Sunday, July 7, 2002		Books

Recipes for relaxation & enlightenment
Arun Gaur

Lunchtime Enlightenment
by Pragito Dove, Penguin, Pages 194 Price Rs 250

THE writer of this book was given the name "Pragito" (meaning "song" in Sanskrit) by Osho. She came to India from "a roomy Victorian house in Saint Albans, Hertfordshire, England" with her little son, when her marriage had ended and spent a year at Osho’s, learning the techniques of meditation developed by him. Later, she settled in Marin County, California, where she is currently working as a consultant and trainer in stress management and meditation.

The book is a result of her 20 years’ training experience in San Francisco. Basically, it deals with a graded set of meditation exercises chiselled by Osho — we can choose one or more of these, depending upon our individual shades of stress.

Meditation can be as simple as breathing or standing bare-footed on the earth — letting the free inter-flow of energy. Or we may look at the sky. How compassionate it is! Or we may sit under a tree with the wind passing through us.

Moving a little up the scale, we encounter the moving meditations. Through Osho Nataraj, we increase the creative power. Dance for 40 minutes freely with closed eyes, following the childlike rhythms of the body. Then lie down silently (20 minutes) and dance again for five minutes. This would liberate the trapped energy, which is the source of tension. Osho Kundalini is the shaking meditation to get rid of physical stress. Shake, dance, become still, lie down (each for 15 minutes).

In Gibberish Meditation, we consciously grow crazy talking nonsense to counter anger and frustration. Dynamic Meditation involves breathing, catharsis (jumping, laughing, screaming), shouting hoo-hoo, silent witnessing, and dancing. Insomnia Meditation makes us talk gibberish to throw out the day’s rubbish. This will help us in getting sound sleep. To overcome mental stress, start laughing right at the moment you wake up in the morning. If there are some irritating differences between the partners, the Couples’ Meditation can help out. The partners should simply hold the hands crosswise, breathe and hum together. While the Eating Meditation can bring about awareness of our eating habits. There is a three-week-long Mystic Rose Meditation designed to reap long-lasting benefits. It prescribes laughing, crying, and sitting silently (one week each for three hours daily). These rhythms calm the ruffled body and mind.

So there seems to be a remedy ready at hand for any problem that may crop up in our everyday life — a veritable panacea. It is the average flow of life that is the focus here and "relaxation" is the key word. Hence all philosophical propositions (though the writer emphatically forbids philosophising) and psychological orientations that the meditations intend introducing are geared up to fill the everyday tenor of life with relaxation. Moreover, relaxation is to be done in a typically relaxed manner through soft options — not through torture of the body or the soul. The difficult lotus posture of sitting becomes anachronistic and is discarded: "Meditation is not afraid of chairs." If our spines are not absolutely erect, it hardly matters. Fasting is useless. "There is no right or wrong way to breathe." These are all "minor" redundant issues. Meditation is not necessarily "to be done quietly and in stillness." It is not the era of the Buddha. It is the era of modern meditation — bringing awareness to every moment of routine activities.

It is all very interesting — this set of meditations and the embedded interplay of defensive psychological orientations. Since the trainer has been training the people in these meditations for quite a long time, needless to say, they must have proved quite effective. They do aim at instilling into an individual a fair amount of confidence through positive virtues so that one may find creative solutions to one’s problems. But these meditations seem to be an oversimplification of the complexity of life that flows around us — reducing it to simplistic paradigms. There is a mortal dread of the mind (and its concomitant concentration), that is accused of being a perpetrator of orthodox deadwood. Since the chain of thoughts cannot be avoided, we are asked to pay attention only to the gaps between them. Let the thoughts pass unmolested. There seems to be a fear of facing the satanic but intensely creative underworld — the web and woof out of which Nietzche floated his Zarathustra. That kind of creativity, I suspect, would elude the scope of the types of meditations under review.

We are even tempted to view these meditations as an adroit mixture — if not a melange — of the yogic introspections and aerobic tumblings (along with the Zen and the sufi elements) glossed with a veneer of craziness offered as novelty.

But surely, they must have proved quite successful in their own way. No wonder in that. Every kind of exercise done with faith and persistence proves effective — call it sacrosanct or secular, mystified or demystified. Ultimately, the matter boils down to personal suitability (may be subjective whims and fancies). Nothing more, nothing less.

But I must end the review on a happy note. My differences with the writer and her mentor’s approach notwithstanding, Pragito Dove is certainly a brave lady (quite capable of laughing at her own self), who has come out of her own sufferings to find her legitimate moorings on the other side of the Atlantic (of course, let us not forget, through India). On occasions, she can write picturesequely with great fluidity — a little like Jane Austen.