Life is possible only through challenges. Life is possible only when you have both good weather and bad weather, when you have both pleasure and pain, when you have both winter and summer, day and night. When you have both sadness and happiness, discomfort and comfort.
Life moves between these two polarities.
Moving between these two polarities you learn how to balance.
Between these two wings you learn how to fly to the farthest star.
If you choose comfort, convenience, you choose death. That's how you have missed real happiness: you have chosen convenience instead. It is very convenient to follow the parental voice, convenient to follow the priest, convenient to follow the church, convenient to follow the society and the state.
It is very easy to say yes to all these authorities — but then you never grow.
You are trying to get life's treasure too cheap. It requires that you have to pay for it.
Be an individual and pay for it. In fact, if you get something without paying for it, don't accept it — that is insulting to you. don't accept it; that is below you.
Say: "I will pay for it — only then will I accept it." In fact, if something is given to you without your being ready for it, without your being capable for it, without your being receptive for it, you will not be able to possess it for long. You will lose it somewhere or other. You will not be able to appreciate its value.
God never gives you anything cheap — because given without any effort on your part, you will never be able to rejoice in it.
Choose the hard way. And to be an individual is the hardest thing in the world, because nobody likes you to be an individual. Everybody wants to kill your individuality and to make a sheep out of you.
Nobody wants you to be on your own. Hence, you go on missing happiness, you go on missing direction, and, naturally, meditation has become impossible, concentration seems to be almost non-existent. You cannot concentrate, you cannot meditate, you cannot be with anything for more than a split second. How can you be blissful?
Choose your own destiny. I cannot show it to you, what your destiny is — nobody else knows it, not even you. You have to sense it, and you have to move slowly.
First, drop all that is borrowed on your being and then you will be able to feel. It always leads you to the right place, to the right goal. The thing that you call conscience right now, it is not your conscience.
It is a substitute — pseudo-conscience, fake, counterfeit. Drop it! and by its very dropping, you will be able to see hidden behind it your real conscience which has been waiting for you. Once that conscience comes into your consciousness your life has a direction, meditation follows you like a shadow.
OSHO