Ninety-nine percent of people start meditating because meditation is talked about. There are times when it becomes fashionable.
America is passing through such a phase. Meditation is talked about; everybody is doing meditation. If you are not doing it you must be missing something. You don’t feel any need for it, it has not arisen in your being, you have not come to that point of evolution where meditation happens on its own accord; but everybody is doing it and everybody is going to the Masters and everybody is sitting silently. Somebody is doing zazen and somebody is doing TM and somebody is doing Dynamic. You must be missing something. So greed arises; out of greed you start making effort.
That effort is not for meditation. That effort is to gain something which you think will be gained out of meditation.
These phases come and go. These cults arise and disappear. These are just like fashions. The real meditator has not come to meditate because others are meditating, but a deep need has arisen in him, has become a knocking in his heart, a continuous knocking. The whole world seems to be meaningless; he wants to go in. He wants to know who he is. Not because others have known! If there is nobody propagating meditation and no books are available and all books are destroyed and all Masters go and hide in the caves in the Himalayas, then too there will be a few people who will meditate, who will find out how to meditate on their own accord. Those will be the real meditators. And for them meditation will be just as easy as anything. It will be just like breathing.
Osho, The First Principle, Ch 4, Q 5 (excerpt)
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