Meditation is in the Present

Mind concentrates: it acts out of the past. Meditation acts in the present, out of the present. It is a pure response to the present, it is not reaction. It acts not out of conclusions, it acts seeing the existential.

Watch in your life: there is a great difference when you act out of conclusions.

You see a man, you feel attracted - a beautiful man, looks very good, looks innocent. His eyes are beautiful, the vibe is beautiful. But then the man introduces himself and he says, "I am Jew" - and you are a Christian. Something immediately clicks and there is distance: now the man is no more innocent, the man is no more beautiful. You have certain ideas about Jews. Or, he is a Christian and you are a Jew; you have certain ideas about Christians - what Christianity has done to Jews in the past, what other Christians have done to Jews in the past, how they have tortured Jews down the ages... and suddenly he is a Christian - and something immediately changes.

This is acting out of conclusions, prejudices, not looking at this man - because this man may not be the man that you think a Jew has to be... because each Jew is a different kind of man, each Hindu is a different kind of man, so is each Mohammedan.

You cannot act out of prejudices. You cannot act by categorizing people. You cannot pigeonhole people; nobody can be pigeonholed. You may have been deceived by a hundred communists, but when you meet the hundred and first communist don't go on believing in the category that you have made in your mind: that communists are deceptive - or anything. This may be a different type of man, because no two persons are alike.

Whenever you act out of conclusion, it is mind. When you look into the present and you don't allow any idea to obstruct the reality, to obstruct the fact, you just look into the fact and act out of that look, that is meditation.

Excerpts from Osho's book
"What is Meditation?"