Osho on transformation of Hypnosis into Meditation

Question - Beloved Osho, While using Hypnosis in the service of Meditation, I have noticed that the Line between Therapy and Meditation is dissolving. As Witnessing can become Easy and natural in Hypnosis, it seems to provide the ground for a quantum Leap into No-Mind. Beloved Master, would you speak on the transformation of Hypnosis into Meditation?

Osho - Prem Purna, it is one of those crimes that Christianity is responsible for. There was a day when hypnosis was a recognized door towards meditation, but Christianity in the Middle Ages condemned hypnosis alongside witchcraft. That condemnation still lingers on, even in the minds of those who are not Christians but who are influenced without their knowing by Christian ideas.

Why was Christianity against hypnosis? You will be surprised to know it was against hypnosis because it leads directly to meditation; neither the priest is needed nor the church is needed – not even God is needed. This was the trouble. If meditation succeeds in the world there are not going to be any religions anymore, for the simple reason that you will be in direct contact with existence and yourself.

Why should you go through brokers and all kinds of agents who know nothing, except that they are knowledgeable, except that they have been disciplined for years in how to influence people and win friends. It is not something religious that they are doing. What they are doing is the politics of numbers: gather as many numbers as possible into your fold; that becomes your strength and your power.

Hypnosis was a danger to the priesthood, and Christianity is absolutely based from the very beginning on priesthood. Jesus does not declare himself to be enlightened, nor has any other Christian after him declared him to be enlightened. He declares something nonsensical – that he is the only begotten son of God. God is a hypothesis, and hypotheses are not Indians who go on producing children. Hypotheses are barren; they produce nothing.

Just the other day I received from Germany... There was a Protestant conference of Christians, and they had invited our sannyasins. They were hoping to refute our sannyasins and their ideas, but the whole thing backfired. There is nobody in the world who can refute my sannyasins because we are proposing neither beliefs nor hypotheses.

We are simply living life. Our philosophy is not something beyond the clouds; it is something rooted in the earth. It is something as scientific as anything can be. This question had arisen there, and there was great difficulty because the sannyasins said, ”Osho is enlightened and Jesus Christ is not.”

And the priests of Protestant Christianity could not produce any evidence that Jesus was enlightened; there is no statement anywhere. All that he was proclaiming was that he is the only begotten son of God. In fact that is a definite indication of UNenlightenment.
He does not know himself, and he is pretending to know God. And his prayer is just like our Vimal – twenty minutes and the religion is finished!

Then the remaining time you are free to do everything irreligious, and then again for twenty minutes you refresh yourself for your irreligiousness. The statements that Jesus has made are so ordinary because he was simply repeating the old prophets. The sannyasins have informed me that it was a strange situation when they confronted the high priests of Protestant Christianity. They looked at each other, what to do?

Enlightenment has not been a Western experience, and the reason why it could not happen in the West is Christianity. Christianity never wanted you to be directly connected with existence. You have to go via the priest, the pope, the son, and THEN God. In between, the mediators are many. And nobody knows who is lying... Of course you can never discover, because you don’t have any direct line with God.

The priest has a direct line with the pope, the pope has a direct line with Jesus, Jesus has a direct line with God – and the numbers are not given in the telephone directories. Hypnosis was the door, has always been the door to meditation. Once a man enters into the world of meditation, he has such clarity, such a strength, so much life arising in him that he no longer needs any father in heaven.

He no longer needs any priest to pray for him. He himself has become prayer – not prayer to any God, but simply a prayerfulness, a gratitude to the whole. It was absolutely necessary for Christianity to condemn hypnosis and to condemn it as something created by the devil. For the same reasons witchcraft was brutally destroyed; millions of women
were burnt alive because they were also doing the same thing.

They were trying to contact the ultimate on their own without going through the proper channel of the church. Your question is very significant, Purna. You are asking, ”While using hypnosis in the service of meditation...” Hypnosis in itself can be used dangerously unless it is used in the service of meditation. I will have to explain to you what exactly is meant by hypnosis and how it can be misused if it is not used singularly in the service of meditation.

Hypnosis literally means deliberately created sleep. It is now known that thirty-three percent, that is one third of humanity is capable of going into the deepest layers of hypnosis. It is a strange number, thirty-three percent; strange because only thirty-three percent of people have the aesthetic sense, only thirty-three percent of people have sensitivity, only thirty-three percent of people have friendliness, only thirty-three percent of people are creators.

And my only experience is that these thirty-three percent of the people are the same, because creativity and sensitivity are meditation, are love, are friendliness. All need essentially one thing: a deep trust in oneself, in the existence, and a receptivity and opening of the heart. Hypnosis can be created in two ways. Because of the first, people became impressed by the Christian propaganda that it is dangerous.

That is hetero-hypnosis: somebody else hypnotizes you, a hypnotist hypnotizes you. There are so many wrong ideas attached, and the most fundamental isthat the hypnotist has the power to hypnotize you. That is absolutely wrong. The hypnotist has the
technique, not the power. Nobody can hypnotize you against yourself, unless you are willing. Unless you are ready to go into the unknown, untraveled darkness, no hypnotist can manage to hypnotize you.

But in fact hypnotists don’t deny that they have the power; on the contrary, they claim that they have the power to hypnotize people. Nobody has the power to hypnotize anyone. Only you have the power to hypnotize yourself or to be hypnotized by somebody else – the power is yours. But when you are hypnotized by somebody else it can be misused.

Osho Discourse on HypnosisContinued...
"Technique of Hypnosis and its Danger"
"Self Hypnosis use in Meditation"