Chapter 5. Dynamic Meditation

Life of Osho

Chapter 5. Dynamic Meditation

Perhaps another reason I kept nodding off was that I had been up since five.

The ten-day meditation camp had started with Osho’s Dynamic meditation – this was the one he had described in The Silent Explosion, though he’d changed it around a bit since then – and which was scheduled for half an hour before dawn.

A group leader had switched on the tape in the dark, and the corrugated-iron roofed shed or hangar in front of the ashram was filled with the sound of drumming. Loud, tomtom-like drumming. This was to spur us on to greater efforts with the fast ‘chaotic’ breathing through the nose… This was all as Osho had described it in his book, as were the next ten minutes. “Jump, dance, weep, shout, laugh… Let out all the madness inside!” However the next bit, the bit where you shouted Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! had been updated. Not only were you to do the shouting, but you were to do it while jumping up and down with your arms in the air. This, while it was excruciating, did in fact summon up a sort of demented energy which I for one didn’t know I had. At the height of it Osho’s voice on the tape suddenly shouted: “Stop!” At this you were to freeze in whatever position the command caught you in. You were not to move a muscle… It was a very strange space because you were at once pulsing with energy, and yet there was nowhere for this energy to go. My mind kept stopping and everything got more and more intense. It was as sharp-edged as a drug. At times I’d panic and try to get things back to normal. But then, after a moment, this strange silence, this sense of fusion, would again as it were well up…

This was timed to coincide with the exact moment of dawn. Strange suspended interval it was as the first light crept into the hangar, picking out the statue-like people frozen in one or another instant of time – picking out the scuffed bamboo mats, the shoulder-bags and cloaks people had discarded… The end was different too. The music started up again and there was a fifteen minute ‘celebratory’ dance. In this you just danced quietly on your own, in any way you felt.

Dancing… dancing wildly… dancing any way you felt… that’s my overriding memory of that first camp. I had never danced so much in my life. All the meditations were to music, and music and dance ran like a scarlet thread through everything: through the mud, through the thunder and lightning, through the rain which bucketed down at the end of every afternoon… “All the old religions of the world” Osho said “were dancing religions. By and by they have disappeared, and instead of the dancing religions very dull and dead churches have arisen. I want to bring all paganism back into religion – all the dance and celebration and the song. All kinds of wild joys have to be brought back into religion; only they can infuse spirit into it… So dance!”

The second meditation of the day, the mid-morning one, was devoted exclusively to dancing. The Nataraj, it was called – after the Dance of Shiva, the archetype of God as a dancer – and on the strength of this meditation alone Osho would be the Godfather of the 80s and 90s rave scene.

For forty minutes you were to dance – and to dance with abandon. You could dance any way you wanted, the only thing which mattered was that you threw yourself into it totally. “Dance madly, because in deep dancing energies melt very easily, blocks disappear very easily.Onebecomes total in dance more easily than anything else because the whole body as an organic unity becomes involved.” Osho insisted that dancing was the simplest way to go deeply into meditation – but you had to dance and dance for it to happen. “When a dancer goes on and on dancing, amomentcomeswhenonly the dance remains and the dancer disappears. That is the moment of enlightenment.

Whenever the doer is not there, whenever the manipulator is not there, whenever there is nobody inside you and there is only emptiness, nothingness, that is enlightenment.”

All Osho’s meditations seemed to start in the same way – with building up energy, with building up energy in the physical body. Where they differed lay in what they did with this energy once they had got it going… Another one, probably the most enjoyable of them all (during the camp there were five different meditations each day) was called the Kundalini. This was done just before dusk, and in a strange way was twinned with the Dynamic, which was done at dawn.

First stage: 15 minutes. Be loose and let your whole body shake, feeling the energies running up from your feet. Let go everywhere and become the shaking. Your eyes may be opened or closed.

I found that if I stood in a certain way, with the knees slightly bent, my body would begin to shake of its own accord.

This trembling could become extremely violent – and seemed to release an enormous amount of energy. “Allow the shaking, don’t do it” Osho said. “If you force it will become an exercise, a bodily physical exercise. Then the shaking will be there but just on the surface, it will not penetrate you. You will remain solid, stone-like, rock-like within; you will remain the manipulator, the doer, and the body will just be following. The body is not the question – you are the question.

“When I say shake I mean your solidity, your rock-like being should shake to the very foundations so that it becomes liquid, fluid, melts, flows. And when the rock-like being becomes liquid, your body will follow.”

Second stage: 15 minutes. Dance… any way you feel, and let the whole body move as it wishes.

Any way you feel was something of an understatement. I suppose it was equally mad in the Dynamic, but that was in the dark and you couldn’t see. On a good afternoon the Kundalini looked like the Snake Pit. (The rickshaw-wallahs, who even then were beginning to pile up round the ashram gates, had made a little hole in the bougainvillea so that they could see a bit of Western tit.

They’d reel away from their peephole, giggling and rolling their eyes, stroking their little moustaches in an agitated sort of a way. But if you got close enough to look in their eyes, you would see something far removed from salacity: genuine fear, I’d say.)

Third stage: 15 minutes. Close your eyes and be still, sitting or standing… witnessing whatever is happening inside and out. This seemed something very close to vipassana – only using music as a means of anchoring yourself in the present moment rather than, as various Buddhist schools did, concentration on the breath. However, if I understood Osho correctly, you were meant to make as intense an effort to stay in the present moment as you had made when you threw yourself into the shaking or the dancing.

Fourth stage: 15 minutes. Keeping your eyes closed, lie down and be still.

This was the opposite. This was the cessation of all effort, that state of ‘let-go’ which was coming to seem the hallmark of all Osho’s meditations… Witnessing was something which while it could lead to meditation was not in itself meditation at all. Witnessing was something you did, meditation was something which happened. Meditation was effortless. Meditation was non-dual. All you could do Osho said was “to create the situation in which meditation is possible.”

It had to happen of its own accord.

And did it?

Yes, it did…well, to some extent. As the camp gained momentum (and there were ten breakneck days of this, starting with the Dynamic before dawn and ending with a particularly weird one you did staring at a stroboscopic light, which was late at night) there were these brief moments when something extraordinary happened. I would be lying on my bamboo mat after one or other of the meditations and everything just stopped. There was a distinct click. You could say that time stopped, or that the sense of ‘I’ disappeared, or just that there was a deep sense of wonder – you could describe it in any of these ways, and they would all be both right and wrong. In fact as soon as I tried to ‘see’ what this state was it disappeared.

It popped like a bubble, leaving nothing behind… But the real impact of the camp lay in the rush of energy and openness it brought about.

Reich – that was what I got off Osho’s meditations.

Reich – who said that energy is locked in the physical body, locked in the ‘muscular armour’ which protects the ego, and whose dissolution will undercut tension in the psyche far more quickly than any amount of analysis. What was it Osho had said? “Dance madly, because in deep dancing blocks disappear very easily.” That was what seemed to be happening to me. The way I saw myself was loosening up – releasing, as was to happen to so many people over the next few years, a flood of energy in the process.

One afternoon, one suddenly sunny afternoon in between storms, I went for the first time to The Blue Diamond, the four-star hotel on the edge of Koregaon Park.

Someone had told me you hung out there if you had any money. Going through the lobby you came to a bar, which gave onto a sparkling blue swimming-pool. All along the far end of the pool there was a group of young sannyasin women, perhaps in their late twenties, working on their tans.

They were beautiful. There was a clutter of club sandwiches and fresh lime sodas along the poolside. I was puzzled. I had been in India long enough to see there was something wrong with the scene in Poona. There was too much money around.

Drop-outs in India didn’t have this kind of money – not large groups of them like this.

Where was it all coming from?