Osho Active Meditations

Osho discourse on What is Dynamic Meditation?

Osho - The first thing to be understood about Dynamic Meditation is that it is a method of creating a situation through tension in which meditation can happen. If your total being is completely tense, the only possibility that remains is relaxation. Ordinarily one cannot go directly into relaxation, but if your whole being is at a peak of total tension then the second step comes automatically, spontaneously: silence is created.

Osho Dynamic Meditation

The first three stages of the technique are done in order to achieve this climax of tension throughout all the layers of your being. The first layer is the physical body. Beyond that is the prana sharir, the vital body: this is your second body, the etheric body. Beyond it is the third body, the astral body. Your vital body takes in breath as its food. If the normal intake of oxygen is changed, the vital body is bound to change. Deep, fast breathing for ten minutes in the first stage of the technique is a means of changing the whole chemistry of your vital body.

The breathing must be both deep and fast – as deep as possible and as fast as possible. If you cannot do both, then it must be fast. Fast breathing becomes a sort of hammering on the vital body and something which is asleep begins to wake: the reservoir of your energies breaks open. The breathing is like a flood of electricity throughout the whole nervous system. So you must do the first step as vigorously, as intensely as possible. You must be in it totally; not a single fragment of you should be outside of it. Your whole being should be in the breathing in the first step.

You are just an anarchy: breathing in, breathing out. Your total mind is in the process – breath going out, breath coming in. If you are totally in it, thoughts will cease because none of your energy is available to move into thought – there is no energy left to keep them alive. Then, when the body electricity begins to work in you, the second step begins. When bioenergy begins revolving in you, working through your nervous system, many things are possible for your body. You must be free to let the body do anything it wants to do.

This second step will be not only a state of let go but a state of positive cooperation too. You must cooperate with your body, because the language of the body is a symbolic one which has ordinarily been lost. If your body wants to dance, you cannot feel the message. So if there is a slight tendency toward dancing in the second stage, cooperate with it; only then will you understand the language. Whatsoever happens in this second ten-minute stage, do to your maximum.

Throughout the whole process of the technique, nothing should be done below the maximum. You may begin to dance, jump, laugh, or cry. Anything that happens to you, however the energy wants to express itself, cooperate with it. It will just be a hunch in the beginning, just a mild temptation – so mild that if you want to suppress it, it will not come to the conscious level at all. It can be suppressed unknowingly. So if there is any hunch, any flickering, any indication in the mind, then cooperate with it and do it to your maximum, to the very extreme.

There is tension only at the extreme, not otherwise. If the dance is not at its maximum then it will not be effective, it will lead nowhere; people dance so many times, but it leads nowhere. So the dance must be at its maximum – and unplanned, just done instinctively or intuitively; your reason or your intellect must not come in between. In the second step just become the body, totally one with it, identified with it – just as in the first step you just become the breath.

The moment you bring your activity to the maximum a new, fresh feeling will surge up in you. Something will be broken: you will see your body as something apart from you; you will become just a witness to it. You do not have to try to be a witness, you just have to be identified with the body totally and allow the body to do whatever it wants to do and go wherever it wants to go. The moment the activity is at its maximum – dancing, crying, laughing, being irrational, doing any nonsense – then there is a happening: you become a witness.

Now you are just watching; there is no identification, just a witnessing consciousness which comes on its own. You don’t have to think about it, it just happens. This is the second step of the technique. Only when the first step has been done totally, completely, can you move into the second step. It is just like the gears in a car: the first gear can be changed into the second only when the speed in first gear is at its maximum, not otherwise. It is only possible to change from second gear into the third when the speed in second gear is at its maximum.

What we are involved with in Dynamic Meditation are the gears of the mind. If the physical body, the first gear, is brought to its maximum extreme through breathing, then you can change into second gear. Then the second must be completely intense: involved, committed, with nothing remaining behind. When you practice Dynamic Meditation for the first time this will be difficult, because we have suppressed the body so much that a suppressed pattern of life has become natural to us. It is not natural! Look at a child: he plays with his body in quite a different way.

If he is crying, he is crying intensely. The cry of a child is a beautiful thing to hear, but the cry of an adult is ugly. Even in anger a child is beautiful; he has a total intensity. But when an adult is angry he is ugly; he is not total. And any type of intensity is beautiful. This second step is only difficult because we have suppressed so much in the body, but if you cooperate with the body then the forgotten language is remembered again. You become a child. And when you become a child again a new feeling comes to you: you become weightless – an unsuppressed body becomes weightless.

When the body becomes totally unsuppressed, suppressions that have been accumulated throughout your life are thrown out. This is catharsis. A person who goes through this catharsis can never become insane; it is impossible. And if an insane person can be persuaded to do it he will return to normality. A person who has gone through this process has gone beyond madness: the potential seed has been killed, has been burnt out through all this catharsis.

This second step is psychotherapeutic. One can only go into meditation by going through catharsis. One must be cleansed completely; everything nonsensical must be thrown out. Our civilization has taught us to suppress, to keep things inside, so that everything goes into the unconscious and becomes part and parcel of the soul and creates much havoc throughout the whole being. Every ghost that has been suppressed becomes a potential seed for insanity. This must be eliminated. As man becomes more civilized, he becomes potentially more mad.

One who is uncivilized is potentially less mad because he still understands the language of the body, he still cooperates with it. His body is not suppressed; his body is the flowering of his being. This second step must be done totally. You must not be outside the body; you must be in it. When you are doing something, do it completely: be the doing, not the doer. That is what is meant by totality: be the doing, become the act; don’t be an actor. An actor is always outside his acting, he is never in it. When I love you I am in it, but when I act lovingly I am outside the act.

In the second step so many things are possible – something different will happen to each individual. One person will begin to dance, another person will begin to cry. One will become naked, another will begin to jump and yet another will begin to laugh. Anything is possible. Move from within, move totally, and then you can proceed to the third stage. The third stage is reached as a result of an inherent sequence. In the first stage, the body electricity, or you can call it Kundalini, is awakened. It begins to revolve and move. Only then can the body be in a total letgo, not before.

Only when the inner movement has begun are outer movements possible. When the catharsis of the second stage is brought to a peak, to a climax, the third ten-minute stage begins. Begin to repeat vigorously the Sufi mantra: Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! The energy that has been awakened through breathing and expressed through catharsis now begins to move inward and upward; the mantra rechannels the energy. Before it was moving downward and outward; now it begins to move inward and upward.

Go on hammering the sound within – Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! – until the whole being becomes nothing but the sound. You must exhaust yourself completely; only then does the fourth stage, the meditation, happen. The fourth stage is nothing – only silence and waiting. If you have moved into the first three stages totally, completely, holding nothing back, then in the fourth stage you will automatically fall into a deep relaxation.

The body is exhausted; all suppressions have been thrown out, all thoughts have been thrown out. Now relaxation comes spontaneously – you need not do anything to make it happen. This is the beginning of meditation. The situation has been created: you are not there. Now meditation can happen. You are open, waiting, receptive. And the happening happens.

Source: from book “The Great Challenge “by Osho

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