Osho on active meditation

[APeacefulWarrior]

I tend to agree with this, at least from my own experience.

I would agree with his assessment, especially, that modern\western people tend to "verbalize" their thoughts and feelings. Those with any self-awareness seem to immediately funnel it into the so-called "inner monologue." Rather than Sensing ---> Reacting, it becomes Sensing ----> Verbalizing ---> Reacting. That act of verbalization automatically slows down the thought\reaction process, as well as (again, as I see it) robbing the process of much of its energy, especially emotional energy.

Words hold very little emotion, compared to action. "Thinking through" a situation, in western parlance, more or less means attempting to convert it into rational\logical expressions. ie, Stripping it of emotion and trying to look at the situation "objectively." The problem is, this is a very slow process -compared to instinctive action- and much of one's internal resources then get turned towards the business of that inner verbalized debate, rather than the business of doing something. Not to mention that attempting to "objectify" a situation effectively means deliberately introducing dissonance into one's thoughts.

What he seems to be advocating, more or less, is the active-thoughtlessness of, say, the trained martial arts practitioner. One who can shut down those verbalization processes and merely sense\react without internal distractions. This, I believe, is the kind of "chaos" he refers to - situations where rapid action is not just useful, but demanded, for the purpose of trying to subvert\bypass that verbalization stage.

Although the nice thing about modern life is that there's no need to get bruised and bloody to achieve this. Many video games can also, I find, bring about that same sense of thoughtlessness. Personally, I started taking a very "martial" approach to Mario Kart a couple years back, and actually found it to be far more productive than I'd even hoped at the time. Originally, I started using advice from "The Art of War" merely to improve my strategy, and instead, I found it allowed me to gain the sort of quasi-meditative state that Osho advocates here.

Presumably just about any sufficiently frenetic game would qualify. Shoot-em-ups, especially of the "bullet hell" variety like Geometry Wars, tend to also be good at bringing about this trance-like state. (The trance music common to the genre undoubtedly helps...)

That's not to say, of course, that it can or should replace traditional quiet meditation, but I believe his suggestions could be quite effective in guiding the mind towards calm\instinctive action without verbalizing or second-guessing one's actions. Especially for those who have trouble calming their minds enough for meditation to work at all. After all, the real "goal" here is not the ability to sit in meditation for an arbitrarily large amount of time. The goal is simply gaining better control of one's thoughts + energy + actions, and learning how to more fully focus them towards one's goals.

The method of doing this which is best, is the one that works best for the student.