Osho,
For years I have been a “groupie” searching for ways to understand myself. I have been in such misery that almost nothing asked of me was too much if it held a chance of alleviating my distress.
Now you offer meditation as a means for leaving my misery behind and all I do is resist. The thought of being still and quiet doesn’t excite me. In fact it scares me, and I end up even more anxious. I don’t understand this.
Could you please explain resistance to meditation?

The thought of stillness and silence excites nobody. It is not your personal problem. It is the problem of human mind as such, because to be still, to be silent, means to be in a state of no-mind.

Mind cannot be still. It needs continuous thinking, worrying. And the mind functions like a bicycle: if you go on pedaling it, it continues. The moment you stop the pedaling, you are going to fall down. Mind is a two-wheeled vehicle just like a bicycle and your thinking is a constant pedaling.

Even sometimes if you are a little bit silent you immediately start worrying, “Why am I silent?” Anything will do to create worrying, thinking, because mind can exist only in one way – in running, always running after something or running from something, but always running. In the running is the mind. The moment you stop, the mind disappears.

And right now you are identified with the mind. You think you are it – from there comes the fear. If you are identified with the mind, naturally if mind stops you are finished, you are no more. And you don’t know anything beyond mind.

And the reality is you are not mind, you are something beyond mind. Hence it is absolutely necessary that the mind stops so that for the first time you can know that you are not mind because you are still there. Mind is gone, you are still there and with greater joy, greater glory, greater light, greater consciousness, greater being. Mind was pretending, and you had fallen into the trap.

What you have to understand is the process of identification: how one can get identified with something which he is not.

An ancient parable in the East is that a lioness was jumping from one hillock to another hillock, and just in the middle she gave birth to a kid. The kid fell down on the road where a big crowd of sheep was passing. Naturally he also mixed with the sheep, lived with the sheep, behaved like a sheep. He had no idea, not even in his dreams, that he is a lion. How could he have? All around him were sheep and more sheep. He had never roared like a lion: a sheep does not roar. He had never been alone like a lion: a sheep is never alone. She is always in the crowd; the crowd is cozy, secure, safe. If you see sheep walking, they walk so closely that they are almost stumbling on each other. They are so afraid to be alone.

But the lion started growing up – it was a strange phenomenon. He was identified mentally with being a sheep, but biology does not go according to your identification; nature is not going to follow you.