So the Moon is the hara, just two inches below the navel. If you hit hard there, you will die. Not even a single drop of blood will come out, and you will die. And there will be no pain. That’s why Japanese can die so easily; nobody else can do that. They simply strike a knife into the hara – but they know exactly where it is – and they disappear. The body is disconnected from the soul.

The Moon center is the death center. That’s why men are afraid of women so much. They come to me – so many men – and they say that they are afraid of women. What is the fear? The fear is because woman is the hara, moon – she eats man. That’s why men have always tried to keep women in control; otherwise she will eat, she will destroy them. Women have always been forced to remain in a certain bondage. Try to understand the phenomenon.

Why, all over the world, has man always been putting women into forced slavery? Why? There must be some fear, some deep fear of women, that if woman is allowed freedom, men will not be able to live. And there is truth in it.

Men can have only one orgasrn at a time; a woman can have multiple orgasrns. A man can make love to only one woman at a time; a woman can make love to as many people as she wants. If a woman is allowed total freedom, no man will be adequate enough to satisfy her – no man. Now the psychologists agree with this. All the recent research of Masters and Johnson and the reports of Kinsey, they all have come to one point which is absolutely certain: that no man is adequate enough to satisfy a woman sexually. If they are allowed freedom, a group of men will be needed to satisfy a woman.

One man, one woman, cannot live together – if total freedom is allowed. Then the woman will demand that she is not satisfied yet, and that will become a death.

Sex energy gives you life. The more you use sex energy, the more death comes closer. Hence, yogis became so much afraid of releasing sex energy, and they started conserving it; because they wanted to prolong life so their work on themselves is completed, so they don’t die before their work is complete, because then they have to start it again.

Sex gives you life. The moment sex energy leaves your body, you are going towards death. There are many small insects which die in one sexual ogasm. There are a few spiders who die on their girlfriend; just making love they die. They make love once, and not only that, you will be surprised, when they die – and they die coupled together – the girlfriend starts eating them. She eats them, actually. Because what to do with a dead boyfriend? And this is true in all sex relationships that the man becomes by and by afraid.

Woman gets energy out of sexual love, man loses energy, because woman’s hara is functioning. She transforms the hot energy into cool energy. She is a receptivity; she is a passive opening, a welcome. She absorbs energy; man loses energy.

This center hara, or call it moon, exists in men also, but is nonfunctioning. It can function only if much effort is put to transform it, to bring it to activity.

The whole science of Tao is nothing but to make the moon center function fully. That’s why the whole Tao attitude is receptive, feminine, passive. Yoga is also on the same way, but from a different angle. Yoga tries to bring solar energy, the sun energy, inside the body, works on the sun energy and the path on which the sun energy has to move, and brings it to the moon. Tao and tantra, they work on the moon, make it more receptive, more magnetic, so it pulls the solar energy towards itself. Yoga is a sun method, Tao and tantra are moon methods, but the work is the same.

All the yoga exercises are to channelize the sun energy towards the moon, and all the Tao and tantra exercises are to make the moon so magnetic that it pulls all the energy that is created by the sun center and transforms it.

That’s why a Buddha or a Mahavir or a Patanjali or Lao Tzu, when they attain to their total, absolute flowering, look more feminine than like men. They lose all the corners that men have; they become more round. Their body becomes more feminine. They attain to a certain grace, which is feminine. Their eyes, their faces, their walking, their sitting – everything becomes more close to feminine. They are no longer aggressive, no longer violent.

"By performing samyama on the moon, knowledge concerning the arrangement of the stars is gained." 

If you bring your samyama, your witnessing, to the hara center, you will become able to know all the stars within your body – all the centers within your body – because when you are focused on the sun center you are so excited, you are so feverish, that you cannot attain to clarity. To attain to clarity one has to come first to the moon. Moon is a great phenomenon of transforming energy.

Just see. In the sky, also, the moon gets the energy from the sun; then it reflects it. It has no energy of its own, it simply reflects it, but changes its quality so totally. Look at the moon and you will feel peace; look at the sun and you will start getting mad. Look at the moon and you will feel a calmness surrounding you. Buddha attained to his final enlightenment on a full moon night.

In fact, all those who have attained have always attained in the night. Not a single human being has become enlightened in the day. Mahavir became enlightened in the night. It was a no-moon night, amavas; the night was totally dark. Buddha became enlightened on the full-moon night, purnima. But both became enlightened in the night. Yet it has not happened that a man has become enlightened in the day. It will not happen, because for enlightenment the energy has to move from the solar to the lunar. Because enlightenment is a cooling down of all excitement, of all tensions. It is a great relaxation – the ultimate relaxation. There is no movement in it.

Try to do it. Whenever you have time, just close your eyes.... In the beginning, press the point just two inches below the navel with your fingers to feel it, and become aware of it. Your breathing goes up to that point. When you breathe naturally, your belly goes up, falls down, goes up, falls down. By and by you will see that your breathing exactly touches the hara. It has to touch it. That’s why when breathing stops you die; the breathing is no longer touching the hara. The hara is disconnected; once the hara is disconnected you die. Death comes from the hara.

When a man is young he is solar; when a man is old he becomes lunar. When a woman is young she is lunar; when she becomes old she becomes solar. That’s why many women will start growing mustaches when they become old; they are becoming solar. The wheel turns. Many men, when they become old, become nagging. Old people are very nagging, irritated, continuously in anger – angry at every and anything. They are becoming lunar. They have not transformed their energies; they have lived an accidental life. Women become more aggressive in old age because the lunar is exhausted. They have used it; now their solar part is still fresh, new, can be used.

Men in their old age start taking the style of women and they start doing things which were never expected of them. For example, in everything woman and man differ. If a man becomes angry, he would like to hit; if a woman becomes angry, she will talk and nag and... but she will not hit. She is not aggressive; she is passive.

The passive energy becomes a nagging. Have you observed? Girls start talking before the boys do. Almost always they are ahead as far as language is concerned; in the schools and the colleges, universities, they are always ahead of the boys as far as language is concerned. A girl starts talking six or eight months before the boy starts talking. And a girl becomes very proficient in talking, very soon, almost perfect. She may talk nonsense, but she talks efficiently. The boy lags behind. He can fight, he can run, he can be aggressive, but he is not so articulate.

Both the energies function in different ways. The moon energy, if life is not going well, becomes sad. The sun energy, if life is not going good, becomes angry. So women become sad; men become angry. If a man feels something is wrong, he would like to do something about it. A woman will wait.

If a man is angry, he would like to kill somebody. If a woman is angry, she would like to commit suicide. The first thing that comes to a man in anger is to murder, to kill. The first thing that comes to a woman in anger is to commit suicide, to destroy oneself.

Have you seen husbands and wives fighting? The husband starts beating the wife; the wife starts beating herself. The functioning is different.

But a perfect man needs to have a synthesis of both the energies – solar and lunar. When both the energies are fifty-fifty and balanced, one attains to tranquility. When man and woman are balanced within you, you come to have a stillness which is not of this earth. The sun cancels the moon, the moon cancels the sun, and you remain there undisturbed... you remain there in your absolute being, with no movement, with no motivation, with no desire.

And once you can feel the hara functioning and your sun energy being transformed by the hara, you will see many things within you. You will see all the stars. What are these stars? Your centers are the stars.

Each center is a star in your inner sky, and each center has to be known and you have to bring your samyama on it, because it has many mysteries hidden behind it. It will reveal them to you. You are a great book – the greatest – and unless you read yourself all reading is useless.

When Socrates and men like Socrates say, ”Know thyself,” they mean this. They mean that you have to know the whole territory of your inner being, every bit. Every nook and corner has to be traveled, light has to be brought, and then you will see what you are – a cosmos, as infinite as the outer cosmos; and in one way greater than it because you are conscious also, because you are not only alive: you know that you are alive because you can become a witness also.

       Dhruve tadgati gyanam.