening a large chest the father told his son to go in and pick out the clothing. As soon as the boy was inside, the father locked the chest and then made a lot of noise so that the whole house was aroused. Then he slipped quietly away.

Mind concentrates: it acts out of the past. Meditation acts in the present, out of the present. It is a pure response to the present, it is not reaction. It acts not out of conclusions, it acts seeing the existential.

Watch in your life: there is a great difference when you act out of conclusions.

Whatsoever you do, do it with deep alertness; then even small things become sacred. Then cooking or cleaning become sacred; they become worship. It is not a question of what you are doing, the question is how you are doing it. You can clean the floor like a robot, a mechanical thing; you have to clean it, so you clean it. Then you miss something beautiful. Then you waste those moments in only cleaning the floor. Cleaning the floor could have been a great experience; you missed it. The floor is cleaned but something that could have happened within you has not happened.

Meditation starts by being separate from the mind, by being a witness. That is the only way of separating yourself from anything. If you are looking at the light, naturally one thing is certain: you are not the light, you are the one who is looking at it. If you are watching the flowers, one thing is certain: you are not the flower, you are the watcher.

Watching is the key of meditation.

Watch your mind.

I am not against sex, and I am not saying drop sex. I am just saying understand it, meditate over it - don't just go on making love in an unconscious way - and that will become your greatest meditation. Be more conscious, alert, aware and see what is actually happening. Is this moment of bliss coming through sex or because there is no sex any more for a few moments and the desire has disappeared? For a few hours after sex you don't think about sex, hence the peace, the calm, the quiet.

You can never go beyond the mind if you go on using it. You have to take a jump, and meditation mean that jump. That's why meditation is illogical, irrational. And it cannot be made logical; it cannot be reduced to reason. You have to experience it. If you experience, only then do you know. So try this: don't think about it, try - try to be a witness to your own thoughts. Sit down, relaxed, close your eyes, let your thoughts run just like pictures run on a screen. See them, look at them, make them your objects. One thought arises: look at it deeply. don't think about it, just look at it.

You will have to understand one of the most fundamental things about meditation - that no technique leads to meditation. The old so-called techniques and the new scientific bio-feedback techniques are the same as far as meditation is concerned.

Meditation is not a byproduct of any technique. Meditation happens beyond mind. No technique can go beyond mind.

But there is going to be a great misunderstanding in scientific circles and it has a certain basis.