Tag Archives: Samadhi

February 8, 2013 · 2:49 pm

The Vertical Ascendance of a Sadhaka – Vimala Thakar

The following dialog took place between Vimala Thakar and Yoga teachers from all over the world in Mount Abu, Rajasthan, India on the 11th of September, 2000.

Question: What are the most difficult obstacles that a Sadhaka has to overcome during his spiritual path?

It becomes very difficult to break the silence and touch the space with words; words feel very shy to encroach upon the emptiness of silence. The science of consciousness, Atma Vidya has been the field of study, investigation, exploration, experimentation and verification through the act of living in Ancient India. Naturally all the literature about Atma Vidya, Adhyatma -Spirituality is in ancient Sanskrit language, so the students of Yoga come across the Sanskrit words and terms when they study Yoga Sutras or Mantra Yoga, Tantra Yoga etc.

You have used the term “sadhaka” in your collective question. But the investigation does not begin with Sadhana. Investigation begins first on the theoretical, academic, verbal level. One has to know with the help of words about what one is going to do as Sadhana. .

This phase of investigation, this study through travelling, through reading books, through seminars, you may call it intellectual sadhana, but we call it JIGNASYA the urge to enquire, and one who does that is JIGNASU.

When a person living In Europe and America or outside Asia comes to know through scriptures on Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism or even Islam, when the person comes to know that there are different ways of living, where freedom from the prison-house of thought and from the clutches of the mind is possible, then the desire for liberation is born in the heart. When he knows through that verbal investigation that a different way of living is possible, that people have lived that way, that it is possible for anyone and everyone to be liberated from the grip of the mind and the prison-house of thought structure, then the desire for liberation is born in the heart. The desire for liberation is called Mumuksha – the desire for Moksha. Moksha is liberation. Mukti, Moksha, these are the Sanskrit terms. One who has the desire for Moksha is called MUMUKSHU.

So the JIGNASU becomes MUMUKSHU. First he only wanted to know; now he says I have known that It IS possible, so why should I continue living as a slave of the thought and the mind. If there is a consciousness beyond, if there is a life beyond, well let me explore. So JIGNASU becomes a MUMUKSHU; a person charged with the flame of enquiry, of exploration. So he turns to those who have taken the pilgrimage, those who have followed the path of liberation and freedom. He comes across such persons, sees their lives and he says that I want to educate myself in that way of freedom, in that life style of freedom, so he becomes a SADHAKA.

A Sadhaka is one who launches upon the extensive project of education, learning, discovery. SADHANA is the process of education, the process of learning, a personal discovery of truth. One who does that sadhana is called SADHAKA. So JIGNASU; MUMUKSHU; SADHAKA. When the process of education is gone through at the physical level, at the verbal level, at the mental level, at cerebral level, and in the movement of daily relationships, then he becomes a SIDDHA. The education is completed, now it is mature. SADHANA – SADHAKA and then SIDDHA.

Because you have asked the question and have used the term SADHAKA one must know the background. SADHANA, SADHAKA is the third phase. After verbal investigation, comes the phase where one is charged with the desire for liberation from mind and thought. If that desire is not there, if the urge is not there, then one does not become a Sadhaka. The Sadhana is for Mukti, Moksha, liberation, enlightenment. That is the top priority; that is the first priority. The person is willing to do anything and everything for that discovery of freedom and living in freedom. So the Sadhaka is the student of life, learning and educating himself. If the urge for liberation is not there, then you may do Yoga Asanas and Pranayama for 20 years, they will give you health, they will give you symmetrical body, it is a physical and cultural education, very necessary -but that by itself does not lead you to freedom from the mind. YAMAH- NIYAMAH will give you a disciplined life, even Pratyahara can give you a disciplined life. There will be a disciplined life at the physical level, at the verbal level. You will be speaking Truth -Sat yam, you will be non-violent -Ahimsa, there will be Shaucham- cleanliness at the physical, the mental and the verbal level and modesty, humility. So the Yamahs and Niyamahs will create a very orderly, disciplined person. Asanas, Pranayama will change the quality of physical life and bring about a different freshness in body-brain complex but that by itself is not the totality of Sadhana, it is only a part.

Many people have a misconception when they turn to Yoga; they think that Yoga Asanas, Pranayama and Yamah – Niyamah, will naturally lead them to Dhyanam and Samadhi. But that is a different education because with Yamah- Niyamah, Asana-Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana you have to exercise the physical, the verbal, the mental, the cerebral, you have to make an effort, you have to create an order in the chaos, in the disorder. The “You”, the centre, the monitor is there, the method and techniques of doing away with disorder and creating order: that is there. Yamahs and Niyamahs give you direction for the Asanas, which must be done correctly, a Mantra has to be pronounced correctly, in the proper accent, intonation, punctuation, and articulation. Even in Dharana, the science and the art of concentration, there is still something to learn – concentrate on the breath, concentrate on the movement of breath, concentrate on an idol, concentrate on the flame of a candle and so on, there is the centre, the knowledge, the direction of effort, the methodology of effort.

People find it easy up to there. Education can go on smoothly up to the step of Dharana, if the person is really sincere and really very serious about changing the way of living. It is an alternative way of living. It is an alternative culture. It is an alternative dynamics of relationship with your body, with nature, with human beings with non-human species. It is a holistic change in the way of living, up to that it is comparatively easy and many serious, sincere students of spirituality in the various countries of the world have taken the journey up to there, but then comes the point of DHYANAM or meditation.

You say what is the most difficult obstacle? I will not call it obstacle, but a difficult point that you have to cross. If you convert it into an obstacle it can become an obstacle, otherwise it is something that you have to cross, to go over. What happens is, up to Dharana, the ‘I’, the self, the me, the Ego, the Monitor whatever you call it, can assert itself, can make an effort, can see the result, the product, the result of its effort in time, it can even manipulate the result, so it is satisfied -I have done this, I have progressed. And naturally through Yoga asanas, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, the dormant energies in the body, in the biological organism, in the psychological structure which were not tapped before, they are stimulated. The manifestation of those activised powers is called VIBHUTI. SIDDHI, VIBHUTI. So up till there, the enthusiasm of the ‘l’, the ‘Me’ is tremendous, because it is doing something, it is getting something, it can measure it, people can see what you have achieved and you can teach it to others. But then comes the point of DHYANAM, where the mind and the brain are to be educated in relaxation of all movement – that is the difficult point. The body has to be steady, the speech has to go back into its source, and the mental movement and the movement of the brain have to voluntarily discontinue. You cannot make them stop, because you are a part of that, you are a part of the past, of the thought structure, the conditionings, you are one of it, you are its product so you can not change it, the ‘You’, the monitor which up till now has been very active has to voluntarily discontinue its movement.

The difficult part comes now of educating the mind and the brain to voluntarily discontinue its movement in every direction. If you tell the mind there is nothing to know, nothing to experience, nowhere to go, no experiencing, it runs back into the past. Wants to chew into the memories of the past pleasure, of the past pain, or it wants to jump towards the future that is unborn, that is not here. It does not give up easily its addiction to motion. It has been moving, changing itself, changing others, getting something. It has been busy with the acquisitive movement- acquire knowledge, acquire money, acquire experience, acquire powers, and people acknowledge you, you get social respectability and you can earn money by teaching them.

This part of self-education is a very tough part, because there is no doing. You have to be with yourself whether you sit down, you stand up, and you walk. No books, no reading, no knowing, no experiences. One requires tremendous patience with the cerebral organ, which has been sharpened. It has been made very sharp and sophisticated and you have purified it through your Yamah -Niyamah etc. It is very sensitive: one hundred times more sensitive than any of your electronic gadgets. So when you sit down with yourself or spend some days with yourself, you notice that immeasurable velocity, that tremendous, fantastic momentum with which the thoughts come and go, the emotions come, the memories come up and the Seer has to be there just seeing it, not looking at it. Looking is the activity of the monitor, the ‘I’, the ‘Me’, the mind. Seeing is the energy principle of your life. You don’t see because you want to see, but because you can’t help it. It IS an involuntary action. It is not a movement like thinking, feeling, willing. It is an instantaneous action. So be with oneself, be with the total human past contained in your body, not even to watch it, to observe it, but just be in the state of SEEING. The seeing, the hearing goes on but you are not listening. You listen to something when you have a motivation, but hearing goes on, you can’t help it, if you are awake, the auditory nerves respond to the sound, the optical nerves respond to the light, to the shape, to the colour of the objects.

To be in that austere state of seeing is the toughest part. When the seen, that is the past, the known, the conditioned gets exposed to that seeing energy it gets exhausted, that is to say, the seen energy is not unlimited, it is vast, it is gigantic, but it has had a beginning and it can have an end. One needs patience in educating oneself for being in the state of SEEING without looking, without listening, without comparing, without evaluating, without passing a value judgement on what is seen. Nobody will know, but you go on doing that inwardly. So no value judgement, no comparison, no seeking pleasure out of it, no feeling pain out of it. The seeing is unrelated to that which is seen. It is not a relationship, it is co-existence of the seeing energy and the seen energy -the DRASHTA, DRASHTUTVAM AND DRISHYA.

The body, the movement of the pranas, your breathing, the movement of the mind, the movement of the brain -all these are seen, they are not your existential essence, they are not the essence of your being. The seeing energy is the essence, which you might call ATMAN and CHAITANYA. You might give a variety of names to it, It is just an energy, where seeing and understanding are rolled into one. It is a perceptive sensitivity. Looking is an activity, a joint activity of the mind and the optical nerves, but seeing is unrelated to that which is seen, because one did not want to see it, wish to see it, expect to see it, it is there, therefore it is seen. That is the toughest part, but if that is gone through, then the seen and the seeing energy subside into their sources and there is MAUNAM or silence or emptiness.

So the seeing and the seen are replaced by infinite silence of emptiness. It is still tougher to be in that state if at all a Sadhaka has patience and humility to be in the state. Nothing happens, no experiences, you come out of silence after 2 or 3 hours and somebody asks you” what were you doing?” “I don’t know, nothing”. But you were sitting there with your closed eyes for 3 hours, what happened?” “Nothing.” “What did you get out of it?” “Nothing.”

The immeasurableness and indescribable-ness of that emptiness! How can you describe emptiness? You can describe an object. So the ‘I’ consciousness, the Ego that had gone voluntarily into discontinuity jumps back. It wants to claim and say “I have had an experience of silence”. The ‘I’ can never have that experience, the ‘I’ can have experience of quietness, of abstinence from speaking, it can have an experience of non-motion but silence is something that cannot be experienced. Nothing happens to the chemical or metabolic or nervous system.

What is the obstacle on the path of a Sadhaka? – This nothingness and nobody-ness. To go through that period of solitary silence is difficult especially for those who are living in big cities, they have jobs, they have families. Unless they move away from their working place and family atmosphere for some time this education from the doer, the experiencer to the Seer, from the Seer into the Silence and then into Meditation, this education cannot happen. Devoting an hour a day while living in the family, while working at a job is easy, that can be done, but for the revolution to happen, for the mutation to take place, the Silence has to crystallise. It is only when the silence crystallises as the normal dimension of consciousness that the mutation, the quantum jump into the state of DHYANAM occurs. It is not the result of any human effort. You cannot bring it about as the result of your action. It occurs, it happens if this period of being merged into or being immersed into the ocean of Emptiness is gone through.

You may call it in your language the most difficult obstacle. As I see it, it is a tough phase in education, because it is going beyond mind, it is going beyond brain into another dimension of consciousness -Dhyanajam anashayam (Patanjali Yoga Sutras IV. 6). Out of meditation is born a Chitta which has no content of thought, emotion, feeling, which has no past, which has no conditionings. The “Prakrit chitta” disappears with meditation and Dhyanajam chittam anashayam emerges. Chitta, which is emptiness, emptiness as a dimension of consciousness, gets born. In the beginning it lasts for say few hours and when you are busy in movement of relationships you feel it is slipping out, because that is a period of puberty from one dimension to the other -a touch and go, it slips back into the mental or the cerebral, it becomes aware of it, again gets back into the mental or the cerebral, it becomes aware of it, again gets back into the meditative dimension and then there is a growth into Samadhi, the dimension of invincible equipoise, invincible peace, invincible relaxation. No action can damage the relaxation. No speaking for hours can affect the inner state of silence and no relationships which one has to go through in society can even touch the solitude of the consciousness.

So it seems to me that the tough period begins in Sadhana or the difficult period or obstacle period, begins when one is busy educating oneself in DHYANAM.

There is a very well known Sadhaka poet in India, he is still living, he wrote to me that it is better to be in the dimension of the known where you know how to handle thought, emotions, reactions, defence mechanism, patterns of behaviour. It is much better to be there and safer to be there, than to get transported into the unknown where everything is unknowable. So the idea of psychic security, by which one has lived, has a strong hold over one. Even in the study of Yoga, in the subconscious there is that sense of security with the known – the known place, the known people, and the known activities

Meditation –DHYANAM is a romance with the unknown. I do not know if I have responded to your question, but this being the last meeting of this year, I thought: let me share with you the journey from JIGNASA to SADHANA – sadhana as a process of education –self-education, mutual education, group education. How you do it is secondary, but it is an educational process. Not academic education, which gives you a degree and a job at the end of it. At the end of this education there is the maturity of Samadhi, it is the consummation of human growth. It is not an acquisitive movement but it is a movement of constant discovery of the different nuances of truth and reality, a discovery of the different nuances and shades of that cosmic energy which is playing even in your body.

-Vimala Thakar

As seen at: http://www.ul.ie/~sextonb/vt/Sadhaka.htm

For more posts on Vimala Thakar look here.

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December 17, 2012 · 9:05 am

The ‘Spiritual I’ – Lucy Cornelssen

There is another rather harmless mistake which happens regularly to beginners. Many of them are blessed with various glimpses of the higher life, which they have entered. These carry the stamp of a genuine change of consciousness, and of course the sadhaka is happy, and convinced that he has made real progress. There is no harm in it, because he soon has to face the fact that his ‘experience’ is fading away, never to return. When this happens again and again, he learns to understand these sparks as what they are, glimpses from another dimension which want to teach him to discriminate between, the different dimensions but which also lure him on in his spiritual endeavour. They only become a pitfall, when he, by vanity or impatience, gets stuck in one of them, taking it for final Realisation. Then his further progress is blocked.

The mark by which this pitfall is recognised is ‘I’ have realised…’ This ‘I’ can only be a ‘wrong I’, because it is not the ‘I’ that realises.

The duty of the sadhaka is to watch himself ceaselessly; he has to know what is going on within himself. There is a serious risk in doing this only when he looks too much at others. When he does, his ‘personal I’ at once makes comparisons; and the result will be: ‘I am holier than thou’.

With this idea he gives his ‘personal I’ a strong chance to develop into a ‘spiritual I’, which is much worse than his original quite ordinary ‘I’, strengthened by all his previous spiritual effort. The result is a spiritual pride, the worse the more advanced the sadhaka has become, because his attainments, serve only to confirm his ‘right’ to be proud of his success. But even if he perceives the gentle Voice from within, warning him against this trend going on in him and reminding him of the secret of real ‘attainment’, silent humility, and even if he is quite prepared to accept the warning, there is still the risk that the cunning ego now is concealing itself behind his pride in his humility!

There is only one remedy against these and all other pitfalls on the Path to Realisation: Alert Awareness, relentlessly focusing on the treacherous ego…I.

Luckily the sadhaka is not left alone in his secret struggle against himself on his lonesome journey towards his high destination. How could he ever reach It. Were It not already within himself? And It never fails to send signals of warning when the traveller is nearing a pitfall or has even been caught by one due to inadvertance.

His is a journey like that in fairy-tales, when the hero has to go through many adventures, to fight against many enemies and even demons, to win the princess at the end. The further he proceeds, the mightier the obstacles.

The most cunning pitfall on the path of the sadhaka is the last one, hidden in Realisation Itself.

The first Revelation of the Self is temporary. “Jnana, once revealed, needs time to steady itself.” (Talks, 141).

The danger is not in the sliding back; it is natural to most sadhakas and is met quite naturally by continuing one’s practice faithfully, which in its turn will lead to further Revelations of the Self until finally there is no sadhaka left, but the Self only.

If, on the other hand, the sadhaka tries to ‘hold on’ to that first Revelation, in spite of his Inner Guide warning him, (Who is holding on?), then the ego…I slinks again in where the Self is veiled again and distorts the Revelation of the Self into the cry of victory: ‘I have realised!’ Blindfolded by the Bliss of the final ‘success’ (‘whose success?’) he never stops to scrutinize his condition and thus never finds out the truth: That he became a yogabhrastha, one who has fallen out of his yoga, his ‘union’.

The new and definitive disguise of his ego…I is ‘the Guru’, and this last and most powerful pitfall never releases him, because he never recognises that he is its victim.

There are nowadays many whose Guru-pitfall caught them even much earlier on their path.

-Lucy Cornelssen

Excerpt From Hunting the ‘I’, Obstacles and Pitfalls, pages 38-40

Two related posts can be found at Awakening Before Enlightenment and Enlightenment, Before, During and After.

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Tagged as Advaita, awareness, Being, Consciousness, Enlightenment, Meditation, Ramana Maharshi, Samadhi, self-inquiry, witness, witnessing

December 15, 2012 · 5:14 pm

This Delight is Enlightenment

Meditation starts by being separate from the mind, by being a witness. That is the only way of separating yourself from anything. If you are looking at the light, naturally one thing is certain, you are not the light, you are the one who is looking at it. If you are watching the flowers, one thing is certain, you are not the flower, you are the watcher. Watching is the key of meditation:

Watch your mind.

Don’t do anything — no repetition of mantra, no repetition of the name of God — just watch whatever the mind is doing. Don’t disturb it, don’t prevent it, don’t repress it; don’t do anything at all on your part. You just be a watcher, and the miracle of watching is meditation. As you watch, slowly, slowly mind becomes empty of thoughts; but you are not falling asleep, you are becoming more alert, more aware.

As the mind becomes completely empty, your whole energy becomes a flame of awakening. This flame is the result of meditation. So you can say meditation is another name of watching, witnessing, observing — without any judgment, without any evaluation. Just by watching, you immediately get out of the mind.

The watcher is never part of the mind and as the watcher becomes more and more rooted and strong, the distance between the watcher and the mind goes on becoming longer and longer. Soon the mind is so far away that you can hardly feel that it exists… just an echo in faraway valleys. And ultimately, even those echoes disappear. This disappearance of the mind is without your effort, without your using any force against the mind — just letting it die its own death.

Once mind is absolutely silent, absolutely gone, you cannot find it anywhere. You become for the first time aware of yourself because the same energy that was involved in the mind, finding no mind, turns upon itself. Remember: energy is a constant movement.

We say things are objects, and perhaps you have never thought why we call things objects. They are objects because they hinder your energy, your consciousness. They object; they are obstacles. But when there is no object, all thoughts, emotions, moods, everything, has disappeared. You are in utter silence, in nothingness — rather in no-thingness; the whole energy starts turning upon itself. This returning energy to the source brings immense delight.

Just the other day, I quoted William Blake, “energy is delight.” That man, although he is not a mystic, must have found some glimpse of meditation. When meditation comes back to its own source, it explodes in immense delight.

This delight in its ultimate state is enlightenment.

-Osho

Excerpt from The Invitation, Chapter #21

For the complete question of which this is an excerpt see Discipline and Meditation.

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available online from Amazon.com and in the U.S. from OshoStore-Sedona and Osho Here and Now.

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December 10, 2012 · 7:06 pm

Time Exists No More – Osho

As far as you are concerned, is your birthday just like any other day in the year? Or is it in some way special for you?

Time exists no more for me.

That’s why I have to go on looking at my watch, because I don’t have any sense of time. If I don’t look at my watch, I may speak for the whole night!

To me, every day is the same, every moment is the same.

But when I say every moment is the same, it means it has the same blissfulness, the same ecstasy, the same joy, the same silence, the same peace that passeth understanding.

I don’t see any difference between two points, between two days. As far as I am concerned, all differences have disappeared.

I live in absolute silence.

Even while I am speaking to you, believe it or not, I am silent. Only the mechanism of the mind is being used, but my consciousness is centered in absolute beauty and silence.

-Osho

From Sermons in Stones, Chapter 12

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available online from Amazon.com and in the U.S. from OshoStore-Sedona and Osho Here and Now.

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November 15, 2012 · 4:13 pm

With Growing Desirelessness – Osho

With growing desirelessness, sometimes the person becomes outwardly inactive. Is it lethargy and dullness? Why does it happen?

Many things are possible, and it will depend. Certainly many desires will drop and many actions also. Those actions which were just caused by desires will drop. If I was running for a particular desire, how can I run if the desire has dropped? My running will stop. At least the same running on the same route will stop. So when a person becomes desireless, at least for an interim period, for an interval – and how long it will be will depend on the individual – he will become inactive. The desires will have dropped – and all the actions that he had been doing were concerned with desires, so how can he continue? They will drop.

But by dropping desires and actions, energy will be accumulated – and now energy will begin to move. When it moves, how it moves will vary from individual to individual, but now it will move. There will be a gap, an interim period, an interval. This I call a pregnancy period. The seed is born, but now it will gestate for at least nine months. And it may seem strange, but it happens. This nine months period is meaningful. Near about this, eight months or ten months, will be the interim period, and you will just become inactive. This inactivity will also vary. Someone may become so inactive that people may think that he has just gone into a coma. Everything stops.

For Meher Baba it happened like that. For one year he was just in a coma. He couldn’t even move his limbs. Action was far off; he couldn’t stand up because even the desire to stand had gone. He couldn’t eat; he had to be forced. He couldn’t do anything! For one year continuously he became just helpless – a helpless child. This was a pregnancy period, and then, suddenly, a different man was born. The man who became inactive was no more: a new energy – energy accumulated.

Lives and lives of dissipated energy create this gap – because you do not have enough energy. When desire is not there to invoke, provoke, stimulate, you just drop. Your energy is not really energy, but just a pushing and pulling. Anyhow you go on running because the goal seems just nearby. A few moments’ endeavour more and you will reach! You pull yourself on; somehow you carry yourself and run. But when the goal is dropped, when there is no desire, you will drop. An inactivity will be there. If you can be patient in this inactivity period, after it you will be reborn. Then energy will begin to move without desires.

But I say it depends. It may happen suddenly as it happened for Meher Baba: that was a sudden case. It happened in Bombay. It happened by a kiss from an old lady, Babajan. Meher Baba was just passing, coming back from his school. Babajan was an old Sufi mystic, an old lady who was just sitting under a tree for years and years and years. Meher Baba was just coming, and Babajan called him. He knew this old lady. She was sitting for years under the tree, and he had passed by that street daily on his way towards his school and towards his home. She called and he came near. She kissed him – and he dropped as if dead just there. Then he had to be carried home.

For one year continuously the kiss remained on him and he was in a coma. It may happen suddenly like this. Mm? This was a great transfer, and Babajan died afterwards because she had just been waiting for this moment to give someone the whole energy. This was her last life, and there was not enough time even to explain what she was giving. And also, she was not the type to have explained. She was a silent mystic. She had not touched anybody for years. She was a only waiting for this moment when she was to kiss someone and the whole energy was to be transferred in a single transfer. Before this she had not even touched anyone, so this touch was to be total.

And this child was simply unaware of what was going to happen. He was ready – otherwise this transfer would not have been possible – but he was not aware. He had worked through his past lives. He was just coming up. He might have become aware later on, but just now he was completely unaware. This happened so suddenly that he had to go again through a second pregnancy. For one year he was as if not. Many medicines were given; many, many doctors and physicians tried to help, but nothing could be done. And the woman who could do something, she disappeared, she died. After one year he was a different man – totally different.

If it happens so suddenly, then it will be a deep coma. If it happens through some exercises, then it will never be so deep a coma. If you are doing awareness exercises, meditation, then it will never happen so suddenly. It will come so gradually, so gradually, that you will never even become aware of when it has happened. By and by, inactivity will be there, activity will be there, and very gradually inside everything will have changed. And the desire will drop, the activity will drop, but no one will ever feel that you have been lethargic or that you have become inactive.

This is the gradual process. So those who follow yoga or any method will not feel the suddenness. There are also methods in which sudden happenings become possible, but one can be prepared. Babajan never prepared this boy; she never even asked his permission. It was a one-way affair. She just transferred the energy.

Zen monks also transfer, but before transferring they prepare the ground. A person can be made ready to receive the energy, then this reaction will not be there. He may feel lethargy for some days, for some months, but no one will feel outside that inside everything has become inactive. But that needs preparation, and that can happen only in schools. And when I say “school”, I mean a group working.

Babajan was alone; she never made anyone her disciple. There was no school; there was not a following in which she could have prepared anyone. And, also, she was not the type. She was not the teacher type; she couldn’t teach. But she had to give to someone, to whomsoever passed and she felt: “Now is the moment, and this one will be able to carry it,” so she could just deliver it.

So it depends. Inactivity is bound to be there – more or less, but it will be there, a period will be there. And only then can you be reborn, because the whole mechanism has to change completely. The mind drops, old roots drop, the old habits drop, the old association of consciousness and desires, consciousness and mind, drops – everything old drops and everything has to be new.

A waiting is needed, patience is needed. And if one is patient, one has not to do anything: just to wait is enough. The energy begins to move by itself. You just sow the seed and then wait! Don’t be in a hurry; don’t go every day to pull the seed out and see what is happening. Just put it inside and wait. The energy will take its own course. The seed will die, and the energy will sprout and will begin to move. But don’t be impatient. One has to wait.

And the greater the seed, and the greater the possibility, the potentiality of the tree that is going to be, the more will be the waiting. But it comes. It comes! The deeper the waiting, the sooner it comes.

-Osho

From The Ultimate Alchemy, V.1, Chapter Four

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available online from Amazon.com and in the U.S. from OshoStore-Sedona and Osho Here and Now.

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October 10, 2012 · 2:43 pm

The Last Barrier to Realization – Jean Klein

I have often heard it said that without the help of Yoga, metaphysical realization can be very difficult. What do you think about it?

To begin with Yoga is a harmonization of the body, to prevent it from being an impediment to spiritual research. It is also a set of techniques tending to the ending of all mental activity. It is a method of voluntary effort and systematic purification, leading to a state of mental stillness (Samadhi).

Samadhi can be experienced as bliss or emptiness. In the case of bliss, it remains in the world of duality. In the case of emptiness, it is the last stage of duality, but it does not throw it off. The emptiness of Samadhi takes place when the object has reached its ultimate simplification. One might say that it is pure object, without any qualification whatsoever, an object which is object and nothing else. This is why it is a barrier, the last barrier, to realization. Sooner or later, Samadhi experienced as emptiness, will reveal its duality and the longing for unity will appear.

This meeting with emptiness is something absolutely new and it may easily be mistaken for realization. Then there occurs a tendency to settle in this emptiness which one has learnt to produce. It is comforting to pacify the ego and to taste this emptiness. But one should not mistake the taste of a silent mind with the experience of which I am speaking. This taste is still an object, it has to be abandoned, the last step has to be taken, for the Yogi who does not awaken to the Experience, is in a situation which, from a certain point of view, may be considered worse than that of the ordinary man. Indeed, when he returns from the state of Samadhi to find those usual objects which had been temporarily eliminated by a voluntary technique, he runs the risk of rediscovering them with an increased virulence.

Samadhi experienced as joy is in fact a state in which one enters and from which one emerges. Sooner or later its insufficiency is felt. The man who leaves this joy, falls back into the world of objects. He has no precise memory of his experience which, since it belongs to a supra-mental reality can leave no mental trace (memory), but nevertheless he remains in a state of shock, of exaltation, of longing which is a source of confusion. Such is the result of the Yogic path.

In the direct path we, by discrimination, come to the conviction that ultimate reality lies beyond any physical or mental framework. As a sideline, we make use of Yoga to loosen certain knots, or do away with certain disturbances. But we never lose sight of the non-dual background.

Liberation is not reached by subservience to certain more or less strict rules, but by knowledge which wipes out time, space, cause-and-effect. A return to ignorance is now excluded.

-Jean Klein

From Be Who You Are, page 40-41

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October 1, 2012 · 5:15 pm

What Is Intensity? – Osho

What is intensity?

It is important, because it is only through intensity that one arrives. When all your desires, when all your passions, fall and become one flame, it is intensity. When there is only one left inside you and your total being supports that one, it is intensity.

It is exactly what the word says: in tensity. The opposite word is ex tensity: you are spread out; you have a thousand and one desires, many fragmentary desires, one going to the north, one going to the south. You are being pulled apart. You are not one, you are a crowd. And if you are a crowd you will be miserable, if you are a crowd you will never feel any fulfillment. You don’t have any center. Intensity means creating a center in yourself.

There are two words which are significant to understand. One is ‘centrifugal’: it means arrows moving from the center going in different directions, extroversion. Small pieces, small parts of your being flying all over the place, in all directions, in all possible directions: that is centrifugal.

That’s how people are – they are centrifugal. Another word is ’centripetal’: when all the arrows are coming towards the center, when all the fragments are joined together. In the first you are falling apart, you are in a kind of de-centering. In the second you are falling together, a kind of integration arises. You are getting centered, concentrated IN: that is the meaning of intensity.

Sometimes you have known moments, in some danger… suddenly, in a dark night, you are faced with a naked sword, and you will know what intensity is. Suddenly ALL your thoughts will disappear, the crowd will become one. In that moment you will be one single individual.

The word ’individual’ means indivisible. You will be undivided, you will be a unity – not only a union but a unity. You will be utterly one. The death facing you has created the intensity.

Or in love sometimes…. You fall in love and there is an intensity. All else becomes irrelevant, peripheral. Only the love is all and the whole of your heart.

When such intensity arises in meditation it brings you to God; or in prayer, then it brings you to God.

A story:

The scene was the last Olympic Games. In the quarters of the American wrestling team stood John Mack, the trainer, warning his protégé, Mike ‘Bull’ Flamm, about the forthcoming match.

“You know,” Mack said, “the Soviet wrestler you are about to tackle, Ivan Katruvsky, is one of the greatest wrestlers in the world. But he really is not as good as you are. The only thing he’s got that makes him a terror is his pretzel-hold. If he once gets a man in his pretzel-hold, that man is doomed. He has used the pretzel-hold on twenty-seven competitors, and in each case his opponent gave up within ten seconds.

“So, listen to me, Bull, you have got to be damned careful. Never let him get you in that pretzel-hold. If he once clamps you in it, you’re a goner!”

Bull listened carefully to Mack’s instructions on how to avoid that crippling grip of Ivan’s. For the first three minutes of the bout, neither the American nor the Russian could gain an advantage. The crowd was on edge.

Then, suddenly, pandemonium broke loose – Bull Flamm had fallen into the clutches of Ivan’s pretzel-hold and was moaning in agony. Mack knew the match was lost, and he left the arena in deep gloom. Down the corridor, the echoes of Bull’s anguished cries still reached him.

And then, as Mack was about to enter his quarters, he heard an enormous shout arise from the stadium, a cheer the likes of which he had never heard in all his long experience. The stands were in absolute uproar. From the shouts, Mack knew that Bull had won the match, but he couldn’t understand it. What could have caused the unthinkable turnabout?

A minute later Flamm came trotting into the American dressing room. His trainer threw his arms around him, and said, “Bull, how in hell did you ever get out of that pretzel-hold?”

“Well,” answered Flamm, “he twisted me into such shapes that I never felt such agony in my life. I thought my bones were going to break. And as I was just about to faint I saw two balls hanging in front of me. With one desperate lunge, I bit those balls. Well, Mack, you can’t imagine what a man is capable of when he bites his own balls.”

-Osho

From Wisdom of the Sands, V.1, Chapter Two

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

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September 22, 2012 · 2:21 pm

That Which Never Changes – Osho

On the periphery we exist as many. Your personality is different from the personality of your neighbor. Your individuality is different from anyone else. But your innermost center is not different. Your innermost center is the innermost center of all. When you reach the innermost, you reach to the one.

The whole world is just the circumference. The center – you may call it God or you may call it the supreme soul or whatsoever you like – but when you reach your own innermost center, you have reached the innermost center of all. And there, all secrets are hidden, in that one. And there, all the mysteries can be revealed to you.

You cannot know them beforehand. Unless you enter the innermost temple of the one, mysteries will remain mysteries. You can create many theories about them and many philosophies but it is of no use, futile, meaningless. You can philosophize much, but nothing can be concluded. It has happened for ages. Centuries have passed and men have been philosophizing, creating thousands and thousands of philosophies, theories and systems with no result. You can create them, but it is mental. You don’t know.

You can imagine. You can create a very coherent system of thoughts, but it is only in your thoughts, in your dreams. Philosophers are creative, but creative of dreams, fantasies. They create logical systems, they argue for them, but the truth cannot be created through logical systems; the truth cannot be reached through arguments. Whatsoever you reach will just be a hypothesis. The truth can be reached only through experience.

That is the difference between philosophy and religion. Religion says that the truth is not known, because you are not capable of knowing it. Unless you are transformed totally – unless you become a different one, unless your perspective changes, your outlook changes, your eyes change, your heart changes – you will not know truth. Truth cannot be known through contemplation; it can only be known through your inner transformation.

Contemplation is possible, but you remain the same; you just go on thinking in your head. You can create many things in the head. You can believe in them, but you know they are your creations. Truth is not a creation; you cannot create it. You can only discover it, uncover it – it is hidden. No arguments will help. Only a real travelling inward will be of any use.

Religion is anti-philosophical. It says’ that philosophy is of no use; it is just intellectual gymnastics. You can enjoy it, it is a game of words, logic, arguments, but it will not give you anything; you will not reach anywhere. You are just sitting in your easy chair with closed eyes, thinking and thinking and thinking. You can go on thinking for ages. You can think coherently, consistently, but you will still not come any nearer to the truth.

You may even go farther away, because truth is not a mental construct. It is already there; it is not a mental construct. On the contrary, because of your mentation, because there is too much activity in your mind, it is hidden. Your mind creates the clouds. You go on moving in the clouds and the sky is hidden. Disperse the clouds, disperse thoughts, disperse arguments, logic, philosophies, and suddenly it is revealed. It has always been there; it is already the case. You do not have to do anything to create it. You simply have to be yielding, surrendering to it, thoughtless, alert, aware, and it is there. It has always been there. The truth is hidden within you, so you need not go anywhere else. No need to go to the Himalayas. The only need is to go within.

[…] But only through non-thinking can you inquire. This seems contradictory, because whenever we inquire we use thinking. Our ordinary method of inquiry means thinking and more thinking. But this inquiry, the inquiry of religion, is not thinking. The inquiry of religion can be done only when you are alert and non-thinking.

Remember this: I emphasize non-thinking alertness because in non-thinking you may go to sleep if you are not alert. Then it is of no use. You are alert when you are thinking but that is of no use, because thinking creates the clouds. Or, you can be non-thinking and asleep. That too is of no use because the sky is there but you are asleep so you cannot see it. So two things are needed: non-thinking and alertness. No-thought consciousness. No-mind awareness. If you can create this phenomenon within you (no mind on the one hand and awareness on the other hand), this is what meditation is; this is what I call dhyana.

In this situation, truth becomes revealed. And that truth is one, the most inner one. It is not yours. That center is the center of the whole existence.

You exist only on the periphery, the circumference. The more inward you move, the less and less you become. When you reach to the innermost center, you are no more. In a sense, you are no more; the old man is dead. But in another sense, for the first time you are, because now the innermost reality is revealed to you, the eternal is revealed to you. Now you have reached that which never changes.

-Osho

Excerpt from The New Alchemy, Chapter 16

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

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June 12, 2012 · 1:54 pm

The Attraction for Drugs is Spiritual – Osho

Drugs are as old as humanity itself, and they certainly fulfill something of immense value. I am against drugs, but my being against drugs is for the same reason as for thousands of years people have been addicted to the drugs.

It may look very strange. The drugs are capable to give you a hallucinatory experience beyond the mundane world. That is the experience that is being searched through meditation.

Meditation brings you to the real experience, and drug gives you just a hallucination, a dream-like experience but very similar. To meditate is difficult. The drug is cheap. But the attraction for drugs is spiritual.

Man is not satisfied with his mundane existence. He wants to know something more. He wants to be something more. Just the ordinary life seems so flat, so meaningless, that if this is all then suicide seems to be the only way out of it. It gives no ecstasy, no joy. On the contrary, it goes on piling you up with more and more misery, anxiety, disease, old age and, finally, death.

From the cradle to the grave, the ordinary life is just a drag. People go on living it because they are cowards. Otherwise they will commit suicide. They don’t have the courage enough to commit suicide. But this is not something one can rejoice in.

You can drag on but you cannot call it living. There is no dance in it, no color in it. It is just a vast desert spreading as far as you can see, with no oasis anywhere. I am reminded of one of the dreams of Leo Tolstoy. It is a rare dream. It is also unique that it went on repeating continuously almost his whole life. As long as he could remember, the dream was happening. And the dream is very strange. In his dream he sees a vast desert and two gumboots without anybody in them, just the two gumboots without any feet inside them, are walking. They go on walking and they go on walking, and there is no end to this walk. The desert is endless. And he always woke up perspiring, his heart beating louder, gripped with great fear.

Without going to any psychoanalyst, he knew the meaning. He himself was a genius. He knew that this is his life, this is not a dream. It is not even symbolic. It is exactly his life. Where he is going? Wherever he goes he will end into the grave. Who is going he does not know. The gumboots are empty.

He is unaware of anybody inside. He is unacquainted of the person who is wearing the gumboots. He is invisible. All that is visible is the gumboots and the desert, and the tedious journey, pointless, meaningless.

This is the reason that drugs have attracted man since the very beginning. And they have at least given him a temporary relief. Only few people tried meditation. And my own understanding is, these people also tried meditation because drugs at a point become useless. You become immune.

In the beginning they give you tremendous experiences, but soon they become almost part of your body chemistry. Then if you don’t take them you are in trouble. Your whole chemistry wants them. If you take them, you gain nothing. You go on increasing the doses.

In India where the experiments with drugs must have been the oldest, because the oldest scripture in the world is Rigveda, the religious source book of the Hindus, it talks about a certain drug, Somras. Because of this Somras, Aldous Huxley has called the ultimate drug one day, when LSD is refined and there is no side effect, it will be called Soma. The name is from Rigveda.

Rigveda according to Hindus is ninety thousand years old, and nobody has been able to prove that they are wrong because their arguments for its old age are almost irrefutable. They are not logical, otherwise it would have been easy. They are astronomical.

In Rigveda there is a description of a certain combination of stars that had happened according to modern astronomers also ninety thousand years before. Now there is no way for the people who were writing Rigveda to describe it in absolute detail unless they have seen it.

Now this is such an evidence that you cannot do anything about it. The astronomers say for ninety thousand years that combination has not been again in the sky. So certainly whoever was writing it was fully aware of the combination of stars at that time.

For ninety thousand years Hindus have accepted drugs almost as part of their religious ceremonies. It was only under British regime that drugs created trouble, but because they were part of a religious ritual, which is the ancient most religion in the world, even the British government was afraid to interfere with it. It continued. Even in my childhood all drugs were available in the market. There was no question of any illegality. And every school of Hindu religion was using drugs, but they were using it in a very scientific way.

They will give the drug in a certain quantity, create a certain experience in the man, and then when he will come out of it will tell him that, “This was only an illusion. It was simply because of the drug, because of the chemistry, your mind experienced.

“Would you like to experience it in its reality? If the illusion is so beautiful, you can think how much more the reality would be. And the experience created by the drug lost for few hours, and again you are back to the same old rotten world. But if the experience is real, it is yours forever. You never lose it. It is not something that has happened to you, it is something that was already in you; you have discovered it.”

So I don’t see that it was wrong to use drugs in this way. In fact, this should be the approach around the world for the modern man.

And now we have more advanced drugs, synthetically made, and we are capable to purify them more. We can make drugs which have no bad effects at all. We can make drugs which are not addictive. And we can have in every hospital, in every university, a certain department which teaches people how to move from drug to meditation.

Just to talk about meditation remains simply verbal. There is no way through the words to give you any experience. But drugs are immensely useful. The words can explain to you what meditation is, the drug can give you an hallucinatory experience of it. And then you can be initiated into a method. And now you will not be moving in darkness. Now you know that something… if an ordinary drug can do so much, then there must be some way to find an authentic transformation, to experience it without any dependence on anything.

So the drug simply opens up a door and helps you to understand that man’s life and his experience need not be confined to the ordinary mundane world – he can fly high towards the stars — that he is capable of knowing things which are not ordinarily available.

Under proper guidance — medical, meditational — drugs can be of immense help. I said I am against drugs because if they become addictive then they will be the most destructive for your journey towards the self. Then you become enchanted into hallucinations. And because it is cheap — no effort has to be done, just you have to go on taking bigger and bigger doses….

In India it came to a point…. Still today there are monasteries where they keep poisonous snakes because the people had become so addicted to all kinds of drugs that no drug has any effect on them. They can take any dose and they will remain normal. The only thing that gives them a little experience is a bite on their tongue by a cobra. That will be death to anybody, but to them it is a beautiful drug experience.

Sometimes it has happened that these people become addicted even to cobra bites. Their whole bloodstream becomes poisonous. And it is on record, and once it happened in front of me, that a cobra was brought to bite. The cobra did it perfectly well on the tongue, and died.

The man had become so poisonous… because the cobra is not poisonous in his whole body. He has simply a small gland which has poison, and that gland is just in his mouth. So whenever the cobra bites someone, he immediately turns upside down, because the gland in his mouth has the opening up. He will bite; that is not dangerous. That is simply making your blood available. And then he will turn over to pour the poison on your blood.

The bite is not really poisonous. The poison comes from the gland which hangs above his tongue in the mouth. It has to hang that way, otherwise the poison cannot remain in it. So he turns upside down. The poison starts flowing out of the gland into the wounds that he has made by his bite. But before he could do that, biting the man was enough to get poisoned himself.

For thousands of years people have been using drugs. Moralists, religious people, governments have been trying prohibition absolutely unsuccessfully. And I don’t see that they can ever succeed.

The only way to succeed is what I am suggesting. Rather than prohibiting drugs, let the scientists find out better drugs which give deeper and more psychedelic, more colorful, more ecstatic experiences and without any side effects, and without any addiction. And these should be available in the universities, in the colleges, in the hospitals — wherever some kind of guidance is possible, that the person is not prohibited, is allowed total freedom to use anything that he wants. And we use his experience to help him grow towards some authentic process so that he can start experiencing something far greater than any drug can give.

And only then he can compare that the first one was just a dream, and this is a reality, and the first one was just cheating myself through chemistry, ‘And the first one was not helping me in my spiritual growth. It was in fact preventing the growth, keeping me addicted and retarded’. The second one goes on growing, and now he starts gathering courage to explore more.

He was never aware that these experiences are possible, that these experiences are not just fiction. So drug can be used in a very beneficial way, to make the person realize that this is hallucination, and the hallucination is so satisfying, would not you like to try the real? We have the real drug also.

I call it meditation. And it takes you to the uttermost blissful experience possible.

Then only drugs become useless for you.

If we want humanity to get free of drugs, then meditation is the way. But before we can get free of them, they are very important and can be used to introduce people to meditation.

So this paranoia about drugs is not helpful to humanity. You can make drugs illegal, it makes no change. In fact, they become more attractive, more exciting. Particular to the youth they become a challenge.

I am amazed sometimes that, is man going ever to learn even the ABC of human psychology? The same stupidity goes on which God did with Adam and Eve: prohibition. Don’t eat the fruit of this tree. But that becomes an invitation. That becomes a challenge.

And thousands of years have passed, but the authority figures are still in the same mood: don’t use the drug, otherwise imprisonment for five years, seven years. And nobody bothers that drugs are being made available in jails. Just you have to pay a little higher price. And the people who come out of the jail are not cured. They go back again because … the reason is the drug gives them something which your society is not giving.

They are ready to destroy their health, their body, their whole life becomes a mess, but still that drug gives them something which your society does not give. So rather than preventing them, create a society which gives something which is better.

I have been fighting in India with one of the most idiotic prime ministers India had, Morarji Desai. He is absolutely fanatic, is not ready to listen to any reasonable argument. Alcohol has to be prohibited. He prohibited the alcohol. That does not make any change. People start making alcohol but that proves dangerous. Thousands of people died because the alcohol they drank was poisonous, was not made rightly. The people who were making it had no idea what they are making.

And this has been happening around the world. Once in a while some idiot comes in and tries to prohibit, but nobody asks why people drink alcohol.

Your life gives them nothing. You suck them of their blood and in return what they get? No joy, just anxieties upon anxieties. Safe alcohol makes them relax for few hours, sing a song or have a little dance — or a fight in the pub.

But for few hours they are transported from your world. The very attraction proves that your society is wrong, not that alcohol is wrong.

Your society should help people to dance, to sing, to rejoice, to love. The alcohol will disappear. The other drugs are far better than alcohol.

There are many drugs which have less bad after-effects, particularly synthetic drugs taken in a right atmosphere, in a right mood, for example, LSD. It simply enhances your mood, it does not do anything to you. If you are in a despair the LSD experience will become a nightmare. But if you are feeling a well-being, that is the time to take LSD. Then it can give you a really positive ecstatic experience, although it will be hallucinatory.

But if you don’t know the real, it looks almost the real. Even a man like Aldous Huxley, one of the most intelligent men of this generation, thought that through LSD he has achieved the same experience as Gautam Buddha, Kabir, Ramakrishna.

If you don’t know the real, naturally you cannot call it hallucinatory. It is so real. Huxley had no experience of meditation. He has really no right to say such a thing. You can say such a thing only when you have experienced both, that it is the same experience as Kabir.

Kabir never used any drug. His experience was purely of meditation. On what grounds Huxley can say it is the same experience? He does not know the experience of Kabir. I can understand that he has been through a tremendously beautiful experience, but that experience disappears as the effect of the LSD goes out of the system.

But Kabir’s experience remains twenty-four hours, day in, day out, his whole life. Once it happens, it is always there.

This is a simple criterion. But he was so much fascinated by the experience, and he corrupted almost a whole generation. They thought that if a man like Huxley says that LSD can give you samadhi, then what is the need of going into so much trouble for meditation with no guarantee whether you will be able to succeed or not?

I am against drugs because they can become addictive and they can prevent your spiritual growth. You can start thinking that you have achieved what you were seeking, and your hands are empty. You are just dreaming.

But, on the other hand, I am a very scientific mind. On the other hand, I would like drugs to be used, not to be prohibited — but used under proper guidance as a stepping-stone towards meditation.

And governments should pay more attention for improving the drugs rather than preventing people. If improved drugs are available, then other drugs will already be out of the market. There is no need to prohibit anything in the world. Just produce something better — something better, cheaper, legal. Then who is going to bother about marijuana, hashish, heroin — for what? There is no reason. Something better is available with the medical store, without prescription. Even in the hospital you can book a place for yourself that doctors can look after you while you are in the drug experience. Meditators can help you to understand what has happened to you. And this is possible very easily through meditation.

One thing more, that if something even hallucinatory happens to a person, meditation becomes easier. Something in him becomes certain. Something in him is now perfectly guaranteed that meditation is not just fiction.

And the hallucinatory experience also opens some doors.

The guidance can be of very much importance. For example, when somebody is under LSD and is having an ecstatic joy, that is the moment to teach him the method of meditation, because he is very sensitive, very clean and clear as he is not ordinarily. He is dull and cloudy. Now the whole sky is a clarity. You can teach him meditation more easily in this moment than you can teach him when he is in an ordinary state. He seems to listen but he only hears. It does not go deep. His sleep is thick.

But in certain moments under LSD he is very close to awakening. Under a right guide he can be introduced to the technique of meditation. He can be given what is called post-hypnotic suggestions for which he is absolutely vulnerable. He can be told that, “This meditation, you will be able to do it when you are out of LSD experience.” You can go on repeating it that, “You are going to succeed in it.” It is a simple method and there is no problem in not succeeding in it. Just one or two sessions with a guide will be enough. The man can be moved towards meditation. And once he moves towards meditation, drugs have no importance at all.

All the efforts of scientists and the government should be to understand that if a certain thing has been so attractive for the whole history of man, and no government has ever been successful to prohibit it, then there must be certain need that it fulfills. And unless that need is fulfilled in some other way, drugs are going to remain in the world. And they are destructive.

And the more governments are against them, more destructive they are, because nobody can make any refinements on them, nobody can make any experiments on them, nobody is even allowed to say what I am saying.

But I can say it because I am against drugs. But that does not mean they cannot be used. They can be used as a means, they are not the end.

And if we can hope a future free of drugs, if man becomes naturally meditative…. And that is possible. If a child finds his father is meditating, his mother is meditating, everybody is meditating, he will start being curious about it. He also wants to meditate.

And that is the age when meditation is very simple because he is not yet corrupted by the society. Yet he is innocent.

And if everybody around him is doing something and enjoying in doing it, he cannot remain behind. He will sit with them with closed eyes. First they may laugh at him, that it is not possible for children. But they do not understand. It is more possible for children than for the so-called grownups.

Just the atmosphere of meditation in schools, in colleges, in universities — wherever the person goes he finds that atmosphere which nourishes his own meditativeness.

I would love to see that no drugs are needed in the world. But not through prohibition, but through creating something better, something real. Drugs will be defeated without any difficulty, but these idiotic governments go on giving importance to drugs and they go on destroying the youth around the world.

The most precious time of life is wasted in hallucinations, and by the time they realize what they have done to themselves, perhaps it is too late. They cannot come back to a normal state. Their body has become accustomed to have certain chemicals in it. Then even unwillingly they have to go on injecting themselves with all kinds of poisons.

Or if somebody has not been on hard drugs, returns back, then he finds life very much dull, more dull than you find it because he has seen something beautiful. It always remains a comparison.

He has made love under the impact of drug and he had felt at the very top of the world. And now he makes love and finds that it is nothing but a kind of sneeze. It feels good; you sneeze and it feels good, but it is not something that you live for. Nobody can say that, “I am living here for sneezing.”

-Osho

From The Last Testament, Vol. 4, Chapter Six

You can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available online from Amazon.com and in the U.S. from OshoStore-Sedona and Osho Here and Now.

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Tagged as Aldous Huxley, awareness, Consciousness, drugs, LSD, Meditation, Osho, RigVeda, Samadhi, self-inquiry, Soma, witness, witnessing

May 25, 2012 · 9:06 pm

Annihilation of the Mind – Meher Baba

The following is an excerpt from Meher Baba’s Discourse on Manonash

Mind is never transformed. Ego is transformed once only. “Ego” means Astitva, which means your very Being as the Real “I.” The transformation should clearly be understood.

Today you feel that you are a man. Tomorrow you die and then your mental impressions give you the feeling that you are a woman. All this is false. Mind’s attitude is changed according to circumstances, but mind remains mind, whether it is lifted up or goes down. Mind can be happy, and it can be miserable. It is the attitude of the mind which thus changes. Mind creates worlds, delusions, illusions, ad infinitum – but mind remains as mind.

Mind cannot be transformed. Why? Because it is not One itself. Mind survives by desires and thoughts, and it is made up of impressions. Ego is One in itself, but this Real Ego – the Real “I” – is now bound by the mind. And this mind which is made up of false impressions makes the Real “I” think itself false. Mind makes you think of birth, death, happiness, misery, et cetera, as real things, but nothing can be more false than this. You are now here, alive in the body, in your senses, and why? Because you always were.

Have you any impression of how you were born and how your birth took place? No. Because you were not born at all! Mind gives you this impression that you are here, there, and so forth. It is the mind which gives you the impression according to which you say: “She is my wife,” or “He is my husband,” and so forth.

Mind always keeps you hopping at a tap dance! If you knew that your wife, children, et cetera, are One, and if you knew that you never die, never suffer, you are then All in all. But the mind is there to baffle you!

Mind says: “Beware, she is your wife; they are your children; these are your things,” ad infinitum. Mind creates such types of impressions.

Therefore mind, which is made up of false impressions, makes the Real “I” think itself false. To think I am the body, I am young, old, I am a man, a woman, I am this or that – are all impressions created by the mind. It never makes itself feel “I am God.” Mind might make you say “I am God,” but it cannot make you feel “I am God.

So long as mind is there, ego cannot be transformed from its false attitude to its real state. Mind thus also makes you say that you are infinite, all-powerful, and so forth, but you do not feel it. Why? Because mind, which is made up of false impressions, makes you feel the “I” as small, limited I.

Now what has happened? If the false ego is to have its real, original state, the mind must go. As long as the mind is there, although its outlook is changed, the real “I-am-God” state cannot be experienced.

In sound sleep, mind has temporarily gone. Ego is there, and the impressions again make the mind wake up, and mind again makes the ego feel false. And so, in innumerable lives and forms, the ego is there. The mind is there, but the mind’s impressions change and so, accordingly, body changes – and also accordingly, experience changes. Therefore, for the false “I” to become Real “I” the mind must go.

The real goal of life is not death of the ego, but of the mind! Therefore when Muhammad or Zarathustra or Jesus talked of being born once or dying once, they meant the death of the mind. Mind is born from the very beginning, even before the stone state. This birth is once, and also the death of the mind takes place only once.

When the mind dies, the false ego is transformed into Reality. Real Ego is never born and never dies. Ego is always real but due to the mind, it feels and acts as limited and false “I.”

Now mind goes on taking bodies according to its good and bad impressions. This taking and leaving the body is not the death either of the mind or the ego. After physical death the mind remains with its impressions. It is the impressions which make the mind take bodies, in order that the impressions might be wiped out. Consequently, the mind takes bodies according to the impressions, and the ego witnesses this. When one body is discarded, another comes up and forms, though there is a certain amount of time lag between the giving up of one body and taking up another.

This jadu (magical spell) of sanskaras has bound you so tight that the more you try to come out, the more you get bound. Because mind has to be destroyed from its root, and who is to destroy it? Mind has to destroy itself. That is an impossible task. The very process of destroying itself creates impressions of trying to destroy it, and so one gets more bound.

As Hafiz has said:

“You yourself are the veil, O Hafiz!

And so remove your self!”

Now, how to remove you self? The very process of removing creates fresh sanskaras.

Thousands have thought of destroying the mind – the main methods being those of action, meditation, knowledge and LOVE. These ways have been chalked out by the Perfect Masters for the purpose of destroying the mind while remaining consciousness.

Now, the path of Action (Karma Yoga), which is meant for this goal of Manonash, which transforms the false “I” into the Real “I,” has to be considered – because the main activity of mind through the body is of actions. The Perfect Masters saw that actions which have false ego and an impression-filled mind as its background, instead of destroying the mind, feed it. They saw that everyone has to do actions. Even the laziest of men has to do actions, such as eating, drinking, sleeping, et cetera. Therefore, the Masters thought of “actionless actions.” That means to do actions, but to do them in such a way that the effect is as if no action was done. If this is done, the past impressions of actions get spent up mentally by experiences of happiness or misery, but no new impressions are created.

Suppose you do an action of helping someone without any thought of self-interest, and while doing so, you are beaten, and the police, on the other hand, arrest you and put you in jail. These happenings spend up some of your old sanskaras, but since you had no self-interest, no fresh sanskaras are formed. This process, however, is so long and complicated that one can attain Manonash through action only after yugas (cycles of time).

So, Perfect Masters wanted actions to kill actions; that is, actions done in such a way that the effect of the impressions becomes impotent – hence no result, no binding. For example, a scorpion by nature wags its tail and stings anyone who comes near it. Now, suppose the scorpion’s dangerous stinger is broken and removed. The scorpion goes on wagging its tail and continues to behave as before. But the action is rendered impotent in the matter of its dangerous results; that is, the bad effect of actions is remove. If actions have to be without binding, the effect leading to the binding has to be eliminated.

The world and its activities are really speaking worthless. Actions continue, whether they are good or bad, and therefore the Perfect Masters said: “Act in such a way that the actions do not bind you and impressions are not created.” This is almost an impossible task, as about to be explained. There are three ways by which actions can be done without creating impressions and the consequent bindings: First: To act, but having absolutely no thought that you are acting. This must be a continuous process. That means that the ego does not give even one moment to the mind to exert its influence. In fact, you act for others, and not for yourself. This selfless action, which is also called selfless service, is also almost impossible because the moment you think: “I am serving others, I must help, I must uplift a certain cause,” you are caught. And for leaders it is very risky, unless this thought about themselves is given up one hundred percent continuously.

This point may be explained further. If a leader asks others to sacrifice everything for some cause with the best of motives and with no self-interest, but fails to do so himself continuously one hundred percent, without any thought of self, then the result is disastrous. All the sanskaras of the whole group fall on him, and even his followers are caught in the impressions, even though they might have acted with the best of intentions. A similar disaster occurs in the case of a guru and disciple if there is any thought of self on either side. Even pity for others should not be there. In short, when action has to be effectless, then it must be done without self-interest, which is almost impossible.

The second way is that whatever you do, good or bad, you dedicate it to God, or your Master. This is also almost impossible, because the dedication has to be continuous, without a moment’s break. If you are able to do so, then the impressions are not created by actions. But if there is a break, even once, the reaction is disastrous, and all the sanskaras gather on you.

The third way is to do whatever you are asked to do by One who is free from impressions and whose mind is destroyed. Such actions do not bind you. This too is most difficult. You must have one hundred percent unflinching faith in the Master; even a moment’s doubt is fatal. Krishna had to convince Arjuna that he was in every being, and that none died – all were dead already. Then, what Arjuna did was “action without action.”

These three ways are thus almost impossible to attain. So how should one act? To be involved in mere “sansar” (worldly matters) with your wife, children, business, et cetera, and to act, results in getting bound with hooks of iron. But submissive, weak and loose impressions are created by actions which are done without self-interest, even if at times thoughts of helping or pitying others come into the mind, as mentioned. Mind’s part is to make the ego, through the body, feel false and to experience the sanskaras. But when the mind sees that the false ego is not so ready to accept its dictatorship, then the impressions formed by actions of this type are weak. Such actions are therefore eventually of help toward attaining Manonash.

Some Perfect Masters chalked out ways of destroying the mind through mind itself – through meditation and concentration. When mind becomes concentrated, its further function is weakened, and the impressions wipe out themselves, because impressions are like worms and exhaust themselves. But this process of meditation and concentration makes Manonash almost impossible because mind has its habit of getting impressions spent. When the mind feels frustrated, it gets more desperate. The moment you sit for meditation, sometimes thoughts which you never did think before come to you, and eventually one of the following three things happens:

1st: You get fed up because you cannot concentrate; or 2nd: You get sleepy or dreamy; or 3rd: More bad thoughts enter your mind, and you have to give up your attempts. But if you have a brave heart and patiently persist, then, in a very few cases, the mind is temporarily stilled. Now, this results in one of two things: one either enters into a trance or samadhi. This trance (hal) and samadhi are not Manonash. Samadhi becomes a profession, in some cases; and trance becomes like a dope – one gets addicted to it. One enjoys the trance, but it is temporary. There have been cases of those going into samadhi and, while coming down to normal consciousness, their first thought is the same thought which they had while going into samadhi. Thus, if they had thought of money before entering into samadhi, they get the same thought of money while coming out of it.

Some Perfect Masters thought that the best way was to forget oneself and to give the mind no chance of having new impressions. The question is one of how to forget oneself. The answer is: through Devotion (Bhakti Yoga). When one is devoted one hundred percent, then one forgets oneself. But this is also practically impossible, because such devotion and forgetfulness have to be continuous.

Hafiz has said:

“If you want the presence of the Beloved,

do not absent yourself from the memory of the Beloved.”

You must not be, even for one moment, without this devotion, without this self-forgetfulness, which is almost an impossibility. This is the path of Devotion, or Bhakti Marg. Therefore, one Perfect Master has said: “One moment with the Master is better than one hundred years of sincere piety.”

Some Perfect Masters thought that the mind must be diverted if it is to be killed. Mind makes the ego say: “I am body.” Therefore, make the mind say: “I am not the body, I am not this, I am not that, I am God!” Now, this too is almost impossible, because mind has false impressions, and to make this false mind say what it feels to be false is like a hypocritical act. Thus, for example, the mind knows that it is “Mr. So-and-so.” Now, if this person’s mind says: “I am not a human being, but I am God,” then, at that very moment, the mind feels that it is lying. The result is that this tires out the heart, emotions and any love. The mind cannot do actionless actions since it says: “I am God. What have I to act for?” Mind cannot forget itself in devotion because it says: “I am God. To whom to pray?”

So, Manonash is impossible. But if selfless action, even if not perfect, is persistently done, a stage is reached when mind is permanently at peace. It sees God, but it is not yet destroyed. If through bhakti yoga a stage of devotion is reached by which constant devotion is attained, then this peace of mind and seeing of God comes. So, if one says: “I am God; I am not the body,” and persists in this saying with one hundred percent faithfulness at the cost of everything, then this peace of mind is achieved. But for Manonash there is always one thing. One who is free can uproot the minds of others, even of the masses. Even the past Prophets and Avatars had to have the help and grace of the Perfect Ones in order to achieve the annihilation of their minds.

In short, there are all these ways to attain Manonash and to make you feel that you are God, Infinite, Eternal. But it is rightly said that:

“When you cannot step out of your nature,

how can you aspire to enter the threshold of the Beloved?”

Following different paths, different people encounter different difficulties. Some who do not know the technique of meditation become mad. Some say that they should not see even a woman. They get so nervous about sex.

The fact is that we are God, but we are misled by this shameless mind. The mind is so shameless that the more you wish to get rid of it, the more you become entangled in it – just as when you try to take out one foot from the mud, your other foot gets more deeply stuck. All the same, you have to get rid of this trouble.

Manonash is real samadhi (bliss) for the mind. Mind is uprooted and then its death occurs and the ego immediately feels: “I am everything, and have no concern with the body.” At that moment, either the shock is too strong and the body falls, or the momentum keeps the body for some time, and then it falls, as in the case of the majzoobs.

Real Ego is the Goal. Some who reach the Manonash stage and have to perform certain duties continue to remain in their body with an impressionless mind to help others in seeing themselves in everyone.

Call it “Impressionless Mind,” call it “Real I,” call it “Transformed Ego,” or call it “Real Mind” – it is One and the same Infinite Truth, beginningless and endless. You are All in all. All that you need is emancipation from all that is false which has fallen to your lot.

-Meher Baba

Excerpt from Meher Baba’s Discourse on Manonash

Published in Lord Meher, the 20-volume biography of Avatar Meher Baba.

The entire 20 volume biography can be viewed at: http://www.lordmeher.org/index.jsp

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