Osho understood freedom and the illusion of freedom very well.
“The
freedom from something is not true freedom.
The freedom to do
anything you want to do is also not the freedom I am talking about.
My vision of freedom is
to be yourself.”
One of my favorite gurus is Osho… a controversial figure. He dared speak his truth. He blurted blistering opinions on almost anything from the medical establishment, to corporations, to schooling, to meditation. He was a witness to the fusing of two worlds, the West and the East, a merging he deemed necessary because he didn’t think the split characterizing the world would help us go forward.
We often call the Western societies, “the free world,” but this is just a sweet chimera. Half of the world has been and continues to be under more or less obvious oppressive regimes. This has been going on for centuries. And the West… well, just look at the media reports on NSA surveillance, the New York Times’ report unveiling the AT&T deal with the US Drug Enforcement Administration, to which it has provided with 26 years of phone call records. Privacy has gone through the drain. And without privacy, can we really talk of freedom?
In Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic, a compilation of nearly 5,000 hours of Osho’s recorded talks, we learn not only about his life but also about the importance he gave to meditation.
Meditation, he said, is the only thing that can give us freedom. It will free us of the mind.
Psychoanalysis and psychosynthesis, he said, work on the mind and make us more conscious of the mind. Instead, meditation makes us observe the mind and to the extent we stop identifying with it, we transcend. Transcendence IS freedom.
Osho encourages dynamic meditation and practicing it alone…if you feel comfortable with it. The group, according to Osho is for people who have grown uncomfortable with their egos. They can “dissolve” into the group and forget about their egos for a while.
Meditation has been transformative for me. It does change the way we experience the world.