Ashtavakra is a messenger, a messenger of consciousness, of witnessing. Pure witnessing, just watching. If there is unhappiness, observe it. If there is happiness, observe it. In unhappiness don’t become identified with unhappiness.
In happiness don’t become identified with happiness. Let both come, let both go. Night has come, observe it. Day has come, observe it. At night, don’t think you have become night. In the day, don’t think you have become the day.
You have to accept the fact that you are living alone – maybe in a crowd, but you are living alone; maybe with your wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, but they are alone in their aloneness, you are alone in your aloneness, and those alonenesses don´t touch each other, never touch each other.
That you may live with someone for twenty years, thirty years, fifty years – it makes no difference, you will remain strangers. Always and always you will be strangers. Accept the fact that we are strangers; that we don´t know who you are, that you don´t know who I am. I myself don´t know who I am, so how can you know? But people are presuming that the wife should know the husband, the husband is assuming the wife should know the husband. Everybody is functioning as if everybody is a mind reader, and he should know, before you say it, your needs, your problems. He should know, she should know – and they should do something. Now this is all nonsense.
Nobody knows you, not even you, so don´t expect that anybody else should know you; it is not possible in the very nature of things. We are strangers. Perhaps by chance we have met and we are together, but our aloneness is there. Don´t forget it, because you have to work upon it. Only from there is your redemption, your salvation. But you are doing just the opposite: how to forget your aloneness? The boyfriend, the girlfriend; go to the movie, the football match; get lost in the crowd, dance in the disco, forget yourself, drink alcohol, take drugs, but somehow don´t let this aloneness come to your conscious mind – and there lies the whole secret.
You have to accept your aloneness, which in no way you can avoid. And there is no way to change its nature. It is your authentic reality. It is you
Love is the most healing force in the world; nothing goes deeper than love. It heals not only the body, not only the mind, but also the soul. If one can love then all one´s wounds disappear. Then one becomes whole - and to be whole is to be holy.
Unless one is whole one is not holy. The physical health is a superficial phenomenon. It can happen through medicine, it can happen through science. But the innermost core of one´s being can be healed only through love. Those who know the secret of love know the greatest secret of life. Then there is no misery for them, no old age, no death. Of course the body will become old and the body will die, but love reveals to you the truth that you are not the body. You are pure consciousness, you have no birth, no death. And to live in that pure consciousness is to live in tune with life. Bliss is a by-product of living in tune with life.
A natural man is orgasmic in all his emotions.
Somebody has asked a question: “If people become authentic and natural, and if they don’t smile because a smile is phony, and if they go on screaming and shouting in the streets, what will happen to the world?”
Many things will happen to the world. First, wars will become impossible. There will be no Vietnams and no Israels, because people will never accumulate so much anger in them that they have to kill, and kill millions. Many things will happen to the world if people are natural. Then they will not shout so much as you think they will shout. Right now they are allowed to shout they will shout – but for how long?
If they are given complete freedom, shouts and abusing and condemnation and fights will start disappearing from the world.
It is a vicious circle. It is as if you have been starving a person and you don’t allow him to go close to the fridge. And you say “If we allow him he will eat too much.” And you have been starving him – and now you are afraid if you allow him any freedom he will eat too much, he will fall ill. So you don’t allow him to come to the fridge. He has to live by his quota – whatsoever you give, he has to live on.
Now he fantasizes, he dreams: What to do? How to reach to the fridge? How to eat more? His whole imagination becomes focused on food, he dreams of food.
If you are hungry, if you are kept starving, then the fear arises that if you are left loose in the streets you may enter into a restaurant, kill the owner, or do something. But if you are well fed then nobody does anything like that. This is what has happened – for thousands of years you have been repressed, you have been made more and more phony. Now the fear arises. The questioner is right – the fear arises, if people become authentic and start screaming and shouting and doing things the way they always wanted to do and were never allowed to do, the world will go mad.
Yes, for a few years the world will go mad. But that madness will be therapeutic, it will help immensely.
After that nobody will ever go mad. Neurosis will disappear, psychosis will disappear, wars will disappear, politicians will become meaningless. Nations and the militaries and armies will become irrelevant – they will not be needed. That’s why the politician and the priest are so much in favor of repressing people, because they depend on these repressions. Wars will not be there. Generals won’t like it, army people won’t like it, if there is no Vietnam – then their whole purpose is lost. If there are no nations then what is the point of having prime ministers and presidents? They are irrelevant.
Government becomes irrelevant if people are natural. Less and less government will be needed. So, so many people have investments. And their fear looks right, logical, because for so many centuries man has been repressed that they are afraid that things may explode. Yes, for a few years, for one generation at least, there will be great explosion. Then things will disappear.
Bertrand Russell has written that when he was a child, even legs of chairs were covered with cloth. Legs, because they look sexual. And he says ‘I had not seen any legs of a woman.’ The garments had to be so long that you could not see. And Bertrand Russell says in those days people used to fantasize about legs, dream about legs. Even a dream about a leg was enough of an excitement, an ecstasy. Now nobody bothers about the legs. Once you have seen men and women naked you stop worrying about, dreaming about, their nakedness. Dreams change.
The world needs to be more natural. Then there will be less anxiety, less fear, less worry. But for a generation there will be great explosion – after that, things will settle.
We have to take that risk, only that risk can save humanity.
Otherwise everybody is going mad
Health is not only a physical phenomenon. That is only one of its dimensions, and one of the most superficial dimensions because basically the body is going to die – healthy or unhealthy, it is momentary.
Real health has to happen somewhere inside you, in your subjectivity, in your consciousness, because consciousness knows no birth, no death. It is eternal.
To be healthy in consciousness means: first, to be awake; second, to be harmonious; third, to be ecstatic; and fourth, to be compassionate. If these four things are fulfilled, one is inwardly healthy. And sannyas can fulfill all these four things. It can make you more aware, because all the meditation techniques are methods to make you more aware, devices to pull you out of your metaphysical sleep. And dancing, singing, rejoicing, can make you more harmonious.
There is a moment when the dancer disappears and only the dance remains. In that rare space one feels harmony. When the singer is completely forgotten and only the song remains, when there is no center functioning and only the song remains, when there is no center functioning as I – the I is absolutely absent – and you are in a flow, that flowing consciousness is harmonious.
To be awake and harmonious creates the possibility for ecstasy to happen. Ecstasy means the ultimate joy, inexpressible; no words are adequate to say anything about it.
And when one has attained to ecstasy, when one has known the ultimate peak of joy, compassion comes as a consequence.
When you have that joy, you like to share it; you cannot avoid sharing, sharing is inevitable. It is a logical consequence of having. It starts overflowing; you need not do anything. It starts happening of its own accord.
These four are the four pillars of inner health. Attain to it. It is our birthright; we just have to claim it
When you start relaxing, start from the circumference – that is where we are. We can start only from where we are. Relax the circumference of your being - relax your body, relax your behavior, relax your acts. Walk in a relaxed way, eat in a relaxed way, talk, listen in a relaxed way. Slow down every process. Don´t be in a hurry and don´t be in haste. Move as if all eternity is available to you - in fact, it is available to you. We have always been here and we will be here always. Forms go on changing, but not the substance. Garments go on changing, but not the soul.
The first step in relaxing is relaxing the body. And you will be surprised that if you approach any part of your body, it listens, it follows you - it is your body! With closed eyes, go inside the body from the toe to the head searching for any place where there is a tension. And then talk to that part as you talk to a friend. Let there be a dialogue between you and your body. Tell it to relax, and tell it, "There is nothing to fear. Don´t be afraid. I am here to take care - you can relax." Slowly slowly, you will learn the knack of it.
Question : I want to commit suicide.
Osho – Then first take sannyas. And you may not need to commit suicide, because sannyas is the greatest suicide possible. And why should one want to commit suicide? Death is coming on its own — why are you in such a hurry? Death will come, it always comes. Even if you don’t want it to come, it comes. You need not go to meet it, it comes uninvited.
But you must be missing your life badly. It is out of anger, out of desperation, that you want to commit suicide. I will teach you the real suicide: Become a sannyasin. And the ordinary suicide will-not help much, you will be born immediately into some other womb somewhere. Some foolish couple will be making love somewhere, remember…and you will be trapped again. You cannot escape so easily — there are fools and fools. Before you will be escaping from this body you will be caught in another net. And again you will have to go to the school and the college and the university — just think of that! Think of all those miserable experiences — that will prevent you from committing suicide.
You know, Indians don’t commit suicide so easily, because they know that they will be born again. In the West, much suicide and the suicidal idea exists; many people commit suicide. And psychoanalysts say there are very very rare people who don’t think of committing it. In fact one person has investigated and gathered data, and he says every person, every single person, thinks at least four times in his life to commit suicide. But he must be thinking of the West. In the East, because of the idea of reincarnation, nobody wants to commit suicide — what is the point? You escape from this door and from another door you are in again. You can’t go so easily.
I will teach you real suicide, you can go for ever. That’s what it means to become a Buddha — to go for ever. When somebody used to commit this suicide in samadhi, Buddha had a special name for him, he would call him ANAGAMI — one who will not return. One who has gone to the farthest shore and will not be coming back. I can make you anagami, a non-returner. Then no womb can be a trap for you again.
Why do you want to commit suicide? Maybe life is not going the way you want it to go? But who are you to impose your way on life, your will on life? Maybe your desires are not fulfilled? But then drop desires! Why drop yourself? Maybe your expectations are not fulfilled, and you are feeling frustrated? In frustration one wants to destroy. And there are only two possibilities — either murder somebody or murder yourself. Murdering somebody else is more dangerous, so people start thinking of murdering themselves. But it is murder.
Why not change your life rather than destroying it? And please don’t commit it here, otherwise you will create problems for me.
I have heard: A policeman saw a man standing on the parapet of Blackfriars Bridge one evening, obviously about to jump. Rushing over to him, he tried to talk him out of it. ‘If you jump, sir,’ he said, ‘it will be my duty to jump in after you to try to rescue you. Then I’ll get wet, catch pneumonia, and die too. So why don’t you just go home quietly and put your head in the gas oven?’
Please don’t create any trouble here. And don’t talk about it, because there are many people who would like the idea — you may convert a few people.
I have heard: A man was walking across Waterloo Bridge late one night when he noticed another man on the parapet about to throw himself over. He rushed up to the would-be suicide and shouted, ‘Wait a minute! Don’t jump! Come and have a drink and talk things over.’
The two men went off to a nearby pub and spent the next hour chatting over the state of the country, inflation, taxes, and the future of Western civilization. Then they finished their drinks, walked back to Waterloo Bridge, and both jumped.
So don’t spread this idea here. If you want to commit suicide just come in the evening to darshan and I will help
Source: Osho Book “This Very Body the Buddha”
How is it that we usually choose to be unhappy? How is it that we don’t feel aware that it is a choice?
This is one of the most complex human problems. It has to be considered very deeply, and it is not theoretical – it concerns you. This is how everybody is behaving...always choosing the wrong, always choosing the sad, the depressed, the miserable. There must be profound reasons for it, and there are.
The first thing: the way human beings are brought up plays a very definite role in it. If you are unhappy you gain something from it, you always gain. If you are happy you always lose.
From the very beginning an alert child starts feeling the distinction. Whenever he is unhappy everybody is sympathetic towards him, he gains sympathy. Everybody tries to be loving towards him, he gains love. And even more than that: whenever he is unhappy everybody is attentive towards him, he gains attention. Attention works like food for the ego, a very alcoholic stimulant. It gives you energy; you feel you are somebody. Hence so much need, so much desire to get attention.
If everybody is looking at you, you become important. If nobody is looking at you, you feel as if you are not there, you are no more, you are a non-being. People looking at you, people caring about you gives you energy. The ego exists in relationship. The more people pay attention to you, the more you gain ego. If nobody looks at you, the ego dissolves. If everybody has completely forgotten you, how can the ego exist? How can you feel that you are? Hence the need for societies, associations, clubs. All over the world clubs exist – Rotary, Lions’, Masonic Lodges...millions of clubs and societies. These societies and clubs exist only to give attention to people who cannot get attention in other ways.
It is difficult to become a president of a country. It is difficult to become a mayor of a corporation. It is easier to become the president of a Lions’ Club; then a particular group gives you attention. You are very important – doing nothing! Lions’ Clubs, Rotary Clubs...doing nothing at all but still they feel they are something important. The president goes on changing; one this year, another next year. Everybody gets attention. It is a mutual arrangement, and everybody feels important.
From the very beginning the child learns the politics. The politics are: look miserable, then you get sympathy, then everybody is attentive. Look ill; you become important. An ill child becomes dictatorial; the whole family has to follow him – whatsoever he says is the rule.
When he is happy nobody listens to him. When he is healthy nobody cares about him. When he is perfect nobody is attentive. From the very beginning we start choosing the miserable, the sad, the pessimistic, the darker side of life. That’s one thing.
A second thing related to it is: whenever you are happy, whenever you are joyful, whenever you feel ecstatic and blissful, everybody is jealous of you. Jealousy means that everybody is antagonistic, nobody is friendly; at that moment everybody is an enemy. So you have learnt not to be so ecstatic that everybody becomes inimical towards you – not to show your bliss, not to laugh.
Look at people when they laugh. They laugh very calculatingly. It is not a belly laugh, it is not coming from the very depth of their being. They first look at you, then they judge...and then they laugh. And they laugh to a particular extent, to the extent you will tolerate, to the extent which will not be taken amiss, the extent where nobody will become jealous.
Even our smiles are political. Laughter has disappeared; bliss has become absolutely unknown, and to be ecstatic is almost impossible because it is not allowed. If you are miserable nobody will think you are mad. If you are ecstatic and dancing everybody will think you are mad. Dance is rejected, singing is not accepted. A blissful man...we think something has gone wrong.
What type of society is this? If someone is miserable everything is okay; he fits because the whole society is miserable, more or less. He is a member; he belongs to us. If somebody becomes ecstatic we think he has gone berserk, insane. He doesn’t belong to us...and we feel jealous.
Because of jealousy we condemn him. Because of jealousy we will try in every way to put him back to his old state. We call that old state normality. Psychoanalysts will help, psychiatrists will help to bring that man to the normal misery.
In the West, the whole society is turning against psychedelics. The law, the state, the government, the legal experts, the high courts, the legislators, priests, popes...everybody is turning against them. They are not really against psychedelics, they are against people being ecstatic. They are not against alcohol, they are not against other things which are drugs, but they are against psychedelics because psychedelics can create a chemical change in you. And the old crust that the society has created around you, the imprisonment in misery, can be broken, there can be a breakthrough. You can come out of it, even for a few moments, and be ecstatic.
Society cannot allow ecstasy. Ecstasy is the greatest revolution. I repeat it: ecstasy is the greatest revolution. If people become ecstatic the whole society will have to change, because this society is based on misery.
If people are blissful you cannot lead them to war – to Vietnam, or to Egypt, or to Israel. No. Someone who is blissful will just laugh and say: This is nonsense!
If people are blissful you cannot make them obsessed with money. They will not waste their whole lives just accumulating money. It will look like madness to them that a person is destroying his whole life, just exchanging his life for dead money, dying and accumulating money. And the money will be there when he is dead. This is absolute madness! But this madness cannot be seen unless you are ecstatic.
If people are ecstatic then the whole pattern of this society will have to change. This society exists on misery. Misery is a great investment for this society. So we bring up children...from the very beginning we create a leaning towards misery. That’s why they always choose misery.
In the morning for everybody there is a choice. And not only in the morning, every moment there is a choice to be miserable or to be happy. You always choose to be miserable because there is an investment. You always choose to be miserable because that has become a habit, a pattern, you have always done that. You have become efficient at doing it, it has become a track. The moment your mind has to choose, it immediately flows towards misery.
Misery seems to be downhill, ecstasy seems to be uphill. Ecstasy looks very difficult to reach but it is not so. The real thing is quite the opposite: ecstasy is downhill, misery is uphill. Misery is a very difficult thing to achieve, but you have achieved it, you have done the impossible...because misery is so anti-nature. Nobody wants to be miserable and everybody is miserable.
Society has done a great job. Education, culture, and the culturing agencies, parents, teachers – they have done a great job. They have made miserable creatures out of ecstatic creators. Every child is born ecstatic. Every child is born a god. And every man dies a madman.
Unless you recover, unless you reclaim your childhood, you will not be able to become the white clouds I am talking about. This is the whole work for you, the whole sadhana – how to regain childhood, how to reclaim it. If you can become children again then there is no misery.
I don’t mean that for a child there are no moments of misery – there are. But still there is no misery. Try to understand this.
A child can become miserable, he can be unhappy, intensely unhappy in a moment, but he is so total in that unhappiness, he is so one with that unhappiness that there is no division. The child separate from unhappiness is not there. The child is not looking at his unhappiness separate, divided. The child is unhappiness – he is so involved in it. When you become one with unhappiness, unhappiness is not unhappiness. If you become so one with it, even that has a beauty of its own.
So look at a child – an unspoilt child, I mean. If he is angry, then his whole energy becomes anger; nothing is left behind, no holding back. He has moved and become anger; there is nobody manipulating and controlling it. There is no mind. The child has become anger; he is not angry, he has become the anger. And then see the beauty, the flowering of anger. The child never looks ugly; even in anger he looks beautiful. He just looks more intense, more vital, more alive...a volcano ready to erupt. Such a small child, such a great energy, such an atomic being – with the whole universe to explode!
And after this anger the child will be silent. After this anger the child will be very peaceful. After this anger the child will relax. We may think it is very miserable to be in that anger but the child is not miserable – he has enjoyed it.
If you become one with anything you become blissful. If you separate yourself from anything, even if it is happiness, you will become miserable.
So this is the key. To be separate as an ego is the base of all misery; to be one, to be flowing, with whatsoever life brings to you, to be in it so intensely, so totally, that you are no more, you are lost, then everything is blissful.
The choice is there, but you have even become unaware of the choice. You have been choosing the wrong so continuously, it has become such a dead habit, that you simply choose it automatically. There is no choice left.
Become alert. Each moment when you are choosing to be miserable remember: this is your choice. Even this mindfulness will help, the alertness that this is my choice and I am responsible, and this is what I am doing to myself, this is my doing. Immediately you will feel a difference. The quality of mind will have changed. It will be easier for you to move towards happiness.
Once you know that this is your choice, then the whole thing has become a game. Then if you love to be miserable, be miserable, but remember, this is your choice and don’t complain. There is nobody else who is responsible for it. This is your drama. If you like this way, if you like a miserable way, if you want to pass through life in misery, then this is your choice, your game. You are playing it. Play it well!
Then don’t go and ask people how not to be miserable. That is absurd. Don’t go and ask masters and gurus how to be happy. The so-called gurus exist because you are foolish. You create the misery, and then you go and ask others how to uncreate it. And you will go on creating misery because you are not alert to what you are doing. From this very moment try, try to be happy and blissful
How is it that the body begins to feel light after the deep and fast breathing in dynamic meditation?
It is true that the body will feel light after this meditation. It will be so because our consciousness of body is one of heaviness. What we call heaviness is nothing more than our awareness of the body. The body weighs heavy on a sick person even if he is skinny and wiry. But a healthy person, even if he is a heavyweight, carries his body very lightly. So it is really our body-consciousness that feels like a weight on us.
And we become conscious of our body only when it is in pain, when it is suffering. We become conscious of our feet when they are hurting. We become aware of our head when it is aching. If there is no body pain, we are never aware of our body. This consciousness is the measure of our suffering.
We define a healthy person as one who feels as if he is bodiless.
He who does not feel that he is a body, who has a feeling of bodilessness, is really a healthy person. And if he is identified with a particular part of his body it can be said that this part of his body is sick.
As the amount of oxygen increases and as the kundalini awakens, you will begin to have experiences that are not of the body; they belong to the soul or the atman. And on account of these subtle experiences you will simultaneously feel lightness, an extraordinary kind of weightlessness. Many people will feel as if they are levitating. Not that they really levitate – an event of actual levitation takes place only once in a long while. But because of the feeling of utter weightlessness, you feel that you are levitating. If you open your eyes and see, you will find that you are sitting on the ground. But why this feeling of levitation?
The fact is that our mind, in its inmost depths, does not know any language as we know. It only knows the language of pictures, symbols. So when you experience weightlessness, utter weightlessness, your mind expresses it in the language of pictures. It does not say verbally that it is weightlessness, it pictures it as an act of levitation, it feels levitation.
Our deeper mind, our unconscious mind does not think in words, it thinks in pictures, in symbols.
That is why our dreams in the night have only pictures and hardly any words. The dreaming mind has to transform everything – including experiences and thoughts – into pictures. For this reason when we wake up in the morning we find it so difficult to understand our own dreams. The language we know and use in the waking hours is utterly different from the pictorial language of dreams. The two are total strangers to each other, and therefore great interpreters in the form of pundits, psychologists and psychiatrists are needed to interpret them for us. We just cannot do without them.
Now someone is ambitious. How will he express his ambition when he is dreaming? He will turn into a bird on the wing soaring high in the sky. Then he will be at the top of everything, leaving the whole world behind him. Ambition in dreams takes the form of flights – one dreams that he is flying and flying. All ambitious men have dreams of flying. But the word ambition will never find a place in dreams. So after waking up in the morning the person wonders why he was flying in his dreams. It is his ambition turned into a flying bird in dreams.
My commune is a totally different phenomenon. It is neither an ashram, modern or ancient, nor a monastery, Christian or Mohammedan. My commune is, in the first place, non-ascetic.
It basically tries to destroy all psychological sicknesses in you – in which sado-masochist ideas are included. It teaches you to be healthy and not to feel guilty for being healthy. It teaches you to be human, because my experience is that people who have been trying to be divine have not become divine, but have fallen far lower than humans. They were trying to go up beyond humanity – yes, they have gone beyond humanity, but below it.
In the monasteries, people are almost animals, because the more you torture yourself, the more you start losing your intelligence; intelligence needs comfort. Intelligence is a very delicate flower. Don´t try to grow roses in the desert. Intelligence is a very delicate flower. It grows in luxury. It needs a luxurious ground, fertile, creative, full of juice; only then can it blossom. And without intelligence, what are you?
My effort is first to help your intelligence become a flame, and to help that flame to consume all that is not your authentic self. You become a fire and you burn everything that is rubbish, thrown by others onto you.
So first intelligence, and second meditation. Meditation comes out of intelligence – burning all crap from your being. Then you are pure, alone, just the way existence wants you to be
If you don´t escape, if you allow the suffering to be there, if you are ready to face it, if you are not trying somehow to forget it, then you are different. Suffering is there but just around you; it is not in the center, it is on the periphery. It is impossible for suffering to be in the center; it is not in the nature of things. It is always on the periphery and you are the center.
So when you allow it to happen, you don´t escape, you don´t run, you are not in a panic, suddenly you become aware that suffering is there on the periphery as if happening to someone else, not to you, and you are looking at it. A subtle joy spreads all over your being because you have realized one of the basic truths of life, that you are bliss and not suffering.
If you are unhappy, that simply means that you have learned tricks for being unhappy. Nothing else! Unhappiness depends on the frame of your mind. There are people who are unhappy in all kinds of situations. They have a certain program in their mind that transforms everything into unhappiness. If you tell them about the beauty of the rose, they immediately start counting the thorns. If you say to them, "What a beautiful morning, what a sunny day!" they will say, "Only one day between two dark nights, so why are you making so much fuss?"
All depends on what kind of frame you are carrying in your head. Millions of people are carrying crosses. Naturally, obviously, they are burdened; their life is a drag. Their frame is such that it immediately becomes focused on everything that is negative. It magnifies the negative. That is a morbid approach towards life, pathological. But they go on thinking, "What can we do? The world is such."
No, the world is not such! The world is absolutely neutral. It has thorns, it has roses, it has nights, it has days. The world is utterly neutral, balanced - it has all. Now it depends on you as to what you choose. That´s how people create hell and heaven on the same earth.
Seventy percent of diseases are mind-oriented. Through hypnosis those diseases can be prevented before they occur. Through hypnosis it can be found out what kind of sickness is going to happen in the near future. There are no symptoms on the body, the routine physical examination of the person will not show any indication that he is going to be sick or ill, he is perfectly healthy.
But through hypnosis we can find that within three weeks he is going to fall sick, because before anything comes to the body, it comes from the deep cosmic unconscious. It travels from there to the collective unconscious, to the unconscious, and only then, when it comes to the conscious mind, can it be checked and found in the body.
Sicknesses can be prevented even before the person has any idea that he is going to be sick.
In Russia, one genius photographer, Kirlian, has even photographed people.... His whole life he has been working in photography, with very sensitive plates, sensitive lenses, to find something that is not available to ordinary eyes and ordinary instruments. And he was puzzled that he can see in his photographs at least six months ahead.
If he takes a picture of a rosebud with his special sensitive plates, the picture is not of a rosebud, the picture is of a rose. Tomorrow it is going to be a rose. No other camera can do that miracle.
First he himself was puzzled how the sensitive plate can take a picture of something which has not happened yet – and when tomorrow the bud opens up, it is exactly similar to the photograph, there is no difference at all.
Then he discovered more and more that there is a certain aura surrounding the bud – just an energy aura, and that energy aura has the whole program of how the bud is going to open. The sensitive plate gets the picture of the energy aura that we cannot see with our bare eyes. Then he started working on diseases, and in Soviet medicine he has created a revolution.
You need not first become sick, and then be cured. You can be cured even before you had any knowledge of any sickness, because Kirlian photography will show in what part the sickness is going to show, because the energy aura will be sick, already sick. It is six months ahead. It is connected with your cosmic unconscious.
Through hypnosis and deeper experiments with it, you can find sicknesses that are going to happen and they can be treated.
The children can be happier. It has been a topic of concern to the psychoanalysts why all over the world, except in a few places, seventy years has become the routine idea of the length of life, because there are a few tribes in Kashmir, where people have always lived one hundred and thirty years, one hundred and forty years, one hundred and fifty, and even at the age of one hundred and fifty they were as energetic as any young man. They never became old, they remained young until they died.
He enquired in the town and they said, “He is right. His father lived for two hundred years and we hope that he will also live two hundred years, because no sign of death can be seen.”
Psychologists have been concerned to find the reason why in a few places people live long and in most of the world people live only the routine seventy years.
George Bernard Shaw, when he became seventy years old, moved away from London. His friends said, “What are you doing? In old age it is better to be here with friends, society – and you are a man of society, a man of culture.”
He said, “I cannot live here. I am now seventy. This society believes that people die at seventy and that belief is dangerous. I am going to find some place where people don’t believe such a thing.”
And he found a small village nearby, and the way he went to find out was to go into graveyards and look on the stones for how long people had been living; and on a stone he found in one graveyard it said that the man had lived one hundred and twenty years. And the graveyard stone was saying, “He died an untimely death at the age of one hundred and twenty years.”
He said, “This is the place to live, where people think that somebody dying at one hundred and twenty is untimely.” And he lived there, and he lived long. He managed to live a century. And in that graveyard that was the case; on all the stones nobody had died at seventy.
It seems to be that it is just a psychological programming. For centuries we have been programmed...seven decades and you are finished. That has gone so deep that you die, not because your body is not capable of living, but because your psychology insists, “Follow the routine. Follow the crowd.” And in everything else you are following the crowd, so naturally you follow the crowd psychology in this too.
Scientists say that man’s body is capable of living at least three hundred years. Just as it goes on rejuvenating itself for seventy years, in fact it can go on for three hundred years, but the program has to be changed. Scientists think in a different way how to change the program, and it will take very long for them. They think the program is in the cells of the body.
So unless we split the human cell, just as we have been able to split the atom, and reprogram it, which seems to be far away, because even the scratch work has not started....
But my understanding is that there is no need to go through physiology, you can go through psychology.
If your hypnosis goes deep enough...the more you go into it, if it becomes an everyday thing, slowly, slowly you will touch the cosmic unconscious and there is the real programming, you can change it.
Our children can live longer, our children can live healthier, our children can live without old age. All this is possible, and we have to make it, to show to the world, but it is dangerous in the sense that if politicians get hold of hypnotic methods they are going to use it for their own purposes.
Confusion is a great opportunity. The problem with people who are not confused is great – they think they know, and they know not. The people who believe that they have clarity are really in great trouble; their clarity is very superficial. In fact they know nothing of clarity; what they call clarity is just stupidity.
Idiots are very very clear – clear in the sense that they do not have the intelligence to feel confusion.
To feel confusion needs great intelligence.
Only the intelligent ones feel confusion; otherwise the mediocre go on moving in life, smiling, laughing, accumulating money, struggling for more power and fame. If you see them you will feel a little jealous; they look so confident, they even look happy.
If they are succeeding, if their money is increasing and their power is increasing and their fame is growing, you will feel a little jealous. You are so confused and they are so clear about their life; they have a direction, they have a goal, they know how to attain it, and they are managing, they are already achieving, they are climbing the ladder. And you are just standing there, confused about what to do, what not to do, what is right and what is wrong. But this has always been so; the mediocre remains certain. It is only for the more intelligent to feel confusion, chaos.
Confusion is a great opportunity. It simply says that through the mind there is no way. If you are really confused you are blessed. Now something is possible, something immensely valuable; you are on the verge. If you are utterly confused, that means the mind has failed; now the mind can no longer supply any certainty to you.
You are coming closer and closer to the death of the mind. And that is the greatest thing that can happen to any man in life, the greatest blessing – because once you see that the mind is confusion and there is no way out through the mind, how long can you go on clinging to the mind? Sooner or later you will have to drop it; even if you don’t drop it, it will drop of its own accord. Confusion will become so much, so heavy, that out of sheer heaviness it will drop. And when the mind drops, confusion disappears.
I cannot say that you attain to certainty, no, because that too is a word applicable only to the mind and the world of the mind. When there is confusion, there can be certainty; when confusion disappears, certainty also disappears.
You simply are – clear, neither confused nor certain, just a clarity, a transparency. And that transparency has beauty, that transparency is grace, it is exquisite.
It is the most beautiful moment in one’s life when there is neither confusion nor certainty. One simply is, a mirror reflecting that which is, with no direction, going nowhere, with no idea of doing something, with no future, just utterly in the moment, tremendously in the moment.
When there is no mind there can be no future, there can be no program for the future. Then this moment is all, all in all; this moment is your whole existence. The whole existence starts converging on this moment, and the moment becomes tremendously significant. It has depth, it has height, it has mystery, it has intensity, it has fire, it has immediacy, it grips you, it possesses you, it transforms you.
But I cannot give you certainty; certainty is given by ideology. Certainty is nothing but patching up your confusion. You are confused. Somebody says, “Don’t be worried,” and says it very authoritatively, convinces you with arguments, with scriptures, and patches up your confusion, covers it with a beautiful blanket – with the Bible, with the Koran, with the Gita. You feel good but it is temporary, because the confusion is boiling within. You have not got rid of it, it has only been repressed.
The intelligent person hesitates, ponders, wavers. The unintelligent never wavers, never hesitates. Where the wise will whisper, the fool simply declares from the housetops.
Lao Tzu says, “I may be the only muddle-headed man in the world. Everybody seems to be so certain, except me.” He is right; he has such tremendous intelligence that he cannot be certain about anything.
I cannot promise you certainty if you drop the mind. I can promise you only one thing, that you will be clear. There will be clarity, transparency, you will be able to see things as they are
Misery arises because we don´t allow change to happen. We cling, we want things to be static. If you love a woman you want her tomorrow too, the same way as she is yours today. That´s how misery arises. Nobody can be certain about the next moment – what to say about tomorrow?
A man of awareness knows that life is constantly changing. Life is change. There is only one thing permanent, and that is change. Except change, everything else changes. To accept this nature of life, to accept this changing existence with all its seasons and moods, this constant flow that never stops for a single moment, is to be blissful. Then nobody can disturb your bliss. It is your hankering for permanency that creates troubles for you. If you want to live in a life with no change – you are asking the impossible.
A man of awareness becomes courageous enough to accept the changing phenomena. In that very acceptance is bliss. Then all is good. Then you are never frustrated
In the name of astrology, ninety-nine percent of astrologers are only bluff. Only one percent know that astrology is a vast subject - so vast that someone can only enter into it hesitatingly. The astrology I am talking about is of much depth. Something essential between your life and the universe is connected, is in a rhythmic harmony. We are not separate or isolated but joined together in an organic way. Life is a whole. Whatever is happening anywhere in the universe also affects man and vice versa. If we can understand this properly, there is no need to live encaged within ego and pride. Your ego is not, but the cosmos is. Very powerful forces are operating, and your ego is absolutely insignificant. You are an integral part of this big world.
Every child, every new life, insists on a specific moment for conception and for birth - both are interdependent. He will choose the appropriate constellations according to what he wants to be – whatever his innate possibilities, whatever the shape his previous lives have taken in their entirety, whatever his motivating consciousness is.
At the time of birth, the condition of a child’s mind is exactly like a very sensitive photo plate. When a child is conceived, this is the first exposure. The day the child is born is a second exposure. These two exposures are registered upon the sensitive mind of the child, as if on film. The world, as it is at that moment, is imprinted upon the child. This determines the child’s sympathies and antipathies for his entire life.
The first part of astrology is the outermost layer, which is nonessential. There everything is circumstantial, uncertain, unpredictable. The more we talk about external happenings, the more there is coincidence. The second part is the middle layer, the semi-essential layer. There is possibility of transformation if the right choice is made. The third part is the core, the essence. It cannot be changed. When it is known, the only way is to cooperate with it.
The real thing is the third. It is the quintessence of everything. It belongs to the innermost and is absolutely predetermined. The more one moves toward one’s center, the nearer one comes to the essential, the predetermined part. With inner phenomena things begin to appear scientific, as if based on a definite law. They become more and more decisive.
Between these two conditions - the peripheral and the essential – in the middle layer there is ample room to effect changes by exercising one’s freedom of choice. Here, someone with awareness will make the correct choice, and the right way is to start moving towards your center. A person who is in the darkness of ignorance, though, will drift into his destiny, putting up with whatever comes his way.
When you go to an astrologer, ask him an essential question, like, “Will I die unhappy or fulfilled?” This is worth asking; it is connected to essential astrology. You are usually asking the astrologer how long you will live - as if just living is sufficient. Why will you live? For what shall you live? What shall I become if I live? Astrology can become a tool in your hands only if you distinguish the essential from the nonessential
What is the Zen attitude towards death?
I would simply like to be forgiven and forgotten. There is no need to remember me. The need is to remember yourself! People have remembered Gautam Buddha and Jesus Christ and Confucius and Krishna. That does not help. So what I would like: forget me completely, and forgive me too – because it will be difficult to forget me. That´s why I am asking you to forgive me for giving you the trouble.
Remember yourself.
And don´t be bothered about historians and all kinds of neurotic people – they will do their thing. It is none of our concern at all.
You once suggested to me that I keep my energy inside and bring it to my Hara, my lower belly. Since doing this, I notice that my Hara has become like a mirror for all my feelings.
I feel that behind this small suggestion of yours lies more than I can imagine. Could you please comment?
The Hara is the center from where a life leaves the body. It is the center of death. The word hara is Japanese; that’s why in Japan, suicide is called hara-kiri. The center is just two inches below the navel. It is very important, and almost everybody in the world has felt it. But only in Japan have they gone deeper into its implications.
Even the people in India who had worked tremendously hard on centers, had not considered the Hara. The reason for their missing it was because they had never considered death to be of any significance. Your soul never dies, so why bother about a center that functions only as a door for energies to get out, and to enter into another body? They worked from sex, which is the life center. They have worked on seven centers, but the Hara is not even mentioned in any Indian scriptures.
The people who worked hardest on the centers for thousands of years have not mentioned the Hara, and this cannot be just a coincidence. The reason was that they never took death seriously. These seven centers are life centers, and each center is of a higher life. The seventh is the highest center of life, when you are almost a god.
The Hara is very close to the sex center. If you don’t rise towards higher centers, towards the seventh center which is in your head, and if you remain for your whole life at the sex center, then just by the side of the sex center is the Hara, and when then life ends, the Hara will be the center from where your life will move out of the body.
Why did I tell you this? You were very energetic, but not aware of any higher centers; your whole energy was at the sex center, and you were overflowing. Energy overflowing at the sex center is dangerous, because it can start releasing from the Hara. And if it starts releasing from the Hara, then to take it upwards becomes more difficult. So I had told you to keep your energy in, and not to be so expressive: Hold it in! I simply wanted the Hara center, which was opening and which could have been very dangerous, to be completely closed.
You followed it, and you have become a totally different person. Now when I see you, I cannot believe the expressiveness that I had seen at first. Now you are centered and your energy is moving in the right direction of the higher centers. It is almost at the fourth center, which is the center of love and which is a very balancing center. There are three centers below it, and three centers above it.
Once a person is at the center of love, there is very rarely a possibility for him to fall back down, because he has tasted something of the heights. Now valleys will be very dark, ugly; he has seen sunlit peaks, not very high, but still high; now his whole desire will be.... And that is the trouble with all lovers: they want more love, because they don’t understand that the real desire is not for more love but for something more than love. Their language ends with love; they don’t know any way that is higher than love, and love does not satisfy. On the contrary, the more you love the more thirsty you become.
At the fourth center, of love, one feels a tremendous satisfaction only when energy starts moving to the fifth center. The fifth center is in your throat, and the sixth center is your third eye. The seventh center, the sahastrara, is on the top of your head. All these centers have different expressions and different experiences.
When love moves to the fifth center then whatever talents you have, any creative dimension, is possible for you. This is the center of creativity. It is not only for songs, not only for music; it is for all creativity.
The sixth center, which we call the third eye, is between the two eyes. This gives you a clarity, a vision of all your past lives, and of all the future possibilities. Once your energy has reached your third eye, then you are so close to enlightenment that something of enlightenment starts showing. It radiates from the man of the third eye, and he starts feeling a pull towards the seventh center.
Because of these seven centers, India never bothered about the Hara. The Hara is not in the line; it is just by the side of the sex center. The sex center is the life center, and the Hara is the death center. Too much excitement, too much uncenteredness, too much throwing your energy all over the place is dangerous, because it takes your energy towards the Hara. And once the route is created, it becomes more difficult to move it upwards. The Hara is parallel to the sex center, so the energy can move very easily.
The Hara should be kept closed. That’s why I told you to be more centered, to keep your feelings inside, and to bring the energy to your Hara. If you can keep your Hara consciously controlling your energies, it does not allow them to go out. You start feeling a tremendous gravity, a stability, a centeredness, which is a basic necessity for the energy to move upwards.
Your Hara center has so much energy that, if it is rightly directed, enlightenment is not a faraway place.
So these two are my suggestions: keep yourself as centered as possible. Don’t get moved by small things: somebody is angry, somebody insults you, and you think about it for hours. Your whole night is disturbed because somebody said something.... If the Hara can hold more energy, then naturally that much more energy starts rising upwards. There is only a certain capacity in the Hara, and every energy that moves upwards moves through the Hara; but the Hara should just be closed.
So one thing is that the Hara should be closed.
The second thing is that you should always work for higher centers. For example, if you feel angry too often you should meditate more on anger, so that anger disappears and its energy becomes compassion. If you are a man who hates everything, then you should concentrate on hate; meditate on hate, and the same energy becomes love.
Go on moving upwards, think always of higher ladders, so that you can reach to the highest point of your being. And there should be no leakage from the Hara center.
Energy should not be allowed through the Hara. A person whose energy starts through the Hara you can very easily detect. For example, there are people with whom you will feel suffocated, with whom you will feel as if they are sucking your energy. You will find that, after they are gone, you feel at ease and relaxed, although they were not doing anything wrong to you.
You will find just the opposite kind of people also, whose meeting you makes you joyful, healthier. If you were sad, your sadness disappears; if you were angry, your anger disappears. These are the people whose energy is moving to higher centers. Their energy affects your energy. We are affecting each other continually. And the man who is conscious, chooses friends and company which raises his energy higher.
One point is very clear. There are people who suck you, avoid them! It is better to be clear about it, say goodbye to them. There is no need to suffer, because they are dangerous; they can open your Hara too. Their Hara is open, that’s why they create such a sucking feeling in you.
Psychology has not taken note of it yet, but it is of great importance that psychologically sick people should not be put together. And that is what is being done all over the world. Psychologically sick people are put into psychiatric institutes together. They are already psychologically sick, and you are putting them in a company which will drag their energy even lower.
Even the doctors who work with psychologically sick people have given enough indication of it. More psychoanalysts commit suicide than any other profession, more psychoanalysts go mad than any other profession. And every psychoanalyst once in a while needs to be treated by some other psychoanalyst. What happens to these poor people? Surrounded by psychologically sick people, they are continually sucked, and they don’t have any idea how to close their Haras.
There are methods, techniques to close the Hara, just as there are methods for meditation, to move the energy upwards. The best and simplest method is: try to remain as centered in your life as possible. People cannot even sit silently, they will be changing their position. They cannot lie down silently, the whole night they will be turning and tossing. This is just unrest, a deep restlessness in their souls. One should learn restfulness. And in these small things, the hara stays closed. Particularly psychologists should be trained. Also, psychologically sick people should not be put together.
You have done well. Just continue whatever you are doing, accumulating your energy in yourself. The accumulation of energy automatically makes it go higher. And as it reaches higher you will feel more peaceful, more loving, more joyful, more sharing, more compassionate, more creative. The day is not faraway when you will feel full of light, and the feeling of coming back home
