Look at your past, dis-identified

What the Method Is

The core instruction for this meditation method is: “Let attention be at a place where you are seeing some past happening, and even your form, having lost its present characteristics, is transformed.”. This sutra provides a technique to transcend identification with the past and the physical form.

How It Is Done

To practice this method, you should:

  • Remember a past happening: Choose any event from your past, such as your childhood, a love affair, or the death of a parent.
  • Observe without involvement: As you remember, do not get involved in the memory. Instead, remain aloof, like a witness or an observer.
  • Perceive it as someone else’s life: View the memory as if it belongs to someone else, not you. This helps create distance.
  • Detachment from your past form: When your past form appears in the “film” of your memory, be detached from it. For example, if you recall being insulted, observe the past form of yourself being insulted, but do not become angry again or get elated if praised. Look at the entire scene indifferently, like watching a film.
  • Practice daily (for the day’s events): At night, before falling asleep, go backward through the memories of your entire day. Start from the most recent event (e.g., being on the bed) and move back step-by-step to the first experience of the morning. Do this slowly, without hurrying, and ensure you do not get involved in the emotions or reactions of the events.
    • Crucial instruction: Always go backward, never from morning to evening, as going forward re-emphasizes and deepens the “trap” of the mind.
  • Practice in the morning (for sleep): In the morning, before opening your eyes, go backward through your night’s sleep, trying to recall dreams and the moment you fell asleep.
  • Deep exploration (for the whole past): For a more profound experience, you can dedicate a day to this practice. Go to a lonely place, fast, remain silent, lie down, and consciously move backward through your entire past, aiming to remember the first moment you entered the womb, and potentially even past lives.
  • Initial focus on easier things: Start with easier, ordinary things like walking or simple actions before moving to more complex emotional states like anger or sex, which require deeper awareness.
Commentaries and Insights
  • Breaking Identification (The “Only Sin”): This technique is fundamentally about breaking the identification with the body and mind, which Gurdjieff refers to as the “only sin”. When you realize that the “form” in your past is not “you,” you create a vital gap between the observer and the observed. This gap allows you to realize that you are the consciousness behind the form and name, not the form itself.
  • The World as a Dream (Maya): Osho highlights that our past is like a dream or “maya” (illusion). Just as you only realize a dream was unreal upon waking and becoming detached, you can view your past as a dream when you create a distance from it. The technique helps you to understand that “this world of maya is not a world of maya for you; it is very real, and the role of the guru is to show you that it is not real”.
  • Unwinding the Mind and Catharsis: This backward reflection acts as an “unwinding of the mind,” which can release unfinished and incomplete matters that constantly weigh on the mind. This process is a deep catharsis that can resolve psychological issues and even make many physical diseases disappear that are hangovers of the past, bringing a new sense of health and freshness.
  • Living in the Present: By freeing yourself from the burden of the past, this technique enables you to be constantly in the present moment. All meditation ultimately aims to bring you to the “here and now”.
  • Enlightened Sleep and Dreaming: An enlightened person does not dream because they are perfectly conscious even in sleep. Dreams are a consequence of unconsciousness and incomplete experiences. By practicing this technique, you transform the quality of your sleep, making it meditative and aware, eventually transcending the need for dreams.
  • Non-Judgment and Authenticity: The method requires you to observe without judgment or interpretation, allowing for a direct encounter with facts as they are. This promotes authenticity, freeing you from cultivated, false personas and allowing you to uncover your real being.
  • Energy Management: Your emotions (like anger or love) are energy. Instead of expressing or suppressing this energy, the technique guides you to move inward to the source from which the mood arises. This allows the energy to return to its origin, making you the master of your own energy and preventing dissipation.
  • Simplicity and Ego’s Resistance: The technique appears deceptively simple. However, Osho warns that the ego is attracted to difficult challenges, and thus may dismiss simple methods as unhelpful for profound spiritual growth. These simple methods are powerful precisely because they touch fundamental realities directly.
  • Master’s Role and Initiation: While these methods can be practiced individually, Osho notes that modern psychological approaches like dianetics or psychodrama utilize similar principles. However, for deeper transformation, a master’s initiation and guidance are invaluable, as they can tailor the technique to the individual’s specific needs and ensure proper understanding and execution. The master helps shatter fictions and make the “facticity” (truth) available.
  • No Fear of Death: By realizing “you are not the body,” this method contributes to the profound understanding that “you cannot die”. This realization can help overcome the fundamental fear of death.
  • The “Why” vs. “How”: Tantra is a science focused on “how” to attain truth, rather than “why” things are. It provides techniques to experience transformation, emphasizing that “doing is knowing”.