Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 4 

Chapter #3 
Chapter title: Sleep, identification, duality 
23 April 1975 am in Buddha Hall 

The word means ignorance, but avidya is not ordinary ignorance. It has to be understood deeply. Ignorance is lack of knowledge. Avidya is not lack of knowledge but lack of awareness.  Ignorance can be dissolved very easily; you can acquire knowledge.  It is only a question of training the memory. Knowledge is mechanical; no awareness is needed. It is as mechanical as ordinary ignorance. Avidya is lack of awareness. One has to move towards more and more consciousness, not towards more and more knowledge. Only then can avidya be dissolved. 

Avidya is what Gurdjieff used to call 'the spiritual sleep'. Man moves, lives, dies, not knowing why he was alive, not knowing from where he was coming, not knowing where he was moving, for what. Gurdjieff calls it sleep, Patanjali calls it avidya: they mean the same thing. You don't know why you are. You don't know the purpose of your being here in this world, in this body, in these experiences. You do many things without knowing why you are doing them, without knowing that you are doing them, without knowing that you are the doer. Everything moves as if in a deep sleep. Avidya, if I am to translate it for you, will mean 'hypnosis'.  

Man lives in a deep hypnosis. I have been working on hypnosis, because that is the only way to bring man out of hypnosis, to understand it. All awakening is a sort of de-hypnotization, so the process of hypnosis has to be understood very, very clearly. Only then can you move out of it. A disease has to be understood, diagnosed; only then can it be treated. Hypnosis is the disease of man, and de-hypnosis will be the way. 

One third of the people in the world are good mediums, thirty-three percent, and those people are not unintelligent. Those people are very, very intelligent, imaginative, creative. From this thirty three percent come all the great scientists, all the great artists, poets, painters, musicians. If a man can be hypnotized, that shows that he is very sensitive. Just the contrary is the rumor: people think that only a person who is a little stupid can be hypnotized. That is absolutely wrong. It is almost impossible to hypnotize an idiot, because he won't listen, he won't understand, and he will not be able to imagine. A very strong power of imagination is needed. People think that only weak personalities can be hypnotized. Absolutely wrong -- only very strong persons can be hypnotized. A weak person is so loose that he has no integration in him, he has no center in him. And unless you have a center of some sort, hypnosis cannot work because from where will it work and spread through your being? And a weak person is so uncertain about everything, so not confident about himself, that he cannot be hypnotized. Only people who have strong personalities can be hypnotized. 

I worked on many people and this is my finding: that a person who can be hypnotized can be de-hypnotized, and a person who cannot be hypnotized finds it very difficult to move on the spiritual path, because the ladder goes both ways. If you can be hypnotized easily, you can be de-hypnotized easily. The ladder is the same. Whether you are hypnotized or de-hypnotized, you move on the same ladder; only the directions differ.