What is meditation?

"It is the most important question as far as I am concerned. Meditation is the very center of my whole effort. It is the very womb out of which a new religiousness is going to be born. But it is very difficult to verbalize it: to say something about meditation is a contradiction in terms.

It is something that you can have, that you can be, but by its very nature you cannot say what it is. Still, efforts have been made to convey it in some way. Even if only a fragmentary, partial understanding arises out of it, that is more than one can expect. Even that partial understanding of meditation can become a seed. Much depends on how you listen. If you only hear, then not even a fragment can be conveyed to you. But if you listen … Try to understand the difference between the two.

Hearing is mechanical. You have ears, you can hear. If you are going deaf then a mechanical aid can help you to hear. Your ears are nothing but a certain mechanism to receive sounds. Hearing is very simple: animals hear, anybody who has ears is capable of hearing—but listening is a far higher stage.

Listening means that when you are hearing, you are only hearing and not doing anything else—there are no other thoughts in your mind, no clouds passing in your inner sky, so whatever is being said reaches as it is being said. It is not interfered with by your mind; it is not interpreted by you, by your prejudices—not clouded by anything that, right now, is passing within you, because all these are distortions.

Ordinarily it is not difficult; you go on managing just by hearing, because the things that you are hearing are common objects. If I say something about the house, the door, the tree, the bird, there is no problem. These are common objects; there is no need of listening. But there is a need to listen when we are talking about something like meditation, which is not an object at all; it is a subjective state. We can only indicate it; you have to be very attentive and alert—then there is a possibility that some meaning reaches you.

Even if a little understanding arises in you it is more than enough, because understanding has its own way of growing. If just a little bit of understanding falls in the right place, in the heart, it starts growing of its own accord." - Osho, Mindfulness in the Modern World