Action goes in one direction, thinking goes in another, feeling is somewhere else. We go on falling apart, we become more and more fragmented; that’s what misery is – we lose integration, we lose unity. We become just a periphery. And naturally a life which is not harmonious is going to be miserable, tragic, a burden to be carried somehow, asuffering. People are living in suffering.
There are only two ways out of it: either they can become meditators – alert, aware, conscious – that’s an arduous thing. It needs guts. The cheaper way is to find something that can make you even more unconscious than you are, so you cannot feel the misery. Find something that makes you utterly insensitive, some intoxicant, some pain killer that makes you so unconscious that you can escape into that unconsciousness and forget all about your anxiety, anguish, meaninglessness.
The second way is not the true way. The second way only makes your suffering a little more tolerable, but it does not transform you. The only transformation happens through meditation, because meditation is the only method that makes you aware. To me meditation is the only true religion.
Abridged from The Old Pond, Plop!, courtesy: Osho Times International, www.osho.com