How can jumping around like monkeys facilitate meditation?

A friend has asked, Osho, will jumping around like monkeys make meditation possible?

Because you are a monkey, there is no getting rid of the monkey within you without some jumping around. It’s not that jumping is needed for meditation; it’s needed because of your monkey-ness. Whatever is hidden inside you—suppress it for lifetimes if you like—you won’t be free of it. It has to be shaken off, thrown out. Burying garbage brings no liberation; it must be swept out. There are two ways to quiet the monkey. One is to force him to sit still with the fear of a stick: don’t move, don’t sway, don’t dance, don’t jump. On the surface the monkey will control himself—but what about the monkey within? Outwardly he may restrain himself, but inside even more energy will build up. And if you suppress the monkey like this, he will go mad. Many people have gone mad in just this way. The madhouses are full of them.…

A friend has asked: Osho, monks, renunciates, yogis have attained meditation by sitting in caves for years. And you say that meditation is possible even in forty minutes. Is meditation really that simple?

After the three stages, the last ten minutes are only waiting. We can do nothing more. A man can only leave himself open for the divine. Can we drag “Him” in? How? Can we grasp “Him” in our fist? At most we can send an invitation and wait. The sun rises outside the door; we can leave our door open and say, “Come in”—we cannot bring the sun in. If the door is open, the sun comes. Note a strange fact. We cannot bring the sun in—but we can keep it out. Close the door. Not only that; we carry a small pair of doors in our pocket—our eyelids. The door may be open, but if we close our eyes, what can the sun do? Close these tiny shutters and the sun is helpless. Negativity we have in abundance. Negatively, we can block the divine; positively, we cannot compel it.…

Osho, in the experiment you are speaking about these days, what physical and psychic difference is there between doing it sitting and doing it standing?

When you are in anger, in a sense you are in a momentary madness. At that time you do things you would never do in awareness. You abuse, you throw stones, you can break things, jump off a roof—anything. If a madman did it, we would understand; but when an ordinary person does it in anger, we say, “He was angry.” But it was the same person. If these things were not inside him, they could not come out; they are within. We are just holding them down. My understanding is that, before meditation, all this must be released. The more it is released, the lighter your consciousness will become. Therefore, what took years in the old methods where you sat in siddhasana can be completed in months by this process; what took lifetimes can happen in days. Because even in that approach, expulsion had to happen—only, the movements had…

Question: dynamic meditation is very active, very strenuous.can one not go into meditation just by sitting silently?

You can go into meditation just by sitting, but then be just sitting; do not do anything else. If you can be just sitting, it becomes meditation. Be completely in the sitting; nonmovement should be your only movement. In fact, the word zen comes from the word zazen, which means, just sitting, doing nothing. If you can just sit, doing nothing with your body and nothing with your mind, it becomes meditation; but it is difficult. You can sit very easily when you are doing something else but the moment you are just sitting and doing nothing, it becomes a problem. Every fiber of the body begins to move inside; every vein, every muscle, begins to move. You will begin to feel a subtle trembling; you will be aware of many points in the body of which you have never been aware before. And the more you try to just…

Question: in hatha yoga there is an exercise in which one tenses every muscle in the body and then releases the tension and becomes relaxed. Is this similar to what happens in dynamic meditation?

You are not aware of the spiritual because you have so much tension in the body, so much tension in the mind. But if you are not tense in the physical and mental realms, you will automatically know the bliss of the spiritual, the relaxation of the spiritual. It comes to you; it has been waiting for you. Your whole attention is so absorbed by the physical and the mental that there is no attention left to divert to the spiritual. Only if the body and the mind are not tense can you delve into the spiritual, can you know the bliss of it. The spiritual is never tense; it cannot be. There is no spiritual tension, only bodily tension, only mental tension. Bodily tension has been created by those who, in the name of religion, have been preaching anti-body attitudes. In the West, Christianity has been emphatically antagonistic toward…