Health, Meditation, and Dreams

How is it that the body begins to feel light after the deep and fast breathing in dynamic meditation?

It is true that the body will feel light after this meditation. It will be so because our consciousness of body is one of heaviness. What we call heaviness is nothing more than our awareness of the body. The body weighs heavy on a sick person even if he is skinny and wiry. But a healthy person, even if he is a heavyweight, carries his body very lightly. So it is really our body-consciousness that feels like a weight on us. 

And we become conscious of our body only when it is in pain, when it is suffering. We become conscious of our feet when they are hurting. We become aware of our head when it is aching. If there is no body pain, we are never aware of our body. This consciousness is the measure of our suffering.

We define a healthy person as one who feels as if he is bodiless. 

He who does not feel that he is a body, who has a feeling of bodilessness, is really a healthy person. And if he is identified with a particular part of his body it can be said that this part of his body is sick. 

As the amount of oxygen increases and as the kundalini awakens, you will begin to have experiences that are not of the body; they belong to the soul or the atman. And on account of these subtle experiences you will simultaneously feel lightness, an extraordinary kind of weightlessness. Many people will feel as if they are levitating. Not that they really levitate — an event of actual levitation takes place only once in a long while. But because of the feeling of utter weightlessness, you feel that you are levitating. If you open your eyes and see, you will find that you are sitting on the ground. But why this feeling of levitation? 

The fact is that our mind, in its inmost depths, does not know any language as we know. It only knows the language of pictures, symbols. So when you experience weightlessness, utter weightlessness, your mind expresses it in the language of pictures. It does not say verbally that it is weightlessness, it pictures it as an act of levitation, it feels levitation.

Our deeper mind, our unconscious mind does not think in words, it thinks in pictures, in symbols. 

That is why our dreams in the night have only pictures and hardly any words. The dreaming mind has to transform everything — including experiences and thoughts — into pictures. For this reason when we wake up in the morning we find it so difficult to understand our own dreams. The language we know and use in the waking hours is utterly different from the pictorial language of dreams. The two are total strangers to each other, and therefore great interpreters in the form of pundits, psychologists and psychiatrists are needed to interpret them for us. We just cannot do without them. 

Now someone is ambitious. How will he express his ambition when he is dreaming? He will turn into a bird on the wing soaring high in the sky. Then he will be at the top of everything, leaving the whole world behind him. Ambition in dreams takes the form of flights — one dreams that he is flying and flying. All ambitious men have dreams of flying. But the word ambition will never find a place in dreams. So after waking up in the morning the person wonders why he was flying in his dreams. It is his ambition turned into a flying bird in dreams.

The same way when we enter the depths of meditation, weightlessness feels like levitation. 

Really weightlessness can be pictured only as levitation, there is no other way. And once in a great while the body actually levitates in a state of extreme weightlessness.

Osho, In Search of the Miraculous