The mind is a vicious circle.

It gives you an idea, and because of that idea certain things happen.

Then that idea becomes more fixed, you become more afraid, and then you are constantly in fear.

How will you do meditation?

Rather than being in fear, be in love.

love should give you the right atmosphere,

the right soil to meditate.

And meditation should give you

the right fragrance for love

to become a treasure,

a glory, a benediction.

OSHO

Love is just like when you enter into a swimming pool, step by step you are going into deeper water. Then the floor of the swimming pool is divided in two parts, one for those who cannot swim, so the water is up to your neck, and then the second part for those who can swim.

But those who want to learn swimming have to learn in the first part, which is not for swimmers. They have to learn it there. Once they have learned, then slowly they will gather courage and enter into deeper water, because for a swimmer it does not matter how deep the water is; the swimmer is always on the surface.

The water may be a hundred feet deep, five hundred feet deep, or five miles deep, it makes no difference to the swimmer. It makes a difference only to the non-swimmer. Beyond five feet, everything is death. But the swimming pool is one — shallow, deep — it is one. And the boundary line is only a line until you learn to swim.

To me, love and meditation are just like that. Love is the shallow space in a swimming pool, for those who cannot meditate. But that is the place to learn meditation. And it is the same pool, it is the same water, it is the same kind of phenomenon. You are just unable to go deeper because you have been made afraid even to enter into it. The shallow part has been condemned, and you have been told to jump into the deeper part without knowing how to swim.

So they disturbed your love life by condemnation and they disturbed your meditative life by sheer strategy: because you don't know swimming, you cannot go so deep. And you don't have any experience of silence, peace, sheer joy, a little bit of ecstasy, something orgasmic — these will give you the hints how meditation is not a myth. You have tasted it a little bit. It is the same energy field, just you have to go deeper into it.

OSHO