Many people who go on long fasts think they have attained meditation. It is not meditation, it is just low energy, paralysis, insensitivity.
They are moving like dead corpses. They are not alive.
Remember, meditation will bring you more and more intelligence, infinite intelligence, a radiant intelligence. Meditation will make you more alive and sensitive; your life will become richer.
Look at the ascetics: their life has become almost as if it is not life. These people are not meditators. They may be masochists, torturing themselves and enjoying the torture…the mind is very cunning, it goes on doing things and rationalizing them.
Ordinarily you are violent towards others but mind is very cunning — it can learn non-violence, it can preach non-violence. then it becomes violent towards itself. And the violence that you do on your own self is respected by people because they have an idea that to be an ascetic is to be religious. That is sheer nonsense.
God is not an ascetic, otherwise there would be no flowers, there would be no green trees, only deserts. God is not an ascetic, otherwise there would be no song in life, no dance in life — only cemeteries and cemeteries. God is not an ascetic; God enjoys life.
God is more Epicurean than you can imagine. If you think about God, think in terms of Epicurus. God is a constant search for more and more happiness, joy, ecstasy. Remember that.
But mind is very cunning. It can rationalize paralysis as meditation; it can rationalize dullness as transcendence; it can rationalize deadness as renunciation. Watch out. Always remember that if you are moving in the right direction you will go on flowering. Much fragrance will come out of you and you will be creative. And you will be sensitive to life, to love, and to everything that God makes available to you.
Have a very penetrating eye inside your mind — see what its motivations are. When you do something, immediately look for the motivation, because if you miss the motivation, the mind goes on befooling you and goes on saying that something else was the motivation.
For example: you come home angry and you beat your child. The mind will say, 'It is just for his own sake, to make him behave.' This is a rationalization.
Go deeper… You were angry and you wanted somebody with whom you could be angry. You could not be angry with the boss in the office, he is too strong for that. And it is risky and economically dangerous.
No, you needed somebody helpless. Now this child is perfectly helpless, he depends on you; he cannot react, he cannot do anything, he cannot pay you back in the same coin. You cannot find a more perfect victim.
Look. Are you angry with the child? If you are, then the mind is befooling you.
The mind goes on befooling you twenty-four hours a day and you cooperate with it.
Then in the end you are in misery, you land in hell. Watch every moment for the right motivation. If you can find the right motivation, the mind will become more and more incapable of deceiving you And the further away you are from deception, the more you will be capable of moving beyond mind, the more you will become a master.
OSHO
