In guided meditations a soft hypnosis is used. Osho talks on different occasions on the possibility to use hypnosis for meditation. It can be bridge, and a stepping stone towards meditation.

 

If you want to change anything in you which you think is impossible, you can give it a try -- nothing is impossible. You have decided many times to change this, to change that, but you have always failed, because the decision remains in the conscious and the action comes from the unconscious -- they don't meet.

The unconscious never hears anything that the conscious is deciding, and the conscious cannot control the unconscious -- the unconscious is so vast.

The secret of hypnosis is that it takes you to the unconscious, and then you can put the seed of anything in the unconscious, and it will grow, blossom. The blossoming will happen in the conscious, but the roots will remain in the unconscious.

As far as I am concerned, hypnosis is going to be one of the most significant parts of the mystery school. Such a simple method, which only demands a little trust, a little innocence, can bring miraculous changes in your life -- and not in ordinary things only. Slowly it can become the path of your meditation.

You meditate, but you don't succeed. You don't succeed in watching; you get mixed up with thoughts, you forget watching. You remember later on, "I was going to watch, but I am thinking." Hypnosis can help you; it can make the watcher and the thoughts separate.

For spiritual growth I don't think there is anything more important than hypnosis.
From an Osho talk found in Beyond Psychology

 

Once it happened that a man stayed overnight in an inn. He ate dinner at night and left early the next morning. A year later he returned to the same inn. The innkeeper was shocked to see him. "Are you all right?" he asked the traveler.

"I am all right. Why, what's the matter?"

"We were quite frightened," said the innkeeper. "You see, the last night you stayed here, a snake fell into the pot and was cooked with the food served to you. Four other people who ate the food died soon after. We couldn't figure out what happened to you because you left quite early. We were so worried about you."

When the traveler heard this, he said, "What? A snake in my food?" and dropped dead. A year later! He died of fear.

 

For such ailments, hypnosis is very useful. Hypnosis only means that the falsehood we have created around ourselves can be neutralized by another falsehood. Remember, if an imaginary thorn has pricked your foot, don't try to remove it with the help of a real thorn; it would be dangerous. First of all, the imaginary one will never be removed, and furthermore, the real one will hurt your foot. A false thorn has to be pulled out with the help of a false thorn.

So, what is the relation between meditation and hypnosis? Only this: hypnosis is required to pull out the false thorns stuck in your body.

An example of hypnosis is when I tell you to feel that the body is relaxing. This is hypnosis. Actually you yourself have assumed that the body cannot relax. In order to nullify this assumption, hypnosis is necessary -- otherwise not. Were it not for your false assumption, feeling just once that the body is relaxed, it will relax. The suggestions I give you are not really to relax your bodies, but to take away your belief that the body can never relax. This cannot be done without creating a counter-belief in you that the body is relaxing. Your false concept will be neutralized by this false concept, and when your body relaxes, you will know it is relaxed. Relaxation is a very natural quality of the body, but you have filled yourselves with so much tension that now you have to do something to get rid of it.

This is as far as hypnosis goes. When you begin to feel the body is relaxing, the breathing is relaxing, the mind is calming down -- this is hypnosis. But only up to this point. What follows afterwards is meditation -- up to this point there is no meditation. Meditation begins after this, when you are in the state of awareness. When you become aware within, when you begin to witness that the body is relaxed, that the breathing is relaxed, that thoughts have either ceased or are still moving -- when you begin to watch, just watch -- this watching, this state of witnessing is meditation.

From an Osho talk found in And Now and Here

 

The hypnotist is only a help to awaken you to your own power, and then it can be used for many things: for healing, for making you live longer, for changing your harmful habits, smoking, drinking. It can do tremendous work.

It can be used as an educative methodology. You can learn in hypnosis better than you can learn ordinarily, because everything is silent and you are hearing only one voice. Even if somebody else comes and talks, you will not hear, you are open only to a small narrow way to the hypnotist. He can teach you any new language. He can teach you any new science. He can teach you arithmetic, anything within minutes for which people take hours and days to learn.

And it can be used for meditation too. As far as I am concerned hypnosis is simply a relaxed, deliberate sleep with a small opening, a little window, to the person who hypnotized you. He can tell you that your meditation will go deeper every day, and if this thought gets in your unconscious, your meditation will start going deeper. Just a few sessions and he can give you the last post-hypnotic suggestion: now you don't need any hypnosis; your meditation will go deeper on its own accord.

Hypnosis has not been used in the whole of history for meditation, but it can be used, and it can be used with tremendous power, because you have to fight so much with your thoughts unnecessarily. That whole struggle with your mind can be dropped by hypnotic sessions without much effort.

 

Just an innocent heart is needed for meditation. And hypnosis can cleanse your heart and can bring you into the state of a small child.

 

Little Roger was frightened of the large bulldog that occupied the yard next to his home. One day, feeling adventurous, Roger climbed the fence. The huge bulldog rushed up to him and licked his face. The boy began to scream and his mother came running to his side.

"Did he bite you, darling?"

"Not yet," whimpered Roger, "He just tasted me."

 

That is the simplicity of a child.

Old Sam Rosenbaum was seventy-five, really very old, and finally got his nerve together to take a flight in a small airplane. As he climbed out after the ride, he turned to the pilot and said, "Sir, I wish to thank you for both those rides."

"What are you talking about?" said the pilot, "You had only one ride."

"Oh no I didn't," said old Sam. "I had two: my first and my last!"

 

In old age also, if people have lived rightly they come back to the same innocence of a child. And according to me, unless an old man becomes again a child, he has missed the opportunity of growing in the spiritual dimension; he has wasted his life in trivia. He has been collecting only seashells and colored stones on the sea beach, but he has not been able to discover the treasure of consciousness, awareness, enlightenment.

Hypnosis can be certainly used. Here we are going to create a school for hypnosis, where you will be able to learn how to auto-hypnotize yourself so you don't have the dependence on the hypnotist. And then you can use that auto-hypnotizing process for meditation.

This is a pioneer effort to bring hypnosis and meditation together for the first time. But together they can be tremendously great. They can bring you so much light, so much blissfulness -- and so easily. I like to repeat Chuang Tzu's statement, "Easy is right; right is easy." I don't want you to become unnecessarily self-torturing, following unnecessarily long, arduous ways to come to yourself.

You don't have to go anywhere.

I want to teach you the great pilgrimage from here to here. I want you to learn the art of reaching to God singing, dancing, rejoicing.

Laugh your way to God.

In essence that is my teaching.

And it is possible, with the help of hypnosis, to make meditation the easiest process.

from an Osho talk found in The Great Pilgramage FROM HERE TO HERE

 

And each individual is so unique that you cannot make a superhighway on which everybody has to travel to find the aim of life. On the contrary, everybody has to find his life without following the crowd, but following his own inner voice; without moving in a mob, but following a small footpath. That too is not created by anybody else. You create it as you walk.

The world of life and consciousness is almost like the sky -- birds fly but they don't leave any footprints. As you live deeply, sincerely, honestly, you don't leave any footprints and nobody has to follow you. Everybody has to follow his own, still, small voice.

My emphasis on meditation is so that you can hear your still, small voice -- which will give you the guidance, the sense of direction. No scripture can give it to you. No religion, no religious founder can give it to you because they have been giving it to humanity for thousands of years and all their efforts have failed. They have only created retarded people, unintelligent people, because they insisted on believing. The moment you believe in someone, you lose intelligence. Belief is almost like poison to your intelligence.

I say to you not to believe in anyone, including me. You have to find your own insight, and then follow it. Wherever it leads is the right path for you. Whether anybody else is following that the path or not is not the question. Each individual is unique and each individual life has a beauty in its uniqueness.

from an Osho talk found in The Hidden Splendor

a list of guided meditations: 

Relaxing the Body Mind from And Now and Here
new: The Inner Sky
new: Center of Sound
`Reminding yourself of the forgotten language of talking to the mind and body` from Body/mind balancing
Hara Stop!  
Opening the Inner Door  
Bubble of Joy
Tuning Into the Moment
Awakening of the Heart
new: Healing the Body
Forgiveness

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