“Death is more important than life. Life is quite trivial, superficial. Death is deeper. Through death you grow into real life… through life you only reach death and nothing more.
What we call and mean by life is merely a journey toward death. If you can understand that your whole life is only a journey and nothing else, then you will be less interested in life and more interested in death. And when one becomes more interested in death, one can enter into the very depths of life. Otherwise, one remains always on the surface.
But we are not interested in death at all. Rather, we escape from the facts; we are continuously avoiding the facts. Death is here, and at every moment we are dying. Death is not something far away; it is here and now. We are dying. Yet while dying, we go on being interested in life. This interest in life, this excessive interest in life, is simply an escape, just fear. Death is here, deep within—unfolding.
Shift the emphasis: redirect your attention. If you begin to be interested in death, your life will be revealed to you for the first time, because the moment you stop being worried about death, you have attained a life that cannot die.
The moment you have known death, you have known that life which is eternal…
That is why everything that is known as meditation is a voluntary death—a deepening inward, a falling inward, a sinking inward, a moving away from the surface toward the depths….
When we say of someone that he is a worldly person, this means that he is more interested in life than in death—indeed, exclusively interested in life and not interested in death at all. The worldly person is one for whom death comes at the end. And when it comes, he is unconscious.
Religious is the one who dies every moment. Death does not come at the end; it is the very process of life. Religious is the one who is more concerned with death than with life, because he feels that what he has known as life will be taken away from him.
It disappears; in every moment you are losing it. Life is like sand in an hourglass. In every moment the sand disappears and you can do nothing about it. The process is natural. Nothing can be done; it is irreversible.”
Osho, from Meditation: The Art of Ecstasy
∗Translation from the Bulgarian website.
