Dropping the Artificial Mind
NOW BEGINS THE LAST SECTION OF PATANJALI'S SUTRAS, KAIVALYA PADA.
1. THE POWERS ARE REVEALED AT BIRTH, OR ACQUIRED THROUGH DRUGS, REPEATING SACRED WORDS, AUSTERITIES, OR SAMADHI.
2. THE TRANSFORMATION FROM ONE CLASS, SPECIES, OR KIND, INTO ANOTHER, IS BY THE OVERFLOW OF NATURAL TENDENCIES OF POTENTIALITIES.
3. THE INCIDENTAL CAUSE DOES NOT STIR THE NATURAL TENDENCIES INTO ACTIVITY; IT MERELY REMOVES THE OBSTACELS - LIKE A FARMER IRRIGATING A FIELD: HE REMOVES THE OBSTACLES, AND THEN THE WATER FLOWS FREELY BY ITSELF.
4. ARTIFICIALLY CREATED MINDS PROCEED FROM EGOISM ALONE.
5. THOUGH THE ACTIVITIES OF THE MANY ARTIFICIAL MINDS VARY, THE ONE ORIGINAL MIND CONTROLS THEM ALL.
Man is almost mad - mad because he is seeking something which he has already got; mad because he's not aware of who he is; mad because he hopes, desires, and then ultimately, feels frustrated. Frustration is bound to be there because you cannot find yourself by seeking; you are already there. The seeking has to stop, the search has to drop: that is the greatest problem to be faced, encountered.
The problem is that you have something and you are seeking it. Now how can you find it? You are too occupied with seeking, and you cannot see the thing that you already have. Unless all seeking stops, you will not be able to see it. Seeking makes your mind focus somewhere in the future, and the thing that you are seeking is already here, now, this very moment. That which you are seeking is hidden in the seeker himself: the seeker is the sought. Hence, so much neurosis, so much madness.
Once your mind is focused somewhere, you have some intention. Immediately, your attention is no longer free. Intention cripples attention. If you are intently looking for something, your consciousness has narrowed down. It will exclude everything else. It will include only your desire, your hope, your dream. And to realize that which you are you need not have any intention; you need attention, just pure attention: not intending to go anywhere, unfocused consciousness, consciousness here-now, not anywhere else. This is the basic problem: the dog is chasing its own tail. It gets frustrated; it becomes almost mad because each step, and nothing comes into its hands - only failure, failure, failure.
Just the other day a sannyasin told me that he was now feeling frustrated. I became tremendously happy. Because when you feel frustrated, something opens within you. When you feel frustrated, if really frustrated, then future disappears. Future can exist only with the support of expectation, desire, intention. Future is nothing but intentionality. I became tremendously happy that one man was frustrated.
Fritz Perls, one of the very perceptive men of the last century, has said that the whole work of the therapist is nothing but skillful frustration, creating frustration.
What does he mean? He means that unless you are really frustrated with your desires, hopes, expectations, you will not be thrown back to your own being. A real frustration is a great blessing.
Suddenly you are, and there is nothing else. The sannyasin said, "I am feeling frustrated. It seems that nothing is happening. I have been doing all sorts of meditations, all sorts of group therapies, and nothing is happening." That's the whole point of all meditations and all group therapies: to make you aware that nothing can happen. All has happened already. In deep frustration, your energy moves back to the source. You fall upon yourself.
You will try to create new hope. That's why people go on changing their therapists, their therapies, their Masters, gurus, religions. They go on changing because they say, "Now I am feeling frustrated here; somewhere else, I will again sow new seeds of hope." Then you will be continuously missing. If you understand, the problem is: how to throw you upon yourself, how to frustrate you in your desires.
Of course, it has to be very skillful.
That's what I am doing here. If you don't have any desires, first I create them. I give you hope. I say, "Yes, soon something is going to happen" - because I know that desire is there, but not full-fledged.
It is there hiding in a seed form; it has to sprout, it has to flower. And when the desire flowers, those flowers are of frustration.
Then suddenly you drop the whole nonsense, the whole trip. And once you are authentically frustrated - and when I say authentically, really frustrated, I mean that now you don't start any other hope again; you simply accept it and you return back home - you will start laughing. This is what you were always seeking. And it has always been inside you, but you were too much occupied with seeking.
There is a very beautiful movie called THE KING OF HEARTS. The context is the First World War, and the Germans and the English are fighting over a French town. The Germans plant a time-bomb and leave the town, and the French learn about the bomb and they also leave the town.
All the people in the insane asylum come out, take over the empty town, and have a wonderful time - because nobody is left there, only the insane people of the insane asylum. Even their guards have escaped, so they are free. They come into the town and everything is empty: shops are empty, offices are empty. So they take over the town; they take over the empty town. and have a wonderful time. They all put on different clothes and enjoy themselves thoroughly. Their madness simply disappears; they are no more mad. Whatsoever they always wanted to become and could not become, now they simply became, without any effort. Somebody became the general, and somebody became the duke, and somebody the madame, and somebody else the doctor, the bishop, or whosoever he wants to become. Everything is free. They put on different clothes and enjoy themselves thoroughly. Everyone takes on some role in the town: general, duke, lady, madame, bishop, etc. One guy becomes a barber, and he pays customers because he enjoys being a barber; and he gets more customers that way.
They are all living these roles, living in the moment and enjoying it completely, utterly.
A British soldier is sent to the town to disable the bomb. He gets frustrated because he cannot find where the bomb has been put. He starts ranting and raving and shouting, "We are all going to die!" So everyone, everyone: the general, the duke, the bishop - the mad people - everyone brings lounge chairs to watch him perform. They clap and they cheer. Of course, he gets even more mad.
The next day both the Germans and the British march back into the town and all the crazy people treat it as a parade. Then the soldiers see each other, shoot and kill each other. The duke, up in a balcony, looks down disdainfully at all the bodies and says, "Now they are overacting." A young woman looks down sadly and says with puzzlement, "Funny people." The Bishop says, "These people have certainly gone mad."
You think mad people are mad... just look at yourself, at what you are doing. You think when a madman pretends that he is the prime minister or the president that he is mad? Then what are your presidents and prime ministers doing? In fact, they may be more mad. The madman simply enjoys the fantasy, he does not bother to make it an actuality; but the premiers, the presidents and the generals have not remained satisfied with their fantasy; they have tried to actualize it.
Of course, if any madman is an Alexander or a Genghis Khan, he never kills anybody; he simply is. He does not go to prove that he really is. He's not dangerous, he's innocent. But when these so-called sane people - like the neocons - have the idea of being an Alexander, a Genghis Khan, a Tamurlaine, then they don't remain contented with the idea. They try to actualize it. Your Adolf Hitlers are more mad, your Mao Tse Tungs are more mad than any mad people in any mad asylum.
The problem is that the whole humanity exists as if under a certain hypnosis.
It is as if you have all been hypnotized and you don't know how to get out of it. All our life-styles are insane, neurotic. They create more misery than they create happiness. They create more frustration than they create fulfillment. The whole way you live brings you more and more, closer and closer, nearer and nearer to hell. Heaven is just a desire; hell is almost a reality. You live in hell and you dream about heaven. In fact, heaven is a sort of tranquilizer: it gives you hope - but all hopes are going to be frustrated. The hope of heaven simply creates a hell of frustration. Remember this; only then will you be able to understand Patanjali's last chapter, KAIVALYA PADA.
What is the art of liberation? The art of liberation is nothing but the art of de-hypnosis: how to drop this hypnotic state of mind; how to become unconditioned; how to look at reality without any idea creating a barrier between you and the real; how to simply see without any desires in the eyes; how simply to be without any motivation. That's all yoga is about. Then suddenly that which is inside you, and has always been inside you from the very beginning, is revealed.
The first sutra...
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #1
Chapter title: Dropping The Artificial Mine
Dropping the Artificial Mind
Remember Who You Are
The first sutra...
JANMAUSADHI-MANTRA-TAPAH-SAMADHIJAH SIDDHAYAH. THE POWERS ARE REVEALED AT BIRTH...
This is a very pregnant sutra, and I have not yet come across a right commentary about this sutra. It is so pregnant that unless you penetrate it to the very core, you will not be able to understand it.
THE POWERS ARE REVEALED AT BIRTH, OR ACQUIRED THROUGH DRUGS, REPEATING SACRED WORDS, AUSTERITIES, OR SAMADHI.
Whatsoever you are is revealed at birth without any effort. Every child, while he is being born, knows the truth, because he has not yet been hypnotized. He has no desires; he is still innocent, virgin, not corrupted by any intention. His attention is pure, unfocused. The child is naturally meditative.
He is in a sort of samadhi; he's coming out of the womb of God. His life river is yet absolutely fresh, just from the source. He knows the truth, but he does not know that he knows. He knows it, not knowing that he knows it. The knowledge is absolutely simple. How can he know that he knows?
It is because there has never been a moment of not knowing. To feel as if you know something, you have to have some experience of non-knowledge. Without ignorance you cannot feel knowledge. Without darkness you cannot see stars. In the day you can't see the is all dark; contrast is needed.
A child is born in perfect light: he cannot feel that this is light. To feel it, he will have to pass through the experience of darkness. Then he will be able to compare and see, and know that he knows.
His knowledge is not yet aware. It is innocent. It is simply there, as a matter of fact. And he is not separate from his knowledge; he is his knowledge. He has no mind, he has simple being.
What Patanjali is saying is this: what you are seeking you had known before. Not knowing it, you had known it before. Otherwise, there would be no way to seek it because we can only seek something which we have known in some way - maybe very dimly, vaguely. Maybe the awareness was not clear: it was clouded in mist; but how can you seek something which you have not known before?
How can you seek God? How can you seek bliss? How can you seek truth? How can you seek the self, the supreme self? You must have tasted something of it, and that taste, the memory of that taste is still treasured somewhere within your being. You are missing something; that's why search, seeking arises.
The first experience of samadhi, the first experience of infinite power, siddhi, of potentiality, of being a god, is revealed at birth. But at that time, you cannot make a knowledge out of it. For that you will have to go through a dark night of the soul; you will have to go astray. For that, you will have to sin.
The word 'sin' is very beautiful. It simply means going off-track, missing the right path, or missing the target, missing the goal. The Adam has to go out of the Garden of Eden. It is a necessity. Unless you miss God, you will not be able to know Him. Unless you come to a point where you don't know whether God is or is not, unless you come to a point where you are miserable, in pain and anguish, you will never be able to know what bliss is. Agony is the door to ecstasy.
Patanjali's first sutra is simply saying that whatsoever is attained by the yogi is nothing new. It is a recovery of something lost. It is a remembrance. That's why in India once somebody attains samadhi, we call it a rebirth; he is reborn. We call him dwija - twice born. One birth was unconscious, the first birth; the second birth is conscious. He has suffered, gone astray, and come back home.
When Adam returns home, he is Jesus. Every Jesus has to go far away from the home; then he is Adam. When Adam starts the returning journey, he is Jesus. Adam is the first man, Jesus the last.
Adam is the beginning, the alpha, and Jesus the end, the omega; and the circle is complete.
"The powers are revealed at birth.:.." Then arises 'the world'; what Hindus call maya. It has been translated as illusion, magic, but the best way to translate it is as hypnosis. Then arises the hypnosis.
A thousand and one hypnoses are all around: here he's being taught that he is a Hindu - now it is a hypnosis; he's being taught that he is a Christian - now it is a hypnosis. Now his mind is being conditioned and narrowed down. He's a Mohammedan - it is a hypnosis. Then he is taught that he is a man or a woman - it is a hypnosis.
Ninety per cent of your manhood or womanhood is simply hypnosis; it has nothing to do with your biology. The biological difference between man and woman is very simple, but the psychological difference is very complicated and complex. You have to teach small boys to be boys and small girls to be girls, and you bifurcate them. You create an intention: the girls are going to become beautiful women, and the boys are going to become very powerful men. The girls are going to be just confined in the home: householders, housewives, mothers; and the boys are going on a great adventure in the world: money, power, prestige, ambition. The society - parents, schools, churches - they create different intentions in them, the children.
In different societies, different conditionings are given. There are societies which are matriarchal; the woman is predominant. Then you will see an unbelievable truth there: whenever there is a society in which the woman is predominant, the man becomes weak and woman becomes powerful. She manages all outside work and the man simply looks after the home.
But because we live in a male-dominant society, man becomes powerful and woman becomes weak and fragile. But this is a hypnosis; it is not natural. It is not so in nature. You give a certain direction, then a thousand and one sorts of hypnoses go round.
Shudra Caste - The Untouchables
In India, if a man is born in a poor, untouchable's family, is a shudra, he's confined to being a shudra for his whole life. He cannot. even change his business. He cannot become a brahmin. He's confined: a very narrow hole, a tunnel-like hole is given to him. He has to go through that; no other alternatives are available. And he will think in those terms, he will live a certain style of life. And each conditioning of the mind is self-perpetuating: it goes on creating itself more and more skillfully.
Then you are given ideas about God. In Soviet Russia, you were given the idea that there is no God.
Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, has written in her memoirs that from the very beginning, of course, since she was Stalin's daughter, she was taught very strictly to be an atheist. But by and by, she started feeling, "Why? If there is no God, why is there so much propaganda against Him? What is the point? There is no point in it; if God is not there, finished. Why be worried? Why create anti-God propaganda, literature, this and that; why try to prove? The very effort shows that something seems to be there, something may be there." She became suspicious, and when Stalin died she revolted.
She became a religious person, but her mind was narrowed down. She must have been a very rare human being, because to be a theist in Soviet Russia was as difficult as it is to be an atheist in India.
These things are not taught, these things are caught - with the blood of the mother, with the milk of the mother, with the breathing of the mother. Your whole atmosphere surrounds you as a subtle conditioning. These things are not taught. Nobody is teaching you these things in particular; you catch them. The first thing a Hindu child hears when he opens his eyes and his ears here, the first thing is going to be a mantra, or something from the Bhagavad-Gita. He does not understand anything, but the first impact is of Sanskrit, the first impact is of some religious scripture. Then he starts growing; he sees his mother praying, the statues of gods, and flowers and incense, and he goes on crawling there, watches and sees what is happening. He can see that the mother is crying, tears are coming, and she looks so happy and so graceful. Something tremendously great is happening; he cannot know what it is, but something is happening. He is catching.
Then the temple, then the priest, then the flamboyant robes, and the whole atmosphere; he goes on drinking in the atmosphere. It becomes part of his being. Either from the mother's breast or from the state's breast, but these things are just caught while he is unaware. You become a Christian: by the time you become alert you are already a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Jaina, a Buddhist, and it is very difficult to be unconditioned.
The whole effort of Patanjali is how to uncondition you, how to help you so that you can uncondition yourself. All that has been given to you has to be dropped so that again you come out of the clouds into the open sky, so that again you can come out of this small, tunnel-like existence of being a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a communist, this and that; how to find the open sky again - dimensionless. No religion, particularly no organized religion, is in favor of it. They decorate their tunnels. They force things on people, as if theirs is the only way to reach to God.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #1
Chapter title: Dropping The Artificial Mind
I have heard about a man, a Protestant, who died and reached to heaven. He asked Saint Peter, "First, before I settle somewhere, I would like to have a tour. I would like to see the whole of heaven."
Saint Peter said, "Your curiosity is understandable, but one thing you will have to remember: I will take you around, but don't talk, be completely quiet. And walk so that no noise is made." The Protestant was a little worried, "Why so much...?" but they walked. Whenever he wanted to say anything, Saint Peter would put his finger on his lips and say, "Shhh! Keep quiet."
When the tour was over he asked, "What is the matter? Why so much quietness?"
Peter said, "Everybody here believes. For example, the Catholics believe only they are in heaven; the Protestants believe only they are in heaven; the Hindus believe only they are; the Mohammedans believe only they are. So they feel very much offended if they come to know that somebody else is also there. That is impossible for them to believe."
On the earth people live in tunnels, and in heaven also.
No organized religion can be in favor of a totally open mind. That's why an organized religion is not a religion at all; it is just another form of politics.
Just the other day I received a letter from Amida. She was in Africa. Now she has come here, so those African people are very much disturbed. She has become a sannyasin, so they have written a letter of expulsion. She is expelled. This looks like nonsense. This seems to be politics. Now she cannot be allowed to attend their meetings anymore, or to participate with them. In their jargon they have said, "Now you are put in water." She is condemned. The same goes on everywhere.
Scientology does the same to people. Once you are in Scientology and you leave it, just as Amida has been put in water, they give a notice that you are now an enemy. An enemy!
But this is how it has always happened. Always remember, wherever your mind is being narrowed, escape from there. It is not religion, it is politics. It is an ego-trip.
Religion widens you.
Religion widens you so much that the whole house around you, by and by, disappears. You are just under the sky, absolutely nude, in total communication with existence. Nothing exists between you and existence. This point is achieved easily, naturally, spontaneously, at the time of birth. The powers are revealed at birth - everything is revealed at birth. It is only a question of reclaiming it. It is a question of remembering it again. It is not going to be a discovery, it is going to be a re-discovery. It is remembering who you really are.
Many people come to me and they ask, "If samadhi happens, if enlightenment happens, how are we going to recognize it, that it is that?" I say to them, "Don't you be worried; you will recognize it because you know what it is. You have forgotten. Once it happens again, suddenly, in your consciousness, the memory will arise, surface, and immediately you will recognize."
And this can be also acquired in four ways. The first is through drugs. Hindus have made drugs for thousands of years. In the West the craze is very new; in India it is very ancient.
Patanjali says,
IT CAN BE ACQUIRED THROUGH DRUGS, REPEATING SACRED WORDS, MANTRAS, AUSTERITIES, OR SAMADHI.
He's in favor only of samadhi, but he's a very, very scientific man. He has not left anything out.
Yes, it can be acquired through drugs, but that is the lowest glimpse of it. Through chemicals, you can have a certain glimpse, but that is almost a violence, almost a rape of God - because you are not growing into the glimpse; rather, you are forcing the glimpse upon yourself. You can take LSD, or marijuana, or something else: you-are forcing your chemistry. If the chemistry is forced too much, for a few moments it becomes loosened from the conditioning of the mind. From the tunnel-like style of your life it becomes loose. You have a certain glimpse, but the glimpse is at a very great cost.
Now you will become addicted to the drug. Whenever you need the glimpse you will have to go to the drug, and each time you go the drug, more and more quantity of it will be needed. And you will not be growing at all, you will not be maturing at all. Only the drug will grow in quantity, and you will remain the same: This is getting a glimpse of the divine at a very great cost. It is not worth it. It is destroying yourself. It is suicidal, but Patanjali puts it there as a possibility.
Many have tried that, and many have gone almost insane through it. It is dangerous to try any violence on existence. One should grow naturally. At the most, it can be like a dream, but it cannot be a reality. A person who has been taking LSD for long remains the same person. He may talk about new spaces that he has achieved and he will talk about 'far-out experiences', but you can see that the man has remained the same. He has not changed. He has not attained to any grace. It may be otherwise: he may have lost any grace that he already had before. He has not become more happy and blissful.
Yes, under the impact of the drug he may laugh, but that laughter is also ill: it is not arising naturally, it is not flowering naturally. And after the impact of the drug he will be dull, he will have a hang-over; and he will again and again seek, again and again he will seek and search for the same glimpse. Now he will become hypnotized by the experience of the drug. It is the lowest possibility.
The second, better than this, is of mantra. If you repeat a certain mantra for a long time, that too creates subtle chemical changes in your being. It is better than drugs, but still, that too is a subtle drug. If you repeat, Aum, Aum, Aum, continuously, the very repetition creates sound waves in you.
It is as if you go on throwing rocks into the lake and waves arise and arise and go on spreading, creating many patterns. The same happens when you use a mantra, the continuous repetition of any word. It has nothing to do with Aum, Ram, Ave Maria or Allah; it has nothing to do with them.
You can say, "Blah, blah, blah"; that will do. But you have to repeat the same, the same sound with the same tone, in a rhythm. It goes on falling on the same center again and again, and creating ripples, vibrations, pulsations. They move inside your being and spread out. They create circles of energy. It is better than drugs, but it is still of the same quality.
That's why Krishnamurti goes on saying that mantra is a drug. It is a drug, and he is not saying anything new; Patanjali says the same. It is better than the drug: you don't need any injection, you are not dependent on any outside agency. You are not dependent on the drug-pusher because he may not be giving you the right thing. He may be handing you something bogus. You need not depend on anybody. It is more independent than drugs. You can repeat your mantra inside you, and it is more in tune with the society. The society will not object that you repeat: Aum, Aum, Aum, but if you take LSD the society will object. Chanting is better, more respectable, but still a drug. It is through sound that the chemistry of your body is changed.
Now, much experimentation is going on with sound, music, chanting. It certainly changes chemistry.
A plant grows faster if it is surrounded by music - by a certain music of course - classical or Indian; not by modern Western music. Otherwise, the growth stops, or, the plant goes crazy with subtle vibrations, with great rhythm and harmony, the plant grows faster. The growth is almost doubled and the flowers come bigger, more colorful; they live longer and they have more fragrance. Now these are scientific truths. If a plant is affected so much by sounds, much more will happen to human beings. And if you can create an inner sound, a continuous vibration, it will change your physiology, your chemistry - your mind, your body - but it is still an outside help. It is still an effort: you are doing something. And by doing you are creating a state which has to be maintained. It is not naturally spontaneous. If you don't maintain it for a few days, it will disappear. So, that too is not a growth.
Once a Sufi visited me. For thirty years he had been doing a Sufi mantra, and had done it really sincerely. He was full of vibrations - very alive, very happy, almost ecstatic the whole day, as if in samadhi... drunk. His disciples brought him to me. He stayed with me for three days. I told him, "Do one thing: for thirty years you have been doing a certain chanting; stop for three days."
He said, "Why?"
I said, "Just to know whether it has happened to you yet or not. If you go on chanting you will never know. You may be creating this drunkenness by chanting continuously. You drop it for three days and just see."
He became a little afraid, but he understood the point. Because unless something becomes so natural that you need not do it, you have not attained to it. Just within three days, everything disappeared; just within three days! A thirty-year effort, and after the third day the man started crying and he said, "What have you done? You have destroyed my whole SADHANA!"
I said, "I have not destroyed anything; you can start again. But now remember, if you repeat for thirty lives even, you will not attain. This is not the way. After thirty years, you cannot go for a three-day holiday? That seems to be a bondage, and it has not yet become spontaneous. It has not yet become part of you; you have not grown. These three days have revealed to you that for thirty years the whole effort has been in the wrong direction. Now it is up to you. If you want to continue, continue. But remember, now don't forget that any day it can disappear; it is a dream that you are holding through continuous chanting. It is a certain vibration that you are holding, but it is not arising there. It is cultivated, nurtured; it is not yet your nature."
The third way is by austerities, by changing your way of life, not hankering for comfort, convenience, for food, for sleep, for sex; dropping all that the mind naturally desires and doing just the opposite.
That is still a little higher than mantras. If the mind says go to sleep, the man of austerities says, "No, I'm not going to sleep. I am not going to be a slave to you. When I would like to go to sleep, I will go; otherwise not." The mind says, "You are feeling hungry, now go and beg"; the man of austerities says, "No!" The man of austerities says no continuously to his mind. That is what austerity is: saying no to the mind. Of course, if you continuously say no to the mind, the conditioning becomes loosened.
Then the mind is no longer powerful over you, then you are released a little. But that no has to be said again continuously. Even if you listen to the mind for one day, again the whole power of mind will return to dominate and possess you. So just a moment's going astray, and all is lost.
The man of austerities is doing better; he is doing something more permanent than the man of chanting - because when you chant, your life-style remains unchanged. Just inside, you feel good, a certain well-being. That's why Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation (TM) has so much appeal in the West, because he does not ask you to change your life-style. He says, "Whatsoever, wherever you are, it's okay." He does not want you to make a disciplined life; simply repeat the mantra, twenty minutes in the morning and twenty minutes in the evening, and that will do.
Of course, it will give you better sleep, a better appetite. You will be more calm and quiet. In situations where anger was easy, it will not be so easy. But you have to continue the chanting every day. It will give you a certain inner bath in sound waves. It will give you a little cleansing, but it is not going to help you grow. Austerities help more because your life starts changing.
If you decide not to do a certain thing, the mind will insist that you do it. If you go on denying the mind, your whole life pattern changes. But, that too is forced. People who are in austerities too much, they lose grace, become a little ugly. Constant struggle and fight, and constant repression and saying 'no' creates a very deep rift in their beings. They may have more permanent glimpses than the man of chanting or the man who is addicted to drugs. They will have more permanent results than Timothy Leary and Mahesh Yogi, but still, it is not a spontaneous flowering. It is still not Zen, not real Yoga, not Tantra.
...OR SAMADHI.
Then comes the fourth which Patanjali has been trying to explain to you. Through samyama, through samadhi, everything has to be attained. Whatsoever he has been teaching up to now is through samyama, samadhi - bringing your awareness to it. The man of drugs works through the chemistry; the man of austerities works through the physiology; the man of chanting works through the sound- structure of his being, but they are all partial. His totality is not yet touched by them. And they all will create a sort of lopsidedness. One part will grow too big, and other parts will lag behind, and he will become ugly.
Samadhi is the growth of the total.
And the growth has to be natural, spontaneous, not forced. The growth has to be through awareness; not through chemistry, not through physics, not through sound. The growth has to be through awareness, witnessing: that's what samadhi is. Samadhi will bring you to the same point when you were born. Suddenly, it will reveal your being to you, who you are.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #1
Chapter title: Dropping The Artificial Mind
...OR SAMADHI.
Now, a few things about samadhi will have to be understood.
One: it is not a goal to be achieved, it is not a desire to be achieved. It is not an expectation, it is not a hope, it is not in the future; it is here & now. That's why the only condition for samadhi is desirelessness - not even the desire for samadhi.
If you desire samadhi, you are continuously eroding samadhi yourself. The nature of desire has to be understood, and in that understanding it drops by itself, on its own accord. That's why I say that when your hopes are frustrated, you are in a beautiful space; use it. That is the moment when you can enter into samadhi more easily.
Blessed are those who are hopeless: let it be added to Jesus' other beatitudes.
Jesus says, "Blessed are the meek, because they shall inherit the earth." I say to you: blessed are the hopeless, because they will inherit themselves in being whole.
Try to see how hope is destroying you. With hope arises fear. Fear is the other side of the same coin.
Whenever you hope you also become afraid. You become afraid of whether you are going to fulfil your hope or not. Hope never comes alone; it keeps company with fear. Then, between fear and hope you are spread out. Hope is in the future and fear is also in the future, and you start swinging between hope and fear. Sometimes you feel, "Yes, it is going to be fulfilled"; and sometimes you feel, "No, it seems impossible," and fear arises. Between fear and hope, you lose your being.
Let me tell you one very famous old Indian story.
A fool was sent to buy flour and salt. He took a dish in which to carry his purchases. He was told not to mix the two ingredients, but to keep them separate. After the shop-keeper had filled the dish with flour, the fool, thinking of the instructions, inverted the dish asking that salt be poured on the upturned bottom. Therewith the flour was lost, but he had the salt. He brought it to his boss who enquired, "But where is the flour?" The fool turned the dish over to find it, so the salt was gone too.
Between hope and fear, your whole being is lost.
That is how one has become so disintegrated, split, schizophrenic. Just see the point of it: if you don't have any hope, you will not be creating any fear - because fear cannot come without hope.
Hope is a step toward fear within you. Hope creates the door for the fear to enter. If you don't have any hope then there is no point in fear. And when there is no hope and no fear, you cannot move away from yourself. You are simply that which you are. You are here-now. This moment becomes intensely alive.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #1
Chapter title: Dropping The Artificial Mind
The second sutra:
JATY-ANTARA-PARINAMAH PRAKRTY-APURAT.
THE TRANSFORMATION FROM ONE CLASS, SPECIES, OR KIND INTO ANOTHER IS BY THE OVERFLOW OF NATURAL TENDENCIES OR POTENTIALITIES.
Very significant....
If you are a man of austerities you will not be overflowing. You will have repressed your energies.
Afraid of sex, afraid of anger, afraid of love, afraid of this and that, you will have repressed all your energies; you will not be in an overflow. And Patanjali says that only through overflow is there transformation. It is one of the most basic laws of life.
Have you watched that when you are feeling low in energy, suddenly love disappears? When you are feeling low in energy, creativity disappears. You cannot paint, you cannot write a poem. If you write, your poetry will not walk; dancing is far away. It will not even walk; it may, at the most, limp.
It will not be much of a poem. If you paint when you are low-energy, your painting will be ill. It will not be healthy. It cannot be because it is your painting and you are feeling low in energy. In fact, the painting is you spread on the canvas. It will be gloomy, sad, dying.
I have heard...
One great painter who had asked one of his friends, a doctor, to come and see his painting. The doctor watched, looked from this side and that. The friend, the painter, was very happy at how much he was appreciating. Then he finally asked, because he saw that the doctor was looking puzzled - not even puzzled, but worried. The friend said, "What is the matter? What do you think of this painting?"
His doctor friend said, "Appendicitis."
He had made a portrait of somebody and the doctor was looking everywhere, because the face was so pale and the body looked in such agony that he felt it must be appendicitis. Later on, it was found that the painter had the appendicitis, he was suffering from it.
You spread yourself into your poetry, into your painting, into your sculpture. Whatsoever you do, it is you; it has to be so.
Flowers come into the trees only when they are overflowing; the energy's too much. They can afford it. When a tree has not much energy, it will not flower because it has not even energy enough for the leaves. It has not even energy enough for the roots - how can it afford? Flowers will be almost a luxury.
When you are hungry, you don't bother to buy paintings for your house. When you don't have clothes, you think of clothes; you don't think of having a beautiful garden. These are luxuries. When energy is overflowing, then only is the celebration, the transformation. When you are overflowing with energy you want to sing, you want to dance, you want to share.
THE TRANSFORMATION FROM ONE CLASS, SPECIES OR KIND INTO ANOTHER IS BY THE OVERFLOW...
Ordinarily, as man is, he is so blocked and there are so many problems repressed that the energy never comes to a point where it can overflow and just be shared with others. And your sahasrar, which is your flowering, the lotus in the crown of your head, will not flower unless energy is overflowing, unless it is overflowing so much so that it goes on rising higher and higher. The level goes on rising higher and higher; it reaches to the second center, the third center, the fourth center, and whatsoever center is touched by the overflowing energy opens, flowers. The seventh chakra is the flower of humanity: sahasrar. sahasrar dul kamal: the one-thousand-petalled lotus that will flower only when you are in an overflow.
Never repress and never create blocks in your being. Never become too solid. Don't get frozen.
Flow. Let your energy remain always streaming. That's the whole purpose of yoga methods: that your blocks are broken. The yoga postures are nothing but just a methodology to break the blocks that you create inside your body.
Now, something exactly like it has happened in the West. It is Rolfing, founded by Ida Rolf. Because in the West the mind is more technological, people don't want to do their own thing. They want it to be done by somebody else; hence Rolfing. The Rolfer will do the work. He will give you deep massage, and he will try to melt your blocks. The musculature that has become hardened will be relaxed.
The same can be done with yoga, and more easily, because you are your own master. You can feel your inner being more rightly, accurately. You can feel where your blocks are. If you close your eyes and sit silently every day, you can feel where your body is feeling uncomfortable, where your body is feeling tense. Then there are yoga asanas for that particular body part to relax. Those asanas will help to dissolve the musculature which has become hardened and will allow the energy to move.
But one thing is certain: that a repressed person never flowers.
A repressed person remains with dammed energy, pent-up energy. And if you don't channelize your energy in right directions, your energy can become destructive and suicidal to you. For example: if your energy is not moving towards love, it will become anger. It will go sour, bitter. Whenever you see an angry person remember, somehow his energy has missed love. Somehow, he has gone astray; hence, he is angry. He is not angry at you, he is simply angry; you may be just an excuse.
He is anger. The energy is blocked and life is feeling almost meaningless, without any significance; he is in a rage.
There is a very famous poem of Dylan Thomas. His father died, and on that night he wrote this poem. In this poem come the lines, Rage, rage against the dying of the light: Do not go gently into that good night!
He is saying to his father "Fight with death; rage against it. Don't surrender, don't just let go. Give a good fight even if you are defeated, but don't go without a fight."
If love is not fulfilled, one becomes angry. If life is not fulfilled, one becomes angry at death. A man whose life is a fulfillment will not rage against death, he will welcome. And he will not say that it is dark night; he will say, "So beautiful, so restful." The dark is restful. It is almost warm, like mother's womb. One is moving again into the greater womb of God.
Why rage? Those who have flowered, surrender. Those who are frustrated cannot surrender. Out of their frustrations they create more hopes, and each hope brings more frustrations - and the vicious circle goes on and on, ad nauseam.
If you want not to be frustrated, drop hope - then there will be no frustration. And if you want really to grow, never repress. Enjoy energy. Life is an energy phenomenon. Enjoy energy - dance, sing, swim, run - let energy stream all over you, let energy spread all over you. Let it be a flow. Once you are in a flow, flowering becomes very easy.
THE INCIDENTAL CAUSE DOES NOT STIR THE NATURAL TENDENCIES INTO ACTIVITY; IT MERELY REMOVES THE OBSTACLES - LIKE A FARMER IRRIGATING A FIELD: HE REMOVES THE OBSTACLES, AND THEN THE WATER FLOWS FREELY BY ITSELF.
Patanjali is saying that, in fact, if you don't have blocks everything will be attained naturally. It is not a question of creating anything; the question is only of removing the blocking. It is as if a spring is there, and a rock is blocking its way. It is streaming behind it, but cannot remove the rock. The spring, the water, has not to be created, it is already there; you simply remove the rock and it bursts forth. It is like a fountain: you just remove the rock and it bursts forth, it flowers. The child has it naturally; you have to attain it by understanding. And, you have to drop all the blocks that the society has enforced upon you.
The society is against sex: it has created a block, just near the sex center. Whenever sex arises you feel restless, you feel guilty, you feel afraid. You shrink; you don't stream, you don't flow. The society is against anger: it has created a block there. So anger comes, but you cannot move into it totally.
You will have to drop all these blocks.
That's why I insist for dynamic cathartic methods: they will melt your blocks. If you are angry, scream, yell.
There is no need to yell and scream at anybody; just a pillow will do. Beat the pillow, jump on it, kill the pillow - there is no need to kill anybody. Just the idea that you are killing the pillow is enough.
Just getting into the rage, into the anger, is enough; the block is broken. If you want to kill somebody, or if you want to be angry at somebody, you can never be totally in it - impossible - because the other is going to be hurt, wounded, and you are a human being: you have compassion and love also. So one withholds.
Beat the pillow. Have a good knife and kill the pillow. When the pillow is dead, bury the body and be finished with it. Suddenly, you will feel that something has broken inside you. A rock has been removed. Yell, jump, jog. If sex arises, help it to arise. Forget all that the society has taught you. Enjoy the very feeling of sensuality arising in you. Cooperate with it. Don't shrink and don't resist it; cooperate with it. Soon you will see that the sensuality is transforming. When the pool is full, it starts overflowing. Sensuality overflowing becomes sensitivity. People who repress their sex become insensitive, dull. They don't have life. They become wooden.
THE INCIDENTAL CAUSE DOES NOT STIR THE NATURAL TENDENCIES INTO ACTIVITY; IT MERELY REMOVES THE OBSTACLES - LIKE A FARMER IRRIGATING A FIELD: HE REMOVES THE OBSTACLES...
The whole effort of yoga is to remove the obstacles, via negativa. Nothing is really to be done because you have everything; it is just not flowing. A few rocks have been put on the path. You have been distracted. It is just like a farmer irrigating a field. Have you seen a farmer irrigating a field?
Water is flowing in one channel; he removes a little earth and the water starts moving into that path.
When that part is irrigated he puts a little earth back on the gate; the water stops flowing on that path. Then he opens the channel somewhere else; the water starts flowing there. Water is there; it needs channelization. Energy you have, you are; it simply needs channelization so it reaches to the sahasrar, to the highest peak, the c1imax of your being.
ARTIFICIALLY CREATED MINDS PROCEED FROM EGOISM ALONE.
And we all have artificial minds. That's what I call the hypnosis that society has done to you.
We have a group in the ashram, and I have been thinking about it. It is called 'Hypnotherapy', but I would like to call it 'deHypnotherapy' - because the basic effort is to de-hypnotize you, or unhypnotize you, uncondition you.
All minds are artificially created minds: nirmana cittany asmita-matrat. Artificially created minds proceed from egoism alone: I am a Hindu, I am a Mohammedan, I am black, I am white, I am this, that - they are all artificial minds. The original face, the original mind, uncreated by man, has to be known and realized.
I have heard:
A little colored boy accidentally spilled a tin of white paint over himself. When he arrived home, his father gave him a good hiding and told him to go straight to bed. Sobbing his way out of the room he said, "I have only been white for twenty minutes, and I hate you blacks already!"
Even a twenty-minute-old child has started accumulating the artificial mind. Even a twenty-minute- old child looks at his mother with more love than towards anybody else, because he has learned one trick. The conditioning has started: she is food, and survival depends on food. So howsoever ugly the mother, the mother always looks beautiful. It is survival, and the child has started learning diplomacy. He will not smile so much at the father. He does not know who this man is. He will learn it later on. By and by, he will see that this man is important. Of course, he is not seen very much in the home, but important. Rarely, on Sundays he is there, but even the mother depends on him, even the mother smiles at him. Then the child also smiles at the father. He is learning the artificial mind. He's creating relationships, arranging his survival, creating a situation - diplomacy, politics - but this artificial mind which is a help in survival in the beginning, becomes the greatest problem in the end.
When you have survived and you have used the artificial mind, then it hangs around you like a rock around your neck. It becomes the ego. It has to be learned; nothing can be done about it. Every child will have to move into the artificial mind. But when you become alert and aware, and when you start thinking and meditating about life, then it is time to, by and by, drop it. And drop the ego, because the ego is nothing but the artificial mind. The center of the artificial mind is the ego. And every artificial mind can be continued only if you go on enhancing your ego.
Hindus will say that they have the greatest religion in the world, that they are the most religious people in the world. In fact, if they were really religious they would not utter such nonsense, because a religious mind is humble, simple. This is ego. Then every country has its own ego. The Russian, the Chinese, the American, the German, the English - everybody has his own ego, and every country goes on feeling that, "We are the superb, the chosen." Every country finds ways and means to feel enhanced, as with every race, every group, and every man and woman.
I have heard:
The elephant looked down and saw a little, very tiny mouse standing by its foot. "Dear me," said the elephant, "you are very tiny."
"Yes," agreed the mouse, "I have not been very well lately."
Even a mouse has his own ego? - he has been ill, that's why.
The artificial mind lives through ego, so if you start dropping your ego, the artificial mind will start disintegrating. Or, if you drop your artificial mind, the ego will start disintegrating. And if you really want to get rid of this rock, start both ways together. Never enhance the ego in any way. The ways are very subtle.
Remember that the original mind is egoless. It does not know the 'I', because 'I' is a shrinking. The original mind is infinite, like the sky.
And one problem arises continuously as far as ego is concerned. In the beginning you try to befool others about yourself, but, by and by, you are befooled yourself. When you start convincing others that you are somebody in particular, you become convinced of that yourself.
There was a strict rule in the mental asylum: no pets.The security guard heard poor Harry talking to a dog called Rover, and marched into his padded cell. There was Harry, leading a tube of toothpaste around on a piece of string. "What is that?" asked the security guard. Harry looked at him in surprise.
"Surely any fool can see it is just a tube of toothpaste on a piece of string!" he said. Satisfied, the guard left. Just as he closed the door behind him, Harry breathed a sigh of relief. "Good boy, Rover. We sure fooled him that time."
The more you try to befool others, to prove that you are somebody in particular, exceptional, extraordinary, this and that - all neurotic ideas - the more you succeed in proving it to others, the more you will only succeed in befooling yourself. Look at the whole nonsense of it.
Nobody is extraordinary, or, everybody is extraordinary. Nobody is special, or, everybody is special. But there is no point in proving anything either way - there is no need.
Artificially created minds proceed from egoism alone, so if you want to come to the original mind - which is the whole effort of Yoga, Tantra, Zen - then you will have to drop the artificial mind; the mind that has been created by the society and given to you; the mind that has been created from the outside and enforced on you. By and by, drop it. The more you see, the more you will be able to drop. Whenever you start feeling attached to the artificial mind: whenever you say, "I am a Hindu, and I am an Indian; or, I am English, I am British"; or this and that, just catch yourself redhanded.
Deep inside, slap your face, and say "What nonsense!" By and by, don't be defined by society. Then you will find the indefinable; your real, authentic being.
THOUGH THE ACTIVITIES OF THE MANY ARTIFICIAL MINDS VARY, THE ONE ORIGINAL MIND CONTROLS THEM ALL.
So whatsoever your artificial mind, in fact, in reality, the original mind hiding behind it controls them all. Find the controller. Try to find who you originally are before the society corrupted you, contaminated you, before the society entered, planned you, and destroyed your wildness. In Zen they call it: finding the original face which you had before you were born, and which you will have when you will again die; the original face, untouched by society. That's your nature, your soul, your being.
Finding the original face, you will be reborn, you will become a dwij, twice-born. You will become really a brahmin, one who knows. Then again everything will be revealed to you as it was revealed at the time of birth, because you will be born again. But this time, there is going to be a great difference - You will be alert.
The first time you missed; you will not miss this time. The first time it happened naturally; this time it will happen with your alertness, your awareness. You will be conscious of it. You will see yourself reborn again, being born again, arising out of the past, out of the clouds and confusion - thoughts, prejudices, egos, minds, conditionings - arising out of them, virgin, pure.
Then you will again see the power that you are, the being that you are.
So first, it happens at birth; second it happens at samadhi; in between, it can be managed by three methods - drugs, chanting, austerities - but those three methods are ways of deceiving, cheating.
And you cannot cheat upon God, but you can cheat upon yourself. Remember that.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #1
Chapter title: Dropping The Artificial Mine
Edited just now by turiya
Aloneness Is The Last Achievement
The first question:
DOES A DISCIPLE STEAL SOMETHING FROM HIS MASTER?
Everything!
Because the truth cannot be taught, it has to be learned. The Master can only tempt you, make you more and more thirsty for it; but he cannot deliver it to you - it is not a thing. He cannot simply transfer it in your name - it is not an inheritance. You will have to steal it. You will have to work hard in the dark night of the soul. You will have to find ways how to steal it. The Master only tempts you; he simply provokes you. He shows that something is there, a treasure, and now you have to work hard. In fact, he will create all sorts of obstacles so that you cannot reach to the treasure very easily.
Because if you reach to the treasure very easily, you will not have grown; you will lose that treasure again. It will be a treasure in the hands of a child. The key will be lost, the treasure will be lost.
So not only do you have to steal, but the Master has to work in such a way that you become able to steal only when you are ready. He has to create many obstacles. He goes on hiding the treasure.
He will allow you only when you are ready. Just your greed or your desire is not enough, but your readiness, your preparedness; you have to earn it. And it is like stealing because the effort has to be made in the dark, and the effort has to be made very silently. And there are a thousand and one obstacles on the path, temptations to go away, temptations to get distracted. The help of the Master is really to make you more skillful, to give you the knack of how to feel whether the treasure exists here or not.
Living with the Master, surrounded by his climate, slowly, slowly, a certain awareness arises in you.
Your eyes become clear and you can see where the treasure is. And then, you work hard for it. The Master gives you a glimpse of the far-away peak of the Himalayas - snow-covered, shining in the sun - but it is far away and you will have to travel. It is going to be hard, it is going to be uphill. There is every possibility that you may get lost. There is every possibility that you may miss the goal, you may go astray. The closer you come to the peak, the possibility of missing becomes bigger and bigger, greater and greater - because the closer you come to the peak, the less you can see the peak. You have to move just by your own alertness. From far away you can see the peak; it is difficult to lose the direction. But when you have reached the mountains and you are moving upward, you cannot see the peak. You have simply to grope in darkness, so it is more like stealing. The Master is not going to give to you easily. It can be allowed very easily - the door can be opened right now - but you will not be able to see any treasure there because your eyes are not trained yet. And even if, just on trust, you believe that this is very, very valuable, you will lose your trust again and again.
Unless you feel and know that this is valuable, it is not going to be kept for long; you will throw it anywhere.
I have heard about a poor man, a beggar, who was coming with his donkey on the road. The donkey had a beautiful diamond just dangling on his neck. The beggar had found it somewhere and thought it looked beautiful, so he had made a little ornament for the donkey, a necklace. One jeweller saw it. He reached to the poor man and asked, "How much will you take for this stone?" The poor man said, "Eight annas will do." The jeweller became greedy. He said, "Eight annas? - for just this small stone? I can give you four annas." But the poor man said, "For four annas why take it away from the donkey? Then I'm not going to sell." The jeweller said that the beggar would sell, so he went a little far away. He would come back to persuade. But by that time, another jeweller saw it. He was ready to give one thousand rupees, so the poor man sold immediately because the other was not even ready to give eight annas. And this jeweller looked almost mad; one thousand rupees he offered! -The first jeweller came back but the diamond was gone. He said to the poor man, "You are a fool! You have sold it just for one thousand rupees; it was worth almost one million RUPEES!" The beggar laughed, "I may be a fool - I am - but what about you? I did not know that it was a diamond, and you knew it and you would not take it even for eight ANNAS."
You can get the diamond; it will be taken away from you. You cannot keep it for long. It will be stolen unless you yourself understand how valuable it is. So you have to grow.
The work of the Master is very paradoxical. The paradox is: he provokes you, he invites you, and goes on hiding the treasure. He has to do both simultaneously: he has to tempt you, seduce you, and yet, he is not to allow you an easy approach. Between these two very paradoxical efforts - provoking, continuously provoking....
I go on speaking every day; this is nothing but temptation, an invitation. But I will hide it to the last unless you have become capable of stealing. I am not going to give it; it cannot be given. You can only steal it. But you will become, by and by, a master thief. The temptation will make you. What will you do? I will tempt you and nothing will be given to you. What will you do? - you will start thinking of how to steal it.
Nothing happens before its right time; truth, at least, never happens before its right time. And if I try to give it to you, it will never reach you in the first place. Even if it reaches, you will lose it again.
And... it will not be an act of compassion on my part if I give it to you. My compassion has to be hard. My compassion has to be so hard that you go on crying for it and I go on hiding it. On the one hand, I tempt you; on the other hand, I hide it. Once tempted, you will become, by and by, crazier and crazier. You will find ways; you have to find ways. Because only through finding, searching, seeking ways, inventing, innovating, enquiring new paths, getting out of the old patterns, finding new patterns, new disciplines, will you grow, will you become rich. In fact, the moment you have grown, suddenly the truth is there within you. One just has to recognize it, but that recognition comes the hard way. You will have to stake everything that you have: that is the meaning of stealing. It is not a business: it is not a bargain. It is like stealing.
Think of the thief: he stakes everything for something which is not known, which he doesn't know whether it is really there or not. He stakes his property, he stakes his family, he stakes his own life. If he misses and something goes wrong, he may be in prison forever. He's a gambler; very courageous. He's not a businessman. He stakes everything for something which may be there or may not be there. The businessman has a dictum: he says, "Never lose your half bread in the hand for a whole bread in the future, in imagination. Never lose that which you have for that which you don't have." That is the dictum of the businessman, the businessman's mind.
The thief follows another dictum totally: he says, "Put everything that you have at stake for something that you don't have." For his dream, he stakes the real. It is just a 'perhaps'. He risks all his securities for something very insecure. That's where courage is.
So rather than being a businessman, be a thief, be a gambler. Because the unknown can be found only when you are ready to drop the known. When the known ceases, the unknown enters into your being. When all security is lost, only then do you give way for the unknown to enter in you.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #2
Chapter title: Aloneness Is The Last Achievement
Aloneness Is The Last Achievement
Patanga: Moth That Willingly Flies Into The Flame Of Love
The second question:
CANNOT ONE ENJOY LIFE ALONE? BECAUSE I AM NOT SO AWARE, THAT MOVING INTO WATER WITHOUT GETTING WET, OR GOING THROUGH FIRE WITHOUT GETTING BURNT CAN BE POSSIBLE FOR ME. CANNOT ONE ENJOY LIFE ALONE?
At least the questioner cannot enjoy, because one who can enjoy will never ask the question.
The very question shows that it will be impossible for you to enjoy being alone. Your aloneness will deteriorate and become loneliness. Your aloneness will not be a fullness; your aloneness will be loneliness - empty.
Yes, out of fear you can settle in it. Out of the fear of getting wet in the water, out of the fear of getting caught in the fire; out of fear, you may settle. Many have settled. Go to the monasteries; look into the old ashrams: many have settled just out of fear.
Relationship is a fire; it burns. It is difficult. It is almost impossible to live with someone. It is a constant struggle. Many have escaped, but they are cowards. They are not grown-ups; their effort is childish. Yes, they will live a more convenient life, that's true. When the other is not there, of course, everything goes easily. You live alone - with whom to get angry? - with whom to get jealous? - with whom to fight? But your life will lose all taste. You will become tasteless; you will not have any salt.
Many escape from life just because life is too much, and they don't find themselves capable of coping with it. I will not suggest that; I am not an escapist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHUiLR2QFwI
I will tell you to fight your way through life, because that is the only way to become more aware and alert; to become so balanced that nobody can unbalance you; to become so tranquil that the presence of the other never becomes a distraction. The other can insult you but you are not irritated. The other can create a situation in which, ordinarily, you would have gone mad, but you don't go. You use the situation as a stepping- stone for a higher consciousness.
Life has to be used as a situation, as an opportunity to become more conscious, more crystallized, more centered and rooted. If you escape, it will be as if a seed escapes from the soil and hides in a cave where there is no soil, only stones. The seed will be safe. In soil, the seed has to die, disappear.
When the seed disappears, the plant sprouts. Then dangers start. For the seed there was no danger: no animal would have eaten it, and no child would have broken it. Now the beautiful green sprout, and the whole world seems to be against it: the winds come and they try to uproot it, clouds come, and thunders come, and the small seed is fighting alone against the whole world.
There are children and there are animals and there are gardeners, and millions of problems to be faced. The seed was living comfortably, there was no problem: no wind, no soil, no animals - nothing was a problem. It was closed completely into itself; the seed was protected, secure.
So you can go to a cave in the Himalayas: you will become a seed. You won't sprout. Those winds are not against you; they give you an opportunity, they give you challenge, they give you an opportunity to get deeply rooted. They tell you to stand your ground and give a good fight. That makes you strong.
You see, one eucalyptus tree is here. Just to protect it, Mukta placed a bamboo by the side when the tree was small. Now it has gone so long, but it cannot stand on its own. The bamboos are still there and now it seems impossible. Once you remove the bamboos, the whole tree will fall down. The protection will have proved to be dangerous. Now the tree has become accustomed to protection. It has not grown in strength, it has remained childish.
Challenges are growth opportunities, and there is no greater challenge in life than love. If you love someone, you are in a tremendous turmoil. Love is not all roses as your poets say; they are all fools. They may have dreamed about love but they have never known it. It is not all roses. It is more thorny than you can imagine. Roses are rare, here and there; thorns are millions. But when out of a million thorns a rose arises, it has a beauty of its own. Love is the greatest danger in life. That's why I insist that if you really want to grow, accept the greatest danger and move into it.
People have tried to find many ways of avoiding it. Some have left the world. Why are you so afraid of the world? The fear of the world is really fear of love, because when others are there, the possibility is there that you may fall in love with someone. There are so many beautiful souls around, so many attractions; you may get caught somewhere. Danger... escape! A few have escaped to the monasteries, a few have escaped in other ways. A few have escaped into marriages. That too is an escape. The monastery is an escape, and marriage is also an escape - to avoid love.
One never knows what will be the outcome of a love affair. It is always on the rocks. It is never convenient, it is never comfortable. It may bring you moments of joy, but it brings hell also. It is painful growth, but all growth is painful. One never grows without pain. Pain is part, an essential part. If you avoid the pain you also avoid the growth.
Many have settled somewhere. A few have settled in ambition, have become politicians. They are not worried about love. They say they have great things to do in the world. They are worried about power: they use power as an escape. A few are buried in their monasteries, a few are buried in their families: marriage, children, this and that, but I rarely come across a man who has faced the challenge of love, the greatest storm there is. But one who has faced it, grows. He comes out of it one day, clean, pure, mature.
So you ask,
...CANNOT ONE ENJOY LIFE ALONE?
You can be happy alone, but you cannot enjoy. You can be happy, in a way, because there will be no disturbance, no turmoil, no conflict. Your happiness will be more like peace, less like enjoyment. It will not have any ecstasy in it. Joy is very ecstatic; joy is very much like dance. Happiness is like the singing you do in your bathroom - the bathroom singing - it is very lukewarm; you can do it alone. You always do it in your bathroom because you are alone. But singing and dancing with other people, getting completely possessed by it, is joy. Joy is a shared phenomenon; happiness is a non-shared phenomenon.
People who are miserly always look for happiness, not for joy - because joy needs sharing. You cannot be joyful alone. A certain atmosphere is needed, a certain climate is needed: a certain whirlwind of people, persons, consciousness, is needed. Alone you can be happy, at the most.
And remember, happiness is not a very happy thing.
Joy is really moving high. Joy is the c1imax, like peaks; happiness is a plain ground: one moves comfortably with no fear of any fall anywhere - no valley around, no danger. You can walk with your eyes closed. You know the path. You have been moving on that path, this way and that. You can move completely unconsciously.
Joy needs consciousness. Have you ever moved into the mountains and just by the side, a great valley is yawning? You become alert. That is one of the beauties of mountaineering. It is not really the joy in the mountain; the joy is in moving in danger, constant danger. Always there is death around; the valley is waiting to swallow you at any moment. Once you lose your footing, you are gone forever. Because of that danger one becomes very sharply aware, like a sword. That awareness gives joy.
When you are moving with people, in relationship, you are always in danger. Life becomes sharp.
Then you have a tone; then your energy is not just resting, it is flowing. Look at the people who have lived too long in the caves or in the monasteries: you will see that a certain rust has settled on their faces. They will not look alive. They will be dull almost to the point of being stupid. That's why monks have not created anything beautiful in the world. Nothing has come out of them. They are wastages; they are not fertile soil. They proved impotent.
All escape makes you more of a coward, impotent. And the more you escape, the more you want to escape. All escape is suicidal.
Then what do I mean? Am I saying to you, never be alone? No, not at all. But I am saying, never be lonely. Aloneness comes out of the richness that you have learned through relationships, out of many relationships, of many dimensions, many qualities: being with a mother, being with a father, being with a friend, being with a brother, sister, being with a wife, being with a beloved, lover, with friends, with enemies.'Being with' is the world. And one has to be in as many relationships as possible; then you expand. Each relationship contributes something to your inner enrichment. The more you spread into people, the more you expand. You have a bigger soul, and you have a richer soul. Otherwise, you become impoverished.
Now psychoanalysts have been working hard on children who have not received their first and basic relationship: the relationship between the child and the mother. They shrink. These children are never normal. Somehow, the first urge to expand has not happened. The relationship between a child and the mother is the first entry into the world.
You enter into the world with your mother's love. You enter into the world because you relate with your mother, and you learn how to relate. The warmth that flows between the child and the mother is the first exchange of energies. It is tremendously sexual, because all energy is sexual. The child smiling, the mother smiling, a tremendous energy is being exchanged. The mother cuddling the child, hugging the child, kissing the child; a great energy is being given to the child, and the child is getting ready to respond. Sooner or later, the day will come when the child will hug and kiss the mother. Now he's ripe - not only ready to take, but ready to give also. That is his first learning. Then he will move with brothers and sisters and father and uncles, and the circle will become bigger and bigger and bigger: in school, and in college, and in the university, and then in the universe one goes on.
The more and more you relate, the more and more you are. The being is discovered through being related. Each relationship is a mirror. It shows a fragment of your being to you. It reflects something about yourself. When you have grown so much and expanded to the infinity, then the last relationship is with God.
That is the last relationship.
If you escape from relationship, as these so-called religious people do.... They are doing something very absurd. They will not be able to relate with God because they have not learned how to relate.
They have not learned how to move in relationship. And remember, to relate with God is the greatest, the most dangerous relationship there is.
Just the other day I was reading a memoir of a Christian...
A very beautiful person who had lived in Soviet Russia's jails for many years. For three years continuously he was in an underground cell, thirty feet into the earth. For three years continuously he never saw any sunlight, any flower, any butterfly, any moon. He didn't see any human face, except the guard. For three years it was maddening: no book to read, nothing to do. He was not even aware of whether it was day or night, whether the sun had arisen outside in the world or not. There was no newspaper, no news of what was happening in the world, nothing. He was completely unrelated.
He started doing one thing - tremendously beautiful: he started talking to God. What to do? What else to do? For three years he talked to God and, by and by, he started giving sermons. God was the only audience. He would stand and he would give a sermon. But those sermons are really beautiful.
Now, out of the jail, he has collected those sermons, and he has put them as he had given them to God. He says, "Don't be offended," because many times he becomes angry with God. One has to become. What nonsense: for three years! He quotes from scriptures and says to God, "Look at what you have said. In the Bible you say that a man should never be alone. What about me! Have you forgotten all about your scripture and your message that you gave through Jesus? Where are you? Have you changed your rules? A man should never be alone? - then why have you forced me for three years to be alone?"
And he says, "Remember, at the last day of judgement I am not going to be the only culprit, you are also going to be the culprit. Not only will you tell about my sins, I am also going to tell about your sins. Remember! Don't forget it! It is not going to be a one way street."
Really, those sermons are beautiful, those talks with God. He remained sane because of these talks. He came out perfectly sane, saner really than when he had gone in - more sane. Such a beautiful relationship... and the God was absolutely silent. It irritates. You go on talking; he never says yes, no - nothing.
Just think - you go on speaking and your wife keeps quiet. She goes on working in the kitchen. You are going crazy and you are shouting and yelling, and she goes on silently doing her things. How will you feel? The same happens in relationship with God. One has to learn it in life, then you can relate with God. To relate with God is to relate with the whole. Of course, the whole is silent, and great skill is needed in relating - only then. After you have related with God, and you have become merged with Him, then aloneness arises.
Aloneness is the last achievement.
That's what Patanjali calls kaivalya: absolute aloneness. It is not in the beginning; it is in the end.
That is why we are reading the last chapter. The chapter is about aloneness, Kaivalya Pada. It is the whole effort of the yogi through many lives to reach to aloneness. It is not so cheap as you think - that you just leave the house and you go into a cave, and you are alone. Then there is no need for Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. A simple sutra will do: go to the railway station, purchase a ticket, and go to the Himalayas - finished. Who is preventing you? Who can prevent you? How can you be prevented?
But that way, life would be too cheap, would not be of worth. One has to learn it. Aloneness is the flowering of all your relationships. You have gathered the fragrance out of all your relationships: good and bad, beautiful and ugly; you go on gathering fragrance. Then, a flame arises in you. That aloneness has to be the goal. What you call aloneness. Right now is not aloneness; it is going just to be loneliness. To be solitary is not to be in solitude. To be solitary is ugly, ill, sad. To be in solitude has a tremendous beauty in it; it is an achievement.
....BECAUSE I AM NOT SO AWARE, THAT MOVING INTO WATER WITHOUT GETTING WET, OR GOING THROUGH FIRE WITHOUT GETTING BURNT CAN BE POSSIBLE FOR ME.
Then how are you going to become aware? Move more and more. By escaping you will never become aware. All these situations are needed to make you aware. If you cannot become aware in the world, you cannot become aware out of the world. Otherwise, why has the world been given to you; why are you in the world? - It is to learn awareness.
When so many people are criss-crossing your path, so many energies criss-crossing all around you, and it is a puzzle to solve, awareness will arise out of it. Yes, one day you will be able to walk in water and the water will not touch your feet; but before that happens, you will have to walk in many rivers and many oceans of life. Yes, one day you will be capable of walking into fire and the fire will not burn you, but that has to be learned through many fires, and many burnings. Only out of experience is one freed. Truth liberates; experience gives you truth. Never decide for the life of no experience.
Always decide for more experience. Howsoever hard and difficult, but always choose the life of experience. One day, you will transcend, but one transcends only by knowing it.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #2
Chapter title: Aloneness Is The Last Achievement
Aloneness Is The Last Achievement
Caliph Harun al-Rashid & His Court Jester Bahlul Dana
The third question:
IN REPLY TO MY QUESTION, YOU SAID THE OTHER DAY TO LIVE AND ENJOY LIFE TOTALLY.
BUT WHAT IS LIFE THEN? - TO GO IN SEX, TO MAKE MONEY, TO FULFILL WORLDLY DESIRES, AND ALL THAT? IF SO, THEN ONE HAS TO DEPEND ON OTHERS, AND THE WORLDLY THINGS WHICH ARE SURE TO BECOME A BONDAGE IN THE LONG RUN. AND ALSO, WILL IT NOT MAKE THE SEARCH OF THE SEEKER VERY, VERY LONG?
Yes, life is all that you can imagine and desire. Sex is included, money is included; everything that the human mind can desire is included. But you live in a sort of hang-over. Even in the formulation of a question, your condemnations are absolutely clear, emphatically clear.
You say, "In reply to my question, you said the other day to live and enjoy life totally. But what is life then? - to go in sex, to make money, to fulfil worldly desires, and all that?" The condemnation is clear.
You seem to know the answer before you have asked the question. Your learning is absolutely clear: cut sex, cut love, cut money, cut people. Then what sort of life would be left there?
This has to be understood: the word 'life' has no meaning in it if you go on cutting everything. And everything can be condemned. Enjoying food is life; anybody can condemn it:
"What nonsense! Just chewing food and swallowing it inside? Can this be life? Then breathing - just taking air in, throwing it out, taking it in, throwing it out - what boredom! And for what? Then getting up early in the morning and going to sleep in the evening, and going to the office and to the shop, and a thousand and one miseries. Is this life? Then making love to a woman? Just two dirty bodies! Kissing a woman - nothing but an exchange of saliva and millions of germs. Think of germs: it is not even hygienic; certainly it is irreligious. It is also unhygienic."
So what is life? Take everything out of the context of the whole, and it looks meaningless, absurd.
That is how religious people have been condemning life through the ages. You give them anything, and they will be able to condemn it. They say, "What is the body? Just in a bag of skin there are millions of dirty things. Just open the bag and see." And you will find that then they are right.
But have you asked the other question? These people must have been expecting something which they have not found. Were you expecting gold inside the bag of skin, or diamonds inside the bag of skin? Then would things have been better?
Ask the other question: what were you expecting? You cannot find a better and more beautiful body than you have, and you go on looking at the dirt inside. You don't look at the beautiful work it continues doing.
The whole body continues to work for seventy, eighty, or even a hundred years with such smooth efficiency, with such silence. Look at the throbbing energy in the body, the pulsation of energy. But there are people who can always find something wrong. Whatsoever it is, they can find something wrong. You show them a rose and they will take it off the plant and will say, "What is it? It will be dead within a few hours. Yes, it will wither, so all beauty is lost." You show them a beautiful rainbow, and they will say that it is illusory: "You go there and you will not find anything. It simply appears to be." These are the great condemnors, the poisoners of life. They have poisoned everything, and you have listened to them too much. Now you find that it has become almost impossible for you to enjoy life. But you never think that this incapacity to enjoy life is created by your so-called religious teachers. They have poisoned your being. Even when you are kissing a woman, they go on inside telling you, "What are you doing? This is nonsense. There is nothing in it." Even while you are eating they go on saying, "What are you doing? There is nothing in it." Those condemnors have done a great work.
And this is one of the basic problems: that to appreciate is difficult, and to condemn is easy. To appreciate is very difficult because you have to prove something positively. Only then can you appreciate.
Heinrich Heine, one great German poet, writes in his memoirs:
"One day I was standing with the great philosopher, Hegel, and it was a beautiful cool night - dark, silent - and the whole sky was beautifully full of stars." Of course, the poet started appreciating it, and he said, "What beauty; what tremendous beauty!" And he added, "I always think that if a man only looks at the earth and never looks at the sky, he may become an atheist. But a man who looks at the sky, how can he become an atheist? - impossible!"
But, by and by, he became a little uneasy because Hegel was completely silent; he had not uttered a word. He asked Hegel, "What do you think, sir?" And Hegel said, "I can't see any beauty or anything. These stars you are talking about? - they are nothing but a leprosy of the sky."
Leprosy...!
Condemnation is so easy. That's why condemnors are so articulate. People have not talked in favor of life because it is difficult to say anything positive about life - it is too much for words. Condemnors have been very articulate: they have been condemning and negating, and they have created a certain mind in you which goes on working from the inside and goes on poisoning your life. Now you ask me, "What is life - to go in sex? to make money? to fulfil worldly desires, and all that?" And what is wrong in worldly desires? In fact, all desires are worldly. Have you come across any desire which is not worldly? What do you desire God for? - and you will find the whole world hidden there in your desire. What do you desire heaven for? - and you will find the whole world hidden there.
Those who know say that desire is the world. They don't say 'worldly desires'. Buddha has never said 'worldly desires'. He says, "Desire is the world"; desire as such. The desire for samadhi, the desire for enlightenment, is also worldly. To desire is to be in the world; not to desire is to be out of the world.
So don't condemn the worldly desire; try to understand it, because all desires are worldly. This is the fear: that if you condemn the worldly desires, you will start creating new desires for yourself which you will call unworldly, or other-worldly. You will say, "I am not an ordinary man. I am not after money. What is it, after all? You die - you cannot take the money with you. I'm seeking, searching for some eternal wealth." So are you unworldly, or more worldly? People who are satisfied with the wealth of this world - which is momentary, and death will take it away - they are worldly. And you are searching for some wealth which is permanent, which is forever and ever; and you are unworldly?
You seem to be more cunning and clever. People are making love to ordinary human beings - they are worldly. And what are you desiring?
And look in the Koran, look in the Bible, look in the Hindu scriptures: what are you desiring in heaven? - beautiful damsels made of gold, never aging, remaining always young. They are always at the age of sixteen - never fifteen, never seventeen - something miraculous. When the scriptures were written, then too they were at the age of sixteen. Now the scriptures have become very ancient, but those girls continue to be at the age of sixteen. What are you desiring?
In Mohammedan countries homosexuality has been prevalent, so even that is provided for in heaven.
You will not only have beautiful girls, you will have beautiful boys available. And in this world alcohol is condemned, and there, in the Mohammedan heaven, there are springs of wine. Springs! You need not go to the pub, you can just swim in them, drown in them. And you call these people unworldly? In fact, they are nothing but very worldly people who have become so frustrated with this world that now they live in fantasy. They have a fantasy world; they call it paradise, heaven, or something else.
All desires are worldly, and when I say that, I am not condemning them - I am simply stating a fact: to desire is to be worldly. Nothing is wrong in it. God has given you an opportunity to understand what desire is. In understanding desire, in the very understanding of it, the desire disappears. Because desire is in the future, desire is somewhere else, and you are here-now. You want to be here-now; and the reality is here-now, the existence is happening here-now, everything is converging on here- now, and with your desire you are somewhere else so you go on missing. You remain always hungry because that which can satisfy you is showering here, and you are somewhere else.
Now is the only reality, and here is the only existence. Desire takes you away.
Try to understand desire: how it goes on deceiving you, how it goes on taking you away on further trips, and you go on missing. So whenever you remember, come back, come back home.
There is no need to fight with the desire, because if you fight with the desire you will create another desire. Only one desire can fight with another desire. Understanding is not a fight with desire. In the light of understanding desire disappears, as darkness disappears when you kindle a lamp.
So don't call these worldly desires; don't be a condemnor. Try to understand.
IF SO, THEN ONE HAS TO DEPEND ON OTHERS, AND THE WORLDLY THINGS WHICH ARE SURE TO BECOME A BONDAGE IN THE LONG RUN.
But what is wrong in depending on others? The ego does not want to depend on anybody. The ego wants to be independent. But you are dependent. You are not separate from existence, you are part of it. Everything is joined together. We exist together, in a togetherness.
Existence is a togetherness, so how can you become independent? Will you not breathe then? Will you not eat food? If you will eat food, you will have to depend on the trees, on the plants. They are supplying food to you. Will you not drink water? - then you will have to depend on rivers. And will you not need the sun? - then you will die. How can you become independent?
'Independent' is a wrong word, as wrong as the word 'dependent'. Independence and dependence are both wrong. The real thing is 'interdependent'. We are all together, interdependent. Even the king is dependent on his slave, as much as the slave is dependent on the king. It is an interdependence.
It happened in the life of Caliphas Harun-al-Rashid. He was sitting with his court joker, Bahlul, and he said, "Bahlul, I'm the most independent man in the world. I'm a monarch with infinite power, and whatsoever I want I can do. The whole world obeys me. Can you find anything which is not under my order?"
Bahlul kept silent, then he said, "Sir, this one fly is disturbing me very much. Can you order her not to disturb me?"
Harun-al-Rashid said, "You are a fool. How can I order the fly? And she will not listen to me."
Bahlul said, "Have you forgotten sir, what you were saying: that the whole world follows your orders? - And, even this fly just in front of you is sitting on my head. I am trying to avoid it, and it goes on landing again and again on my nose; and I have seen it landing on your nose also, sir! And you cannot order this small fly? - and the whole world follows your order? You think again."
The world is an interdependence.
Harun-al-Rashid and flies are all interdependent, and Bahlul is wiser than Harun-al-Rashid. In fact, because he is very wise is why he's thought of as a fool. Or, maybe it is because of his wisdom that he calls himself a fool - because to exist in this world of fools you should not declare that you are a wise man. Otherwise, they will kill you.
This Bahlul seems to be wiser than Socrates and Jesus. They committed one mistake: they declared that they were wise. That created trouble. All the fools gathered together and they said, "We cannot tolerate you." You cannot crucify a Bahlul. Maybe he is wiser than Jesus and Socrates. He says, "I am a fool, sir"; but see his insight.
Once Harun-al-Rashid wrote a poem. Now, everybody appreciated it; everybody had to appreciate. It was just nonsense. And when he asked Bahlul before the court, he said, "This is just nonsense. Even a fool like me, sir, will not write this."
Of course, Harun-al-Rashid was very angry. Bahlul was thrown into imprisonment, and he was beaten and forced to starve. After seven days, again he was brought to the court. Harun-al-Rasid had written another poem, and had improved much upon the first. And the whole court said, "Rah, rah!"
Again Bahlul was asked. He looked at the poem, he listened, and immediately stood up and started to leave. The King said, "Where are you going?" He said, "To the prison. Again, I am going. I will not give you the trouble of sending me. What is the point?" He was really a wise man.
This is the irony: that many times the wise man has to appear as a fool. Remember, the effort to be independent is very foolish. And it is not possible; it is impossible. Then you will become more and more frustrated, because always you will find that you are again dependent, and again dependent.
Wherever you go you will remain dependent, because you cannot go out of the net of existence. We are like the knots of a net - energies go on passing through us. When many energies pass through a point, that point becomes an individual, that's all. Draw a line on paper, then draw another line across it; where these two lines cross, individuality arises. Where life and death cross, you are there - just a crossing point.
To understand it, is all. Then you are neither dependent nor are you independent; both are absurdities. Then you are simply interdependent, and you accept.
IF SO, THEN ONE HAS TO DEPEND ON OTHERS, AND THE WORLDLY THINGS WHICH ARE SURE TO BECOME A BONDAGE IN THE LONG RUN.
Who has told you that they are sure to become bondage in the long run? Either you know or you don't know. If you know, then there is no point in asking me; you will not get into that bondage. If you don't know and you have simply heard it from others, this is not going to help you.
You will be in trouble. You will always be half-hearted because it is not your understanding, and only your understanding can liberate you.
Let me tell you a few anecdotes.
A man and his wife made a pact that whichever one of them died first would come back and tell the other one what it was like on the other side. "There is just one thing, though," said the husband. "If you die first, I want you to promise me that you will come back during the daytime." He was afraid, half-hearted.
If you have believed others - because others say that if you move in the world, you will be in bondage - then wherever you move, you will be in bondage because it is not your understanding. Understanding frees you. And remember, the bondage does not happen in the long run; it happens immediately.
The moment you desire, that very moment, the bondage has happened. It is of desire, and the desire has arisen around you; you are already imprisoned. If you have the insight, you will immediately see that every desire brings an imprisonment with it, and not in the long run. The long run... the very idea of long run arises because others say so. This is not your own experience. And always remember to accept your own experience; nothing else is of worth.
It happened in a court: "I notice," said the judge to the tramp in the docket, "that in addition to stealing this money, you also took a lot of very valuable jewellery."
"Yes, Your Honor," remarked the tramp cheerfully. "You see, me mother taught me from childhood that money alone does not bring happiness."
Teachings from others are not going to help. You will change their whole meaning according to you.
It will happen unconsciously, not consciously. You read the Dhammapada: you don't read Buddha's words, you read your own interpretations. You read Patanjali's Yoga Sutras: you don't read Patanjali, you read yourself through Patanjali. So if you are ignorant, you will find something in Patanjali which helps your ignorance. If you are greedy, you will find something in Patanjali which helps your greed.
If you are greedy, you may become greedy for kaivalya, for liberation, nirvana. If you are an egoist, you will find something which helps your egoism. You will start becoming a great independent being.
How can you depend?... such a great man. How can you depend on anybody else? - you have to be independent. You will always find yourself whatsoever you read, whatsoever you listen to, unless you start understanding your own life.
AND ALSO, WILL IT NOT MAKE THE SEARCH OF THE SEEKER VERY, VERY LONG?
- Now, this is greed. Why be afraid?
Why be too concerned with the result? I am saying continuously, repeatedly, to be here-now; don't think of the tomorrow. And you are not thinking only of tomorrow, you are thinking of future lives.
WILL IT NOT MAKE THE SEARCH OF THE SEEKER VERY, VERY LONG?
Why be afraid of it? Infinity is available. There is no shortage of time. You can move very, very slowly; there is no hurry. The hurry is because of the greed. So whenever people become very greedy, they become very hurried and go on finding more ways to gain more speed. They are continuously on the run because they think that life is running out. These greedy people say, "Time is money." Time is money? Money is very limited; time is unlimited. Time is not money; time is eternity. It has always been there and will be there, and, you have been always here and you will always be here.
So drop greed, and don't be bothered about the result. Sometimes it happens that because of your impatience, you miss many things. If you are listening to me with greed, with greedy eyes, then you will not be listening to me. You will inside be continuously talking: "Yes, this is good; this I will try. This I will do. This seems that it will bring me to the goal very soon." You have missed me, what I was saying, and in listening to what I was saying, the goal was hidden there.
One doctor used to come here; now he is transferred. He used to take continuous notes. I asked him, "What do you go on doing?"
He said, "Later, at home, with ease, I read it. And then, later on, whenever I need, I can read it again."
But I told him, "You go on missing me. You hear one thing - you write - in that time I have said something which you have missed. Again you write something, again you have missed. And whatsoever you collect are fragments, and you will not be able to join them together. You will fill the gaps with your own greed, your own understandings, your own prejudices, and then the whole thing will be destroyed."
The goal is here.
You have just to be silent, patient, alert. Live life totally. The goal is hidden in life itself. It is God who has come to you as life in millions of ways. When a woman smiles at you, remember, it is God smiling at you in the form of a woman. When a flower opens its petals, look, watch - God has opened his heart in the form of a flower. When a bird starts singing, listen to it - God has come to sing a song for you. This whole life is divine, holy.
You are always on holy ground. Wherever you look, it is God that you look at; whatsoever you do, it is to God that you are doing it; whatsoever you are, you are an offering to the God. That's what I mean: live life, enjoy life, because it is God. And He comes to you and you are not enjoying Him. He comes to you and you are not welcoming Him.
He comes to you and finds you sad, aloof, uninterested, dull.
Dance, because each moment He is coming in infinite ways, in millions of ways, from all directions.
When I say live life in totality, I mean, live life as if it is God. And everything is included. When I say life, everything is included. Sex is included, love is included, anger is included; everything is included. Don't be a coward. Be brave and accept life in its totality, in its total intensity.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #2
Chapter title: Aloneness Is The Last Achievement
Aloneness Is The Last Achievement
The last question:
CAN ONE BE INTIMATE WITH YOUR SOUL WITHOUT BEING YOUR DISCIPLE?
It is as if you ask, "Can one be intimate with you without being intimate with you?"
What is a disciple? - a disciple is just an attitude, a readiness to be intimate. A disciple is just a receptivity, a readiness to accept, welcome. A disciple is a gesture: if you give to me, I will not reject it. But you are fogged with words. You have lost all insight into love, intimacy. If you are not a disciple, you will not be intimate from your side. From my side, I am intimate to all, whether they are my disciples or not. I am unconditionally intimate.
But if you are not a disciple - not open - from your side, you are closed. So my intimacy alone won't work for you. It will not get connected with you. You will remain an outsider. Somehow, you will remain in a defending mood. Of course, you will choose whatsoever you like, and you will reject whatsoever you don't like.
A disciple is one who says, "Osho, I accept you totally. Now I will not be a chooser with you" - that's all. "Now I drop my mind; you become my mind. I will listen to you and not to my mind. If there is any conflict, I will go with you and not with my mind" - that's all. "If a decision has to be taken, then you will be closer to me than my own mind" - that's all.
One who is not a disciple stands on the border and he says, "Whatsoever I like, or whatsoever I feel convinced of, I will choose; and whatsoever I don't like and don't feel convinced of I will not choose."
Whatsoever you like will make your mind more and more strengthened; whatsoever you don't like will not allow your mind any transformation. You will become more knowledgeable. You will learn many things from me, but you will not learn me. So it is up to you.
It is not a question, for me, to make you a disciple; it is up to you to be open or closed. When more is available, you decide for less - so far, so good.
Let me tell you one anecdote.
A doctor had two patients from different ends of town, both chronic insomniacs. To help get some sleep, he gave them some sleeping pills. One got blue pills and the other, red ones.
One day, both got into conversation about their sleeplessness, and at the end of the talk, one man felt so annoyed that he rushed to his doctor and said, "How is it that when I take my pills, I go to sleep and dream I am a docker unloading a dirty tramp steamer in Liverpool, getting covered in oil and filth, while Mr. Brown takes his pills and dreams that he is Lying on a beach in Bermuda, surrounded by half-dressed beautiful girls, all caressing him and kissing him and giving him a good time?"
The doctor shrugged and said, "Be reasonable, now. You are on the government-sponsored Medicare, and Mr. Brown is a private patient."
So, only that much can I say to you: be reasonable!
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #2
Chapter title: Aloneness Is The Last Achievement
Returning To The Original Mind
6. ONLY THE ORIGINAL MIND WHICH IS BORN OF MEDITATION IS FREE FROM DESIRES.
7. THE YOGI'S KARMAS ARE NEITHER PURE NOR IMPURE, BUT ALL OTHERS ARE THREE- FOLD: PURE, IMPURE AND MIXED.
8. DESIRES ARISE FROM THESE THREE-FOLD KARMAS WHEN CIRCUMSTANCES ARE FAVORABLE FOR THEIR FULFILLMENT.
9. BECAUSE MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS RETAIN THE SAME FORM, THE RELATIONSHIP OF CAUSE AND EFFECT CONTINUES, EVEN THOUGH SEPARATED BY CLASS, LOCALITY, AND TIME.
10. AND THERE IS NO BEGINNING TO THIS PROCESS, AS THE DESIRE TO LIVE IS ETERNAL.
This is one of the most significant sutras.
ONLY THE ORIGINAL MIND WHICH IS BORN OF MEDITATION IS FREE FROM DESIRES.
First, what is the original mind?
Because the original mind is the very goal of all yogas.
The East has been searching continuously the path to the original mind. The original mind is that mind which you had before you were born, not in this life, but before you entered the world of desires; before you were confined to thoughts, desires, instincts, body, mind --> that original space, uncontaminated by anything; that original sky, unclouded - that is the original mind.
On that original mind, layers and layers of minds are there. A man is like an onion; you go on peeling it. You peel one layer, another layer is there; you peel that layer, another layer comes up. You don't have one mind, you have layers and layers of many minds. Because in each life you have cultivated a certain mind, then in another life another mind, and so on and so forth. And the original mind is lost completely behind these minds, these layers upon layers. But if you go on peeling the onion, a moment comes when only emptiness is left in your hands. The onion has disappeared.
When minds disappear, then arises the original mind. In fact, to call it a mind is not good, but there is no other way to express it. It is a no-mind. The original mind is a no-mind. When all the minds that you have, have been dissolved, dropped, the original appears with its pristine purity, with its virginity.
This original mind you have already. You may have forgotten. You may be lost in the jungle of your mind's conditionings, but deep down, hidden behind all these layers, you still live in your original mind, and in rare moments, you penetrate to it. In deep sleep, when even dreams have stopped, in dreamless sleep, you have a dip into the original mind. That's why in the morning you feel so fresh.
But if there has been a continuity of dreams the whole night, then you feel tired. You feel more tired than you were feeling when you went to bed. You could not have a dip into your inner Ganges, into your stream of pure consciousness. You could not move into it, you could not bathe in it. In the morning you feel tired, worried, tense, confused, divided. You don't have the harmony that comes out of deep sleep. But it is not coming out of deep sleep; deep sleep is just a passage to the original mind. That's why Patanjali says that samadhi is like deep sleep with only one difference: in samadhi, you move into the same original mind that you move into in sleep, but you move fully aware; in deep sleep, you slip into it unawares, not knowing where you are going, not knowing what path you are following. That's your only contact left with the original mind.
Doctors and physicians know well that whenever somebody is suffering from a disease, if he cannot sleep well, then there is no way to cure him. Sleep is therapeutic. In fact, the first thing for the patient is: how to help him move into deep sleep, deep rest. That rest cures because the patient becomes again connected with the original mind, and the original mind is a healing source. It is your source of life-energy, love. All that you have is coming from the oceanic world of your original mind.
Of course, when it has to pass so many layers of mind, it is contaminated, polluted. Your inner ecology is no longer original. It has been filled up, stuffed with many dead things. Your minds are nothing but your dead experience.
A person who wants to move into the original mind alert, aware, has to learn how to unlearn, how to unlearn the experience, how to die to the past continuously, how not to cling to the past. One moment you have lived - finished - be finished with it. Let there be no continuity with it; become discontinuous. It no longer belongs to you. It is finished and finished forever. Let it be a full point, and you get out of it as a snake moves out of the old skin and does not even look back. Just a moment before, that skin was part of his body; now, no more. Move out of the past continuously so that you can remain in the present. If you can remain in the present, you cannot go out of your original mind. The original mind knows no past and no future.
What you call the mind is nothing but past and future, past and future - a swing between past and future - and your mind never stops here-now. That's the meaning of meditation: to get out of the past, not create the future, and remain with the reality that is available here-now. Remain with it.
Suddenly, you will see there is no mind between you and the reality, between you and that which is, because mind cannot exist in the present. You cannot think about it, because the moment you think about anything it is already the past, or, it is not yet present. Thinking needs time. Hence, the sutra, that only through meditation does one come to the original mind.
Meditation is not thinking; it is dropping of thinking.
I have heard:
An old tramp was on the dole and he was asked what he did all day long. "Well," he said, "sometimes I sits and thinks and other times I just sits."
That 'just sits' is exactly the meaning of meditation. In Japan they call meditation zazen. 'Zazen' means: just sitting and doing nothing, just being and doing nothing; in a state of suspended mentation.
And clouds open, and you can see the open space, the blue sky. Once you know how to move in that space, it is available always. You can go on working and whenever you want, you can have a dip inside. It becomes so easy, as if you move inside the house and outside the house. Once you know the door, there is no problem in it. You don't even think about it. When it is feeling too hot, you move inside the house, into the coolness and the shelter. When it is feeling too cold and you are freezing, you move out of the house into the hot sun. You become fluid between the inner and the outer.
The mind is blocking the path to the inner. Whenever you go within yourself, again and again you find some layer of mind: some thought fragment, some desire, some planning, some dream, something of the future or something of the past. And remember, future is nothing but a projection of the past.
Future is again asking for the past in a slightly modified way, a little better. In the past you had happinesses and unhappinesses, pleasures and pains, thorns and flowers. Your future is nothing but flowers, thorns deducted, pains dropped - just pleasures and pleasures and pleasures. You go on sorting out your past, and whatsoever you feel was good and beautiful, you project it into the future.
Once you know how to get out of the past, future automatically disappears. There being no past inside, there cannot be any future. Past produces the future. Past is the mother of the future, the womb. When there is no past and no future, then what is, is. Then what is, is! Then suddenly, you are in eternity.
This is what the original mind is: with no flicker of thought, no cloud in sight, no dust around you.
Just pure space.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #3
Chapter title: Returning To The Original Mind
Returning To The Original Mind
But the Rock cried out, "I can't hide you!"
TATRA DHYANAJAM ANASAYAM.
ONLY THE ORIGINAL MIND ... IS FREE FROM DESIRES.
It's because the original mind is free from the past, free from experiences. When you are free from experiences, how can you desire? Desire cannot exist without the past. Just think: if you don't have any past, how can you desire? What will you desire? To desire anything, experience - an accumulated experience - is needed. If you cannot desire you will be in a vacuum - tremendously beautiful emptiness.
Only the original mind is free from desires, so don't fight with desires. That fight will not lead you anywhere because to fight with desires you will have to create anti-desires. And they are as much desires as other desires. Don't fight with desires; see the fact. The original mind cannot be found through fighting with desires. You may find a better mind, but not the original mind. You may have a sinner's mind, and if you fight with it, you may gain a saint's mind; but the saint is nothing but sinner upside-down.
Sinners and saints are not separate beings; they are two aspects of the same coin. You can turn the coin this way or that. A sinner can become the saint any moment, and the saint can become the sinner any moment. And the sinner is always dreaming of becoming a saint, and the saint is always afraid of falling again back into the mire of sin. They are not separate; they exist together. In fact, if all sinners disappeared from the world, there will be no possibility for saints. They cannot exist without sinners.
Nina Simone - Sinnermanhttps://youtu.be/QH3Fx41Jpl4
I have heard:
A priest was going to his church. On the way, by the side of the road, he saw a man who had been stabbed, almost dying. Blood was flowing. He rushed, but when he went near and saw the man's face, he shrank back. He knew this face well. This man was nobody else but the devil himself. He had a picture in his church of the devil. But the devil said, "Have compassion on me. And you talk about compassion, and you talk about love! And have you forgotten? Many times you have been preaching in your church,'Love your enemy.' I am your enemy; love me."
Even the priest could not deny the validity of the argument. Yes, who is more an enemy than a devil? For the first time he became aware, but still he could not bring himself to help a dying devil.
He said, "You are right, but I know that the devil can quote scriptures. You cannot befool me. It is good that you are dying. It is very good; the world will be better if you die." The devil laughed, a very devilish laugh and he said, "You don't know; if I die, you will be nowhere. You will have to die with me. And now I am not quoting scripture, I am talking business. Without me where will you be, and your church, and your God?" Suddenly, the priest understood. He took the devil on his shoulders and went to the hospital. He had to, because even God cannot exist without the devil.
Without the sinner, the saint cannot exist. They feed upon each other, they protect each other, they defend each other. They are not two separate things; they are two poles of the same phenomenon.
The original mind is not a mind. It is neither the mind of the sinner nor the mind of the saint. The original mind has no mind in it. It has no definition, no boundary;It is so pure that you cannot even call it pure, because to call anything pure you have to bring the concept of impurity in. Even that will contaminate it. It is so pure, so absolutely pure that there is no point in saying that it is pure.
ONLY THE ORIGINAL MIND WHICH IS BORN OF MEDITATION IS FREE FROM DESIRES.
Now, tatra dhyanajam - 'born out of meditation' is a literal translation, but something is missed in it. Sanskrit is a very poetic language. It is not just a language, it is not just a grammar; it is more a poetry, a very condensed poetry. If it is rightly translated, if the sense is translated and not only the letter, then I will translate 'which is re-born of meditation'; not just born, because the original mind is not born. It is already there, just re-born; it already there, just re-cognized; it is already there, just rediscovered. God is always a rediscovery. Your own being is already there. It cannot be emphasized too much: it is already there; you reclaim it. Nothing new is born, because the original mind is not new, is not old; it is eternal, always and always and always.
Anasayam means: without any motivation, without any support, without any cause, without any ground.
TATRA DHYANAJAM ANASAYAM.
The original mind exists without any motivation. It exists without any cause. It exists without any support: anasayam literally means without any support. It exists without any ground, groundless.
It exists in itself, it has no outward support. It has to be so because the ultimate cannot have any support - because the ultimate means the total - nothing is outside it. You can think that you are sitting on the earth, and then the earth is being supported by some magnetic forces in the planetary system, and the planets are supported by some other magnetic force of some super-sun. But the whole cannot have any support, because from where will the support come?
The total cannot have any grounding to it.
You go to the market; of course, you have a motivation: you go to earn money. You come home; you have certain motivation: to rest. You eat food because you are hungry; there is a cause to it.
You have come to me - there is a motivation; you are in search of something. It may be vague, clear, known, not known, but the motivation is there. But what can be the motivation of the total?
It is unmotivated, it is desireles - because motivation will bring something from the outside. That's why Hindus call it leela, a play. A play comes from the inside: you are just going for a walk - there is no motivation, not even health. A health fanatic never goes for a walk; he cannot go because he cannot enjoy the very walk. He's calculating, "How many miles?" He's calculating, "How many deep breaths?" He's calculating, "How much perspiration?" He's calculating. He is taking the morning walk as work to be done, as an exercise. It is not just a play.
The English word 'illusion' is almost always used as a translation for the Eastern word 'maya'.
Ordinarily, the word 'illusion' means unreal, but that is not its true meaning. It comes from a Latin root, ludere, which means to play. 'Illusion' simply means a play, and that is the real meaning of maya.
Maya does not mean illusory; it simply means playful: God is playing with Himself. Of course, He was nobody except Himself, so He is playing a hide-and-seek with Himself. He hides one of His hands and tries to find it with another hand, knowing all the time where it is.
The original mind is unmotivated, with no cause, no agenda, no goal to be achieved.
Other minds, which are not original, but imposed upon, are, of course, motivated. And because of motivation, we cultivate them. If you want to become a doctor you will have to cultivate a certain mindset in order for you to become a doctor. If you want to become an engineer, you will have to cultivate another sort of mind. If you want to become a poet, you cannot cultivate the mind of a mathematician. Then you will have to cultivate the mind of a poet.
So whatsoever is your motivation, you create a certain mind for that purpose.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #3
Chapter title: Returning To The Original Mind
I have heard:
A lady was seated on a bus with her son. She bought a single ticket. The conductor addressed the boy, "How old are you, little fellow?"
"I am four," answered the lad.
"And when will you be five?" asked the conductor.
The boy glanced at his mother, who was smiling her approval of the conversation, and said, "As soon as when I get off this bus."
He has been taught to say something but still he cannot understand the motivation. He has been taught to say 'four years-old' to ride for free, but he does not know the motivation of it, so he repeats like a parrot.
Every child is more in tune with the original mind than grownups. Look at children, playing, running around: you will not find any motivation in particular. They are enjoying, and if you ask for what, they will shrug their shoulders. It is almost impossible to communicate with grown-ups. The children simply feel it almost impossible; there exists no bridge, because the grown-up asks a very silly question: "For what?"
The grown-up lives with a certain economic mind. You do something to earn something. Children are not yet aware of this constant motivation. They don't know the language of desire, they know the language of playfulness. That's the meaning when Jesus says, "You will not be able to enter into the kingdom of God unless you are like small children." He's saying that unless you become a child again, unless you drop motivation and become playful.... Remember, work has never led anybody to God. And people who are working their path towards God will go on moving in a circle in the market-place; they will never reach Him. He is playful, and you have to be playful.
Suddenly, communion; suddenly, a bridge.
Meditate playfully, don't meditate seriously. When you go into the meditation hall, leave your serious faces where you leave your shoes. Let meditation be fun. 'Fun' is a very religious word; 'seriousness' is very irreligious. If you want to attain to the original mind, you will have to live a very non-serious, though sincere life; you will have to transform your work into play; you will have to transform all your duties into love. 'Duty' is a dirty word; of course, a four-letter word.
Avoid duty. Bring more love to function. Change your work more and more into a new energy which you can enjoy, and let your life be more of a fun, more of a laughter, and less of desire and motivation. The more you are motivated, the more you will cling to a certain mind. You have to, because the motivation can be fulfilled only by a certain mind. And if you want to drop all mind - and all minds are to be dropped - only then do you attain to your innermost nature, your spontaneity. It is totally different, a different language from desire.
Let me tell you one anecdote.
There was a case against Mulla Nasrudin in the court. After hearing the early part of the evidence in a case brought before the County Court, the judge directed that the remainder of the case should be heard 'in camera'. Mulla Nasrudin, the defendant, objected on the grounds that he did not know the meaning of the word 'in camera', but the judge over-ruled the objections, saying, "I know what it means, the defending counsel knows what it means, the prosecution knows what it means, and the jury knows what it means; now clear the Court."
This having been done, counsel for the defense asked Mulla Nasrudin, the defendant, to tell the court in his own words what had happened on the night in question. "Well," said Mulla Nasrudin, "I was walking this girl home along a country lane and we decided to take a short-cut across a field. Half-way across the field, she seemed tired, so we sat down for a rest. It was a nice summer's night and I felt a bit romantic, so I gave her a kiss, and she gave me a kiss, and I gave her a kiss, and she gave me a kiss, and ten minutes later, hi-tiddly-hi-tee."
The judge said, "Hi-tiddly-hi-tee? What on earth does that mean?"
"Well," answered Nasrudin, "the defending counsel knows what it means, the prosecuting counsel knows what it means, and the jury knows what it means - and if you had been there with your camera, you would know what it means, too!"
Desire has its own language, motivation has its own language, and all languages are of desire and motivation - different desires. For example, Christianity has its own language for a certain desire. It is not religion. Hinduism has a language for some other desire, but it is not a religion; and so on and so forth.
The original mind has no language. You cannot reach to it by being a Hindu, a Christian, a Mohammedan, a Jaina, a Buddhist, no. These are all desires. Through them you want to attain something. They represent your greed projected.
The original mind is known when you drop all desiring, all languages, all minds. And you suddenly don't know who you are. A religious person is one who has dropped all his identity with any pattern of thinking and is simply standing there naked, alone, surrounded by existence without any dressing, without any covering of language and minds - an onion, peeled completely; emptiness has come into the hands.
TATRA DHYANAJAM ANASAYAM.
ONLY THE ORIGINAL MIND WHICH IS BORN OF MEDITATION IS FREE FROM DESIRES.
So how to attain to this original mind? Now, one of the most important problems in religion has to be understood: the original mind is free from desires, and the way to attain it is to become desireless.
A problem arises for the thinking intellect: what is primary? - whether we have to drop the desires, and then can we attain the original mind? But then the problem arises that if only the desires are dropped when the original mind is attained, then how can we drop desires before it is attained? Or, if the original mind has to be attained, then desires drop of themselves, of their own accord, as a consequence of it. Then we have to attain the original mind when desires are still there, and the original mind cannot be attained without dropping desires, so a paradox arises. But the paradox is only because your intellect divides.
In fact, the original mind and being desireless are not two things; it is just one phenomenon talked about in two ways. It is just one energy - call it desirelessness or call it the original mind - it is not two things. It happens simultaneously; this I know.
Unless the original mind is attained you cannot become absolutely desireless, but you can become ninety-nine point nine per cent desireless, and that is the way. You start understanding your desires.
Through understanding, many of them simply disappear because they are simply stupid. They have not led you anywhere except into more and more frustration. They have opened doors for hell and nothing else - more anguish, more anxiety, more pain and agony. Just look at them; they will disappear. First, desires which have led you into frustration will disappear, and then you will attain to a more keen perspective. Then you will see that desires which you have been thinking up to now, desires which have led you into pleasure, have also not led you into pleasure - because whatsoever seems to be pleasant finally, eventually, turns sour and bitter.
So pleasure seems to be a trick of desire: to trick you into pain. First the painful will drop, and then you will be able to see that the pleasure is illusory, unreal, a dream. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of desires will disappear through understanding, and then the final happens. It happens simultaneously: a hundred per cent of desires disappear, and the original mind arises in a single moment, not as cause and effect, but simultaneous, together.
It is better to use Carl Gustav Jung's term for it: synchronicity. They are not related as cause and effect. They appear together simultaneously, and that too has to be said that way because I have to use language. Otherwise they are one, two faces of the same coin. If you look through understanding, meditation, you will call it the original mind. If you look through your desires, passions, you will call it desirelessness. When you call it desirelessness it simply shows that you have been comparing it with desire; when you call it the original mind, it simply shows that you have been comparing it with the mechanical minds, but you are talking about one and the same thing.
Wherever you are, you are in a mechanical mind. Whoever you are, you are in a mechanical mind, imprisoned. Don't feel sorry for yourself. That's natural. Every child has to learn something; that creates mind. And every child has to learn ways to survive in the world; that creates the mind. Don't feel angry against your parents or against your society; that is not going to help. In love they have helped you; it was natural.
You needed a mind to survive, and every society tries to force every child because all children, as born, are wild. They have to be tamed, they have to be framed. They come frameless. It will be difficult for them to survive and live in a world where much struggle goes on, where survival is a continuous problem. They have to become efficient in certain ways to protect themselves. They have to be armoured, protected, sealed against the inimical forces in the world. They have to be taught to behave like others; they have to be taught to be imitative. The mechanical mind is created through imitation. The original mind is created by dropping imitation.
I have heard:
Three ghosts were playing cards when a fourth ghost opened the door and came in. The draft from the outside blew all the cards on the floor. The new ghost was a child ghost - very young, very new to the world of the ghosts.
One of the ghosts looked up and said, "Can't you use the keyhole like everybody else?"
Now even ghosts have to be trained: "There is no need to open the door; come through the keyhole as everybody is doing!"
That's how parents go on teaching you - imitate - and those who are great imitators are appreciated. A child who does not imitate is punished. A rebellious child is punished, an obedient child is praised.
Obedience is thought to be a great value, and rebellion a great disvalue. The whole society tries to make you obedient, forces you: through awards, through punishments, fear, appreciation, ego- enhancement. There are a thousand and one ways to force you to just imitate others, because that is the only way to give you a frame, to give you a narrowness, to give you a tamed discipline. But of course, this is at a very great cost. It had to happen, it has happened, and there was no other way. Nobody could have avoided it, and I don't see that there will ever be a possibility of avoiding it completely. More or less, it will be there.
People ask me, if I had to teach children, what would I teach them? But whatsoever you teach them will give them a mind. You can teach them rebellion, but that too will give them a mind. They will start imitating the rebellious people. Again they will be framed.
Krishnamurti has a few schools around the world to teach children so that they don't become imitators - but they become imitators all the same. They start imitating Krishnamurti. The problem is very subtle. When you teach the children not to imitate, they start imitating you; they say, "Don't imitate!" You teach them that imitation is a disvalue, and of course, you use the same means. If they imitate they are condemned; everybody looks down upon them. If they become rebellious, they are appreciated. It is the same mechanism of award and punishment, of fear and greed. They become imitation rebels, but how can a rebel be an imitator?
There is no way to avoid the mind, but there is a way to come out of it. It has to be accepted as a necessary evil of being born in a society, of being born out of parents. It is a necessary evil to be tolerated. Of course, make it as loose as possible, that's all. Make it as liquid as possible, that's all.
A good society is the society which gives you a mind, and yet keeps you alert that one day this mind has to be dropped - "This is not any ultimate value; it has to be gone through but gone beyond also.
It has to be transcended." A mind has to be given, but there is no need to give an identity with the mind. If the identity remains a little relaxed, when people are grown up they will be able to come out of it more easily, with less pain, less agony, less effort.
Whether you are rich or poor, whether you are white or black, whether you are educated or uneducated, it makes no difference; we are in the same boat: the boat of the artificial mind. And that's the problem. So you can become rich from being poor, or you can renounce your riches and can become a beggar, a Buddhist bhikkhu, a monk, but that will not change you. You will still remain in the same boat. You will simply be changing roles. You will be changing personalities, but your essence will remain confined.
I have heard:
The millionaire saw the old tramp wandering around his garden and shouted to him, "Get out of here this minute!"
The tramp said, "Look here mister, the only difference between you and me is that you are making your second million, while I'm still working on my first - not much of a difference."
The poor man, the rich man, the educated, the uneducated, the cultured, the uncultured, the civilized, the primitive, the Western, the Eastern, the Christian, the Hindu: it makes no difference.
Differences may be of some quantity, but not of quality. We are all in the mind, and the whole of religion is an effort to get beyond it.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #3
Chapter title: Returning To The Original Mind
KARMASUKLAKRSNAM YOGINAS TRI-VIDHAM ITARESAM.
THE YOGI'S KARMAS ARE NEITHER PURE NOR IMPURE, BUT ALL OTHERS ARE THREE- FOLD: PURE, IMPURE, AND MIXED.
This is something which has been very, very difficult to be understood in the West, because in the West only two categories exist: pure and impure, the saintly and the sin, the divine and the devilish, heaven and hell, black and white. The whole West follows the Aristotelian logic, and it has not yet come to be aware of something transcendental which goes beyond both and is neither. Sutras like this are very difficult to be understood by a Western mind because the mind has a certain frame.
The frame says, "How is it possible? - a man is either good or bad! How can a man be possible, a mind be possible, which is neither? - you will be either good or bad."
The dichotomy, the dualism - either this or that - is very clear in the Western mind. It is analytical.
The sutra says,
"The yogi's karmas are neither pure nor impure because they come out of the original mind."
Now, many things are implied here.
You see somebody dying and immediately, in the Aristotelian mind, a problem arises: if God is good, why death; if God is good, why poverty; if God is good, why cancer? If God is good, then everything has to be good. Otherwise, doubt arises. Then God cannot be. Or, if He is, then He cannot be good.
And how can you call a God 'God' who is not even good? So the whole of Christian theology, for centuries, has been working out this problem; how to explain it away? But it is impossible - because with the Aristotelian mind it is impossible. You can avoid it, but you cannot completely dissolve it because it arises out of the very structure of that mind.
In the East we say that God is neither good nor bad, so whatsoever is happening, is happening.
There is no moral value in it. You cannot call it good or bad. You call it 'such', as in 'such are the way things are', it is because you have a certain mind. It is in reference to your mind that something becomes good and something becomes bad.
Now look.... Adolf Hitler was born; if the mother had killed Adolf Hitler, would it have been good or bad? Now, we can see that if the mother had killed Adolf Hitler, it would have been very good for the world. Millions of people were killed; it would have been better to kill one person. But if the mother had killed Adolf Hitler she would have been punished tremendously. She might have been given a life sentence, or she might have been shot by the government, by the court, by the police.
And nobody would have said that the government was wrong, because it is a sin to kill a child. But do you see the implications? Then Adolf Hitler killed millions of people. He had almost brought the world to the very verge of death. Nobody has been such a calamity ever before. All Genghis Khans' and Tamburlaines become pale before him. He was the greatest murderer ever. But what to say? - whether he did well, or not, is still difficult because life is never complete, and unless it is complete how can you evaluate it? Maybe whatsoever he did was good. Maybe he cleaned the earth of all wrong people - who knows? And who can decide it? Maybe without him the world would have been worse than it is.
Whatsoever we say is good is just according to a certain narrow mind. Whatsoever we say is bad is also according to a certain narrow mind.
There is a Taoist fable:
A man had a very beautiful horse, so precious that even the emperor was envious and jealous. Many times offers had come to him, and people were ready to pay whatsoever amount of money he expected or asked. But the old man would laugh. He would say, "I love the horse and how can you sell your love? So thank you for your offer, but I cannot sell it."
Then one day, in the night the horse was stolen, or something happened. The horse was not found in the stable the next morning. The whole town gathered and they said, "Now look, silly old man! - the horse is gone. And you could have become very rich. Such a calamity has never happened in this town. And you are poor and old. You should have sold it; you did wrong."
The old man laughed. He said, "Don't go into evaluations, and don't say anything about good or bad, and don't talk about calamity or blessing. I know only one thing: that last night the horse was in the stable, this morning he is not there, that's all. But I don't say anything about it. Just remain with the fact: the horse is not in the stable - finished. Why bring any mind to it? - whether it is good or bad, whether it should not have happened, whether it is a calamity; forget all about it."
The people were shocked. They felt insulted that they had come to show their sympathy, and this fool was talking philosophy! - "So it has been good. This man needed to be punished, and Gods are always just."
But after fifteen days, the horse came back. It had not been stolen; it had escaped to the forest. And there came twelve other horses with it - wild horses, very beautiful, very strong. The whole town gathered. They said, "This old man knows something.... He was right; it was not a calamity. We were wrong." And they said, "We are sorry. We could not understand the whole situation, but it is a great blessing. Not only is your horse back, but twelve other horses! And we have never seen such beautifully strong horses. You will gather a lot of money."
The old man said again, "Don't bother about whether it is a blessing or a calamity. Who knows? Future is unknown, and we should not say anything unless we know the future. You are again making the same mistake. Just say,'The horse is back, and is back with twelve other horses,' that's all."
They said, "Now don't try to befool us. We know you have gathered a lot of money."
But after a week, the only son of the old man was teaching a horse, a wild horse, trying to tame it. He fell down from the horse. All over he was broken - many fractures. He was the only support of the old man, and the people said, "This old man knows, really knows... now this is a great calamity. This coming of the horse has been a misfortune. The only support in his old age, his son, is almost dead. He had been supporting the old man; now the old man will have to serve the young man because he will remain in the bed for his whole life. And he was just going to be married. Now the marriage will be impossible!"
And they gathered again, and again they spoke, and the old man said, "How to tell you? You go on doing the same thing again and again. Only say this much: that my young son has many fractures, that's all. Why move in the future? Why do you go so fast into the future? And you have seen for these few days that again and again you were wrong, but again and again you go off from the present and you start evaluating."
And it happened that after a few days, the country went to war with a neighboring country, and all the young men of the town were forcibly taken into the army. Only this old man's son was left because he had fractures. They again gathered, but before they gathered the old man said, "Keep quiet! When will you understand? - life is complex."
This is the Eastern attitude, in essence.
The yogi lives in the original mind, in suchness. Whatsoever happens, happens; he never evaluates it. And he does not do anything on his own accord, he becomes just a vehicle of the whole. The whole flows through him. He becomes like a hollow bamboo, a flute. The yogi carries that which comes from God, from the total. That's why Krishna says to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, "Don't be worried, and don't think in terms that whatsoever you are going to do will be violence and you will kill so many people. If God wills it, let it be so. If He wants to kill, He will kill, whether through you or through somebody else. In fact," Krishna says, "He has already killed. You are just instrumental, so don't become too identified with your actions. Remain a witness."
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #3
Chapter title: Returning To The Original Mind
Edited Sept 2 by turiya
Whatsoever ordinary people are doing - by 'ordinary' I mean people who have not attained to their innermost core of being; people who are living with their minds are ordinary, who are living with their ideas and thoughts and ideologies and scriptures, whatsoever they are doing - either their actions are pure, or their actions are impure, or their actions are mixed; but their actions are not spontaneous, not original. They react, they don't act. Their response is a reaction. It is not an overflowing of energy. They are not available to this moment, right now.
Somebody asked Lin Chi, a Zen Master, "If somebody comes and attacks you, what will you do?"
He shrugged his shoulders. He said, "Let him come, and I will see. I cannot be prepared beforehand. I don't know. I may laugh, or I may weep, or I may jump and kill that man. Or, I may not bother about it at all. But I don't know. Let the man come. The moment will decide, not I. The whole will decide, not I. How can I say what I will do?"
An enlightened man does not live through the mind. He has no frame around him. He is vast emptiness. Nobody knows how God will act through him in that moment. He will not interfere - that's all - because there is nobody to interfere. Mind interferes; he is no more a mind. He will not try to do something which he thinks is good, and he will not try to avoid something which he thinks is bad. He will not try anything. He will be simply in the hands of the divine and let the thing happen.
He will not interpret later on that whatsoever has happened is good or bad. No, an enlightened man never looks back, never evaluates, never looks ahead, never plans. Whatsoever the moment... and he allows the moment to decide. In that moment, everything converges. The whole existence takes part, so nobody knows.
Lin Chi said, "If somebody attacks me, nobody knows. It will depend. That somebody may be Gautam Buddha, and if he attacks me I will laugh. I may touch his feet at how compassionate it is of him to attack me, poor Lin Chi. But it will depend on the moment, on so many things that it is unpredictable."
Just at the beginning of this [last] century, in the year 1900, a great scientist, Max Planck, came to make one of the greatest discoveries ever. He came to feel and he came to discover that existence seems to be discontinuous, that it is not a continuity. It is not as if you pour oil from one pot into another.
Then the oil has a continuity; it falls in a continuous stream. Max Planck said, "Existence is such: as if you are pouring peas from one carton into another - discontinuous - each pea falling separately."
He said, "The whole life is discontinuous. These discontinuous elements he calls 'quanta'." That is his Theory of Quantum. 'Quanta' means: each thing is separate from each other thing, and discontinuous, and between two things there is a space. Now, that space is holding everything because two things are not connected, two atoms are not connected between themselves. The space, the emptiness is holding both. They are not connected directly, they are connected through space. Still, nobody has tried some parallel theory about mind, but exactly the same is the case.
Two thoughts are not connected with each other, and thoughts are discontinuous. One thought, another thought, another thought, and between these thoughts, there are gaps, very small gaps - that is your inner space. That's what original mind is - the space between thoughts. One cloud passes, another cloud passes; between the two is the sky. One thought passes, another passes; between the two is the original mind. If you think your thoughts are continuous, then you think of yourself as a mind.
In fact, there is nothing like a mind - only thoughts, discontinuous thoughts wandering within you, moving so fast that you cannot see the gaps. These thoughts are held by your inner space. Atoms are supported by the outer space, thoughts are supported by the inner space. If you count matter, you become a materialist; if you count your thoughts, you become a mentalist. But mind and matter, both are false. They are processes, discontinuous. And I would like to say to you that this is yoga's ultimate synthesis: that the inner space and the outer space are not two. Your original mind and God's original mind are not two. Your artificial mind is different from God, but your original mind is nothing different. It is the same.
DESIRES ARISE FROM THESE THREE-FOLD KARMAS WHEN CIRCUMSTANCES ARE FAVORABLE FOR THEIR FULFILLMENT.
If you do a pure karma, a good act, a saintly act, then desires will arise, of course, to do more good. If you do an impure act, desires will arise to do more impure acts, because whatsoever you do creates a certain habit in you to repeat it. People go on repeating. Whatsoever you have done, you become skillful in doing it. If you do a mixed act, of course a mixed desire arises in which good and bad are both mixing. But all are artificial minds. Even the mind of the saint is still a mind.
I have heard:
Abe Cohen, a great businessman, a Jew, was convicted of murder before the ending of capital punishment. The prison warden visited him on the morning of his execution. "Mr. Cohen," he said, "it will cost this country 100 pounds to hang you."
"Bad business," said Abe. "Give me 95 pounds, and I will shoot myself."
A businessman is a businessman. He goes on thinking in terms of business, in terms of money. He has become skillful about it. Just watch whatsoever you have been doing - you have a tendency to repeat it, unawares, unconsciously. You go on repeating the same things again and again and again, and of course, the more you repeat, the more you are caught in the habit. A time comes when even if you want to leave the habit, the habit has become so deep-rooted that you want to leave it, but it does not want to leave you.
I have heard:
It happened. A certain teacher, out of indigence, wore only thin cotton cloth in the winter. A storm carried a bear down from the mountains by way of the river. Its head was hidden in the water.
The children, seeing only the back of the bear, cried, "Teacher, look! A fur-coat has fallen into the water, and you are cold. Go and fetch it!"
The teacher, in the extremity of his need, leapt into the river to catch the fur coat. The bear quickly attacked him and caught him. "Teacher," the boys shouted from the bank, "either grasp the coat, or let it go and come out!"
"I am letting the fur coat go," shouted the teacher, "but the fur coat is not letting me go!"
That's the problem with habits: first you cultivate them, then, by and by, they have become almost a second nature to you. Then you want to drop them, but it is not so easy to drop them. What to do?
You will have to become more aware.
Habits cannot be dropped. There are only two ways to drop them: one is to change the habit for a substitute habit - but that is just changing one problem for another, it is not going to help much; the other is to become more aware. Whenever you repeat a habit, become aware. Even if you have to repeat it, repeat it, but repeat with a witnessing, an alertness, an awareness. That awareness will make you separate from the habit, and the energy that you go on giving to the habit unknowingly, will not be given anymore. By and by, the habit will shrink; the water will not be flowing through it, the channel will be blocked. By and by, it will disappear.
Never try to change one habit into another, because all habits are unconsciously repeated. Even good habits are bad, because they are habits. Don't try to change impure habits into pure habits. It is good for the society that you change your bad habits into good habits. Rather than going to the pub every day, if you go to the church or to the temple every day, it is good for the society. But as far as you are concerned it is not going to help much. You have to go beyond habits. Then it is helpful.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #3
Chapter title: Returning To The Original Mind
The first question:
WHILE TALKING ABOUT WISDOM, INSIGHTS, AND ENLIGHTENMENT, YOU OFTEN SAY 'WE IN THE EAST'. PLEASE EXPLAIN THE MEANING OF THIS PHRASE.
By saying 'WE IN THE EAST' it has nothing to do with the actual EAST. Using the phrase 'The East' is just symbolic of the inner space, of the inner world of consciousness. 'EAST' is symbolic of religion, WEST is symbolic of science. So even if in the East a person attains to a scientific attitude, he becomes Western. He may live in the East, he may be born in the East - that doesn't matter. Or, whenever a person attains to religious consciousness - he may be born in the West, it makes no difference - he begins to be a part of the East. Jesus, Francis, Eckhart, Boehme, Wittgenstein, even Henry Thoreau, Emerson, Swedenborg - they are all Eastern. The East is symbolic, always remember. I am not concerned with geography.
So whenever I say 'we in the East', I mean all who have come to know the inner reality. And whenever I say 'you in the West', I simply mean the scientific mind, the technological mind, the Aristotelian mind: rational, mathematical, scientific, but not intuitive; objective but not subjective.
Once you understand it, then there will be no problem. All the great religions were born in the East.
The West has not yet produced a great religion. Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Tao: they were all produced in the East. It is something like a feminine mind, and it has to be so because on every level there is a meeting of yin and yang, the male and the female. The circle has to be divided. The East functions as a feminine part, the West functions as a male part.
The male mind is aggressive; science is aggressive. The feminine mind is receptive; religion is receptive. Science tries hard. It forces nature to reveal its secrets. Religion simply waits, prays and waits, invokes but does not force; calls, cries, weeps, persuades, almost seduces nature to reveal its mysteries and secrets, but the effort is feminine. Hence, meditation. When the effort is male, aggressive, it is like the laboratory: all sorts of instruments to torture nature, to force nature to reveal its secrets, to hand over the key. The male mind is an attack. The male mind is a rapist mind, and science is a rape. Religion is the mind of a lover; it can wait. It can wait infinitely.
So whenever I say 'we in the East', I mean all, wherever they were born, wherever they were brought up. They are spread all over the world. The East is spread all over the world, just as the West is spread all over the world. When somebody from India gets a Nobel prize for his scientific discoveries, he is a Western mind. He's no more part of the East, he's no more part of the Eastern tradition. He has changed his home, he has changed his address. Now he has fallen in line, in the queue with Aristotle.
The East is within you, and we call it 'East' because East is nothing but the rising sun: awareness, consciousness, alertness.
So never be confused whenever I say 'we in the East'. I don't mean the countries that are in the East, no. I mean the consciousness that is Eastern. I don't mean India when I use the word 'India'.
It is a bigger thing for me. It is not just on the map as other countries. It is simply symbolic of the tremendous energy that India has put into the inner search. So wherever you are born, if you start moving towards God, you become Indian. Suddenly, your pilgrimage towards India starts. You may come to India or you may not come; that is not the point. But you have started your pilgrimage.
And the day you realize, suddenly you will become part of Gautam Buddha, Mahavir the Jaina, the Upanishadic seers, the rishis of the Vedas, Krishna, Patanjali. Suddenly, you are no more part of the technological mind, the logical mind; you have become supra-logical.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #4
Chapter title: Everything Is Interdependent
11. BEING BOUND TOGETHER AS CAUSE-EFFECT, THE EFFECTS DISAPPEAR WITH THE DISAPPEARANCE OF CAUSES.
12. PAST AND FUTURE EXIST IN THE PRESENT, BUT THEY ARE NOT EXPERIENCED IN THE PRESENT BECAUSE THEY ARE ON IDFFERENT PLANES.
13. WHETHER MANIFEST OR UNMANIFEST, THE PAST, THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE ARE OF THE NATURE OF GUNAS: STABILITY, ACTION AND INERTIA.
14. THE ESSENCE OF ANY OBJECT CONSISTS IN THE UNIQUENESS OF THE PROPORTIONS OF THE THREE GUNAS.
15. THE SAME OBJECT IS SEEN IN DIFFERENT WAYS BY DIFFERENT MINDS.
16. AN OBJECT IS NOT DEPENDENT ON ONE MIND.
17. AN OBJECT IS KNOWN OR UNKNOWN DEPENDING ON WHETHER THE MIND IS COLORED BY IT OR NOT.
The first sutra:
BEING BOUND TOGETHER AS CAUSE-EFFECT, THE EFFECTS DISAPPEAR WITH THE DISAPPEARANCE OF CAUSES.
Avidya, ignorance of one's own being, is the basic cause of the world. Once avidya, the ignorance of one's own being, disappears, the world also disappears - not the world of objects, but the world of desires; not the world that is outside you, but the world that you have been constantly projecting from the inside. The world of your dreams, illusions, projections, immediately disappears the moment ignorance disappears within you.
This has to be understood: ignorance is not simply lack of knowledge so you can go on gathering knowledge but ignorance will not disappear that way. You can become very knowledgeable, but still you will remain ignorant. In fact, knowledge functions as a protection for ignorance. Ignorance is not destroyed by knowledge. On the contrary, it is protected by it. The urge to collect knowledge, accumulate knowledge, is nothing but to hide one's own ignorance. The more you know, the more you think that now you are no longer ignorant.
There is a saying in Tibet:
Blessed are they who are ignorant, for they are happy in thinking that they know everything.
Trying to know everything is not going to help; it is missing the whole point. Trying to know one's self is enough. If you can know your own being you have known all because you participate with the whole, your nature is of the whole.
You are just like a drop of water. If you know the drop-of water totally, you have known all the oceans, past, present and future. In a single drop of water the whole nature of the ocean is present.
A man who is after knowledge continuously forgets himself and goes on accumulating information that he gets from outside of himself.
He may come to know much, but still he will remain ignorant. So, ignorance is not against knowledge; knowledge is not the antidote for ignorance. Then what is the antidote for ignorance?
Yoga says:
Awareness; not knowledge, but knowing; not focusing yourself outside, but focusing on the very faculty of knowing.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #5
Chapter title: This is It!
When a child is in the mother's womb, he is completely asleep. The first months in the mother's womb are of deep sleep, what yoga calls sushupti - sleep without any dreams. Then, by the end of the sixth or seventh month, the child starts a little dreaming. The sleep is disturbed; it is no more absolute. Something happens outside, a noise, and the child's sleep is disturbed. Vibrations reach him, and in his deep sleep a distraction arrives and he starts dreaming. The first ripples of dream arise. Dreamless sleep is the first state of consciousness.
The second state is: sleep plus dream. In the second state sleep remains, but a new faculty starts functioning: the faculty of dreaming. Then, when the child is born a third faculty arises, what we ordinarily call the state of waking. It is not really the state of waking, but a new faculty starts functioning and that faculty is of thought. The child starts thinking.
The first state was dreamless sleep: the second state was sleep plus dreaming; the third state is sleep, plus dreaming, plus thinking, but sleep still remains. Sleep has not been completely broken. You remain asleep in your thinking also. Your thinking is nothing but another way of dreaming; the sleep is not disturbed. These are the ordinary states. Rarely does a man reach higher than this third stage of thinking.
And that is the goal of yoga: to reach to a state of pure awareness, as pure as the first state is. The first state is of pure sleep, and the last state is of pure awakening, pure awareness. Once your awareness is as pure as your deep sleep, you have become a Buddha, you have attained, you have come home.
Patanjali says: samadhi, the ultimate state of awareness, is just like sleep, with one difference. It is as calm and quiet as sleep, as silent, undisturbed as sleep, as integrated and blissful as sleep, with one difference: it is fully alert. These are the points of evolution.
Ordinarily, we remain at the third. Deep down sleep continues, on top of it a layer of dreaming, on top of it another layer of thinking - but the sleep is not broken. And you can observe it; it is not a theory. You can observe the facticity of it.
At any moment you close your eyes, first you will see thoughts, a layer of thinking all around you, thoughts vibrating - one coming, another going - a crowd, a traffic. Remain silent for a few seconds, and suddenly you will see that thinking is no longer there but dreaming has started. You are dreaming that you have become the president of a country, or you have found a brick of gold on the road, or you have found a beautiful woman or a man, and suddenly you start projecting; dreams start functioning. If you continue dreaming for a long time, one moment will come when you will fall asleep - thinking, dreaming, sleep, and from sleep again to dreaming and thinking. This is how your whole life revolves.
Real awareness is not known yet, and that real awareness is what Patanjali says will destroy ignorance - not knowledge, but awareness. We collect knowledge just to befool ourselves and others.
I have heard:
In a small school it happened that a school inspector said to the class, "Who knocked down the walls of Jericho?" And one of the pupils, a lad called Billy Green, replied promptly, "Please sir, it was not me."
The inspector was amazed at this show of ignorance and brought the matter up in the headmaster's study at the end of the visit. "Do you know," he said, "I asked the class, 'Who knocked. down the walls of Jericho,' and young Billy Green said it was not him!"
The headmaster said, "Billy Green? Oh well... I must say that I have always found the lad to be honest and trustworthy, and if he says that it was not him, then it was not him."
The inspector left the school without further comment, but lost no time in reporting the full sequence of events to the Ministry of Education in a written report. In due course, he received the following reply: "Dear sir, Reference: The Walls of Jericho; this is a matter for the Ministry of Works, and your letter has been sent to them for their attention."
But nobody wants to recognize a simple fact, that they don't know. Everybody tries; whatsoever the question, everybody tries the answer. You should catch yourself red-handed many times if you try. Somebody asks something, somebody talks about something you don't know, but you start commenting, advising, saying something or other so that you are not caught ignorant, so nobody thinks that you are ignorant. But the first beginning of awareness starts with the recognition that you are ignorant. Ignorance can be destroyed, but not without recognizing it.
When P. D. Ouspensky, the great disciple of George Gurdjieff, met his Master for the first time, he was already a very famous, well known man in the world. Gurdjieff was unknown, Ouspensky was known very much already. He had already written one of the best books written in this century, TERTIUM ORGANUM. It is really a bold attempt. In fact, in this century no other man has tried such a bold speculation. With courage, Ouspensky has described his book as the third canon of thought: TERTIUM ORGANUM. The first was written by Aristotle; the second was written by Bacon. And he said, "I write the third canon of thought." He said, "The first and the second are nothing before the third. The third existed before the first." It was really a bold attempt, and not just egoistic. The claim was almost true.
When Ouspensky went to Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff looked at him. He could see the knowledgeable man who knew much, who knew that others also knew that he knew much - the subtle ego. Gurdjieff gave him a paper, a sheet of paper, and told him to go to a room on the side and write down on one side whatsoever he knew, and on the other side whatsoever he did not know. Because the work could start only when he was clear about what he knew and what he did not know.
Gurdjieff said, "Remember, whatsoever you write that you know, I will accept, and we will never talk about it again. It is finished; you know. Whatsoever you write that you don't know, we will work on it." And the first thing Gurdjieff said was to know what you know and what you don't know.
Ouspensky went into the room. He started thinking of what he knew for the first time in his life, and he could not write a single thing on the paper. He tried God, self, the world, mind, awareness - what did he know? For the first time the question was asked authentically. He knew many things about God, and he knew many things about the soul, and he knew many things about awareness, but he did not really know a thing about God. It was all information; it was not his experience. And unless something is your experience how can you say you know it?
You may know about love, but that is not knowledge really. You have to pass through love, you have to pass through the fire of love. You have to burn, you have to survive the challenge, and when you come out of love you are totally different, different from the man who had gone in. Love transforms.
Information never transforms you. Information goes on becoming an addition: whatsoever you are, it goes on adding to it. It becomes like a treasure to you but you remain the same. Experience changes you. Real knowledge is not an accumulation, it is a transformation, a mutation - the old dies and the new is born. It is hard....
Ouspensky tried as hard as possible to find at least a few things, because it was so much against his ego not to write anything. He could not even write, "I know myself." If you have not known the basic entity, yourself, then what else can you know? It was a cold night and he started perspiring. Just a moment before he was shivering with cold. His whole being was at stake. He started feeling dizzy, as if he would fall into a swoon or a fit. Long hours passed, then Gurdjieff knocked at the door and said, "Have you done anything?" And Gurdjieff could see that the man had changed. Just keeping that blank sheet of paper in his hand, sitting there - it had been a great meditation, a zazen. He gave the empty, blank paper to Gurdjieff and said, "I don't know anything. I am absolutely ignorant. Accept me as your disciple."
Gurdjieff said, "You are ready then... to recognize that one is ignorant is the first step towards wisdom."
BEING BOUND TOGETHER AS CAUSE-EFFECT, THE EFFECTS DISAPPEAR WITH THE DISAPPEARANCE OF CAUSES.
You can fight with your anger; it will be repressed and will explode somewhere again. Effects cannot be destroyed by fighting with effects. That's why yoga is not a system of morality, it is a system of awareness. The real cause has to be found. If you go on cutting and pruning the leaves of a tree it is not going to affect the tree. New leaves will come up. You will have to seek out the roots, the very cause. If you want to destroy the tree you will have to destroy the roots. With the roots destroyed, the tree will disappear. But you can go on cutting the branches; it is not going to destroy the tree.
In fact, wherever you cut one branch, three will come up. Prune a tree and it becomes denser and thicker. Cut the roots and the tree disappears.
Yoga says:
Morality goes on fighting with the effects.
You are greedy, you try to be non-greedy, but what happens? You can be non-greedy only if your greed can be diverted towards non-greed. If somebody says that if you become non-greedy you will go to heaven, and if you remain greedy you will go to hell, now what is he doing? He is giving you a new object for your greed. He is saying, "Become non-greedy; you will attain to paradise and you will be happy there forever and ever." Now, a greedy person will start thinking how to practice non-greed so he can reach to heaven.
You are afraid; fear is there. How to get rid of fear? You can be made more afraid, and so much fear can be created about fear that you start repressing it. But that is not going to make you fearless; you will simply become more afraid. A new fear will arise, the fear of fear.
You are angry. It is simple for you to become angry, and very difficult to resist the temptation. Now something can be done. Why do you become angry? Whenever your ego is hurt, you become angry.
Now it can be taught to you that a man who is controlled is respected in society. A man who does not show his anger so easily is thought to be a great man. Then your ego is being enhanced: become more disciplined and controlled, and don't be so easily tempted to become angry. Your ego is not destroyed; rather, it is strengthened. The disease may change its form, name, but the disease will remain.
Remember this: yoga is not a system of morality because it doesn't bother about effects. That's why there is no such thing as ten commandments with yoga.
People go on teaching each other without knowing the basic cause. And unless the basic cause is known, nothing can be done; the human personality remains the same; maybe a little modified here and there, polished here and there.
I have heard:
A Polish man went to the eye hospital for an eye test. Seated in front of the chart, the doctor asked him to read through the lines one at a time.
As the man got to the bottom line which read: C S V E N C J W, he hesitated. The doctor said, "Don't look so worried. If you can't read it, just try your best." The Polish man said, "Read it? I know the fellow personally!"
It is so hard to accept that you don't know, that you don't know why you are egoistic. You don't know why you get so easily angry. You don't know why greed is there. You don't know why lust is there, why fear is there. Without knowing the cause, you start fighting with the effects. You assume that you know. Many people come to me and they say, "Somehow, we would like to get rid of anger." I ask them, "Do you know the cause?" They shrug their shoulders. They say, "Just, anger is there, and I get very easily angry and it disturbs me, disturbs my relationship, makes me more tense, creates anxiety, repentance, guilt." But these are all effects.
Why, in the first place, does anger arise? - nobody asks. And this is the beauty of it: if you ask about the cause, if you inquire about the cause, you will be surprised to find out that the cause is one. There are millions of effects but the cause is one, the root is one. Anger, greed, ego, lust, fear, hatred, jealousy, envy, violence: whatsoever the effect, the cause is one. And the cause is: that you are not aware enough.
You can control anger, but that will not help you. It will be just controlling the disease within you, holding it in. It will not make you healthy. It may even make you more unhealthy.
You can see - a person who gets easily angry is never very dangerous. You can be certain that he will never commit any murder. He will never accumulate enough anger to become a murderer. Every day he catharts. Easily, with any provocation, he gets angry. That means that his steam no longer accumulates in him. He has a leaking system. Whenever there is too much steam, he lets it go.
A man who is very much controlled is a dangerous man. He goes on holding in steam; his energies become pent-up, dammed. One day or other the energies will prove more than his control. Then he will explode, then he will do something really grave. A man who easily gets angry, easily cools also.
I have heard:
"I'm sorry sir," said the clerk, "but I'm giving in my notice."
"But why?" asked his boss in surprise.
"Well sir, to tell you the truth, I can't stand your foul temper."
"Oh, come now," pleaded the boss. "I know I can be a bit grumpy at times, but you must admit that no sooner is my temper on than it is off."
"That's true sir, but also, as soon as it is off, it is on again."
But this type of man can never be a murderer. He never accumulates that much steam. People who simply get emotional are good people. They may not be very controlled, they can cry and weep and laugh, but they are good people. To be with them is better than to be with a religious man - moralistic, puritan, very collected, controlled - is dangerous.
Just a few days ago a young man had been in Teertha's encounter [therapy] group. He had taken training for many years in aikido. Now aikido, judo, karate, and all methods of ju-jitsu are disciplines of control.
You have to control yourself so much that a person becomes almost a statue, so controlled you cannot provoke him. And this man took part in the encounter group.
Now, the philosophy of an 'encounter' group is totally different. It is to bring out whatsoever is inside you. Never accumulate it. Cathart -> let it go -> act it out. Encounter and aikido are totally diametrically opposite things.
Aikido says: control - because the training of aikido is the training for a warrior. All the Japanese trainings are to make you a great warrior, and certainly they have developed methods which are tremendously dangerous. But they were meant to be so because the Japanese are very small people. Their height is very small, and they had to fight with people who were bigger than them. They had to create devices in which they could prove themselves stronger than the bigger people, stronger people, and they really found devices. The one device is to control every energy in you. It becomes a pooled-up thing. So the Japanese, the Chinese, they have lived with much control, discipline. They are dangerous. Once they attack you they will not leave you alive. Ordinarily, they will not attack you, but once they attack you, you can be certain that they will to put you down.
Now this man who had been deeply in aikido was in the encounter group, and Teertha, the therapist, must have been insisting for him to bring things out, and he would not. His whole training - he told me later on - "My whole training is to remain controlled."
Now one woman participant in the group started hitting him. She was bringing her anger out, and he remained like a statue because his whole training is to not act out. He remained like a Buddha; but not actually a Buddha, because a Buddha remains alert, not controlled. On the surface, both may look the same. A man who is controlled and a man who is aware may look the same, but deep inside they are totally different. Their energy is qualitatively different.
He became more and more angry inside, and also more and more controlled because his whole training was at stake. Then he threw a pillow at the girl, and even a pillow thrown by a man of aikido can be dangerous. He can hit you at such a delicate point, with such force, that even death can occur with a pillow. That is the whole training - one takes years - a small hit, but at the very delicate points.
The Japanese have worked out where to hit very slightly, and the person is gone. Just with a single finger they can defeat the enemy. They have found the delicate points to hit, and how to hit, and when to hit.
But then, he himself became afraid, afraid that he could kill the woman. He became so afraid that he escaped from the group and he came to me and complained. He said, "This type of group should not be allowed in the ashram. Someday, somebody may murder somebody." He's right, because the murderer in him is there. His fear is right; it is right about himself. He can be a murderer. In fact, trainings like that are trainings to make you a murderer of man, to make you a good warrior.
Remember, if you control anger, greed, and things like that, they go on accumulating in the basement of your being - and you are sitting on a volcano. Yoga has nothing to do with repression. The focus of yoga is in awareness.
BEING BOUND TOGETHER AS CAUSE-EFFECT, THE EFFECTS DISAPPEAR WITH THE DISAPPEARANCE OF CAUSES.
Find out the cause, and the cause is one. And things become simple, because you are not to fight with so many effects. You simply cut one root, the main root, and a whole tree of a thousand and one branches simply disappears, withers away. Become more aware.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #5
Chapter title: This is It!
As in a dream you can dream you are awake, in thinking you can think you are awake - but in reality, you are not. Real awakening happens only when all thoughts have disappeared - there is no cloud inside you, not a single thought floating, just pure you. It is just a purity, a clarity of perception; just a vision with no object in your vision, the whole sky empty. If you look at anything, no word arises in you.
You see a rose flower: not even this much arises in you, that "This is a beautiful flower." You simply see the rose there, you here, and between you two, no verbalization. In that silence, for the first time you know what being aware is, what is this state of wakefulness - and that cuts the root. Now try it in many ways.
One way is: when you get angry try to be aware. Suddenly, you will see that either you can be angry or you can be aware; you cannot be both together. When sexuality arises try to be aware. Suddenly, you will see that either you can be aware or you can be sexual; you cannot be both together. That will help you to see the fact: that awareness is the antidote, not control.
If you become more and more aware, energy starts moving in a totally different dimension. The same energy that was moving in anger, in greed, in sex, is freed, starts moving like a pillar of light inside you. And that awareness is the highest state of human evolution. A man becomes a god when he is aware. Unless you attain to that, your life has been a wastage. We live as if we are drunk.
Let me tell you a few anecdotes.
After a wild night in Old Mexico, the tourist woke up with a raging hangover and only a dim memory of the night before. Beside him in the bed lay a filthy, ugly, wrinkled and toothless hag. Retching with disgust, he ran to the bathroom, where he bumped into a pretty, young Mexican girl. "Hey, was I drunk last night?" he asked her. "I think you must have been," came the reply. "Otherwise you would not have married my mother."
Whatsoever you have done up to now, one day, suddenly you will see that all has gone wrong.
Whosoever you are married to, whatsoever your life has been motivated by up to now, whatsoever your desire has been up to now, one day you will become aware and see that it has always been as if you have been drunk.
John Smith was a notorious tippler. One night, after an evening on the town, he was taking a shortcut home through a cemetery when he tripped over a gravestone and fell flat on his face. He did not regain consciousness until the next morning, and the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the gravestone above his head. Now, John Smith is a common name, and the grave he was lying on happened to belong to another man with the same name. As the words 'Sacred to the Memory of John Smith' came into focus, he muttered to himself, "Well, that's me alright, but I don't remember a damned thing about the funeral!"
When a person starts meditating, he is coming out of a long drunkenness of many lives. For the first time, one cannot even believe how one has lived up to now. It seems like a nightmare - horrible.
That's why people don't even try to be aware, because the first glimpse of awareness is going to shatter, to destroy their whole life that they had been thinking had any meaning up to now. Their whole life is going to become meaningless, insignificant. The fear of awareness is the fear that it may prove your whole life wrong. That's why only very courageous people try to meditate, try to become aware. Otherwise, people just go on moving in the same vicious circle of the same desires, and the same dreams, and the same thoughts; and they come again and again back to life, and again die - from the cradle to the grave....
Just start thinking a little, contemplate about what you have been doing: repeating a few unconscious desires, repeating something which never gives you any blissfulness, which always frustrates you. Still you go on as if you are hypnotized. In fact, that's what yoga says: that we are in a deep hypnosis.
Nobody else has hypnotized us, we are hypnotized by our own minds; but we live in a hypnosis.
I have heard:
As the drunk staggered homeward, he was wracking his brains for a means of concealing his condition from his wife. Finally he thought of a bright idea: he could go in and pick up a book. "After all," he thought, "who ever heard of a drunk reading a book?" Putting his plan into action, he let himself into his house, walked straight into the lounge and sat down.
A minute later, his wife came stamping down the stairs and peered round the door. "What do you think you're doing?" she asked. "Just reading, dear," replied the drunk. "You're blind drunk again, you alcoholic idiot," ranted his wife. "Now close that suitcase and come to bed."
Whatsoever you are doing in your unconscious state, whatsoever it is, I say unconditionally, is going to be idiotic. You also feel that sometimes, but again and again you drop the subject. You don't remember it for too long because that seems to be too much of a risk.
You love a woman: if you became aware, the love might disappear because your love might be just a hypnosis, as it is ordinarily. You are ambitious, you are trying to reach to the capital to become a president or a prime minister: now you will be afraid of becoming aware, because if you become aware suddenly the whole thing will look stupid, and you have staked your whole life for it.
Just the other day I saw a picture of Senator Humphrey crying, because he had been trying for his whole life to become the President of America, and this was his last chance, and there seemed to be no possibility. So, standing before his admirers he started weeping. Tears came to his eyes and he said, "Now I am old, and this seems to be my last chance; I will never be standing again for President." Crying like a small child... your politicians are just small children playing and fighting with each other.
If you become aware, you may suddenly see the whole nonsense of your efforts. You may stop, and that 'somewhere' deep inside it is always felt. You are after money....
Once it happened:
A very rich man used to come to listen to me. Suddenly he stopped. After many months I suddenly met him on a morning walk. I asked him, "Where have you been? You have disappeared suddenly?"
He said, "Not suddenly; but I became, by and by, afraid. I will come to listen to you, but now is not the time. I am young, and listening to you, by and by, I was getting less and less ambitious. Now that will be dangerous. I have to attain my ambitions first. In my later years, when I have become old, then I will meditate, but this is not for me now. First I had come to you just out of curiosity, but by and by, I was getting caught in it. I stopped myself. It was difficult to stop, but I am a man of willpower."
You cannot become aware because you have many investments in your foolishness, in your ignorance, in your unawareness. In this sleep, in this slumber, you have invested your life, and in many things. Now, the first ray of awareness, and you will feel that your whole life has been a wastage. You are still not courageous. That's why people go on changing effects, because then there is no danger. And they never touch the root cause.
Once it happened:
I was traveling with Mulla Nasrudin. Suddenly he became aware that he had lost his ticket. He looked in all his pockets: in the coat, in the shirt, in the pants - but I was watching. He was not looking in one of his pockets. So I told him, "You are looking in every pocket, in the suitcase, in the bag and everything. Why don't you look in this pocket?"
He said, "I am afraid. If the ticket is not there then I will be done. I am leaving it so that the hope remains that if it is not anywhere, at least that pocket is still there; maybe it is there? If I look into it and it is not there, I will be finished."
You know where to look, but still you are afraid. Then you go on looking in other places just to remain occupied. You go on looking in money, in power, in prestige, in this and that, but never inside you, never in your inner being. You are afraid; it seems that if you look there and nothing is found you will be finished. But those who have looked there have always found. Not a single exception has ever happened of one who has gone within and has not found the treasure. This is one of the most universal facts. Even scientific facts are not so universal; this fact is without any exception.
Whenever, in any country, in any century, any woman or any man have looked into themselves, they have found the treasure. But one has to look, and for that a great daring is needed. You have arranged your world outside of yourself. Your love, your power, your money, your fame, your name are all outside of you. One who wants to go in will have to leave these things, will have to close his eyes; and one clings to the very end.
Life goes on frustrating you; that's a blessing. Life goes on frustrating you again and again. Life is saying, "Go within." All frustrations are simply indications that you are looking in a wrong direction.
Fulfillment is possible only in a right direction. Life frustrates you because life is a tremendous blessing. If you are satisfied outside you will be lost forever; then you will never look within. But in spite of all the frustrations you go on hoping.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #5
Chapter title: This is It!
I have heard about a man:
"Why did you quit your last job?"
"Well, the boss said I was sacked, but I did not take any notice. He was always saying that. So I went in the next day and all my things had been cleared out of my office. Then I went in the day after and my name plate had been taken off the door, and the following day I found someone else sitting in my chair. 'This is too much!' I thought to myself; so I had resigned."
But even that is not too much to the average Joe. Every day one is sacked, every day one is being fired, every day one is frustrated, each & every moment.
Whatsoever arrangements one makes, it is destroyed every moment. Whatsoever is proposed is disposed. All hopes simply prove hopeless, and all dreams turn into dust and leave a very bitter taste in the mouth. One feels continuously nauseous, but still one goes on clinging: some day, maybe, from somewhere, the dreams may be fulfilled. This is how one goes on hanging on to the very illusory world of their own projections. Unless one becomes alert and sees the hopelessness of one's own hopes, unless one drops all hoping, one will not turn within, and henceforth, will not be able to destroy the cause.
PAST AND FUTURE EXIST IN THE PRESENT, BUT THEY ARE NOT EXPERIENCED IN THE PRESENT BECAUSE THEY ARE ON DIFFERENT PLANES.
Yoga believes in eternity, not in time. Yoga says: all always is - the past is still there, hidden in the present, and the future is also there, hidden in the present - because the past cannot simply disappear and the future cannot simply appear out of nothingness. Past, present, future, all are here-now. For us, these times are divided because we cannot see the totality. We have very small slits of eyes, senses, to look at reality. We divide. Our minds divide.
If our consciousness is pure and there is no cloud in it, we will see eternity as it is. There will be no past and there will be no future. There will only be this moment, eternally this moment.
A great Zen Master, Bokuju, was dying, and his disciples gathered. The chief disciple asked, "Master, you are leaving us. People will ask us what your message was, after you are gone. Though you have been teaching us always and always, you have taught so many things, and we are ignorant people; it will be difficult for us to condense your message. So please, before you leave, give your very essence just in a single sentence."
Bokuju opened his eyes and said loudly, "This is it!" closed his eyes and died. Now after him, for centuries, people have been asking what he meant by saying, "This is it!"
He had said everything.
This... is... it...
He had given the whole message: this moment is all there is. This moment - the whole past, the whole present, the whole future, is involved in this moment. But you cannot see it in its totality because your mind is so clouded, so dusty with thought, dream, sleep; so much hypnosis, desire, motive. You cannot see. You are not total, your vision is not total.
Patanjali says,
"Once the vision is total, past and future exist in the present, but they are not experienced in the present because they are on different planes."
The past has moved on a different plane. It has become superconscious. You cannot know your future. You are closed in your small consciousness, very fragmentary. You are just like the tip of an iceberg: much is hidden deep, just beneath you, and much is hidden just above you. Just below, and above, and the whole reality surrounds you, but you are clinging to a very small consciousness. Make this consciousness greater and bigger.
That's what meditation is all about - how to make your consciousness bigger, how to make your consciousness infinite. You will only be able to know that much reality; in the same proportion will you be able to know the reality as you have consciousness. If you have infinite consciousness you will know the infinite; if you have momentary consciousness you will know the moment. On your consciousness depends everything.
WHETHER MANIFEST OR UNMANIFEST, THE PAST, THE PRESENT, AND THE FUTURE ARE OF THE NATURE OF THE THREE GUNAS: STABILITY, ACTION AND INERTIA.
We have talked in the past about the three gunas: sattva means stability, rajas means action, and tamas means inertia. Patanjali now joins past, present, and future with the three gunas. For Patanjali, everything in life and existence is somehow joined with the three gunas, the three attributes of existence. That is Patanjali's trinity. Everything consists of three things. Stability; the past is stability. That's why you cannot change your past; it has become almost stable. Now you cannot change it. There is no way to change it. It has become permanent. The present is action, rajas. The present is a continuous process, movement. Present is dynamic and future is inertia. It is still in the seed, fast asleep. In the seed the tree is asleep, is in inertia.
The future is the potential, the past is the actual, and the present is the movement of the potential towards the actual.
The past is that which has happened, the future is that which is going to happen, and the present is the passage between the two. Present is the passage of the future to become past, for the seed to become the tree.
THE ESSENCE OF ANY OBJECT CONSISTS IN THE UNIQUENESS OF THE PROPORTIONS OF THE THREE GUNAS.
Now physicists say that the electron, neutron, and proton are the basic elements, and everything is made of these. Everything is made of these three: the positive, the neutral and the negative.
That is exactly the meaning of sattva, rajas, and tamas: the positive, the neutral, and the negative - and everything is made of these three. Just the proportions differ, otherwise these are the basic elements that the whole existence consists of.
THE SAME OBJECT IS SEEN IN DIFFERENT WAYS BY DIFFERENT MINDS...
... but a different mind will see the same object in a different way.
For example, a woodcutter comes into the garden - he will not look at the flowers, he will not look at the greenery; he will be looking at the wood and the possibilities for the wood - which tree can become a beautiful table, which tree can become a door. For him, trees exist only as material for furniture. Potential furniture, that's what he will see. And if there comes a painter he will not think of furniture at all. Not even for a single moment will furniture enter into his consciousness. He will think of colors: the green, the red, the white, and thousands of colors all around. He will think of painting, of bringing these colors to canvas. If a poet comes he will not think of painting, he will think of something else. A philosopher comes and he will think still of something else. It depends on the mind. The object is always seen through the mind; the mind colors it.
A few anecdotes...
The tramp happened to call at the house of a temperance man. "I want to ask you a question," said the man to the tramp. "Do you ever take alcoholic drinks?"
"Before I answer," said the tramp, "I want to know whether it is put as an inquiry or as an invitation."
It depends... the answer will depend on the question. The tramp is trying to be safe as to whether it is an invitation or an inquiry. His 'yes' and 'no' is going to be dependent on what it is. When you see a certain thing, you don't see the thing as such.
Immanuel Kant has said that a thing in itself cannot be known, and he is right in a way. He is right because whenever you know a thing, your mind, your prejudice, your greed, your concept, your culture, your religion, are all there looking at the thing. But Immanuel Kant is not absolutely true because there is a way to look at a thing without the mind. But he was not aware of meditation at all.
That's the difference between Western philosophy and Eastern philosophy. The Western philosophy goes on thinking through the mind, and the whole effort in the East is how to drop the mind and then see things, because then things appear in their own light, in their intrinsic qualities. Then you don't project anything.
He was the laziest man in the entire town. Unfortunately, he had a bad accident: he fell off his couch at home. A doctor examined him and said, "I'm afraid I have some rather bad news for you, sir. You will never be able to work-again."
"Thank you doctor," said the lazy one. "Now what is the bad news?"
For a lazy man it is not bad news that he will never be able to work again in his life. This is good news. It depends on your interpretation. And always remember, all interpretation is false because it falsifies reality.
The man lay on the psychiatrist's couch in a state of nervous tension. "I keep having this recurring, horrible nightmare," he told the psychiatrist. "In it I see my mother-in-law chasing me with a man- eating alligator on a leash. It is really frightening. I see the yellow eyes, the dry scaly skin, the yellow, decaying and razorsharp teeth, and smell foetid heavy breath."
"It sounds pretty nasty," agreed the psychiatrist understandingly.
"That's nothing, doctor," continued the man. "Wait till I tell you about the alligator!"
Your mind is continuously projecting something. The reality functions as a screen and you go on working as a projector. A man who is learning how to be aware will learn how to drop his projections and look at facts as they are. Don't bring your mind in, otherwise you will never be able to know reality. You will remain closed in your own interpretations.
THE SAME OBJECT IS SEEN IN DIFFERENT WAYS BY DIFFERENT MINDS. AN OBJECT IS NOT DEPENDENT ON ONE MIND.
But still, Patanjali is not saying the same things as Bishop Berkeley. Berkeley says that things are absolutely dependent on mind. He says that when you go out of your room everything in the room disappears. If there is nobody to see, how can things exist? And, in a way, it is difficult to disprove him because he says, "When you come back into the room again, things appear. When you go out, they disappear because a mind is needed to interpret them."
Berkeley is saying that things are nothing but interpretations. So when you go out, of course your interpretation goes with you and there is no thing left in the room. It is very difficult to prove that he is wrong, because if you come back into the room to prove, you have come back, so things have appeared. But people have tried.
One man tried to find a few things which even Bishop Berkeley would be forced to believe.
You are sitting in a train and the train is moving, and you are not looking at the wheels, but still they are, because the train is moving. Nobody may be looking at the wheels, but you cannot deny that they are, otherwise you would not reach from one station to another. And all the passengers are inside the train but nobody is looking at the wheels, but wheels are. Of course, he was also worried about things because if all things disappear, then how will they come back again? Finally he decided that they exist in the mind of God, so even when you are not there God is looking at your furniture.
That's why it remains; otherwise it would disappear.
Berkeley's philosophy is very logical in a way. He believes in the mind, and he does not believe in matter. He says matter exists just as things exist in your dreams. In your dream you see a palace; it exists there, as real as anything you have ever seen. By the morning, when you open your eyes, it is gone. But when you dream it again it is again there. He's a perfect mayawadin -> a perfect believer in illusion, that the world is illusory.
But Patanjali is very scientific. He says that the thing is not your interpretation, though whatsoever you think about the thing is your interpretation. The thing in itself exists. When nobody comes into the garden - the carpenter, the woodcutter, the painter, the poet, the philosopher; nobody comes into the garden - still flowers flower, but without any interpretation. Nobody says they are beautiful, so they are not beautiful, they are not ugly. Nobody says they are white or red, so they are not red or white, but still they are.
Things exist in themselves, but we can know things in themselves only when we have dropped our minds. Otherwise, our minds go on playing tricks. We go on seeing things which we desire. We see only that which we want to see. It happens every day here: I talk to you; you listen to that which you want to listen to. You choose that which helps you. Your own mind is strengthened by it. If I say something which goes against you, there is every possibility you will not listen to it. Or, even if you listen to it, you will interpret it in such a way that it does not create any irritation in your mind, that it is absorbed, that you make it a part of your mind. Whatsoever you hear has to be your interpretation, because you listen from the mind.
Patanjali says:
Right listening means listening without the mind, right seeing means seeing without the mind; you are simply aware.
AN OBJECT IS KNOWN OR UNKNOWN DEPENDING ON WHETHER THE MIND IS COLORED BY IT OR NOT.
Now, one thing more: when you look at an object, your mind colors the object and the object colors your mind. That's how things are known or unknown. When you look at a flower you say, "Beautiful."
You have projected something on the flower. The flower is also projecting itself onto your mind: its color, its form. Your mind gets in tune with the form and the color of the flower; your mind gets colored by the flower. That's the only way to know a thing. If you are not colored by the flower, the flower may be there but you have not known it.
Have you watched? Let's say you are in the marketplace, and somebody says, "Your house is on fire!" You start running, you pass by many people. Somebody says, "Hello, where are you going?" but you don't listen. On another day, at another time, you would have listened, but now your house is on fire.
Your mind is totally directed towards your house. Now your attention is not here. You are not getting colored. You may pass a beautiful flower, but you will not say 'beautiful', you will not even recognize that the flower is there - impossible.
I have heard...
One man, a very great philosopher; his name was Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. The Governor General was going to give him an award for his services, his learning, his scholarship, but he was a very poor man. He lived in Calcutta, a poor Bengali, and his clothes were not such that he should go wearing those clothes when the award was to be given to him.
So the friends came and they said, "Don't be worried, we have ordered beautiful clothes for you."
But he said, "I have never used anything more costly than these clothes. Just to take an award, should I change my whole way of life?"
But the friends convinced him and he became ready. The same evening he was coming home from the market, just walking behind a Mohammedan who was walking with great dignity - very slow, with grace - a very beautiful man. And then a servant came running to that Mohammedan and said, "Sir, your house is on fire," but the Mohammedan continued the same way.
The servant said, "Have you heard me or not? Your house is on fire! Everything is burning!"
The Mohammedan said, "I have heard you, but just because the house is on fire I cannot change my way of walking. And even if I run, I cannot save the house, so what is the point?"
Ishwar Chandra listened to this dialogue between the servant and the master. He could not believe his eyes, he could not believe his ears: "What is this man saying?" And then he remembered: "I am just changing my clothes and going in borrowed clothes just to receive an award?" He dropped the idea. The next day he appeared in his ordinary poor clothes. The Governor General asked, the friends asked; he related the story.
Now, this Mohammedan had a certain awareness, a certain awareness which cannot be clouded by anything, a certain wakefulness which is not easily disturbed. Ordinarily, everything colors you and you color everything. When this coloring stops, this reciprocal coloring stops, things start appearing in their true being. Then you come to see reality as it is. Then you come to know, 'This is It'. Then you come to know that which is.
These sutras are just indicators that unless a state of no-mind is achieved, ignorance cannot be destroyed. Awareness is against ignorance, knowledge is not against ignorance. So don't become parrots, and don't rely only on memorizing. Don't cram; try to see. Become more capable of seeing things as they are. The Vedas, the Upanishads, The Koran, the Bible, cannot help much. You can become great learned scholars, but you will remain, deep down, just fools. And when ignorance is decorated by knowledge then one clings to it. One does not want to destroy it. In fact, ego feels very happy.
You will have to choose. If you choose the ego, you will remain ignorant. If you want awareness, you will have to become aware of the tricks the ego goes on playing with you.
This morning, contemplate what you know and what you don't know, and don't be easily satisfied.
Go as deep as possible into what you know and what you don't know. If you can decide that this you know and this you don't know, you have taken a great step. And that step is the most significant step a man can ever take because then the pilgrimage starts, the pilgrimage towards reality. If you go on believing that you know many things, and you don't know them, you are deceiving yourself and you will remain hypnotized by your knowledge. You will waste your whole life in drunkenness.
Ordinarily, people live just like they are deeply asleep, walking in their sleep, doing things in their sleep, somnambulists.
Gurdjieff took Ouspensky and his thirty disciples to a very faraway place, and he told his thirty disciples to be absolutely silent for three months. He told them to be so silent that they should not communicate even through eyes or gestures. And thirty persons were to remain in a small bungalow as if there were not thirty people, but as if each one was living alone. After a few days a few people left, because it was too much, impossible.
Gurdjieff was a hard task-master. If he saw somebody smiling at somebody else, immediately he was expelled because he had communicated; the silence was broken. He said, "Live in this house as if you are alone. There are twenty-nine other people, but you are not concerned with them - just as if they are not."
By the time the three months ended only three persons were left; twenty-seven had left. Ouspensky was one of those three persons. Those three persons became so silent that Gurdjieff took them outside the bungalow into the town, moved them in the market-place, and Ouspensky writes in his diary, "For the first time I could see that the whole of humanity is walking in sleep. People are talking in their sleep. Shopkeepers are selling things, customers are purchasing things, great crowds are going here and there, and I could see that moment that everybody is fast asleep; nobody is aware."
Ouspensky said, "We felt so uncomfortable in that mad place that we asked Gurdjieff to take us back to the bungalow. But he said, 'That bungalow was just an experiment to show you the reality of humanity, and you also have lived the same way. Because now you are silent you can see that people are just drunk, unconscious; not living really, just moving not knowing why, not knowing for what.'"
Watch yourself, meditate over it, and see whether you are living in sleep. If you are living in sleep, then come out of it.
Meditation is nothing but an effort to gather together the small consciousness that you have, to gather together, to crystallize it, to make all sorts of efforts to increase it more and more, and to decrease unconsciousness. By and by, consciousness becomes higher and higher: less and less dreamy; less and less thoughts come to you, and there are more and more gaps of silence. Through those gaps, windows will open to the divine. One day, when you have become really capable & you can say, "I can exist for a few minutes without any thought or dream interfering with me," for the first time you will know. The purpose is fulfilled.
From deep sleep you have come to deep awareness. When deep sleep and deep awareness meet, the circle is complete.
That's what samadhi is. Patanjali calls it kaivalya - pure consciousness, alone; so pure, so alone that nothing else exists. Only in this aloneness does one become blissful. Only in this aloneness, one comes to know what truth is. Truth is your being. It is there but you are asleep.
Awaken.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #5
Chapter title: This is It!
18. THE MODIFICATIONS OF THE MIND ARE ALWAYS KNOWN BY ITS LORD, DUE TO THE CONSTANCY OF THE PURUSA, PURE CONSCIOUSNESS.
19. THE MIND IS NOT SELF-ILLUMINATING, BECAUSE IT IS ITSELF PERCEPTIBLE.
20. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE MIND TO KNOW ITSELF AND ANY OTHER OBJECT AT THE SAME TIME.
21. IF IT WERE ASSUMED THAT A SECOND MIND ILLUMINATES THE FIRST, COGNITIION OF COGNITION WOULD ALSO HAVE TO BE ASSUMED, AND A CONFUSION OF MEMORIES.
22. KNOWLEDGE OF ITS OWN NATURE THROUGH SELF-COGNITION IS OBTAINED WHEN CONSCIOUSNESS ASSUMES THAT FORM IN WHICH IT DOES NOT PASS FROM PLACE TO PLACE.
23. WHEN THE MIND IS COLORED BY THE KNOWER AND THE KNOWN, IT IS ALL- APPREHENDING.
24. THOUGH VARIEGATED BY INNUMERABLE DESIRES, THE MIND ACTS FOR ANOTHER, FOR ITS ACTS IN ASSOCIATION.
PATANJALI TAKES the whole complexity of the human being into account that has to be understood.
Never before and never after has such a comprehensive system ever been evolved. Man is not a simple being. Man is a very complex organism. A rock is simple because the rock has only one layer, the layer of the body. It is what Patanjali calls anamayakos -> anamaya kosha, the most gross, only one layer.
You go into the rock; you will find layers of rock but nothing else. Look at a tree and you will also find something else other than the body. The tree is not just the body. Something of the subtle has happened to it. It is not so dead as rock; it is more alive - a subtle body has come into existence. If you treat a tree like a rock, you mistreat it. Then you have not taken into account the subtle evolution that has happened between the rock and the tree. The tree is highly evolved. It is more complex.
Then, take an animal - still more complex. Another layer of subtle body has evolved.
Man has five bodies, five seeds, so if you really want to understand man and his mind - and there is no way of going beyond if you don't understand the whole complexity - then we have to be very patient and careful. If you miss one step, you will not be able to reach to your innermost core of being. The body that you can see in the mirror is the outermost shell of your being. Many have mistaken it, as if this is all.
In psychology, there is a movement called behaviorism, which thinks that man is nothing but the body. Always beware of people who talk of 'nothing buts'. Man is always more than any 'nothing but' can imply. Behaviorists: Pavlov, B. F. Skinner and company, think that man is the body - not that you have a body, not that you are in the body, but simply that you are the body. Then man is reduced to the lowest denominator. And of course, they can prove it. They can prove it because that is the most gross part of man and is easily available to scientific experimentation. The subtle layers of man's being are not so easily available. Or, to say it in other words: scientific instrumentation is not yet so sophisticated. It cannot touch the subtler layers of man.
Freud, Adler, go a little deeper into man. Then man is not just the body. They touch something of the second body, what Patanjali calls pranamayakos: the vital body, the energy body. But only a very fragmentary part is touched by Freud and Adler; one part by Freud and another part by Adler.
Freud reduces man to just sexuality. That is also there in man, but that is not the whole story. Adler reduces man to just ambition, will to power. That too is there in man. Man is very big, very complex.
Man is an orchestra; many instruments are involved in it.
But this has always happened. This is a calamity, but this has always happened: when once somebody finds something, he tries to make a total philosophy out of his finding. That's a great temptation. Freud stumbled upon sex, and that too, not the whole of sex. He stumbled only upon the repressed sexuality. He came across repressed people. Christian repression has made many blocks in man where energy has become coiled up within itself, has become stagnant, is no longer flowing. He came against those rock-like blocks in the stream of human energy, and he thought - and the ego always thinks that way - that he had found the ultimate truth. Adler, working in a different way, stumbled upon another block of man: the will to power. And then he made a whole philosophy out of it.
Man has been taken in fragments. Yoga is the only philosophy in existence which takes the whole of man into account. Jung went still a little further, deeper. One fragment of the third body of man, manomayakos - he caught hold of it and he created a whole philosophy out of it. To comprehend the whole body - even that has not been possible because the body itself is very complex: millions of cells in a great harmony, functioning in a miraculous way. When you were born in your mother's womb, you were just a small cell. Out of that one cell, another cell arises. The cell grows and divides in two, then the two cells grow and divide into four. Out of one division - and division goes on - you have millions of cells. And they all function in a deep cooperation, as if somebody is holding them.
It is not a chaos; you are a cosmos.
And then, some cells become your eyes, some cells become your ears, some cells become your genital organs, some cells become your skin, some cells your bones, some cells your brain, some cells your nails and your hair; and they all are coming out of one cell. They are all alike. They have no qualitative difference, but they function so differently. The eye can see; the ear cannot see. The ear can hear, but cannot smell. So those cells not only function in harmony, but they become experts.
They gain to a certain specialization. A few cells turn into the eyes. What has happened? What type of training is going on? Why do certain cells become eyes, and certain other cells become ears, and still certain others become your nose, and they are all alike? There must be a great training inside - some unknown power training them for a specific purpose.
And remember, when those cells are getting ready to see, they have not yet seen anything. When the child is in the womb, he remains completely blind. He has not seen any light; the eyes are closed.
A miracle: no training to see and the eyes are ready, no possibility to see and the eyes are ready.
The child does not breathe with his own lungs, he has not known what breathing is, but the lungs are ready. They are ready before the child is going to enter into the world and breathe. The eyes are ready before the child is going to enter into the world and see. Everything is ready. When the child is born he is a perfect human being of tremendous complexity, specialization, subtlety. And there has been no training, no rehearsal. The child has never taken a single breath, but immediately out of the mother's womb, he cries and takes his first breath. The mechanism is ready before any training has been given: some tremendous power, some power which comprehends all the possibilities of the future, some power which is preparing the child to be able to face all possibilities of life for the future, is working deep within.
Even the body is not completely understood, not yet. Our whole understanding is fragmentary. The science of man does not exist yet. Patanjali's yoga is the closest effort ever made. He divides the body into five layers, or into five bodies. You don't have one body, you have five bodies; and behind the five bodies, your being. The same as has happened in psychology has happened in medicine.
Allopathy believes only in the physical body, the gross body. It is parallel to behaviorism. Allopathy is the grossest medicine. That's why it has become scientific, because scientific instrumentation is only capable yet of very gross things. Go deeper.
Acupuncture, the Chinese medicine, enters one layer more. It works on the vital body, the pranamayakos. If something goes wrong in the physical body, acupuncture does not touch the physical body at all. It tries to work on the vital body. It tries to work on the bioenergy, the bioplasma.
It settles something there, and immediately the gross body starts functioning well. If something goes wrong in the vital body, allopathy functions on the body, the gross body. Of course, for allopathy, it is an uphill task. For acupuncture, it is a downhill task. It is easier because the vital body is a little higher than the physical body. If the vital body is set right, the physical body simply follows it because the blueprint exists in the vital body. The physical body is just an implementation of the vital.
Now acupuncture is gaining respect, by and by, because a certain very sensitive photography, Kirlian photography, in Soviet Russia, has come across the seven hundred vital points in the human body as they have always been predicted by acupuncturists for at least five thousand years. They had no instruments to know where the vital points in the body were. But by and by, just through trial and error, through centuries, they discovered seven hundred points. Now Kirlian has also discovered the same seven hundred points with scientific instrumentation. And Kirlian photography has proved one thing: that to try to change the vital through the physical is absurd. It is trying to change the master by changing the servant. It is almost impossible because the master won't listen to the servant. If you want to change the servant, change the master. Immediately, the servant follows. Rather than going and changing each soldier, it is better to change the general. The body has millions of soldiers, cells, simply working under some order, under some commandment. Change the commander, and the whole body pattern changes.
Homeopathy goes still a little deeper. It works on the manomayakos, the mental body. The founder of homeopathy, Hahnemann, discovered one of the greatest things ever discovered, and that was:
the smaller the quantity of the medicine, the deeper it goes. He called the method of making homeopathic medicine 'potentizing'. They go on reducing the quantity of the medicine. He would work in this way: he would take a certain amount of medicine and would mix it with ten times the amount of milk sugar or with water. One quantity of medicine, nine quantities of water; he would mix them. Then he would again take one quantity of this new solution, and would again mix it with nine times more water, or milk sugar. In this way he would go on: again from the new solution he would take one quantity and would mix it with nine times more water. This he would do, and the potency would increase. By and by, the medicine reaches to the atomic level. It becomes so subtle that you cannot believe that it can work; it has almost disappeared. That is what is written on homeopathic medicines, the potency: ten potency, twenty potency, one hundred potency, one thousand potency.
The bigger the potency, the smaller is the amount. With ten thousand potency, a millionth of the original medicine has remained, almost none. It has almost disappeared, but then it enters the most deep core of manomaya. It enters into your mind body. It goes deeper than acupuncture. It is almost as if you have reached the atomic, or even the sub-atomic level. Then it does not touch your body.
Then it does not touch your vital body; it simply enters. It is so subtle and so small that it comes across no barriers. It can simply slip into the manomayakos, into the mental body, and from there it starts working. You have found an even bigger authority than the pranamaya.
Ayurved, the Indian medicine, is a synthesis of all three. It is one of the most synthetic of medicines.
Hypnotherapy goes still deeper. It touches the vigyanmayakos: the fourth body, the body of consciousness. It does not use medicine. It does not use anything. It simply uses suggestion, that's all. It simply puts a suggestion in your mind call it animal magnetism, mesmerism, hypnosis or whatsoever you like - but it works through the power of thought, not the power of matter. Even homeopathy is still the power of matter in a very subtle quantity. Hypnotherapy gets rid of matter altogether, because howsoever subtle, it is matter. Ten thousand potency, but still, it is a potency of matter. It simply jumps to the thought energy, vigyanmayakos: the consciousness body. If your consciousness just accepts a certain idea, it starts functioning.
Hypnotherapy has a great future. It is going to become the future medicine, because if by just changing your thought pattern your mind can be changed, through the mind your vital body and through the vital body your gross body, then why bother with poisons, why bother with gross medicines? Why not work it through thought power? Have you watched any hypnotist working on a medium? If you have not watched, it is worth watching. It will give you a certain insight.
You may have heard, or you may have seen - in India it happens; you must have seen fire-walkers. It is nothing but hypnotherapy. The idea that they are possessed by a certain god or a goddess and no fire can burn them, just this idea is enough. This idea controls and transforms the ordinary functioning of their bodies.
They are prepared: for twenty-four hours they fast. When you are fasting and your whole body is clean, and there is no excreta in it, the bridge between you and the gross drops. For twenty-four hours, they live in a temple or in a mosque, singing, dancing, getting in tune with God. Then comes the moment when they walk on the fire. They come dancing, possessed. They come with full trust that the fire is not going to burn, that's all; there is nothing else. How to create the trust is the question. Then they dance on the fire, and the fire does not burn.
It has happened many times that somebody who was just a spectator became so possessed. Twenty persons walking on fire are not burned, and somebody would immediately become so confident: "If these people are walking, then why not I?"; and he has jumped in, and the fire has not burned. In that sudden moment, a trust arose. Sometimes it has happened that people who were prepared, were burned. Sometimes an unprepared spectator walked on fire and was not burned. What happened?
- the people who were prepared must have carried a doubt. They must have been thinking whether it was going to happen or not. A subtle doubt must have remained in the vigyan mayakos, in their consciousness. It was not total trust. So they came, but with doubt. Because of that doubt, the body could not receive the message from the higher soul. The doubt came in between, and the body continued to function in the ordinary way; it got burned. That's why all religions insist for trust.
Trust is hypnotherapy. Without trust, you cannot enter into the subtle parts of your being, because a small doubt, and you are thrown back to the gross. Science works with doubt. Doubt is a method in science because science works with the gross. Whether you doubt or not, an allopath is not worried.
He does not ask you to trust in his medicine; he simply gives you medicine.
But a homeopath will ask whether you believe, because without your belief it will be more difficult for a homeopath to work upon you. And a hypnotherapist will ask for total surrender. Otherwise, nothing can be done.
Religion is surrender. Religion is a hypnotherapy. But, there is still one more body. That is the anandmayakos: the bliss body. Hypnotherapy goes up to the fourth. Meditation goes up to the fifth.
'Meditation' - the very word is beautiful because the root is the same as 'medicine'. Both come from the same root. Medicine and meditation are off-shoots of one word: that which heals, that which makes you healthy and whole is medicine; and on the deepest level, that is meditation.
Meditation does not even give you suggestions because suggestions are to be given from the outside. Somebody else has to give you suggestions. Suggestion means that you are dependent upon somebody. They cannot make you perfectly conscious because the other will be needed, and a shadow will be cast on your being. Meditation makes you perfectly conscious, without any shadow - absolute light with no darkness. Now even suggestion is thought to be a gross thing. Somebody suggests - that means something comes from the outside, and in the ultimate analysis that which comes from the outside is material. Not only matter, but that which comes from the outside is material. Even a thought is a subtle form of matter. Even hypnotherapy is materialistic.
Meditation drops all props, all supports. That's why to understand meditation is the most difficult thing in the world, because nothing is left - just a pure understanding, a witnessing. That is what this first sutra is.
THE MODIFICATIONS OF THE MIND ARE ALWAYS KNOWN BY ITS LORD...
Who is the lord within you? That lord has to be found.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #7
Chapter title: The Witness Is Self-Illuminating
THE MODIFICATIONS OF THE MIND ARE ALWAYS KNOWN BY ITS LORD, DUE TO THE CONSTANCY OF THE PURUSA, PURE CONSCIOUSNESS.
In you two things are happening. One is a cyclone of thoughts, emotions, desires - a great whirlwind around you, constantly changing, constantly transforming itself, constantly on the move. It is a process. Behind this process is your witnessing soul - eternal, permanent, not changing at all.
It has never changed. It is like the eternal sky: clouds come and go, gather, disperse... the sky remains untouched, uninfluenced, unimpressed. It remains pure and virgin. That is the lord, the eternal within you.
Mind goes on changing. Just a moment before you had one mind, a moment afterwards you have another mind. Just a few minutes before you were angry, and now you are laughing. Just a moment before you were happy, and now you are sad. Modifications, changes, continuous waves up and down; like a yo-yo you go on. But something in you is eternal: that which goes on witnessing the play, the game. The witnesser is the lord. If you start witnessing, by and by, you will come closer and closer to the lord.
Start witnessing objects. You see a tree. You see the tree, but you are not aware that you are seeing it; then you are not a witness. You see the tree, and at the same time you see that you are seeing; then you are a witness. Consciousness has to become double-arrowed: one arrow going to the tree, another arrow going to your subjectivity.
It is difficult, because when you become aware of yourself you forget the tree, and when you become aware of the tree you forget yourself. But by and by, one learns to balance, just as one learns to balance on a tight-rope. Difficult in the beginning, dangerous, risky, but by and by, one learns the balance. Just go on trying. Wherever you have an opportunity to be a witness, don't miss it, because there is nothing more valuable than witnessing. Doing an act: walking or eating or taking a bath, become a witness also. Let the shower fall on you, but inside you remain alert and see what is happening - the coolness of the water, the tingling sensation all over the body, a certain silence surrounding you, a certain wellbeing arising in you - but go on becoming a witness. You are feeling happy; just feeling happy is not enough - be a witness. Just go on watching - "I'm feeling happy...
I'm feeling sad... I'm feeling hungry" - go on watching. By and by, you will see that happiness is separate from you, unhappiness also. All that you can witness is separate from you. This is the method of viveka, discrimination. All that is separate from you can be witnessed, and all that can be witnessed is separate from you. You cannot witness the witnesser; that is the lord. You cannot go behind the lord; you are the lord. You are the ultimate core of existence.
THE MIND IS NOT SELF-ILLUMINATING, BECAUSE IT IS ITSELF PERCEPTIBLE.
The mind itself can be seen. It can become an object. It can be perceived, so it is not the perceiver.
Ordinarily, we think that it is the mind which is seeing the flower. No, you can go beyond the mind and you can see the mind, just as the mind is seeing the flower. The deeper you go, the more you will find that the observer itself becomes the observed. That's why Krishnamurti goes on saying again and again, "The observer is the observed; the perceiver is the perceived." When you go deep, first you see the trees, and the rose and the stars, and you think the mind is witnessing. Then close your eyes. Now, see the impressions in the mind: of roses, stars, trees. Now who is the perceiver?
The perceiver has gone a little deeper. Mind itself has become an object.
These five koshas, these five seeds, are five stations where the perceiver again and again becomes the perceived. When you move from the gross body, the food body, the anamayakos, to the vital body, you immediately see that from the vital body the gross body can be seen as an object. It is outside the vital body. Just as the house is outside you, when you stand in the vital body, your own body is just like a wall around you. Again you move from the vital body to manomayakos, the mental body; the same happens. Now, even the vital body is outside you, like a fence around you; and this way it goes on. It goes on to the ultimate point where only the witnesser remains. Then you don't see yourself as, "I am blissful"; you see yourself as a witness of bliss.
The last body is the bliss body. It is the most difficult to separate from because it is very close to the lord. It almost surrounds the lord like a climate. But that too has to be known. Even at that last point when you are ecstatically blissful, then too you have to do the ultimate effort, the last effort of discrimination, and of seeing that the bliss is separate from you.
Then is liberation, kaivalya. Then you are left alone - just the witnesser - and everything has been reduced to objects: the body, the mind, the energy. Even the bliss, even the ecstasy, even meditation itself is no more there. When meditation becomes perfect, it is no more a meditation. When the meditator has really achieved the goal, he does not meditate. He cannot meditate because that too is now an activity like walking, eating. He has become separate from everything. That is the difference between dhyan and samadhi, between meditation and samadhi. Meditation is of the fifth body, the bliss body. It is still a therapy, a medicine. You are still a little ill, ill because you are identifying yourself with something which you are not. All illness is identification, and absolute health is through non-identification. Samadhi is when even meditation has been left behind.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #7
Chapter title: The Witness Is Self-Illuminating
I was reading a book by Edward de Bono. He writes about a very ancient incident that happened in China.
Once in ancient China, a pagoda, a temple burned down. A strange and appetizing smell led the searchers in the ashes to the roasted body of an unfortunate pig which had got into the blaze, burned in the blaze. Roast pig became a delicacy in China. Accidentally it was discovered because the pagoda burned and a pig was burned in it. But then people thought that it must have something to do with the pagoda, otherwise how could the pig be so delicious? So for centuries in China it continued that whenever they would like to eat a roast pig, they would build a pagoda first, then put a pig inside and burn it down. It was very costly, but it looked very scientific to them. Only after centuries did they become aware that it was foolish. The pig can be roasted without the pagoda.
The pagoda is not essential to it.
But this is how the human mind functions, because you become aware of your body first and everything gets associated with it. When you feel a certain well-being, a happiness all around you, of course you feel it is because of the body, because, "I am feeling healthy, no illness, no disease. That's why it is there." Then you try to keep the body young, healthy. Nothing is wrong in it, but well-being comes from somewhere deep within you. Yes, a healthy body is needed, otherwise those deep springs will not be able to be active. A healthy body functions as a vehicle to bring you the well-being from your own innermost core, but the body itself is not the cause.
Let me tell you a few anecdotes on how the mind gets apparently very logical, but deep down comes to very absurd conclusions.
A professor once trained a hundred fleas to jump when he shouted the right command. Once they were responding satisfactorily, he took a pair of scissors and snipped off their legs. As soon as he realized that not one single flea obeyed the command to jump anymore, he announced his findings to the medical world: "I have irrefutable proof, gentlemen, that a flea's ears are situated in its legs."
This has happened many times in the whole history of human thought: legs cut, now they don't jump, they don't listen to the command. Of course, naturally, the ears of the flea are situated in the legs.
Logic can go to very illogical ends. Logic can conclude very illogical conclusions. The body is the most gross part, easily comprehensible; you can catch hold of it, you can train it, you can make it more healthy by giving food, nutrition. You can kill it by starving it. You can do a thousand and one things with the body. It is graspable. Beyond the body starts the world of the elusive.
Scientists are a little afraid to move into the elusive world, because then their criteria don't function well. Then everything goes on becoming dimmer and dimmer. Of course, they stay where light is.
A famous anecdote about Rabia al Adaviya:
One evening Rabia al Adaviya was searching for something in the street. Somebody asked, "What are you searching for?"
She said, "I have lost my needle." So those people, being kind people, started helping her. "The old woman, poor woman, has lost her needle"; everybody tried to help. But then somebody became aware that a needle is such a small thing...
"Exactly where has it fallen? The street is big. If we go on searching it will take millennia." So they asked, "Where exactly has the needle fallen, so we can search only in that place?"
Rabia said, "Don't ask that, because the needle has fallen inside, in my house."
They all stood up and said, "Have you gone mad! If the needle has fallen inside, search for it there!"
Rabia said, "But there is no light! Here on the street there is still light. The sun has not yet set. Don't waste time. Help, because soon the sun will set and the street will be dark."
In a way, it looks illogical; in another way it seems to be very logical. That's what science has been doing. The body seems to be the only lighted part of you; everything else is dark - the deeper you go, the more dark. The deeper you go, the more direction is lost. The deeper you go, all that looked clear looks clear no more. Everything seems to be a tremendous confusion. Better keep to the lighted part; remain there. Something can be done, because the body can be manipulated.
But in this way, something very valuable is being lost, and humanity, by and by, has become too focused with the body. And the body is just your outer shell.
It happened in a prison...
Joe was sentenced to twenty years for his part in a robbery. Shortly after his term of imprisonment began, he discovered a flea in his hair, and having nothing better to do, trained it to do tricks. First of all, Joe taught the flea to jump on command, then gradually the tricks became more and more complex. Every single day of every single week, Joe kept up a routine of constant practice and calm patience, so that when the day of his release came he had trained the flea to do tricks which were utterly unbelievable.
As soon as he got outside the prison gates, Joe rushed to the world's biggest circus. Hurrying into the manager's caravan Joe produced the flea from his top pocket and placed it on the table, "Just look at this," said Joe to the manager."
Yes," said the manager, as he slammed a large heavy ashtray down on the flea. "Nuisances, are they not?"
He killed the flea, and now there is no way for that poor Joe to prove that he had trained the flea to do almost miraculous things, unbelievable things. Now there is no way to prove it.
That's what gross thinking about humanity has done -> it has killed the inner mystery. It has made people so addicted with the body that they have forgotten their inner world. Now even to prove it has become difficult. People like Buddha and Jesus and Krishna look insane. There are books in the English language and in other Western languages proving Jesus to be neurotic.
Of course, if you have not known anything of the inner world, he looks neurotic. He is neurotic if you don't know anything about the inner world. Then he seems to be like a madman because sometimes he talks to God, and he declares that he receives the answers also. And you have lost all contact with the inner world, so what is the difference between a madman and him? A madman also listens to voices. You can see; go to the madhouse and you can see mad people sitting alone and talking so enchantedly, as if somebody is present there.
What is the difference? When in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus prayed, raised his hands towards the sky and started talking to God, what is the difference? There seems to be nobody there. Jesus is as mad as the madman. When on the cross he started crying and saying things to God, what is the difference? Because many thousands of people had gathered there; they could not see anybody there. And Jesus said, "Father, forgive these people, because they don't know what they are doing." He is mad. To whom was he talking? He had gone out of his senses. By and by, if your innermost world is crippled and you have lost contact with it, you cannot believe in Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, or Patanjali. What are they talking about? These people are dreaming. And you, very clever people, go on talking about your dreaming in a very scientific way.
Many mad people are very, very logical. If you listen to mad people, you will be surprised. They are very argumentative, very rational; and up to a certain extent you will be almost convinced by them.
I have heard about one man who went to see some relative who was in a madhouse. In the same cell there was another inmate, and the other man looked so gentlemanly, so graceful, and was sitting with such dignity reading a newspaper, that this visitor asked, "You don't look mad at all." He talked with that man and he was perfectly logical, absolutely normal. The visitor was surprised: "Why have you been kept?"
He said, "Because of my relatives; they wanted to throw me in here because they want to grab all the money that I have, and that is the only way: either to kill me, or to throw me into a madhouse. And I also agreed. This is better. At least I am alive. Otherwise, they would have killed me. I have such a lot of money."
And everything was so logical and normal that the visitor said, "You don't be worried. I know the governor, and I will go to him and tell everything."
The madman said, "Please, if you can do something, do it."
When the visitor was just leaving the room, suddenly the madman jumped and hit him hard on the head. The visitor said, "What are you doing?"
He said, "Just to remind you... don't forget to go to the governor. Now you will not forget."
Everything was logical somewhere, but how to differentiate between a madman and a mystic?
Because everything seems to be logical in a mystic also, to a certain extent. Then suddenly, he is talking of something which you have not ever experienced. Then you become afraid, and to protect yourself from the fear, you start rationalizing your fear.
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE MIND TO KNOW ITSELF AND ANY OTHER OBJECT AT THE SAME TIME.
These sutras are all about witnessing. Patanjali is saying, step by step, that it is impossible for the mind to do two things: to be perceived and to be the perceiver. Either it can be the perceiver or it can be the perceived. So when you can witness your mind, that proves absolutely that the mind is not the perceiver. You are the perceiver. You are not the body; you are not even the mind. The whole emphasis is: how to help you to discriminate from that which you are not.
IF IT WERE ASSUMED THAT A SECOND MIND ILLUMINATES THE FIRST, COGNITION OF COGNITION WOULD HAVE TO BE ASSUMED, AND A CONFUSION OF MEMORIES.
But there have been philosophers who say that there is no need to assume a witness; we can assume another mind: mind one is perceived by mind #2. That's what psychologists will also agree to, because why bring something absolutely unknown into account? - mind is observed by mind itself, by a subtle mind. But Patanjali gives a very logical refutation of this attitude. He says, "If you assume that mind one is perceived by mind #2, then who perceives mind #2? Then mind #3; then who perceives mind #3?" He says, "Then this will create confusion. It will be an infinite regress. Then you can go on, ad absurdum; and again, even if you say 'the mind one thousand', the problem remains the same. Then you have to again assume a mind behind mind #1000 -> #1001 (one thousand and one) - and this will go on and on and on.
No, one has to understand something absolutely inside, behind which there is nothing. Otherwise there is a confusion of memories, otherwise, a chaos. Body, mind, and the witnesser: the witnesser is absolute. But who perceives the witnesser? Who knows the witnesser? And then we come to one of the most important hypotheses of yoga.
KNOWLEDGE OF ITS OWN NATURE THROUGH SELF-COGNITION IS OBTAINED WHEN CONSCIOUSNESS ASSUMES THAT FORM IN WHICH IT DOES NOT PASS FROM PLACE TO PLACE.
Yoga believes that the witness is a self-illuminating phenomenon. It is just like a light. You have a small candle in your room - the candle illuminates the room, the furniture, the walls, the painting on the wall. Who illuminates the candle? You don't need another candle to find this candle; the candle is self-illuminating. It illuminates other things, and simultaneously it illuminates itself.
svabuddhi- samvedanam: innermost consciousness is self-illuminating.
It is of the nature of light. The sun illuminates everything in the solar system - at the same time it illuminates itself. The witnesser witnesses everything that goes on around in the five seeds and in the world, and at the same time it illuminates itself. This seems to be perfectly logical. Somewhere, we have to come to the rock bottom. Otherwise, we go on and on - and that will not help, and the problem remains the same.
KNOWLEDGE OF ITS OWN NATURE THROUGH SELF-COGNITION - SVABUDDHI- SAMVEDANAM - IS OBTAINED WHEN CONSCIOUSNESS ASSUMES THAT FORM IN WHICH IT DOES NOT PASS FROM PLACE TO PLACE.
When your inner consciousness has come to a moment of no movement, when it has become deeply centered and rooted, when it is unwavering, when it has become a constant flame of awareness, then it illuminates itself.
WHEN THE MIND IS COLORED BY THE KNOWER AND THE KNOWN, IT IS ALL- APPREHENDING.
The mind is just between you and the world. The mind is the bridge between you and the world, between the witnesser and the witnessed. The mind is a bridge, and if the mind is colored by things, and also by the witness, it becomes all-comprehending. It becomes a tremendous instrument of knowledge. But two types of coloring are needed; one: it should be colored by the things it sees, and, it should be colored by the witnesser. The witnesser should pour down its energy into the mind; then only can the mind know things.
For example: a scientist is working. He has dissected the body of a man and he is looking very minutely, as minutely as scientific instruments make available. He is searching for the soul, and he cannot find any soul, just matter, matter. At the most, he can find something belonging to the world of physics or to the world of chemistry, but nothing belonging to the world of consciousness. And he comes out of the lab, and he says, "There is no consciousness." Now, he has missed one thing.
Who was looking in the dead body? He has completely forgotten himself. The scientist is watching the object but is completely oblivious of his own being. The scientist is trying to find consciousness outside, but has forgotten completely that the one who is trying is consciousness. The seeker is the sought. He has become too much focused on the object, and the subject is forgotten.
Science is too focused on the object, and so-called religions are too focused on the subject. But yoga says, "There is no need to become lopsided. Remember the world is there, and also remember that you are." Let your remembrance be total and whole, of the object and the subject both. When your mind is infused with your consciousness, and also infused with the objective world, there happens apprehension.
And Patanjali says,
WHEN THE MIND IS COLORED BY THE KNOWER AND THE KNOWN, IT IS ALL-APPREHENDING.
It can know all that can be known. It can know everything that can be known. Then nothing is hidden from that mind. A religious mind - let us call him an introvert - by and by, knows only his subjectivity and starts saying that the world is illusion, maya, a dream, made of the same stuff as dreams are. A scientist who is too focused on objects starts believing in the objective world and says that only the material exists; consciousness is just poetry, a talk of the dreamers: good, romantic, but not real.
The scientist says that consciousness is illusory. The extrovert says that consciousness is illusory; the introvert says that the world is illusory.
But yoga is the supreme science. Patanjali says, "Both are real."
Reality has two sides to it: the outside and the inside. And remember, how can the inside happen, how can it exist without an outside? Can you conceive that only the inside exists and the outside is illusory? If the outside is illusory, the inside will become illusory automatically. If the inside of your house is real, and the outside of the house is unreal, where will you demarcate? Where does the reality stop and illusion start? And how can an outside which is illusory have a real inside? An unreal body will have an unreal mind; an unreal mind will have an unreal consciousness. A real consciousness needs a real mind; a real mind needs a real body; a real body needs a real world.
Yoga does not deny anything. Yoga is absolutely pragmatic, empirical. It is more scientific than science, and more religious than religions, because it makes the greater synthesis of the inner and the outer.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #7
Chapter title: The Witness Is Self-Illuminating
THOUGH VARIEGATED BY INNUMERABLE DESIRES, THE MIND ACTS FOR ANOTHER, FOR IT ACTS IN ASSOCIATION.
The mind goes on working, but it is not working for itself. It has a managerial post; the master is hidden behind. It cooperates with the master. Now, this has to be deeply understood.
If the mind cooperates with the master, you are healthy and whole. If the mind goes astray, against the master, you are unhealthy and ill. If the servant follows the master like a shadow, everything is okay. If the master says, "Go to the left," and the servant goes to the right, then something has gone wrong. If you want your body to run and the body says, "I cannot run," then you are paralyzed. If you want to do something and the body and the mind say, "No," or, they go on doing something which you don't want to do, then you are in great confusion. This is how humanity is.
Yoga has this as the goal: that your mind should function according to your lord, the innermost soul.
Your body should function according to the mind, and you should create a world around you which is in cooperation. When everything is in cooperation - the lower is always in cooperation with the higher, and the higher is in cooperation with the highest, and the highest is in cooperation with the utterly ultimate - then you have a life of harmony. Then you are a yogin. Then you become one, but not in the sense that only one exists: now you have become one in the sense of unison. You have become one in the sense of an orchestra - many instruments, but the music is one; many bodies, millions of objects, desires, ambitions, mood, ups and downs, failures and successes, a great variety, but everything in unison, in harmony. You have become an orchestra. Everything is cooperating with everything else, and everything finally is cooperating with the very center of your being.
That's why in India we have called sannyasins 'swamis'. 'Swami' means: the lord. You become a swami only when you have attained to this harmony that Patanjali is talking about. Patanjali is not against anything whatsoever. He is in favor of harmony. He's against discord. He is not against anything: he's not against the body, he's not an anti-body man; he's not against the world, he's not anti-life; he absorbs everything. And through that absorption he creates a higher synthesis. And the ultimate synthesis is when everything is in cooperation, when there is not even a single jarring note.
I have heard an anecdote:
The baby baboon was five years old but had not spoken a word since birth. Its parents were convinced that their offspring was dumb until one night when the little baboon was eating a banana. It suddenly looked up at its mother and spoke clearly: "What is the idea of feeding me a rotten banana?" The mother baboon was overjoyed and asked her baby why he had never spoken before. "Well," said the little baboon, "the food has been okay up to now."
If you are in a harmony, you will not complain about the world. You will not complain about anything. The complaining mind is simply indicative that things are not in harmony inside. When everything is in harmony, then there is no complaint. Now, you go to your so-called saints: everybody is complaining - complaining of the world, complaining of desires, complaining of the body, complaining of this and that. Everybody lives in complaints; something is jarring. A perfect man is one who has no complaints. That man is a God-man who has accepted everything, absorbed everything and become a cosmos, is no more a chaos.
Another anecdote:
The sweet little old lady was proud of the way she had trained her talking parrot, and was showing him off to the vicar. "If you pull his left leg, he says the Lord's Prayer, and if you pull his right leg, he repeats the Psalms," she explained.
"What if you pull both legs at once?" asked the vicar.
"I would fall flat on my behind, you stupid old coot!" retorted the parrot.
And this is what has happened to man. If you pull one leg it is okay; if you pull the other leg, that too is okay; but if you pull both legs, everything is bound to topple down. That's what has happened to man. His whole being has been pulled down. Religions have been trying to pull his body. They are much too afraid of the body, too guilty. They have been continuously trying to destroy and poison the body. They would like you to be like ghosts, without bodies. Their idea is that body is intrinsically wrong, that body is the body of sin. So you should be like spirits - without bodies, disembodied.
Now the materialists - the communists, the Marxists, the scientists - have been trying the other way. They have been trying to pull the other leg. They say that there is nothing like consciousness; there is no self. It is just a combination of physical and chemical things that you are. You should be a body, nothing else. Now, both together have pulled both legs, and the whole man has become a miserable thing, a disease, a dichotomy.
Patanjali says, "Accept everything, use it, be creative about it; don't negate." Negation is not his way, but affirmation. That's why Patanjali has worked so much on the body, on food, on yoga asanas, on pranayam. These are all efforts to create the harmony: right food for the body, right posture for the body; rhythmic breathing for the vital body. More prana, more vitality has to be absorbed. Ways and means have to be found so that you are not always lacking in energy, but overflowing.
With mind also, pratyahar; the mind is a bridge: you can go outside on the bridge, you can move on the same bridge and go inside. When you go outside, objects, desires, predominate you. When you go inside, desirelessness, awareness, witnessing, predominate over you; but the bridge is the same. It has to be used; it is not to be thrown and broken. It has not to be destroyed because it is the same bridge by which you have come into the world, and by which you have to go back again into the inner nature, and so on and so forth.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #7
Chapter title: The Witness Is Self-Illuminating
Patanjali goes on using everything. His religion is not one of fear, but of understanding. His religion is not for God and against the world. His religion is for God through the world, because God and the world are not two. The world is God's creation. The world is His creativity, His expression; the world is His poetry. If you are against the poetry, how can you be in favor of the poet? In condemning the poetry, you have already condemned the poet. Of course, poetry is not the goal; you should seek the poet also. But on the way you can enjoy the poetry; nothing is wrong in it.
A methodist minister was on a flight to America when the stewardess asked if he would like a drink from the bar. "At what height are we flying?" he asked. When told that it was thirty thousand feet, he replied, "I would rather not... too near headquarters."
Fear - continuously, religious people are obsessed by fear. But fear cannot give you a grace, cannot give you dignity. Fear cripples, paralyses, corrupts. Because of fear religion has become almost a disease. It makes you abnormal. It does not make you healthy, it makes you more and more afraid to live: hell is there, and whatsoever you do it seems to be that you are doing something wrong. You love and it is wrong; you enjoy and it is wrong. Happiness has become associated with guilt. Only wrong people seem to be happy. The good people are always serious and never happy. If you want to go to heaven you have to be serious and unhappy and sad and miserable.
You have to be austere. If you want to go to hell, be happy and dance and enjoy. But remember, Omar Khayyam says somewhere, "I am always worried about one thing: if all these unhappy people are going to heaven, what will they do there? They cannot dance, they cannot sing, they cannot drink, they cannot enjoy, they cannot love. The whole opportunity will be wasted on these foolish people. People who could enjoy are thrown into hell. In fact, they should be in heaven. It seems more logical."
Omar Khayyam says, "If you really want to go to heaven, live a heavenly life here, so that you are ready."
Patanjali would like you to radiate with life, to throb with the unknown. He is not against anything. If you are in love he says, "Make your love a little more deep." There are greater treasures waiting for you. These treasures are good; these trees, these flowers, are good. Then man, woman, they are good and beautiful, because somehow, howsoever far away, God has come to you through them.
Maybe there are many screens. When you meet a man or a woman, there are many screens and sheets, but still the light is of God. It may be passing through many barriers, it may be distorted, but still, the light is of God.
Patanjali says, " Don't be against this world. Rather, search through this world. Find a way so that you can come to the original source of light, the pure, the virgin light."
There are people who live only for food, and there are people who go against food - both are wrong. Jesus says, "Man cannot live by bread alone" - true, perfectly true - but can man live without bread? That has to be remembered. Man cannot live by bread alone, right; but man also cannot live without bread.
I was reading a small anecdote.
The woman bought a budgerigar from the pet shop on the assurance that it would talk. Two weeks later she was back to complain. "Buy a little bell for it to play with," suggested the pet shop owner. "That often helps to get them talking."
The woman bought the bell and went off. A week later she was back to say the bird had still not uttered a word. The shop owner suggested that she buy a mirror, which was a sure-fire way of encouraging budgies to talk.
She took the mirror and went away, only to return in another three days. This time the shop owner sold her a small plastic bird which he suggested would give the bird something to talk to. Another week passed and the woman came in to inform the shop owner that the bird had now died.
"Did he die without ever speaking?" asked the shop owner.
"Ah, no," replied the woman. "It said one thing shortly before it passed away."
"What was that?"
"Food! For Pete's sake, give me food!"
One has to be very, very alert, otherwise one can move to opposite polarities very easily. Mind is an extremist. This is my observation: people who have lived only for food, when they get frustrated with their life-style, start fasting. Immediately, they move to the other extreme. I have never come across a faster, a fanatic about fasting, who has not previously been a fanatic about food. They are the same people. People who are too much in sexuality start becoming celibate. People who are very miserly start renouncing everything. This is how the mind moves from one extreme to another.
Patanjali would like you to balance your life, to bring an equilibrium. Just in the middle somewhere, where you are not mad after food and you are not mad against food, where you are not mad after women or men and you are not mad against them; you are simply balanced, a tranquility.
A psychiatrist says that we all are a little strange in our behavior. Another way of saying this is: I am original, you are eccentric, he is nuts. When you do the same thing you think you are original, when your friend is doing the same thing you think he is eccentric, and when your enemy is doing the same thing you think he is nuts. Remember, this egoistic way of thinking will destroy all the opportunities for growth. Be very objective about yourself.
There is a strain of insanity in everybody, because humanity has been insane for millennia. There is a strain of neurosis in everybody, because civilization has not yet come to a point where it can allow the full functioning of the human being. It has been repressive. So watch: if you are neurotic you will eat too much. You can move to the other extreme - you can stop eating completely - but your neurosis remains the same. Now, the neurosis is against food. And don't think that you are doing great spiritual work, very original work.
Once Veena brought a boy to me. In fact, that is how she got caught with me. She had come with some other boy who was almost neurotic. He had come to ask me, "Can man live on water alone?" He wanted to live on water alone. And he was very thin, and almost dying and pale. When I said, "Don't be foolish," he was not happy. He said, "You just give me some address, some people who can help me, because I want to live only on water. Everything is impure - just pure water."
These people are neurotic. You can find them all over India: in monasteries, in ashrams. Out of a hundred people you will find ninety-five neurotic. And you cannot call them mad because they are doing yoga asanas, fasting, prayer, this and that. But their neurosis can be seen immediately, what I call neurosis. Any extremism is neurotic.
To be balanced is to be healthy; to be unbalanced is to be neurotic. Wherever you find any unbalance within yourself or in somebody else, beware.
Otherwise, you will miss the ultimate unison. Lopsided, unbalanced, you cannot create the orchestra that Patanjali is trying to give you a glimpse of.
THE MODIFICATIONS OF THE MIND ARE ALWAYS KNOWN BY ITS LORD, DUE TO THE CONSTANCY OF THE PURUSA, PURE CONSCIOUSNESS.
SADA JNATAS CITTA-VRITAYAS TAT-PRABHU PURUSASYAPARINAMITVAT.
TAT-PRABHU, the lord has to be found. He's hiding in you; you have to seek him. Whatsoever you are, he's present. Whatsoever you do, he's the doer. Whatsoever you see, he's the seer. Even whatsoever you desire, it is he who has desired it. Layer upon layer, like an onion, you have to peel yourself. But peel yourself not in a rage, but in love. Peel yourself very cautiously, carefully, because it is God you are peeling. Peel very prayerfully. Don't become a masochist. Don't start creating suffering for yourself. Don't enjoy suffering. If you start enjoying suffering and you become a masochist, you are going on a suicidal trip. You will destroy yourself. One has to be very, very cautious, careful and creative. You are moving on holy ground.
When Moses reached to the top of the mountain where he encountered God, what did he see? He saw in a bush, a flame, a fire, and he heard a voice: "Leave your shoes off, because it is holy ground you are walking on." But wherever you are walking, you are walking on holy ground. When you touch your body, you are touching something holy. When you eat something, you are eating something holy; annambrahma: food is God. When you love somebody, you are loving the divine, because it is He all around, in millions of forms. It is He who is expressing.
Keep this always in mind so that no neurosis can take possession of you. Remain balanced and tranquil, just walk the path in the middle, and you will never be lost, you will never be unbalanced, lopsided.
Yoga is balance. Yoga has to be a balance because it is going to be the path to the ultimate unity, the ultimate harmony of all that is.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #7
Chapter title: The Witness Is Self-Illuminating
25. WHEN ONE HAS SEEN THIS DISTINCTION, THERE IS A CESSATION OF DESIRE FOR DWELLING IN THE ATMA, THE SELF.
26. THEN THE MIND IS INCLINED TOWARDS DISCRIMINATION, AND GRAVITATES TOWARDS LIBERATION.
27. IN BREAKES OF DISCRIMINATION, OTHER PRATYAYAS, CONCEPTS, ARISE THROUGH THE FORCE OF PREVIOUS IMPRESSIONS. THESE SHOULD BE REMOVED IN THE SAME WAY AS OTHER AFFLICTIONS.
28. ONE WHO IS ABLE TO MAINTAIN A CONSTANT STATE OF DE3SIRELESSNESS EVEN TOWARDS THE MOST EXALTED STATES OF ENLIGHTENMENT, AND IS ABLE TO EXERCISE THE HIGHEST KIND OF DISCRIMINATION, ENTERS THE STATE KNOWN AS 'THE CLOUD WHICH SHOWERS VIRTUE'.
29. THEN FOLLOWS FREEDOM FROM AFFLICTIONS AND KARMAS.
30. THAT WHICH CAN BE KNOWN THROUGH THE MIND IS VERY LITTLE COMPARED WITH THE INFINITE KNOWLEDGE OBTAINED IN ENLIGHTENMENT, WHEN THE VEILS, DISTORTIONS, AND IMPURITIES ARE REMOVED.
31. HAVING FULFILLED THEIR OBJECT, THE PROCESS OF CHANGE IN THE THREE GUNAS COMES TO AN END.
32. KRAMAHA, THE PROCESS, IS THE SUCCESSION OF CHANGES THAT OCCUR FROM THE MOMENT TO MOMENT WHICH BECOME APPREHENSIBLE AT THE FINAL END OF THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE THREE GUNAS.
33. KAIVALYA IS THE STATE OF ENLIGHTENMENT THAT FOLLOWS THE REMERGENCE OF THE GUNAS, DUE TO THEIR BECOMING DEVOID OF THE OBJECT OF THE PURUSA.
34. IN THIS STATE, THE PURUSA IS ESTABLISHED IN HIS REAL NATURE, WHICH IS PURE CONSCIOUSNESS.
The first sutra:
VISESA-DARSINA ATMA-BHAVA-BHAVANAVINIVRTTIH.
BUDDHA HAS CALLED the ultimate state of consciousness anatta - no self, non-being. It is very difficult to comprehend it. Buddha has said that the last desire to drop is the desire to be. There are millions of desires. The whole world is nothing but to desire objects, but the basic desire is to be.
The basic desire is to continue, to persist, to remain. Death is the greatest fear; the last desire to be dropped is the desire to be.
Patanjali in this sutra says: when your awareness has become perfect, when viveka -> discrimination has been achieved, when you have become a witness, a pure witness of whatsoever happens, outside you, inside you.... You are no more a doer, you are simply watching; the birds are singing outside... you watch; the blood is circulating inside... you watch; the thoughts are moving inside... you watch -> you never get identified anywhere. You don't say, "I am the body"; you don't say, "I am the mind"; you don't say anything. You simply go on watching without being identified with any object. You remain a pure subject; you simply remember one thing: that you are the watcher, the witness - when this witnessing is established, then the desire to be disappears.
Death exists because you don't want to die.
And the moment the desire to be disappears, death also disappears. Death exists because you want to persist. Death exists because you don't want to die. Death exists because you are struggling against the whole. The moment you are ready to die, death is meaningless; it cannot be possible now. When you are ready to die, how can you die? In the very readiness of dying, disappearing, all possibility of death is overcome. This is the paradox of religion.
Jesus says, "If you are going to cling to yourself, you will lose yourself. If you want to attain yourself, don't cling." Those who try to be are destroyed. Not that somebody is there destroying you; your very effort to be is destructive because the moment the idea arises: "I should persist," you are moving against the whole.
It is as if a wave is trying to be against the ocean. Now the very effort is going to create worry and misery, and one moment will come when the wave will have to disappear. But now, because the wave was fighting against the ocean, the disappearance will look like death. If the wave was ready, and the wave was aware: "I'm nothing but the ocean, so what is the point in persisting? I have been always and I will be always, because the ocean has always been there and will be always there. I may not exist as a wave - wave is just the form I have taken for the moment. The form will disappear, but not my content. I may not exist like this wave; I may exist like another wave, or I may not exist as a wave as such. I may become the very depth of the ocean where no waves arise...."
But the innermost reality is going to remain because the whole has penetrated you. You are nothing but the whole, an expression of the whole. Once awareness is established, Patanjali says, "When one has seen this distinction, that 'I am neither this nor that', when one has become aware and is not identified with anything whatsoever, there is a cessation of desire for dwelling in the atma, in the self" Then the last desire disappears, and the last is the fundamental.
Hence, Buddha says, "You can drop desiring money, wealth, power, prestige - that's nothing. You can stop desiring the world - that's nothing - because those are secondary desires. The basic desire is to be."
So people who renounce the world start desiring liberation, but liberation is also their liberation. They will remain in moksha, in a liberated state. They desire that pain should not be there. They desire that misery should not be there. They will be in absolute bliss, but they will be. The insistence is that they must be there.
That's why Buddha could not get roots into this country - India - which thinks itself very religious. The most religious man who was born on this earth could not get roots into this so-called 'religious country'. What happened? He said, he insisted, to drop the basic desire of being: he said, "Be a non-being." He said, "Don't be." He said, "Don't ask for liberation because the freedom is not for you. The freedom is going to be freedom from you; not for you, but from you."
Liberation is liberation from yourself. See the distinction: it is not for you; liberation is not for you. It is not that in liberation you will exist. But in liberation, you will disappear. Buddha has said, "Only bondage exists."
Try to explain it...
Have you ever come across health? You have been healthy many times, but can you say what health is? Only disease exists. Health is non-existential; you cannot pin-point it. If you have a headache you know it is there, but have you ever known the absence of headache? In fact, if there is no headache the head also disappears. You don't feel it anymore. If you go on feeling your head, that simply shows that there must be a certain tension inside, a certain stress, a strain. A sort of headache must be there continuously.
If your whole body is healthy, the body disappears. You forget that the body is. In Zen, when meditators sit for many years, just sitting and doing nothing, a certain moment comes when they forget that they have bodies. That is their first satori. Not that the body is not there; body is there but there is no tension, so how to feel it? If I say something you can hear me, but if I'm silent how can you hear me? Silence is there - it has much to communicate to you - but silence cannot be heard. Sometimes when you say, "Yes, I can hear the silence," then you are hearing some noise. Maybe it is the noise of the dark night, but it is still noise. If it is absolutely silent, you will not be able to hear it. When your body is perfectly healthy, you don't feel it. If some tension arises in the body, some disease, some illness, then you start hearing. If everything is in harmony and there is no pain and no misery, suddenly you are empty. A nothingness overwhelms you.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #9
Chapter title: Kaivalya
Kaivalya is the ultimate health, wholeness, all wounds healed. When all wounds heal, how can you exist? The self [ego] is nothing but accumulated tensions. The self is nothing but all sorts of diseases, illnesses. The self is nothing but desires unfulfilled, hopes frustrated, expectations, dreams - all broken, fractured. It is nothing but accumulated disease, that you call 'self'. Or take it from another side: in moments of harmony you forget that you are. Later on, you may remember how beautiful it was, how fantastic it was, how far-out. But in moments of real far-outness, you are not actually there.
Something bigger than you has overpowered you; something higher than you has possessed you; something deeper than you has bubbled up. You have disappeared. In deep moments of love, lovers disappear. In deep moments of silence, meditators disappear. In deep moments of singing, dancing, celebration, celebrators disappear. And this is going to be the last celebration, the ultimate, the highest peak -> kaivalya.
Patanjali says, "Even the desire to be disappears. Even the desire to remain disappears." One is so fulfilled, so tremendously fulfilled that one never thinks in terms of being.
For what? - you want to be there tomorrow, also, it is because today is unfulfilled. The tomorrow is needed; otherwise you will die unfulfilled. The yesterday was a deep frustration; today is again a frustration; the tomorrow is needed.
A frustrated mind creates future. A frustrated mind clings with the future. A frustrated mind wants to be because now, if death comes, no flower has yet flowered. Nothing has yet happened; there has only been a fruitless waiting: "Now, how can I die? I have not even lived yet." That unlived life creates a desire to be.
People are so much afraid of death: these are the people who have not lived. These are the people who are, in a certain sense, already dead. A person who has lived and lived totally does not think about death. If it comes, good; he will welcome. He will live that too, he will celebrate that too.
Life has been such a blessing, a benediction; one is even ready to accept death. Life has been such a tremendous experience; one is ready to experience death also. One is not afraid because the tomorrow is not needed; the today has been so fulfilling. One has come to fruition, flowered, bloomed. Now the desire for tomorrow disappears. The desire for tomorrow is always out of fear, and fear is there because love has not happened. The desire to always remain simply shows that deep down you are feeling yourself completely meaningless. You are waiting for some meaning.
Once the meaning has happened, you are ready to die - silently, beautifully, gracefully.
"Kaivalya," Patanjali says, "happens only when the last desire to be has disappeared." The whole problem is to be or not to be. The whole life we try to be this and that, and the ultimate can happen only when you are not.
The self is nothing but the most purified form of the ego. It is the last remnant of strain, stress, tension. You are still not perfectly open; something is still closed. When you are completely open, just a watcher on the hill, a witness, even the death desire disappears. With the disappearance of this desire, something absolutely new happens in life. A new law starts functioning.
You have heard about the law of gravitation; you have not heard about the law of grace. The law of gravitation is that everything falls downwards. The law of grace is that things start falling upwards.
And that law has to be there because in life everything is balanced by the opposite. Science has come to discover the law of gravitation: Newton sitting on a bench in a garden saw one apple falling - it happened or not; that is not the point - but seeing that the apple was falling down, a thought arose in him: "Why do things always fall downwards? Why not otherwise? Why doesn't a ripe fruit fall upwards and disappear into the sky? Why not sideways? Why always downwards?"
He started brooding and meditating, and then he discovered a law. He came upon, stumbled upon a very fundamental law: that the earth is gravitating things towards itself. It has a gravitation field. Like a magnet, it pulls everything downwards.
Patanjali, Buddha, Krishna, Christ - they also became aware of a different fundamental law, higher than gravitation. They became aware that there comes a moment in the inner life of consciousness when consciousness starts rising upwards - exactly like gravitation. If the apple is hanging on the tree, it does not fall. The tree helps it not to fall downwards. When the fruit leaves the tree, then it falls downwards.
Exactly the same: if you are clinging to your body you will not fall upwards; if you are clinging to your mind you will not fall upwards. If you are clinging to the idea of self, you will remain under the impact of gravitation - because body is under the impact of gravitation, and mind also. Mind is subtle body; body is gross mind. They are both under the impact of gravitation.
Your true nature - the witnessing conscious - is not under the impact of gravitation, but because you are clinging to something that is under the impact of gravitation - body & mind - it has greater influence. It is as if you are carrying a big rock and trying to swim in a river; the rock will pull you down. It won't allow you to swim. If you leave the rock, you will be able to swim easily.
We are clinging to something which is functioning under the law of gravitation -> body, mind. Hence, the reason why humanity has so easily fallen.
Patanjali says, "Once you have become aware that you are neither the body nor the mind, suddenly you start rising upwards." Some center somewhere high in the sky pulls you up. That law is called 'grace'.
Then God pulls you upwards. And that type of law has to be there, otherwise gravitation could not exist. In nature, if positive electricity exists, then negative electricity has to exist. Man exists, then the woman has to exist. Reason exists, then intuition has to exist. Night exists, then the day has to exist. Life exists, then death has to exist. Everything needs the opposite to balance it. Now science has become aware of one law: gravitation. Science still needs a Patanjali to give it another dimension, the dimension of falling upwards. Then life becomes complete.
You are a meeting place of gravitation and grace. Within you, grace and gravitation are criss-crossing. You have something of the earth and something of the sky within you. You are the horizon where earth and sky are meeting. If you hold too much to the earth, then you will forget completely that you belong to the sky, to the infinite space, the beyond. Once you are no more attached with the earth part of you, suddenly you start rising high.
TADAHI VIVEKA-NIMNAM KAIVALYA-PRAGBHARAM CITTAM.
A new gravitation starts functioning. Liberation is nothing but entering the stream of grace. You cannot liberate yourself, you can only drop the barriers; liberation happens to you.
Have you seen a magnet? - small iron pieces are pulled towards it. You can see those small iron pieces rushing towards the magnet, but don't be deceived by your eyes. In fact, they are not rushing, the magnet is pulling them. On the surface it appears that those iron filings are going, moving towards the magnet.
That is just on the surface. Deep down, something just opposite is happening: they are not moving towards the magnet, the magnet is pulling them towards itself. In fact, it is the magnet which has reached them. With the magnetic field it has approached them, touched them, pulled them. If those iron filings are free, not attached to something - not attached to a rock - then the magnet can pull them. If they are attached to a rock, the magnet will go on pulling but they will not be pulled because they are attached.
Exactly the same happens: once you discriminate that you are not the body, you are no more bound to any rock, you are no more in bondage with earth. Immediately, God's magnet starts functioning.
It is not that you reach to God. In fact, God has already reached you. You are under His magnetic field, but clinging to something. Drop that clinging and you are in the stream. Buddha used to use a word srotaapanna -> falling into the stream. He used to say, "Once you fall into the stream, then the stream takes you to the ocean. Then you need not do anything." The only thing is to jump into the stream. You are sitting on the bank. Enter the stream and then the stream will do the remaining work.
It is as if you are standing on a high building, on the roof of a high building, three hundred feet or five hundred feet above the earth. You go on standing, the gravitation has reached you, but it will not work unless you jump. Once you jump, then you need not do anything. Just a step off the roof... enough; your work is finished. Now the gravitation will do all the work. You need not ask, "Now what am I supposed to do?" You have taken the first step. The first is the last step. Krishnamurti has written a book, THE FIRST AND THE LAST FREEDOM. The meaning is: the first step is the last step because once you are in the stream, everything else is to be done by the stream. You are not needed. Only for the first step is your courage needed.
You start moving slowly upwards. Your life energy starts rising high - an upsurge. And it is unbelievable when it happens because it is against all the laws that you have known up to now.
It is levitation, not gravitation. Something in you simply starts moving upwards, and there is no barrier to it. Nothing bars its path. Just a little relaxation, a little unclinging - the first step - and then automatically, spontaneously, your consciousness becomes more and more discriminative, more and more aware.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #9
Chapter title: Kaivalya
You have heard the word, the phrase: 'vicious circle'. Let us make another phrase: 'virtuous circle'. In a vicious circle, one bad thing leads to another. For example, if you get angry then one anger leads you to more anger, and of course, more anger will lead you to still more anger. Now you are in a vicious circle. Each anger will make the habit of anger more strong, and will create more anger, and more anger will make the habit still more strong, and on and on. You move in a vicious circle which goes on becoming stronger and stronger and stronger.
Let us try a new word: virtuous circle. If you become aware, what Patanjali calls vivek, awareness; if you become aware: vairagya. Discrimination creates renunciation. If you become aware, suddenly you see that you are no more the body. Not that you renounce the body; in your very awareness the body is renounced. If you become aware, you become aware that these thoughts are not you.
In that very awareness those thoughts are renounced. You have started dropping them. You don't give them any more energy; you don't cooperate with them. Your cooperation has stopped, and they cannot live without your energy. They live on your energy, they exploit you. They don't have their own energy. Each thought that enters you partakes of your energy. And because you are kaivalya willing to give your energy, it lives there, it makes its abode there. Of course, then its children come, and friends, and relatives, and this goes on. Once you are a little aware, vivek brings vairagya, awareness brings renunciation. And renunciation makes you capable of becoming more aware.
And of course, more awareness brings more vairagya, more renunciation, and so on and so forth.
This is what I am calling the virtuous circle: one virtue leads to another, and each virtue becomes again a ground for more virtue to arise.
"This goes on," Patanjali says, "to the last moment" - what he calls, dharma megha samadhi. We will be coming to it later on. He calls it 'the cloud of virtue showering on you'. This virtuous circle, vivek leading to vairagya, vairagya leading to more vivek, vivek again creating more possibilities for vairagya, and so on and so forth - comes to the ultimate peak when the cloud of virtue showers on you: dharma megha samadhi.
Still, though, many intervals will be there. So don't be discouraged. Even if you have become very aware and in sudden moments you feel the pull, the upward pull of grace, and in certain moments you are in the stream, floating perfectly beautifully, with no effort, effortlessly, and everything is going and running smoothly, still there will be gaps.
Suddenly you will find yourself standing again on the riverbank just because of old habits. For so many lives you have lived on the bank. Just because of the old habit, again and again the past will overpower you. Don't be discouraged by it. The moment you see that you are again on the bank, again get down into the stream. Don't be sad about it, because if you become sad you will again be in a vicious circle. Don't be sad about it. Many times the seeker comes at very close quarters, and many times he loses the track. No need to be worried; again bring awareness. This is going to happen many times; it is natural. For so many millions of lives we have lived in unawareness - it is only natural that many times the old habit will start functioning.
A few anecdotes.
The boss was full of confidence as he approached the reception desk at a large hotel with his secretary and signed the register as Mr. and Mrs.
"Double or twin beds?" inquired the clerk.
He turned to his secretary and asked casually, "Would a double be alright, darling?"
"Yes, sir," she answered.
"Yes, sir," the wife was saying to the husband! - but just the old habit of being a secretary, continuously saying, "Yes sir, yes sir, yes sir." Habits become very ingrained, and they catch hold of you in such a way that unless you are very, very watchful, you will not even suspect.
It happened:
An indignant schoolteacher rang the local police station to complain that a crowd of young hooligans had chalked four-letter words all over her front door. "And what is more," she concluded, "they have not even spelled them right!"
A school teacher is just a school teacher. She is complaining against the four-letter words, but the basic complaint is that they have not even spelled them right. Continuously correcting the spelling of children....
Many times you will be pulled back, again and again and again. The struggle is hard, but not impossible. It is difficult, it is very arduous, but don't become sad and don't become discouraged.
Whenever you remember again, don't be worried about what has happened. Let your awareness again be established, that's all. Continuously establishing your awareness again and again and again will create a new impact inside your being, a new impression of virtue. One day, it becomes as natural as other habits.
"One who is able to maintain a constant state of desirelessness even towards the most exalted states of enlightenment..."
Patanjali calls it paravairagya: the ultimate renunciation. You have renounced the world: you have renounced greed, you have renounced money, you have renounced power; you have renounced everything of the outside. You have even renounced your body, you have even renounced your mind, but the last renunciation is the kaivalya renunciation of kaivalya itself, of moksha itself, of nirvana itself. Now you renounce even the idea of liberation, because that too is a desire. And desire, whatsoever its object, is the same. You desire money, I desire moksha.
Of course, my object is better than your object, but still my desire is the same as yours. Desire says, "I am not content as I am. More money is needed; then I will be contented. More liberation is needed; then I will be contented."
The quality of desire is the same, the problem of desire is the same. The problem is that the future is needed: "As I am, it is not enough; something more is needed. Whatsoever has happened to me is not enough. Something still has to happen to me; only then can I be happy."This is the nature of desire: you need more money, somebody needs a bigger house, somebody thinks of more power, politics, somebody thinks of a better wife or a better husband, somebody thinks of more education, more knowledge, somebody thinks of more miraculous powers, but it makes no difference. Desire is desire, and desirelessness is needed.
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10
Chapter #9
Chapter title: Kaivalya