Meditation in the East is not what is understood by it in the West. In the West, meditation means contemplation: meditating in God, meditating on truth, meditating on love. But if you meditate on something, you are not meditating at all, because you are focusing on something outside yourself. It may be love, it may be truth, it may be God, it makes no difference.
Meditation in the East has a totally different meaning, just the opposite of the Western meaning. Meditation in the East means having no object in the mind, no content in the mind, no meditating upon something but dropping everything - neti, neti. neither this or that. Meditation is emptying yourself of all content. When there is no thought moving inside you there is stillness, and that stillness is meditation. Not even a ripple arises in the lake of your consciousness, and that silent lake, absolutely still, is meditation.
And in that meditation you will know what truth is, you will know what love is, you will know what godliness is. Not by meditating on God ... See the point: how can you mediate on God? You don't know anything about God. All your meditation is going to be just imagination, an exercise of imagination. You don't know truth - what are you going to meditate upon? Some idea given by others, some belief, some concept? That is not going to help.
First become meditation, and then in meditation, truth, godliness, love and all that is transcendental will be revealed to you.
Mediation is just being, not doing anything - no action, no thought, no emotion. It is very simple - a totally relaxed state of consciousness where you are not doing anything. The moment doing enters, you become tense, anxious. What to do? How to do it? How to succeed? How not to fail? You have already moved into the future.
In meditation you just are. And it is a sheer delight. Meditation is just being delighted in your own presence; meditation is a delight in your own being.
Where does this delight come from, when you are not doing anything? It comes from nowhere or it come from everywhere. It is not caused by anything, because existence itself is made of the stuff called joy. It needs no cause, no reason. If you are unhappy you have a reason to be unhappy; if you are happy, you are simply happy - there is no reason for it. Your mind tries to find a reason because it cannot believe in 'the uncaused' because it cannot control the uncaused - with the uncaused the mind simply becomes impotent. So the mind goes on finding some reason or other. But I would like to tell you that whenever you are unhappy, you have a reason to be unhappy, because happiness is just the stuff you are made of. It is your very being, it is your innermost core. Joy is you inner most core.
-Osho
