Introduction

Meditation, says Osho in the second of this series of talks, is a science. A simple statement, with profound implications. Not a belief, not a faith, not a ritual but a science, an experiment that takes place not in the outer world of science as we know it, but in the inner world of the experimenter.

It is a science that has been known by the mystics for centuries and misunderstood by the masses for just as long. It is not a body of knowledge that can be learned from books – although the words indicating it may be passed on, as these sutras of Vigyan Bhairav Tantra have been passed on. But the experience to which the words are pointing can only be transmitted by one who has lived them. They can be passed on only by a master to a disciple.

Modern man, particularly in the Western world and increasingly in the East as it is influenced by the West, has forgotten what meditation is, and has substituted beliefs and rituals in its place. We have glimpses of meditation, when we are struck by beauty, or speechless with love. But we have been taught and conditioned to look outside, so much that the prospect of looking in never occurs to us. Or if it does, we are so tense, so complicated, so entangled in our outside preoccupations that we do not know where or how to begin.

Enter Osho. His whole life’s work has been to reclaim the science of meditation from the past and make it fresh and relevant to modern man. And this series of talks on the sutras given by Shiva to his consort Devi is a landmark in Osho’s work. His commentaries on the 112 meditation techniques of Vigyan Bhairav Tantra contain the whole science of meditation, reborn for the 21st Century. There is a technique here, Osho says, for every type of man and woman in the world. He speaks on each, and answers questions about them. He encourages his listeners to experiment, in a playful and relaxed way, and see what “clicks”. If you try them all and nothing clicks, he says, then meditation is not for you.

So that is the most important thing – that you become not just a reader but a scientist of your own inner world. Along the way, a few things may be helpful to know, and we have put them in this introduction.

In the beginning of the book, Osho contrasts yoga and tantra. Yoga he says is the path of will, and tantra is the path of surrender, or let-go. Westerners already have a highly developed will, he says, and that is why yoga cannot help them very much. Tantra is the path based on acceptance:

Tantra says, accept whatsoever you are. You are a great mystery of many multidimensional energies. Accept it, and move with every energy with deep sensitivity, with awareness, with love, with understanding. Move with it! Then every desire becomes a vehicle to go beyond it. Then every energy becomes a help. And then this very world is nirvana, this very body is a temple – a holy temple, a holy place (p. 19).

Osho adds that no methods or techniques of meditation would be needed if we knew how to love. Since we have had only glimpses of love at the most, then these methods can help us to go beyond our limitations. But without Osho’s guidance, these sutras are often very difficult to understand.

Going through the techniques patiently one by one, Osho shows clearly which techniques are right for different types of people – for example, which are suitable for those of an intellectual bent and which for the heartful, feeling type of person.

Thinking and feeling – these are the two basic types…. Remember to find out your type. And no type is higher or lower. Do not think that the intellectual type is higher or the feeling type is higher – no! They are simply types. No one is higher or lower (p. 269).

This kind of advice alone can save us hours of experimenting with a method which is unlikely to work for us.

The meditations are quite distinct in another way – they are based in different senses. Some deal with the eyes, with looking, with vision, with images. Some deal with sound, listening meditations. Some involve the senses of taste and smell.

The meditations also relate to the different energy centers in the body. There are meditations which bring the energy down to the base chakra, the sex center, or to the hara, and there are some for opening the heart or throat centers, and others for the third eye or the crown chakra.

Because these sutras were designed by Shiva and given to his consort Devi, his lover, they also include some meditations which are specifically for women.

Osho talks about the energy differences between the bodies of men and women, and as he goes along, he indicates which meditations are more comfortable for women or for men. I’ll say a bit more about this later.

Experimenting with the meditations

Although these meditations are very ancient, they are just as powerful today, perhaps more so, when used in accordance with the guidance set for them by Osho. During the last three years, Swami Deva Wadud and I have used them in our Esoteric Science Training given in Osho Multiversity, Poona, India. In this three-month training, we couldn’t do all 112 meditations, so we presented a selection of 55 or 60 of them and designed the presentation according to the map of the seven chakras. Osho doesn’t give us this sequence in the book, and they don’t have to be done this way, but it worked for us in the course.

Each participant received copies of the meditations so they could read Osho’s own words about them. Then the whole group experimented with them together. We presented a large variety so people could find the meditation that suited them best, but we were not able to do every meditation every day. However, there was one meditation which we did do almost every day – the darkness meditation, also appearing in history as the Darkness of the Essenes. As a result of this course, hundreds of people have now experimented with these techniques and had astonishing results. I would like to tell you a bit about how we used these meditations in the course and what we found.

To begin with, Wadud and I as leaders of the course found that we could only show people the meditations if we had already done them ourselves for a period of time. We spent at least a year in preparation for this course and we tried dozens of these meditations. Many times the methods took us to unknown places, sometimes frightening and sometimes very blissful. We felt like a couple of mad scientists being the experimenter and the experimented on all at the same time. And it was always an incredible blessing to be able to lead and join in these meditations in a group.

I found that one meditation was especially helpful to me as a course leader. During the course, we would listen to the participants describe their experiences. Sometimes we had to do a meditation just to stay in tune with what the people were telling us – the meditation which is called “listening through the heart”. Osho describes it saying,

While listening to music, listen to it from the heart. Feel the music coming to your heart, let your heart vibrate with it. Let your senses be joined to the heart, not to the head (p. 154).

With this meditation, I would listen from my heart as the people spoke and I could fall enough in tune with them to understand what they were trying to express. Putting an experience of meditation into words is almost impossible, and sometimes when people were giving their experiences they sounded like candidates for madhouses! Harmless ones of course, but still….

For example one meditation that we did early in the course was a looking meditation where people would go out into the garden and look at a plant but at a certain point the direction shifts and you let the energy come back to you through the eyes. When Osho describes this meditation, he says:

When you look at a flower or at a face, a certain energy is being thrown – your look is energy… suddenly, from the flower your attention will come back, bounce back to yourself. It will become a circle…. If there are no thoughts, this happens. Then you are not looking at the flower only, you are looking at the looker also. Then the looker and the flower have become two objects and you have become a witness of both (p. 728-730).

After trying this meditation, sometimes people would say, “I feel the plant is looking at me” or “I feel like the plant loves me.” One person said, “I feel like the plant and I became one,” and another said, “I felt there was no separation between me and the plant.” Now in our society if a person says, “I feel the plant lives inside me,” or “The energy was flowing between the plant and me,” many others would suspect that the person had become quietly mad, or at least, very eccentric.

So, many times during the feedback sessions, we had to listen both from the experience of having done the meditation ourselves and also from the perspective of “listening with the heart.” Otherwise we just could not have understood what the person was trying to say.

Sometimes people would have physical reactions in their bodies when they started doing this looking meditation. Some might experience their eyes burning, or they would be in tears, or they would want so much to close their eyes and were fighting to keep them open. Sometimes they would have other physical reactions and we would always ask them first to go and be checked by a doctor. If everything was okay we would assume that it was just something moving in their energy. Then we would help them find whatever made them more comfortable doing the meditation, but mainly people followed their own intuition to find the way to help their energy to begin to flow in a more natural and even way. If they did that, then the body would begin to relax and the physical problems would disappear. And pretty soon, the people would find that they could keep their eyes open without blinking for a longer time.

Later they would come back and say, “I can do the looking meditation anywhere even when I’m just waiting for five minutes in a queue or in a quiet street or even in the doctor’s waiting room. Everything becomes very settled and quiet. But I didn’t want to tell the nurse in the office that the plant was looking at me!”

The heart as the door

In fact, it has been my experience that the heart meditations are a very important place for beginning the whole process of meditation. It can be said that meditation really only has two steps: from the head to the heart and from the heart to the navel, the original center. So we introduced the heart meditations right at the start of the course and then we bring them in frequently throughout the whole three months. At first the participants do not recognize the space of the heart. After all, says Osho,

There are schools, Colleges, universities to train the mind, but there is no place to train the heart…. Really, the more man becomes civilized, the less and less the heart is trained. We have really forgotten about it – that it exists, or that there is any need for its training (p. 153).

So we go to the heart indirectly. In one exercise we have people sit in front of another person and simply tune into the feelings going on inside the other, emotionally and physically. Most people are quite surprised and delighted to find that ninety percent of the time what they are sensing, tuning into, is quite accurate. At this stage people tend to think they are in tune with the heart of the other person. But it is not always necessarily so.

Another looking meditation which we use is the mediation which we call “the eyes of love” (p. 176). We ask people to simply close their eyes and remember how their eyes would look upon the face of a loved one or a newborn baby. And then we ask people to open their eyes and look at the other people in the room with the same eyes with which they would look at a buddha or at someone they love very much. This “eyes of love” meditation also puts people in an attunement or harmony with another. But even this is actually not the energy of the heart, but of the second center, although it may also include the heart center.

Another way of coming into attunement or harmony with another person is the listening with the heart meditation that I already mentioned. Here the person simply imagines that all the sounds which he or she is hearing – the voice of a partner or the sounds from outside the room or from nature – that all the sounds are coming into his heart and that he is receiving the sounds into the heart. This meditation is much like the looking meditation but it’s from the perspective of an auditory person. Still it brings the person into an attunement or harmony with the energy or the feelings of another.

We use these experiences to begin even though they are not meditations of the heart because it’s a little like learning to ride a bike. A person may start out not riding very well, maybe falls off the bicycle a few times. He has to concentrate on using his feet to pedal and he has to concentrate on holding the handlebars so he can get the bike to go the direction he wants to go. He’s got to look in all directions to make sure he is not going to run into a tree and he might have to ring the bell or maybe change gears and he has to remember where the brakes are. It’s quite complicated in the beginning. Slowly the person gets the knack of it and at a certain point he can ride the bicycle easily – and it is the same way with the heart meditations.

The beginning steps are very important so we try quite a few meditations at this stage. For example, there is a meditation which is considering the consciousness of another to be your own consciousness (p. 1080-1084). Now at the beginning, it’s not likely that a person will have the experience of another’s consciousness, but they start to be able to feel as if they are standing in another’s shoes and finding out how that person is feeling inside – they often start with finding what the person is feeling inside emotionally. This we can sense through the second chakra. It’s not actually the energy of the heart center, it’s the energy of the second center, but it is a good beginning place.

Later as participants work with the meditations more and more, they penetrate through that whole layer of emotions and feelings and they move into a space which we could call the “emptiness of the heart”. Here the feelings of love or what we call love suddenly change from being passionate to cool. At this point the participant actually begins for the first time to have what I think is really the experience of the heart opening. Up until then, the experience may be of the heart opening but does not necessarily have to include it.

Once the heart does open up there comes an acceptance of things as they are – a very deep acceptance. Once that acceptance is there, then the person has the ability to turn their eyes inward and look at what is actually happening within themselves. Until there is this space of acceptance, things within the person are hiding.

We have all been taught through our culture to condemn, criticize, judge and reject ourselves. So anything which has been judged and criticized and rejected in us starts hiding and we cannot see it. It is not until the space of the heart opens that meditation can really begin.

This is why I think Osho speaks about the heart as the door to meditation. When this empty space comes, this acceptance, it’s not the passionate feeling that people think is love – that’s usually just a chemical and hormonal response to another, with a strong attachment or attraction and we are used to calling it love.

As I understand what Osho means when he uses the word love… actually in the course we don’t use the word love because there is so much confusion in people about what it really means. Osho says,

Love itself is the greatest method, but love is difficult – in a way impossible. Love means putting yourself out from your consciousness, and in the same place where your ego has been in existence, putting someone else. Replacing yourself by someone else means love – as if you are not and only the other is (p. 177).

Now I don’t think that very many of us have really had any more than glimpses of this kind of love. So we try to avoid the word love and use the words acceptance, compassion, intuition, playfulness, silence, trust. These are the qualities that begin to open up for the first time when the heart center actually does open.

Now the reason that a person cannot actually have an experience of meditation until the heart opens is that in order to have this experience, there has to be no judgment. Osho has described the essential qualities of meditation as watching, relaxation, and no judgment. Only when the heart opens is a person capable of having no judgment and simply accepting whatever is. Then it is possible for people to see what is inside themselves. There may be others who walk a few steps ahead and who can sec what is inside a person but it does not matter who else sees it. The only thing that matters is whether the person himself can look inside in that space of acceptance or nonjudgement and simply see what is there and leave it as it is, not trying to get rid of it, not trying to change it. Even to have the idea of trying to change it is a subtle condemnation of yourself as you are.

So when the heart opens and the acceptance is felt, then there is a tremendous expression of energy, spontaneity, chaos, playfulness. And after that the person grows not in a linear way – not step by step, putting one foot down and then lifting the other one and putting that down – but growth seems to come in leaps, vertical leaps. And a tremendous creativity is released in the process.

Exploring the chakras

People really discover the emptiness of the heart with this cool quality only after a month or more of these meditations. But once this acceptance is present, than a very deep exploration can begin. The participants start to unravel many mysteries inside themselves. And as they discover the mysterious, they find they are just simple facts of life.

When this space of the heart does open, only then is it possible to go down into the lower chakras. Here we can explore the energy of power or misuse of power in the third chakra; explore the emotions – anger, sadness, fear – in the second; and explore sexuality and fears of life and death, fear concerning survival, in the first, or base chakra.

Things that have been stored in the unconscious start to bubble up like Champagne in a glass. They come to the top and are released and others come up and burst and are released. If we stay in the heart so there is no criticism and no judgment, no rejection of these things, then what has been repressed reveals itself. And once these repressions are released, then the treasures begin to bubble up. So first there is a release of the repressions which is like throwing out the collective trash and then the treasures start to come up. Once the lower centers are cleared and opened of repressions and fears, the things which have been stopping the energy from flowing are released.

Once they are released, energy flows up from the lower center into the heart, and from there, it starts to flow upward into the throat center. Creativity is released and spontaneity arises. Then the people start living moment-by-moment rather than according to guidelines or rules or unconscious patterns of conditioning associated with their repressions. Out of that spontaneity, tenderness and expressions of love come playfulness and the ability of a person to laugh at himself or herself. And that laughter is very healing.

Once this has happened, we begin with meditations for opening the third eye. There are actually two basic methods for opening the third eye, the sixth chakra. One is to bring the energy from the base of the spine up through all the energy centers through the body until it hits the third eye from the inside underneath and it opens. And the other method is to go more directly through the looking meditations.

According to Osho, about eighty percent of our energy is lost through the eyes. It just goes out of the eyes and we lose all that energy. In the looking meditations, the energy is reversed and it goes back in through the eyes and hits the third eye and it opens. Sometimes one method works better for one type of person and sometimes the other – people have to experiment. And there also is a beautiful meditation devised by Osho called Gourishankar Meditation. This uses a blue light and is a beautiful way to develop and open the third eye.

The circle of love

Once the lower chakras have been cleared, then it is also possible to try some of the meditations that we would customarily describe as “tantric”. Of course, we can only introduce them in the group; people who want to try the tantric meditations have to do them either alone or with a lover, depending on the meditation, outside the group.

But I can tell you a bit about my own experience with them. First let me say, I don’t want to confuse anybody about the meaning of tantra. Tantra does not mean sex, tantra means love which uses sex as a vehicle to reach to meditation. Let’s be completely clear about this.

Tantra means this: the Transformation of love into meditation. And now you can understand why tantra talks so much about love and sex.

Why? Because love is the easiest natural door from where you can transcend this world, this horizontal dimension. …

Love suddenly changes your dimension. You are thrown out of time and you are facing eternity. Love can become a deep meditation the deepest possible. …

Love for Shiva is the great gate. And for him sex is not something to be condemned. For him sex is the seed and love is the flowering of it, and if you condemn the seed you condemn the flower. Sex can become love. If it never becomes love then it is crippled. Condemn the crippledness, not the sex. Love must flower, sex must become love. If it is not becoming, it is not the fault of sex, it is your fault.

Sex must not remain sex; that is the tantra teaching. It must be transformed into love. And love also must not remain love. It must be transformed into light, into meditative experience, into the last, ultimate mystic peak. How to transform love? Be the act and forget the actor. While loving, be love – simply love. Then it is not your love or my love or anybody else’s – it is simply love. When you are not there, when you are in the hands of the ultimate source, or current, when you are in love, it is not you who is in love. When love has engulfed you, you have disappeared; you have just become a flowing energy (p. 95-96).

There are a number of basic meditations in this book which we can try. But first we have to understand that as we are using sex right now, it is not a meditation. As tantra would see it, we are misusing sex because we have condemned it so much in the past. There has been so much condemnation of sex that it is buried in our collective unconscious – we might not even be aware of it.

Constant hammering on the human mind that sex is sin has created a deep barrier within you. You never allow yourself a total let-go. Something is always standing aloof condemning, even for the new generation. They may say they are not burdened, obsessed, that sex is not a taboo for them, but you cannot unburden your unconscious so easily. It has been built over centuries and centuries; the whole human past is there. So while you may not be condemning it as sin consciously, the unconscious is there constantly condemning it. You are never totally in it. Something is always left out. That left-out part creates the split.

Tantra says move in it totally. Just forget yourself, your civilization, your religion, your culture, your ideology. Forget everything. Just move in the sex act: move in it totally; do not leave anything out. Become absolutely nonthinking. Only then does the awareness happen that you have become one with someone. And this feeling of oneness can then be detached from the partner and it can be used with the whole universe. You can be in a sex act with a tree, with the moon, with anything.

Once you know how to create this circle, it can be created with anything – even without anything (p. 471).

In reference to this, Osho says some meditations are appropriate for men and some for women. These distinctions are based in his understanding about the complementary differences in the bodies of men and women. First he says, both men and women are half man and half woman because they are born of both a man and a woman. But then where a man’s body is positive, a woman’s body is negative and vice versa. In the man, the base chakra has a positive energy, so positive energy can rise up from there. This is why men can have the experience of kundalini energy rising up the spine. But, says Osho, the woman’s body is negative at the first chakra; in that part of the body, she will have a deep receptivity, the potential here for her is a letting go.

Women have their positive energy located at the breasts. So there are two meditations specifically for women. One is becoming aware of the energy “between the armpits”, that is, the whole area of the heart center. If women focus on this area, they will feel a positive energy there. The second meditation for women is to concentrate exactly on the nipples, on both nipples simultaneously. Osho says this will bring a sweet fragrance to the body of a woman, she may even begin to lose weight, to feel lighter or to have visions. The counterpart for men is to concentrate on the root of the penis where the man’s energy is positive.

Really, if a man tries to concentrate near the breasts he will become very uneasy. Try it.

Within five minutes you will start perspiring and you will become very uneasy, because male breasts are negative, they will give you negativity. You will feel uneasy, uncomfortable, that something is going wrong in the body, ill. But female breasts are positive. If women concentrate near the breasts, they will feel very happy, very blissful, a sweetness will pervade all over their being and their body will lose gravity. They will feel light, as if they can fly. And with this concentration many things will change; you will become more motherly. You may not become a mother but you will become more motherly. To everyone your relationship will become motherly – more compassion, more love will happen. But this concentration near the breasts should be done very relaxedly, not tensely. If you are tense about it there will be a division between you and the breasts. Relax and melt into them, and feel that you are no more, that only the breasts are there.

If the man has to do the same he will have to do it with the sex center, not the breasts. Hence the importance of the first chakra in all kundalini yogas. He has to concentrate just at the root of the penis – there he has the creativity, there he is positive (p. 950-952).

There are also meditations which men and women can do together – one is “In the sex act, do not seek the release” (p. 466-469). Another one is called “The Circle of Love”. When a man and a woman are making love, if he gives energy from his positive first chakra to hers, which is negative and receptive, then it can rise up through her body to the heart area where she is positive. From there it can pass to his heart area, which is negative, and if he receives it, the energy moves down through his body to the first chakra. A circle of love energy is created.

One time I tried this without telling the man what I was doing. So much energy came to my heart I felt like it was going to burst. So I just asked him, “Will you open your heart a bit?” And he did, and a circle of energy was created.

Osho goes on to say that if a circle of love is created, then a flickering can happen, where the man suddenly feels that he is the woman, and she feels she is the man, and then it reverses again.

When two lovers really meet and become a circle then a flickering happens. For a moment the lover becomes the beloved and the beloved becomes the lover, and the next moment, again the lover is the lover and the beloved is the beloved. The male becomes the female for a moment, then the female becomes the male for the moment – because the energy is moving, and it has become one circle (p. 951).

In addition, there are two tantric meditations that you can do alone. These are based on the understanding that the bliss we feel in love-making is not really coming from the other:

When two lovers are there, by and by they both become absent. A pure existence remains without any egos, any conflict… just a communion. In that communion one feels blissful. It is wrongly inferred that the other has given that bliss to you. That bliss has come because unknowingly you have fallen into a deep meditative technique.

You can do it consciously – and when you do it consciously it goes deeper, because then you are not obsessed with the object. Remember this, the bliss happens because of you. Because you are so absorbed in the other, the bliss happens (p. 178-179).

So the first tantric meditation alone is called “Shaking in sex” (p. 469-470). Actually this one can also be done with a partner and it can help us to become total in the act of making love. And the other is called “Make love without the partner” (p. 470-472). If you have experienced the “circle of love” with a partner, then you can experience it alone:

If you have had the feeling, if you have known the moment when you were not there but only a vibrating energy had become one and there was a circle with the partner, in that moment there was no partner. In that moment only you are, and for the partner you are not: only he or she is. That oneness is centered within you; the partner is no more there. And it is easier for women to have this feeling because they are always making love with closed eyes.

You can create this circle within yourself because man is both man and woman, and woman is both woman and man. You are both because you were created by two. You were created by man and woman both, so half of you remains the other. You can forget everything completely, and the circle can be created within you. Once the circle is created within you – your man is meeting your woman, the inner woman is meeting the inner man – you are in an embrace within yourself.

And only when the circle is created is real celibacy attained (p. 470-471).

Darkness of the Essenes

I mentioned at the beginning that we do the darkness meditation throughout the whole three months of the course. We fix the doors and windows so that we can seal them and no light enters at all. The room is completely black, completely dark, and we sit there for one hour. We keep the eyes open and allow them to become very receptive and absorb the darkness like a sponge absorbing water. We allow the whole body to become filled with darkness. This is the first stage of the darkness meditation.

If you start doing this meditation, it’s important for you to know that Osho advised us to do one meditation of light, or a moving meditation, while doing the darkness meditation. Otherwise the energy becomes too introverted and can get stuck.

There is a second stage of the darkness meditation where we sit in the dark with eyes open absorbing the darkness for 45 minutes. Then we lie down in the fetal position, and imagine that we are in the womb of the mother.

And then there is a third stage after one has been doing the darkness meditation for several months: when you leave the room where the darkness meditation has been happening, whether its day or night, you carry a small patch of darkness inside. Basically, this meditation allows your energy to become cool, more relaxed and receptive.

One participant who did the darkness meditation said, “This meditation makes it possible for me to exist in vast and limitless space with no boundaries.” Another said that the darkness meditation felt “really healing – it was so soothing, like classical music.” And a third person told the group that even though he had spent “three days with my eyes covered and wearing earplugs, I found just one hour of darkness meditation to be even more intense.”

Trying the meditations

I want to emphasize that Osho’s approach is very scientific – he never asks us to believe what he says about a method. He always encourages us to try it for ourselves. But if you read the book and then put it back on the shelf without trying the meditations, then they will remain merely information or knowledge, and they will not be able to help you in your quest. Of course, not every technique is suitable for every person, but within these 112 methods there is at least one method that will appeal to every type of person.

As you read what Osho says about the different techniques, one will seem to just click for you. This is the one to try. Osho suggests that if you have an affinity with it, play with it for three days, then relax, take it easy. If you continue to feel good about it, and you find it effective in making you more aware, try it for three months.

Even if you understood the method verbally the first time you read it, it is still important to reread what Osho says about a meditation you are trying, so you can catch the nuances and subtle points after you’ve had some experience with it.

A person who does the meditations sincerely begins to discover for himself or herself what is true. So if you try any of the methods, you will come to know about its effects on your own authority. But there is one point to remember: in Osho’s way of seeing the meditations, the techniques are not for “doing”. So try to avoid being result-oriented.

Bliss is a by-product, you cannot grab it directly. It is so delicate a phenomenon that you have to approach it only indirectly. Do something else and it happens. You cannot do it directly. … If you are concerned only with the result, then it will never happen. And then it becomes very strange. People come to me and say, “You said that if we do meditation this will happen, but we are doing it and this is not happening.” And they are right, but they have forgotten the condition: you have to forget about the result, only then does it happen.

You have to be in the act totally. The more you are in the act, the sooner the result happens.

But it is always indirect. You cannot be aggressive about it, you cannot be violent about it. It is such a delicate phenomenon, it cannot be attacked. It only comes to you while you are engaged somewhere else so totally that your inner space is vacant. These techniques are all indirect. There is no direct technique for spiritual happening (p. 174).

Once the experience is yours, trust arises.

There is a story which clearly illustrates my experience with these meditations. It’s about a poor woodcutter who meets an old man, a Sufi mystic, in the woods.

The old man asks him why he’s cutting wood when there is a copper mine close by – one day’s work will be enough to support himself for a whole week. So the woodcutter collects some copper and it really is enough for a week’s needs. He goes back to express his gratitude and the mystic tells him that if he goes a little farther, he will find a silver mine and one day’s work will be enough to support himself for a whole month. So the man mines some silver and it is enough for a month. He goes to express his gratitude again and the mystic tells him there is a gold mine just a little further ahead.

So the man goes a little further and mines some gold, and it’s enough for a whole year! Then the next time the woodcutter comes, he is wearing new clothes and looks much healthier and he asks the Sufi if there is something else a little further along. And the Sufi tells him there is a diamond mine.

He mines enough for his whole life, but then he realizes the Sufi is sitting under the tree not bothering at all about gold or diamonds – the mystic tells him then that there is something beyond diamonds, that unless he discovers the mine of his own being, he hasn’t found anything. So he sat by the mystic and the whole day passed in such joy. Afterwards, he asks the mystic why he didn’t just tell him about this bliss in the first place.

And the Sufi replied, “You would not have listened. First diamonds are needed. Now you can go home, because the mine of your treasures is within you.”1

This story clearly illustrates my experience with Osho over the years of listening and exploring, understanding and misunderstanding, and discovering these meditations since 1976. Slowly slowly as each suggestion led me to myself, deeper and deeper, trust grew until now this trust is very deep, very strong, and the rewards from trying the methods are as deep and strong.

For Wadud and me, it is an incredible blessing to be in a room meditating with so many sincere people during this course. I have often had the feeling of “Ahh!” being with people who would allow themselves to melt with such innocence into something beyond the mind, something the mind could not recognize even.

The course is very beautiful for everyone in another way, too – the participants come to appreciate and respect each other. They learn to understand that people’s experiences are different and so not to compare themselves with others. They can just allow their own experience to be completely unique, just like the experiences in their everyday lives.

Osho tells us right in the beginning of the book that when a technique is really working for us, there will be a transitory period when we feel more disturbed or more aware of our disturbances. The technique may lead to silence only later on (p. 26-27). Sometimes it happens in the course that difficulties of everyday life come up or are highlighted because we are doing a particular meditation. We all begin to see that with each thing that arises, if we look deeply into the difficulty, then it can become a point of understanding. It can lead to such compassion.

When somebody has worked through a problem and come through to the other side, then they can turn and be able to see someone else struggling with the same difficulty. They can look directly into the eyes of the other with no judgment, no criticism, no rejection or condemnation, and appreciate the other with such understanding and tenderness. The person who is still having the difficulty can see the compassion and acceptance in the eyes of the other. It is such a healing and gives the second person the strength and courage to continue on until finally they can stand on the other side, too, with the same understanding and compassion for the next person who might stumble on that same stone in their journey.

So meditating together and participating in the whole process is a tremendously enriching experience, even a magnificent one. By the end of the course, people usually settle on two or three of the meditations they want to continue and to move into more deeply. And what happens to these people is that the depth they reach doing the meditations over time is, umm, well, indescribable.

On January 19, 1990, Osho left his body, having said that he would be dissolved in his people. If you are one of his people, then you already know this is so, and these words from Osho may become even more precious to you. And if this is your first step, perhaps by reading Vigyan Bhairav Tantra and experiencing the techniques, you will come to know and be blessed by Osho’s presence and indestructible energy. You can ride on the wave of this energy into a wonderful journey home to yourself.

Note: 1. Excerpted from Osho, Socrates Poisoned Again After 25 Centuries

Introduction to Osho, Vigyan Bhairav Tantra – The Book of the Secrets: A New Commentary

Published in loving memory of Waduda (Leela), who was a true healer and friend on the path for many. Text scan and upcoming articles organized by Nirbija.

Ma Deva Waduda, B. S., M. A., Psychology Bodhisattvaa, Siddha, M.M., D.M. (RIMU)

Ma Yoga Ranjana, Ph.D., Political Science Bodhisattvaa, Arihanta, M. M., D. Phil. M. (RIMU)

Related articles

• VBT: The supreme doctrine – without any doctrine – Osho’s introduction to the discourse series on the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra. “Tantra is not an intellectual proposition, it is an experience.”
• The Book of Secrets – How Shivananda came to design the book and cards for the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra set. An interview by Punya (December 2021)
• Leela (aka Waduda) – 30 September 2017 (obituary)