With an increasing interest in the mind-body connection, meditation is hitting the mainstream. At home, at work and at play, everyone is looking within. To assist people in doing this, an entire industry of self-help books, tapes and CD-ROMs and classes has been growing steadily. Arun Katiyar went to the Osho International Commune to absorb life in the suburbs of inner space. And he's come back convinced that freaking out will soon be passé. It's freaking in that will corner the market.

Mohini Bhullar's job is stressful. for over two decades now, she has been one of the driving forces behind the group that publishes India Today, Business Today, the magazine you are reading right now and a slew of other print and television products. As executive director of the company she travels non-stop, attends meetings back-to-back, relentlessly pushes people, papers and policies and can't seem to hang up the phone. Bhullar says yoga has helped her cope with the punishing schedules she keeps. She gave up practising yoga a few years ago, but insists that its effects continue to last. I'd say that if you can avoid complicated cardiac procedures with a few minutes of sitting still and some regulated breathing that yoga teaches you, it's pretty good. Go out there and do it. Because one day it could help you avoid spending a fortune on a gory chest incision.

Yoga is one way of stilling the mind, stopping the disturbing ripples in the pond of life. You are free to try vipasana, transcendental meditation, Catholic rosary or even what the Hindus call pranic breathing. The truth is that each of these is a different path to the same paradise. That being the case, I packed my bag for the Osho International Commune in Pune, to try out some dramatic techniques that still the pond of blurred thoughts and help in centering yourself. Oh, yes, people smile when they hear that sort of thing. Not only does nobody understand what it means but also because the real reason why anyone goes to the Osho ashram is for a generous peek at bare skin, tripping out and doing some drugs, right? Wrong.

I've been going to the ashram on and off for a couple of years and have always returned bathed in a calm energy. Sometimes, all I've done is take a walk through Osho Teerth, the fabulous Zen garden in Osho's backyard. On a sharp February morning, the cool greens of the garden enter your soul through a magical osmosis. Last year, while absorbing the crooked sound of a brook that runs through Osho Teerth, I spotted the Bird of Paradise as its long, white tail cut sharp Japanese calligraphic art in the crisp air. There have been times when I have driven 200 km from Mumbai for a vegetarian pizza at Sriman, a tiny, no-frills restaurant near the ashram frequented by Osho's maroon-robed sanyasis. There have been weekends spent drifting along the Koregaon Park Road, stopping by at the German Bakery for a slice of almond cake and Feta cheese rolls. I'd say: don't miss any of this and some of it may bring greater satisfaction than a weekend spent within the ashram, trying to find elusive meaning in meditation.

Five years ago, I decided to attend what is called the Meeting of the Osho White Robe Brotherhood. It is a meeting held every evening at 6.30 pm within the Buddha Hall, which is a large marble platform over which is draped a giant canvas, making it all resemble an informal circus tent. In the gathering darkness, high-energy music plays and the Brotherhood violently sways and shouts "Osho'' thrice (I never understood why thrice, but never mind) before getting down to a videotaped discourse by Osho. Two hours later this is followed by 10 minutes of ecstatic dancing and another 10 minutes of shattering silence.

If you've heard or read Osho, this revelation is not going to be new: his discourses are packed with contradictions. That, I suspect, is what got me hooked. Here was a man who acknowledged the contradictions in his thinking and made no attempt to hide them behind a smokescreen of justifications. Instead, he dealt with each of the conflicting thoughts as if they were the most natural way to live. Even more striking was the fact that the ashram sanyasis, generally believed to be free-floating, free-thinking souls, went through something as structured as the evening meetings, enjoying every moment. Japanese management experts may have raised a few objections to the occasionally flimsy white robes, but would have approved of the discipline.

When I left the hall, it was as if the chitta-vritti, the mind's matter as described in Patanjali's yoga sutras, had been hard-wired to eternity. There was not a ripple in the pond of life. Not a reflection on its brilliant mirrored surface. According to The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation, a review of contemporary meditation research published by the Esalen Institute of Exceptional Study in San Rafael, California, this kind of quieting of the mind and body results in a reduction of the body's consumption of energy. Returning to my hotel room, I walked right past the German Bakery. My body didn't need more energy, remember? Then I fell into a sleep of illuminated darkness. Oh, yes, I was going to come back for this peaceful roller-coaster ride through calm. I had stumbled across a Disneyland in inner space, an Estate of Mind where you were free to roam without fear.

"A dead man floats because he has no fear of drowning,'' says Swami Veddant who runs Osho Multiversity. A European woman, whose name I've forgotten, promises to look into my eyes and reveal to me my deepest fears. If you meet your fears they might even become your friends, she reassures me, or at least that is what I understand. Swami Shankara, a New Zealander clad in a black robe, discusses cricket while giving me a fabulous massage; the honey-nut cake for breakfast at the ashram's Mariam restaurant, does a healthy fox trot down my throat. The flowing maroon robe next to me at the early-morning Dynamic Meditation looks like a chemical casualty: part human, part no-body, part ecstasy.

All of this, and more, happens over a space of three days. Somewhere at the end of it, I am convinced that there is space on earth which is free of time and personal identity. Call it New Age Shamanism, call it Escapism, call it what you please, deal with it how you want to. And even if this is going to turn my reputation to toast, this much I will confess: acid is good, DMT (dimethyltryptamine) is a dream, but this thing called meditation is flying First Class.

Once a month, the ashram opens its doors to the outside world, to let in newbies. Over a space of three days, it lets them taste the subtle flavours of meditation. It's up to you to become greedy, belly up and turn into a distant cousin of the Buddha. Be prepared to take an AIDS test (administered at the ashram itself), pay a fee of Rs 25 and wear maroon robes within the ashram. Be sure to turn your normal currency into commune vouchers, because the restaurants and bookshops within the ashram don't accept cash. And be there at the ashram gate at 5.50 a.m. for the first meditation in a series of six for the day.

This one is called Dynamic Meditation, where, in the receding darkness of the Buddha Hall, hundreds of sanyasis experience the deep rush of chaotic breathing followed by a bizarre physical chaos. By the time the body is pumped up with uncontrollable volumes of oxygen, there is a complete freeze on motion. You can feel the body renewing itself, charging each cell and atom with the brew of internal awareness. An hour passes and you are ready for breakfast at Mariam.

The day moves on rapidly amid several meditation techniques at the Buddha Hall, each based on a variety of physical movements and free-form dance motions. No rules apply. From time to time, the recorded voice of Osho encourages you to "forget that you are the dancer and become the dance'' or, in a complete volte face, it might chide you by saying: "The dancer and his dance cannot be separated; they have to become one.'' The idea is not to fight the contradictions between one meditation and another. Rather, it is to bring a spiritual belief and involvement to the task, and believe that all things can be true and possible at the same time.

I happened to join the celebrations during the initiation of several new sanyasis in the Buddha Hall. There must have been about 400 people from countries as diverse as Japan and Australia, England and Italy, Peru and India. And yet, as they danced to the hypnotic music, they seemed connected. Forty-five minutes into the dance, and I had lost myself in a space I'd never visited. The conga player had begun to float and soar, till finally he was slithering across the canvas roofing; there were elves operating some kind of delicately translucent glass machinery out of which rose brilliant shards of light. Was I downloading a luxurious version of infinity? Would I smash past the edge of oblivion? Did this trance-induced virtual reality have meaning?

As Osho says, don't look for meaning. This is a pathless path. Along the way you burn down life's assumptions and from their ashes recreate a sparkling new consciousness. You open the doors to the aahh experience, kneel before it and learn to make those neurochemical adjustments with simple biochemical triggers. If there's one smart drug in the market right now, it has to be meditation: it doesn't cost a dime and has no side effects. If you don't count the manic, feel-good grin plastered on your face.

Three days spent dancing can sound ridiculous. But not when you consider this: Sufis spend a considerable part of their time dancing. On the other hand, so do teenagers at the disco. So, what's the difference? I don't think there's a significant difference between the two. Both groups, in their own way, become part of an overall fractal equation that is defined in chaos mathematics as phase-locking. There's no need to know mathematics to understand phase-locking. Members of a meditation group phase-lock by altering their circadian rhythms, dancing to the same music, generating individual energy, but become a part of the larger energy pool. It may all sound frighteningly like tribal culture, which is what it really is, but stop and think for a moment: collective energy can perform anything. I see it happen in mob riots, and if you have to be positive about the whole thing, I see it happen during bhajans and kirtans and during the whirling recommended by Sufis.

At the ashram, as the sanyasis dance, no one person turns into a perfect ballerina. There are no performers, no audiences, no leaders, no followers, no me, no you, no id, no ego. It is one seamless ball of energy hurtling through the inner spaces of each individual, illuminating the darkness within. Believe me, every one needs this awareness kick. Ma Neelam, who lived with Osho for more than 20 years and is now widely believed to be the driving force behind the ashram, says: "Perhaps 15 years ago people came to Osho because they wanted to freak out. Now they come to freak in.''

That could well become the mantra for the closing years of this century. I met participants at Ma Prem Chandrakala's introduction to Die Before You Die in a sparse room where the theme was black and white and everyone sat on a straw mat. Most of her talk was about letting go. "Your boyfriend goes, a tooth goes, your youth goes,'' said Ma Prem Chandrakala, a Canadian. "You have to let go. When you let your breath go, you renew life every moment. Every time you exhale, you die a little.'' Confusing? At the moment she was explaining it, everything seemed to make perfect sense. Could it have been the magic of the sonorous drilbu (Tibetan meditation bell) that Ma Prem Chandrakala kept striking from time to time?

The idea of meditation in its various forms at the ashram is to deprogramme the mind. To discontinue with the past. To break our identification with national and cultural boundaries. To reduce stress and tension by giving the mind control over the release of substances like blood lactate (associated with anxiety and high blood pressure), prolactin (related to sleep and rest) and catecholamine (related to sympathetic activity).

Every time I go to the ashram, I come back with new music from Terra Incognita and Al Gromer Khan (New Earth Records) playing in my head. It cleanses me of the boring and predictable Top 10 Hits running through my head. I stop by at the stores selling hats and pick up one for the All Night Techno Trance Party. I dig into Zen pizzas and futura pesto (pasta with basil sauce). There is a hypershift in reality. My body dances to a new rhythm.

You want to know why I don't mention the orgies and drug extravaganzas that the ashram's sanyasis have a reputation for? This isn't a clever answer, but the bottom line is that you find only what you seek. If you look to rid yourself of the growing toxic core, meditation can make that happen. If you are looking for something else, you'll find that as well. So see you soon, cruising inner space.

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