The meditation shakes up your inner stuff while you stay awake watching; the braver and more attentive you are, the more it works, and fear or resistance blocks it.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
What is dynamic meditation?
The first thing to be understood about Dynamic Meditation is that it is a method of creating a situation through tension in which meditation can happen. If your total being is completely tense, the only possibility that remains is relaxation. Ordinarily one cannot go directly into relaxation, but if your whole being is at a peak of total tension then the second step comes automatically, spontaneously: silence is created. The first three stages of the technique are done in order to achieve this climax of tension throughout all the layers of your being. The first layer is the physical body. Beyond that is the prana sharir, the vital body: this is your second body, the etheric body. Beyond it is the third body, the astral body. Your vital body takes in breath as its food. If the normal intake of oxygen is changed, the vital body is bound to change.…
Is there not a possibility of hypnosis and illusion in your new method of dynamic meditation? With many participants nothing is happening; are they not on the right track? There are others in whom a lot of processes are happening; are they on the right path? Could some of these be just putting on an act?
There are two or three things which have to be properly under-stood. Hypnosis is a science and it can be easily used for creating deceptions. However, hypnosis can also be used to help you. Science is always a two-edged sword. Atomic energy can produce wheat in the fields; it can also wipe out the whole humanity at a stroke. Both the possibilities are there. The electric current that moves the fans in your house can also kill you, but you will not hold electricity responsible for it. If an egoist makes use of hypnosis he will do so to suppress, destroy and delude the other. But the opposite of this is also possible. Hypnosis is a neutral energy; it is a science. It can be used to break the dreams that go on inside you, and your deep-rooted illusions can also be eradicated by it. The method I am using…
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…
Osho, in your new method of meditation, isn’t there still the possibility of hypnosis and delusion? Many people say nothing is happening to them—does that mean they are not on the true path? And for those in whom many processes are happening, are they surely on the true path? Or could some of them be doing it deliberately, pretending?
Do not decide without doing Our mind makes very strange arrangements. It says, “All this is nonsense; nothing will happen to me. I am not weak; I am strong.” But had you been strong, it would have happened; had you been intelligent, it would have happened. The first mark of an intelligent person is that until he has done it himself he does not make a judgment. He will not even say that the other is faking. Who am I to decide that? And to judge another as false is a very degrading thing. Who are we to decide that the other is pretending? It is this kind of false judgment that has caused so much trouble. People did not accept that something had happened to Jesus—otherwise they would not have crucified him. They thought he was a confused man, saying anything. They would not have thrown stones at Mahavira.…
The state in which the soul, with the help of the energies of the sun and other gods, and through the instrumentality of these fourteen: mind, intellect, mind stuff, ego, and the ten sense organs -- becomes sensitive to sound, touch and such other gross objects, is called the waking state. When the living being, on account of the unfulfilled desires of the waking state, becomes sensitive to sound, touch and such other gross objects -- even in the absence of the latter -- it is called the dreaming state of the self or soul.
This state of dreaming, the rishi says, means without the instrumentality of your senses. The senses are closed -- they are not aware of the world beyond you; now you are within your cells, within your body, but still you can create you own worlds. This creation of your own worlds in dreams becomes possible because your mind is a conditioning of everything you have known, you have felt; everything has been accumulated in it. It is an accumulation, not only of this life, but of all the lives one has lived; and not only of human lives, of animal lives also; and not only of animal lives, but of vegetable lives also. So in a dream you can become a tree; in a dream you can become a lion. Sometime you have been a tree: that memory is still there -- it can unfold. This unfolding of past memories,…