Learning and awakening are quite different things. Learning is just a matter of memorizing; no knowing is needed. The knowing may be someone else's — you can still learn.
This is how all our education operates. All education is borrowed knowledge, there is no concern for one's own experiencing. The libraries are full of books that will help you to learn about love. You can read them all and conduct great research programs, and can even write your own treatises on love; no loving is necessary in order to learn about love. Learning does not require that you experience.
To experience, waking up is necessary; and to experience the divine you will have to be fully awake — it is the experience of complete awakening, it can happen only if you are perfectly awake. You can accumulate worldly knowledge in your sleep too, but to come to know truth is impossible in a sleeping state.
We live our lives in slumber; walking, talking, sitting, working, we slumber, unaware of what we are doing. Hungry, we gobble down a good meal. We have to work, so we spend our day in the office and go home in the evening. But these and our other activities are carried through by force of habit; no awakening is needed for them, they are all mechanical routines.
Listening to me. In these moments of listening, if your hearing is all, if only your hearing remains and your mind wanders nowhere else but is here and now, if hearing is the only thing happening, as if the rest of the world has disappeared, as if nothing else remains. Here, I am the speaker, there, you are the listener and a bridge is created between us. Your mind does nothing else, it falls silent, utterly silent; it hears, only hears. When only hearing remains, you experience awareness. For the first time, you discover what meditation is.
Meditation means being in the moment, not leaving this moment. Someone asked Buddha, "How shall we meditate?"
Buddha replied, "Whatsoever you do, do it with awareness; this is meditation. Walking, walk attentively, as if walking is everything; eating, eat with awareness, as if eating is everything; rising, rise with awareness; sitting, sit with awareness; all your actions become conscious, your mind does not travel beyond this moment, it remains in the moment, settles in the moment — this is meditation."
Meditation is not a separate process. Meditation is simply the name for life lived with awareness. Meditation is not an hour-a-day affair where you sit for one hour and then it is over till tomorrow. No, if twenty-three hours are empty of meditation and only one hour is meditative, then it is certain that the twenty-three hours will defeat the single hour. Non-meditation will win, meditation will lose. If you are living twenty-three hours a day without awareness, and only one hour with awareness, then you will never attain to the state of buddhahood. How can this single hour triumph over the other twenty-three hours?
There is something else that also has to be understood. How can one be aware for one hour if in the remaining twenty-three hours one is not aware? How can you be healthy for one hour if you are sick the other twenty-three hours of the day? Health and sickness are the result of an internal flow. If you are healthy for twenty-three hours of the day, you will be healthy for all twenty-four hours, because the internal flow cannot suddenly be broken for just one of those hours. The current that is flowing goes on flowing.
Meditation cannot come about just because you visit a temple or mosque or gurudwara.. If you were not awake in the shop, in the marketplace, or at home, how can you all of a sudden be awake in the temple? Nothing is going to come about suddenly, when it is not part of an internal flowing. This is why Buddha has said that meditation can happen only if you are meditative for twenty-four hours a day.
OSHO