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Meditation is just like breathe; the way breathing is a continuous process, in the very same way meditation is a continuous process. You breathe while you walk, talk, sleep, eat, you breathe for twenty hours a day. You can not breathe for one hour and then put it aside for twenty-three hours. In the very same way, it is not possible to be meditative for one hour. If you are doing that, that means your meditation is false. Meditation is the breath of your soul. Just as breathing is the life of the body, meditation is the life of the soul. People who are not aware of meditation are spiritually dead.

George Gurdjieff used to say that very few people have souls – and he is right. One is born not with a soul but only with a seed which can grow into a soul – which may not grow. It will depend on you. You will have to create the right soil, the right climate for it to grow, to bloom. You will have to provoke the spring into coming to you so that your soul can flower, otherwise you are just a body-mind. The soul is only an empty word. Meditation makes it a reality. Meditation is the climate in which the soul happens.

Zen is another name for Meditation. The word zen comes from the Sanskrit root dhyan – it has traveled far. Dhyan means a state of absolute silence, of thoughtless silence, but full of awareness. Even the thought that “I am aware” is enough to distract you from your meditation. Even to know that “I am in Meditation” is enough to destroy it. Dhyan is the greatest contribution of the East to the evolution of humanity.

A state of meditation is an innocent, silent state. You are blissfully unaware of your awareness. You are, but you are utterly relaxed. You are not in a state of sleep; you are fully alert, more alert than ever. You are alertness, rather.

Meditation is an absolute state of awareness. You cannot do it every morning for a few minutes or for half an hour and then forget all about it. It has to become like your heartbeat. You have to sit in it, you have to walk in it. Yes, you have even to sleep in it.

Meditation has to become something so deep in you that wherever you go it remains, abides with you; whatsoever you do it is always there. Only then can your life be transformed. Then not only will you be meditative in your life, you will be meditative in your death too. You will die in deep meditation.

That’s how Buddha died. That’s how all the Buddha’s have always died: their death is something exquisitely beautiful. Their life is beautiful, their death too. There is no gap between their life and death. Their death is a crescendo of their life, the ultimate peak, the absolute expression.

- Osho