kaivalya Archives - Sat Sangha Salon

Kaivalya – Osho

When one has seen this distinction, there is a cessation of desire for dwelling in the atma, the self.

Then the mind is inclined toward discrimination and gravitates toward liberation.

In breaks of discrimination, other pratyayas, concepts, arise through the force of previous impressions. These should be removed in the same way as other afflictions.

One who is able to maintain a constant state of desirelessness even toward the most exalted states of enlightenment and is able to exercise the highest kind of discrimination, enters the state known as “the cloud which showers virtue.”

Then follows freedom from afflictions and karmas.

That which can be known through the mind is very little compared with the infinite knowledge obtained in enlightenment, when the veils, distortions, and impurities are removed.

Having fulfilled their object, the process of change in the three gunas comes to an end.

Kramaha, the process, is the succession of changes that occur from moment to moment which become apprehensible at the final end of the transformations of the three gunas.

Kaivalya is the state of enlightenment that follows the reemergence of the gunas, due to their becoming devoid of the object of the purusa.

In this state, the purusa is established in his real nature, which is pure consciousness.

-Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras

The first sutra:

Visesa-darsina atma-bhava-bhavanavinivrttih.

When one has seen this distinction, there is a cessation of desire for dwelling in the atma, the self.

Buddha has called the ultimate state of consciousness anatta – no self, non-being. It is very difficult to comprehend it. Buddha has said that the last desire to drop is the desire to be. There are millions of desires. The whole world is nothing but desire objects, but the basic desire is to be. The basic desire is to continue, to persist, to remain. Death is the greatest fear; the last desire to be dropped is the desire to be.

Patanjali in this sutra says: when your awareness has become perfect, when viveka, discrimination has been achieved, when you have become a witness, a pure witness of whatsoever happens, outside you, inside you . . . you are no more a doer; you are simply watching; the birds are singing outside . . . you watch; the blood is circulating inside . . . you watch; the thoughts are moving inside . . . you watch – you never get identified anywhere. You don’t say, “I am the body”; you don’t say, “I am the mind”; you don’t say anything. You simply go on watching without being identified with any object. You remain a pure subject; you simply remember one thing: that you are the watcher, the witness – when this witnessing is established, then the desire to be disappears.

And the moment the desire to be disappears, death also disappears. Death exists because you want to persist. Death exists because you don’t want to die. Death exists because you are struggling against the whole. The moment you are ready to die, death is meaningless; it cannot be possible now. When you are ready to die, how can you die? In the very readiness of dying disappearing, all possibility of death is overcome. This is the paradox of religion.

Jesus says, “If you are going to cling to yourself, you will lose yourself. If you want to attain yourself, don’t cling.” Those who try to be are destroyed. Not that somebody is there destroying you; your very effort to be is destructive because the moment the idea arises that “I should persist,” you are moving against the whole. It is as if a wave is trying to be against the ocean. Now the very effort is going to create worry and misery, and one moment will come when the wave will have to disappear. But now, because the wave was fighting against the ocean, the disappearance will look like death. If the wave was ready, and the wave was aware: “I’m nothing but the ocean, so what is the point in persisting? I have always been, and I will always be because the ocean has always been there and will always be there. I may not exist as a wave – wave is just the form I have taken for the moment.

“The form will disappear but not my content. I may not exist like this wave; I may exist like another wave, or I may not exist as a wave as such. I may become the very depth of the ocean where no waves arise . . .”

But the innermost reality is going to remain because the whole has penetrated you. You are nothing but the whole, an expression of the whole. Once awareness is established, Patanjali says, “When one has seen this distinction, that ‘I am neither this nor that,’ when one has become aware and is not identified with anything whatsoever, there is a cessation of desire for dwelling in the atma, in the self.” Then the last desire disappears, and the last is the fundamental. Hence, Buddha says, “You can drop desiring money, wealth, power, prestige – that’s nothing. You can stop desiring the world – that’s nothing – because those are secondary desires. The basic desire is to be.” So people who renounce the world start desiring liberation, but liberation is also their liberation. They will remain in moksha, in a liberated state. They desire that pain should not be there. They desire that misery should not be there. They will be in absolute bliss, but they will be. The insistence is that they must be there.

That’s why Buddha could not get roots into this country which thinks itself very religious. The most religious man who was born on this earth could not get roots into this religious country. What happened? He said, he insisted, to drop the basic desire of being: he said, “Be a non-being.” He said, “Don’t be.” He said, “Don’t ask for liberation because the freedom is not for you. The freedom is going to be freedom from you; not for you, but from you.”

Liberation is liberation from yourself. See the distinction: it is not for you; liberation is not for you. It is not that liberated you will exist. Liberated, you will disappear. […]

In Zen, when meditators sit for many years, just sitting and doing nothing, a certain moment comes when they forget that they have bodies. That is their first satori. Not that the body is not there; body is there but there is no tension, so how to feel it? If I say something you can hear me, but if I’m silent how can you hear me? Silence is there – it has much to communicate to you – but silence cannot be heard. Sometimes when you say, “Yes, I can hear the silence,” then you are hearing some noise. Maybe it is the noise of the dark night, but it is still noise. If it is absolutely silent, you will not be able to hear it. When your body is perfectly healthy, you don’t feel it. If some tension arises in the body, some disease, some illness, then you start hearing. If everything is in harmony and there is no pain and no misery, suddenly you are empty. A nothingness overwhelms you.

Kaivalya is the ultimate health, wholeness, all wounds healed. When all wounds heal, how can you exist? The self is nothing but accumulated tensions. The self is nothing but all sorts of diseases, illnesses. The self is nothing but desires unfulfilled, hopes frustrated, expectations, dreams – all broken, fractured. It is nothing but accumulated disease that you call “self.” Or take it from another side: in moments of harmony, you forget that you are. Later on, you may remember how beautiful it was, how fantastic it was, how far-out. But in moments of real far-outness, you are not there. Something bigger than you has overpowered you; something higher than you has possessed you; something deeper than you has bubbled up. You have disappeared. In deep moments of love, lovers disappear. In deep moments of silence, meditators disappear. In deep moments of singing, dancing, celebration, celebrators disappear. And this is going to be the last celebration, the ultimate, the highest peak – kaivalya.

Patanjali says, “Even the desire to be disappears. Even the desire to remain disappears.” One is so fulfilled, so tremendously fulfilled that one never thinks in terms of being. For what? – you want to be there tomorrow also because today is unfulfilled. The tomorrow is needed; otherwise you will die unfulfilled. The yesterday was a deep frustration; today is again a frustration; tomorrow is needed. A frustrated mind creates future. A frustrated mind clings with the future. A frustrated mind wants to be because now, if death comes, no flower has flowered. Nothing has yet happened; there has only been a fruitless waiting: “Now, how can I die? I have not even lived yet.” That unlived life creates a desire to be.

People are so much afraid of death: these are the people who have not lived. These are the people who are, in a certain sense, already dead. A person who has lived and lived totally does not think about death. If it comes, good; he will welcome. He will live that too; he will celebrate that too. Life has been such a blessing, a benediction; one is even ready to accept death. Life has been such a tremendous experience; one is ready to experience death also. One is not afraid because the tomorrow is not needed; the today has been so fulfilling. One has come to fruition, flowered, bloomed. Now the desire for tomorrow disappears. The desire for tomorrow is always out of fear, and fear is there because love has not happened. The desire to always remain simply shows that deep down you are feeling yourself completely meaningless. You are waiting for some meaning. Once the meaning has happened, you are ready to die – silently, beautifully, gracefully.

“Kaivalya,” Patanjali says, “happens only when the last desire to be has disappeared.” The whole problem is to be or not to be. The whole life we try to be this and that, and the ultimate can happen only when you are not.

When one has seen this distinction, there is a cessation of desire for dwelling in the atma, the self.

You have heard about the law of gravitation; you have not heard about the law of grace. The law of gravitation is that everything falls downward. The law of grace is that things start falling upward. And that law has to be there because in life everything is balanced by the opposite. Science has come to discover the law of gravitation: Newton sitting on a bench in a garden saw one apple falling – it happened or not; that is not the point – but seeing that the apple was falling down, a thought arose in him: “Why do things always fall downward? Why not otherwise? Why doesn’t a ripe fruit fall upward and disappear into the sky? Why not sideways? Why always downward?” He started brooding and meditating, and then he discovered a law. He came upon, stumbled upon a very fundamental law: that the earth is gravitating things toward itself. It has a gravitation field. Like a magnet, it pulls everything downward.

Patanjali, Buddha, Krishna, Christ – they also became aware of a different fundamental law, higher than gravitation. They became aware that there comes a moment in the inner life of consciousness when consciousness starts rising upward – exactly like gravitation. If the apple is hanging on the tree, it does not fall. The tree helps it not to fall downward. When the fruit leaves the tree, then it falls downward.

Exactly the same: if you are clinging to your body, you will not fall upward; if you are clinging to your mind, you will not fall upward. If you are clinging to the idea of self, you will remain under the impact of gravitation – because body is under the impact of gravitation, and mind also. Mind is subtle body; body is gross mind. They are both under the impact of gravitation. And because you are clinging to them – you are not under the impact of gravitation – but you are clinging to something which is under the impact of gravitation. It is as if you are carrying a big rock and trying to swim in a river; the rock will pull you down. It won’t allow you to swim. If you leave the rock, you will be able to swim easily.

We are clinging to something which is functioning under the law of gravitation: body, mind. “Once,” Patanjali says, “you have become aware that you are neither the body nor the mind, suddenly you start rising upward.” Some center somewhere high in the sky pulls you up. That law is called “grace.” Then God pulls you upward. And that type of law has to be there, otherwise gravitation could not exist. In nature, if positive electricity exists, then negative electricity has to exist. Man exists, then the woman has to exist. Reason exists, then intuition has to exist. Night exists, then the day has to exist. Life exists, then death has to exist. Everything needs the opposite to balance it. Now science has become aware of one law: gravitation. Science still needs a Patanjali to give it another dimension, the dimension of falling upward. Then life becomes complete.

You are a meeting place of gravitation and grace. In you, grace and gravitation are crisscrossing. You have something of the earth and something of the sky within you. You are the horizon where earth and sky are meeting. If you hold too much to the earth, then you will forget completely that you belong to the sky, to the infinite space, the beyond. Once you are no more attached with the earth part of you, suddenly, you start rising high.

When one has seen this distinction, there is a cessation of desire for dwelling in the self.

Tadahi viveka-nimnam kaivalya-pragbharam cittam.

Then the mind is inclined toward discrimination and gravitates toward liberation.

A new gravitation starts functioning. Liberation is nothing but entering the stream of grace. You cannot liberate yourself; you can only drop the barriers; liberation happens to you. Have you seen a magnet? – small iron pieces are pulled toward it. You can see those small iron pieces rushing toward the magnet but don’t be deceived by your eyes. In fact, they are not rushing, the magnet is pulling them. On the surface, it appears that those iron filings are going, moving toward the magnet. That is just on the surface. Deep down, something just opposite is happening, they are not moving toward the magnet, the magnet is pulling them toward itself. In fact, it is the magnet which has reached them. With the magnetic field, it has approached them, touched them, pulled them. If those iron filings are free, not attached to something – not attached to a rock – then the magnet can pull them. If they are attached to a rock, the magnet will go on pulling, but they will not be pulled because they are attached.

Exactly the same happens once you discriminate that you are not the body, you are no more bound to any rock, you are no more in bondage with earth, immediately, God’s magnet starts functioning. It is not that you reach to God. In fact, God has already reached you. You are under His magnetic field but clinging to something. Drop that clinging and you are in the stream. Buddha used to use a word srotaapanna: falling into the stream. He used to say, “Once you fall into the stream, then the stream takes you to the ocean. Then you need not do anything.” The only thing is to jump into the stream. You are sitting on the bank. Enter the stream and then the stream will do the remaining work. It is as if you are standing on a high building, on the roof of a high building, three hundred feet or five hundred feet above the earth. You go on standing, the gravitation has reached you, but it will not work unless you jump. Once you jump, then you need not do anything. Just a step off the roof . . . enough; your work is finished. Now the gravitation will do all the work. You need not ask, “Now what am I supposed to do?” You have taken the first step. The first [step] is the last step. Krishnamurti has written a book, The First and Last Freedom. The meaning is: the first step is the last step because once you are in the stream, everything else is to be done by the stream. You are not needed. Only for the first step is your courage needed.

Then the mind is inclined toward discrimination and gravitates toward liberation.

You start moving slowly upward. Your life energy starts rising high – an upsurge. And it is unbelievable when it happens because it is against all the laws that you have known up to now. It is levitation, not gravitation. Something in you simply starts moving upward, and there is no barrier to it. Nothing bars its path. Just a little relaxation, a little unclinging – the first step – and then automatically, spontaneously, your consciousness becomes more and more discriminative, more and more aware.

Let me tell you about another thing. You have heard the word, the phrase: “vicious circle.” Let us make another phrase: “virtuous circle.” In a vicious circle, one bad thing leads to another. For example, if you get angry then one anger leads you to more anger, and of course, more anger will lead you to still more anger. Now you are in a vicious circle. Each anger will make the habit of anger stronger and will create more anger, and more anger will make the habit still stronger, and on and on. You move in a vicious circle which goes on becoming stronger and stronger and stronger.

Let us try a new word: virtuous circle. If you become aware, what Patanjali calls vivek, awareness, if you become aware, vairagya – discrimination – creates renunciation. If you become aware, suddenly you see that you are no more the body. Not that you renounce the body; in your very awareness the body is renounced. If you become aware, you become aware that these thoughts are not you.

This is what I am calling the virtuous circle: one virtue leads to another, and each virtue becomes again a ground for more virtue to arise.

“This goes on,” Patanjali says, “to the last moment” – what he calls, dharma megha samadhi. We will be coming to it later on. He calls it “the cloud of virtue showering on you.” This virtuous circle, vivek leading to vairagya, vairagya leading to more vivek, vivek again creating more possibilities for vairagya, and so on and so forth – comes to the ultimate peak when the cloud of virtue showers on you: dharma megha samadhi.

In breaks of discrimination, other pratyayas, concepts, arise through the force of previous impressions.

Still, though, many intervals will be there. So don’t be discouraged. Even if you have become very aware and in certain moments you feel the pull, the upward pull of grace, and in certain moments you are in the stream, floating perfectly beautifully, with no effort, effortlessly, and everything is going and running smoothly, still there will be gaps. Suddenly you will find yourself standing again on the bank just because of old habits. For so many lives you have lived on the bank. Just because of the old habit, again and again the past will overpower you. Don’t be discouraged by it. The moment you see that you are again on the bank, again get down into the stream. Don’t be sad about it, because if you become sad, you will again be in a vicious circle. Don’t be sad about it. Many times, the seeker comes at very close quarters, and many times he loses the track. No need to be worried; again, bring awareness. This is going to happen many times; it is natural. For so many millions of lives we have lived in unawareness – it is only natural that many times the old habit will start functioning. […]

In breaks of discrimination, other concepts arise through the force of previous impressions.

Many times, you will be pulled back, again and again and again. The struggle is hard, but not impossible. It is difficult, it is very arduous but don’t become sad and don’t become discouraged. Whenever you remember, again don’t be worried about what has happened. Let your awareness again be established, that’s all. Continuously establishing your awareness again and again and again will create a new impact inside your being, a new impression of virtue. One day, it becomes as natural as other habits.

One who is able to maintain a constant state of desirelessness, even toward the most exalted states of enlightenment, and is able to exercise the highest kind of discrimination, enters the state known as “the cloud which showers virtue.”

One who is able to maintain a constant state of desirelessness even toward the most exalted states of enlightenment . . . Patanjali calls it paravairagya: the ultimate renunciation. You have renounced the world: you have renounced greed, you have renounced money, you have renounced power; you have renounced everything of the outside. You have even renounced your body, you have even renounced your mind, but the last renunciation is the kaivalya – renunciation of kaivalya itself, of moksha itself, of nirvana itself. Now you renounce even the idea of liberation because that too is a desire. And desire, whatsoever its object, is the same. You desire money, I desire moksha. Of course, my object is better than your object, but still my desire is the same as yours. Desire says, “I am not content as I am. More money is needed; then I will be contented. More liberation is needed; then I will be contented.” The quality of desire is the same; the problem of desire is the same. The problem is that the future is needed: “As I am, it is not enough; something more is needed. Whatsoever has happened to me is not enough. Something still has to happen to me; only then can I be happy.” This is the nature of desire: you need more money, somebody needs a bigger house, somebody thinks of more power, politics, somebody thinks of a better wife or a better husband, somebody thinks of more education, more knowledge, somebody thinks of more miraculous powers, but it makes no difference. Desire is desire – and desirelessness is needed.

Now the paradox: if you are absolutely desireless – and in absolute desirelessness, the desire of moksha is included – a moment comes when you don’t desire even moksha, you don’t desire even God. You simply don’t desire; you are, and there is no desire. This is the state of desirelessness. Moksha happens in this state. Moksha cannot be desired – by its very nature – because it comes only in desirelessness. Liberation cannot be desired. It cannot become a motive because it happens only when all motives have disappeared. You cannot make God an object of your desire because the desiring mind remains ungodly. The desiring mind remains unholy; the desiring mind remains worldly. When there is no desire, not even the desire for God, suddenly He has always been there. Your eyes open and you recognize Him.

Desires function as barriers. And the last desire, the most subtle desire, is the desire to be liberated. The last, subtle desire is the desire to be desireless.

One who is able to maintain a constant state of desirelessness, even toward the most exalted states of enlightenment and is able to exercise the highest kind of discrimination . . .

Of course, the ultimate in discrimination will be needed. You will have to be aware – so much so that this very, very deep desire of becoming free of all misery, of becoming free of all bondage, even this desire does not arise. Your awareness is so perfect that not even a small corner is left dark inside your being. You are full of light, illuminated with awareness. That’s why when Buddha is asked again and again, “What happens to a man who becomes enlightened?” he remains silent. He never answers. Again and again, he is asked, “Why don’t you answer?” He says, “If I answer, you will create a desire for it, and that will become a barrier. Let me keep quiet. Let me remain silent so I don’t give you a new object for desire. If I say, ‘It is satchitananda: it is truth, it is consciousness, it is bliss,’ immediately a desire will arise in you. If I talk about that ecstatic state of being in God, immediately your greed takes it. Suddenly, a desire starts arising in you. Your mind starts saying, ‘Yes, you have to seek it, you have to find it. This has to be searched. Whatsoever the cost, but you have to become blissful.’” Buddha says, “I don’t say anything about it, because whatsoever I say, your mind will jump on it and make a desire out of it, and that will become the cause, and you will never be able to attain it.”

Buddha insisted that there is no moksha. He insisted that when a man becomes aware, he simply disappears. He disappears as when you blow out a lamp and the light disappears. The word “nirvana” simply means blowing a lamp out. Then you don’t ask where the flame has gone, what has happened to the flame; it simply disappears – annihilated. Buddha insisted that there is nothing left; when you have become enlightened, everything disappears, like the flame of a lamp put out. Why? – Looks very negative – but he does not want to give you an object of desire. Then people started asking, “Then why should we try for such a state? Then it is better to be in the world. At least we are; miserable – but at least we are; in anguish – but we are. And your state of nothingness has no appeal for us.”

Then everything will remain as it is; only their religion will disappear. So they learned a trick, and in Japan, in China, in Ceylon, in Burma, they started talking of beautiful states after enlightenment. They betrayed Buddha. The purity was lost; then religion spread. Buddhism became one of the greatest religions of the world. They learned the politics of the human mind. They fulfilled your desire. They said, “Yes . . . lands of tremendous beauty, Buddhalands, heavenly lands where eternal bliss reigns.” They started talking in positive terms. Again, people’s greeds were inflamed, desire arose. People started following Buddhism, but Buddhism lost its beauty. Its beauty was in its insistence that it would not give you any object for desire.

Patanjali has written the best that it is possible to write about the ultimate truth, but no religion has arisen around him, no established church exists around him. Such a great teacher, such a great Master has remained really without a following. Not a single temple is devoted to him. What happened? His Yoga Sutras are read, commented upon, but nothing like Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Mohammedanism exists with Patanjali. Why? – because he will not give any hope to you. He will not give any help to your desire.

Dharma megha samadhi: this word has to be understood. It is very complex. And so many commentaries have been written on Patanjali, but it seems they go on missing the point. Dharma megha samadhi means: a moment comes when every desire has disappeared. When even the self is no more desired, when death is not feared, virtue showers on you – as if a cloud gathers around your head and a beautiful shower of virtue, a benediction, a great blessing . . . But why does Patanjali call it “cloud”? – One has to go even beyond that; it is still a cloud. Before, your eyes were full of vice, now, your eyes are full of virtue, but you are still blind. Before, nothing but misery was showering on you, just a hell was showering on you; now, you have entered heaven and everything is perfectly beautiful, there is nothing to complain about, but still, it is a cloud. Maybe it is a white cloud, not a black cloud, but still, it is a cloud – and one has to go beyond it also. That’s why he calls it “cloud.”

That is the last barrier, and of course, it is very beautiful because it is of virtue. It is like golden chains studded with diamonds. They are not like ordinary chains; they look very ornamental. They are more like ornaments than chains. One would like to cling to them. Who would not like to have a tremendous happiness showering on oneself, a non-ending happiness? Who would not like to be in this ecstasy forever and ever? But this too is a cloud – white, beautiful, but still the real sky is hidden behind it.

There is a possibility from this exalted point to still fall back. If you become too attached to dharma megha samadhi, if you become too much attached, and you start enjoying it too much and you don’t discriminate that “I am also not this,” there is a possibility that you will come back.

In Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, only two states exist: hell and heaven. This is what Christians call heaven, what Patanjali calls dharma megha samadhi. In the West, no religion has risen beyond that. In India we have three terms: hell, heaven and moksha. Hell is absolute misery; heaven is absolute happiness; moksha is beyond both: neither hell nor heaven. In Western languages, there exists not a single term equivalent to moksha. Christianity stops at heaven – dharma megha samadhi. Who bothers anymore to go beyond it? It is so beautiful. And you have lived in so much misery for so long; you would like to remain there forever and ever. But Patanjali says, “If you cling to it, you slip from the last rung of the ladder. You were just close to home. One step more, and then you would have achieved the point of no return – but you slipped. You were just reaching home and you missed the path. You were just at the door – a knock and the doors would have opened – but you thought that the porch was the palace and you started living there.” Sooner or later, you will even lose the porch because the porch exists for those who are going into the palace. It cannot be made an abode. If you make an abode of it, sooner or later you will be thrown out: you are not worthy. You are like a beggar who has started to live on somebody’s porch.

You have to enter the palace; then the porch will remain available. But if you stop at the porch even the porch will be taken away. And the porch is very beautiful, and we have never known anything like that, so certainly we misunderstand – we think the palace has come. We have lived always in anxiety, misery, tension, and even the porch, even to be close to the ultimate palace, to be so close to the ultimate truth, is so silent, so peaceful, so blissful, such a great benediction, that you cannot imagine that better than this is possible. You would like to settle here.

Patanjali says, “Remain aware.” That’s why he calls it a cloud. It can blind you; you can be lost in it. If you can transcend this cloud – Tatah klesa-karma-nivrttih – Then follows freedom from afflictions and karmas.

If you can transcend dharma megha samadhi, if you can transcend this heavenly state, this paradise, then only . . . then follows freedom from afflictions and karmas. Otherwise, you will fall back into the world. Have you seen small children play a game called ludo, ladders and snakes? From the ladders they go on rising, and from the snakes they go on coming back. From point ninety-nine – if they reach the hundred [point], they have won the game, they are victorious – but from point ninety-nine there is a snake. If you reach ninety-nine, you are suddenly back, back into the world.

Dharma megha samadhi is the ninety-ninth point, but the snake is there. Before the snake takes hold of you, you have to jump to the hundredth point. Only then, there is abode. You have come back home, a full circle.

Then follows freedom from afflictions and karmas.

That which can be known through the mind is very little compared with the infinite knowledge obtained in enlightenment, when the veils, distortions, and impurities are removed.

Just a few sutras back, Patanjali said that the mind is infinitely knowledgeable, the mind can know infinitely. Now he says that which can be known through the mind is very little compared with the infinite knowledge obtained in enlightenment.

As you progress higher, each state is bigger than the first state that you have transcended. When one is lost in his senses, the mind functions in a crippled way. When one is no more lost in the senses and no more attached to the body, the mind starts functioning in a perfectly healthy way. An infinite apprehension happens to mind; it becomes capable of knowing infinities. But that too is nothing compared to when mind is completely dropped, and you start functioning without mind. No medium is now needed. All wheels disappear and you are immediate to reality. Not even mind is there as an agent, as a go-between. Nothing is in between. You and the reality are one. The knowledge that comes through mind is nothing compared to the knowledge that happens through enlightenment.

Having fulfilled their object, the process of change in the three gunas comes to an end.

The whole world stops for the enlightened person because now there is no need for the world to go on. The ultimate has been achieved. The world exists as a situation. The world exists for your growth. The school exists for learning. When you have learned the lesson, the school is no more for you; you have graduated. When somebody attains enlightenment, he has graduated from the world. Now, the school no longer has any function for him. Now, he can forget about the school, and the school can forget about him. He has gone beyond, he has grown. The situation is no longer needed.

The world is a situation: it is a situation for you to go astray and come back home. It is a situation to be lost in and then come back. It is a situation to forget God and to remember Him again.

But why this situation? – because there is a subtle law: if you cannot forget God, you cannot remember Him. If there is no possibility to forget Him, how will you remember, why will you remember? That which is always available is easily forgotten. The fish in the ocean never knows the ocean, never comes across it. Lives in it, is born in it, dies in it, but never comes to know the ocean. There is only one situation when the fish comes to know the ocean: when it is taken out of the ocean. Then suddenly it becomes aware that this was the ocean, my life. When the fish is thrown on the bank, on the sand, then she knows what ocean is.

We needed to be thrown out of the ocean of God; there was no other way to know Him. The world is a great situation to become aware. Anguish is there, pain is there, but it is all meaningful. Nothing is meaningless in the world. Suffering is meaningful. The suffering is just like the fish suffering on the bank, in the sand, and making all efforts to go back to the ocean. Now, if the fish goes back to the ocean, she will know. Nothing has changed – the ocean is the same, the fish is the same – but their relationship has tremendously changed. Now she will know, “This is the ocean.” Now she will know how grateful she is to the ocean. The suffering has created a new understanding. Before, also she was in the same ocean, but now the same ocean is no more the same because a new understanding exists, a new awareness, a new recognition.

Man needs to be thrown out of God. To be thrown into the world is nothing but to be thrown out of God. And it is out of compassion, out of the compassion of the whole that you are thrown out, so that you try to find the way back. By effort, by arduous effort you will be able to reach, and then you will understand. You have to pay for it by your efforts, otherwise God would be too cheap. And when a thing is too cheap, you cannot enjoy it. Otherwise, God would be too obvious. When a thing is too obvious you tend to forget. Otherwise, God would be too close to you and there would be no space to know Him. That will be the real misery, not to know Him. The misery of the world is not a misery; it is a blessing in disguise because only through this misery will you come to know the tremendous blissfulness of recognizing, of seeing face to face . . . the divine truth.

Having fulfilled their object, the process of change in the three gunas comes to an end.

The whole world of the three gunas: sattva, rajas, tamas, comes to an end. Whenever somebody becomes enlightened, for him the world comes to an end. Of course, others go on dreaming. If there are too many fish suffering on the bank, in the hot sand, in the burning sun, and one fish tries and tries and jumps into the ocean, again back home, for her, or for him, the hot sun and the burning sand and all the misery have disappeared. It is already a nightmare of the past, but for others, it exists.

When a fish, like Buddha or Patanjali, jumps into the ocean, for them the world has disappeared. They are again back in the cool womb of the ocean. They are back again, joined, connected to the infinite life. They are no longer disconnected; they are no longer alienated. They have become aware. They have come back with a new understanding: alert, enlightened – but for others the world continues.

These sutras of Patanjali are nothing but messages of a fish who has reached home, trying to jump and say something to the people who are still on the bank and suffering. Maybe they are very close to the ocean, just on the border, but they don’t know how to enter into it. Or are not making enough effort, or are making them in the wrong directions, or are simply lost in misery and have accepted that this is what life is, or are so frustrated, discouraged, that they are not making any effort. Yoga is the effort to reach to that reality with which we have become disconnected. To be reconnected is to be a yogi. Yoga means: re-connection, re-union, re-merging.

Kramaha, the process, is the succession of changes that occur from moment to moment, which become apprehensible at the final end of the transformations of the three gunas.

In this small sutra Patanjali has said everything that modern physics has come to discover. Just thirty or forty years ago, it would have been impossible to understand this sutra because the whole quantum physics is present, in seed form, in this small sutra. And this is good because this is just the last-but-one. So Patanjali summarizes the whole world of physics in this last-but-one sutra: then, the metaphysics. This is the essential physics. The greatest insight that has come to physics in this century is the theory of quantum.

Max Planck discovered a very unbelievable thing. He discovered that life is not a continuity; everything is discontinuous. One moment of time is separate from another moment of time, and between the two moments of time, there is space. They are not connected; they are disconnected. One atom is separate from another atom, and between the two atoms there is great space. They are not connected. This is what he calls “quanta”: discrete, separate atoms not bridged with each other, floating in infinite space, but separate – just as you pour peas from one carton into another and the peas all fall, separate, discrete, or, if you pour oil from one container into another, the oil falls in a continuity.

The existence is like peas, separate. Why does Patanjali mention this? – because he says, “One atom, another atom: these are two things the world consists of. Just between the two is the space. That is what the whole consists of – the God. Call it space, call it brahma, call it purusa or whatsoever you like; the world consists of discrete atoms, and the whole consists of the infinite space between the two.”

Now physicists say if we press the whole world and press the space out of it, all the stars and all the suns can be pressed into just a small ball. Only that much matter exists. It is really space. Matter is very rare, here and there. If we press the earth very much, we can put it into a matchbox – if all the space is thrown out, unbelievable! “And that too, if we go on pressing it still more,” Patanjali says, “then even that small quantity will disappear.” Now physicists say that when matter disappears it leaves black holes.

Everything comes out of nothingness, plays around, disappears again into nothingness. As there are material bodies – earth, sun, stars – there are, just similar to them, empty holes, black holes. Those black holes are nothingness condensed. It is not simple nothingness; it is very dynamic – whirlpools of nothingness. If a star comes by a black hole, the black hole will suck it in. So it is very dynamic, but it is nothing – no matter in it, simply absence of matter – just pure space, but tremendously powerful. It can suck any star in, and the star will disappear into nothingness; it will be reduced to nothingness. So ultimately, if we try, then all matter will disappear. It comes out of a tremendous nothingness, and it drops again into a tremendous nothingness: out of nothingness, and back into nothingness.

Kramaha, the process – the process of quantum – is the succession of changes that occur from moment to moment which becomes apprehensible at the final end of the transformations of the three gunas.

This the yogi comes to see at the final stage, when all the three gunas are disappearing into black holes, disappearing into nothingness. That’s why yogis have called the world maya, a magic show. […] It is God’s imagination. The whole is dreaming, the whole is projecting. […]

Patanjali says, “The world is nothing but a cinematograph, a projection.” But this understanding arises only when one achieves to the last point of understanding. When he sees all gunas stopped, nothing is moving, suddenly he becomes aware that the whole story was created by illusory movement, by fast movement. This is what is happening to modern physics.

First, they said when they had come to the atom, “Now this is the ultimate; it cannot be divided anymore.” Then they also divided the atom. Then they came to electrons: “Now it cannot be divided anymore.” Now they have divided that too. Now they have come to nothingness; now they don’t know what has come. Division, division, division, and a point has come in modern physics where matter has completely disappeared. Modern physics has reached via matter, and Patanjali and the yogis have reached to the same point via consciousness. Up to this last-but-one sutra, physics has reached. Up to this last-but-one sutra, scientists can have an approach, an understanding, a penetration. The last sutra is not possible for scientists because that last sutra can be achieved only if you move through consciousness, not through matter, not through objects but directly through subjectivity.

Purusartha-sunyanam gunanam pratiprasavah kaivalyam svarupa-pratistha va citi-sakter iti.

Kaivalya is the state of enlightenment that follows the reemergence of the gunas, due to their becoming devoid of the object of the purusa. In this state, the purusa is established in his real nature which is pure consciousness. Finish.

Kaivalya is the state of enlightenment that follows the reemergence of the three gunas . . . when the world stops, when the process, the kramaha of the world stops, when you become able to see between two moments of time and two atoms of matter, and you can move into space, and you can see that everything has arisen out of space and is moving back into space; when you have become so aware that suddenly the illusory world disappears like a dream, then kaivalya. Then you are left as pure consciousness – with no identity, with no name, no form. Then you are the purest of the pure. That you are the most fundamental, the most essential, the most existential, and you are established in this purity, aloneness.

Patanjali says, “Kaivalya is the state of enlightenment that follows the reemergence of the gunas, due to their becoming devoid of the object of the purusa. In this state the purusa is established in his real nature.” You have come back home. The journey has been long, torturous, arduous, but you have come back home. The fish has jumped into the ocean which is pure consciousness.

Patanjali does not say anything more about it because more cannot be said. And when Patanjali says, “Finish; the end,” he does not only mean that the Yoga Sutras finish here. He says, “All possibility to express ends here. All possibility to say anything about the ultimate reality ends here. Beyond this is only experience. Expression ends here.” And nobody has been able to go beyond it – nobody. Not a single exception exists in the whole history of human consciousness. People have tried. Very few have even reached to where Patanjali has reached, but nobody has been able to go beyond Patanjali.

That’s why I say he’s the alpha and the omega. He starts from the very beginning; nobody has been able to find a better beginning than him. He begins from the very beginning, and he comes to the very end. When he says, “Finish,” he’s simply saying expression is finished, definition is finished, description is finished. If you have really come with him up to now, there is only experience beyond. Now starts the existential. One can be it, but one cannot say it. One can live in it, but one cannot define it. Words won’t help. All language is impotent beyond this point. Simply saying this much: that one achieves to one’s own true nature – Patanjali stops. That’s the goal: to know one’s own nature and to live in it – because unless we reach to our own natures we will be in misery. All misery is indicative that we are living somehow unnaturally. All misery is simply symptomatic that somehow our nature is not being fulfilled, that somehow, we are not in tune with our reality. The misery is not your enemy; it is just a symptom. It indicates. It is like a thermometer; it simply shows that you are going wrong somewhere. Put it all right, put yourself right; bring yourself in harmony, come back, tune yourself. When every misery disappears, one is in tune with one’s own nature. That nature Lao Tzu calls tao, Patanjali calls kaivalya, Mahavir calls moksha, Buddha calls nirvana. But whatsoever you want to call it – it has no name, and it has no form – but it is in you, present, right this moment. You have lost the ocean because you have come out of your Self. You have moved too much in the outer world. Move inwards. Now, let this be your pilgrimage: move inwards. […]

You are the temple of God. You are the abode of the ultimate. So the question is not where to find truth, the question is: how have you lost it? The question is not where to go; you are already there – stop going.

Drop from all the paths. All paths are of desire, extensions of desire, projections of desire: going somewhere, going somewhere, always somewhere else, never here.

Seeker, leave all paths, because all paths lead there, and He is here.

Purusartha-sunyanam gunanam pratiprasavah kaivalyam svarupa-pratistha va citi-sakter iti.

-Osho

From Yoga: The Supreme Science, Yoga: The Science of the Soul, V. 10, Discourse #9 (Previously titled Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, V. 10).

This discourse is the Listening Meditation in the twentieth program of the module, Osho Yoga and the Discipline of Transformation, one of several modules in A Course in Witnessing.

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 in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Absolute Aloneness – Osho

Liberation is obtained when there is equality of purity between the purusha and sattva.

-Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras

The Chhandogya Upanishad has a beautiful story.

Let us begin with it.

Satyakam asked his mother, Jabala, “Mother, I want to live the life of a student of supreme knowledge. What is my family name? Who is my father?”

“My son,” replied the mother, “I don’t know. In my youth, when I went about a great deal as a maidservant, I conceived you. I do not know who is your father. I am Jabala and you are Satyakam, so call yourself Satyakam Jabal.”

Then the boy went to Gautama, a great seer of those days, and asked to be accepted as a student. “Of what family are you, my dear?” inquired the sage.

Satyakam replied, “I asked my mother what my family name was, and she answered, ‘I don’t know. In my youth, when I went about a great deal as a maidservant, I conceived you. I do not know who is your father. I am Jabala and you are Satyakam, so call yourself Satyakam Jabal.’ Sir, I am therefore Satyakam Jabal.” The sage then said to him, “None but a true brahmin, a true seeker of truth, would have spoken thus. You have not swerved from the truth, my dear. I will teach you that supreme knowledge.”

The first quality of the seeker is to be authentic, not to swerve from truth, not to deceive in any way. Because if you deceive others, eventually you are deceived by your own deceptions. If you tell a lie too many times, it almost starts looking like a truth to you. When others start believing in your lies, you also start believing in them. Belief is infectious.

That’s how we have got into the mess we are in.

The first lie that we have accepted as truth is that “I am a body.” Everybody believes in it. You are born in a society which believes that we are bodies. Everybody reacts as a body; nobody responds as a soul.

And remember the difference between reaction and response: reaction is mechanical; response is alert, aware, conscious. When you push a button and the fan starts moving, it is a reaction. When you push a button, the fan does not start thinking, “Am I to move or not?” When you put the light on, the electricity does not respond; it reacts. It is mechanical. There is not any gap between your pushing of the button and the electricity’s functioning. There is not a little gap of thought, of awareness, of consciousness.

If you go on reacting in your life — somebody insults you and you become angry, somebody says something and you become sad, somebody says something, you become very happy — if it is a reaction, a push-button reaction, then by and by you will start believing that you are the body.

The body is a mechanism. It is not you. You live in it — it is your abode — but you are not it. You are totally different.

This is the first lie that cripples life. Then there is another lie: that I am the mind. And this is deeper than the first, obviously, because the mind is closer to you than the body. You go on thinking thoughts, dreaming dreams, and they move so close to you, almost touching your being, just surrounding you; you start believing in them also. Then you become the mind. The mind also reacts.

You become a soul the moment you start responding. Response means now you are not reacting mechanically. You contemplate, you meditate, you give a gap to your consciousness to decide. You are the deciding factor. Somebody insults you: in reaction he is the deciding factor. You simply react; he manipulates you. In response you are the deciding factor: somebody insults you — that is not primary, that is secondary. You think over it. You decide whether to do this or that. You are not overwhelmed by it. You remain untouched, you remain aloof, you remain a watcher.

These two lies have to be broken. These are fundamental lies. I am not counting the millions of lies that are not fundamental. You go on identifying yourself with a name. A name is just a label, utilitarian. You don’t come with a name, and you don’t go with a name. A name is just used by the society; it will be difficult to exist in a society without a name. Otherwise you are nameless. Then you think you belong to a certain religion, to a certain caste. You think that you belong to a certain man who is your father, a certain woman who is your mother. Yes, you come through them, but you don’t belong to them. They have been passages, you have travelled through them, but you are different.

In Kahlil Gibran’s masterpiece, The Prophet, a woman asks the prophet Almustafa, “Tell us something about our children,” and Almustafa says, “They come through you, but they don’t belong to you. Love them, but don’t give your thoughts to them. Love them, because love gives freedom, but don’t possess them.”

Your innermost core belongs to nobody; it is not anybody’s possession. It is not a thing; it cannot be possessed. Your body can be possessed, your mind can also be possessed.

When you become a Mohammedan, your mind is possessed by people who call themselves Mohammedans. When you become a Hindu, your mind is possessed by people who call themselves Hindus. When you become a communist, you are possessed by Das Kapital. When you become a Christian, you are possessed by the Bible. When you think of yourself as the body, you think of yourself in terms of white, of black.

Your innermost core is neither Christian nor Hindu, your innermost core is neither white nor black, your innermost core is neither communist nor anticommunist. Your innermost core remains absolutely aloof from the body and the mind. It is higher than the body and higher than the mind. The mind cannot touch it; the body cannot reach it.

Why did Gautama the great sage accept Satyakam Jabal? He was true. He could have deceived; the temptation is easy. To move in the world, saying to people, “I don’t know who is my father,” is very humiliating. And the mother was also true. It is easy to deceive the child because the child has no means to discover whether you are deceiving or not.

When a child asks his mother, “Who created the world?” there is every temptation for the mother to say, “God created the world” — not knowing at all what she is saying.

This is the basic reason why when children grow up, they become almost antagonistic toward their parents; they can never forgive them because they lie too much. They lose all respect for them. Parents go on saying, “Why? We loved you. We brought you up. The best we could do we have done. Why don’t children respect us?” You have lost the opportunity because of your lies. Once the child discovers that the mother and the father have been lying, all respect disappears. Deceiving a small helpless child? Saying things they did not know anything about?

That Jabala was a rare mother. She said, “I don’t know who is your father.” She accepted that when she was young, she was moving with many men. She loved many men and was being loved by many men, so she does not know who is the father. A true mother. And the child was also brave. He told it to the Master; he repeated exactly the words that the mother had said.

This truth appealed to Gautama, and he said, “You are a true brahmin.” This is the definition of being a brahmin; a true man is a brahmin. A brahmin has nothing to do with any caste. The very word comes from “Brahman”; it means “a seeker of God,” a true authentic seeker.

Remember, the more you get involved in lies, howsoever paying they appear in the beginning, in the end you will find that they have poisoned your whole being.

Be authentic. If you are authentic, sooner or later you will discover you are not the body. Because authenticity cannot go on believing in a lie. The clarity dawns, the eyes become more perceptive, and you can see: you are in the body, certainly, but you are not the body. When a hand is broken, you are not broken. When you have a fractured leg, you are not fractured. When there is a headache, you know the headache; you are not the headache itself. When you feel hungry, you know the hunger, but you are not hungry. By and by the basic lie is sabotaged. Then you can enter deeper and can start seeing your thoughts, dreams floating in the consciousness. Then you can distinguish, discriminate — what Patanjali calls vivek — then you can discriminate what is the cloud and what is the sky.

Thoughts are like clouds moving in empty space. That empty space is the real sky, not the clouds — they come and go. Not the thoughts, but the empty space in which those thoughts appear and disappear.

Now let me tell you one very basic yoga structure of your being.

Just as physicists think that the whole consists of nothing but electrons, electric energy, yoga thinks that the whole consists of nothing but sound electrons. The basic element of existence for yoga is sound because life is nothing but a vibration. Life is nothing but an expression of silence. Out of silence we come and into silence we dissolve again. Silence, space, nothingness, nonbeing, is your innermost core, the hub of the wheel. Unless you come to that silence, to that space where nothing else remains except your pure being, liberation is not attained. This is the yoga framework.

They divide your being into four layers. I am speaking to you; this is the last layer. Yoga calls it vaikhari; the word means “fruition,” flowering. But before I speak to you, before I utter something, it becomes manifest to me as a feeling, as an experience; that is the third stage. Yoga calls it madhyama, “the middle.” But before something is experienced inside, it moves in a seed form. You cannot experience it ordinarily unless you are very meditative, unless you have become so totally calm that even a stirring in the seed which has not sprouted yet can be perceived; it is very subtle. Yoga calls that pashyanti; the word pashyanti means “looking back,” looking to the source. And beyond that is your fundamental being out of which everything arises. That is called para; para means “the transcendental.”

Now try to understand these four layers. Para is something beyond all manifestation. Pashyanti is like a seed. Madhyama is like a tree. Vaikhari is like fruition, flowering.

Let me tell you another story, again from the Chhandogya Upanishad.

“Fetch me from thence a fruit of the nyagrodh tree,” asked the father, the great sage Uddalak, to his son.

“Here is one, sir,” said Svetaketu.

“Break it.”

“It is broken, sir.”

“What do you see there?”

“These seeds, almost infinitesimal.”

“Break one of them.”

“It is broken, sir.”

“What do you see?”

“Nothing, sir. Absolutely nothing.”

The father said, “My son, that subtle essence which you do not perceive there, of that very essence this great nyagrodh tree exists. Believe it, my son, that there is the subtle essence in that all things have existence. That is the truth. That is the self. And that, Svetaketu, that art thou — tatvamasi, Svetaketu.”

The nyagrodh tree, a big tree. The father asks for a fruit; Svetaketu brings it. Fruit is vaikhari — the thing has flowered, fruition has happened. Fruit is the most peripheral thing, absolutely manifested. The father says, “Break it.” Svetaketu breaks it — millions of seeds. The father says, “Choose one seed. Break it also.” He breaks that seed also. Now there is nothing in hand. Now inside the seed there is nothing. Uddalak says, “Out of this nothingness comes the seed. Out of the seed comes the tree. Out of the tree comes the fruit. But the basis is nothingness, the silence, the space, the formless, the unmanifest, the beyond, the transcendental.”

At the point of vaikhari, you are very much confused because you are farthest from your being. If you move deeper into your being, when you come closer to madhyama, the third point, you will be a little closer to your being. That’s why it is called the middle, the bridge. That’s how a meditator enters into his being. That’s how a mantra is used.

When you use a mantra and you repeat rhythmically “aum, aum, aum . . .” first it is to be repeated loudly: vaikhari. Then you have to close your lips and you have to repeat it inside — “aum, aum, aum . . .” — nothing comes out: madhyama. Then you have to drop even repeating inside; it repeats itself. You get in such tune with it that you drop the repeating and it goes on, on its own accord — “aum, aum, aum . . .” Now, you have become a listener rather than repeating it. You can listen and watch and see: it has become pashyanti. Pashyanti means looking back to the source; now your eyes are turned toward the source. Then by and by that aum also disappears into the formless: suddenly there is emptiness and nothing else. You don’t hear “aum, aum, aum . . .”; you don’t hear anything. Neither is there anything heard nor the hearer. Everything has disappeared.

“Tatvamasi, Svetaketu” — Uddalak said to his son, “That art thou.” That nothingness, when the chanter has disappeared and the chanting.

Now if you are attached to things too much, you will remain at the point of vaikhari. If you are attached to your body too much, you will remain at the point of madhyama. If you are attached to your mind too much, you will remain at the point of pashyanti. And if you are not attached at all, suddenly you dissolve into para, the transcendental, the beyond. That’s liberation.

Being liberated means coming back home. We have gone far away. Hmm? . . . just see. Out of nothingness comes the seed, then out of the seed the sprout, then a big tree, then fruits and flowers. How far things have gone. But the fruit falls back into the earth; the circle is complete. Silence is the beginning; silence is the end. Out of pure space we come and into pure space we go. If the circle is not complete, then you will have a being stuck at some point where you have become almost frozen and you cannot move and you have lost the dynamism, the energy, the life.

Yoga wants to make you so alive that you can complete the whole circle, the wheel of life, and you can come to the very beginning again. The end is nothing but the very beginning. The goal is nothing but the source. It is not that we are going to achieve God for the first time. We had him in the first place. We lost him. We will be regaining it, reclaiming it. God is never a discovery; it is always a rediscovery. We have been in him, in that womb of peace and silence and bliss, but we have gone farther away.

It was also part of growth to go far away because if you have never gone out of your home, you will never know what home is. If you have never gone farther away from home, you will never know the beauty, the peace, the comfort, the rest of your home. To come to one’s own home one has to knock at many doors. To come back to oneself one has to stumble upon many things. To come to the right path, one has to go astray.

This is necessary, absolutely necessary for growth, but don’t get stuck somewhere. People are stuck. A few people are stuck with their bodies, with their bodily habits. A few people are stuck with their minds, ideologies, thoughts, patterns of dreams.

Says the Katha Upanishad, “Beyond the objects are the senses. Beyond the senses is the mind. Beyond the mind is the intelligence. Beyond the intelligence the soul. Beyond the soul the nonmanifest. Beyond the nonmanifest the Brahman. And beyond Brahman himself there is nothing.” This is the end, the pure consciousness.

And this pure consciousness can be achieved through many paths. The real thing is not a path. The real thing is the authenticity of the seeker. Let me emphasize this.

You can travel on any path. If you are sincere and authentic, you will reach to the goal. Some paths may be hard, some may be easier, some may have greenery on both sides, some may be moving through deserts, some may have beautiful scenery around them, some may not have any scenery around them, that’s another thing; but if you are sincere and honest and authentic and true, then each path leads to the goal. Krishna has said in Shrimad Bhagavad Geeta, “Whatever path men travel is my path. No matter where they walk, it leads to me.”

So it simply can be reduced to one thing: that authenticity is the path. No matter what path you follow, if you are authentic, every path leads to him. And the opposite is also true: no matter what path you follow, if you are not authentic, you will not reach anywhere. Your authenticity brings you back home, nothing else. All paths are just secondary. The basic thing is to be authentic, to be true.

There is a Sufi story:

A man heard that if he went to a certain place in the desert at dawn and stood facing a distant mountain, his shadow would point to a great buried treasure. The man left his cabin before the first light of day and at dawn was standing in the designated place. His shadow shot out long and thin over the surface of the sand. “How fortunate,” he thought as he envisioned himself with great wealth. He began digging for the treasure. He was so involved with his work that he did not notice the sun climbing in the sky and shortening his shadow, and then he noticed it. It was now almost half of the previous size. He became worried and started digging again in the new spot. Hours later, at noon, the man again stood in the designated spot. He cast no shadow. He became very much worried. He started crying and weeping — the whole effort lost. Now where is the place?

Then there passed a Sufi Master, who started laughing at him and said, “Now exactly the shadow is pointing to the treasure. It is within you.”

All paths can lead to it because, in a way, it is already achieved. It is within you. You are not seeking something new. You are seeking something which you have forgotten. And how can you really forget it? That’s why we go on searching for bliss because we cannot forget it. It goes on resounding inside us. The search for bliss, the search for joy, the search for happiness is nothing but the search for God. You may not have used the word “God,” that doesn’t matter, but all searching for bliss is the search for God — is the search for something that you knew, that one day was yours and you lost.

That’s why all the great saints have said “remember.” Buddha calls it samyak smriti, “right remembrance.” Nanak calls it nam smaran, “remembering the name” — remembering the address. Have you not observed many times it happens? You know something, you say, “It is exactly on the tip of my tongue,” but still it is not coming. God is at the tip of your tongue.

In a small school the chemistry teacher wrote a formula on the blackboard, and he asked a small boy to stand up and tell him what this formula represents. The boy looked, and he said, “Sir, it is just on the tip of my tongue, but I cannot remember.”

The teacher said, “Spit it out! Spit it out! It is potassium cyanide!”

God is also on the tip of the tongue, and I will tell you, “Swallow it! Swallow it! Don’t spit it out! It is God!” Let him circulate in your blood. Let him become part of your innermost vibrations. Let him become a song inside your being, a dance.

The identification with the body is nothing but a habit. A child is born, he does not know who he is, and the parents have to create some identity; otherwise, he will be lost in the world. They have to tell him who he is. They also don’t know. They have to create a false label. They give him a name, they give him a mirror, and they tell him, “Look. This is your face. Look. This is your name. Look. This is your home. Look. This is your caste, your religion, your country.” These identifications help him to feel who he is — without knowing who he is. These are habits.

Then by and by his mind starts developing. If he is born in a Hindu home, he reads the Geeta, listens to the Geeta. If in a Christian home, he is brought to the church. A new identity starts, an innermost identity — he becomes a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan. He is born in India, he becomes an Indian. In China, he becomes Chinese. And he starts identifying himself with the tradition of the country. A Chinese identifies himself with Chinese tradition and history, the past of China. Then one feels at home, one has roots — the whole tradition. If one is Indian, one has roots, one is not a vagabond. One has created a certain home: in the tradition, in the country, in the history, in the heroes — Ram, Krishna — now one feels at home. One has found his place, but that is not a real place. This identity is utilitarian.

And then this habit becomes so solid that even one day you come to know what nonsense it is that you think you are Indian, Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Chinese — what nonsense — but then too the old habit will persist.

Bertrand Russell has written that he knows that he is no longer a Christian, but somehow, he goes on forgetting it again and again. The whole conditioning . . . You may go against the tradition, but still you will cling to it. Even people who become revolutionaries remain attached to their traditions, maybe in a negative way. If a Hindu goes against Hinduism, he will still talk about Krishna — against him; he will still talk about Rama — against him. If a Mohammedan goes against his tradition, he will still be criticizing the Koran; of course, criticizing now, criticizing Mohammed, but he remains attached to the tradition.

A real rebel is one who drops the tradition so deeply, so utterly, that he is not even against it. He is neither for nor against; then one is free. If you are against, you are still not free. If you are against anything, you will find you are bound with that thing; there is a tie.

And habits become unconscious. I know a very, very learned man, very scholarly, very famous, and really a great intellectual. He has been a follower of J. Krishnamurti for long, almost forty years. And whenever he will come to see me, he will again and again say, “There is no meditation. What are you teaching to people? Krishnamurti says there is no meditation; all mantras are just repetitive; and all meditations, all methods, condition the mind. And I don’t meditate.”

I waited for a right moment to hammer the truth home. Then he fell ill, a heart attack. I rushed to see him, and he was repeating, “Ram, Ram, Ram . . .” I could not believe it. I shook his head and I said, “What are you doing? — Ram, Ram, Ram . . . You are a follower of Krishnamurti. Have you forgotten?”

He said, “Forget all about that. I am dying. And who knows? Maybe Krishnamurti is wrong. And there is no loss in just repeating Ram, Ram, Ram; and it is very consoling.”

What happened to this man? Forty years of listening to Krishnamurti, but his Hindu is there. At the last moment the mind will start reacting. No, he is not a rebel. He was thinking he is a rebel. He has been fighting everything, he has been against all that Hindus say, and in the last moment the whole edifice falls.

Life ordinarily is nothing but a habit, a mechanical habit. Unless you become aware, unless you become really aware, it will be difficult to get out of it. […]

In a fit of habit, you are almost unconscious and helpless. That’s why the insistence of yoga is to bring more awareness to your ties. Remember as much as you can that you are not the body. And remember one thing more, that it is difficult to break a habit, but not difficult if you create another to substitute it. And that’s how it happens; people go on substituting habits. If you tell them, “You are not the body,” they will start thinking they are the mind. Then nothing changes, just the name of the habit changes.

This I see. If I tell somebody, “Stop smoking,” he starts chewing pan. If I tell him to stop chewing pan, he starts chewing gum. Or if you stop him from that too, he starts talking too much; that too is the same thing. In the beginning he was just smoking; at least he was harming only himself, nobody else. Now he cannot smoke, so he talks too much; now he is destroying others’ peace and silence also. A smoker is good in a way; he remains confined to himself. Women talk too much; once they start smoking, their talking becomes less.

In fact, you must have observed: whenever you feel nervous, you start smoking. That smoking is just to escape from nervousness. And the same happens whenever you start talking. You are feeling nervous; you want to distract yourself with something. […]

But people go on changing habits. Sometimes it happens you can change a bad habit into a good habit, and everybody will be happy and everybody will be satisfied. But yoga will not be satisfied. You can stop smoking and you can start repeating a mantra. Now, if you don’t repeat your mantra one day, you feel uneasiness in the same way as you used to feel before when you were smoking and if you did not smoke for one day — the same desire to follow the routine, to do whatsoever you have been doing, mechanically. You can change a bad habit into a good habit, but the habit is still a habit. It may be good in the eyes of society, but for your inner growth it has no meaning.

All habits have to be dropped. I am not saying become a chaos. I am not saying live a life absolutely hectic and haphazard, zigzag, no. But let your life be decided by your awareness.

It is possible you can get up at five o’clock, early in the morning, as a habit; and it is also possible to get up early, five o’clock in the morning, not as a habit but as an awareness. And both are so different, their quality is absolutely different. When a person rises at five o’clock just as a habit, then he is almost as mechanical as the other person who gets up at nine o’clock as a habit. Both are in the same boat. And the person who rises at five o’clock will be as dull as the person who rises at nine o’clock because the dullness is not a question of when you get up. The dullness is a question of whether you get up through habit or awareness.

If you get up through awareness, you will be alert. It may be nine o’clock in the morning, but if you get up aware, you will be sensitive, you will see things with a clarity, and everything will be beautiful. After a long rest, after all the senses have rested, they become alive again, more alive. The dust has disappeared; everything is more clear. Rested, deep down into your para, your beyond, you had fallen in your sleep — all thoughts, body forgotten, left far away — you had moved to your home. You come back from there rejuvenated, fresh. But if it is just a habit, then it is as useless as any other habit.

Religion is not a question of habit. If you go to the church or to the temple just as a habit, a formality, a routine in which you have got into, you have been trained into, then it is useless. If you go to the temple alert, then the temple bells will have a totally different meaning for you, a different significance. Those temple bells will ring something within your heart. Then the silence of the church will surround you in a totally new way.

So remember, it is not a question of habit. Religion is not a question of practice. You have to understand, and this is how Patanjali has brought you, by and by, giving you more and more understanding, revealing to you more and more of the path.

The more you become clear, the more you can read the message written everywhere, on every leaf, on every flower. The message is God’s. His signatures are everywhere. You need not go into the Bhagavad Geeta, you need not go into the Bible and the Koran. The Koran and the Bhagavad Geeta and the Bible are written all over existence. You only need penetrating eyes.

I have heard:

A young married woman in London believed she was pregnant and went to the doctor to verify it. The doctor gave her a cursory examination and assured her that her suspicions were correct. Then, to her astonishment, he simply took a rubber stamp, printed something with it on her abdomen, and said, “That’s all.”

The wife related this strange event to her husband, and he asked, “What does it say?”

“Well, read it,” she replied.

He found that the print was too small for him to read, but a magnifying glass made everything clear. It read: “When you can read this without a magnifying glass, rush your wife to the hospital.”

Right now, you need a magnifying glass — of a Buddha, of a Jesus, of a Krishna, of a Patanjali. And then too you cannot read because your eyes are almost blind. Once your eyes are clear, his message is everywhere. And so clear is the message that you will simply be surprised how you missed for so long, how you couldn’t see it. It was everywhere, all around; from every direction and dimension he was knocking at your door.

But if you live in the body, you will not hear it. If you live in the mind, you will hear it a little, but you will theorize about it and you will miss. If you go deeper than the mind into pashyanti, where meditations lead you, you will be able to read the message and you will not become a victim of theorization, you will not philosophize. And once you don’t philosophize about it, once you don’t think about God but you see him and you don’t go around and around, about and about, and you penetrate directly, you disappear from pashyanti, the seed is broken. You fall into the abyss of para, the beyond.

The circle is complete: from silence to silence, from space to space, from God to God. The beginning is God, the end is God. The alpha and omega — he is both.

Now the sutra:

Sattva-purushayoh shuddhi-samye kaivalyam.

Liberation is obtained when there is equality of purity between purusha and sattva.

Yoga divides existence in two. The unmanifest is one, but the manifest is two because in the very process of manifestation things become two. For example, you look at a rose bush, beautiful flowers. You just look, you don’t say a word. You simply see the rose, not even uttering a word inside. The experience is one. Now if you want to say to somebody, “The flowers are beautiful,” the moment you say, “The flowers are beautiful,” you have said something about ugliness also. The flowers are “not ugly.” With beauty, ugliness enters in. If somebody asks, “What is beauty?” you will have to use ugliness to explain it.

If you look at a woman and no word arises in you, then the experience is one, nondual. The moment you say, “I love you,” you have brought hate in because love cannot be explained without hate. The day cannot be explained without night, and life cannot be explained without death. The opposite has to be brought in.

At the point of vaikhari, everything is clear-cut, duality; night is separate from day, death is separate from life, beauty is separate from ugliness, light is separate from darkness — everything divided in an Aristotelean way, clear-cut, no bridge. Move a little deeper. At the point of madhyama, division starts but is not so clear; night and day meet, mix, as in the evening or in the morning. Go still deeper. At the point of pashyanti, they are in the seed, the duality has not arisen yet; you cannot say what is what, everything is undifferentiated. Move still deeper. At the point of para, there is no division — visible, invisible.

At the point of expression, yoga divides reality in two: purusha and prakriti. Prakriti means “matter”; purusha means “consciousness.” Now when you are identified with the body-mind, with prakriti, with nature, with matter, both are polluted. Pollution is always double.

For example, if you mix water and milk, you say, “The milk is no longer pure,” but you have not observed anything: the water is also no longer pure. Because water is free so nobody is worried, that is one thing; but when you mix water and milk, both become impure. This is something because both were pure — water was water, milk was milk — both were pure. This is a miracle. Two purities meet, and both become impure.

Impurity has nothing condemnatory in it. It simply says the foreign element has entered. It simply says something which is not of its innermost nature has entered, that’s all.

This sutra is very beautiful. Vibhuti Pada ends with this sutra; it is a culmination. This sutra says when you are identified with the body, you are impure, body is impure. When you are identified with the mind, you are impure, mind is impure. When you are not identified, both become pure.

Now this will look like a paradox. A siddha, or a buddha, one who has achieved, his mind functions in purity. His genius functions in purity; all his talents become pure. And his consciousness functions in purity. Both are separated — milk is milk, water is water. Both have become pure again.

The sutra says, “Liberation is obtained when there is equality of purity between the purusha and sattva.” Sattva is the highest point of prakriti, nature, matter. Sattva means the “intelligence”; and purusha means the “awareness.” That is the most subtle tie inside you because they are so similar. Intelligence and awareness are so similar that many times you may start thinking that an intelligent man is an aware man. It is not so.

Einstein is intelligent, tremendously intelligent, but he is not a buddha, he is not aware. […] Intelligence is not necessarily awareness. Awareness is necessarily intelligence! A man who is aware is intelligent, but a man who is intelligent need not be aware, there is no necessity in it. But both are very close. Intelligence is part of body-mind, and awareness is part of purusha, the ultimate, the beyond.

The sky meets the earth. That point, that horizon where the sky meets the earth, is the point to become perfectly unidentified — there, where intelligence meets awareness. Both are very similar. Intelligence is purified matter, so pure that one can get into it and one can think, “I have become aware.” That’s how many philosophers waste their lives: they think their intelligence is their awareness. Religion is the search of awareness; philosophy the search of intelligence.

Liberation is obtained when there is equality of purity between the purusha and sattva.

But how to attain liberation? First you have to attain to the purity of sattva, intelligence. So, move deeper. Vaikhari is intelligence manifest; madhyama is intelligence manifest only to you not to the world; pashyanti is intelligence in seed form; and para is awareness. By and by detach yourself, discriminate, start looking at the body as an instrument, a medium, an abode; and remember it as much as you can. By and by, the remembrance settles. Then start working on the mind. Remember you are not the mind. This remembrance will help you to become separate.

Once you are separate from the body-mind, your sattva will be pure. And your purusha has always been pure; just the identity with matter has helped it to appear impure. Once both mirrors are pure, nothing is mirrored. Two mirrors facing each other: nothing is mirrored, they remain empty.

This point of absolute emptiness is liberation. Liberation is not from the world. Liberation is from identification. Don’t be identified, never be identified with anything. Always remember you are the witness, never lose that point of witnessing; then one day the inner awareness rises like thousands of suns rising together.

This is what Patanjali calls kaivalya, liberation.

The word kaivalya has to be understood.

In India different prophets have used different words for that ultimate thing. Mahavir calls it moksha. Moksha can be rightly translated as “absolute freedom,” no bondage, all imprisonment has fallen. Buddha has used the word nirvana; nirvana means “cessation of the ego.” As you put a light off and the flame simply disappears, just the same way the light of the ego disappears: you are no longer an entity. The drop has dissolved into the ocean; or the ocean has dissolved into the drop. It is dissolution, annihilation.

Patanjali uses kaivalya; the word means “absolute aloneness.” It is neither moksha nor nirvana. It means absolute aloneness: you have come to a point where nobody else exists for you. Nothing else exists; only you, only you, only you. In fact, it is not possible to call yourself “I,” because “I” has reference with “thou,” and “thou” has disappeared. It is no longer possible to say you are in moksha, freedom, because when all bondage has disappeared, what is the meaning of freedom? Freedom is possible if imprisonment is possible. You are free because the prison exists just near the neighborhood. You are not inside the prison, there are other people inside the prison, but potentially, theoretically, you can be put into the prison any day. That’s why you are free. But if the prison has disappeared absolutely, utterly, then what is the point of calling oneself free?

Kaivalya, just aloneness. But remember, this aloneness has nothing to do with your loneliness. In loneliness “the other” exists, is felt, the absence of the other is felt. That’s why loneliness is a sad thing. You are “lonely”: that means you are feeling the need for the other. “Alone”: when the need for the other has disappeared. You are enough unto yourself, absolute unto yourself, no need, no desire, nowhere to go: this is what Patanjali calls “you have come home.” This is liberation in his description; this is his nirvana or moksha.

Glimpses can come to you also. If you sit silently and detach yourself . . . First detach yourself from the objects. Close your eyes, forget the world, even if it exists just take it as a dream. Then look at the ideas and remember that you are not them, they are floating clouds. Detach yourself from them; they have disappeared. Then one idea arises: that you are detached. That is pashyanti. Now drop that too because otherwise you will hang there. Drop that too; simply be a witness to this idea also. Suddenly you explode into nothingness. It may be only for a single split moment, but you will have the taste of tao, the taste of yoga and tantra; you will have the taste of truth. And once you have had it, it becomes easier and easier to approach it, allow it, become vulnerable to it, become available to it. Every day it becomes easier and easier. The more you travel the path, the more the path becomes clear.

One day you go in and never come out . . . kaivalyam. This is what Patanjali calls the absolute liberation. This is the goal in the East.

Eastern goals reach very much higher than Western goals. In the West heaven seems to be the last thing; not so in the East. Christians, Mohammedans, Jews, for them heaven is the last thing, nothing beyond it. But in the East, we have worked more, we have drilled into reality deeper. We have drilled to the very end, when suddenly the drill comes to face the emptiness, and nothing can be drilled anymore.

Heaven is a desire, desire of being happy; hell is a fear, fear of being unhappy. Hell is pain accumulated; heaven is pleasure accumulated. But they are not freedom. Freedom is when you are neither in pain nor in pleasure. Freedom is when the duality has been dropped. Freedom is when there is no hell and no heaven: kaivalyam. Then one attains to the uttermost purity.

This has been the goal in the East, and I think this has to be the goal of all humanity.

-Osho

From Yoga: The Path to Liberation, Yoga: The Science of the Soul, V.9, Discourse #9 (Previously titled Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, V.9).

This discourse is the Listening Meditation in the eighteenth program of the module, Osho Yoga and the Discipline of Transformation, one of several modules in A Course in Witnessing.

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 in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Beyond the Error of Experiencing – Osho

Experience is the result of the inability to differentiate between purusha, pure consciousness, and sattva, pure intelligence, although they are absolutely distinct.

Performing samyama on the self-interest brings knowledge of the purusha separated from the knowledge of others.

From this follow intuitional hearing, touching, seeing, tasting, and smelling.

These are powers when the mind is turned outward but obstacles in the way of samadhi.

-Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras

One of the most important sutras of Patanjali – the very key. This last part of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras is called “kaivalya pada.” Kaivalya means the summum bonum – the ultimate liberation, the total freedom of consciousness which knows no limitation, which knows no impurity. The word kaivalya is very beautiful; it means innocent aloneness; it means pure aloneness.

The word “aloneness” has to be understood. It is not loneliness. Loneliness is negative: loneliness is when you are hankering for the other. Loneliness is the feeling of the absence of the other; aloneness is the realization of oneself. Loneliness is ugly; aloneness is tremendously beautiful.

Aloneness is when you are so content that you don’t need the other, that the other has completely disappeared from your consciousness – the other makes no shadow on you, the other creates no dream in you, the other does not pull you out.

The other is continuously pulling you off the center. Sartre’s famous saying, Patanjali would have understood it well, is, “The other is hell.” The other may not be hell, but hell is created by your desire for the other. The desire for the other is hell.

And to be desireless of the other is to attain to your pristine clarity of being. Then you are and you are the whole, and there exists nobody except you. This Patanjali calls kaivalya.

And the way toward kaivalya, the path, is first the most essential step, viveka, discrimination; the second important step is vairagya, renunciation; and the third is the realization of kaivalya, aloneness.

Why are you hankering so much for the other? Why this desire – this constant madness for the other? Where have you taken a wrong step? Why are you not satisfied with yourself? Why don’t you feel fulfilled? Why do you think that somehow you lack something? From where arises this misconception that you are incomplete? It arises out of the identity with the body. The body is the other. Once you have taken the first wrong step, then you will go on and on, and then there is no end to it.

By viveka Patanjali means: to discriminate yourself as separate from the body – to realize that you are in the body but you are not the body, to realize that you are in the mind but you are not the mind. To realize that you are always the pure witness – sakshi, drashta – the seer. You are never the seen; you are never the object. You are pure subjectivity.

Søren Kierkegaard, one of the most influential existential thinkers in the West, has said, “God is subjectivity.” He comes very close to Patanjali. What does he mean when he says God is subjectivity? When all objects are known as separate from you, they start disappearing. They exist through your cooperation. If you think you are the body, then the body continues. It needs your help, your energy. If you think you are the mind, the mind functions. It needs your help, your cooperation, your energy.

This is one of the inner mechanisms: that just by your presence nature becomes alive. Just by your presence the body functions as alive; just by your presence the mind starts functioning. In yoga they say it is as if the master had gone out, then he comes back home. The servants were chitchatting and sitting on the steps of the house and smoking, and nobody was worried about the house. The moment the master enters, their chitchat stops, they are no longer smoking, they have hidden their cigarettes and they have started working, and they are trying to show that they are so much involved in their work that you cannot even conceive that just a moment before they were gossiping, sitting on the steps idling, lazy, resting. Just the presence of the master and everything settles – as if the teacher had gone out of the class and there was much turmoil, almost a chaos, and the teacher comes back and all the children are in their seats and they have started writing, doing their work, and there is complete silence. The very presence.

Now scientists have something parallel to it. They call it the presence of the catalytic agent. There are a few scientific phenomena in which a certain substance is needed just to be present. It does not act in any way, it does not enter into any activity, but just the presence of it helps some activity to happen – if it is not present that activity will not happen. If it is present it remains in itself; it does not go out. Just the very presence is catalytic – it creates some activity in somebody else, somewhere else.

Patanjali says that your innermost being is not active; it is inactive. The innermost being is called, in yoga, the purusha. Your pure consciousness is a catalytic agent. It is just there doing nothing – seeing everything but doing nothing, watching everything but getting involved in nothing. By the sheer presence of the purusha, the prakriti, nature – the mind, the body, everything – starts functioning.

But we get identified with the body, we get identified with the mind: we slip out of the witnesser and become a doer. That’s the whole disease of man. Viveka is the medicine – how to go back home, how to drop this false idea that you are a doer, and how to attain to the clarity of just being a witness. The methodology is called viveka.

Once you have understood that you are not the doer, and you are the watcher, the second thing happens spontaneously – renunciation, sannyas, vairagya. The second is: now, whatsoever you were doing before, you cannot do. You were getting involved too much in many things because you were thinking you are the body, because you were thinking you are the mind. Now you know that you are neither the body nor the mind, so many activities that you were following and chasing and getting mad about simply drop. That dropping is vairagya; that is sannyas, renunciation. Your vision, your viveka, your understanding, brings a transformation: that is vairagya. And when vairagya is complete, another peak arises which is kaivalya – you for the first time know who you are. But the first step of identification leads you astray; then once you have taken the first step, once you have ignored your separation and you have got caught in the identity, then it goes on and on and on; and one step leads to another, then to another, and you are more and more in the mire and in the mess.

Let me tell you one anecdote:

Two young friends were breaking into society, and young Cohen had high hopes of marrying an heiress. To give him moral support, he took young Levy along with him to meet the girl’s parents. The parents smiled at young Cohen and said, “I understand you are in the clothing business.”

Cohen nodded nervously and said, “Yes, in a small way.”

Levy slapped him on the back and said, “He is so modest, so modest. He has twenty-seven shops and is negotiating for more.”

The parents said, “I understand you have an apartment.” Cohen smiled, “Yes, a modest couple of rooms.”

Young Levy started laughing, “Modesty, modesty! He has a penthouse in Park Lane.”

The parents continued, “And you have a car?”

“Yes,” said Cohen. “Quite a nice one.”

“Quite nice nothing!” interjected Levy. “He has three Rolls-Royces, and that is only for the town use.”

Cohen sneezed. “Do you have a cold?” asked the anxious parents. “Yes, just a slight one,” replied Cohen.

“Slight, nothing!” yelled Levy. “Tuberculosis!”

One step leads to another, and once you have taken a wrong step, your life becomes an exaggeration of that wrong. It is mirrored and reflected in millions of ways. And if you don’t correct it there – you can go on correcting all over the world – you will not be able to correct it.

Gurdjieff used to tell his disciples, “The first thing is to become nonidentified and to remember continuously that you are a witness, just a consciousness – neither an act nor a thought.” If this remembrance becomes a crystallized phenomenon in you, you have attained to viveka, discrimination; then spontaneously follows vairagya. If you don’t become discriminate, spontaneously follows samsar, the world. If you become identified with the body and the mind, you move out – you go into the world. You are expelled from the Garden of Eden. If you discriminate, and you remember that you are in the body and the body is an abode and you are the owner and the mind is just a biocomputer, you are the master and the mind is just a slave; then – a turning in.

Then you are not moving into the world because the first step has been removed. Now you are no longer bridged with the world, suddenly you start falling in. This is what vairagya is, renunciation.

And when you go on falling in and in and in and there comes the last point beyond which there is no go, the summum bonum, it is called kaivalya: you have become alone. You don’t need anybody. You don’t need the constant effort of filling yourself with something or other. Now, you are in tune with your emptiness, and because of your tuning in with the emptiness, the very emptiness has become a fullness, an infinity, a fulfillment, a fruition of being.

This purusha is there in the beginning, this purusha is there in the end, and between the two is just a big dream.

The first sutra:

Experience is the result of the inability to differentiate between purusha, pure consciousness, and sattva, pure intelligence, although they are absolutely distinct.

Performing samyama on the self-interest brings knowledge of the purusha separated from the knowledge of others.

Each word has to be understood because each word is tremendously significant.

“Experience is the result of the inability to differentiate . . .” All experience is just an error. You say, “I am miserable,” or you say, “I am happy,” or you say, “I am feeling hungry,” or you say, “I am feeling very good and healthy” – all experience is an error, is a misunderstanding.

When you say, “I am hungry,” what do you really mean? You should say, “I am conscious that the body is hungry.” You should not say, “I am hungry.” You are not hungry. The body is hungry; you are the knower of the fact. The experience is not yours; only the awareness. The experience is of the body; the awareness is yours. When you feel miserable, again, the experience may be of the body or of the mind – which are not two.

Body and mind are one mechanism. The body is the gross mechanism of the same entity; the mind is the subtle mechanism. But both are the same. It is not good to say “body and mind”; we should say “body-mind.” The body is nothing but mind in a gross way, and if you watch your body, you will see that the body also functions as a mind. You are fast asleep, and a fly comes and hangs around your face – you remove it with your hand without in any way getting up or waking up. The body functioned, very mindfully. Or something starts crawling on your feet – you throw it away. Fast asleep. You will not remember in the morning. The body functions as a mind – very gross, but it functions as a mind.

So body-mind has all the experience – good or bad, happy, unhappy, it makes no difference. You are never the experiencer; you are always the awareness of the experience. So Patanjali says in a very bold statement, “Experience is the result of the inability to differentiate . . .” All experience is an error. The error arises because you don’t discriminate, you don’t know who is who. […]

Patanjali says all experience is an error – error in your vision. You become identified with the object, and the subject starts thinking as if it is the object. You feel hunger, but you are not hungry – the body is hungry. You feel pain, but you are not in pain – the body is in pain; you are only alert.

Next time something happens to you – and every moment something or other is happening – just watch. Just try to keep hold of this remembrance that “I am the witness,” and see how much things change. Once you can realize you are the witness, many things simply disappear, start disappearing. And one day comes which is the final day, the day of enlightenment, when all experience falls flat. Suddenly you are beyond experience: you are not in the body, you are not in the mind; you are beyond both. Suddenly you start floating like a cloud, above all, beyond all. That state of no-experience is the state of kaivalya.

Now one thing more about it. There are people who think that spirituality is also an experience. They don’t know. There are people who come to me, and they say, “We would like to have some spiritual experience.” They don’t know what they are saying. Experience as such is of the world. There is no spiritual experience – there cannot be. To call an experience “spiritual” is to falsify it. The spiritual is only a realization of pure awareness, purusha.

How does it happen? How do we get identified? In yoga terminology, the truth, the ultimate truth, has three attributes to it, sat chit anand – satchitanand. Sat means “being” – the quality of eternity, the quality of permanence, being. Chit: chit means “consciousness,” awareness – chit is energy, movement, process. And anand: anand is “blissfulness.” These three have been called the three attributes of the ultimate. This is the yoga trinity; of course, more scientific than the Christian trinity because it does not talk about persons – God, the Holy Ghost, the Son. It talks about realizations.

When one reaches to the ultimate peak of existence, one realizes three things: that one is and one is going to remain, that is sat; the second, one is and one is conscious – one is not like dead matter – one is and one knows that one is, that is chit; and, one knows that one is and one is tremendously blissful.

Now let me explain it to you. It is not right to call it “blissful,” because then it will become an experience. So a better way will be to say “one is bliss” – not “blissful.” One is sat, one is chit, one is anand; one is being, one is consciousness, one is bliss.

These are the ultimate realizations of the truth. Patanjali says these three, when they are present in the world, create three qualities in prakriti, in nature. They function as a catalytic agent; they don’t do anything. Just their presence creates a tremendous activity in prakriti. That activity is corresponded by three gunas, qualities: sattva, rajas, tamas.

Sattva corresponds to anand, the quality of bliss. Sattva means pure intelligence. The closer you come to sattva, the more you feel blissful. Sattva is the reflection of anand. If you can conceive of a triangle, then the base is anand and the other two lines are sat, chit. It is reflected into the world of matter, prakriti. Of course, in the reflection it becomes upside down: sattva, and rajas, tamas – the same triangle.

But the ultimate truth is not doing anything – that is the emphasis of Patanjali. Because once the ultimate truth is doing something, he becomes a doer, and he has already moved into the world. In Patanjali, God is not the creator; he is just a catalytic agent. This is tremendously scientific because if God is the creator, then you will have to find the motive, why he creates. Then you will have to find some desire in him to create. Then he will become just as ordinary as man. No, in Patanjali, God is absolute, pure presence. He does not do anything, but by his presence things happen – the prakriti, the nature, starts dancing.

There is an old story. A king had made a palace; the palace was called the Mirror Palace. The floor, the walls, the ceiling, all were covered in millions of mirrors, tiny, tiny mirrors. There was nothing else in the whole palace; it was a mirror palace. Once it happened, the king’s dog, by mistake, was left inside the palace in the night and the palace was locked from the outside. The dog looked, became frightened – there were millions of dogs everywhere. He was reflected; down, up, all the directions – millions of dogs. He was not an ordinary dog; he was the king’s dog – very brave – but even then, he was alone. He ran from one room to another, but there was no escape, there was no [where to] go. All over. He became more and more frightened. He tried to get out, but there was no way to get out – the door was locked.

Just to frighten the other dogs, he started barking, but the moment he barked, the other dogs also barked – because they were pure reflections. Then he became more frightened. To frighten the other dogs, he started knocking against the walls. The other dogs also jumped into him, bumped into him. In the morning the dog was found dead.

But the moment the dog died, all the dogs died. The palace was empty. There was only one dog and millions of reflections.

This is the standpoint of Patanjali: that there is only one reality, millions of reflections of it. You are separate from me as a reflection, I am separate from you as a reflection, but if we move toward the real, the separation will be gone – we will be one. One reflection is separate from another reflection; you can destroy one reflection and save another.

That’s how one person dies . . . There are many argumentative people in the world who ask, “Then if there is only one Brahman, one God, one being spread all over, then when one dies, why don’t others die also?” This is simple. If there are a thousand and one mirrors in the room, you can destroy one mirror: one reflection will disappear – not others. You destroy another: another reflection will disappear – not others. When one person dies, only one reflection dies. But the one who is being reflected remains undying; it is deathless. Then another child is born – that is, another mirror is born; again, another reflection.

This story goes on and on. That’s why Hindus have called this world a maya: maya means a magic show. Nothing is there really; everything only appears to be there. And this whole magic world depends on one error and that error is of identity.

“Experience is the result of the inability to differentiate between purusha, (absolute) pure consciousness, and sattva, pure intelligence . . .” Purusha is reflected into prakriti as sattva. Your intelligence is just a reflection of the real intelligence; it is not the real intelligence. You are clever, argumentative, groping in the dark, thinking, contemplating, creating philosophies, systems of thought – this is just a reflection. This intelligence is not the real intelligence because the real intelligence need not discover anything: for the real intelligence everything is already discovered.

Now look at the different paths of philosophy and religion. Philosophy moves in the reflected intelligence, into sattva – it goes on thinking and thinking and thinking and goes on creating bigger palaces of thought. Religion moves into purusha – it drops this so-called intelligence; hence the insistence of meditation to drop thinking. […]

Thinking is just dreaming logically; it is creating verbal palaces. And sometimes one can get caught so much in the verbal, then one completely forgets the real. The verbal is just a reflection.

Language is one of the reasons we got so caught up in the verbal. For example, in English, it is very difficult to drop the use of the “I.” It is very prominent in English. The “I” stands so vertical – almost a phallic symbol. It is phallic. That’s why perceptive people like E. E. Cummings started writing “I” in the lower case. And it is not only vertical, phallic, when you write. When you say, “I,” it is phallic, like an erection, egoistic. Just watch how many times “I” has to be used. And the more you use it, the more it is emphasized, the more ego becomes prominent – as if the whole English language hangs around “I.”

But in Japanese it is totally different. You can talk for hours without using “I.” It is possible to write a book without using “I”; the language has a totally different arrangement. The “I” can be dropped easily.

No wonder Japan became the most meditative country in the world and achieved to the higher peaks of Zen, satori, and samadhi. Why did it happen in Japan? Why has it happened in Burma, in Thailand, in Vietnam? All the countries which have been influenced by Buddhism, their language is different from other countries which have never been influenced by Buddhism because Buddha said there is no “I” – anatta, anatma, no-selfness, there is no “I.” That emphasis entered the languages.

Buddha says, “Nothing is permanent.” So when for the first time the Bible was being translated into Buddhist languages, it was very difficult to translate it. The problem was very basic – how to put “God is,” because in Buddhist countries “is” is a dirty word. Everything is becoming, nothing is. If you want to say, “The tree is,” in Burmese, it will come to mean, “The tree is becoming.” It will not mean, “The tree is.” If you want to say, “The river is,” you cannot say it in Burmese. It will come to mean, “The river is becoming.” And that’s true because the river is never is. It is always in a process – the river is “rivering.” It is not a noun; it is a verb. The river is rivering, becoming. Never in any stage can you catch it as “is.” You cannot take a snap of it; it is a movie – continuous process. You cannot have a photograph – the photograph will be false because it will be “is,” and the river never is.

Buddhist languages have a different structure to them; then, they create a different mind. The mind depends much on language; its whole game is linguistic. Beware of it. […]

If Buddha comes to you and says, “There is no God,” you immediately get anxious, worried. What has he said? He has simply said something which goes against your linguistic pattern, that’s all. If he says, “There is no self, no ‘I,”’ you become disturbed. What has he done? He has simply taken away a strategy of your ego, nothing else. He has simply shattered your linguistic pattern.

It is happening every day here. When I say something, and I destroy some linguistic pattern in you, you become annoyed, you become angry. If you are a Christian, of course, you have a Christian house of language. If you are a Hindu, you have a Hindu house of language. I am neither, and I am here to destroy all linguistic patterns. You bet you get angry. You become annoyed. You start thinking what to do. But what am I doing? What can I take from you? Can Buddha take God from you if you have known God – can he take it from you? Then there is no question. But he can take a linguistic theory; he can take a hypothesis from you.

Experience is the result of the inability to differentiate between purusha, pure consciousness, and sattva, pure intelligence . . ..

Language belongs to sattva, theories belong to sattva, philosophies belong to sattva. Sattva means your intelligence, your mind. Mind is not you.

Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, belong to the mind. That’s why Buddhist monks say, “If you meet Buddha on the way, kill him immediately.” Buddhist monks saying that? They say, “Kill the Buddha if you see him, immediately.” They are saying, “Kill the mind, don’t carry a theory about the Buddha; otherwise you will never become a Buddha. If you want to become a Buddha, drop all ideas about Buddha – all ideas. Kill Buddha immediately!” They say, “If you utter the name of Buddha, immediately wash and rinse your mouth – the word is dirty.” Buddhist monks saying that? They are amazing people . . . but really wonderful. And they mean it.

If you can see their point, you will become able to see many more things. Bodhidharma says, “Burn all scriptures, all – including Buddha’s.” Not only the Vedas, Dhammapada included – burn all scriptures. There is a very famous painting of Bin-chi burning all the scriptures, creating a holi. And they were very, very deep into reality. What are they doing? They are simply taking away your mind from you. Where is your Veda? It is not in the book; it is in your mind. Where is your Koran? It is in your mind; it is not in the book. It is in your mental tape. Drop all that; get out of it.

Intelligence, the mind, is part of nature. It is just a reflection. It looks almost like the real, but remember, even “almost like the real,” then too it is not real. It is as if in the full moon night, you see the moon reflected in the cool, placid lake. No ripple is arising; the reflection is perfect, but still it is a reflection. And if the reflection is so beautiful, just think about the real. Don’t get caught in the reflection.

What Buddha says is a reflection, what Patanjali writes is a reflection, what I am saying is a reflection. Don’t be caught in it. If the reflection is so beautiful, try reality. Move away from the reflection toward the moon.

And the path is going to be just the opposite to the reflection. If you go on looking at the reflection and you become hypnotized by the reflection, you will never be able to see the moon in the sky because it is diametrically opposite. If you want to see the real moon, you will have to move away from the reflection – you will have to burn scriptures and you will have to kill buddhas. You will have to move in the very opposite, diametrically opposite, dimension. Then your head moves toward the moon; then you cannot see the reflection. The reflection disappears.

All scriptures, at the most, can train and discipline your intelligence. No scripture can lead you toward the real, pure purusha – the witness, the awareness.

. . . inability to differentiate between purusha, pure consciousness, and sattva, pure intelligence . . .

That is the very cause of getting into ignorance, into the dark night, into the world, into matter, losing contact with your own reality and becoming a victim of your own ideas and projections.

. . . although they are absolutely distinct. You can see that. Even the greatest idea is different from you – you can watch it arising as an object inside you. Even the greatest idea remains a thing within you and you remain far away from it, a watcher on the hill looking down at the idea. Never get identified with any object.

Performing samyama on the self-interest brings knowledge of the purusha separated from the knowledge of others – Svartha samyamat purusha gyanam.

Patanjali is saying, “Selfishness brings the absolute knowledge” – svartha. Become selfish, that is the very core of religion. Try to see what your real self-interest is, where your real self is. Try to distinguish yourself from others – “pararth,” from the others.

And don’t think that the people who are outside you are the others. They are others, but your body is also the other. It will return to the earth one day; it is part of the earth. Your breathing is also the other; it will return to the air. It is just given to you for the time being. You have borrowed it; it will have to be returned. You will not be here, but your breath will be here in the air. You will not be here, but your body will lie down in deep sleep in the earth – dust unto dust. That which you think of as your blood will be flowing into rivers. Everything will go back.

But one thing you have not borrowed from anybody: that’s your witnessing, that’s your sakshi bhav, the awareness.

Intellect will disappear, reasoning will disappear. All these things are like formations of clouds in the sky: they come together, they disappear, but the sky remains. You will remain as a vast space. That vast space is purusha – the inner sky is purusha.

How to come to know it? Samyama on the self-interest. Bring your concentration, dharana; your contemplation, dhyan; your ecstasy, samadhi; bring all the three to your self-interest – turn in. In the West people are turning “on” – then you turn out. Turn in. Just bring your consciousness to a focus, to who you are. Differentiate between the objects. Hunger arises – this is an object. Then you are satisfied, you have eaten well, a certain well-being arises – that too is an object. Morning comes – that too is an object. Evening comes – that too is an object. You remain the same – hunger or no hunger. Life or death, misery or happiness, you remain the same watcher.

But even in looking at a movie you get caught. You know well there is only a white screen and nothing else and shadows are moving on it, but have you watched people sitting in a movie house? A few start crying when something tragic is happening on the screen. Their tears start coming. Just see: there is nothing real on the screen, but the tears are very real. The unreal is bringing tears? People reading a story in a book become so excited. Or seeing a picture of a nude woman become sexually aroused. Just see, there is nothing. Just a few lines – nothing else. Just a little ink spread on the paper. But their sexual arousal is very real.

This is the tendency of the mind: to get caught with the objects, become identified with them.

Catch yourself red handed as many times as you can. Again and again, catch yourself red handed and drop the object. Suddenly you will feel a coolness, all excitement gone. The moment you realize there is only the screen and nothing else, for what am I getting so much excited, for what . . . The whole world is a screen, and all that you are seeing there are your own desires projected; and whatsoever you want, you start projecting and believing. This whole world is a fantasy. And remember, you all don’t live in the same world. Everybody has his own world because his fantasies are different from the others. The truth is one; fantasies are as many as there are minds. If you are in a fantasy, you cannot meet the other person, you cannot communicate with the other.

He is in his fantasy. That is what is happening: when people want to relate, they cannot relate. Somehow, they miss each other. Lovers, wives, friends, husbands, miss each other, they go on missing. And they are very much worried over why they cannot communicate. They wanted to say something, but the other understands something else. And they go on saying, “I never meant this,” but the other goes on hearing something else.

What is happening? The other lives in his fantasy; you live in your own fantasy. He is projecting some other film on the same screen; you are projecting some other film on the same screen. That’s why a relationship becomes such an anxiety, anguish. One feels [to be] alone is to be good and happy, and whenever you move with somebody, you start getting into a mire, into a hell. When Sartre says, he says through his experience: “The other is hell.” But the other is not creating the hell; just two fantasies clashing, just two worlds of dreams clashing.

Communication is possible only when you have dropped your fantasy world and the other has dropped his fantasy world. Then two beings face each other – and they are not two because the twoness drops with the world of fantasy. Then they are one.

When a buddha faces somebody who is also a buddha, they are not two. That’s why two buddhas have not been known to talk to each other – there are not two persons to talk. They remain quiet; they remain silent. There are stories that when Mahavir and Buddha were alive . . . They were contemporaries, and they moved, wandered, in the same small province of Bihar; it is called Bihar because of these two people: bihar means wandering. Because these two persons wandered all over the place, it became known as the province of their wandering – but they never met. Many times, they were in the same town; the place is not very big. Many times, they stayed in the same place, a small village. Once it happened that they stayed in the same serai, in the same dharmasala, but they never met.

Now a problem arises: Why? And if you ask Buddhists or Jains why they didn’t meet, they feel a little embarrassed. The question seems embarrassing because that simply shows maybe they were very egoistic? Who should go to whom? Buddha to Mahavir or Mahavir to Buddha? Nobody can do that. So Jains and Buddhists avoid the question – they have never answered. But I know: the reason is there were not two persons to meet. It is not a question of egoism. Simply, there were not two persons to meet! Two emptinesses staying in the same serai, so what to do? How to bring them together? And even if you bring them together, they will not be two. There will be only one emptiness. When two zeros meet, it becomes one zero.

Performing samyama on the self interest brings knowledge of the purusha separated from the knowledge of others.

Tatah pratibha sravana vedan adarsh asvada varta jayante.

From this follow intuitional hearing, touching, seeing, tasting, and smelling.

Again the word pratibha has to be understood. One who attains to pure attention, to pure awareness, to pure inner clarity, innocence, attains to pratibha. Pratibha is not intuition. Intellect is sun-oriented; intuition is moon-oriented; pratibha is beyond both. Man remains an intellectual, woman intuitional, but the Buddha – purusha, one who has attained, is neither man nor woman. […]

Woman has to flower in her moonhood as man has to flower in his sunhood, but pratibha is beyond both. Intellect is psychological, intuition parapsychological, pratibha para psychological.

From this follows intuitional hearing, touching, seeing, tasting, and smelling.

Remember this, that it can happen on two levels. If you are a moon person, a feminine person – maybe man or woman, that doesn’t make any difference – if you function from the moon center, you will be able to hear many things which others cannot hear and you will be able to see many things which others cannot see. You will become perceptive of the hidden. The hidden dimension will be not so hidden for you; the secret will become a little open for you.

That’s what is being studied by parapsychology. Now it is gaining momentum; a few universities of the world have opened parapsychological departments. Much research work is being done, even in Soviet Russia. Because man has failed in a way. The sun center has failed. We have lived through that sun center for thousands of years; it brings only violence, war, misery. Now the other center has to be tackled.

Even in Soviet Russia, which is dominated by the sun center, by the communists, who don’t believe in any possibility of the beyond, even they are trying. And they have done much work, and they have discovered much. Of course, they interpret it in terms of intellect – -they don’t call it “extrasensory,” they don’t call it “parapsychological.” They say, “This is also sensory, only refined.” Eyes can become more refined and they can see things which ordinarily cannot be seen. For example, eyes can see your inner body just as an X-ray can see it. If the X-ray can see it, then the eye can also see it; one just needs to train the eyes.

And in a way they are right. Intuition is not beyond the senses; it is a refinement of sense. Pratibha is beyond the senses – it is non-sensory, it is immediate, the senses are dropped. This is the yoga standpoint, that within you, you are all knowing – all knowingness is your very nature. In fact, you think that you see through the eyes; yoga says you are not seeing through the eyes – you are being blinded by the eyes. Let me explain it to you.

You are standing in a room and you are looking outside from a small hole. Of course, in a room you will feel that that small hole gives at least a certain knowledge to you about the world outside. You may become focused on it. You may think without this hole it will be impossible to see. Yoga says you are getting into a very, very erroneous attitude. This hole allows you to see, but this hole is not the cause of seeing – seeing is your quality. You are seeing through the hole; the hole is not seeing.

You are the seer. You are looking through the eyes into the world; you are looking at me. Your eyes are just the holes in the body, but you are the seer inside. If you can get out of the body, the same will happen as will happen if you can open the door and can come out into the open sky. Because of the hole being lost, you will not become blind. In fact, then you will understand that the hole was blinding you. It was giving you a very limited vision. Now open, under the sky, you can see the whole in a total, instantaneous vision, altogether. Now your vision is not linear, and your vision is not limited, because there is no window to it. You have come under the sky: you can see all around.

The same is the standpoint of yoga, and [it is] true. The body is giving only small holes to you: from the ears you can hear, from the eyes you can see, from the tongue you can taste, from the nose you can smell. Small holes, and you are hiding behind. Yoga says, come out, get out, go beyond. Get out of these holes, and you will become all-knowing, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. This is pratibha.

From this follows . . . the hearing that is of the beyond, the hearing that is not through the intellect nor through the intuition but through pratibha; and [so with] touching and seeing and tasting and smelling.

Remember it, that one who has achieved lives life in its totality for the first time. The Upanishads say, “ten tyakten bhunjitha” – “Those who have renounced, only they have indulged.” Very paradoxical. “Those who have renounced, only they have known and experienced and enjoyed, indulged.” Your limitation in the body is making you impoverished. Getting up beyond the body, you will become richer. One who has attained is not poorer – he becomes tremendously rich. He becomes a god.

So yoga is not against the world. In fact, you are against the world. And yoga is not against bliss – you are against bliss. And yoga wants you to drop the world so all limitations can be dropped and you can become unlimited in your being, in your experiencing.

These are powers when the mind is turned outward, but obstacles in the way of samadhi.

But Patanjali is always aware to tell you again and again – he goes on hammering the point to hit it home – that even these powers, of immediate hearing, listening, tasting, smelling, touching – remember, they are powers if you are going outward, but if you want to go in, they become hindrances. All powers become hindrances when one is going in.

The person who is going out is going through the moon and to the sun and to the world. And the person who is going in, his energy is moving from the sun to the moon and from the moon to the beyond. Their target and goals are totally different, diametrically opposite.

It happens then, sometimes you start feeling the first glimpse of pratibha, of the beyond, and you become so powerful – you are filled with power, you are power – and in that moment you can fall again. Power corrupts; you can fall. You can get into the head so much, you can get into the ego so much, that you would like to have a ride on it – the power. You would like to do miracles or other foolish things.

All miracle mongers are in a way foolish – whatsoever they say. They may say that they are doing these miracles to help people. They are not helping anybody; they are simply harming themselves – and harming others also. Because in doing such things they are falling below the beyond. And then their whole thing becomes just a trickery. There are tricks of the parapsychic, of the intuitional, of the moon world, which once you know them, you can play around. They are tricks still, and the ego can again use those tricks. […]

Patanjali says, “These are powers when the mind is turned outward, but obstacles in the way of samadhi.” If you want to attain to the ultimate, you have to lose all. You have to lose all! This is the way of the real seeker: whatsoever he gains, he goes and sacrifices it to God. He says, “You have given it to me, but what am I going to do with it? I put it again back at your feet.” He goes on sacrificing whatsoever he attains, and he remains always empty of attainment. That is spirituality: to remain always empty of attainment, and whatsoever comes by the way, one goes on sacrificing it. […]

Whatsoever comes on your way of inner growth . . . and much comes. Every moment is a new discovery on the inner path; every moment something suddenly falls in your hands – you had not even imagined; you have never asked for it. Millions are the gifts of the path, but only the one reaches to the end who goes on offering those gifts back to God. Otherwise, if you start clinging to the gift, then and there your progress stops. Then and there your growth stops. Then and there you make an abode and start living there.

Te samadhav upasarga vyuthane siddhayah.

If you want samadhi, the ultimate peace, the ultimate silence, the ultimate truth, then never get attached to any attainment whatsoever – worldly, other worldly, psychological, parapsychological, intellectual, intuitive, whatsoever. Never get attached to any attainment. Go on offering it to God, go on offering it to God . . . and more will be coming! Go on offering it to God.

When you have offered all, God comes. When you have offered all, given it back to him, he comes as the last gift. God is the last gift.

-Osho

From Secrets of Yoga; Yoga: The Science of the Soul, V.8, Discourse #7 (Previously titled Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, V.8).

This discourse is the Listening Meditation in the sixteenth program of the module, Osho Yoga and the Discipline of Transformation, one of several modules in A Course in Witnessing.

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 in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Sudden Enlightenment and its Obstacles – Osho

You said that either one sees the world or the Brahman and that no gradually increasing perception of the Brahman is possible. But in experience we feel that as we become aware and more silent and still, the feeling of the divine presence becomes gradually clearer and clearer. What is this gradual growth and clarity if the authentic experience is never gradual, but sudden?

This has been a very ancient problem: “Is enlightenment sudden or gradual?” Many things have to be understood. There has been a tradition which says that enlightenment is gradual and that everything can be divided into degrees, everything can be divided into steps – that like anything else, knowledge can also be divided; you can become more and more wise, you can become more and more enlightened. This has been widely accepted because the human mind cannot conceive of anything sudden. Mind wants to divide, analyze. Mind is a divider. Degrees can be understood by the mind, but suddenness is non-mental – beyond mind.

If I say to you that you are ignorant and that gradually you will become wise, this is comprehensible, you can comprehend it. If I say to you, “No, there is no gradual growth. Either you are ignorant, or you become enlightened, there is a sudden jump,” then the question arises of how to become enlightened. If there were no gradualness, there could be no progress. If there were no degree of growth, no degrees, then you could not make progress, you could not proceed. From where to begin? In a sudden explosion, the beginning and the end are both the same. There is no gap between the beginning and the end, so from where to begin? The beginning is the end. It becomes a puzzle for the mind, it becomes a koan. But sudden enlightenment seems to be impossible. It is not that it is impossible, but that the mind cannot conceive of it. And remember, how can the mind conceive of enlightenment? It cannot. It has been widely accepted that this inner explosion is also gradual growth. Even many enlightened persons have conceded that to your minds, and they have said, “Yes, there is a gradual growth.”

It is not that there is. They have said it and accepted your attitude, your way of perception. They have been in a deep compassion for you. They know that if you start thinking that it is gradual, the start will be good, but there will be no gradual growth. But if you start, if you go on seeking it, someday the sudden thing will happen to you. And if it is said that enlightenment is only sudden and no gradual growth is possible, you are not even going to start, and it will never happen. Many enlightened persons have said that enlightenment is a gradual thing just to help you, just to persuade you to start.

Something is possible through gradual process, but not enlightenment – not enlightenment, something else. And that something else becomes helpful. For example, if you are making water to evaporate it, heating it, evaporation will come suddenly. At a certain point, at a hundred degrees, evaporation will happen – suddenly! There will be no gradual growth between water and vapor. You cannot divide; you cannot say that this water is a little vapor and a little water. Either it is water, or it is all vapor. Suddenly the water jumps into the state of vapor. There is a jump – not gradual growth. But by heating you are gradually giving heat to the water. You are helping it to reach the hundred-degree point, the evaporating point. This is a natural growth. Up to the evaporating point, the water will grow in the sense of being more and more hot. Then evaporation will happen suddenly.

So there have been masters who were wise, compassionate, who used the language of the human mind which you can understand, telling you, “Yes, there is a gradual growth.” It gives you courage and confidence and hope, and a possibility that it can happen to you also. You cannot attain in a sudden explosion, but by and by, step by step, with your limitations, with your weaknesses, you can grow to it. It may take many lives, but still there is hope. You will just get heated by all your efforts.

The second thing to remember: even hot water is still water. So even if you become more clear in your mind, more pure in your perceptions, more moral, more centered, you are still man, not a buddha, not enlightened. You become more silent, more still, calmer. You feel a deep bliss, but still, you are a man, and your feelings are really negative, not positive.

You feel calm because you are now less tense. You feel blissful because now you are clinging less to your miseries; you are not creating them. You feel collected. It is not that you have come to realize the one, but only because now you are less divided. Remember this: your growth is negative. You are just hot water. The possibility is there that at any moment you will come to the point where evaporation happens. When it happens, you will not feel calmness, you will not even feel blissful, you will not feel silent, because these attributes are relative to their opposites. When you are tense, you can feel silence. When you feel noise, you can feel stillness. When you are divided, fragmentary, you can feel oneness. When you are in suffering, anguish, you can feel bliss.

That is why Buddha was silent – because language cannot now express that which is beyond polarities. He cannot say, “Now I am filled with bliss,” because even this feeling that “Now I am filled with bliss” is possible only with a background of suffering and anguish. You can feel health only with a background of illness and disease; you can feel life only with a background of death. Buddha cannot say, “Now I am deathless,” because death has disappeared so completely that deathlessness cannot be felt.

If the misery has disappeared so completely, how can you feel blissful? If the noise and the anguish are so absolutely non-existent, how can you feel silence? All these experiences, feelings, are related to their opposites. Without their opposites they cannot be felt. If darkness disappears completely, how can you feel light? It is impossible.

Buddha cannot say, “I have become light!” He cannot say, “Now I am filled with light.” If he says such things, we will say he is not yet a buddha. He cannot utter such things. Darkness must be there if you want to feel light; death must be there if you want to feel deathlessness. You cannot avoid the opposite. It is a basic necessity for any experience to exist. So what is Buddha’s experience? Whatsoever we know, it is not that. It is neither negative nor positive, neither this nor that. And whatsoever can be expressed, it is not that.

That is why Lao Tzu insists so much that truth cannot be said, and the moment you say it you have falsified it. Already it is untrue. Truth cannot be said because of this: it cannot be divided into polar opposites, and language is meaningful only with polar opposites. Language becomes meaningless otherwise. Without the contrary, language loses meaning.

So there is a tradition which says that enlightenment is gradual, but that tradition is not really the truth. It is just a half-truth uttered in compassion for human minds. Enlightenment is sudden, and it cannot be otherwise. It is a jump! It is a discontinuity from your past! Try to understand: if something is gradual, the past goes on remaining in it. If something is gradual, then there is a continuity.

There is no gap. If from ignorance to knowledge there is gradual growth, the ignorance cannot completely disappear. It will remain, it will continue, because there has been no discontinuity, there has been no gap. So the ignorance may become more polished, the ignorance may become more knowledgeable. The ignorance may appear wise, but it is there. The more polished it is, then, of course, the more dangerous. The more knowledgeable it is, then the more cunning one is and the more capable of deceiving oneself.

Enlightenment and ignorance are absolutely separate, discontinuous. A jump is needed – a jump in which the past dissolves completely. The old is gone; it is no more, and the new has appeared which was never there before.

Buddha is reported to have said, “I am not that one who was seeking. The one who has appeared now never was before.” This looks absurd, illogical, but it is so. It is so! Buddha says, “I am not he who was seeking; I am not he who was desiring enlightenment; I am not he who was ignorant. The old man is dead completely. I am a new one. I never existed in that old man. There has been a gap. The old has died and the new is born.”

For the mind to conceive of this is difficult. How can you conceive of it? How can you conceive of a gap? Something must continue. How can something disappear completely and something new appear? It was absurd for logical minds, it was absurd for scientific minds, just two decades before. But now, for science, it is not absurd. Now they say that deep down in the atom electrons appear and disappear, and they take jumps. From one point the electron takes a jump to another; in between the two it is not. It appears at point A, then disappears and reappears at point B, and within the gap it is no more. It is not there. It becomes absolutely non-existent.

If this is so, it means that non-existence is also a sort of existence. It is difficult to conceive of, but it is so: non-existence is also a sort of existence. It is as if something moves from the visible to the invisible, as if something moves from form to formlessness.

When Gautam Siddharth, the old man who died in Gautam Buddha, was seeking, he was a visible form. When the enlightenment happened, that form completely dissolved into the formless. For a moment there was a gap; there was no one. Then from that formlessness a new form arose.

This was Gautam Buddha. Because the body continues in the same way, we think that there is a continuity, but the inner reality changes completely. Because the body continues in the same way, that is why we say “Gautam Buddha” – that “Gautam Siddharth has now become Gautam the awakened; he has become a buddha.” But Buddha himself says, “I am not he who was seeking. I am a totally different one.”

It is difficult for the mind to conceive of this – and for the mind many things are difficult, but they cannot be denied just because they are difficult for the mind. The mind has to yield to those impossibilities which are incomprehensible to it. Sex cannot yield to the mind; the mind has to yield to sex. This is one of the most basic inner facts – that enlightenment is a discontinuous phenomenon. The old simply disappears and the new is born.

There has been another tradition, a later tradition, of those who have been insisting all through history that Enlightenment is sudden – that it is not gradual. But those who belong to it are very few. They stick to the truth, but they are bound to be very few because no following can be created if sudden Enlightenment is the case. You simply cannot understand it, so how can you follow it? It is shocking to the logical structure, and it seems absurd, impossible. But remember one thing: then you move into deeper realms. Whether of matter or of mind, you will have to encounter many things of which a superficial mind cannot conceive. […]

This is beautiful. If you want to move away from your mind, you will need something of which your mind cannot conceive. If your mind can conceive of it, it will absorb it into its own system, and then you cannot transcend your mind. That is why every religion has insisted on some point which is absurd. No religion can exist without some absurdity just as a foundation in it. From that absurdity you either turn back and say, “I cannot believe so I will go away.” Then you remain yourself – or you take a jump, you turn away from your mind. And unless your mind is killed the enlightenment cannot happen.

Your mind is the problem, your logic is the problem, your arguments are the problem.

They are on the surface. They look true, but they deceive. They are not true. For example, look how the mind’s structure functions. The mind divides everything in two, and nothing is divisible. Existence is indivisible; you cannot divide it – but mind goes on dividing it. It says that “this” is life, and “this” is death. What is the actual fact? The actual fact is that both are the same. You are both alive and dying this very moment; you are doing both. Rather, you are both – death and life.

Mind divides. It says, “this” is death, and “this” is life. Not only does it divide; it says that both are opposites, enemies, and that death is trying to destroy life. And it looks okay: death is “trying to destroy life.” But if you penetrate deeper, deeper than the mind, death is not trying to destroy life!

You cannot exist without death. Death is helping you to exist. It is every moment helping you to exist. If for a single moment death stops working, you will die.

Death is every moment throwing away many parts in you which have become non-functional. Many cells die; they are removed by death. When they are removed, new ones are born. You are growing: something is dying and something is being born continuously. Every moment there is death and life, and both are functioning. In language I have to call them both, two. They are not two; they are two aspects of one phenomenon. Life and death are one; “life-death” is a process. But mind divides.

That division looks okay for us, but that division is false.

You say “this” is light and “that” is dark; you divide. But where does darkness start and where does light end? Can you demarcate them? You cannot demark them. Actually, whiteness and blackness are two poles of a long greyness, and that greyness is life. On one pole blackness appears and, on another pole, whiteness appears, but the reality is grey, and that grey contains both in itself. Mind divides and then everything looks clear-cut. Life is very confusing; that is why life is a mystery.

And because of this, mind cannot understand life. It is helpful to create clear-cut concepts. You can think easily, conveniently, but you miss the very reality of life. Life is a mystery, and mind demystifies everything. Then you have dead fragments, not the whole.

With the mind you will not be able to conceive of how enlightenment is sudden, how you will disappear and something new will be there which you had never known before. But don’t try to understand through mind. Rather, practice something which will make you more and more hot.

Rather, try to attain some fire which will make you more and more hot. And then one day suddenly you will know that the old has disappeared; the water is no more. This is a new phenomenon. You have evaporated, and everything has changed totally.

Water was always flowing downwards, and after evaporation the new phenomenon is rising upwards.

The whole law has changed. You have heard about one law, Newton’s law of gravity, which says that the earth attracts everything downwards. But the law of gravity is only one law. There is another law. You may not have heard about it because science has yet to uncover it, but yoga and tantra have known it for centuries. They call it levitation. Gravity is the pull downwards and levitation is the pull upwards.

The story of how the law of gravity was discovered is well known. Newton was sitting under a tree, under an apple tree, and then one apple fell down. Because of this he started thinking, and he felt that something is pulling the apple downwards. Tantra and yoga ask, “How did the apple reach upwards in the first place? How?” That must be explained first – how the apple reached the upward position, how the tree is growing upwards. The apple was not there; it was hidden in a seed, and then the apple traveled the whole journey. It reached the upward position and only then did it fall down. So gravity is a secondary law. Levitation was there first. Something was pulling the apple upwards. What is that?

In life we easily know gravity because we are all pulled downwards. The water flows downwards; it is under the law of gravity. When it evaporates, suddenly the law also evaporated. Now it is under levitation, it rises upwards.

Ignorance is under the law of gravity: you always move downwards, and whatsoever you do makes no difference. You have to move downwards. In every way you will have to move downwards, and struggle alone will not be of much help unless you enter a different law – the law of levitation. That is what samadhi is – the door for levitation. Once you evaporate, once you are no more water, everything changes. It is not that now you can control: there is no need to control, you simply cannot flow downwards now. As it was impossible before to rise upwards, now it is impossible to flow downwards.

It is not that a buddha tries to be non-violent; he cannot do otherwise. It is not that he tries to be loving; he cannot do otherwise. He has to be loving. That is not a choice, not an effort, not any cultivated virtue, it is simply that now this is the law: he rises upwards. Hate is under the law of gravity; love is under levitation.

This sudden transformation doesn’t mean that you are not to do anything and that you are simply to wait for the sudden transformation. Then it will never come. This is the puzzle. When I say – or someone else says – that enlightenment is sudden; we think that if it is sudden nothing can be done that we must simply wait. When it happens, it will happen, so what can one do? If it is gradual, you can do something.

But I say to you that it is not gradual, and yet you can do something. And you have to do something, but that something will not bring you enlightenment. That something will bring you near the phenomenon of enlightenment. That something will make you open for the phenomenon of enlightenment to happen. So enlightenment cannot be an outcome of your efforts; it is not. Through your efforts you simply become available for the higher law of levitation. Your availability will come through your effort, not enlightenment. You will become open, you will become non-resistant, you will become cooperative for the higher law to work. And once you are cooperative and non-resistant, the higher law starts functioning. Your efforts will yield you; your efforts will make you more receptive.

It is just like this: you are sitting in your room with closed doors. The sun is outside, but you are in darkness. You cannot do anything to bring the sun in, but if you simply open the doors your room becomes available. You cannot bring the sun in, but you can block it out. If you open your doors, the sun will enter, the waves will come; the light will come into the room.

You are not really bringing the light; you are simply removing the hindrance. The light comes by itself. Understand it deeply: you cannot do anything to reach enlightenment, but you are doing many things to hinder it – to hinder it from reaching to you. You are creating many barriers, so you can only do something negatively: you can throw the barriers; you can open the doors. The moment the doors are open, the rays will enter, the light will touch you and transform you.

All effort in this sense is to destroy the barriers, not to attain enlightenment. All effort is negative. It is just like medicine. The medicine cannot give you health; it can only destroy your diseases. Once the diseases are not there, health happens; you become available. If diseases are there, health cannot happen. […]

Diseases can be treated, destroyed. Barriers are broken and the light enters. Similar is the phenomenon of enlightenment. It is a spiritual health. Mind is a spiritual disease, and meditation is nothing but medicine. […]

Destroy the barriers. What are the barriers? Thinking is the basic barrier. When you think, a barrier of thoughts is created. Between you and the reality a wall of thoughts is created, and thoughts are more dense than any stone wall can be. And then there are many layers of thought. You cannot penetrate through them and see what the real is. You go on thinking about what the real is and you go on imagining what the real is, and the real is here and now waiting for you. If you become available to it, it will happen to you. You go on thinking about what the real is, but how can you think if you don’t know?

You cannot think about something which you don’t know; you can only think about something which you already know. Thinking is repetitious, tautological; it never reaches to anything new and unknown. Through thinking you never touch the unknown; you only touch the known, and it is meaningless because you already know it. You can go on feeling it again and again; you may enjoy the feeling, but nothing new comes out of it.

Stop thinking. Dissolve thinking, and the barrier is broken. Then your doors are open, and the light can enter. And once the light enters, you know that the old is no more. You know now that that which you are is absolutely the new. It never was before; you had never known it; but you may even say that this is the “ancient-most” – it was there always, not known to you.

You can use both expressions; they mean the same. You can call it the “ancient-most” – the brahman who has always been there, and you can say that you were missing it continuously.

Or you can say that this is the newest – that which has happened only now and never was before.

That too is right because for you this is the new. If you want to speak about the truth, you will have to use paradoxical expressions. The Upanishads say, “This is the new and this is the old. This is the most ancient and this is the newest. It is the far and the near both.” But then language becomes paradoxical, contradictory.

And you ask me, “What is this gradual growth and clarity if the authentic experience is never gradual, but sudden?” This clarity is of the mind; this clarity is of a lessening of disease; this clarity is of the falling of barriers. If one barrier falls you are less burdened, your eyes are less clouded. If another barrier falls you are still more unburdened, your eyes become still more clear. But this clarity is not of enlightenment; this clarity is only of a lessening disease, not of health. When all barriers disappear, with those barriers your mind also disappears.

Then you cannot say, “Now my mind is clear, it is no more.” Then you simply say, “Now there is no mind.” When there is no mind, then the clarity is of enlightenment. Then the clarity is of enlightenment! That is absolutely different. Then another dimension has opened. But you will have to pass through clarities of mind. Remember always that no matter how clear your mind becomes, it is still a barrier.

No matter how transparent your mind becomes, even if it becomes a transparent glass and you can look to the other side, still it is a barrier, and you will have to break it completely. So sometimes it happens that when one is meditating one becomes more and more clear, more sane, more still; silence is felt. Then one clings to meditation and thinks that everything is achieved. Great masters have always been emphasizing that a day comes when you have to throw your meditation also. […]

You cannot understand it right now. Krishnamurti goes on saying that there is no need of any meditation, and he is right. But he is talking to wrong persons. He is right; there is no need for any meditation, but he is wrong because of to whom he is saying this. Those who cannot even understand what meditation is, how can they understand that there is no need for any meditation?

This is going to be harmful for them because they will cling to this idea. They will feel that this idea is very good, there is no need of meditation, so “We are already enlightened.”

Listening to Krishnamurti, many feel that now there is no need of meditation and that those who are meditating are foolish. They may waste their whole life because of this thought, and this thought is right. There comes a point when meditation has to be thrown; there comes a point when meditation becomes a barrier. But wait for this point to come. You cannot throw something which you don’t have. Krishnamurti says, “No need of meditation; don’t meditate.” But you have never meditated, so how can you say, “Don’t meditate”?

A rich man can renounce his riches, not a poor man. To renounce you need something to renounce in the first place. If you meditate, you can renounce it one day – and that is the last renunciation, and that is the greatest. Wealth can he renounced; it is easy. Family can be renounced; it is not difficult.

The whole world can be renounced because everything is outer and outer and outer. The last thing is meditation, the innermost wealth. And when you renounce it, you have renounced yourself. Then no self remains – not even the meditating self, the great meditator. Even that image is broken. You have fallen into nothingness. Only in this nothingness, the discontinuity. The old has disappeared and the new has happened. You become available through meditation.

Whatsoever is felt through meditation, don’t think that it is enlightenment. These are just glimpses of a lessening disease, of a dispersing disease. You feel good. The disease is less, so you feel relatively healthy. Real health is not yet there, but you are more healthy than before, and it is good to be more healthy than before.

-Osho

From The Book of Secrets, Discourse #40, Q1

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 in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

The Cloud Which Showers Virtue – Osho

One who is able to maintain a constant state of desirelessness, even towards the most exalted states of enlightenment, and is able to exercise the highest kind of discrimination, enters the state known as ‘the cloud which showers virtue’.

One who is able to maintain a constant state of desirelessness even towards the most exalted states of enlightenment…

Patanjali calls it paravairagya: the ultimate renunciation. You have renounced the world: you have renounced greed, you have renounced money, you have renounced power; you have renounced everything of the outside. You have even renounced your body, you have even renounced your mind, but the last renunciation is the kaivalya renunciation of kaivalya itself, of moksha itself, of nirvana itself. Now you renounce even the idea of liberation, because that too is a desire. And desire, whatsoever its object, is the same. You desire money, I desire moksha. Of course, my object is better than your object, but still my desire is the same as yours. Desire says, “I am not content as I am. More money is needed; then I will be contented. More liberation is needed; then I will be contented.” The quality of desire is the same; the problem of desire is the same. The problem is that the future is needed: “As I am, it is not enough; something more is needed. Whatsoever has happened to me is not enough. Something still has to happen to me; only then can I be happy.” This is the nature of desire: you need more money, somebody needs a bigger house, somebody thinks of more power, politics, somebody thinks of a better wife or a better husband, somebody thinks of more education, more knowledge, somebody thinks of more miraculous powers, but it makes no difference. Desire is desire, and desirelessness is needed.

Now the paradox: if you are absolutely desireless – and in absolute desirelessness, the desire of moksha is included – a moment comes when you don’t desire even moksha, you don’t desire even God. You simply don’t desire; you are, and there is no desire. This is the state of desirelessness. Moksha happens in this state. Moksha cannot be desired, by its very nature, because it comes only in desirelessness. Liberation cannot be desired. It cannot become a motive because it happens only when all motives have disappeared. You cannot make God an object of your desire because the desiring mind remains ungodly. The desiring mind remains unholy; the desiring mind remains worldly. When there is no desire, not even the desire for God, suddenly He has always been there. Your eyes open and you recognize Him.

Desires function as barriers. And the last desire, the most subtle desire, is the desire to be liberated. The last, subtle desire is the desire to be desireless.

One who is able to maintain a constant state of desirelessness, even towards the most exalted states of enlightenment, and is able to exercise the highest kind of discrimination…

Of course, the ultimate in discrimination will be needed. You will have to be aware – so much so that this very, very deep desire of becoming free of all misery, of becoming free of all bondage, even this desire does not arise. Your awareness is so perfect that not even a small corner is left dark inside your being. You are full of light, illuminated with awareness. That’s why when Buddha is asked again and again, “What happens to a man who becomes enlightened?” he remains silent. He never answers. Again and again he is asked, “Why don’t you answer?” He says, “If I answer, you will create a desire for it, and that will become a barrier. Let me keep quiet. Let me remain silent so I don’t give you a new object for desire. If I say, ‘It is satchitananda: it is truth, it is consciousness, it is bliss,’ immediately a desire will arise in you. If I talk about that ecstatic state of being in God, immediately your greed takes it. Suddenly, a desire starts arising in you. Your mind starts saying, ‘Yes, you have to seek it, you have to find it. This has to be searched. Whatsoever the cost, but you have to become blissful.’” Buddha says, “I don’t say anything about it, because whatsoever I say, your mind will jump on it and make a desire out of it, and that will become the cause, and you will never be able to attain it.”

Buddha insisted that there is no moksha. He insisted that when a man becomes aware, he simply disappears. He disappears as when you blow out a lamp and the light disappears. The word “nirvana” simply means blowing a lamp out. Then you don’t ask where the flame has gone, what has happened to the flame; it simply disappears – annihilated. Buddha insisted that there is nothing left; when you have become enlightened everything disappears, like the flame of a lamp put out. Why? – Looks very negative – but he does not want to give you an object of desire. Then people started asking, “Then why should we try for such a state? Then it is better to be in the world. At least we are; miserable – but at least we are; in anguish – but we are. And your state of nothingness has no appeal for us.”

In India, Buddhism disappeared; in China, in Burma, in Ceylon, in Japan, it reappeared, but it never appeared in its purity again because Buddhists learned a lesson: that man lives through desire. If they insist that there is nothing beyond enlightenment and everything disappears, then people are not going to follow them. Then everything will remain as it is; only their religion will disappear. So they learned a trick, and in Japan, in China, in Ceylon, in Burma, they started talking of beautiful states after enlightenment. They betrayed Buddha. The purity was lost; then religion spread. Buddhism became one of the great religions of the world. They learned the politics of the human mind. They fulfilled your desire. They said, “Yes… Lands of tremendous beauty, Buddhalands, heavenly lands where eternal bliss reigns.” They started talking in positive terms. Again people’s greeds were inflamed, desire arose. People started following Buddhism, but Buddhism lost its beauty. Its beauty was in its insistence that it would not give you any object for desire.

Patanjali has written the best that it is possible to write about the ultimate truth, but no religion has arisen around him, no established church exists around him. Such a great teacher, such a great Master has remained really without a following. Not a single temple is devoted to him. What happened? His Yoga Sutras are read, commented upon, but nothing like Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, exists with Patanjali. Why? – Because he will not give any hope to you. He will not give any help to your desire.

Dharma megha samadhi: this word has to be understood. It is very complex. And so many commentaries have been written on Patanjali, but it seems they go on missing the point. Dharma megha samadhi means: a moment comes when every desire has disappeared. When even the self is no more desired, when death is not feared, virtue showers on you – as if a cloud gathers around your head, and a beautiful shower of virtue, a benediction, a great blessing…. But why does Patanjali call it ‘cloud’? – One has to go even beyond that; it is still a cloud. Before, your eyes were full of vice, now your eyes are full of virtue, but you are still blind. Before, nothing but misery was showering on you, just a hell was showering on you; now, you have entered heaven and everything is perfectly beautiful, there is nothing to complain about, but still it is a cloud. Maybe it is a white cloud, not a black cloud, but still it is a cloud – and one has to go beyond it also. That’s why he calls it ‘cloud’.

That is the last barrier, and of course it is very beautiful because it is of virtue. It is like golden chains studded with diamonds. They are not like ordinary chains; they look very ornamental. They are more like ornaments than chains. One would like to cling to them. Who would not like to have a tremendous happiness showering on oneself, a non-ending happiness? Who would not like to be in this ecstasy forever and ever? But this too is a cloud – white, beautiful, but still the real sky is hidden behind it.

There is a possibility from this exalted point to still fall back. If you become too attached to dharma megha samadhi, if you become too much attached, you start enjoying it too much and you don’t discriminate that “I am also not this,” there is a possibility that you will come back.

In Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, only two states exist: hell and heaven. This is what Christians call heaven, what Patanjali calls dharma megha samadhi. In the West, no religion has risen beyond that. In India we have three terms: hell, heaven and moksha. Hell is absolute misery; heaven is absolute happiness; moksha is beyond both: neither hell nor heaven. In Western language, there exists not a single term equivalent to moksha. Christianity stops at heaven – dharma megha samadhi. Who bothers anymore to go beyond it? It is so beautiful. And you have lived in so much misery for so long; you would like to remain there forever and ever. But Patanjali says, “If you cling to it, you slip from the last rung of the ladder. You were just close to home. One step more, and then you would have achieved the point of no return – but you slipped. You were just reaching home and you missed the path. You were just at the door – a knock and the doors would have opened – but you thought that the porch was the palace and you started living there.” Sooner or later you will even lose the porch, because the porch exists for those who are going into the palace. It cannot be made an abode. If you make an abode of it, sooner or later you will be thrown out: you are not worthy. You are like a beggar who has started to live on somebody’s porch.

If you can transcend dharma megha samadhi, if you can transcend this heavenly state, this paradise, then only… then follows freedom from afflictions and karmas. Otherwise, you will fall back into the world. Have you seen small children play a game called ludo, ladders and snakes? From the ladders they go on rising, and from the snakes they go on coming back. From point ninety-nine, if they reach a hundred they have won the game, they are victorious. But from point ninety-nine there is a snake. If you reach ninety-nine, you are suddenly back, back into the world.

-Osho

From Yoga: The Supreme Science, Discourse #9 (previously published as Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, V.10)

I have split the last sutra discourse from the Yoga series into three posts. This is the second of three. The first one is The Virtuous Circle and the third is You Are the Abode of the Ultimate.

I have also posted all three together in this post, Kaivalya.

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 in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

The Virtuous Circle – Osho

Visesa-darsinaatma-bhava-bhavanavinivrttih.

When one has seen this distinction, there is a cessation of desire for dwelling in the atma, the self.

Patanjali in this sutra says: when your awareness has become perfect, when viveka, discrimination has been achieved, when you have become a witness, a pure witness of whatsoever happens, outside you, inside you…. You are no more a doer, you are simply watching; the birds are singing outside… you watch; the blood is circulating inside… you watch; the thoughts are moving inside… you watch – you never get identified anywhere. You don’t say, “I am the body”; you don’t say, “I am the mind”; you don’t say anything. You simply go on watching without being identified with any object. You remain a pure subject; you simply remember one thing: that you are the watcher, the witness – when this witnessing is established, then the desire to be disappears.

And the moment the desire to be disappears, death also disappears. Death exists because you want to persist. Death exists because you don’t want to die. Death exists because you are struggling against the whole. The moment you are ready to die, death is meaningless; it cannot be possible now. When you are ready to die, how can you die? In the very readiness of dying, disappearing, all possibility of death is overcome. This is the paradox of religion.

Jesus says, “If you are going to cling to yourself, you will lose yourself. If you want to attain yourself, don’t cling.” Those who try to be are destroyed. Not that somebody is there destroying you; your very effort to be is destructive because the moment the idea arises: “I should persist,” you are moving against the whole. It is as if a wave is trying to be against the ocean. Now the very effort is going to create worry and misery, and one moment will come when the wave will have to disappear. But now, because the wave was fighting against the ocean, the disappearance will look like death. If the wave was ready, and the wave was aware: “I’m nothing but the ocean, so what is the point in persisting? I have been always and I will be always, because the ocean has always been there and will be always there. I may not exist as a wave – wave is just the form I have taken for the moment.

The form will disappear, but not my content. I may not exist like this wave; I may exist like another wave, or I may not exist as a wave as such. I may become the very depth of the ocean where no waves arise….”

But the innermost reality is going to remain because the whole has penetrated you. You are nothing but the whole, an expression of the whole. Once awareness is established, Patanjali says, “When one has seen this distinction, that ‘I am neither this nor that’, when one has become aware and is not identified with anything whatsoever, there is a cessation of desire for dwelling in the atma, in the self.” Then the last desire disappears, and the last is the fundamental. Hence, Buddha says, “You can drop desiring money, wealth, power, prestige – that’s nothing. You can stop desiring the world – that’s nothing – because those are secondary desires. The basic desire is to be.” So people who renounce the world start desiring liberation, but liberation is also their liberation. They will remain in moksha, in a liberated state. They desire that pain should not be there. They desire that misery should not be there. They will be in absolute bliss, but they will be. The insistence is that they must be there.

Liberation is liberation from yourself. See the distinction: it is not for you; liberation is not for you. It is not that liberated you will exist. Liberated, you will disappear. Buddha said, “Only bondage exists.”

Let me try to explain it to you.

Have you ever come across health? You have been healthy many times, but can you say what health is? Only disease exists. Health is non-existential; you cannot pin-point it. If you have a headache you know it is there, but have you ever known the absence of headache? In fact, if there is no headache the head- also disappears. You don’t feel it anymore. If you go on feeling your head, that simply shows that there must be a certain tension inside, a certain stress, a strain. A sort of headache must be there continuously. If your whole body is healthy, the body disappears. You forget that the body is. In Zen, when meditators sit for many years, just sitting and doing nothing, a certain moment comes when they forget that they have bodies. That is their first satori. Not that the body is not there; body is there but there is no tension, so how to feel it? If I say something you can hear me, but if I’m silent how can you hear me? Silence is there – it has much to communicate to you – but silence cannot be heard. Sometimes when you say, “Yes, I can hear the silence,” then you are hearing some noise. Maybe it is the noise of the dark night, but it is still noise. If it is absolutely silent, you will not be able to hear it. When your body is perfectly healthy, you don’t feel it. If some tension arises in the body, some disease, some illness, then you start hearing. If everything is in harmony and there is no pain and no misery, suddenly you are empty. A nothingness overwhelms you.

Kaivalya is the ultimate health, wholeness, all wounds healed. When all wounds heal, how can you exist? The self is nothing but accumulated tensions. The self is nothing but all sorts of diseases, illnesses. The self is nothing but desires unfulfilled, hopes frustrated, expectations, dreams – all broken, fractured. It is nothing but accumulated disease, that you call ‘self’. Or take it from another side: in moments of harmony you forget that you are. Later on, you may remember how beautiful it was, how fantastic it was, how far-out. But in moments of real far-outness, you are not there. Something bigger than you has overpowered you; something higher than you has possessed you; something deeper than you has bubbled up. You have disappeared. In deep moments of love, lovers disappear. In deep moments of silence, meditators disappear. In deep moments of singing, dancing, celebration, celebrators disappear. And this is going to be the last celebration, the ultimate, the highest peak – kaivalya.

People are so much afraid of death: these are the people who have not lived. These are the people who are, in a certain sense, already dead. A person who has lived and lived totally does not think about death. If it comes, good; he will welcome. He will live that too, he will celebrate that too. Life has been such a blessing, a benediction; one is even ready to accept death. Life has been such a tremendous experience; one is ready to experience death also. One is not afraid because the tomorrow is not needed; the today has been so fulfilling. One has come to fruition, flowered, bloomed. Now the desire for tomorrow disappears. The desire for tomorrow is always out of fear, and fear is there because love has not happened. The desire to always remain simply shows that deep down you are feeling yourself completely meaningless. You are waiting for some meaning. Once the meaning has happened, you are ready to die – silently, beautifully, gracefully.

When one has seen this distinction, there is a cessation of desire for dwelling in the atma, the self.

The self is nothing but the most purified form of the ego. It is the last remnant of strain, stress, tension. You are still not perfectly open; something is still closed. When you are completely open, just a watcher on the hill, a witness, even the death desire disappears. With the disappearance of this desire, something absolutely new happens in life. A new law starts functioning. You have heard about the law of gravitation; you have not heard about the law of grace. The law of gravitation is that everything falls downwards. The law of grace is that things start falling upwards. And that law has to be there because in life everything is balanced by the opposite. Science has come to discover the law of gravitation: Newton sitting on a bench in a garden saw one apple falling – it happened or not; that is not the point – but seeing that the apple was falling down, a thought arose in him: “Why do things always fall downwards? Why not otherwise? Why doesn’t a ripe fruit fall upwards and disappear into the sky? Why not sideways? Why always downwards?” He started brooding and meditating, and then he discovered a law. He came upon, stumbled upon a very fundamental law: that the earth is gravitating things towards itself. It has a gravitation field. Like a magnet, it pulls everything downwards.

Patanjali, Buddha, Krishna, Christ – they also became aware of a different fundamental law, higher than gravitation. They became aware that there comes a moment in the inner life of consciousness when consciousness starts rising upwards – exactly like gravitation. If the apple is hanging on the tree, it does not fall. The tree helps it not to fall downwards. When the fruit leaves the tree, then it falls downwards.

Exactly the same: if you are clinging to your body you will not fall upwards; if you are clinging to your mind you will not fall upwards. If you are clinging to the idea of self, you will remain under the impact of gravitation – because body is under the impact of gravitation, and mind also. Mind is subtle body; body is gross mind. They are both under the impact of gravitation. And because you are clinging to them you are not under the impact of gravitation, but you are clinging to something which is under the impact of gravitation. It is as if you are carrying a big rock and trying to swim in a river; the rock will pull you down. It won’t allow you to swim. If you leave the rock, you will be able to swim easily.

Then God pulls you upwards. And that type of law has to be there, otherwise gravitation could not exist. In nature, if positive electricity exists, then negative electricity has to exist. Man exists, then the woman has to exist. Reason exists, then intuition has to exist. Night exists, then the day has to exist. Life exists, then death has to exist. Everything needs the opposite to balance it. Now science has become aware of one law: gravitation. Science still needs a Patanjali to give it another dimension, the dimension of falling upwards. Then life becomes complete.

When one has seen this distinction, there is a cessation of desire for dwelling in the self.

Tadahiviveka-nimnam kaivalya-pragbharam cittam.

Then the mind is inclined towards discrimination, and gravitates towards liberation.

A new gravitation starts functioning. Liberation is nothing but entering the stream of grace. You cannot liberate yourself, you can only drop the barriers; liberation happens to you. Have you seen a magnet? – small iron pieces are pulled towards it. You can see those small iron pieces rushing towards the magnet, but don’t be deceived by your eyes. In fact, they are not rushing, the magnet is pulling them. On the surface it appears that those iron filings are going, moving towards the magnet.

That is just on the surface. Deep down, something just opposite is happening: they are not moving towards the magnet, the magnet is pulling them towards itself. In fact, it is the magnet which has reached them. With the magnetic field it has approached them, touched them, pulled them. If those iron filings are free, not attached to something – not attached to a rock – then the magnet can pull them. If they are attached to a rock, the magnet will go on pulling but they will not be pulled because they are attached.

Exactly the same happens: once you discriminate that you are not the body, you are no more bound to any rock, you are no more in bondage with earth. Immediately, God’s magnet starts functioning. It is not that you reach to God. In fact, God has already reached you. You are under His magnetic field, but clinging to something. Drop that clinging and you are in the stream. Buddha used to use a word srotaapanna: falling into the stream. He used to say, “Once you fall into the stream, then the stream takes you to the ocean. Then you need not do anything.” The only thing is to jump into the stream. You are sitting on the bank. Enter the stream and then the stream will do the remaining work. It is as if you are standing on a high building, on the roof of a high building, three hundred feet or five hundred feet above the earth. You go on standing, the gravitation has reached you, but it will not work unless you jump. Once you jump, then you need not do anything. Just a step off the roof… enough; your work is finished. Now the gravitation will do all the work. You need not ask, “Now what am I supposed to do?” You have taken the first step. The first is the last step. Krishnamurti has written a book, The First and the Last Freedom. The meaning is: the first step is the last step because once you are in the stream; everything else is to be done by the stream. You are not needed. Only for the first step is your courage needed.

Then the mind is inclined towards discrimination, and gravitates towards liberation.

You start moving slowly upwards. Your life energy starts rising high – an upsurge. And it is unbelievable when it happens because it is against all the laws that you have known up to now. It is levitation, not gravitation. Something in you simply starts moving upwards, and there is no barrier to it. Nothing bars its path. Just a little relaxation, a little unclinging – the first step – and then automatically, spontaneously, your consciousness becomes more and more discriminative, more and more aware.

Let me tell you about another thing. You have heard the word, the phrase: ‘vicious circle’. Let us make another phrase: ‘virtuous circle’. In a vicious circle, one bad thing leads to another. For example, if you get angry then one anger leads you to more anger, and of course, more anger will lead you to still more anger. Now you are in a vicious circle. Each anger will make the habit of anger more strong, and will create more anger, and more anger will make the habit still more strong, and on and on. You move in a vicious circle which goes on becoming stronger and stronger and stronger.

Let us try a new word: virtuous circle. If you become aware, what Patanjali calls vivek, awareness; if you become aware: vairagya. Discrimination creates renunciation. If you become aware, suddenly you see that you are no more the body. Not that you renounce the body; in your very awareness the body is renounced. If you become aware, you become aware that these thoughts are not you.

In that very awareness those thoughts are renounced. You have started dropping them. You don’t give them any more energy; you don’t cooperate with them. Your cooperation has stopped, and they cannot live without your energy. They live on your energy, they exploit you. They don’t have their own energy. Each thought that enters you partakes of your energy. And because you are kaivalya willing to give your energy, it lives there, it makes its abode there. Of course, then its children come, and friends, and relatives, and this goes on. Once you are a little aware, vivek brings vairagya, awareness brings renunciation. And renunciation makes you capable of becoming more aware. And of course, more awareness brings more vairagya, more renunciation, and so on and so forth. This is what I am calling the virtuous circle: one virtue leads to another, and each virtue becomes again a ground for more virtue to arise. “This goes on,” Patanjali says, “to the last moment” – what he calls, dharma megha samadhi. We will be coming to it later on. He calls it ‘the cloud of virtue showering on you’. This virtuous circle, vivek leading to vairagya, vairagya leading to more vivek, vivek again creating more possibilities for vairagya, and so on and so forth – comes to the ultimate peak when the cloud of virtue showers on you: dharma megha samadhi.

In breaks of discrimination, other pratyayas, concepts, arise through the force of previous impressions.

Still, though, many intervals will be there. So don’t be discouraged. Even if you have become very aware and in sudden moments you feel the pull, the upward pull of grace, and in certain moments you are in the stream, floating perfectly beautifully, with no effort, effortlessly, and everything is going and running smoothly, still there will be gaps. Suddenly you will find yourself standing again on the bank just because of old habits. For so many lives you have lived on the bank. Just because of the old habit, again and again the past will overpower you. Don’t be discouraged by it. The moment you see that you are again on the bank, again get down into the stream. Don’t be sad about it, because if you become sad you will again be in a vicious circle. Don’t be sad about it. Many times the seeker comes at very close quarters, and many times he loses the track. No need to be worried; again bring awareness. This is going to happen many times; it is natural. For so many millions of lives we have lived in unawareness – it is only natural that many times the old habit will start functioning. Let me tell you a few anecdotes.

The boss was full of confidence as he approached the reception desk at a large hotel with his secretary and signed the register as Mr. and Mrs.

“Double or twin beds?” enquired the clerk.

He turned to his secretary and asked casually, “Would a double be alright, darling?”

“Yes, sir,” she answered.

“Yes, sir,” the wife was saying to the husband! – but just the old habit of being a secretary, continuously saying, “Yes sir, yes sir, yes sir.” Habits become very ingrained, and they catch hold of you in such a way that unless you are very, very watchful, you will not even suspect.

It happened: An indignant schoolteacher rang the local police station to complain that a crowd of young hooligans had chalked four-letter words all over her front door. “And what is more,” she concluded, “they have not even spelled them right!”

A school teacher is just a school teacher. She is complaining against the four-letter words, but the basic complaint is that they have not even spelled them right. Continuously correcting the spelling of children….

In breaks of discrimination, other concepts arise through the force of previous impressions.

Many times you will be pulled back, again and again and again. The struggle is hard, but not impossible. It is difficult, it is very arduous, but don’t become sad and don’t become discouraged.

Whenever you remember again, don’t be worried about what has happened. Let your awareness again be established, that’s all. Continuously establishing your awareness again and again and again will create a new impact inside your being, a new impression of virtue. One day, it becomes as natural as other habits.

-Osho

From Yoga: The Supreme Science, Discourse #9 (previously published as Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, V.10)

I have split up the last sutra discourse from the Yoga series into three posts. This is the first of three. The second one is The Cloud Which Showers Virtue and the third is You Are the Abode of the Ultimate.

I have also posted all three together in this post, Kaivalya.

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 in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

You Are the Abode of the Ultimate – Osho

Then follows freedom from afflictions and karmas. That which can be known through the mind is very little compared with the infinite knowledge obtained in enlightenment, when the veils, distortions, and impurities are removed.

Just a few sutras back, Patanjali said that the mind is infinitely knowledgeable, the mind can know infinitely. Now he says that that which can be known through the mind is very little compared with the infinite knowledge obtained in enlightenment.

As you progress higher, each state is bigger than the first state that you have transcended. When one is lost in his senses, the mind functions in a crippled way. When one is no more lost in the senses and no more attached to the body, the mind starts functioning in a perfectly healthy way. An infinite apprehension happens to mind; it becomes capable of knowing infinities. But that too is nothing compared to when mind is completely dropped and you start functioning without mind. No medium is now needed. All wheels disappear and you are immediate to reality. Not even mind is there as an agent, as a go-between. Nothing is in between. You and the reality are one. The knowledge that comes through mind is nothing compared to the knowledge that happens through enlightenment.

Having fulfilled their object, the process of change in the three gunas comes to an end.

For the enlightened person the whole world stops, because now there is no need for the world to go on. The ultimate has been achieved. The world exists as a situation. The world exists for your growth. The school exists for learning. When you have learned the lesson, the school is no more for you; you have graduated. When somebody attains enlightenment, he has graduated from the world. Now the school no longer has any function for him. Now he can forget about the school, and the school can forget about him. He has gone beyond, he has grown. The situation is no longer needed.

The world is a situation: it is a situation for you to go astray and come back home. It is a situation to be lost in and then come back. It is a situation to forget God and then remember Him again.

But why this situation? – Because there is a subtle law: if you cannot forget God, you cannot remember Him. If there is no possibility to forget Him, how will you remember, why will you remember? That which is always available is easily forgotten. The fish in the ocean never knows the ocean, never comes across it. He lives in it, is born in it, dies in it, but never comes to know the ocean. There is only one situation when the fish comes to know the ocean: when it is taken out of the ocean. Then suddenly it becomes aware that this was the ocean, his life. When the fish is thrown on the bank, on the sand, then she knows what ocean is.

We needed to be thrown out of the ocean of God; there was no other way to know Him. The world is a great situation to become aware. Anguish is there, pain is there, but it is all meaningful. Nothing is meaningless in the world. Suffering is meaningful. The suffering is just like the fish suffering on the bank, in the sand, and making all efforts to go back to the ocean. Now, if the fish goes back to the ocean she will know. Nothing has changed – the ocean is the same, the fish is the same – but their relationship has tremendously changed. Now she will know, “This is the ocean.” Now she will know how grateful she is to the ocean. The suffering has created a new understanding. Before also she was in the same ocean, but now the same ocean is no more the same because a new understanding exists, a new awareness, a new recognition.

it is a blessing in disguise because only through this misery will you come to know the tremendous blissfulness of recognizing, of seeing face to face… the divine truth.

Having fulfilled their object, the process of change in the three gunas comes to an end.

The whole world of the three gunas: sattva, rajas, tamas, comes to an end. Whenever somebody becomes enlightened, for him the world comes to an end. Of course, others go on dreaming. If there are too many fish suffering on the bank, in the hot sand, in the burning sun, and one fish tries and tries and jumps into the ocean, again back home, for her, or for him, the hot sun and the burning sand and all the misery has disappeared. It is already a nightmare of the past; but for others, it exists.

When a fish like Buddha, Patanjali, jumps into the ocean, for them the world has disappeared. They are again back in the cool womb of the ocean. They are back again, joined, connected to the infinite life. They are no longer disconnected; they are no longer alienated. They have become aware. They have come back with a new understanding: alert, enlightened – but for others the world continues.

These sutras of Patanjali are nothing but messages of a fish who has reached home, trying to jump and say something to the people who are still on the bank and suffering. Maybe they are very close to the ocean, just on the border, but they don’t know how to enter into it. They are not making enough effort, or, are making them in the wrong directions, or, are simply lost in misery and have accepted that this is what life is, or, are so frustrated, discouraged, that they are not making any effort. Yoga is the effort to reach to that reality with which we have become disconnected. To be reconnected is to be a yogi. Yoga means: re-connection, re-union, re-merging.

Kramaha, the process, is the succession of changes that occur from moment to moment, which become apprehensible at the final end of the transformations of the three gunas.

In this small sutra Patanjali has said everything that modern physics has come to discover. Just thirty or forty years ago, it would have been impossible to understand this sutra because the whole quantum physics is present, in seed form, in this small sutra. And this is good, because this is just the last-but-one. So Patanjali summarizes the whole world of physics in this last-but-one sutra: then, the (meta) physics. This is the essential physics. The greatest insight that has come to physics in this century is the theory of quantum.

Max Planck discovered a very unbelievable thing. He discovered that life is not a continuity; everything is discontinuous. One moment of time is separate from another moment of time, and between the two moments of time there is a space. They are not connected; they are disconnected. One atom is separate from another atom, and between the two atoms there is great space. They are not connected. This is what he calls ’quanta’: distinct, separate atoms not bridged with each other, floating in infinite space, but separate – just as you pour peas from one carton into another and the peas all fall, separate, distinct, or, if you pour oil from one container into another, the oil falls in a continuity.

The existence is like peas, separate. Why does Patanjali mention this? – Because he says, “One atom, another atom: these are two things the world consists of. Just between the two is the space. That is what the whole consists of, the God. Call it space, call it brahma, call it purusa or whatsoever you like; the world consists of distinct atoms, and the whole consists of the infinite space between the two. ”

Now physicists say that if we press the whole world and press the space out of it, all the stars and all the suns can be pressed into just a small ball. Only that much matter exists. It is really space. Matter is very rare, here and there. If we press the earth very much, we can put it into a matchbox. If all the space is thrown out, unbelievable! “And that too, if we go on pressing it still more,” Patanjali says, “then even that small quantity will disappear.” Now physicists say that when matter disappears it leaves black holes.

Everything comes out of nothingness, plays around, disappears again into nothingness. As there are material bodies: earth, sun, stars, there are, just similar to them, empty holes, black holes. Those black holes are nothingness condensed. It is not simply nothingness; it is very dynamic – whirlpools of nothingness. If a star comes by a black hole, the black hole will suck it in. So it is very dynamic, but it is nothing – no matter in it, simply absence of matter; just pure space, but tremendously powerful. It can suck any star in, and the star will disappear into nothingness; it will be reduced to nothingness. So ultimately, if we try, then all matter will disappear. It comes out of a tremendous nothingness, and it drops again into a tremendous nothingness: out of nothingness, and back into nothingness.

This the yogi comes to see at the final stage, when all the three gunas are disappearing into black holes, disappearing into nothingness. That’s why yogis have called the world maya, a magic show.

Have you seen a magician producing a mango tree within seconds, and then it goes on growing; and not only that – within seconds mangoes have appeared… out of nothing? It is just illusory; he creates illusion. Maybe he sends deep messages to your unconscious. It is just like deep hypnosis. He creates the idea, but he visualizes his idea so deeply and he impresses it on your unconscious so deeply that you also start seeing it as he wants you to see it. Nothing is happening. The tree is not there, the mango is not there. And it is possible, just out of great imagination, to create a mango tree, and mangoes come. Not only that, but he can pluck one mango and give it to you and you will say, “Very sweet.”

Hindus call the world maya, a magic show. It is God’s imagination. The whole is dreaming, the whole is projecting.

You go to a movie: on a wide screen you see a great story being enacted, and you see that everything seems to be continuous, but it is not. If the film is moved a little slower, you will see that everything is discontinuous – quanta. One picture goes, another comes, another goes, another comes, but between two pictures there is a gap. In that gap you can see the real screen. When the pictures are moving very fast, they create an illusion of movement. Of course, a movie film is not a moving film. It is as static a photograph as any other. The movement is illusory because those static photographs are running after each other so fast, the gap between them is so small, that you cannot see the gap. So everything looks as if it is continuous.

I move my hand: to show this hand moving in a film, thousands of pictures will be needed of each state of stasis – from this point to this, from this point to this, from this point to this. The one simple movement of the hand will be divided into thousands of small static movements. Then all those pictures move fast: the hand seems to be moving. It is an illusion. Deep down, between two pictures, it is a white screen, empty.

First they said when they had come to the atom, “Now this is the ultimate; it cannot be divided anymore.” Then they also divided the atom. Then they came to electrons: “Now it cannot be divided anymore.” Now they have divided that too. Now they have come to nothingness; now they don’t know what has come. Division, division, division, and a point has come in modern physics where matter has completely disappeared. Modern physics has reached via matter, and Patanjali and the yogis have reached to the same point via consciousness. Up to this last-but-one sutra, physics has reached. Up to this last-but-one sutra, scientists can have an approach, an understanding, a penetration. The last sutra is not possible for scientists, because that last sutra can be achieved only if you move through consciousness, not through matter; not through objects, but directly through subjectivity.

Purusartha-sunyanam gunanam pratiprasavah kaivalyam Svarupa-pratistha va citi-sakter iti.

Kaivalya is the state of enlightenment that follows the remergence of the three gunas… when the world stops, when the process, the kramaha of the world stops, when you become able to see between two moments of time and two atoms of matter, and you can move into space, and you can see that everything has arisen out of space and is moving back into space; when you have become so aware that suddenly the illusory world disappears like a dream, then kaivalya. Then you are left as pure consciousness – with no identity, with no name, no form. Then you are the purest of the pure. Then you are the most fundamental, the most essential, the most existential, and you are established in this purity, aloneness.

Patanjali says, “Kaivalya is the state of enlightenment that follows the remergence of the gunas, due to their becoming devoid of the object of the Purusa. In this state the Purusa is established in his real nature.” You have come back home. The journey has been long, torturous, arduous, but you have come back home. The fish has jumped into the ocean which is pure consciousness.

Patanjali does not say anything more about it, because more cannot be said. And when Patanjali says, “Finish; the end,” he does not only mean that the Yoga Sutras finish here. He says, “All possibility to express ends here. All possibility to say anything about the ultimate reality ends here. Beyond this is only experience. Expression ends here.” And nobody has been able to go beyond it – nobody. Not a single exception exists in the whole history of human consciousness. People have tried. Very few have even reached to where Patanjali had reached, but nobody has been able to go beyond Patanjali.

That’s why I say he’s the alpha and the omega. He starts from the very beginning; nobody has been able to find a better beginning than him. He begins from the very beginning and he comes to the very end. When he says, “Finish,” he’s simply saying expression is finished, definition is finished, description is finished. If you have really come with him up to now, there is only experience beyond.

Now starts the existential. One can be it, but one cannot say it. One can live in it, but one cannot define it. Words won’t help. All language is impotent beyond this point. Simply saying this much: that one achieves to one’s own true nature – Patanjali stops. That’s the goal: to know one’s nature and to live in it – because unless we reach to our own natures we will be in misery. All misery is indicative that we are living somehow unnaturally. All misery is simply symptomatic that somehow our nature is not being fulfilled, that somehow we are not in tune with our reality. The misery is not your enemy; it is just a symptom. It indicates. It is like a thermometer; it simply shows that you are going wrong somewhere. Put it all right, put yourself right; bring yourself in harmony, come back, tune yourself. When every misery disappears one is in tune with one’s nature.

That nature Lao Tzu calls tao, Patanjali calls kaivalya, Mahavir calls moksha, Buddha calls nirvana. But whatsoever you want to call it – it has no name and it has no form – it is in you, present, right this moment. You have lost the ocean because you have come out of your Self. You have moved too much in the outer world. Move inwards. Now, let this be your pilgrimage: move inwards.

It happened: A Sufi mystic, Bayazid, was going on a pilgrimage to Mecca. It was difficult. He was poor and somehow he had managed the travelling expenses by begging for years. Now he was very happy. He had almost the necessary money to go to Mecca, and then he travelled. By the time he reached near Mecca, just outside the town he met a fakir, his Master. He was sitting there just under a tree, and he said, “Oh fool, where are you going?” Bayazid looked at him; he had never seen such a luminous being. He came near him and the man said, “Give me whatsoever you have! Where are you going?” He said, “I am going to Mecca for a pilgrimage.” He said, “Finish. There is now no need; you just worship me. You can move around me as many times as you like. You can do your parikrama, your circumlocution, around me. I am Mecca.” And Bayazid was so filled with this person’s magnetism that he gave all his money, he worshipped. Then the old man said, “Now go back home”; and he went back home.

When he went into his town people gathered and said, “Something seems to have happened to you. So really it works, going to Mecca works? You are looking luminous, so full of light.” He said, “Stop this nonsense! One old man met me – he changed my whole pilgrimage. He says, ‘Go home,’ and since then I have been going home, inwards. I have arrived. I have arrived, I have reached to my Mecca.”

The outer Mecca is not the real Mecca. The real Mecca is inside you. You are the temple of God.You are the abode of the ultimate. So the question is not where to find truth, the question is: how have you lost it? The question is not where to go; you are already there – stop going.

Drop from all the paths. All paths are of desire, extensions of desire, projections of desire: going somewhere, going somewhere, always somewhere else, never here.

Seeker, leave all paths, because all paths lead there, and He is here.

Purusartha-sunyanam gunanam pratiprasavah kaivalyam Svarupa-pratistha va citi-sakter iti.

-Osho

From Yoga: The Supreme Science, Discourse #9 (previously published as Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, V.10)

I have split the last sutra discourse from the Yoga series into three posts. This is the last of three. The first one is The Virtuous Circle and the second one is The Cloud Which Sh0wers Virtue.

I have also posted all three together in this post, Kaivalya.

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 in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Tag: kaivalya

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