The Heart of Yoga (Yoga: The Science of the Soul)

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The practice of Yoga is now being widely embraced by the West in an endless range of evolving formats, particularly with added movement components. It is therefore very timey that Osho with his razor-sharp insight, respect, and compassion for the individual brings a wider understanding of the potential benefits of Yoga for contemporary people n these talks on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

Patanjali lived around 400BC and although Yoga was already in existence, he was able through his unique combination of logician, poet, and mystic, to present Yoga in a way that could be of help to all. And that continues to be true today.

Osho describes Patanjali as a mathematician of the ultimate poetry; a mystic with a scientific mind, who analyzes and dissects as if in a lab, but his lab is one of the inner being. Patanjali has searched deeply into human energy and devised many techniques; he has found that in order to meditate, the body, mind, and being need to be healthy. His discovery that the body energy becomes whole with the chanting of om, the basic sound of existence, and his findings of the deep connection between breathing and thinking have been of great importance to generations of meditators.

Osho's unique contribution to the understanding of who we are defies categorization. Mystic and scientist, a rebellious spirit whose new way of living. To continue as before is to invite threats to our very survival on this unique and beautiful planet.

His essential point is that only by changing ourselves, one individual at a time, can the outcome of all our "selves" – our societies, our cultures, our beliefs, our world – also change. The doorway to that change is meditation.

Osho the scientist has experimented and scrutinized all the approaches of the past and examined their effects on the modern human being and responded to their shortcomings by creating a new starting point for the hyperactive 21st Century mind: Osho Active Meditations.

Once the agitation of a modern lifetime has started to settle, "activity" can melt into "passivity," a key starting point of real meditation. To support this next osho has transformed the ancient "art of listening" into a subtle contemporary methodology: the OSHO Talks. Here words become music, the listener discovers who is listening, and the awareness moves from what is being heard to the individual doing the listening. Magically, as silence arises, what needs to be head is understood directly, free from the distraction of a mind that can only interrupt and interfere with this delicate process.

These thousands of talks cover everything from the individual quest for meaning to the most urgent social and political issues facing society today. Osho's books are not written but are transcribed from audio and video recordings of these extemporaneous talk to international audiences. A he puts it, "So remember: whatever I am saying i not just for you... I am talking also for the future generations."

Osho has been described by The Sunday Times in London as one of the "1000 Makers of the 20th Century" and by American author Tom Robbins as "the most dangerous man since Jesus Chist." Sunday Mid-Day (India) has selected Osho as one of ten people – along with Gandhi, Nehru and Buddha – who have changed the destiny of India.

About his own work Osho has said that he is helping to create the conditions for the birth of a new kind of human being. He often characterizes this new human being as "Zorba the Buddha" – capable both of enjoying the both of enjoying the earthy pleasures of a Zorba the Greek and the silent serenity of a Gautama the Buddha.

Running like a thread through all aspects of Osho's talks and meditations is a vision that encompasses both the timeless wisdom of all ages past and the highest potential of today's (and tomorrow's) science and technology.

Osho is know for his revolutionary contribution to the science of inner transformation, with an approach to meditation that acknowledges the accelerated pace of contemporary life. His unique Osho Active Meditation are designed to fist release the accumulated stresses of body and mind, so that it is then easier to take an experience of stillness and thought-free relax-ation into daily life.

Patanjali – I call him the scientist of the religious world, the mathematician of mysticism, the logician of the illogical. Two opposites meet in him. If a scientist reads Patanjali's Yoga Sutras he will understand immediately. A Wittgenstein, a logical mind, will immediately feel an affinity with Patanjali. He's absolutely logical. And if he leads you toward the illogical, he leads you in such logical steps you never know when he has left the logic and taken you beyond it.

He moves like a philosopher, a thinker, and makes such subtle distinctions that the moment he takes you into nirvichara, into no-contemplation, you will not be able to see when the jump has been taken. He has cut the jump into many small steps.

With Patanjali you will never feel fear, because he knows where you will feel fear. He cuts the steps smaller and smaller, almost as if you move on the plain ground. He takes you so slowly that you cannot observe when the jump has happened, when you have crossed the boundary. And he is also a poet, a mystic - a very rare combination.

There are mystics like Tilopa, there are great poets like the rishis of the Upanishads, there are great logicians like Aristotle, but you cannot find a Patanjali. He is such a combination that since him there has been no one who can be compared to him. It is very easy to be a poet because you are out of one piece. It is very easy to be a logician - you are made of one piece. It is almost impossible to be a Patanjali because you comprehend so many opposites - and he combines them all in such a beautiful harmony. That's why he has become the alpha and the omega of the whole tradition of Yoga.

In fact, it was not he who invented Yoga; Yoga is far more ancient. Yoga had been there for many centuries before Patanjali. He is not the discoverer, but he almost became the discoverer and founder just because of this rare combination of his personality. Many people had worked before him and almost everything was known, but Yoga was waiting for a Patanjali. And suddenly, when Patanjali spoke about it, everything fell in line and he became the founder. He was not the founder, but his personality is such a combination of opposites, he comprehends in himself such incomprehensible elements, he became the founder - almost the founder. Now Yoga will always be associated with Patanjali.