Place your whole attention in the nerve, delicate as the lotus thread, in the center of your spinal column. In such be transformed.
- Preparation: study a physiology book or look at a body-structure model to get a real image of the spine. Then close eyes and visualize your own spinal column from inside — straight and erect. Within it, at the very center, visualize a thread-like silver cord, delicate as a lotus thread, and concentrate on it.
- Why the spine, and the cord is immaterial — the spinal column is the base of the whole body (the brain is just its top pole), and within it runs this cord, which is your very life-energy. It is not findable by surgery: it is energy, not matter, and physiology is silent about it. It is the bridge between the invisible (soul) and the visible (body), between inner self and outer existence. It is seen only in deep meditation.
- Absolute straightness is mandatory — the cord is so subtle that even a slight spinal curve makes it invisible. The entire tradition of sitting, sleeping, and walking postures was built around this single requirement; without an erect spine the glimpse is nearly impossible.
- Imagination shifts to actual inner seeing — at first the visualization feels made-up; persist. (We normally block all inner sight because seeing our own bones, blood and veins is fearful.) A seeker Osho worked with spontaneously saw a different spine from the anatomical picture he had been given — the spine he was actually seeing from inside. When that shift occurs, drop the picture and follow the inner vision.
- Marker: light explosion and aura — when the thread is realized, an explosion of light fills the body from within and spreads outward as a visible aura. Auras are real; the halos painted around enlightened teachers are not decoration but the actual phenomenon, and a master can read it in another.
- Who it is for — especially body-oriented people (materialists, those who feel themselves to be nothing but body) and, more than men, women: women naturally close their eyes during love and feel the body from within, whereas men stay outward-facing and find inner visualization harder. For anyone not body-oriented, visualizing from inside is very difficult.
- Tantric shortcut via silent embrace — in a prolonged, still, non-moving sexual embrace (not mechanical release — a spiritual communion of two innernesses penetrating each other), energy concentrates near the spine and the thread becomes far more visible because the body is at rest. In that warmth: forget the other person, go inside, close eyes, visualize the spinal column. The spine literally discharges electricity in deep love (objects move, light is photographed around it). Tantra has worked this systematically — but the quality must be wholly unlike hurried, goal-oriented sex.
- Q&A — uncover, don’t build: the navel center cannot be built because it already exists perfectly; this technique uncovers it. Heart and head centers, by contrast, must be developed through love and conditioning. This is why any person — regardless of talent, education, or upbringing — can become a buddha: buddhahood is not an individual achievement (which, like becoming an Einstein, would need the exact unrepeatable life), but the discovery of what is already the case.