Chapter 3. “Jump, Dance, Weep, Shout, Laugh…”

Life of Osho

Chapter 3. “Jump, Dance, Weep, Shout, Laugh…”

At the height of the summer of 1975 I was up in Dharamsala, in the Himalayas, waiting for the monsoon to break.For the best part of a year I had been in India and Sri Lanka, studying Buddhism. In particular I was trying to come to grips with vipassana meditation, which method could be said to lie at the heart of Buddhist teaching. So simple is it, it can hardly be called a method at all. You just sit comfortably, close your eyes and allow your attention to rest lightly on whatever is happening in the present moment. It does not matter what it is that is happening, it can be the sensation of what you are sitting on, or a memory in your mind, or a noise outside the window. It doesn’t matter, you observe it all with equal detachment.

You just watch… for in this approach nothing has any more importance than anything else. Never, and this goes right to the heart of the method, do you make any value judgments. If you like something, you merely note that you like it; if you dislike something, you merely note that you dislike it. Nothing has any greater status than anything else. Everything is just data. This in Buddhist texts is called ‘bare attention’, and the practice as a whole ‘witnessing’.

Vipassana was the central meditation developed by the Buddha. Historically if you put it back in its context you can see how violent a break with the past it was. Before Buddha ‘religion’ was essentially a form of worship – worship of some god or other, a form of praise or supplication, a ritual whose nature was specified by a caste of priests who were the heirs of tradition. All of this was revolutionised, literally overturned by the Buddha. “Be a light unto yourself” he said. Go back to the beginning again, and work out everything for yourself. Pay no attention to what anyone else says: the past is irrelevant.

Clearly such an attitude – a voluntary embracing of complete ignorance – can only appeal to an individual, or perhaps to a whole time, which has come to doubt everything they once held as true; an individual or a time which has come to suspect that nothing is as it appears to be – that it itself is not as it appears to be. Seen as such meditation becomes essentially a process of social deconditioning.

And an alarming one at that. For technically the purpose of vipassana – the word vipassana literally means ‘insight’ – is to break up all existing patterns, and to turn experience into a vast mass of de-conditioned, floating data – data which is free to suddenly, spontaneously, rearrange itself in its own inherent form, however shocking or even insane this may be to our conditioned minds. The texts speak of a “turning about in the deepest seat of consciousness” – a sudden blinding understanding for which nothing could prepare you.

Perhaps, deep down, this really frightened me. Perhaps, deep down, I didn’t want to let go into this… well, total mental breakdown, I guess. Anyway – for whatever the reason – after a year in India, travelling all over the place and talking to different meditation teachers, doing intensive retreats for weeks on end, I had to admit that I had drawn an almost complete blank. I was going round and round in a circle. I mean, there were ‘insights.’ Long forgotten childhood memories floated up. There would be moments when everything somehow became one – still and perfect and beautiful – but they only lasted a short while and then were gone again.

There would, particularly on the retreats, be these flashes of an incredibly intense rapture, which were somehow associated with the spine and the brain, but they lasted no longer than the moments of deep peace, and equally disappeared without leaving a trace… Basically I was just going round and round in my mind. Thinking as a process seemed to be totally out of control. It raced on and on; I was at once sunk in it, completely taken over by whatever was in my mind at that moment, yet at the same time somehow not aware of it at all. I couldn’t stop talking to myself. My mind didn’t seem to be ‘my’ mind at all…

This was when I met my first sannyasin.

Ananda Dass was a tall German Hippie, with long hair and a finely chiselled face. He was wearing what appeared to be a shapeless orange ball-gown; perhaps the first rains had already come because I seem to remember the dress being splashed with mud. Round his neck he had a necklace of wooden beads with a black-and-white photo in a wooden locket. “Bhagwan” he said, holding it towards me. It was a photo of a bald, bearded man looking into the middle distance. He looked a bit like Moses.

Ananda Dass was pacing up and down my little room in McLeod Ganj talking to me about his ‘Bhagwan’ when suddenly he froze, and an expression of alarm flashed across his face. He took a few steps with a curious halting gait. “It is a bit of clap” he announced, with a shout of nervous laughter. “I got it at the ashram.” I thought I had not heard. “The ashram?” I repeated, on what I hoped was a judicious note. I mean, I didn’t want to sound naive or anything. “Yeah” he said, taking a few tentative paces, stiff-legged like a bird. “Yeah.” It was the odd stress he had put on the word ashram… as though to say, where else? That sounds a weird ashram, I thought. Ananda Dass gave me an Osho book to read. It was a cheap Indian hardback, bound in black. The Silent Explosion it was called.

In the first few pages Osho said contemporary Westerners could not meditate because they were too tense from bottled-up feelings. Inside themselves was a thick layer of pain and madness which was blocking access to their real being. Failure to penetrate this left the meditator turning round and round in the shallows of the mind – obsessed, and fundamentally crazy.

Osho had, he said, been exploring an altogether different approach to meditation, and he proceeded to describe one such experiment in what he called ‘dynamic’ or ‘chaotic’ meditation. This was something best done early in the morning, and was divided into four stages, each of ten minutes.

First stage: 10 minutes of fast, deep breathing. You were to stand still, with your eyes closed, and to breathe through the nose as quickly and as deeply as possible. You were to do this chaotically, without any rhythm, and to keep it up for the full ten minutes. You were, he stressed, to drive yourself as hard as you possibly could. If you did so this breathing technique would quickly bring about hyperventilation and a huge rush of energy.

Second stage: 10 minutes. Cooperate with the reactions of the body and the emotions. Let go completely. Allow your body and emotions to do whatsoever this wave of energy prompted. “The body and mind will begin to move” he said.

Do not control the reactions. Cooperate completely with your body. The movements will take many forms: don’t suppress them. Let whatsoever happens happen. Jump, dance, weep, shout, laugh, anything you like. Let out all the madness inside. Express what you feel completely. The body will take its own course so don’t interfere with its movements. Be a witness to the process.

Third stage: 10 minutes of shouting Hoo – Hoo – Hoo – Hoo.

This was to build up the energy once more – only this time an energy purged of physical restlessness and subconscious emotional distress.

Fourth stage: 10 minutes deep relaxation. No movement – just silence and waiting. Be as a dead man. Totally let go of your mind and body. At this point, Osho said, meditation was ‘possible.’

All tensions are completely exhausted. You can sit or lie down. But now be relaxed completely, and be empty. Leave everything and just remain as you are.

This is the moment of non-doing, neither breathing, nor movement. Just silence.

You have become a vacuum, an emptiness, an open channel for divine grace. It pours in when you are not. You are totally conscious, relaxed, and doing nothing. In these moments meditation happens by itself. You are not to do anything to meditate.

Meditation will just flower in you the moment you come to surrender your action oriented mind. The ego goes with the doer. You have jumped to the centre.

Someone asked him: “Bhagwan, is it essential to express your inner feelings, your emotions, in this technique?”

And he answered: Yes, you must express what you are, totally. Of course that means madness because we are mad. We have been collecting every type of insanity for centuries… It is total nonsense to even try to discipline the mind. For you have not known the innermost core and are cultivating discipline on the periphery. You will become outwardly disciplined but the mad being will always remain within you. So the ultimate outcome is bound to be schizophrenic… First of all, one has to become mad to go out of madness. The demons and ghosts must come out of the machine before it can work properly…