Only very courageous people can take the jump

Meditation is an end and a beginning – the end of the old and the birth of the new. You cannot even comprehend it because the old cannot comprehend the new, the old can only comprehend something which is old. It has limitations, it can move only within the boundary of the known, and the new is not within its boundary, the new is unknown. Hence only very courageous people can take the jump.

Courage is needed because you have to die to the old, and the old is familiar. You are dropping that which is familiar for something which is absolutely unfamiliar. This is what courage is: dropping the known for the unknown.

There are two steps to courage: the first is dropping the known for the unknown, and the second is dropping the knowable for the unknowable. By dropping the known for the unknown, meditation happens. And by dropping the knowable for the unknowable – samadhi, the ultimate form of meditation, beyond which nothing exists.

Meditation is the beginning of samadhi. There is no word in English for samadhi. Samadhi means all problems have disappeared, all thoughts have died, the ego is no longer there. One has become immersed with the whole, just like a dewdrop slipping from a lotus leaf into the lake. In a way it disappears; in another way it becomes the very lake.

Osho, I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am, Ch 28 (unpublished)