Osho on traditional method of Vipassana Meditation

 

 

 

Question: 

Osho,

Since we have been singing and dancing in our seats for the past discourses, I have found witnessing so much easier and deeper. It's almost difficult not to witness because everything is so bright and clear. This makes me wonder how monks who do vipassana can keep it up, not having a master to dance with. Can you please comment?

 

 

The traditional method of vipassana is a very cold, dull and dead way, and because it is cold it takes a longer time - perhaps a few lives to become awakened. But because all the religions of the world have praised coldness in their saints, in their seekers, searchers, they have all delayed progress, delayed the evolution of consciousness.

 

Energy moves better when it is warmer. This is one of my contributions, which will be condemned by all the religions - the religions of the cold. I teach you a religion of warmth, love, singing, dancing, music. These are all tremendously helpful to make you alert, wakeful. Sitting in a cave - a dark cave in a mountain alone - people have been dozing in the name of vipassana. They can doze, it is their life.

 

I am not in any way going to interfere. They have chosen it. They will doze their way towards enlightenment, however long it takes. But when there is music and your whole body is thrilling, and when there is song, although you are sitting, in a subtle sense there is a dance in you. You cannot remain unconscious, you have to become more watchful.

 

I want vipassana to be a warmer path; then it becomes a very short cut. I would like you to sing and dance and play on instruments - that will take you away from the mundane world, the day-to-day world. I would like you to love, I would like you to laugh. The society has repressed everything; even when you laugh it is halfhearted because it is thought to be not gentlemanly.

 

To laugh wholeheartedly looks a little rustic. But if you laugh totally, then the laughter will be coming from your hara, just below the navel, two inches below the navel, and that is the source of your life, that's where your center of life is. You should learn laughing through Geeta. She is Japanese and she knows how to laugh from the hara and then it is like bells ringing in a temple. It is only Geeta who makes me laugh; otherwise I somehow manage seriousness.

 

Whenever you are total in anything you will feel more watchful, more alert, more awakened, more fresh, more alive. I am all for life. Your so-called religions are all against life, they are anti-life. Naturally they have to be as cold as a corpse. I would like my sannyasins to be living totally and multi-dimensionally, even in small things - bringing their whole being to a focus.

 

And if you can start living moment to moment in different ways - but always total - vipassana will happen to you more easily than you can conceive because you have never seen anything happening so easily, without effort, on its own accord. You can force yourself to sit in silence and remain awake. I don't teach that kind of vipassana. I teach a vipassana that follows you like a shadow, as a by-product of your total living.

 

-Osho, "The Transmission of the Lamp, #46"