Is meditation also valuable for younger people?
Youth is the best time for inner transformation because youth is the most flexible time. Children are more flexible than young people, but they are not so understanding. They need a little experience. Youth is exactly the middle; you are no longer a child, no longer ignorant of life and its ways and not yet settled as an old man. You are in a state of transition, and the state of transition is the best time that you can jump out of the wheel of life and death. Youth is the most significant time to take any jump, because the jump needs courage, it needs energy, it needs risk, it needs daring.
Osho, The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 8, Talk #1
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The real virtue arises out of meditation, the pseudo virtue is cultivated. The pseudo virtue is part of character, the real virtue is part of consciousness. All societies live on pseudo virtue because it is easier to impose on children; it is difficult to make them meditators. That's what people have thought up to now. It is not true: children can be taught to be meditative, and more easily than older people.
But for centuries the idea has persisted that they are children -- how can they meditate? Of course they cannot sit still like an old man, but there is no need to sit like an old man. Meditations can be devised especially for them: they can dance and jump and jog and run, and yet meditation can happen. Their meditation has to be very active, it cannot be inactive.
If children are introduced to meditation from the very beginning they will have a totally different kind of virtue. Then you need not tell them what is right and what is wrong; they will know it on their own.
And that's my effort here: to help you to know on your own what is right and what is wrong, I never say what is right and what is wrong, I have no commandments, no shoulds, no should-nots. I simply want you to be able to see, to be clear like a mirror so that you can reflect reality.
Any action out of that clarity is virtuous.
Osho: The Imprisoned Splendor
(This title is no longer available at Osho's Request)
