In the first part of this article, we explored how Osho uses unexpected silent gaps between his words to trigger innate neurological responses that bypass the controlling mind, thus creating moments of pure awareness, momentary glimpses of meditation.
For silence to flourish, the ground has to first be prepared through a purifying process.
These fleeting experiences of silence, induced through Osho’s speaking, are only a sneak preview, a teaser of sorts to inspire us to embark on the journey to uncover our own inner silence, buried somewhere under the rubble of our busy minds. Crucially, if we are to transform this quasi-reflexive peek into a lasting imprint, if we are to anchor these transitory impressions deep into our being and create new pathways of receptivity, a little homework is necessary to clear the ground.
Osho:
“Right now, you cannot understand silence, you can understand only words. I have to use words to give you the message of silence. Between the words, between the lines, sometimes – if you hang around me long enough – you may one day start hearing silence.”1
Ever since they became popularized – and commercialized – in the West, Eastern spiritual practices and meditation practices in particular became associated with variations on the theme of sitting in silence, from zazen to Vipassana.
Osho warns us not to deceive ourselves into believing that the silences we have glimpsed listening to him are truly ours and find ourselves rather helplessly trying to replicate the experience on our own by jumping straight into the next Vipassana retreat.
“Vipassana comes in the end; you cannot begin with Vipassana. To begin with Vipassana you will have to go through the dark night of the soul. And you will not find the dawn anywhere. The dark night will go on becoming longer and darker. It is a simple psychology: you are not prepared, you have not done your homework, and you have started a work which needs a tremendous background of experience….
“We have so many meditations here, but I have put Vipassana at the very end. First go through all other kinds of experiences, purifying, so that you can become capable of entering Vipassana. People want to jump into paradise directly, and they don’t see the place where they are standing, that if they jump from there they will have multiple fractures.
“One has to reach to the steps and one has to move step by step, consciously, cautiously. It is a pilgrimage.” 2
The apparent absurdity of the “pilgrimage” can be summarized into one question: how can one “cultivate” non-doing? How can any kind of doing ever lead to non-doing?
Man does not exist for any methods – all methods exist for man.
The start of an answer is in the recognition that the modern human being and the contemporary societies we live in have evolved into such complexities that the methods used at the time of Patanjali, Buddha and Lao Tzu are no longer addressing the challenges we face as individuals and as a species:
“Now Patanjali cannot be applied to modern human beings exactly as he has taught to his disciples. Five thousand years have passed, man is no longer the same. If you want to apply Patanjali you will need another Patanjali to shift many things, to change many things, to drop many things, to add many things.
“He will have to create the whole methodology again, because man does not exist for any methods – all methods exist for man.
“No system is so valuable that man can be sacrificed to the system; all systems have to serve man. If they serve, good; if they become useless, out-of-date, irrelevant, they have to be dropped – with deep reverence, with gratitude: they have done their work.
“But the human mind is such, it always loves the past. The more ancient a method is, the more it is loved. In fact, the more ancient it is, the more useless it is: it can’t change you, it can’t help you to change.”3
Osho calls even into question the Zen tradition. During its fourteen centuries-long quest for transcendence, Zen refined the search to its non-cartesian essence with novel strategies to silence the mind: the concepts of “non-doing,” effortless effort, action without action, wei wu wei, and the seemingly absurd, incoherent, unsolvable koan, a device that the mind itself, with its linear way of thinking, simply cannot comprehend.
For all its contribution to a deeper exploration into the world of meditation, Osho makes the startling statement that Zen is also doomed to failure because of a basic mistake. Results matter.
As Osho plainly puts it, the proof is in the awakening:
“That’s what Zen teachers have been telling their disciples: ‘Be silent, but don’t make any effort.’ Now, you are putting the person into such a difficult fix: Don’t make any effort and be silent…. If he makes any effort he is wrong – and there is no way to be silent without making any effort. If it were possible to be silent without any effort there would have been no need of any master, there would have been no need of teaching meditation. People would have become silent without any effort.
“I have gone as deep into Zen efforts as possible. They have been working for almost fourteen centuries, since Bodhidharma. They are one of the greatest groups in the world, totally devoted to a single thing and that is meditation. There is no other experiment anywhere that has been done for so long a time continuously. But still there are not many Zen masters.
“Yes, there are more masters in the stream of Zen than in any other stream in the world, but still they are very few compared to the people who have been working. I have been searching out what was the basic mistake. This is the basic mistake: those Zen masters told them the right thing but not in the right way.
“I am making you aware of silences without any effort on your part. My speaking is for the first time being used as a strategy to create silence in you.” 4
Osho explains that the “basic mistake” of all traditional approaches, including Zen, is to engage, however subtly, in a form of conflict or struggle with the mind, treating it as an enemy to be conquered through effort and control, thus reducing meditation into a practice to be “done” rather than an experience of “being”.
Wiping clean the smokescreen of the unconscious mind.
As we have seen, the exposure to sudden silence creates an attention spike that activates a brain system (the DMN) that is associated with internal integration of external stimuli. Importantly, it is an equally if not more active state than listening to sound itself. It involves memory processing, daydreaming, future planning and, to the extent that it does not entail any “doing” but a relaxed watching, it can be said to have the effect of bringing to the surface, to the conscious mind, whatever has been hiding in the unconscious.
And that is exactly why, to access an enduring state of silence, the smokescreen of the unconscious mind has to be wiped clean, for the empty mind, for the empty mirror to be revealed. Anything less will only result, past the initial jolt, in a wandering mind, lost in thoughts. Hence all the so-called meditation techniques that cultivate focused attention – contemplation or mindfulness – to create an artificial bridge to calm or purify the mind produce only temporary relief but no lasting experience of silence and mind-lessness.
Once again, a dog chasing its own tail, with the mind firmly in control, trying to trick its natural flow, in a process commonly known as spiritual bypassing.
That is not to say deliberate exposure to silence does not have its beneficial outcomes as amply demonstrated here and here. Our concern here goes beyond transitory metabolic changes and a sense of restored wellbeing through relaxation and the chanting of mantras. Namely:
How can we leverage silence as a tool for inner transformation?
In a 2013 study on the effects of prolonged silence on adult hippocampal neurogenesis in mice titled Is Silence Golden?, neuroscientist Imke Kirste found that:
“Two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus, the brain region related to the formation of memory, involving the senses…. The total absence of input was having a more pronounced effect than any sort of input tested…. silence is really helping the new generated cells to differentiate into neurons, and integrate into the system.”
The attention spike triggered by sudden silence creates an environment where sustained neurogenesis is initiated. This “neural reset” has the potential to produce a lasting imprint, not just as a reaction to sensory change, but as a coordinated response that prepares the brain for adaptive plasticity and its correlates: intelligence and awareness.
Putting the science aside, one cannot help but wander at the intuitive genius behind the one “mindless” device infused in every one of Osho’s methods that is the essence of his approach to silence and a life lived in presence to the moment:
Stop Exercises – Totality in opposites
Enters Gurdjieff, the mystic and spiritual wizard who was maybe the first to devise new stratagems, to introduce new methods to wake humanity from its state of deep sleep. Declaring famously that “you can never awaken using the same system that put you to sleep in the first place”, he introduced the “Stop Exercise” at his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in The Prieuré. As everyone literally froze in their tracks at his sudden shout of “stop!”, his students would enter a state of urgent attention, their modus operandi having switched from “doing” to “being”, from mechanical, robot-like unconsciousness to a state of conscious awakening.
Osho:
“Gurdjieff’s ‘stop exercise’ was tremendously significant. Perhaps one of the greatest contributions to the modern world, and the modern world is not even aware of it.… Gurdjieff would tell his disciples to be engaged in all kinds of activities: somebody is digging in the garden, somebody is cutting wood, somebody is preparing food, somebody is cleaning the floor. All kinds of activities are going on, with the one condition that when he says ‘Stop!’ then wherever you are, in whatsoever posture you are, you stop dead….
“In that moment you can see yourself transparently. You are so constantly engaged in activity, and with the activity of the body, the mind’s activity is associated. You cannot separate them.
“So, when the body completely stops, of course, immediately the mind also stops then and there.” 5
Here again, what is being activated is the natural biological response that originates in the body. And there lies the master key that Osho applies rigorously in his effort to provoke us into alertness and bring us out of our busy minds and into the present moment.
For life to be lived at its fullest, for the dormant energies lying in the unconscious to come to light, one has to make conscious use of existence’s natural ebb and flow between opposites. The darker the night, the brightest is the day. The sharper the contrast, the more existence becomes alive in its full array of hues and colors.
It is only with totality in action that the door opens for the deepest experience of relaxation that comes most naturally in its wake.
These are part of the intrinsic laws of the natural world.
For the untapped hidden life forces stored in the body to become manifest, Osho explains one has to break through layers of energy, a concept Gurdjieff similarly embraced:
“The first layer of energy is of the mind, the second is of your soul, the third is of existence. Exhaust the mind and you will reach to the energy of your being.
“Exhaust your being and you attain to the energy of the divine, the universal being, which is eternal, inexhaustible.
“Then you are one with the whole.
“You have to keep on trying, until the third layer of energy is tapped and you reach to that ultimate source of energy. Then you are a siddha, one who has come home. Then you can relax. To relax before this will be suicidal.” 6
Osho further explains what happens at the end of the third stage of Dynamic Meditation when, after a build-up of chaotic breathing, catharsis, and ten minutes of jumping up and down hammering the sound Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!, everything comes to a standstill with the sudden shout of “Stop!”:
“If you continue the technique and do not add the fourth stage it will come by itself as a natural consequence of what has gone before. It is bound to – a moment is bound to come when everything is exhausted and you fall down. There is nothing left to do.
“The fourth stage is the moment of non-doing. That is what I call dhyana, meditation. The first three stages are only steps; the fourth stage is the door. Then you are. There is nothing to do, neither breathing nor movement nor sound, just silence.
“The three previous stages must be “done” in a sense, but the fourth stage comes of its own accord. Then something happens that is not your doing.
“It comes as a grace: you have become a vacuum, an emptiness, and something fills you. Something spiritual pours into you when you are not.” 7
The gap of non-doing – A lasting imprint of meditation
That is a lot of doing to come to a point of non-doing you might say, catharsis and all… but there is, literally, a method to the madness.
“When the fourth stage has ended, when it becomes a memory, then you can recollect it. But in the moment itself there is nothing, there is only consciousness. Because only nothingness is there, you cannot be conscious of anything. Afterward you recognize that there has been a gap. Your mind functioned until a particular moment; then there was a gap, and then it began again.
“You feel this gap afterward: the gap, the interval, becomes a part of your memory.
“Our memory records events and this gap is a great event, it is a great phenomenon. Mind is a mechanism. It records everything; it is just like the tape recorder that we are using here. The recorder will record two things: when we speak, the words are recorded; and when we are not speaking, the silence, the gap, is also recorded. Even when we are not speaking, something is being recorded – the silence, the gap. In the same way, the mechanism of the mind is always there recording everything. In fact, it is even more keen, more sensitive, when there is a gap. The tape recorder can blur what I am saying, but it cannot blur my silence. The gap will be recorded more intensely; there is no possibility of error.
“So the gap is remembered – and the gap is blissful. In a way a memorable event is a burden, a tension, while the gap is a calm, blissful interval.
“This gap is dhyana, meditation”. 7
The sudden stop triggers an awakening to a state of “being” where the mind simply loses its grip. In the silence that follows, a lasting imprint is created through a process that is akin to the rewiring of our synapses that have been conditioned and habituated for lifetimes to engage in “minding” as the only schema we know of as a way to “be”.
“Cogito ergo sum” – or rather, as Osho defines it – “Cogito ergo ego sum” is flipped on its head as the witness, the observer, the “watcher on the hill” emerges naturally out of the chaos.
“You are not there because there is no doing; the ego disappears when there is no doer. The doer is the ego. So you can be in the first three steps because you are doing something – breathing, moving, shouting – but now, in the fourth stage, you cannot be, because there is no doing.
“The ego is nothing but an accumulation of your memories of past actions, so the more a person has done, the more egocentric he is. Even if your doing has been in social service or religious work, whatsoever you have done becomes part of the ego.
“Ego is not an entity but the memory of your doings, so in those moments when there is no doing, you are not.
“Then something happens. Even though you are not doing anything you are totally conscious. Silent, but conscious. Exhausted, but conscious. Only consciousness is there: a consciousness of your deep let-go, a consciousness that now everything has disappeared.” 7
There is a deliberate progression, a natural and logical evolution on the path of awareness that Osho clears for us through the thick forest of our unconsciousness: from the fleeting glimpses created in the gaps between his words to the enduring imprint of silence induced through the repeated exposure to the sudden stop that sends a shock wave of nothingness just as the energy has reached its peak.
Osho’s Evening Meeting – A dress rehearsal for conscious living
Nothing illustrates better how to integrate this interplay of contrast and opposites in the fullness of our lives than Osho’s Evening Meeting, a condensed experiential, living model designed to be fused into our day-to-day activities, a daily rehearsal for a life lived in totality and awareness.
We are introduced to the full spectrum of Osho’s bag of tricks, starting with the wild celebration of energy through dancing that is interrupted by sudden stops and the shout of Osho! Then a moment of silence.
The intermittent pieces of Indian music that follow, becoming faster and faster and abruptly ending in a sudden stop, leave us suspended in the timeless space of silence that ensues. Then, the silent sitting is a master class in the art of listening, the words, the silences, the gaps being constant reminders to fall back into our inner selves.
What follows is a few minutes of Gibberish and Let-Go before more dancing and celebration that opens us to live this moment, and the next moment, and the next, in full receptivity and acceptance.
Once the knots of our unconscious have been untied, or rather unlearned through this purifying process, once the listener arises from the ashes of unconsciousness as an absence, then watching the breath going in and out, then falling into the gap between each breath is no longer a practice but a natural extension of being truly alive.
The witness slowly awakens. Only then is silence no longer seen as an emptiness to be filled.
Meditation is no longer an hour-long practice but a quality of awareness that is infused in every moment of our lives.
Now Vipassana becomes alive in the marketplace.
Basho’s Haiku takes on a whole new meaning:
“The old pond
Frog jumps in
Plop!”
“The reality knows only ‘plop!’ and it simply leaves you there – to wonder, to inquire, to meditate.” 8
END
1. Osho, Tao: The Three Treasures, Vol. 3, Talk #4 – Simply Unlearn the Mind
2. Osho, Hari Om Tat Sat – The Divine Sound: That Is the Truth, Talk #28 – Meditation Is More than Vipassana
3. Osho, The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 7, Talk #6 – Don’t Take Enlightenment Seriously
4. Osho, Satyam Shivam Sundaram – Truth Godliness Beauty, Talk #28 – Authentically Enjoy Your Aloneness
5. Osho, From Personality to Individuality, Talk #9 – A conspiracy of the Priests to Manipulate Your Mind.
6. Osho: Bliss: Living beyond Happiness and Misery, Talk #4 – Deepening the Mantra of Meditation
7. Osho: The Great Challenge, Talk #2 – Dynamic Meditation
8. Osho, The Secret of Secrets, Talk #29 – When the Positive and Negative Meet
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