When such deep unity starts happening in many, many phases of your life; when all around you you start having such tremendous experiences of disappearance, egolessness, nothingness; when the flower is there and you are not, the rainbow is there and you are not; when the clouds are roaming in the sky both within and without and you are not; when there is utter silence as far as you are concerned; when there is nobody in you, just a pure silence, a virgin silence, undistracted, undisturbed by logic, thought, emotion, feeling, that is the moment of meditation. Mind is gone, and when mind is gone mystery enters.
Mystery and mind cannot exist together; they are not, by their very nature, co-existential. Just like darkness and light: you cannot have both in your room. If you want darkness you have to extinguish the light; if you want light then you have to lose darkness. You can only have one, for the simple reason that the presence of light is the absence of darkness, the presence of darkness is the absence of light; they are not two things, in fact. The same phenomenon, present, is light; absent, is darkness. Now you cannot manage both, to be present and absent together.
Mind is the presence of the non-mysterious, the logical, and meditation is the presence of the mysterious, the miraculous.
Hence, move from the mind. Let art, poetry, painting, dancing become more important – they will bring you closer to meditation – and finally take the plunge. If you have tasted something of poetry you will gather enough courage to take the ultimate plunge.
Hence, to me religion consists of three layers; the first layer is of science. Just as your body consists of material, atomic constituents, so religion consists first, the most peripheral part, of science. I am not against science: science is an absolute need, but it is only a peripheral phenomenon, the most superficial, the first concentric circle around your center. Then comes the second concentric circle which is deeper than science, that is of art, aesthetics. And then the third, that is meditation. And if you have entered these three concentric circles, slowly, slowly you will attain to the fourth.
The fourth in the East is called turiya; we have not given it any name, we have simply given it a number, the fourth. Nothing can be said about it, that’s why no name has been given to it. It is even beyond mystery. Meditation will take you into the mysterious, but there is still something more than that; that is inexpressible. Nothing can be said about it, nothing has ever been said about it, nothing will ever be said about it – but it has been experienced.
Only at that ultimate peak of experience, in that ultimate ecstasy, Walter, will you know what it is to be.
You ask me: “Beloved Osho, according to a very recent theory in astronomic physics, every atom which exists in the body or which builds up all material things around us comes out of a cosmic circle through which it must go at least twice.” Whether it goes twice or thrice, how can it help you to feel that you are part of the cosmos? It may go thousands of times – it is irrelevant!
You say: “However, this fact doesn’t help me to feel part of the cosmos.” No fact can help you. You will have to travel the whole terrain in a totally different dimension.