By performing samyama on the light under the crown of the head comes the ability to contact all perfected beings.
Through pratibha, intuition, knowledge of everything.
Performing samyama on the heart brings awareness of the nature of mind.
-Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras
Man is evolution. Not only that man is evolving, he is the very vehicle of evolution itself: he is evolution. A tremendous responsibility, and something to be delighted about also, because that’s the glory of man. Matter is the beginning, God, the end; matter is the alpha point, God, the omega point. Man is the bridge – matter passes through man and is transformed into God. God is not a thing and God is not waiting somewhere. God is evolving through you; God is becoming through you. You are transforming matter into God. You are the greatest experiment that reality has made. Think of the glory of it and think of the responsibility also.
Much depends on man, but if you think that you are already there because you have the form of man, then you will be misguided by your mind. You only have the form; you are only a possibility. The real is going to happen, and you have to allow it to happen. You have to open toward it.
That’s what yoga is all about: how to help you to move upward toward the omega point where your whole energy is released, transformed – the whole of matter is transmuted into divinity. Yoga has mapped the whole journey, the whole pilgrimage of man – from sex to samadhi, from the lowest center, muladhar, to the highest center, the very peak, the pinnacle of evolution: the sahasrar.
These things have to be understood before we can enter into the sutras of today. Yoga divides man into seven layers, seven steps, seven centers. The first is muladhar, the sex center, the sun center; and the last, the seventh, is sahasrar, the God center, the omega point.
The sex center is intrinsically moving downward. It is your connection with matter, what yoga calls prakriti – nature. The sex center is your relation with nature, the world that you have left behind, the past. If you go on confining yourself to the sex center, you cannot evolve. You will remain where you are. You will remain in contact with your past, but you will not be connected with the future. You are stuck there; man is stuck at the sex center.
People think they understand everything about sex. Nothing much is yet known, at least not to those who think they know – the psychologists. They think they know, but the basic thing is yet lacking: the knowledge that sex can become an upward movement, that there is no necessity that it should only move downward. It moves downward because the mechanism to move downward exists in man – already exists in man. It exists in animals also; it exists in trees also. There is nothing much significant about it that it exists in man. The significance of man is that something more exists in man that doesn’t exist yet in the plants, in the birds, in the animals. They are bound to move downward; they don’t have a staircase within them.
That is what we mean by seven centers: the staircase of evolution. It exists in you. You can fall upward – if you choose to. If you don’t choose, you will go on falling downward.
So now, with man, the evolution is going to be conscious. Up to now you have been helped. Nature has brought you to this point; from now onward, you will have to take your own responsibility. You will have to become responsible. Man has matured, man has come of age; now nature can no longer take care of you. So if you don’t move consciously, if you don’t make a conscious effort to evolve, if you don’t accept the responsibility, you will remain stuck.
So many people feel the stuckness, but they don’t know from where it is coming. Thousands of people come to me and they tell me they are feeling stuck. They know something is possible, but they don’t know what it is. They know that they should move, but they don’t know how to move, where to move. They know that they have been in the place where they are long enough and they would like to explode into new dimensions, but they are stuck.
This stuckness is coming from muladhar, from the sex center, the sun center.
Up to now there has been no problem for you. Nature has been helping; nature has mothered you up to now. But you are no longer a child, no longer a babe, and nature cannot go on feeding you on her breast. Now the mother says, “Leave the breast; be on your own.” The mother has said [this] so very long ago. Those who have understood it, they have taken the responsibility and have become siddhas, buddhas, those who have achieved.
Now the path is going to be your decision. Now you have to move on your own. This possibility exists in the muladhar center: it can open upward. So the first thing to be understood today is: don’t think that you understand sex in its totality. You don’t understand it. […]
But I would like to tell you nobody knows all about sex yet. Unless God is realized, you cannot know all about sex because God is the final possibility of sex energy – the ultimate transformation of sex energy. Unless you know who you are, you will not be able to know what sex really is in its totality. You will not be able to comprehend it. Only a part of it is known, the sun part. Even the moon part is not known yet. The psychology for the feminine energy has yet to evolve. Freud and Jung and Adler and others, whatsoever they have been doing is more or less centered around man. Woman yet remains an uncharted territory. The moon center, even the moon center, is not yet a known fact.
A few people have had a few glimpses. For example, Jung had a few glimpses. Freud remained completely sun-oriented. Jung moved a little toward the moon; of course, very hesitatingly because the whole training of the mind is scientific, and to move toward the moon is to move in a world totally different from science. It is to move in the world of myth, it is to move in the world of poetry, imagination. It is to move in the world of “irreason,” illogic.
Let me tell you a few things. Freud is sun-oriented; Jung is leaning a little toward the moon. That’s why Freud was very angry with his disciple Jung. And Freudians are very much annoyed by Jung; it seems he betrayed his master.
The sun-oriented person always feels that the moon-oriented person is dangerous. The sun-oriented person moves on the clean-cut superhighways of reason, and the moon-oriented person starts moving in labyrinths. He starts moving in the wilderness, where nothing is clear-cut – everything is alive, but nothing is clear-cut.
And the greatest fear for man is woman. Somehow man suspects that death is going to come from woman – because life has also come from her. Everybody is born out of a woman. When life has come from woman, then somehow death is also going to happen through her. Because the end always comes to meet the beginning. Only then is the circle completed.
In India, in Indian mythology, we realized it. You must have seen pictures or statues of Mother Kali, who is the symbolization of the feminine mind, and she is dancing on the body of her husband, Shiva. She has danced so terribly that Shiva is dead, and she goes on dancing. The feminine mind has killed the male mind; that is the meaning of the myth.
And why is she painted black? That’s why she is called Kali; kali means “black.” And why so dangerous? In one of her hands, she is carrying a freshly cut head with blood dripping from it. Almost a personification of death. And she is dancing wildly – and on the chest of her husband, and the husband is dead and she goes on dancing in great ecstasy. Why is she black? Because death has always been thought of as black, as a dark black night.
And why has she killed her husband? The moon always kills the sun. Once the moon arises in your being, logic dies. Then logic cannot remain, then reason cannot remain. Now you have attained a totally different dimension.
You never expect logic from a poet. You never expect logic from a painter, from a dancer, from a musician. They move in a totally dark world; they move in darkness.
Reason has always been afraid, and man has always been afraid because man is reason oriented. Have you not observed it, that always man feels it is difficult to understand a woman and the mind of a woman? And the same is the feeling of women – they cannot understand men. A gap exists, as if they are not part of one humanity, as if they are different. […]
Man is always trying to prove something. Watch. A woman takes it for granted that everything is proved, and man goes on trying to prove something – always defensive. Somewhere deep in their sexuality is the root cause of it. When a man and a woman make love, the woman need not prove anything. She can just be passive, but the man has to prove his manhood. From that very effort to prove his manhood, man is continuously defensive and always trying to prove something or other.
The whole of philosophy is nothing but finding proofs for God. Science is nothing but finding proofs for theories. Women have never been interested in philosophy. They take life for granted; they accept it. They are not defensive in any way, as if they have proved already. Their being seems to be more circular, the circle seems to be complete. That may be the cause of their body being so round. It has a shape of roundness. Man has corners and [is] always ready to fight and argue. […]
The male mind always goes on dissecting.
Jung reports in his memoirs that he was sitting with Freud, and that day he suddenly felt a great strain in his stomach, and he felt as if something was going to happen, and suddenly there was a sort of explosion in the cupboard. Both became alert. What has happened? Jung said, “It has something to do with my energy.” Freud laughed and scoffed and said, “Nonsense, how can it have anything to do with your energy?” Jung said, “Wait, within a minute it will come again” – because he again felt his stomach getting strained. And within a minute – exactly within a minute – there was another explosion.
Now this is the feminine mind. And Jung writes in his memoirs, “Since that day, Freud never trusted me.” This is dangerous because it is illogical. And Jung started to think about a new theory he calls “synchronicity.”
The theory that is the base of all scientific effort is “causality” – everything is joined with cause and effect. Whatsoever happens has a cause, and if you can produce the cause, the effect will follow. If you heat water, it will evaporate. Heating is the cause: bring it to a hundred degrees and it will evaporate. Evaporation is an effect. This is the scientific base.
Jung says there is another principle that is “synchronicity.” It is difficult to explain it because all explanations are from the scientific mind, but you can try to feel what he means. Make two clocks so similar that they are synchronized with each other: when in one clock the hand comes to twelve, the other clock chimes the twelve bells. One clock simply moves, shows the time; the other clock chimes – eleven, twelve, one, two. Anybody listening to it will be surprised because the first clock is not the cause of the second chiming. They are in no way related. It is only that the maker, the watchmaker, has synchronized them in such a way that something happens in one and simultaneously something else happens in the other. They are not connected by any cause and effect.
Jung says just by the side of causality there is another principle. The maker of the world, if there is any, he has made the world in such a way that many things happen which are not cause and effect. You see a woman and suddenly love flowers. Now is this to be explained by cause and effect or by synchronicity? Jung seems to be more accurate and closer to the truth. The woman has not caused the love in you, you have not caused the love in the woman, but man and woman, or the energy of sun and moon, has been made in such a way that when they come close love flowers. It is synchronicity.
But Freud became afraid. They were never close again. Freud had chosen Jung to be his successor, but that day he changed his will. Then they fell apart, farther and farther away.
Man cannot understand woman; woman cannot understand man. It is almost like sun and moon: when the sun is there, moon disappears. When the sun goes down, the moon appears. They never meet. They never come face to face. Your intellect, your reason, disappears when your intuition starts functioning. Women are more intuitive. They don’t have a reason for something, but they can have a hunch, and their hunches are almost always true.
Many men have come to me and told me, “This is strange. If we are having some affair and we have not told the wife, somehow or other she comes to know. But we are never able to know whether the wife is having an affair or not.” […]
It is impossible. They have another way of knowing, a separate way of knowing: the moon way of knowing.
The feminine psychology has yet to be developed, and unless the moon psychology is developed, psychology will not have the status of a science. It will remain a prejudice; it will remain male prejudice. It will not say something about human beings as such.
Freudian psychology is sun psychology; Jungian psychology is leaning a little toward the moon. And there is a man, Roberto Assagioli, his psychology is a synthesis between sun and moon, just the beginning of it. He calls his psychology “psychosynthesis.” Freud calls his psychology “psychoanalysis.” Analysis comes from the sun; synthesis comes from the moon. Observe, whenever there is light, things are separate. Then one tree is here, another tree is there, but everything is separate. And then comes the darkness of the night and everything disappears – the separation. Everything becomes one. The dark night, and all divisions disappear.
Moon psychology is going to be synthetical; sun psychology analytical, dissecting, arguing, proving. But there is a possibility of higher psychologies. I would like to give you a few hints, what I call “the psychology of the Buddhas.” Freud is sun, Jung moon, Assagioli sun plus moon. A buddha is sun plus moon plus beyond, and later on I will explain to you what I mean by “beyond.” And then that beyond can also be looked at, through many ways.
Sun plus beyond: you have Patanjali, you have Mahavir, yoga. The language is of the sun; the experience is of the beyond. Then, sun plus moon plus beyond: you have tantra, Shiva. The experience is of the beyond, but the expression is both sun plus moon. And then, you have moon plus beyond: Narad, Chaitanya, Meera, Jesus. The experience is of the beyond, but the expression is of the moon. And then there is just beyond: Bodhidharma, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Zen. They don’t believe in expression so they don’t need sun or moon expression; they say it cannot be said. Lao Tzu says, “The Tao that can be said is no longer Tao. The truth that can be uttered is already a lie; it cannot be expressed.”
These are all the possibilities, but they have not yet been actualized. Here and there a man has attained, but that attainment and realization has to be codified in such a way, classified in such a way, that it becomes a part of the collective human consciousness.
Now the sutra:
By performing samyama on the light under the crown of the head comes the ability to contact all perfected beings.
Sahasrar is just below the crown of the head. Sahasrar is a subtle opening in your head. Just as the genital organs are a subtle opening in muladhar, from that subtle opening you move downward into nature, into life, into the visible, the material, into the form; exactly like that, you have a nonfunctioning organ in the crown of the head, there is also a subtle opening. When energy rushes there, that opening bursts open, and from there you come in contact with super nature, call it God or perfected beings, siddhas – those who have already attained.
Through sex you reproduce more bodies like you. Sex is creative; it gives birth to more children just like you – you reproduce yourself. When your energy moves through sahasrar, the seventh chakra, you reproduce yourself: that is what resurrection is. That is what is meant by Jesus when he says, “Be reborn.” Then you become father and mother to yourself. Your sun center becomes your father, your moon center becomes your mother, and the meeting of your sun and moon inside releases your energy toward the head. It is an inner orgasm – the meeting of the sun and the moon, or call it the meeting of the anima and the animus, the male and the female inside you.
Your whole body is divided into male and female. This has to be understood. Do you see how much left-handed people are suppressed? If a child writes with the left hand, immediately the whole society is against him – the parents, the peers, the teachers. The whole society forces him to write with the right hand. Right is right and left is wrong. What is the matter? Why is it that right is right and left is wrong? What is wrong with left? And ten percent of the people in the world are left-handed. Ten percent is not a small minority. Out of ten there is always one person who is left-handed. He may not have conscious awareness of it, he may have forgotten about it, because from the very beginning left-handed people are being forced to become right-handed. Why?
Right hand is connected with the sun center, with the male inside you. Left hand is connected with the female inside you, with the moon center. And the whole society is male oriented.
Your left nostril is connected with the moon center; your right nostril is connected with the sun center. You can try it. Whenever you are feeling very hot, close your right nostril and breathe from the left, and within ten minutes you will feel a subtle coolness coming to you. You can experiment; it is so easy. Or, if you are shivering and feeling chilly, close your left nostril and breathe from the right; within ten minutes you will be perspiring.
Yoga has come to understand it, and yogis say – and yogis do it: in the morning they will never get up breathing from the right nostril, because if you get up breathing from the right nostril, there is more possibility that in the day you will get angry, you will fight, you will become aggressive – you will not be cool and collected. So in yoga, it is part of the discipline that everybody getting up first looks at which nostril is functioning. If the left is functioning perfectly okay, that is the right moment to get out of bed. If it is not functioning, then turn over, close your right nostril and breathe from the left. By and by the left takes over; then get up. Always get up with the left nostril functioning and you will see a total difference in your whole day’s activity. You will be less angry, less irritated, more cool, more collected, calm. Your meditation will go deeper. If you want to fight, then the right nostril is very good. If you want to love, then the left nostril is very good.
And this breathing continuously changes. You may not have observed but observe it. Modern medicine has to come to understand it because it can be used in treatment very, very significantly. There are diseases which can be helped by the moon, and there are diseases which can be helped by the sun. If you know exactly, then the breathing can be used to treat a person. But modern medicine has not yet stumbled upon the fact. Continuously your breathing changes. Forty minutes one nostril functions, then forty minutes another nostril functions. Continuously within you the sun and moon change – you swing from sun to moon, from moon to sun.
That’s why you change your moods so often. Sometimes you suddenly feel irritated – for no reason at all. Nothing has happened, everything is the same, you are just sitting in the same room – nothing has happened – suddenly you feel irritated. Watch. Bring your hand close to your nose and feel: your breathing must have changed from left to right. Just a moment before you were feeling so good; just a moment after you are feeling so bad, just ready to fight or do something.
Remember, the whole body is divided. Your brain is also divided into two brains. You don’t have one brain; you have two brains – two hemispheres. The left-side brain is the sun brain; the right-side brain is the moon brain. You may be puzzled, because everything left is moon, why the right-side brain is moon? The right-side brain is connected with your left side body. Your left hand is connected with the right-side brain, your right hand is connected with the left side brain, that’s why. Crosswise.
The right-side brain is the seat of imagination, poetry, love, intuition. The left side brain is the seat of reason, logic, argumentation, philosophy, science.
And unless you attain to a balance between the sun and moon energy, you will not be able to transcend. Unless your left-side brain meets with the right-side brain and is bridged, you will not reach to sahasrar. You have to become one to reach sahasrar because sahasrar is the omega point in your being. You cannot reach there as man, you cannot reach there as woman. You have to reach there just as pure consciousness – one, total, whole.
Man’s sexuality is sun oriented, woman’s sexuality moon oriented. […]
Man is sun oriented, light oriented. Eyes are part of the sun; that’s why eyes can see. They correspond with the sun energy. So man is more eyes oriented. That’s why man is a voyeur and woman is an exhibitionist. Men cannot understand why women go on decorating themselves so much. […]
Women are exhibitionists – they would like to be seen. But that’s perfectly okay because that’s how men and women fit: man wants to see; woman wants to show. They fit, perfectly. It is absolutely okay. If women don’t want to exhibit, then they will create trouble, and if man is not a voyeur, for whom will women prepare so much – for whom? Nobody will look at them.
Everything fits in nature in a perfect way. It synchronizes.
But to reach to sahasrar you have to drop this duality of functioning. You cannot reach God as man or woman. You have to reach God as a simple, pure being.
By performing samyama on the light under the crown of the head comes the ability to contact all perfected beings. The energy has to move upward, and samyama is the methodology to do it. First, if you are a man, you have to be fully conscious of your sun, your solar energy center, your sex center. You have to be there at the muladhar, showering your consciousness on the muladhar. When the muladhar is showered by consciousness, you will watch and you will see that an energy is arising and moving into the hara center, into the moon.
And you will feel so blissful when the energy moves in the moon center. All your sexual orgasms are nothing compared to it – absolutely nothing. There is ten-thousand-times more intensity when your sun energy moves into your own moon energy. Then the real man meets the real woman. When you meet a woman outside, howsoever close you come, you remain separate. It is a very superficial meeting – just two surfaces meet, that’s all. Just two surfaces rub each other, that’s all. But when your sun energy moves into the moon energy, then two centers of energy meet. And the man whose sun and moon are meeting remains cheerful, blissful – continuously – because there is no need to lose this orgasm. This is permanent orgasm.
If you are a woman, bring your consciousness to the hara center and you will see your energy moving toward the sun center.
One center is nonfunctioning, one is functioning. The functioning has to be joined to the nonfunctioning: immediately, the nonfunctioning starts to function. And when the energy is meeting – sun and moon are becoming one – you will see that now the energy goes on rising upward. You start falling upward. […]
This sutra says: “Murdha jyotishi siddha darshanam.” The moment your consciousness meets with sahasrar, you suddenly become available to the world beyond – to the world of the siddhas.
In yoga symbology the muladhar, the sex center, is thought to be like a red lotus of four petals. The four petals represent four directions; redness represents the heat because it is sun center. And sahasrar is represented as a thousand-petaled lotus of all colors. A thousand-petaled – sahasrar padma – a thousand-petaled lotus of all colors because it includes the whole. The sex center is only red. Sahasrar is a rainbow – all colors included; the totality included.
Ordinarily, the sahasrar, the one-thousand-petaled lotus, hangs downward in your head. Once the energy moves through it, the energy makes it upward. It is as if a lotus is hanging without energy, downward – just the very weight of it makes it hang downward – then energy rushes into it, makes it alive. It moves upward, opens to the beyond.
When this lotus moves upward and blooms, it is said in yoga scriptures, “It is as resplendent as ten million suns and ten million moons.” One moon and one sun meet in your being. That becomes the possibility of the meeting of ten million suns and ten million moons. You have found the key of the ultimate orgasm, where ten million moons meet ten million suns – ten million females meet ten million males. You can think of the ecstasy.
Shiva must have been in that ecstasy when he was found making love to his consort Devi. He must have been at the sahasrar. His lovemaking cannot be sexual – it cannot be from the muladhar. It must have been from the omega point of his being. That’s why he was completely oblivious of who was watching, who was standing. He was not in time; he was not in space. He was beyond time, beyond space. This is the goal of yoga, of tantra, of all spiritual effort.
Meeting of the male and female energy creates the possibility of the ultimate meeting of Shiva and Shakti, life and death. In this way Hindu gods are tremendously beautiful, and tremendously humane. Hmm? . . . think of a Christian God – with no consort, with no woman. Looks a little rigid, looks a little alone, looks a little empty, looks a little too male oriented, too sun-oriented, hard. No surprise if the Jewish and Christian concept of God is of a very terrible God.
Jews say, “Be afraid of God. Remember, he is not your uncle.” But Hindus say, “Don’t be worried – he is your mother.” Jews have created a very ferocious God, who is always ready to throw fire and thunder and destroy and kill. And just a small sin, maybe just an innocent sin, and he becomes terribly upset. Seems to be almost neurotic.
And the whole Christian conception of the trinity – God, the Holy Ghost, and the Son – the whole trinity seems to be like a boys’ club. Homosexual. No woman at all. And Christians are so afraid of the moon energy, the woman, so afraid, that they have no conception. Somehow, later on, they improved upon it a little by adding Virgin Mary. Somehow, because it is totally against their ideology. And then too they insist that she is a virgin.
The meeting of sun and moon is not allowed at all. Even if they allow Mary to be respected . . . Of course, it is a secondary status because in the original trinity there is no place for her. Somehow feeling the incompleteness of it all, they have managed to bring in Virgin Mary from the back door. But then too they insist she is virgin. Why this insistence? What is wrong in a meeting of male and female energy?
And if you are so afraid of the meeting of male and female energy in the outer world, how will you be ready for the same meeting in the inner world?
Hindu gods are more human, more humane – more down-to-earth – and of course, more compassion, more love flows through them.
Pratibhad va sarvam.
Through pratibha, intuition, knowledge of everything.
The word pratibha is a difficult word; it cannot be translated into English. “Intuition” is a very, very poor substitute for it, and I will have to explain it to you. It cannot be translated; I can only describe it. The sun is intellect; the moon is intuition. When you transcend both then comes pratibha – and there is no word for it. The sun is intellect, analysis, logic. The moon is intuition, the hunch, just a flash – suddenly you jump on the conclusion. Intellect moves through method, process, syllogism. Intuition suddenly comes to the conclusion – with no process, no methodology, no syllogism. You cannot ask intuition why. There is no “therefore” in intuition. A sudden revelation – as if lightning has happened and you have come to see something, and then the lightning disappears and you don’t know how it happened and why it happened, but it has happened and you have seen something. All primitive societies are intuitive; all women are intuitive; all children are intuitive; all poets are intuitive.
Pratibha is totally different. It has been translated as “intuition” in all the English translations of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, hut I would not like to translate it that way. Pratibha means when the energy has moved beyond the duality of intellect and intuition. It is beyond both. Intuition is beyond intellect; pratibha is beyond both. Now there is no logic in it, no sudden lightning in it – everything is eternally revealed. In pratibha one becomes omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. Everything is revealed simultaneously – the past, the present, the future – all. That is the meaning – Pratibhad va sarvam – “Through pratibha, all.”
When your energy moves through sahasrar and ten million moons and ten million suns meet within you and you become an oceanic experience of orgasm – which goes on and on and on, eternally, then there is no end to it – there is pratibha. Then you see – you see all, through and through, you know all, through and through. Then space and time both disappear, with all their limitations.
So, one psychology is sun oriented, another is moon oriented, but the real psychology – the real psychology of being will be pratibha oriented. It will not be divided into man and woman. It will be the highest and the greatest synthesis, and transcendence.
Intellect is like a blind man: it gropes in the dark. That’s why so much argumentation is needed. Intuition is not blind but is like a crippled man: it cannot move. Pratibha is like a healthy man, all limbs healthy.
There is an Indian story that once a forest caught fire. There was one blind man and one crippled man in the forest. The blind man could not see, he could run; but it was dangerous to run without knowing where you are running – where the fire is all over, all around. The crippled man could not walk, but he could see. They came to a tacit understanding: the blind man allowed the crippled man to ride on his back and to see for him, and the crippled man agreed to see for him if he was to run for him. In their synthesis they could get out of the forest and the fire.
Intellect is half, intuition is also half. Intuition cannot run – it is just in flashes. It cannot be a continued source of revelation. And intellect goes on groping in the dark, continuously groping in the dark.
Pratibha is a synthesis and a transcendence.
If you are too intellectual, you will miss a few things in life which are very beautiful. You will not be able to enjoy poetry, you will not be able to delight in singing, you will not be able to celebrate in dancing. They will look a little foolish, a little below you. You will be uptight, you will hold yourself back, you will remain a little repressed. Your moon will suffer.
If you are just intuitive, you may be able to enjoy much, but you will not be able to help others much because the communication will be lacking. You may be able to live a beautiful life yourself, but you will not be able to create a beautiful world around you because that is possible only through intellect.
When science and poetry meet, then a perfect world is possible. Otherwise, intellect goes on condemning intuition; intuition goes on condemning intellect. […]
The intuition thinks the intellect is odd; the intellect thinks the intuition is odd. Separately they are odd. Together they create a great orchestra, a great harmony. […]
The intellect always goes on thinking in its own idiom. The intuition remains incomprehensible to it. And the intuition cannot believe in intellect; it seems too superficial, with no depth.
You have to come to a synthesis within you. That’s what Patanjali means when he says, “Pratibhad va sarvam.” You have to come to such a deep synthesis that pratibha arises in you – which is one where logic and prayer meet, where work and worship meet, where science is not antagonistic to poetry and poetry is not antagonistic to science.
That’s why I say man is yet in the making, he is evolving. Man is yet a form without content. The content has to be achieved; that great alchemy has to be achieved. You have to make yourself a great experimental lab of evolution and you have to bring your energy from the muladhar, from the sex center, upward to the sahasrar.
Hridaye chitta samvit.
Performing samyama on the heart brings awareness of the nature of mind.
That too is not an adequate translation, but it is difficult. Translators are in a difficulty.
Hridaye chitta samvit.
First, when Patanjali uses the word hridaye, he does not mean the physical heart. In yoga terminology, just behind the physical heart is the real heart, hidden. It is not part of the physical body. The physical heart simply corresponds with the real heart, the spiritual heart. There is a synchronicity between them, but no causal relationship. And that heart can be known only when you have reached to the peak. When your energy has come to the omega point of sahasrar, only then can you realize the real heart, the very abode of God.
Hridaye chitta samvit – “Performing samyama on the heart brings awareness of the nature of mind.” That too is not true. Chitta samvit means the very nature of consciousness, not of mind. Mind is gone, left behind, because mind is either sun mind or moon mind. Once you have transcended sun and moon, mind is gone, left behind. In fact, chitta samvit is a state of no mind. If you ask Zen people, they will say no-mind. The mind is gone because it exists with the division; when the division is gone, mind is gone. They are together, two aspects of one phenomenon. The mind divides and the mind exists through division – they depend on each other, they interdepend. When division is gone, mind is gone; when mind is gone, division is gone.
There are two ways to reach this state of no-mind. One is the tantra way: you drop the mind, division disappears. The other is the yoga way: you drop the division, the mind disappears. You can do either. The ultimate result is the same – you become one, a unison arises.
Hridaye chitta samvit.
Then you come to know what is the real nature of consciousness. Again, this word “consciousness” in English denotes as if it is an antonym to “unconsciousness.” Chitta samvit is not an antonym to unconsciousness. Consciousness includes all: unconsciousness is also a sleeping state of consciousness, so there is no antagonism. Consciousness, unconsciousness, all – the very nature of consciousness – is revealed when one brings one’s awareness, samyama, to the heart.
In yoga, the heart center is called anahat chakra, anahat center. You must have heard the famous Zen koan . . . When a disciple reaches to the Master, the Master gives something absolutely absurd to meditate upon. One of the famous absurdities is, the Master says to the disciple, “Go, and listen to the sound of one hand clapping.” Now this is absurd. The one hand cannot clap, and there cannot be a sound of one hand clapping. For the sound two hands are needed to clap and create it. Ahat means by conflict; anahat means without any conflict. Anahat means: the sound of one hand clapping.
When all sounds disappear in you, you hear the sound which is constantly there, which is intrinsic to nature, which is the very nature of existence – the sound of silence, or the sound of soundlessness. The heart is called anahat chakra, the place where constantly a sound is being created – without any conflict – an eternal sound. Hindus have called that sound aumkar – aum. It has to be heard. So people who go on repeating, “Aum, aum, aum . . .” are doing a foolish thing. By your repetition you cannot come to the real aumkar, to the real sound, because if you’re making it, you are creating it by clapping.
Become completely silent, drop all thinking, become unmoving, and suddenly it is there – it has always been there, but you were not available to listen to it. It is a very, very subtle sound. When you have dropped the whole world from your mind and you are alert only for it, then by and by, you become receptive to it – by and by, you start hearing it.
Once you can hear the sound of one hand clapping, you have heard God, you have heard all.
Patanjali is taking you step by step toward the omega point. These three sutras are very significant. Ponder over them again and again, meditate on them. And try to feel them within your being. They can become keys which can open the doors of the divine.
-Osho
From Secrets of Yoga; Yoga: The Science of the Soul, V.8, Discourse #5 (Previously titled Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, V.8).
Copyright © OSHO International Foundation
This discourse is the Listening Meditation in the fifteenth 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.
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