How do new hi-tech experience kits facilitate meditation?

Beloved Osho, it seems western minds crave new experiences. If meditation is concerned with the experiencer, not the experience, how do the new hi-tech experience kits move us into meditation?

But if you think this is meditation then you are wrong. I will say this is good experience, and while you are in that moment of deep sleep... If you can be aware also from the very beginning, as the mind starts changing its waves you have to be more alert, more awake, more watchful of what is happening and you will see that mind is by and by falling asleep. If you can see the mind falling asleep, the one who is seeing the mind falling asleep is your being. And that is the authentic purpose of all meditation. So these machines cannot create that awareness that awareness you will have to create. But these machines can certainly create within ten minutes a possibility which you may not be able to create in years of effort. So I am not against these hi-tech instruments, I am all for them.…

Question: BELOVED OSHO, RESEARCH OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS HAS SUGGESTED THAT CERTAIN STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS BROUGHT ABOUT BY MEDITATION TECHNIQUES APPEAR TO EVOKE SPECIFIC BRAINWAVE PATTERNS. THESE STATES ARE NOW BEING CREATED BY ELECTRONIC AND AUDITORY STIMULATION OF THE BRAIN, AND THEY CAN BE LEARNED THROUGH BIOFEEDBACK. THE TRADITIONAL `MEDITATIVE STATE' -- SITTING SILENTLY (OR AT LEAST QUIETLY ALERT) IS COMPOSED OF BILATERAL, SYNCHRONOUS ALPHA WAVES. DEEPER MEDITATION ALSO HAS BILATERAL THETA WAVES. A STATE CALLED `LUCID AWARENESS' HAS THE BILATERAL SYNCHRONOUS ALPHA AND THETA WAVES OF DEEP MEDITATION, PLUS THE BETA WAVES OF NORMAL THOUGHT PROCESSES. `LUCID AWARENESS' CAN BE LEARNED THROUGH BIOFEEDBACK, USING THE MOST MODERN EQUIPMENT. ARE THESE KINDS OF STIMULATION AND BIOFEEDBACK USEFUL TOOLS FOR THE MEDITATOR? WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP OF THESE TECHNOLOGICAL TECHNIQUES TO THE MEDITATION BEYOND TECHNIQUE? IS THIS AN EXAMPLE OF BRINGING SCIENCE TOGETHER WITH MEDITATION?

In 1969 followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi invited Osho to talk to them. This was the first occasion on which Osho addressed a western audience, and the first time he talked publicly at length in English. The discourse has been published in OTI January 1 & 16, 1991; and February 1, 1991. Osho: Really, there can be no method as far as meditation is concerned. Meditation is not a method. Through technique, through method, you cannot go beyond mind. When you leave all methods, all techniques, you transcend mind. So meditation itself is not a method. Truth cannot be achieved through method. Method is our own invention. We, who are ignorant, have achieved knowledge through methods constructed, created, projected, in our ignorance. Through method you can achieve a sort of self-hypnosis, a sort of auto-hypnosis. Any method, whatsoever it's name, can only give you an illusory kind of peace.

A friend has asked: Osho, if through meditation or spiritual practice one can conquer death, does not the same state occur in sleep? And if it does, why can’t death be conquered through sleep?

But meditation and hypnosis are not the same. Understand me carefully. I said: up to this point it is hypnosis, mesmerism—so long as we are manufacturing suggestions. When the manufacturing of suggestions stops and you awaken—where awareness begins—there meditation begins. Where witnessing begins, meditation begins. And the reason for this hypnosis is that you have fallen into a reverse hypnosis. In scientific language, this is not hypnosis but de-hypnosis. Not mesmerism, but the breaking of mesmerism. We are the ones mesmerized—but we don’t know it. In life we have become hypnotized, and we have no idea how many kinds of hypnotic trances we have taken on, by how many devices we have produced them. A large part of our life is hypnosis. And when we want to be hypnotized, we don’t notice what we are doing. For example… we live like this all our lives. If we became aware of…

Some friends come to me and say, Osho, we keep hearing all sorts of sounds. When will this stop?

It is never going to stop. You are not to become unconscious so that you don’t hear sounds. No—meditation will not come by the stopping of sounds. Sounds are there, and within you no reaction, no response arises—meditation is concerned only with this much. A man is shouting next door; nothing happens to you: you hear, and nothing happens. A sister came to me today and said that in the last fifteen minutes of the afternoon silence her heartbeat increased a lot. So many sounds became audible that she got frightened; she felt like getting up and running away. Not hearing sounds would be a swoon. Hearing sounds and reacting by running away—that is the ordinary state. Hearing sounds and simply listening, remaining only the witness, the watcher—that is meditation. You are not to become stupefied. Whatever is happening, you will know it all—but it will become dreamlike. As long…