Asanas

What is your view about asanas?

As far as asanas are concerned… no, there is no need for you to do them. In this, many asanas will start happening through you. If you do these processes for fifteen or twenty days, many asanas will begin to happen on their own. In the camp, while doing it, someone even went into a headstand. Because when one lets the body go completely, if the body begins to do a headstand, what is one to do? And all these asanas evolved in just this way; no one deliberately devised them. In such a state the body starts taking many forms, making many mudras, many asanas. There was a woman in this camp just now… (inaudible.) Almost all mudras happen through her hands—practically all of them. As many mudras as are discussed in the scriptures, they all manifested in her. Haven’t the photos come to you from there? A movie…

Is the practicing of traditional asanas helpful for meditation?

Why was Mahavira sitting in that position? Buddha's posture is all right, but Mahavira's posture is very absurd. He was not practicing it; it came. Something happened within him and his body took on a certain posture -- although a very absurd posture. If he had been practicing asanas he would have been sitting just like Buddha, because that was the traditional meditation posture. But he was in an attitude of letgo, and samadhi came and created a posture that was particularly required for his body and his individuality. Everyone will need to express himself individually. No person is like any other and no one can be. An individual is unique so that everything that flowers in him will flower in an individual and unique way. If you impose something from without, then it will be a generalized conception; it can never be fitting and harmonious to your situation. So…

Osho, at the Nargol camp you said that yogic asanas, pranayama, mudras and bandhas were discovered in meditative states, and that in different states of meditation different postures and gestures arise by themselves, from which one can tell the seeker’s inner condition. Conversely, if those postures and gestures are done deliberately, the same meditative mood can be created. Then can meditation be attained through the practice of asanas, pranayama, mudras and bandhas? What is their importance and use in meditation practice?

Then, if it begins within, it can be understood. Suppose a seeker is sitting in meditation and I feel that his crying wants to burst forth, but he is holding it back. I can see that if he cries for ten minutes, a movement will happen—a catharsis, a cleansing. But he is restraining himself so that the crying does not come out. If we tell this seeker, “Now don’t hold back—cry from your side; cry,” then for two minutes he will cry as if acting, but from the third minute his crying will become right and authentic, because crying wanted to pour out from within and he was preventing it. His act of crying will not bring crying; it will break the suppression, and what was flowing within will flow out. Similarly, a seeker may be in a state to dance but is standing stiffly. If we say to him,…

Those who want to enter the domain of energy, those who want to go on a pilgrimage to the temple of the supreme energy, they will have to shed all fear, and if the body begins to tremble and shake or begins to dance, allow it to happen with ease and spontaneity. You will be surprised to know that all the techniques of yogic asanas -- body postures -- were discovered accidentally in meditation, in the various states of meditation. It is not that someone created them through thinking and deliberation. They were not created independently. In the state of meditation the body took different positions first, and then they were recognized as yogic postures. And gradually an association between the body and mind was revealed which said that when the mind is in a particular state, the body follows it with a particular posture of its own.