If we look at the practices invented by Osho, the impression is formed that he believed in the usefulness of super-efforts. They last for an hour, and sometimes longer, incorporating very active movements, requiring great intensity and commitment. Requiring totality, as Osho would say. In his practices, he tried to bring people to the explosion of energy which he himself experienced during enlightenment. Therefore, there was everything in them in order to pump up and raise a person’s internal energies, and active stages often gave way to total freezing, in order to provoke this very explosion. Here Osho was close to Gurdjieff, who believed that super-efforts can lead to a breakthrough when hidden sources of energy inside the student open up, which bring him new transcendent experience. Osho sought something else, but the essence of his search was similar. The most famous of Osho’s meditations – the dynamic – was performed in his ashram twice a day, but as far as I know, it did not bring great results. Anyone who performed it knew that the effect of a sudden stopping after half an hour of movement is lost fairly quickly – approximately a week after daily practice. The mind grows accustomed to the exercise, and therefore it becomes a kind of pleasant form of training, although the part connected to the expression of suppressed energies may preserve its relevance even for a longer time.
The need to express suppressed energies is one of Osho’s main discoveries in what concerns the practical side of work on oneself. Although latihan existed even before him, it was Osho who clearly formulated for modern people the need for cleansing the internal space. He gave quite a few practices, but those connected to expression are the most valuable of these. Not counting, of course, his exercises on awareness and self-observation. Osho called all his practices meditations, spreading this term to exercises most diverse in essence – from chaotic breathing to entering into a trance through visualization – but that is, so to speak, his right. Now, at any rate, everything you wish is called meditations, including even exercises for the concentration of attention, and the terminological confusion enables the persistence of confusion in the minds of seekers. Mixing up everything into one pile became one of the reasons why modern people simply cannot understand the difference between awareness and concentration; after all, in their minds there is a notion that it is one and the same, because often it is called the same thing. But Osho, possibly, is absolutely not relevant here.