Is Osho's approach similar to Gurdjieff's 'Stop' experiment?

1. Just as you have the impulse to do something, stop.

2. WHEN SOME DESIRE COMES, CONSIDER IT. THEN, SUDDENLY, QUIT IT. 3. ROAM ABOUT UNTIL EXHAUSTED AND THEN, DROPPING TO THE GROUND, IN THIS DROPPING BE WHOLE. This is a different dimension of the same technique. WHEN SOME DESIRE COMES, CONSIDER IT. THEN, SUDDENLY, QUIT IT. You feel a desire -- a desire for sex, a desire for love, a desire for food, anything. You feel a desire: consider it. When the sutra says consider it, it means do not think for or against it, just consider the desire, what it is. A sexual desire comes to the mind. You say, "This is bad." This is not consideration. You have been taught that this is bad, so you are not considering this desire, you are consulting the scriptures, you are consulting the past -- the past teachers, the RISHIS -- sages. You are not considering the desire itself, you are…

Question: OSHO, WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THE LAW OF KARMA? Gurdjieff started wondering how it happened, why it happened, and soon he was able to figure out that it is just a question of your unconscious accepting the idea. Once your unconscious accepts the idea, then your body and your conscious mind have no power to go against it. In his own exercises that he developed later on when he became a Master, Gurdjieff used all these nomad techniques that he had learned from those strange people -- uncivilized, with no language, no written alphabet, but who knew very primitive methods. And he was surprised to see that hypnotism works not only on children but on grown men, because those children become young adults; then too it works. Then they become old, then too it works. It does not change with age.

Osho, is sadhana a natural development, or is it a leap beyond nature’s evolutionary process and its transcendence? If sadhana is not an overstepping leap beyond natural growth, then will the whole of humanity, within the cosmic process, arrive on its own at spiritual heights? And if evolution always moves forward, why did the great ancient spiritual cultures recede from the evolutionary current?

There are many strands here. First: the moment we separate man from existence and look at him as apart, these questions begin to arise. For example, heat water to one hundred degrees and, at that point, it “leaps” and becomes steam. Water becoming steam is a natural event. Its heating is also natural, not unnatural. Heating is natural; the leap into steam is natural. If nature did not contain the law that at one hundred degrees water can jump into steam, water would have no way to become steam. If nature did not contain the potential to heat to one hundred degrees, water would have no power to reach that heat. Even so, if water had consciousness, it could save itself from fire—or it could put itself on the fire. That too would be a natural happening: to save itself or to offer itself—both. My point is: in this universe…

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.

Beloved master, years ago vimalkirti and I met count durkheim, who at that time was eighty and one of the most influential so-called spiritual leaders of europe. He called us for a visit to warn us against you. He said that your picture on the mala reminded him of mr. Gurdjieff whom he met in paris. He told us how dangerous men like gurdjieff and you are. Then he said, "I have brought zen to europe. Have you got my books?" how is it possible that a man who claims to have done lots of zen sittings in japan with various zen masters, and has written so many books of zen, is so unable to recognize

Turiya, the man, Durkheim, whom you have met in Europe, and you think he did not recognize me... The moment he compared me with his meeting with George Gurdjieff was the moment of recognition. He absolutely recognized: I am certainly dangerous, far more dangerous than George Gurdjieff was. But Durkheim was only a man of knowledge, learning, scholarship. He was a great intellectual. I have gone through all his works; I can see that he has heard only the words of the Zen masters, but he has not heard their silences. He has met their skeletons, but he has not encountered their presence, their existential essence. Durkheim certainly has introduced Zen to Europe, but his Zen is just like a paper boat: you call it a boat, but don't start using it as a boat. He has been in the East. And he is right when he says that he…