Meditation should not be a thing apart from life

1. All these meditations that you are doing here are only to help you to relax, to forget the future, to be here-now. Singing, dancing, chanting, humming… it is a present-moment activity: you get absorbed into it. Listening to me is a meditation: you get absorbed into it. You are not worrying about going anywhere, you are simply here with me.
2. Meditation should not be a thing apart from life; it should be amidst life, it should be a part of life an organic part, nothing ‘put separate’. The temple should exist exactly in the middle of the market, and all distinctions between the sacred and the secular should be dissolved.
3. You become really human only when you start moving in the inner direction of possessing yourself. It can happen only through meditation. Money and meditation are the two directions. If you want to possess things money; if you want to possess yourself — meditation. And if you possess yourself, money loses all meaning.
4. This richness you are carrying as a treasure in your being, but you have not looked there. Start looking inside, search your house. Take a small candle of meditation and go in.
5. Buddha has insisted again and again that while you are meditating, always remember compassion. Don’t forget compassion. It is very easy to forget compassion while you are meditating, so continuously remember. And when you have come to the fulfillment of your meditation, don’t forget compassion. Bring it back to people.
6. Meditation is totally different. When you concentrate you close your mind to everything else. Meditation means just an openness, a relaxed openness. It is not concentration. While listening to me you are listening to the birds singing in the trees too. The wind passing through the trees singing its song — you are open to it too. The aeroplane passing by, or the train — you are open to it too. This is meditation — you are simply open, available, conscious, available, all doors are open.
7. Each activity can be turned into meditation.
8. To move into your centre one needs to be feminine, passive. inactive, non-doing, non-interfering, WU-WEI, meditative; meditation, relaxation, not concentration, is needed. One has to relax oneself completely and utterly. When you are not doing anything then you are at your centre; when you are doing something you have gone away. When you do too much you are too far away. Coming closer means that you are dropping your activities, you are learning how to be inactive, you are learning how to be a non-doer.
9. Go to the source. Let it be a great opportunity for meditation. Transform each ordinary opportunity into meditation and great will be the pay-off. Each moment will start becoming luminous. And there is no mundane or profane activity. All activities can be turned into meditation — they have to be. This is my message too. Meditation has not to be something apart from life, it has to become the innermost core of it. Each activity, small and big, has to be luminous with meditative awareness. Then you will see that each activity brings you to God, each activity brings you home, each activity becomes a liberation.
10. Children can be taught meditation more easily because they are not yet spoiled. When you have been spoiled the hard work is to help you to unlearn.
11. And that is the meaning of meditation: to become hollow, to be empty inside. Not even a thought flutters — no content, just space. Suddenly all misery has disappeared, because misery exists in thoughts; death has disappeared because death exists in thoughts; the past has disappeared because the whole burden is carried through thoughts; ambition disappears because how can you be ambitious without thoughts? How can you be mad without thoughts?
12. Meditation is not something you do once and you are done with. It is something that is like breathing, like blood circulating. It is not that once the blood has circulated it is finished, once you breathe there is no more need of it. No, you have to breathe and you have to go on meditating; every moment you will need it.