Osho on rock music

Question – In reference to the meditation techniques based on sounds, please explain the difference between the chaotic music played in your dynamic meditation and the shake or rock music of the west.

Osho – Your mind is in chaos. That chaos has to be brought out, acted out. Chaotic music can be helpful, so if you are meditating and chaotic music is played or chaotic dancing is there around you, it will help to bring out your chaos. You will flow in it, you will become unafraid of expression. And this chaotic music will hit your chaotic mind within and will bring it out. It helps.

Rock, jazz, or other music which is chaotic in a way also help something to come out, and that something is repressed sexuality. I am concerned with all your repressions. Modern music is more concerned just with your repressed sex, but there is a similarity. However, I am not concerned only with your repressed sex, I am concerned with all your repressions – sexual or not sexual.

Rock music, or other music like that, is so influential in the West because of Christianity. Christianity has been repressing sex for twenty centuries. They have forced sex to go so deep down inside that every man has become a pervert deep down. So the West has to relieve itself of the sin that Christianity has done with man, with his mind, through music, through dance, through chaotic painting, chaotic poetry – in every dimension.

In the West mind has to be completely freed somehow from the whole centuries-long past of repression. In every way they are doing it. All that is influential today is chaotic. But sex is not the only thing, there are many other things also. Sex is the basic thing, it is very important, but there are other things also. Your anger is repressed, your sadness is repressed, even your happiness is repressed.

Man as he is is a repressed being. He is not allowed to do anything, he has just to follow rules. He is not a free agent but just a kept slave, and the whole society is a big prison. The walls are very subtle: they are glass walls, transparent. You cannot see them, but they are, and everywhere. Your morality, your culture, your religion, they are all walls. They are transparent, you cannot see them, but whenever you want to cross them you are thrown back.

This state of mind is neurotic. The whole society is ill. That is why I so much insist on chaotic meditation. Relieve yourself, act out whatsoever society has forced on you, whatsoever situations have forced on you. Act them out, relieve yourself of them, go through a catharsis. The music helps. Once you can throw out everything that has been repressed in you, you will become natural again, you will be a child again. And with that child many possibilities open. With you everything is closed. When you become again a child, then only can your energies be transformed. Then you are pure, innocent, and with that innocence and purity transformation is possible.

Perverted energies cannot be transformed. Natural, spontaneous energy is needed. That is why I insist so much on acting out things: so that you can throw the society out. The society has entered you very deeply. It has not left YOU anywhere; it has entered from everywhere. You are a citadel, and the society has entered from everywhere. Its police, its priests, they have done much to make you a slave. You are not free, and man can attain to bliss only when he becomes a total freedom.

For you to be made a total freedom the whole society has to be thrown out of you, but that doesn’t mean that you are going to become anti-social. Once you throw the society out, once you become aware of your pure freedom inside, you can live with the society; there is no need to be anti. But then the society cannot enter into you. You can move in it, you can act in it, but then the whole thing becomes just a psychodrama – you are acting. Now the society cannot kill you, cannot make a slave of you; you are acting knowingly.

Those who become anti-social simply show that they are still bound to the same society. All the anti-social movements in the West are reactionary, not revolutionary. You are reacting to the same society, you are related to the same society in a reverse manner. You are standing on your head, that is all. You are doing SHIRSHASANA – the headstand posture – but you are the same person. Whatsoever the society is insisting upon, you are doing quite the contrary – but you are still following the society. This will not help.

If you are anti you will never be beyond the society, you will always be part of it. If the society dies, you will die. Think of what in the West they now call the establishment – the society that is established – and the alternate societies of hippies, yippies, or others. They exist as a part of this establishment. If the establishment is dissolved, they will be nowhere. They cannot exist by themselves; they are just a reaction.

You cannot create a society of hippies by itself. Hippies can exist only as an alternate society WITH an establishment – just as a reaction. They cannot exist independently. So howsoever much they may think they are independent, they are not independent. The establishment is their source, their life. Once the establishment is not there, they will be at a loss where to move and what to do. Whatsoever they are doing is dictated by the establishment. They go against it, but the directions, the instructions are given by the establishment.

If the establishment says short hair, you can be long-haired. But if there is no establishment, then what to do? If the establishment says cleanliness, you can be dirty. But if there is no establishment and no fuss about cleanliness, you are nowhere. If the establishment says this, you can do that – quite the reverse – but you follow the establishment. So anti-socials are not revolutionaries. They are reactionaries, a part and a product of the same society – those who have moved against it in bitterness.

A meditator, a sannyasin, is not anti-society, he is beyond society. He is not against the establishment, neither is he for it – but he takes it non-seriously. He knows it is just a play; he moves in it like an actor. And if you can move in the society like an actor on the stage, it never touches you; you remain beyond it. So do not be for it, do not be against it.

But how can you do it? You can do it only when you have thrown the society out of you. If it is there, then there are two paths open to you: follow it or go against it. But you are bound to it; you are in bondage. First one has to clean oneself of society, then for the first time you become an individual. Right now you are not, you are just a social unit.

When the society is thrown out, when its entire presence is thrown out, you are again back to your childhood: you have become innocent. And this innocence is deeper than that which any child can have, because you know the fall as well and now you have risen. It is a resurrection. You have experienced, you have known the whole nonsense. Now you are again pure. This purity becomes the temple for the divine.

Once you can throw the society out of you, without any bitterness, without going against it or being involved in any reaction… if you can simply throw society out of you, the divine can enter into you. With society in, the divine will remain out; with society out, the divine can enter – because the divine means existence. Society is a human, local phenomenon. Existence is greater, infinite. It is not concerned with man, morals, traditions, it is concerned with the very roots of being. One has to be beyond society, not against it, remember. And this chaotic method helps you. It is a
catharsis.

Source – Osho Book “Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, Vol 1”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *