How should one balance relaxation and effort in meditation?

Questioner: in your earlier teaching of meditation you always asked us to be relaxed, still, silent and aware. And now in the course of intense breathing and asking 'who am I?" you exhort us to bring all our efforts into it. But a seeker who practiced the earlier technique of meditation finds it difficult to put in sustained efforts. So which of the two techniques would be good for him?

There is no question of good and bad here. I understand your point; it is not a question of good and bad. You have only to find out which of the techniques gives you more peace and adds to the momentum of your meditation. It cannot be the same for everybody; they will experience it differently. There are people who attain to relaxation only after they have run themselves into the ground. And there are others who can go into relaxation instantly; but they are few and far between. It is rather difficult to move straight into silence; only a handful of people can do so. For the majority of people it is necessary to go through a lot of exertion and tension before they can relax. But the purpose in both cases is the same -- the final objective is the same. It is relaxation.

Another friend has asked: Osho, what is the relationship between the method of meditation and jati-smaran (recollection of past lives)?

But the one who becomes skilled in this—who can fully awaken any day’s memory up to the age of five—will find that the memories begin to awaken completely. And you should test it. As today passes, note down some events and lock them up. After two years, try to recall today. Most of it will have been forgotten. Then remember—and after remembering, break the lock and compare whether what you recalled matches what you had written. You will be amazed—astonished—that besides what you wrote, many more details have come back which you did not even note at the time. They will all be there in memory. Buddha called this alaya-vijnana. There is a corner of the human mind he called the storehouse of consciousness. Like a junk room in the house where we keep all the odds and ends, there is a storehouse that collects memories—where everything from birth after…

Beloved Osho, in relation to what you've just said, zen has a saying: effortless effort. Would you talk to us about that, and how it applies to your dynamic meditation?

Meditation is an energy phenomenon. One very basic thing has to be understood about all types of energies. This is the basic law: energy moves in a dual polarity. That is the only way it moves; there is no other way for its movement. It moves in a dual polarity. For any energy to become dynamic, the anti-pole is needed. It is just like electricity moving with negative and positive polarities. If there is only negative polarity, electricity will not happen; or if there is only positive polarity, electricity will not happen. Both the poles are needed. And when both the poles meet, they create electricity. Then the spark comes up. And this is so for all types of phenomena. Life goes on...between man and woman, the polarity. The woman is the negative life-energy; man is the positive pole. They are electrical, hence so much attraction. With man alone, life…

Osho! I am making tireless efforts to meditate, but success eludes me. What should I do?

In just such an evening Buddha decided—the night of the full moon—“Now I drop this. No more effort. Enough.” And when he told his five disciples, who had followed him like a shadow for six years, “I am tired of this asceticism, these austerities. All this seems to be foolishness. I have done what I was told, but meditation has not happened. So now I drop it,” the five disciples thought that Gautam Siddhartha had fallen. They left him that very evening! They said to him, “Gautam, you have become corrupt! Till now we accepted you as our master because you did what we could not. If we could stand on our heads for an hour, you stood for six. If we ate once a day, you ate once in two days. We were dazzled by you.” Someone had told Buddha to reduce his food each day until he came…

Osho, you have described two kinds of methods. Earlier, in the practice you spoke about, you asked the seeker to be calm, relaxed, silent, alert, and a witness. Now, under intense breathing and the inquiry “Who am I?”, you ask the seeker to make every effort with total energy. When a seeker trained in the first kind of practice moves into the second type of experiment, after a short while the effort drops, the control slips. So which is the right approach—the former or the latter?

It is not a matter of good or bad here.