Osho,
When I was a boy, between twelve and fifteen years old, I often had, lying in my bed in the dark, strange experiences which I loved very much. It started by my imagining that my bed disappeared, then my room, the house, the town, all people, the country, the whole globe…Everything in the universe faded. There was utter darkness and silence; I was just floating in space.
The disappearance of the last material things created a tremendous whirling around me. I was sucked into it; this feeling was almost sexual. It created a sweet, pulling sensation in my belly, which could last for seconds or sometimes for one to two minutes.
I never talked to my parents or anybody else about it, because I feared they might think me mad.
Osho, what was this experience?

There is a Tantra method in which one does exactly the same exercise as you are describing from your childhood. For children it is easy, but for grown-ups also, it is not impossible. It is simply an exercise of the imagination. But that does not mean that what you experience is unreal.

First, let me tell you about a Tantra method. It is for all ages. It has to be done in the dark, because in the dark you cannot see things, so it is easy to imagine that they have disappeared.

Lying down is the most appropriate posture for it. Because man became man, attained a little bit of consciousness by standing up on his two feet – he became vertical – the blood stream now reaches less to his head than when he is lying horizontal. Lying down, the blood reaches in a greater quantity with more speed just because of gravitation. When you stand up, the blood has to go against gravitation; its flow is slowed down, its quantity is cut.

That’s why no other animal has a conscious mind. Even when walking, a cow, a horse, a buffalo – they are horizontal. Their heads are receiving as much blood as any other part of the body. They cannot grow the very subtle, very small cells which enable man to think.

But there is a possibility – and as far as I am concerned it is a certainty – that animals do imagine. They don’t have a conscious mind, but they do have an unconscious mind.

Watching a dog you can see it. A dog is sleeping nearby; you can just watch: once in a while he will try to catch an imaginary fly, a fly which is not there. What is he doing? He imagined it. That catching of the fly which is not there must have been to him a reality in his imagination. And, of course, dogs think of flies just as men think of women.

Nobody has tried to explore the unconscious of the animals. We are not even finished with man, so the question of animals does not arise. They are far back in the queue, standing and waiting. But the wisdom of people has always attributed a certain intelligence to animals.