96. ABIDE IN SOME PLACE ENDLESSLY SPACIOUS, CLEAR OF TREES, HILLS, HABITATIONS.
THENCE COMES THE END OF MIND PRESSURES.97. CONSIDER THE PLENUM TO BE YOUR OWN BODY OF BLISS.
Man is born alone and dies alone, but between these two points he lives in society, he lives with others.
Aloneness is his basic reality; society is just accidental. And unless man can live alone, can know his aloneness in its total depth, he cannot be acquainted with himself. All that happens in society is just outer: it is not you, it is just your relations with others. You remain unknown. From the outside you cannot be revealed.
But we live with others. Because of this, self-knowledge is completely forgotten. You know something about yourself, but indirectly – it is said to you by others. It is strange, absurd, that others should tell you about yourself. Whatsoever identity you carry is given to you by others; it is not real, it is just a labelling. A name is given to you. That name is given as a label because it will be difficult for society to be related to a nameless person. Not only is the name given, the very image that you think yourself to be is given by society: that you are good, that you are bad, that you are beautiful, that you are intelligent, that you are moral, a saint, or whatsoever. The image, the form, is also given by society, and you don’t know what you are. Neither your name reveals anything, nor the form that society has given to you. You remain unknown to yourself.
This is the basic anxiety. You are there, but you are unknown to yourself. This lack of knowledge about oneself is the ignorance, and this ignorance cannot be destroyed by any knowledge which others can give to you. They can say to you that you are not this name, you are not this form, you are ‘soul eternal’, but that too, is given by others, that too is not immediate. Unless you come to yourself directly, you will remain in ignorance. And ignorance creates anxiety. You are not only afraid of others, you are afraid of yourself – because you don’t know who you are and what is hidden in you. What is possible, what will erupt out of you the next moment, you don’t know. You go on trembling and life becomes a deep anxiety. There are many problems which create anxiety, but those problems are secondary. If you penetrate deeply, then every problem will ultimately reveal that the basic anxiety, the basic anguish, is that you are ignorant of yourself – of the source from where you come, of the end to where you are moving, of the being whom you are right now.
Hence every religion says to move into solitude, into aloneness, so that you can for a time leave society and all that society has given to you, and face yourself directly.
Mahavir lived for twelve years alone in the forest. He would not speak during those days, because the moment you speak you have moved into society. Language is society. He remained completely silent, he would not speak. The basic bridge had been cut so that he would be alone. When you don’t speak you are alone, deeply alone. There is no way to move to the other. For twelve long years he lived alone without speaking. What was he doing? He was trying to find out who he was.
It is better to put away all labels, it is better to move away from others so that there is no need for the social image. He was destroying the social image. He was throwing away all the garbage that society had given; he was trying to be totally naked, without any name, without any form. That;s what Mahavir;s nakedness means. It was not just throwing away the clothes. It was deeper. It was the nudity of being totally alone. You also use clothes for society: they are to hide your body, or they are to cover you in the eyes of others, because society doesn’t approve of your whole body.
So whatsoever society doesn’t approve of, you have to hide. Only particular parts of the body are allowed to be in the open. The society chooses you in parts. Your totality is not approved of, not accepted.
The same is happening with the mind – not only with the body. Your face is approved of, your hands are approved of, but your whole body is not approved of, particularly the parts of the body that can give any hint of sex. They are disapproved of, not accepted. Hence the importance of clothes. And this is happening with the mind also: your total mind is not accepted, only parts of it. So you have to hide the mind and suppress it. You cannot open your mind. You cannot open your mind to your deepest friend because he will judge. He will say, “This is what you think? This is what goes on in your mind?” So you have to give him only that which can be accepted – a very minute part – and all else that is in you has to be hidden completely. That hidden part creates many diseases. The whole psychoanalysis of Freud consists only of bringing the hidden part out. It takes years before the person is healed. But the psychoanalyst is not doing anything, he is simply bringing the suppressed part out. Just to bring it out becomes a healing force.
What does it mean? It means the suppression is the illness. It is a burden, a heavy burden. You wanted to confess to someone; you wanted to tell, to express; you wanted someone to accept you in totality. That is what love means – you will not be rejected. Whatsoever you are – good, bad, saint, sinner – someone will accept you in your totalness, he will not reject any part of you. That;s why love is the greatest healing force, it is the oldest psychoanalysis. Whenever you love a person you are open to him, and just by being open, your cut, divided parts are brought together. You become one.
But even love has become impossible. Even with your wife you cannot tell the truth. Even with your lover you cannot be totally authentic, because even his or her eyes are judging. He or she also wants an image to be followed, an ideal – your reality is not important, the ideal is important. You know that if you express your totality you will be rejected, you will not be loved. You are afraid, and because of this fear love becomes impossible. Psychoanalysis brings the hidden part out, but the psychoanalyst is not doing anything, he is simply sitting there listening to you. No one has listened to you it seems. That is why you now need professional help. No one is ready to listen to you. No one has the time. No one has much interest in you. So professional help has come into being – you are paying someone to listen. And then year in, year out, he will listen to you every day, or twice a week, or thrice a week, and you will be healed. This is miraculous! Why should you be healed just by listening? It is because someone pays attention to you without any judgement and you can tell anything that is in you. And just by telling, it comes up and becomes a part of the conscious. When you cut off something, deny something, prohibit something, suppress something, you are creating a division between the conscious and the unconscious, the accepted and the rejected. This division has to be thrown.
Mahavir moved into aloneness so that he could be as he was with no fear of anybody. Because he didn’t have to show a face to anybody he could throw away all the masks, all the faces. Then he could be alone, totally naked, as he is under the stars, by the river and in the forest. No one would judge him and no one would say, :You are not allowed to be like this. You should behave. You should be like this.” Leaving society means leaving the situation where suppression has become inevitable.
So nudity means to be as one is, with no barriers, no withholding. Mahavir moved into silence, into loneliness, and he said, “Unless I find myself – not the self that others have given to me, that is false, but the self that I am born with – I will not return to society. Unless I know who I am I will not return to society. Unless I have come directly face to face with my reality, unless I have encountered the essential in men, not the accidental, I will not speak, because it is useless to speak.”
You are the accidental. Whatsoever you think you are is the accidental part. For example, you are born in India. You could have been born in England or in France or in Japan. That is the accidental part. But just by being born in India, you have a different identity. You are a Hindu. You think yourself a Hindu – but you would have thought yourself a Buddhist in Japan, or a Christian in England, or a communist in Russia. You have not done anything to be a Hindu, it is just an accident. Wherever you were you would have joined yourself with the situation. You think yourself religious but your religion is just accidental. ‘If you have been born in a communist country, you would not have been religious, you would have been as irreligious there as you are religious here. You are born into a Jain family so you don;t believe in God without your having discovered that there is no God. But just by the side of your house another child is born on the same day, and he is a Hindu. He believes in God and you don;t. This is accidental, it is not essential. It depends on circumstances. You speak Hindi, someone speaks Gujarati, someone speaks French – these are accidents. Language is accidental.
Silence is essential; language is accidental. Your soul is essential; your self is accidental. And to find the essential is the search, the only search.
How to find the essential? Buddha moved in silence for six years. Jesus also moved into a deep forest. His followers, the apostles wanted to go with him. They followed him and at a certain moment, at a certain point, he said, “Stop. You should not come with me. Now I must be alone with my God.”
He moved into the wilderness. When he came back he was a totally different man; he had faced himself.
Loneliness becomes the mirror. Society is the deception. That;s why you are always afraid of being alone – because you will have to know yourself, and you will have to know yourself in your nudity, in your nakedness. You are afraid. To be alone is difficult. Whenever you are alone, you immediately start doing something so you are not alone. You may start reading the newspaper, or you may put on the T.V., or you may go to some club to meet some friends, or you may go to visit some family – but you must do something. Why? Because the moment you are alone your identity melts, and all that you know about yourself becomes false and all that is real starts bubbling up.
All religions say that man must move into solitariness to know himself. One need not be there forever, that is futile, but one has to be in solitude for a time, for a period. And the length of the period will depend on each individual. Mohammed was in solitude for a few months; Jesus for only a few days; Mahavir for twelve years and Buddha for six years. It depends. But unless you come to the point where you can say, “Now I have know the essential,” it is a must to be alone.
This technique is concerned with loneliness.
ABIDE IN SOME PLACE ENDLESSLY SPACIOUS, CLEAR OF TREES, HILLS, HABITATIONS.
THENCE COMES THE END OF MIND PRESSURES.
Before we enter this technique three other points about loneliness must be understood. One: to be alone is basic, foundational – that is how your being is. In the mother;s womb you are alone, totally alone, and psychologists say that the hankering for nirvana, for enlightenment, for salvation, for paradise, is really a deep imprinted memory of the experience of the mother;s womb. You have known it – the total aloneness – and the bliss of it. You were alone, you were God. No one else was there. No one disturbed you, no one interfered. Alone, you were the master. With no conflict the peace was intrinsic. Silence was there, no language. You were deep in yourself. You are not consciously aware of the fact but it is deeply imprinted, it is there hidden in the unconscious.
Because of this, psychologists say that everyone thinks that life in childhood was beautiful. And ever country and every race thinks that somewhere in the past was the Golden Age – somewhere in the past, life was blissful. Hindus call it SATYA-YUG, age of truth. In the past, somewhere, the very, very past, before history began, everything was beautiful and blissful. There was no conflict, no strife, no violence. Only love prevailed. That was the Golden Age. Christians say that Adam and Eve lived in Eden, in the garden, in absolute innocence and blissfulness. Then came the fall. So the Golden Age is before the fall. Every country, every race, every religion, believes that the Golden Age was somewhere in the past. And the strangeness is that howsoever deeply into the past you move, this was always believed to be so, always.
In Mesopotamia a stone has been found which is six thousand years old. There is an inscription on it. If you read it you will feel that it is the editorial of today’s morning newspaper. The inscription says that this age is the age of sin. Everything has gone wrong. The son doesn’t believe in the father, the wife doesn’t believe in the husband. Darkness has set. Where are those days, the days of the past, those golden days? This is a six thousand-year-old inscription! Lao Tzu says that in the days of the past, in the days of the ancients, everything was beautiful. Then Tao prevailed, then there was nothing wrong, and because there was nothing wrong, no one preached. There was nothing wrong to be changed, transformed, and there was no priest, no preacher, no moral leaders, because everything was so right. Lao Tzu says that in those days, those old days, there was no religion. There was no need because Tao prevailed. Everyone was so religious that there was no need for religion. There were no sages then, because there were no sinners. Everyone was such a sage that, naturally, no one was aware of who was a sage and who was a sinner.
Psychologists say that this past never existed. This past is just the deep memory within every individual of the womb. It existed. Really, Tao was in the womb, and everything was beautiful, everything was as it should be. Completely unaware of the world, the child is moving in bliss. The situation of the child in the womb is just as it is for Vishnu on his SHESHNAGA. Hindus believe that Vishnu is lying on his couch, a serpent couch, floating on the ocean of bliss. Really, that is the child’s position in the womb. The child floats. The mother’s womb is just like the ocean. And you may be surprised to know that the water in which the child floats in the mother’s womb has the same constituents as the ocean water – very similar, the same salts, everything. It is ocean water, soothing. And the womb always keeps the right temperature for the child. The mother may be shivering with cold, that makes no difference. For the child it is always the same temperature in the womb. He is warm, blissfully floating, with no worries, no anxieties, no responsibilities, alone.
He is not aware of the mother; mother doesn’t exist for him. This SANSKAR, this imprint, is carried on by you. This is the basic reality, how you were before you entered society, and this will be the reality again when you go out of society and die. You will again be alone.
And between these two points of loneliness your life is filled with many events. But those events are accidental. Deep down you remain alone because that is your basic reality. Around that aloneness many things happen: you get married, you become two, then you have children and you become many. Everything goes on happening – but just on the periphery. The deep stratum remains totally alone. That is your reality. You may call this your ATMA, your essence.
In deep solitude this essence has to be recaptured. So when Buddha says that he has achieved nirvana, really he has achieved this loneliness, this basic reality. Mahavir says he has achieved KAIVALYA. The very word KAIVALYA, means loneliness, the alone. Just below the turmoil of events that aloneness is there. It runs through you like a thread running in a mala. The beads are apparent, but the thread is not. But the beads are hanging on the thread, and the beads are many and the thread is one. Really, the mala is a symbol of this reality. The thread is the reality and the beads are just the events which go on hanging on it. And unless you penetrate and come to the basic thread, you will be in anguish, you will be in suffering.
You have a history – that history is accidental. And you have a nature – that nature is non-historical.
You are born on a certain date, to certain parents, in a certain society, in a certain age. You are educated in a certain way. Then you enter a particular profession, you fall in love with a woman, you have children. These dramas are beads, events, history, but deep down you are always alone.
And if you forget yourself completely because of these events you have missed the very purpose of being here. Then you have lost yourself in the drama and you have forgotten the actor who was not part of it, who was just playing the role. All these things are roles.
Because of this India does not have written histories. Really, it is very difficult to be certain about when Krishna was born, when he died; when Ram was born, when he died – or whether he was ever born or not or is just a myth. We have not written his history, and this is the reason: we in India are concerned with the thread and not with the beads. Really, in the religious world, Christ is the first historical person, but had he been born in India he would not have been historical. We in India are always looking for the thread, the beads are irrelevant. But the West is more oriented towards events, facts – temporal things – than to the essential and the eternal. History is the drama. In India, we say that Ramas and Krishnas go on being born in every age. They have been repeated many times before and they will be repeated many times afterwards. So there is no need to carry on the records. When they are born is irrelevant. What their being is – the thread – that is the meaningful.
So we are not concerned if they were really historical persons or not, we are not concerned with outer things that happen to a being, we are concerned with the being itself and whether anything happens to it or not.
When you move into solitude you are moving to the thread; when you move into solitude, you are moving into nature. If you are really alone, not even thinking of others, you will feel the world of nature around you for the first time. You will become attuned to it. Right now you are attuned to society. If you fall from this attunement to society, you will be attuned to nature. When the rains come – they are always coming but you cannot understand the language of the rains – they don’t say anything to you, they don’t mean anything to you; at the most some utilitarian thing about water being needed is realized. So there is some use, but you don’t have any dialogue, you cannot understand the language of the rains, the rain has no personality for you. But if you leave society for a time and remain in aloneness, you will start feeling a new phenomenon: the rains will come and they will talk to you. Then you will feel their moods – some day the rain is very angry and some day it is very soothing and loving. Some day the whole sky is depressed, and some day it is dancing.
Some day the sun rises as if without any will of its own, forced, doing the work; and some day on its own – now it is not a work but a play.
You will feel all the moods around you. Nature has its own language but it is silent, and unless you are silent you cannot understand it.
The first layer of attunement is with society, the second layer of attunement is with nature, and the third layer, the deepest, is with Tao or DHARMA. That is the pure existence. Then the tree, then the rains, then the clouds, they are also left behind. Then, just existence…. Existence has no moods.
Existence is always the same. Existence is always the same: always festive, exploding with energy.
But one has first to move from society to nature – then from nature to existence. When you are attuned with existence you are totally alone, but this aloneness is different from that of the child in the womb. The child is alone, but it is not that he is really alone, he is unaware of anything else.
He is enclosed in darkness, that’s why he feels alone. The whole world exists around him but he is not aware of it. His aloneness is that of ignorance. When you become consciously silent, one with existence, your aloneness will not be surrounded by darkness, it will be surrounded by light.
For the child in the womb the world is not, because he is unaware. For you the world will not be, because the world and you have become one.
When you reach the deepest being you are alone again because the ego is lost. The ego is given by society. It can persist a little even when you are in nature although it will not be as much as it is in society. When you move alone, your ego starts disappearing – because it is always in relationship.
Look at this phenomenon: with every individual your ego changes. If you are talking to your servant, look inside, look at the ego, see how it is. If you are talking to your friend, look within, see how the ego is. You are talking to your beloved, look within, see whether the ego is or is not. If you are talking to an innocent child, look within – the ego will not be there because it will be stupid to be an egoist with an innocent child. You will feel that this would be stupid, so while playing with children you become a child. The child doesn’t know the language of ego. And being egoistic with a child you will look awkward. So when you play with children they pull you down. They bring you back to your own childhood. When you are talking with a dog, or playing with a dog, the ego that the society has given to you cannot exist because with a dog there is no question of ego. If you are walking with your dog – a very beautiful and costly dog – and someone crosses the street, even the dog seems to give you ego. But the dog is not giving you ego, it is the man who is passing. You become straight, you feel elated because you have a very beautiful dog and the man looks jealous.
The ego is there. If you move into a forest the ego disappears. Hence the insistence of all religions to move, at least for a time, into the world of nature.
This sutra is simple: ABIDE IN SOME PLACE ENDLESSLY SPACIOUS – on some hilltop from where you can see endlessly, from where the vision never comes to any end. If you can see endlessly and there is no end to your vision, the ego will dissolve. Ego needs limits, boundaries. The more defined the boundaries, the easier it is for the ego to exist.
ABIDE IN SOME PLACE ENDLESSLY SPACIOUS, CLEAR OF TREES, HILLS, HABITATIONS.
THENCE COMES THE END OF MIND PRESSURES.
Mind is very subtle. You can live on a hilltop where there is no one, but if you can see a cottage deep down in the valley you will start talking with that cottage, you will be in relationship with it – the society has come. You don’t know who lives there, but someone lives there, and that becomes the boundary – you will start dreaming about who lives there and your eyes will search each day to see who lives there. The cottage will become a symbol of humanity. So the sutra says WITHOUT HABITATIONS – even without trees, because it has been known that people who live alone start talking with trees.
They make friendships, they create a dialogue. You cannot understand the difficulty of a man who has gone to be lonely. He wants someone so he will say “Hello” to the tree and “How are you?” And trees are beings. If you are really honest, they will start replying, there will be a response. So you can create a society.
The meaning is this: be in some place and be alert that you don’t create a society again. You may start tending a tree, loving a tree. You may feel that the tree is feeling thirsty so you should bring some water – you have started a relationship and with a relationship you are not alone. So this is the emphasis: move to such a place but have it in your mind that you are not going to create any relationship. Leave all relationship and the world of relationship behind, and be alone there. In the beginning it is going to be very difficult because your mind is created by society. You can leave society but where will you leave the mind? The mind will follow you like a shadow. The mind will haunt you. The mind will start torturing you. Faces will come in your dreams – they will try to pull you. You will try to meditate but thoughts will not cease. You will start thinking of your house, you will start thinking of your wife, of your children. It is human.
And it does not happen to you only – it has happened to Buddha and to Mahavir. It has happened to everyone. Even a Buddha is bound to think of Yashodhara during six long years of loneliness. In the beginning, when the mind was following him, he must have been sitting under a tree pretending to meditate, and Yashodhara must have followed him. He loved that woman. And he must have felt guilty because he had left her – and without saying anything to her. Nowhere is it mentioned that he thought about Yashodhara, but I say he must have thought of her. It is so human; it is so natural.
To think that he never thought again of Yashodhara would be very inhuman and would not be fair to Buddha. Only by and by, after a long struggle, would he have been able to throw off the mind.
But mind will persist because it is nothing but society – society internalized. Society has entered into you – that is your mind. You can escape from society, the outer reality, but the inner will follow you.
Many times Buddha must have been talking with Yashodhara, with his father, with the small child he left behind. The face of his child must have followed him. It was there in his mind when he left. The night he left he went into Yashodhara’s room, just to see the child for the last time. The child was only one day old. Yashodhara was sleeping and the child was clinging to her breast. He looked at the child. He wanted to take the child into his hands because this was his last opportunity. He had not touched him yet and now he might never return so there would be no meeting. He was leaving the world. He wanted to touch and kiss the child but then he became afraid because if he took the child up in his hands, Yashodhara might be awakened. Then it would be very difficult for him to leave – she would start weeping and crying. He had a human heart. It was beautiful that he thought of it: that if she started crying it would be very difficult for him to leave. Then all that he had created in his mind – that this world was useless and futile – would disappear. He would not be able to see Yashodhara crying. He loved that woman. So he left. He moved out of the room without making any noise.
This man could not leave Yashodhara and the child easily. No one could. When he was begging it was bound to come to his mind – his palace and everything. He was a beggar of his own accord.
The past would persist, it would hammer the mind again and again, “Come back.” Many times he would think, “I have made a mistake.” It is bound to be so. Nowhere is this recorded and sometimes I think about making a diary about what happened to Buddha’s mind during those six years – a diary about what happened to his mind, what was going on.
Mind will follow like a shadow wherever you go. So it is not going to be easy. It has never been easy for anyone. It will be a long struggle to make yourself again and again alert; again and again to be a witness; again and again not to fall a victim. And to the very last the mind follows. Unless you are desperate, unless you feel that you are incurable, that nothing can be done, the mind will go on haunting you. It will try in every way. It will create fantasies, reveries, dreams; it will create all types of allurements, seductions. It is written in the lives of all the seers that Satan comes, the Devil comes, to seduce. No one comes – only your mind. Your mind is the only Devil and no one else. It will try in every way. It will say to you, “I will give you the whole world, come back.” It will make you depressed, “You are a fool – the whole world is enjoying and you have come to this hilltop. You are mad. All this religious stuff is humbug, come back. Look, the whole world is not insane and they are enjoying.” And the mind will give such beautiful pictures of everyone who is enjoying and the whole world will be more attractive to you than ever. All that you have left behind will pull you backwards.
This is the basic struggle. And this is just because the mind is a mechanism of habits, of mechanical persistence. On the hilltop the mind will feel like hell – nothing is good there, everything is wrong.
The mind will create negativity all around you, “What are you doing here? Have you gone mad?”
The world that you have left behind will become more and more beautiful to your eyes and the place that you are in will become more and more ugly. But if you persist and you remain aware that this is what the mind is doing, this is what the mind is bound to do, and if you don’t get identified with the mind, a moment comes when the mind leaves you, and with it all the pressures. When the mind leaves you, you are unburdened, because it is the only burden. Then there is no worry, no thought, no anxiety, you have entered the womb of existence. Unworried, you float. A deep silence explodes within you.
The sutra says, THENCE COMES THE END OF MIND PRESSURES. In such solitude, in such loneliness, one thing more has to be remembered: the crowd exerts a deep pressure on you, whether you know it or not.
Now, after working on animals, scientists have come to a very basic law. They say that every animal has a certain space as his territory. If you enter that space then the animal becomes tense and he will attack you, Every animal has a certain space around him. He will not allow anybody to enter, because the moment someone enters, he feels the pressure. You hear many birds singing in the trees. You don’t know what they are doing. Scientists say now, after years of study, that whenever a bird is singing in the trees he is doing many things. One, he is calling for his girlfriend. Another, he is alerting all the male competitors that this is his territory – don’t enter it. And if someone enters the territory a fight will ensue. And the girlfriend will just wait and see who wins, because whoever gets the territory will get her/ She will just wait, and the one who wins will stay there and the one who is defeated will have to leave. By many means every animal creates territory: by sound, by singing, by body odor. No other competitor should enter that territory.
You may have seen dogs pissing all around. Scientists say that they create their territory by pissing.
The dog will go and piss on this pole and on that pole. He will not piss on one place – why? You can do it on one place, why move so much? He is creating territory. His urine has a particular odor and with it he creates a territory. No one should enter, it is dangerous. He lives secluded in his own territory, master of it.
There are many studies going on. They have tried putting many animals in one cage with all their needs fulfilled – better than they can fulfil them themselves in a forest. But they go mad because they don’t have space. When someone is always around they are tense, afraid, ready to fight. This constant readiness to fight gives such tensions that there heart failures or they go mad. Animals even commit suicide because the pressure becomes so much. And many abnormalities develop which are never found in the wild state. Monkeys in the wild are totally different. When caged in a zoo they start behaving abnormally. In the beginning it was thought that it was the bondage that was creating the problem. Now it is known that it is not the bondage. If you give them the proper space that they need in a cage they are happy. Then there is no problem. But they have an intrinsic feeling of space. When someone enters that space, pressure comes to their minds. Their minds start to be tense, strained; they cannot sleep right, they cannot feed right, they cannot love right.
Because of these studies, scientists now say that the whole of humanity is going crazy and mad because of too much over-population. The pressure is so great. You are never left alone: in the train, in the bus, in the office, everywhere, crowds and crowds. Man also has a need of space, to be left alone. But there is no place, you are never alone. When you come to your home, your wife is there, the children are there, and the relatives keep on coming. And they still think that the guest is God! You are already crazy because the pressure is too much all around you. You cannot say to anyone, “Leave me alone.” If you say to your wife, “Leave me alone,” she will get angry, “What do you mean?” She has been waiting for you the whole day. Mind needs space to be relaxed.
This sutra is really beautiful and very scientific. THENCE COMES THE END OF MIND PRESSURES.
When you move alone on a solitary hilltop you have space all around you, endless space. The pressure of the crowd, the pressure of others around you, leaves you. You will sleep more deeply.
You will have a different quality of awakening in the morning. You will feel free. An inner pressure circle is not there. You will feel unimprisoned, unfettered.
This is good. But we have become so addicted to crowds that only for a few days – three or four days – will you feel good, then the desire will arise to go again to the crowd. Every holiday you go on, you want to come back after three days. Because of the pattern, the habit, you feel useless.
Alone, you feel useless, alone you cannot do anything, and even if you do something, no one will know about it, no one will see you doing it, no one will appreciate it. You cannot do anything alone because all your life you have been doing something for others. You feel useless.
So remember, if you ever try this solitary madness, drop the idea of utility. Be useless. Only then can you be alone. Because really, utility has been forced on your mind by society. Society says, “Be of some utility. Don’t be useless.” Society want you to be an economic unit, a thing, efficient, utilitarian. Society doesn’t want you to be just a flower. No, even if you are a flower then you must be worth being sold. Society needs you to be in the market, you must have some utility. Only then are you of use, otherwise not. Society goes on preaching that use is the goal of life, the purpose of life. This is nonsense.
I am not saying be useless. I am saying that this use is not the goal. You have to live in society, to be useful to it, but to remain capable of being useless at any moment. That capacity must be retained otherwise you become a thing and not a person. When you move into solitariness, aloneness, this will become a problem. You will feel yourself useless.
I have been working with many people. Sometimes I suggest that they go for three weeks or three months into total loneliness, silence. And I tell them that after seven days they will want to come back and their mind will find all the reasons for not being there so that they can come back. I tell them not to listen to those arguments and to make it a point that for the time they have decided upon they will not leave. They say to me that they are going of their own will, so why should they leave? I tell them that they don’t know themselves. This will not be there for more than three to seven days; afterwards they will long to return, because society has become alcoholic, it is an intoxicant. In sober moments you can think about being alone, but when you are alone, within three days you will think, “What am I doing?” Remember, use is for society. Society uses you and you use society. This is a reciprocal relationship.
But life is not for use. It is non-utilitarian, purposeless, it is a play, a celebration. So when you move into solitariness to do this technique, be prepared from the very beginning that you are going to be useless, and enjoy it, don’t feel sad about it. You cannot conceive of what arguments the mind will bring. You will say, “The world is in such trouble and you are sitting in silence here. Look what is happening in Vietnam and what is happening in Pakistan and what is happening in China; and your country is dying, there is no food, there is no water. What are you doing here meditation? What is the use? Will it bring socialism to the country?” Mind will bring beautiful arguments; mind is the great arguer. It is the Devil – it will try to persuade you, it will convince you that you are wasting time.
But don’t listen to it. From the very beginning be prepared, “I am going to waste time. I will not be of any use. I will simply enjoy being here.”
And don’t be concerned with the world. The world goes on. It is always in trouble. It has been always in trouble and it will remain always in trouble. That is the way of the world. You cannot do anything so don’t try to be a great world reformer, a revolutionary, a messiah. Don’t try.
You simply be yourself and enjoy your solitariness, just like a rock or a tree or a river. Useless! What is the use of a rock just lying there under the rains, under the sun, under the stars? What is the use of this rock? No use – the rock enjoys itself being that way. Just be a rock. There are rock gardens in Japan, in Zen monasteries; they make rock gardens particularly for this. There are no trees in the garden, just sand and rock. A solitary rock, just sits there, and the master says to the disciple, “Go, and be just a rock, just like that rock. Don’t be bothered about the world. That rock remains there whatsoever happens to the world. It is not worried. It is always in meditation.”
Unless you are really prepared to be useless, you cannot be solitary, you cannot be in solitude.
And once you know the depth of it you can come back to society. You must come back because solitariness is not a style of life – it is just a training. It is not a way of life, it is just a deep relaxation to change the perspective. It is just falling out of step with society to have a look at yourself, who you are, alone. So don’t think that this is a style of life. Many have made it a style of life. They are in error. They are absolutely in error. They have made a medicine food. It is not a style of life, it is just medicinal. You fall out for a time being just to have a perspective, a distance, to see what you are and what society is doing to you. When you are out of it, you can have a better look. You can observe. Without being concerned, without being in it, you can become an observer from the hilltop, you can become a witness. You are so far away. Unprejudiced, undisturbed, you can look.
So note it, this is not a way of life. I am not saying leave the world and become hermits somewhere in the Himalayas – no. But sometimes leave, relax, be useless, be alone, exist like a rock, be independent, free from the world, be a part of nature – and you will be rejuvenated, reborn. Then come back and move in society and in the crowd again. And try to carry that beauty, that silence that happened to you when you were alone. Now carry it, don’t lose contact with it. Move deep into the crowd but don’t become a part of it. Let the crowd be there outside you – you remain alone.
And when you become capable of being alone in the crowd, you have achieved real aloneness. It is easy to be alone on a hilltop. The whole of nature helps you, and nothing is a barrier. To be back in the market-place, in the shop, in the office, in the family, and to remain alone – that is an achievement. Then it is something you have achieved and it is not just accidental, something that happened because of the hills. Now the quality of consciousness has changed. So remain alone in the crowd. The crowd will be there outside but don’t allow it to enter in. Protect whatsoever you have gained. Defend it, don’t allow it to be disturbed. And whenever you feel that the feeling has become dull, that you are missing it, that society has disturbed it, that the dust has gathered around, that the fresh spring is no longer fresh, that it is polluted – move again. Fall out of society to renew it, to make it alive again. Then come back and move in the crowd. And then a moment will come when that original spring will remain fresh and no one will be able to pollute it or contaminate it. Then there is no need to move anywhere.
So this is just a technique, not a style of life. Don’t become a monk, don’t become a nun, don’t move to a monastery to live there forever. That is nonsense. If you live forever in a monastery you will never be able to know whether you have attained what you have attained, or whether the monastery has just given it to you. It may be accidental, not essential. The essential has to be tested. The essential has to be set against society; it has to be brought to the touch-stone. And when it never breaks, when you can depend on it, when nothing can change it, then it has become a crystallization.
The second technique:
CONSIDER THE PLENUM TO BE YOUR OWN BODY OF BLISS.
This second technique is concerned with the first. Consider space to be your own body of bliss.
Meditating on a hilltop with endless space before you, you can do it. Consider it to be filled with your own body of bliss.
There are seven bodies. The bliss body is the last body, so the more you enter within, the more you feel yourself to be blissful. You are nearing the bliss body, the layer of bliss. It is just around your essential soul, which is the first body from within outwards, or the last body from without inwards.
Just around your being, the essential soul, is the layer of bliss. It is called the bliss body. Sitting on a hilltop, looking at the endless sky, feel that the whole space, the whole plenum, is filled with your bliss body. Feel that your bliss body has increased and the whole space is filled with it.
How will you feel it? You don’t know what bliss is so how to imagine it? It will be better to try first to feel that the whole space is filled with silence, not with bliss. Feel it filled with silence. Nature will be helpful about it because in nature even noises are silent. In cities even silence is noisy. Natural sounds are silent because they don’t disturb. They are harmonious. So don’t think that silence is necessarily soundlessness. No, a musical sound can be silence because it is so harmonious – it doesn’t disturb you. Rather, it deepens your silence. So when you move into nature, the breeze blowing, the stream, the river, the wind or whatsoever sounds there are, are harmonious, they make a whole. They are not disturbing. You can listen to them and the very listening will deepen your silence. So first feel that the whole space is filled with silence; feel deeply that it is growing more and more silent, that the sky has become silence around you.
And when you feel that the sky has become silence, only then should you try to be filled with bliss.
As silence deepens you will have the first glimpse of bliss. As tension increases, you have the first glimpse of misery, strain; as silence deepens you will feel at ease, at home, relaxed, and the first glimpse of bliss will come to you. And when that glimpse comes, then you can imagine that the whole space is now filled with that bliss. CONSIDER THE PLENUM TO BE YOUR OWN BODY OF BLISS. The whole sky becomes your body of bliss.
You can do it separately, there is no need to join it to the first, but the same requirements are needed – endless space, silence, no human beings around you. Why this insistence on no human beings around you? Because the moment you see a human being you will start reacting in the old ways.
You cannot see a human being without reacting. Something or other will happen to you immediately.
He brings you back to your old patterns. If you don’t see human beings you forget that you are human, and to forget that you are human, part of society, is good. It is good to remember that simply you are, even if you don’t know what. You don’t belong to anybody, to any society, to any group, to any religion. This non-belonging will be helpful.
So it will be good if you move alone somewhere and do this, practise this. Alone this technique will be helpful, but remember to start with something that you can feel. I have seen people doing techniques which they cannot feel. If you cannot feel, if you don’t have any experience, even a glimpse, then the whole thing becomes false. A man came to me and he said, “I am practising that God is everywhere.” So I asked him, “How can you practise? What do you imagine? Have you any taste, any feeling of God? Only then will it be easy to imagine. Otherwise, you will be simply thinking that you are imagining and nothing will happen.”
Remember this for any technique you do – at the start you must do something you are acquainted with; you may not be totally acquainted with it, but a little glimpse will be necessary. Only then can you progress, step by step. But don’t jump into something which is absolutely unknown to you because then you cannot feel it and you cannot imagine it. Because of this, many masters, particularly Buddha, completely dropped the word ‘God’. Buddha said, “You cannot work with it. It is the very end, and you cannot bring the end into the beginning. So begin from the very beginning.”
He said, “Forget the end, the end will follow automatically.” And he said to his disciples, “Don’t think of God. Think of compassion. Think of love.” So he doesn’t say that one should feel that God is everywhere, one should simply feel compassion for everyone who is there – for the tree, for human beings, for animals. Simply feel compassion. Feel sympathetic, create a love… because love you know, howsoever little. There has been something like love in everybody’s life. You may not have loved, but someone may have loved you, your mother at least. You must have looked into her eyes:
she loved you.
“Just be motherly to existence,” Buddha says, “and feel deep compassion. Feel that the whole world is filled with your compassion. Then everything else will follow.”
Remember this as a basic law: always start with something you can feel because only then can the unknown enter through it.
Aloneness is pain
The first question:
Question 1:
CONFRONTATION OF ONESELF IN ALONENESS IS VERY FEARFUL, VERY PAINFUL.
WHAT TO DO?
It is fearful and it is painful, and one has to suffer it. Nothing should be done to avoid it, nothing should be done to divert the mind, nothing should be done to escape form it. One has to suffer it and go through it. This suffering, this pain, is just a good sign that you are near a new birth, because every birth is preceded by pain. It cannot be avoided, and it should not be avoided because it is part of your growth. This pain and this suffering is known traditionally as TAPASHCHARYA, austerity.
This is the meaning of TAPAS – arduous austerity, effort.
But why is this pain there? This should be understood because understanding will help you to go through it, and if you go through it knowingly, you will come out of it more easily, and sooner.
Why is there pain when you are alone? The first thing is that your ego gets ill. Your ego can exist only with others. It has grown in relationship, it cannot exist alone. So if the situation is one in which it can exist no more, it feels suffocated, it feels just on the verge of death. This is the deepest suffering. You feel just as if you are dying, but it is not you who is dying but only the ego which you have taken to be yourself, with which you have become identified. It cannot exist because it has been given to you by others. It is a contribution.
When you leave others you cannot carry it with you. Think of it in this way: when you are in society, people think you are a very good person. This goodness cannot exist when you are lonely and alone because this is what people thought about you. Now those people are there no more. Your image cannot be helped. It has become foundationless. By and by it will disappear and you will feel very bad because you were such a good person and now you are no more. And not only good people will suffer, if you are a bad person that too was given by others to you. That too is a way of getting attention. When many people consider you bad they give you attention. They cannot be indifferent to you, they have to be aware of you. You are somebody, a bad man, dangerous. When you move into loneliness, you become nobody. That bad image will disappear and you were feeding on it, your ego was feeding on it. So bad men and good men are not basically different – both are gaining their egos. Their mediums differ, but their goals are the same.
The bad depends on others, the good also. They exist in society. The saint and the sinner, they exist in society. Alone you are neither a saint nor a sinner. So in aloneness all that you know about yourself will fall; by and by it will disappear. You can prolong your ego for a certain period – and that too you will have to do through imagination – but you cannot prolong it for long. Without society you are uprooted; the soil is not there from where to get food. This is the basic pain. You are no longer sure who you are: you are just a dispersing personality, a dissolving personality. But this is good, because unless this false you disappears, the real cannot emerge. Unless you are completely washed and become again clean, the real cannot emerge.
This false you is occupying the throne. It must be dethroned. By living in solitariness all that is false can go. And all that is given by society is false – really, all that is given is false, all that is born with you is real. All that is you by yourself, not contributed by someone else, is real, authentic. But the false must go. And the false is a great investment: you have invested so much in it, you have been looking after it so much. All your hopes hang on it. So when it starts dissolving you will feel fearful, afraid, trembling. What are you doing to yourself? You are destroying your whole life, the whole structure.
There will be fear. But you have to go through this fear, only then will you become fearless. I don’t say you will become brave, no. I say you will become fearless. Bravery is just part of fear.
Howsoever brave you are, the fear is hidden behind. I say fearless. You will not be brave, there is no need to be brave when there is no fear. Bravery and fear both become irrelevant. They are both aspects of the same coin. So your brave men are nothing but you standing on your head – just in SHIRSHASAN. Your bravery is hidden within you and your fear is on the surface; their fear is hidden within and their bravery is on the surface. So when you are alone you are very brave, when you think about something you are very brave, but when a real situation comes you are fearful. It is said about soldiers, the greatest of them, that before going to the front they are as afraid as anyone.
The inside is trembling, but they will go. They will push this trembling aside into the unconscious; and the more the inner trembling is there, the more they will create a facade that they are brave around them. They will create an armor. You look at that armor – it looks brave, but deep down they are filled with fear. One becomes fearless only when one has gone through the deepest fear of all – that is the dissolving of the ego, the dissolving of the image, the dissolving of the personality.
This is death because you don’t know if a new life is going to emerge out of it – during the process you will know only death. Only when you are dead as you are, as the false entity, only then will you know that the death was just a door to immortality. But that will be the end. During the process you are simply dying. Everything that you cherished so much is being taken away from you – your personality, your ideas, all that you thought was beautiful.
All is leaving you. You are being denuded. All the roles and robes are being taken away. In the process fear will be there, but this fear is basic, necessary, inevitable – one has to pass through it.
You should understand it, but don’t try to avoid it, don’t try to escape from it because every escape will bring you back again, you will move back into the personality.
Those who go into deep silence and solitude, they always ask me, “There will be fear, so what to do?” I tell them not to do anything, just to live the fear. If trembling comes, tremble, why prevent it?
If an inner fear is there, and you are shaking with it, so shake with it. Don’t do anything. Allow it to happen. It will go by itself. If you avoid it – and you can avoid it. You can start chanting Ram, Ram, Ram; you can cling to a mantra so that your mind is diverted. You will be pacified and the fear will not be there – you have pushed it into the unconscious. It was coming out – which was good, you were going to be free from it – it was leaving you and when it leaves you, you will tremble. That is natural because from every cell of the body, of the mind, some energy which has always been there pushed down, is leaving. There will be a shaking, a trembling; it will be just like an earthquake. The whole soul will be disturbed by it but let it be. Don’t do anything. That is my advice. Don’t even chant the name of Ram. Don’t try to do anything with it because all that you can do will again be suppression. Just by allowing it to be, by letting it be, it will leave you – and when it has left, you will be altogether a different man.
The cyclone has gone and you will now be centered, centered as you never were before. And once you know the art of letting things be, you will know one of the master keys which opens all the inner doors. Then whatsoever the case is, let it be, don’t avoid it.
If just for three months you can be in total solitude, in total silence, not fighting with anything, allowing everything to be, whatsoever it is, within three months the old will be gone and the new will be there.
But the secret is allowing it to be, howsoever fearful, painful, howsoever apparently dangerous, deathlike. Many moments will come when you will feel as if you will go mad if you don’t do something and involuntarily you will start to do something. You may know that nothing can be done, but you will not be in control and you will start to do something.
It is just as if you are moving through a dark street in the night, midnight, and you feel fear because there is no one around and the night is dark and the street is unknown – so you start whistling. What can whistling do? You know it can do nothing. Then you start singing a song. You know nothing can be done by singing a song, the darkness cannot be dispelled, you will remain alone, but still, it diverts the mind. If you start whistling, just by whistling you gain confidence and you forget the darkness. Your mind moves into whistling and you start feeling good.
Nothing has happened. The street is the same, the darkness is the same, the danger, if there is any, is there, but now you feel more protected. All is the same, but now you are doing something.
You can start chanting a name, a mantra, Ram, Ram, that will be a sort of whistling. It will give you strength. But that strength is dangerous, that strength will again become a problem, because that strength is going to be your old ego. You are reviving it again.
Remain a witness, and allow whatsoever happens to happen. Fear has to be faced to go beyond it. Anguish has to be faced to transcend it. And the more authentic the encounter, the more face to face, the more looking at things as they are, the sooner the happening will be there.
It takes time only because your authenticity is not intense. So you may take three days, three months, or three lives – it depends on the intensity. Really, three minutes can also do – three seconds can also do. But then you will have to pass through a tremendous hell, with such an intensity that you may not be able to bear it, to tolerate it. If one can face whatsoever is hidden in oneself, it passes, and when it has gone, you are different. Because all that has left you was part of you before, and now it is no longer a part.
So don’t ask what to do. There is no need to do anything. Non-doing, witnessing, effortlessly facing whatsoever is, not even making a slight effort, just allowing it to be… remain passive and let it pass.
It always passes. When you do something, that is the undoing because then you interfere.
And who will interfere? Who is afraid? The same which is the disease will interfere. The same ego which has to be left behind, will interfere.
I told you that the ego is part of the society. You left the society but you don’t want to leave the part that society has given to you. It is rooted in society; it cannot live without society. So either you have to leave it or you have to create a new society in which it can live.
So you can create an alternative society. That is one of the greatest tricks of the mind. It has always been so. You can create a different society. You can create an ashram. Twenty people who think they want to live in solitude can create a monastery – then the monastery has become an alternative society. So they move from society but they create another society, so basically nothing changes.
They remain the same. Rather on the contrary, they may become more egoistic because now they are the chosen few, the elect. They have left the world but they have created another world, and the same pattern of relationship moves again. Then there is the chief, then there are the disciples, then there is a master, and all hierarchy and everything comes in, in miniature form. And then there are good disciples, there are bad disciples, there are successful ones and the unsuccessful ones… so it is the same. In a small group the whole society is there.
That will not do. Now this is happening in the West. A great number of young people are leaving society because they feel that society is rotten, decadent, dying, and they feel it is so decadent that it cannot be changed. This is a very new thing. Young people always think that the society is rotten, but they think it can be changed, transformed, so a revolution is needed. Only in the last stage of a society or civilization does this happen – people start thinking that nothing can be done, that revolution is nonsense, that society is so dead that no one can revive it, that you cannot change it.
So you just drop out of it.
You cannot do anything, the house is on fire – so you simply escape from it. This is what is happening in the West: hippies, beatniks, yippies, others, all dropping out of society. But they are creating another society, an alternative society. Hippies themselves have become an alternative society.
In ordinary society if you have long hair, others will look at you as if you have gone astray. Something is wrong. In the hippie society if you have short hair, you are wrong! Something is wrong with you.
What is the difference?
In ordinary society if you live in a dirty way you are wrong – you are unmannerly, uncultivated, uneducated, unacceptable. But in a hippie society if you live very cleanly then something is wrong with you. Then you are still clinging to the old mind which said that cleanliness is next to God, God has died a long time ago, now the second thing, cleanliness, has also died. It cannot exist without God.
The same condemnation and the same appreciation is there. You can create an alternative society with just the opposite rules but it makes no difference – your ego can be fed again. It has been transplanted. A new soil has been formed.
To be solitary means not to create an alternative society. Just move out of society, and then whatsoever society has given you will leave you. It can exist only in a milieu, in the social milieu, it cannot exist out of it. You will have to drop it It will be painful because you are so adjusted to it, everything is so arranged. It has become such a comfort to be adjusted, where everything is convenient. When you change and move alone, you are leaving all comforts, all conveniences, all that society can give – and when society gives something to you, it also takes something from you:
your liberty, your soul.
So it is an exchange – and when you are trying to get to your soul in its purity you have to stop the bargaining. It will be painful, but if you can pass through it, the highest bliss is just near. Society is not as painful as loneliness; society is tranquillizing; society is convenient, comfortable. But it gives you a sort of sleep. If you move out of it inconvenience is bound to be there. All types of inconveniences will be there. Those inconveniences have to be suffered with the understanding that they are part of solitude, part of regaining yourself.
This is TAPAS, this is austerity, and you will come out of it new, with a new glory and dignity, a new purity and innocence.
The second question:
Question 2:
LAST NIGHT YOU SAID THAT TOTAL ALONENESS IS THE ESSENTIAL NATURE,
IS THE ULTIMATE REALITY OF MAN.
ANOTHER DAY YOU EXPLAINED THAT INDIVIDUALITY IS FALSE
AND MAN IS A WAVE IN THE ORGANIC WHOLE OF EXISTENCE.
HOW IS A RECONCILIATION POSSIBLE BETWEEN ALONENESS AND WHOLENESS?
There is no need of reconciliation. Aloneness is wholeness. But aloneness doesn’t mean individuality. You are an individual because of society. When you are totally alone you will not be an individual.
An individual means a part of a society, a unit of a society. When you are in the crowd you are an individual; when you move out of the crowd not only is the crowd dropping behind, the individual also is dropping behind. That individuality was given to you. Individuality and society are two poles of one phenomenon. Alone you are not an individual; the individual has to exist in a pattern of society.
It is just as when I said that alone you are neither good nor bad, alone you are neither sage nor sinner, alone you are neither beautiful nor ugly, alone you are neither wise nor foolish. Both the dualities drop. The dichotomy drops.
The individual exists in society; the individual is the unit of society. Alone you are not an individual, so don’t think that you will become an individual when alone. No, you will not be an individual. If there is no society how can you be an individual? You will be there, and that aloneness will be wholeness. The ego will drop, and it is the ego that gives you the feeling of individuality.
Alone doesn’t mean that you are an individual, alone means that now the dichotomy of society and individual is no longer there. This will give you wholeness. You are not part of anything now. You have become the whole.
This is difficult to express because in language it appears absurd. You cannot imagine how you will not be an individual if you are alone, because if you think and imagine yourself on a hilltop, sitting alone somewhere in a Himalayan cave, you will think of yourself as an individual – because you don’t know what aloneness is. Aloneness means that all thought, all mind, all individuality that was given by society has been left behind. You will become just a space, an emptiness, nobody. Sitting in a Himalayan cave there will be no one who is sitting, just a space.
Buddha was meditating under a tree. It was a full moon night and some young people had come to the forest. They had brought much alcohol with them and a young prostitute. But they took so much alcohol and they became so intoxicated that the prostitute escaped. When they became aware that the girl had left them, they started to search for her. Where did she go?
In their search they reached Buddha who was sitting under a tree meditating. So they said to him, “You must have seen a young, beautiful, nude girl passing by here because this is the only way and it is a full moon night. So you must have seen a beautiful young girl, nude, passing by. Did you see her?”
Buddha opened his eyes and said, “Someone passed by, but I cannot say whether the one who passed was a woman or a man. I cannot say whether the person who passed was beautiful or ugly.
And I cannot say whether the person who passed was clothed or naked. Someone did pass – I heard the foot-steps.”
They were amazed and they said, “This is impossible!” Buddha said, “I would not have believed this myself before. When I was a part of society it would have been impossible, but now that I have left society I have left all the conceptions of society as well. Now only nature happens around me. So I heard the sound of someone passing; there was just a sound which reached into my inner space, that is all. Someone passed.”
You become a silent inner space. You are not an individual because you are not a mind. To drop the mind solitude is suggested. And with the mind everything drops. A moment comes when you don’t know who you are – and that is the moment from where real knowledge will start.
A moment comes when you forget completely who you are, and all that you knew before is no longer there, all the old leaves have fallen. Now this is the moment, and now there will be an interval for a time being. This interval will be of much anguish because the old has left and the new has not yet come. When the old leaves drop from the tree, the tree will be naked for a few days, just waiting for the new to emerge. The new leaves are coming, they are on the way, the old have left a place. Now that the place is vacant the new are flowing towards the space and sooner or later they will emerge.
But you will have to wait. While meditating in aloneness, society will drop, the mind will drop, the ego will drop and there will be a gap. You will have to pass through that gap also. Now the tree is awaiting for the new leaves to come, but one cannot do anything. What can the tree do? Nothing can be done to bring them sooner, they will take their own course.
It is good that the old have dropped – because now the place is there. Space is there for the new to emerge. Now there will be no barrier.
So there is an autumn of the inner mind. Leaves will drop. It will be painful. You have lived with those old leaves for so long that you will feel that you are losing something. And then there will be a winter of waiting, an inner winter, when you will be nude – with no leaves, a naked tree against the sky. And you don’t know what is going to happen. Now everything has stopped. Now no bird comes to sing on your branches; now no one comes to sit under you, under your shadow to wait, to relax.
Now you are not in any way aware of whether you are dead or whether a new life is going to happen to you. This is the gap, the interval.
Christian mystics have called it the dark night of the soul – before the sunrise. All artificial lights have been put off. The night has become very dark. And the moment nearest to the sunrise will be the darkest.
So there is a winter of the inner soul when there are no leaves, and no birds sing, and no one comes to wait under you and relax. You feel dead. Everything has stopped. All movement is gone. This has to be passed – because then there will be spring, new leaves will come, new life, new flowers.
A totally new dimension will appear within you.
But remember the autumn, remember the winter – only then is spring possible. The autumn is also part of the spring – if you can understand – it is making the way for the spring to happen. So autumn is not against spring, it is just the beginning of it. And the gap is also necessary, because in the gap you become ready. The old has left. You are not tormented by it now, not burdened by it. You are pregnant – but pregnancy is waiting, the new child is growing. Before it emerges, manifests itself in the world, it will have to hide deep in the unconscious, because every seed has to go deep into darkness, underneath, hidden. Only then does life happen to it. If you put the seed in the sunlight nothing will happen to it. It needs deep darkness, a womb. So there will be winter while you are pregnant: all movement ceases, you just have to carry the burden, consciously, understandingly, lovingly, hoping, praying, waiting.
And then there will be spring. It has been always so. Man is also a tree.
And remember, aloneness is wholeness, they are not contradictory. Ego is part, ego is fragmented, ego cannot be whole, ego is against the whole. In aloneness ego disappears. You become one with the whole and the boundary disappears. When you are really alone you are the cosmos, you are Brahma.
The third question:
Question 3:
IN THE FIRST TECHNIQUE TAKEN LAST NIGHT IT IS SAID
THAT TO ABIDE IN LONELINESS IS TO MINIMIZE RELATIONSHIP.
BUT ON PREVIOUS OCCASIONS YOU SAID THAT ONE SHOULD MAXIMIZE THE RELATIONSHIP
WITH LIMITLESS EXPANSION.
Do either. Either expand yourself so much that nothing remains unrelated to you, then you will disappear; or be so totally alone that nothing remains related to you, then too you will disappear.
You are in the middle, where something is related and something is not related, where someone is a friend and someone is an enemy, where someone belongs to you and someone doesn’t belong to you, where there is a choice. You are in the middle. Move to either extreme. Become related to everyone, to everything that exists and you will disappear. It is so tremendous a phenomenon to be related to everything that you cannot exist, you will be flooded. Your ego is so narrow, it can exist with only a few relationships – and that in those too it is against something, otherwise it could not exist. If you are friendly to everything that is in the world, you disappear. If you want to exist as an ego you can be friendly; but you must also be inimical to someone. You must love someone and you must hate. Then you can exist between these two contradictions – the ego can exist. Either love everything that is and you will disappear, or hate it and you will disappear. They look contradictory.
They are not. The technique is the same. The technique is the same whether you love all or whether you hate all. The hatred of everything is known in the East as VAIRAGYA, as renunciation. This is hatred of everything, withdrawing your love completely, feeling that everything is useless, not worth anything.
If you can hate so totally you will become total – then you cannot exist. You can exist only when two contradictions are there: love and hate. Between these two you balance. It is just like a man walking on a rope. He has to balance between right and left. If he moves to the left completely he will fall; if he moves completely to the right he will fall. So whether you move to the right or to the left makes no difference. Choose one. You will fall down from the rope.
If you want to be a man on a rope, you have to balance, sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right. And really the balance is a science. Whenever you lean to the left you will immediately have to lean to the right because the left will create the possibility of falling. To counter-balance it you will have to lean to the right, and when you lean to the right the possibility comes that you can fall.
So you will have to lean to the left. That is why you go on moving between love and hate, between friend and enemy, between this and that, like and dislike, attraction and repulsion. You are moving on a rope, continuously. If you don’t understand this your life will be a total misunderstanding.
I have been studying many, many people and this is one of the basic problems of all. They love, then they hate, and they cannot understand why they hate when they love also. This is how they balance – and this balancing gives you the ego, your personality. If you really want to be without the ego, choose either extreme. Move to the left, love, and don’t balance it by the right – you will fall from the rope. Or move to the right, hate, and hate totally, and don’t move to the left. You will fall from the rope.
Mahavir says be detached from everything – that is hate. And Krishna says love. That is why Jains can never understand the message of Krishna. Impossible. And Hindus have not taken any note of Mahavir. They have not even mentioned his name in their scriptures. Not a single mention. They have not even taken note because he says be so unattached from everything that it becomes hatred.
Krishna says love, and love so deeply that hate falls completely from the mind. Both are the same.
They look contradictory to you. They are not.
Either you lean to the left or to the right – it makes no difference, you will fall to the ground, you will not be on the rope. That is certain. That rope is the ego or the world, the SANSAR, and you are balancing yourself. Many people love me but I know that sooner or later they will balance and they will hate. And when they hate they get disturbed. They should not get disturbed because that is how they can be on the rope. But the cannot hate long. Again they will have to balance.
In the morning you love, in the evening you hate, in the morning you love again. Unless you are ready to leave the ego the balancing will continue. It can continue infinitely – infinitely it can continue. The rope is endless. But once you get fed up with the whole game, once you feel that this is nonsense – balancing each time with hate and love and each time moving to the opposite direction again and again; this is nonsense – then you can move to one, either love or hate, and drop from the rope.
And once you drop from the rope, you are enlightened. The balance is SANSAR, the world.
The fourth question:
Question 4:
MAN HAS AN INHERENT LONGING TO ENTER INTO THE WOMB.
KINDLY EXPLAIN WHETHER OR NOT MAN’S LUST FOR THE SEXUAL ACT,
PENETRATION, SYMBOLIZES HIS INHERENT LONGING FOR THIS RETURN.
Yes. It is part of it. Everything in nature wants to return to the source. This is one of the laws.
Whatsoever happens in-between is irrelevant, every circle comes to the end or to the very beginning – to the original source.
Man is born out of the womb. Whenever he is in distress or depression, whenever there is too much responsibility in the world, too much burden, things become heavy, he wants to return back to the womb. Hence this attraction, lust, to enter the woman. You cannot enter, you cannot become a child again, so the sexual act becomes a symbolic act. The penetration becomes symbolic. You are again in the womb. That is why sex is so relaxing, so soothing. All the tensions are gone, your mind is unburdened. In this moment at least you are ecstatic. It is a catharsis: you are purged of much dirt.
So sex becomes a release, a relaxation. And the woman becomes a womb. This is part of the attraction, part of the lust. You may not be aware of it, but all that we have created for comfort is womb-like. In a room, closed, at body temperature, silent, you can relax easily. It is womb-like.
And if all the qualities of the womb are there, in your sleeping room, you will sleep deeply. Even a clock on the wall helps you. It goes on tick-tock, tick-tock. It is the same as the heart of the mother going tick-tock, tick-tock, for the child in the womb. He goes on listening to it. The tick-tock rhythm is helpful; the mattress, the pillows, all the things we use are really womb-like. Now scientists are of the mind that sooner or later we will make exactly womb-like sleeping chambers, exactly the same, because they will give you the deepest sleep possible.
The ultimate conception of nirvana is also womb-like. In the womb the child is so free, free of all responsibilities. He never comes to know any desire. Before the desire is there it is fulfilled. That is what Hindus call KALPAVRIKSHA. In heaven there are trees under which you sit and when a desire comes to your mind, immediately it is fulfilled. There is no gap, no time gap, between desire, demand, and supply. There is no time gap. When the desire is there it is fulfilled.
This is happening in the womb, it is KALPAVRIKSHA, the wish-fulfilling tree. A child never becomes aware that he is hungry – before there is hunger, it is fulfilled. The child never becomes aware that he is thirsty – before there is thirst, the thirst is fulfilled. He never becomes aware of any strife, any strain; he is silently served by the cosmos around him. Psychologists say that that is why the child in the womb cannot be conscious. Because for consciousness, strife is needed, struggle is needed.
Consciousness grows only when there is demand, then a time gap, and then supply. That time gap makes you conscious. If there is no time gap, if whatsoever you need is fulfilled immediately, you will fall asleep. So the child is asleep for nine months together – not for a single moment does he become alert. There is no need to be alert. All needs are fulfilled. There is no pain, no suffering, no tension, so alertness is not possible.
The child sleeps, and when he is born it is such a shock that Freud says that no one ever recovers from it. It is traumatic. It remains like a wound in you. And I think he is right. When the child is born it is a shock! He is thrown out of the Garden of Eden, out of paradise. Everything was so beautiful – it was so beautiful that he was asleep. It was so comfortable that there was no need to be awake for even a single moment. It was a dream land, and now he has been thrown out forcibly. There is every possibility that the unconsciousness of the child struggles to remain in the womb. It is difficult to say whether it is so or not, but there is every possibility that the unconsciousness of the child struggles to remain in the womb. He creates every difficulty in coming out. Hence the pain and the struggle.
He is being thrown out, expelled. And the first moment out of the womb is bound to be the greatest suffering that the child will ever suffer again. Even death will not be such a suffering. Because in the first moment on his own he will have to breathe – and the world has started with all its worries.
Now he will be the center and he will be responsible and he will have to carry his own burden. He is thrown out of the mother. He will have to breathe and to cry when he is hungry. And now nothing is certain: whether when he is hungry he will be fulfilled or not, is not certain. It will depend. He has become dependent. Now for every need he has to struggle. But then we provide every comfort for our children, in every way, so the shock is not so much, not too much. The mother goes on fulfilling his needs immediately.
Because of this the child comes to feel that he is the center of the world and the whole world has to follow him. Just a cry and the whole world has to fall at his feet. This gives a very egoistic beginning.
So every child is very egoistic. And then other shocks are bound to follow because this is only the first birth, just the beginning of births. Those who know human phenomena deeply say that the whole life is a continuous birth. There are many births. A day will come when the mother will refuse to breast-feed the child. Now he has to depend on foods. He has to chew it. Responsibility grows.
Now the food has to be chewed, digested. The milk was something else. The child was not doing anything, simply sucking. He was a sucker.
Every day responsibilities will grow and he will be thrown away, away from the mother. And the further away he is thrown, the more the world surrounds him. The world is hostile – the womb was never hostile, it was so friendly,. The world is not friendly: there is competition, and everyone is interested in himself and no one is interested in you. The world is not your mother.
When a child moves to the school he is moving into a hostile world, with traumas and traumas and many shocks. And it goes on. The ultimate break happens when the child falls in love with a woman.
He is becoming grown up. This is the last break with the mother; now the last link is broken. But still this man-child will go on behaving as if his wife is his mother. She is not. She is interested in herself, and he is interested in himself. Both are interested in themselves. They are egos. And every husband goes on trying to get the wife to behave like his mother. That is the struggle. She cannot behave like that – she has her own interests. The mother was totally devoted.
So every man is frustrated with his wife because no wife can be a mother. It is not a question of good and bad wives – no wife can be a mother. Every man is frustrated. I have not yet seen a man who is not frustrated with his wife. It seems impossible not to be frustrated because the desire is so impossible.
But the husband feels good when he enters the woman, the wife. Again he is in the womb. This is a symbolic penetration. In those few moments he forgets all the worries, the world, everything. He is again a child. Look at a man deep in love with his wife, or beloved – his face will look like a child. All the tensions have gone. So it is not just coincidence that when in love the wife will call the husband ‘baby’.
I was just reading an anecdote. It was midnight and a house was on fire. At the last moment a woman was pulled out of it. She was mad and crying, “My baby has remained inside.” And then suddenly the baby appeared – on the balcony stood a three hundred and sixty pound man and he said, “Don’t get worried, I am alive and I am coming.” And the whole crowd was wondering what the matter was!
But they were deep in love, just lying together, and the man was a baby at that moment. In all ways mind is seeking a womb-like state again, but you cannot enter the womb, even in a sexual act. You just seem to be.
The only possibility of entering the womb again is not physical, it is psychological, or, on deeper layers, spiritual. If you can be one with the cosmos you will be in the womb again, and this is something which cannot be taken away from you. Then the whole existence becomes a mother. So to me, those religions that have said that God is not a father but a mother, are more scientific. Those who have called their God ‘father’ are not so scientific. Because a father is not a very essential thing.
It is just accidental. ‘Father’ has not always existed. The word ‘mother’ is very very much older than ‘father’. Even the word ‘uncle’ is older than ‘father’. Because five thousand years back there was no marriage – groups lived together. The child knew his mother but he didn’t know who the father was, so all the male members of the group were uncles. ‘Uncle’ is an older word than ‘father.’ All the males were uncles because there was no certainty who the father was.
Father is a later arrival. When one male dominated a woman and pushed away all the other males, father came into being. And it is not certain whether it is going to remain, because the family is dispersing. It is not something eternal, just institutional. The father seems to be going; in the future he cannot say. For father there is no hope! He will drop. Uncles will again become important.
Mother is basic; father is social and can be discarded. It depends on the institution, on the way society thinks. But mother cannot be discarded. So those religions that think of God as the Mother are really deeper – when you enter God the mother, and become one with it, you have entered the eternal womb. Now there will be no pain, there will be no suffering. Now you will never be thrown out.
The last question:
Question 5:
YOU SAID WE ARE CONCERNED WITH THREADS, NOT THE ESSENCE.
BUT WHOM DO YOU MEAN BY ‘WE ARE’?
BECAUSE AS WE ARE WE ARE CONCERNED WITH BEADS,
WITH EVENTS. WE LIVE IN EVENTS.
When I say that we are concerned with the thread, with the essence, the foundational, the real, by ‘we’ I don’t mean you. You as you are, no. But you as you can be, yes. You are double, and that which you are right now is not the real. It is just a false thing, just an image which can be discarded easily. The real you is that which can be known only when all the masks are thrown away. So when I say ‘we’ are concerned with the thread, I include you in your reality – not as egos, but as souls. You are two: one as you appear to be and one as you are. The appearance is concerned with events, concerned with beads, the superficial. The inner, the one that you are, is not concerned with events:
it is not concerned with time at all. It is concerned with the eternal.
I will tell you a story of one of Buddha’s past lives, when he was not yet a Buddha; in that life Buddha was as ignorant as anyone. He heard about a man who had become enlightened. So he went to touch his feet and to have a DARSHAN. He touched the feet of the enlightened one, and when he was rising, he was amazed to see the enlightened man touching his feet. He said, “What are you doing? I am ignorant, unenlightened, a sinner, and you are enlightened, the purest light I have ever seen. Why should you touch my feet? I have come to touch your feet. Why should you touch my feet?”
The enlightened one laughed and said, “I am not touching your feet. I am touching the feet of the essential, of the soul that is hidden within you. That is already enlightened. You may know it, later on, and when you know, remember. One day you will come to know the reality before which I have bowed down. You don’t know it right now, your own treasure you don’t know, but I know my treasure and the moment I have known my treasure, I have known everybody else’s treasure.”
The enlightened one said to Buddha, “The moment I became enlightened I knew the essential reality of all. You can go on deluding yourself, that is up to you, but I can penetrate and I can see the purest light within you. Remember me when you realize it.”
And when Buddha became enlightened in his next life, he said to his disciples, “I didn’t understand what that awakened one was saying. It was a mystery. But now I can see what he meant. Now the appearance has come. And whatsoever I am now I was at the moment also. He must have bowed to this.”
So when I say ‘we’, I include you in your possibility, not in your appearance. Your appearance is just a dream. But you are not aware of it because if you become aware that you are dreaming, the dream has ceased. You are not aware of the real you. If you become aware, the appearance will disappear.
I am aware. So you can understand my difficulty – I see you as enlightened ones. You are already that. You are just playing the game of being ignorant, just trying to deceive yourself, but whatsoever you do makes no difference to the innermost reality. It remains innocent, pure, absolutely pure. You are here. If I look at your surface, you have to be taught many things. But if I look to your inner, there is no need to teach you anything, there is no need to do anything. That is what I mean when I say, “We are concerned with the thread, the essence, not with the beads, the events, the outer.”
Remember this. Some day when you become enlightened you will know what my meaning was when I said ‘we’, and who was included. It is certain that you are not included as you are here, just before me, the appearance, no – but as you have always been and as you will always be when this curtain is thrown away, when these clouds disappear and the sun rises. I can see the sun behind the clouds.
You are so identified with the clouds that you cannot even believe me. If I say you are already enlightened, how can you believe it? You will say I must be deceiving you or playing a trick. This is the truth, but truth is difficult to understand. And you have to travel long before you come to yourselves, you have to travel long before you come to realize that your home is the goal, that you have been always in the place that you wanted to reach.
Osho ~ Vigyan Bhairav Tantra 