Centering (group)

any ideas for a good image here?

Centering was a seven-day Pune One introductory / "play" group given to many (most?) newcomers. According to the groups timeline chart in The Sound of Running Water, Centering was offered from Jan 1977 to Mar 1978, TSORW's cut-off date. It continued to be offered right through till Jun 1981, when Osho left for the States, and possibly a little afterward. The Community to Provoke God brochure had this to say about it:

This seven day group is structured, playful and intense, using group games, meditation and concentration techniques. The emphasis is not on encounter and catharsis but individual awareness and tuning into the center of one's own being, away from outside opinions and expectations on the periphery.

Sarjano writes about his experience of Centering in his book, When a Real Lion Meets a Real Master. The excerpt below appeared earlier in Osho News' review of the book. In it, Sarjano refers to Centering as a five-day residential group, a very different scenario from the seven-day non-residential remembered by Sarlo. The difference likely arises from an evolution of the group, though the times are not far apart, early Mar 1978 to late Jun 1978. Here is Sarjano (writing about himself in the third person):

He realized immediately that he wouldn’t have to wait for the Tantra Group to give vent to his sexual energy, because already during the Centering one could breathe in that aura of extreme freedom of communication for which the ashram was rightly famous! In fact, every time the participants would all go together to have a shower, there was inevitably some little romance going on, or some little adventure, or a “quickie” to be consumed in ten minutes…

The big shower and toilet building contained twenty cubicles lined up along all the walls, plus a couple of small rooms with a door and a lock, hence whoever wanted to be alone could enter into one of them and even lock the door with the key. So it then would happen that if he liked one of the girls in the group, he simply twinkled at her while she was having her shower with everybody else, and if she would answer in the same fashion, they would run into one of those little rooms, lock the door with the key, and start fucking like two rabbits, which means very quickly, because after ten minutes they were supposed to be back in their group!

The Centering Group lasted for five days; it was very amusing and full of surprises, with a lot of little games to be played in order to awake a little of your awareness, or at least to show to you just how unaware you are.

Prasad, the leader of this group, was a real angel, perhaps the most beautiful person he had ever met in the ashram, who showed infinite patience in his effort to awake, at least a little bit, more than one hundred people at the time.

One of the games he liked most consisted of partnering up two groups of people; the two groups were then told to stand opposite each other and at the two opposite sides of the room. From that moment on they were supposed to always keep eye contact with their partner, and to start advancing towards him or her, and – here is the trick – they had to move in slow motion, the slowest movements they could manage. Once in front of their partner, they were invited to make a deep namaste, and to tell their partner as if in a mirror: “Welcome, welcome to yourself!”

After that, they had to depart from their original partner in any way they preferred, but always in slow motion; at this point everybody was hugging each other slowly, slowly, and for a long time, and then they would move forward and repeat the same ritual with the next person they were going to meet. There were huge mirrors on all the walls and once everybody had met everyone else, the next instructions were to look at yourself in one of the mirrors, then start moving towards your own image, always very, very slowly, and once you arrived just in front of the mirror, bow once more with the gesture of namaste, repeating again, but this time to yourself, “Welcome, welcome to yourself!”

The result was such that in the end, saying these words to themselves, anyone could see how almost everybody was crying copiously in that moment, and without any control! Lastly, the group was residential in the sense that all participants left the room only in the morning and in the evening to attend Osho’s discourses, and then they would go back to their group room to eat the food that was being served, and finally everyone would go to sleep. Naturally during the night there was a continuous back and forth of couples looking for each other, and once found they would caress each other, make love, and all this without even sharing their name!

how about here?

Sarlo remembers another "game" -- and all the exercises were games, meant to be playful ways of exploring oneself in unusual (fresh, new) structured social situations. You paired up with a partner to have a nonsense "conversation" wherein the first one would say "Shatatti" and the second would respond, "Shamaui". Each person would have their single word for the duration of the game, but uttered in a predetermined ever-more complex pattern. For example, the conversation might go, with "A" standing for "Shatatti" and "B" for "Shamaui": "A", "B", "AA", "BB", "A", "B", "AAA", "BBB", "AAAA", "BBBB", "AA", "BB" etc, with each Shatatti sequence mirrored by a Shamaui sequence.

The kicker was not doing it "successfully" in the group (with much hilarity) but taking it outside. Imagine having this completely idiotic conversation with animated voices and gesticulations while walking along Laxmi Road in downtown Pune. For the non-cognoscenti, Laxmi Road was far away from the ashram and from the areas with shops catering to sannyasins. It was a big crowded mainstream shopping street, with lots of curious staring shoppers, wondering at this madness. Are you comfortable with this? Good grist for the mill.

And so it was with all of Centering's seven days of games, non-serious devices to check in on your willingness to be silly and social in new ways, to let go of some baggage, and watch it all unfold, and all in Osho's Buddhafield. Brilliant! And a wonderful introduction to the possibilities of Groups, conducted lovingly and expertly by the unassuming Prasad.