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means the joy of being together with somebody. These are the two wings of a true education. Meditation means independence, freedom -- freedom from all, even from the beloved, because even the presence of the beloved encroaches on your space. It is good for the time being, it is good to overlap your space with somebody, it is good to meet and merge, but ultimately, AND fundamentally, you are alone. And you have to learn how to be alone, and not only how to be alone, but joyously alone, ecstatically alone.
Meditation means sitting silently, doing nothing... just being! The world is too full of doing. The society teaches you to do this, to do that -- why? Because if you do this, you will have that; if you don't do this, you will not have that. Doing is a way of having more, and we are conditioned to have more and more and more -- as if by having more we will really be satisfied, contented; as if by having more we will really become rich.
The truth is just the opposite: the more you have, the more you feel your inner poverty -- in contrast. The richer you become in the outside world, the emptier you feel inside, and no outer richness can fill the inner gap. Nothing from the outside can be taken in. You can have as much wealth as possible, but it will go on piling up outside you; and the bigger the heap, the more you will see your inner emptiness, nothingness, hollowness -- the more miserable you will become.
Hence, the richer a society gets, the more and more it becomes interested in religion. Poor societies cannot be religious; it is almost impossible. I am not saying a poor person cannot be religious -- a poor person CAN be -- but a poor society cannot be. A poor person may be an exception: Kabir was a poor man -- and attained to the highest peak possible, became a Buddha. But the poor society as such cannot be religious.
The poor society remains interested in having more and more, and if you want to have more you will have to do more. You will have to put your whole energy into doing -- and meditation is just the opposite of doing. Meditation is a state of non-doing, it is a state of utter passiveness. It is a state of being: one simply
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