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.

Gurdjieff | Ouspensky

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."

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.

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.