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ing orders, and to different ends.
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Li f e o f Os h o
Likewise Osho s meditations are not all designed to do
the same thing. When he said All my meditations move in
the same way this is not entirely so. All start, it is true, with
building up energy in the physical body but they don t all
do the same thing with it, once it has been generated. Look,
for instance, at the Nataraj, the dancing meditation. There is
40 minutes dancing, then 20 minutes let-go, then a final five
minutes dance. There is no witnessing, no third chakra stage
whatsoever. Or look at the Gourishankar. That was the late-
night one during the ten-day meditation camps in Poona, the
one all the druggies headed for. Quarter of an hour of
pranayama; quarter of an hour staring fixedly at a strobo-
scopic light synchronised with the heartbeat; quarter of an
hour of Subud s latihan; and then the let-go. Through what
adventures does that put a burst of energy?
Looked at it in terms of world culture both Gurdjieff and
Osho have started to trailblaze some entirely new territory.
Their movements or meditations are at once a finely crafted
celebration and a sort of inner lab space where you can begin
to come to grips with your own nature. They are a rediscovery
of the dynamics of ceremony, and their exploration as some-
thing most resembling a new art-form but an art-form which
has broken decisively with the commodity-based preconcep-
tions of contemporary Western culture. What both men left
behind isn t something you consume, it is something you do&
But back to Osho s account of the chakras. If, then, the
energy of these first three chakras was stepped up and tuned
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An Ear l y Comme nt ar y on t he Chakr as
to one another, what would happen? What was meant to take
place in the last stages of any of his meditations during the
freeze in the Dynamic in its final form, or during the let-go in
the Kundalini or the Nadabrahma? As you lay there, your
head still spinning, after the Nataraj?
Await, just await& As if you are dead. As if you have
disappeared&
What was meant to happen in that inner emptiness?
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25
The Chakras
(continued)
If we lived in a sane society, at around the age of twenty-one,
when the intellect is fully formed, another dimension to
human existence should begin to open up. This, in Tantra, is
symbolised by anahat, the fourth chakra. Conventionally
anahat is the heart chakra, though Osho s approach to it has
little to do with what is normally understood by emotion.
Initially he seems to be treating it as a sort of hold-all for the
occult . Activation of the fourth chakra is, he says, charac-
terised by the appearance of paranormal powers.
Hypnotism, telepathy, clairvoyance, are all the poten-
tial of the fourth body. Persons can have contact with
one another without hindrances from time or place;
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Th e Ch a k r a s ( c o nt i nue d )
they can read the thoughts of another without asking
or project thoughts into another. A person can travel
outside of his body; he can do astral projection and
know himself apart from the physical body.75
This is something very different from the note Osho was
to strike in his lectures to Westerners during the 70s. I sus-
pect most of us were completely blocked about this kind of
thing. Osho says this is, in fact, the typical response to it:
Those who made use of this body were always con-
demned and slandered. Hundreds of women were
branded as witches and burnt in Europe because they
used the faculties of the fourth body. Hundreds who
practised Tantra were killed in India because of the
fourth body. They knew some secrets that seemed dan-
gerous to human beings. They knew what was taking
place in your mind; they knew where things were
placed in your house without ever having stepped into
it. So the realm of the fourth body was looked upon as
black art all over the world, as one never knew what
might happen. We have always tried our best to stop
progress from going any further than the third body
because the fourth has always seemed very dangerous.
There are hazards, but together with these there
are wonderful gains. So instead of stopping, research
was necessary. Then we could have found ways of
testing the validity of our experiences.76
I remembered reading accounts of Western mysticism
where in between renouncing the world, which was called
Purgation, and becoming one with God, or Union, there
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Li f e o f Os h o
was an in-between stage which partook of both spheres.
Commonly this was called Illumination. In this stage there
could be deep religious experiences, but they hadn t yet set-
tled into an entirely new psyche; and among these experiences
there were sudden eruptions of a lot of the things Osho
ascribed to his fourth body. Saints were always going off into
raptures and trances; they saw visions and they heard voices;
in certain cases they developed healing powers, or could per-
form miracles. Normally, within the Western contemplative tra-
dition, the advice given was to pay no attention to such
phenomena because they were distractions from the quest for
God, and the ego could very easily regroup itself around any
attempt to cultivate or explore these paranormal powers.
Needless to say, Osho does not agree or not in any
simple-minded way. Not only does he endorse, with his cus-
tomary enthusiasm, all such accounts of illumination & you
can hear music which no one else can hear& you can smell
perfumes& you can see gods and goddesses& you can travel
to heavens and hells& you can effect miracles& all of this is
perfectly possible. But it isn t just a question of exploring
paranormal capacities, wild talents latent within us; it s
much more than that. These powers are aspects of an entirely
different body. They are the first features, or glimpses, of an
entirely different self.
The difficulty with Osho s descriptions of this, the fourth
body, is that he keeps coming at it from a different angle. In
one talk it s one thing, in another it s something else.
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Th e Ch a k r a s ( c o nt i nue d )
Frequently his tone is manic. At times he appears to be
describing a sort of devotional, Sufi mysticism, an apotheo-
sis of the I-Thou; at others something more shamanic, more
like the spaces which can be accessed by psychedelics; at
others again something much more recognisable, as though
anahat were the matrix of all human culture, the driving force
behind all artistic and scientific creativity: a visionary capac-
ity which starts to flicker into life as soon as a society
becomes stable and leisured&
What, then, is the common denominator for all these
things? If the first body is the physical one, the second the
emotions, and the third the mind then what is the
fourth? If there is one word Osho keeps using in this con-
text it is& vision. The fourth body is visionary. At its heart is
imagination.
Vision he says means seeing and hearing things with-
out the use of the usual sense organs. The limitations of time
and space are no more for a person who develops vision. 77
Perhaps this would take in both the ESP dimension to the
heart chakra, and the more artistic, or scientific, elements of
creative breakthrough which seem to be equally associated
with it. Anahat, Osho seems to be saying, revolves around
intuition. The heart imagines the truth. What is now proved
was once only imagin d said Blake who, in Osho s terms,
would be as fourth body a character as you could hope to
meet& But the whole concept of the fourth body remains the
least explored of all the chakras in these lectures.
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Li f e o f Os h o
The next chakra, in comparison, is far simpler and
clearer. This is the fifth chakra, visuddhi. Traditionally it is
located in the throat; and according to Osho is the locus of
the classic enlightenment experience.
How can one tell the difference between a person
who has entered the fifth body and one who has not?
The difference will be that he who has entered the
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