Meditation is the big light, and jati-smaran is pointing that light at past-life memories to see them clearly.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
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…Read the full discourse →
A friend has asked: what is the relation between meditation and jati-smaran, past life remembering?
When one succeeds in recalling past lives and they begin to appear like dreams, immediately one's present life begins to look like a dream too. Those who have called this world maya have not done so just to propound a doctrine of philosophy. Jati-smaran -- recalling past lives -- is at the base of it. Whosoever has remembered his past lives, for him the whole affair has suddenly turned into a dream, an illusion. Where are his friends of past lives? Where are his relatives, his wife and children, the houses he lived in? Where is that world? Where is everything he took to be so real? Where are those worries that gave him sleepless nights? Where are those pains and sufferings that seemed so insurmountable, that he carried like a dead weight on his back? And what became of the happiness he longed for? What happened to everything he…Read the full discourse →
Osho, you discussed the method of jati-smarana—entering the memories of past lives—at the Dwarka camp. You said that the mind must be completely severed from its orientation toward the future and that the power of meditation should be focused toward the past. You also outlined the sequence of the process: first return to the memories of the age of five, then three, then to the memory of birth, then to the state of conception, and then entry into the memories of previous lives. You further said that you are not giving the complete formula for the experiment of jati-smarana. What are the complet
A woman began experimenting with me. I kept telling her there was no need for curiosity, but she was curious and did not listen. We did the experiment, and we had to work hard to make her forget. She remembered that in the previous birth she was a prostitute. That weighed heavily on her present moral, virtuous mind. She said, “I do not want to remember this.” But now forgetting it was very difficult. To remember something is easy; to forget it is very hard. Once a fact becomes part of our knowledge, it is very difficult to push it out. So, knowingly, one formula is withheld: how to pass from this birth into the previous one. But if the memories of this life arise for you—if someone can recall this life in full—he can be told that formula. Yet that is a personal matter. It cannot be discussed publicly.…Read the full discourse →