What are the similarities and differences between Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation and my meditation?

Another friend has asked in this regard: Osho, between Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation—his bhavātīt dhyān—and my meditation, is there similarity or any difference?

There is absolutely no similarity. Not just a difference—there is opposition, a fundamental contrast. What is being called “transcendental meditation” is simple mantra-yoga, name-chanting. If you repeat any word inside the mind, a stupor arises, hypnosis arises, sleep arises, and you get lost in deep sleep. Unconsciousness can come from it—and does. The process of meditation taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is like a tranquilizer, like a sleep-inducing drug. The process I call meditation is like an activator—something that awakens, that breaks unconsciousness. Because in the three stages you exert yourself so much—your blood circulation increases, the oxygen in your body increases, your bodily activity increases, the dormant energy within you awakens—that sleep becomes impossible. In these three stages you are so active, and inwardly you must remain totally aware, a witness, to whatever is happening. When you are breathing, you are a witness to the breath; when you are…

Osho, how is your meditation different from auto-suggestions and hypnosis? And if it is different, how? Please clarify.

It is not different from auto-hypnosis and hypnosis; it is more. As far as auto-hypnosis goes, the path of meditation goes along with it, on the same road. But where auto-hypnosis stops, this path goes beyond. And because of that going-beyond, even in the stretch where it runs alongside hypnosis there remains a fundamental difference. The very basis of hypnosis is that your conscious mind goes to sleep. To become stupefied, to fall into a trance, is hypnosis. The process of hypnotic suggestion takes you into drowsiness. The more drowsy you become, the more sleep-like you become, the more you can be hypnotized. Then in that hypnotic state anything can be made to happen through you, because your discrimination is asleep. In this process of meditation you are not to go into trance; in fact, you cannot—because the whole process is active. That is why a hypnotist will lay you…

Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHAT IS THE TRANSCENDENTAL? Meditation is just the opposite. It is awakening. It is becoming fully aware of your body, of your mind. And you have simply to be watchful. You don't have to repeat anything, because repetition means you have fallen into identifying with the thought process. Chanting is also a thought process. Repeating a mantra or a name of God -- Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, it doesn't matter. You can simply count from one to a hundred and back again, from a hundred to ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven, then go back. Go up, go down. Just climb the whole ladder up to a hundred and again come down. Four or five times you will be able to do it and then you will fall asleep. But the whole night you will have to do that, climbing up, coming down, climbing up, coming down.

With primal my methods will suit very well because both are complementary to each other. Tm was just out of the way. A person who is functioning as a primal therapist will not be benefited by it because your approach is not of tranquillising the mind but expanding it, to make it more alert and aware, to know it more, to go beyond it. Transcendental meditation is a sort of drug. If it works at all, it gives you good sleep, that's all. It calms you down, but even that calming down is not very positive; it is more like dullness, lethargy. It will help you to be less tense, but then you will become less intelligent also and less alive, because it slows down the whole process of your being. It is a tranquiliser -- tranquillisation through sound, mantra.

Question: BELOVED OSHO, CAN YOU PLEASE SPEAK ON DISCIPLINE AND MEDITATION? In fact, after eighteen years being with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and doing his transcendental meditation, what is the need to come here? But mind is so cunning that he is consoling himself that perhaps it is his master, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who has sent him here. But why should he send you here? I don't consider that he knows anything at all about meditation. What Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is teaching in the name of meditation has been known for centuries in the East by almost everybody that it is a psychological trick. It is not harmful. On the contrary, it can give you a little rest; it can give you a good feeling as if you have taken a shower. But it is not meditation, because it cannot take you beyond the mind.