"Then you are still alive.

"And so is the case with thinking and meditation. Thinking is mind which is ill – not at ease, not reconciled with itself, disturbed, fragmented, divided. Meditation means the division is no more, the fragments have disappeared into oneness – you are at ease, at home.

"It is the same mind. Divided, it becomes thinking; undivided, it becomes meditation. If you can think, then you are capable of meditation, although meditation is not thinking. Thinking is an ill state of affairs, a pathology. But one can transcend it, and the transcendence is easy; it is not as difficult as you think. The difficulty comes because you don't really want to go into meditation. Because in meditation not only is thinking going to disappear, you also are going to disappear. Only an ill man is, a healthy man disappears. In health you are not; you exist only in illness, you exist only in pain, in suffering, in hell. You can't exist in heaven, because to feel one's existence means to feel pain.

"Have you not observed it? When you have a headache, then you have a head. When the headache disappears. the head disappears too. If your body is perfectly healthy and everything is running smoothly, humming smoothly, you don't feel the body at all: you become bodiless. In the ancient Indian scriptures, health is described and defined as bodilessness: you don't feel your body. How can you feel your body if it is not ill? Only illness creates knowledge; self-consciousness is created by it, self is created by it.

"So meditation is not difficult if you really want to go into it. It is the simplest thing possible – the most simple, the most primal. In your mother's womb you were in meditation. There was no distracting thought; you were not thinking about anything, you simply were. To regain that state of womb is what meditation is all about. When you see a person meditating, what do you see? He has disappeared into the womb again, he has made his whole body like a womb and he has disappeared into it. Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree…what is he doing? He has moved back to the source."