Courage to be Silent and Alone

I’m reading Osho’s Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously.  He offers one of the best and most currently relevant perspectives on meditation that I’ve found, as follows:

“Meditation is just a courage to be silent and alone.

Slowly slowly, you start feeling a new quality to yourself, a new aliveness, a new beauty, a new intelligence – which is not borrowed from anybody, which is growing within you.  It has roots in your existence.  And if you are not a coward, it will come to fruition, to flowering.

…Who knows, if a child is left on his (or her) own to grow, whether he will be of any use to the vested interests (of society, culture, religion, education) or not?  The society is not prepared to take the risk.  It grabs the child and starts molding him into something that is needed by society.

In a certain sense, it kills the soul of the child and gives him a false identity so that he never misses his soul, his being.  The false identity is a substitute but that substitute is useful only in the same crowd which has given it to you.  The moment you are alone, the false starts falling apart and the repressed real starts expressing itself.  Hence, the fear of being lonely.“