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Cultivating Right Attitudes – Osho

The mind becomes tranquil by cultivating attitudes of friendliness towards the happy, compassion towards the miserable, joy towards the virtuous and indifference towards the evil.

The mind also becomes tranquil by alternately expelling and retaining the breath. When meditation produces extraordinary sense perceptions, the mind gains confidence and this helps perseverance.

Also, meditate on the inner light which is serene and beyond all sorrow.

Also meditate on one who has attained desirelessness.

–Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras

The mind becomes tranquil by cultivating attitudes of friendliness towards the happy, compassion towards the miserable, joy towards the virtuous and indifference towards the evil.

Many things have to be understood before you can understand this sutra. First, the natural attitudes: whenever you see somebody happy, you feel jealous – not happy, never happy. You feel miserable. That’s the natural attitude, the attitude that you have already got. And Patanjali says the mind becomes tranquil by cultivating attitudes of friendliness towards the happy – very difficult. To be friendly with someone who is happy is one of the most difficult things in life.

Ordinarily, you think it is very easy. It is not! Just the opposite is the case. You feel jealous, you feel miserable. You may show happiness, but that’s just a facade, a show, a mask. And how you can be happy? And how you can be tranquil, silent, if you have such an attitude?

Because the whole life is celebrating, millions of happinesses happening all over the universe, but if you have an attitude of jealousy, you will be miserable, you will be in a constant hell. And you will be in a hell precisely because all over there is heaven. You will create a hell for you – a private hell – because whole existence is celebrating.

If somebody is happy, what comes first to your mind? – as if that happiness has been taken from you, as if he has won and you are defeated, as if he has cheated you . . . Happiness is not a competition, so don’t be worried. If somebody is happy, it does not mean that you cannot be happy, that he has taken happiness – now how you can be happy. Happiness is not somewhere existing, which can be exhausted by happy people.

Why you feel jealous? If somebody is rich, maybe it is difficult for you to be rich because riches exist in a quantity. If somebody is powerful in a material way, it may be difficult for you to be powerful because power is a competition. But happiness is not a competition. Happiness exists in infinite quantity. Nobody has ever been able to exhaust it; there is no competition at all. If somebody is happy, why you feel jealous? And with jealousy enters hell in you.

Says Patanjali, when somebody is happy, feel happy, feel friendly. Then you also open a door towards happiness. In a subtle way, if you can feel friendly with someone who is happy, you immediately start sharing his happiness; it has become yours also – immediately! And happiness is not some thing; it is not material. It is not something that somebody can cling to. You can share it. When a flower blooms, you can share it; when a bird sings, you can share it; when somebody is happy, you can share it. And the beauty is that it does not depend on his sharing. It depends on your partaking.

If it depended on his sharing, whether he shares or not, then it would be totally a different thing. He may not like to share. But this is not a question at all, it does not depend on his sharing. When the sun rises in the morning you can be happy, and the sun cannot do anything about it. It cannot prevent you being happy. Somebody is happy: you can be friendly. It is totally your own attitude, and he cannot prevent you by sharing. Immediately you open a door, and his happiness flows towards you also.

This is the secret of creating a heaven all around you, and only within heaven can you be tranquil. How can you be tranquil in hell-fire? And nobody is creating it: you create it. So the basic thing to be understood is that whenever there is misery, hell, you are the cause of it. Never throw the responsibility on anybody else because that throwing of responsibility is escaping from the basic truth.

If you are miserable, only you – absolutely only you – are responsible. Look within and find the cause of it. And nobody wants to be miserable. If you can find the cause within you, you can throw it out. Nobody is standing in your way to prevent you. There is not a single obstacle to be happy.

But by being friendly towards happy people, you become attuned to happiness. They are flowering; you become friendly. They may not be friendly; that is none of your concern. They may not even know you – that doesn’t matter. But wherever there is a blooming, wherever there is bliss, wherever somebody is flowering, wherever somebody is dancing and is happy and is smiling, wherever there is celebration, you become friendly, you partake of it. It starts flowing within you, and nobody can prevent it. And when there is happiness all around you, you feel tranquil.

The mind becomes tranquil by cultivating attitudes of friendliness towards the happy . . .

With the happy, you feel jealous – in a subtle competition. With happy people, you feel yourself inferior. You always choose people around you who are unhappy. You become friendly with unhappy people because with unhappy people you feel superior. You always seek somebody who is below you. You are always afraid of the higher; you always seek the lower, and the more you seek the lower, the lower you fall. Then even more lower people are needed.

Seek the company of those who are higher than you – higher in wisdom, higher in happiness, higher in tranquility, calmness, quiet, collectedness: always seek the company of the higher because that is the way how you become higher, how you transcend the valleys and reach to the peaks. That becomes a ladder. Always seek the company of the higher, the beautiful, the happy – you will become more beautiful, you will become more happy.

And once the secret is known, once you know how one becomes more happy, how with others’ happiness you create a situation for yourself also to be happy, then there is no barrier; then you can go as far as you like. You can become a god where no unhappiness exists.

Who is a god? A god is one who has learned the secret to be happy with the whole universe, with every flower and with every river and with every rock and every star, who has become one with this continuous eternal celebration, who celebrates, who doesn’t bother whose celebration is this. Wherever there is a celebration, he participates. This art of participating in happiness is one of the foundations if you want to be happy. It has to be followed.

Just the opposite you have been doing: if somebody is happy, immediately you are shocked. How is it possible? How come you are not happy, and he has become happy? There is injustice. This whole world is cheating you and there is no God. If God is, how come you are not happy and others are becoming happy? And these people who are happy, they are the exploiters, they are tricky, cunning. They live on your blood. They are sucking others’ happiness.

Nobody is sucking anybody’s happiness. Happiness is such a phenomenon, there is no need to suck it. It is an inner flowering; it doesn’t come from the outside. Just by being happy with happy people you create the situation in which your own inner flower starts blooming:

The mind becomes tranquil by cultivating attitudes of friendliness . . .

You create the attitude of enmity. You can feel friendly with a sad person, and you think it is very virtuous. You can feel friendly with someone who is depressed, in misery, and you think it is something religious, something moral you are doing, but what you are doing, you don’t know.

Whenever you feel friendly with someone who is sad, depressed, unhappy, miserable, you create misery for you. It looks very irreligious, Patanjali’s attitude. It is not, because when you [will] understand his whole standpoint, you will see what he means. He is very scientific. He is not a sentimental person, and sentimentality won’t help you.

One has to be very, very, clear:

. . . compassion towards the miserable . . .

Not friendliness – compassion. Compassion is a different quality; friendliness is different. Friendliness means you are creating a situation in which you would like to be the same as the other person is, you would like to be the same as your friend. Compassion means that someone has fallen from his state. You would like to help him, but you would not like to be like him. You would like to give him a hand; you would like to bring him up, cheer him up. You would like to help him in every way, but you would not like to be like him because that is not a help.

Somebody is crying and weeping, and you sit by the side and you start crying and weeping: are you helping him? In what way? Somebody is miserable and you become miserable; are you helping him? You may be doubling his misery. He was alone miserable; now there are two persons miserable. But in showing sympathy to the miserable you are again playing a trick. Deep down, when you show sympathy to the miserable – and remember, sympathy is not compassion; sympathy is friendliness. When you show sympathy and friendliness to a depressed, sad, miserable person, deep down you are feeling happy. Always there is an undercurrent of happiness. It has to be so because it is a simple arithmetic: when somebody is happy, you feel miserable, then how it is possible when somebody is miserable you can feel unhappy? Somebody is happy you feel miserable; then somebody is unhappy, deep down you feel very happy.

But you don’t show it. Or if you are observed acutely, you even show it – even in your sympathy there is a subtle current of happiness. You feel good; you feel cheered up really, that it is not you who is unhappy, and you are in a position to show sympathy – and you are higher, superior.

People always feel good when they can show sympathy to others; they are always cheered. Deep down they feel that they are not so miserable, thank God. When somebody dies, immediately an undercurrent in you comes that you are still alive, thank God. And you can show sympathy and it costs nothing. Showing sympathy costs nothing, but compassion is a different thing. Compassion means you would like to kelp the other person; you would like to do whatsoever can be done; you would like to help him to come out of his misery. You are not happy about it, but you are not miserable also.

And just between the two exists compassion: Buddha is in compassion. He will not feel miserable with you because that is not going to help anybody, and he will not feel happy because there is no point in feeling happy. How can you feel happy when somebody is miserable? But he cannot feel unhappy also because that is not going to help. He will feel compassion. Compassion exists just in between these two. Compassion means he would like to help you to come out of it. He is for you, compassion means, but against your misery; he loves you, but not your misery. He would like to bring you up, but not your misery with you.

When you are sympathetic you start loving the misery, not the man who is miserable. And if suddenly the man is cheered up and says, “Don’t bother,” you will feel shocked, because he never gave you a chance to be sympathetic and show him how higher, superior and happy a being you are.

Don’t be miserable with somebody who is miserable. Help him to come out of it. Never make misery an object of love; don’t give any affection to misery, because if you give affection and you make it an object of love, you are opening a door for it. Sooner or later, you will become miserable. Remain aloof. Compassion means remain aloof. Extend your hand, remain aloof, help – don’t feel miserable, don’t feel happy, because both are the same. When you feel miserable on the surface with somebody’s misery, deep down runs the current of being happy. Both have to be dropped. Compassion will bring you tranquility of the mind.

Many people come to me; they are social reformers, revolutionaries, politicians, utopians, and they say, “How you can teach people meditation and silence when there is so much misery in the world?” They tell me, “This is selfish.” They would like me to teach people to be miserable with others who are miserable. They don’t know what they are saying but they feel very good – doing social work, social service, they feel very good. And if suddenly the world becomes a heaven, and God says, “Now everything will be okay,” you will find the social reformers and revolutionaries in absolute misery, because they will have nothing to do. […]

They will be in such a difficulty if the world is really changed. If the world really fulfills the utopia of their minds and imaginations, they will commit suicide or they will go mad. Or they will start preaching just the opposite, just the contradictory, just the opposite [to] whatsoever they are preaching now.

They come to me and they say, “How you can tell people to be silent when the world is in such a misery?” They think first the misery has to be removed, then people will be silent? No, if people are silent misery can be removed, because only silence can remove the misery. Misery is an attitude. It is less concerned with material conditions, more concerned with the inner mind, the inner consciousness. Even a poor man can be happy, and once he is happy many things start falling in line.

Soon he may not be a poor man, because how can you be poor when you are happy? When you are happy, the whole world participates with you. When you are unhappy, everything goes wrong. You create all around a situation which helps your unhappiness to be there. This is the dynamics of the mind. It is a self-defeating system. You feel miserable, then more misery attracts towards you. When more misery attracts you say, “How I can be silent? So much misery there.” Then even more misery is attracted toward you. Then you say, “It is impossible now. And those who say they are happy must be telling lies: these Buddhas, Krishnas, they must be telling lies. These Patanjalis, they must be liars, because it [happiness] is possible, [with] so much misery?”

Then you are in a self-defeating system. You attract, and not only you attract for yourself: when one person is miserable, he helps others also to be miserable, because they are also fools like you. Seeing you in misery, they sympathize. When they sympathize, they become vulnerable. So it is just like that: one ill person infects the whole community. […]

Unless others are in misery, you don’t feel happy. But how can you feel happy when others are unhappy, and how can you feel alive really when others are dead? We exist together. And sometimes you may be the cause of many people’s misery. Then you are earning a karma. You may not have directly hit them; you may not have been violent to them. Subtle is the law. You need not be a murderer, but if simply you infect people by your misery, you are participating in it; you are creating misery. And you are responsible for it, and you will have to pay for it. Very subtle is the mechanism.

Just two, three days before, it happened a sannyasin attacked Laxmi. You may not have observed that you all are responsible for it, because many of you have been feeling antagonism towards Laxmi. That sannyasin is just a victim, just the weakest link among you. He has expressed your antagonism, that’s all, and he was the weakest; he became the victim, and now you will feel that he is responsible. That’s not true. You participated. Subtle is the law!

How you participated? Deep down, whenever somebody managing – and Laxmi is managing things around here . . . There are many situations in which you will feel antagonistic, in which she will have to say no to you, in which you will feel hurt – it cannot be avoided – in which you feel that enough attention is not being paid to you, in which you feel that you are treated as if you are nobody. Your ego feels hurt and you feel antagonism.

If many people feel antagonism towards a person, then the weakest amongst them will become the victim; he will do something. He was the craziest amongst you, that’s right. But he alone is not responsible. If you have ever felt antagonism towards Laxmi, that is part [of it] and you have earned a karma, and unless you become so subtly aware, you cannot become enlightened. Things are very complicated. […]

This is a community; you live here as a family. Many tensions are bound to be there, be aware. Be alert about those tensions because your tensions can create a force. They can become accumulative, and suddenly somebody who is weak, vulnerable, simple, may become the shelter of the accumulated force, and then he reacts in a way. Then you all can throw the responsibility on him. But that is not true if you ever have felt any antagonism, you are part of it. And the same is true in the greater world also.

When Godase murdered Gandhi, I never said that Godase is responsible. He was the weakest link; that is true. But the whole Hindu mind was responsible, deep currents of Hindu antagonism against Gandhi. The feeling that he is for Moslems, Mohammedans, was accumulating. This is an actual phenomenon: antagonism becomes accumulated. Just like a cloud, it hovers, and then somewhere a weak heart, a very unprotected man, becomes the victim. The cloud gets roots into him and then the explosion. And then everybody is freed: Godase is responsible – murdering Gandhi – so you can kill Godase and be finished. Then the whole country moves in the same way, and the Hindu mind remains the same: no change. Subtle is the law!

Always find the dynamics of mind. Only then you will be transformed; otherwise not.

The mind becomes tranquil by cultivating attitudes of friendliness towards the happy, compassion towards the miserable, joy towards the virtuous . . .

Look! Patanjali is making steps – and beautiful and very subtle, but exactly scientific.

. . . joy towards the virtuous, and indifference towards the evil.

When you feel somebody is a virtuous man, joy, the ordinary attitude is that he must be deceiving. How anybody can be more virtuous than you? Hence so much criticism goes on.

Whenever there is somebody who is virtuous, you immediately start criticizing, you start finding faults with him. Somehow or other you have to bring him down. He cannot be virtuous. You cannot believe this. Patanjali says joy, because if you criticize a virtuous man, deep down you are criticizing virtue. If you criticize a virtuous man, you are coming to a point to believe that virtue is impossible in this world. Then you will feel at ease. Then you can move on your evil ways easily because, “Nobody is virtuous; everybody is just like me – even worse than me.” That’s why so much condemnation goes on – criticism, condemnation.

If somebody says, “That person is a very beautiful person,” you immediately find something to criticize. You cannot tolerate – because if somebody is virtuous and you are not, your ego is shattered, and then you start feeling that “I have to change myself,” which is an arduous effort. The simple is to condemn; the simple is to criticize; the simple is to say, “No! Prove it! What are you saying? First, prove how he is virtuous!” And it is difficult to prove virtue; it is very easy to disprove anything. It is very difficult to prove! […]

People always believe in the negative easily because to disprove a no is very difficult – how can you prove? How can you prove that Jesus is the son of God? How will you prove? Two thousand years, and Christian theology has been proving [trying] without proving it. But within seconds it was proved that he was a sinner, a vagabond, and they killed – within seconds! Somebody said that “I have seen this man coming out of a prostitute’s house,” – finished! Nobody bothers whether this man who is saying that “I have seen,” is believable or not – nobody bothers! The negative is always believed easily because it is also helping your ego. The positive is not believed.

You can say no whenever there is virtue. But you are not harming the virtuous man: you are harming you. You are self-destructive. You are, in fact, committing suicide slowly – poisoning yourself. When you say that “This man is not virtuous, that man is not virtuous,” what are you, in fact, creating? You are creating a milieu in which you will come to believe that virtue is impossible; and when virtue is impossible, there is no need to attempt. Then you fall down. Then you settle wherever you are. Growth becomes impossible. And you would like to settle, but then you settle in misery because you are miserable.

You all have settled completely. This settlement has to be broken; you have to be unsettled. Wherever you are you have to be uprooted and replanted in a higher plane, and that is possible only if you are joyful towards the virtuous.

. . . joy towards the virtuous and indifference towards the evil.

Don’t even condemn evil.

The temptation is there; you would like to condemn even virtue. And Patanjali says don’t condemn evil. Why? He knows the inner dynamics of the mind: because if you too much condemn evil, you pay too much attention to evil, and by and by, you become attuned to it. If you say that “This is wrong, that is wrong,” you are paying too much attention to the wrong. You will become addicted with the wrong. If you pay too much attention to anything, you become hypnotized. And whatsoever you are condemning you will commit, because it will become an attraction, a deep-down attraction. Otherwise, why bother? They are sinners, but who are you to bother about them?

Jesus says, “Judge ye not . . . .” That’s what Patanjali means – indifference; don’t judge this way or that – be indifferent. Don’t say yes or no; don’t condemn, don’t appreciate. Simply leave it to the divine; it is none of your business. A man is a thief: it is his business. It is his and God’s. Let them settle themselves; you don’t come in. Who is asking you to come in? Jesus says, “Judge ye not . . . .” Patanjali says, “Be indifferent.” […]

When you say that something is wrong, go in the monasteries – the monks condemning sex. […] Twenty-four hours they are thinking about it: trying to avoid it is thinking about it. The more you try to avoid it, the more you are hypnotized. That is why in the old scriptures it is said whenever a saint concentrates, beautiful girls from heaven come and try to disturb his mind. Why beautiful girls should be interested? Somebody is sitting under a tree with closed eyes, why beautiful girls will be interested in this man?

Nobody comes from anywhere, but he is so much against sex it becomes a hypnosis. He is so much hypnotized that now dreams become real. He opens the eyes and sees a beautiful naked girl standing there. You need a pornographic book to see a nude woman. If you go to the monastery, you will not need a pornographic book: you create your pornography yourself all around. And then the seer, the man who was concentrating, becomes more afraid: he closes his eyes, clenches his fist. Now inside the woman is standing.

And you cannot find such beautiful women on this earth because they are creations of dream – hypnosis byproducts – and the more he becomes afraid, the more they are there. They will rub with his body, they will touch his head, they will cling and embrace him. He is completely mad, but this happens. This is happening to you also. Degrees may differ, but this is what is happening. Whatsoever you are against, you will be joined with it deep down.

Never be against anything. To be against evil is to fall a victim. Then you are falling in the hands of the evil. Indifference: if you follow indifference, it means it is none of your concern. Somebody is stealing: that is his karma. He will know and he will have to suffer. That is not your business at all: you don’t think about it, don’t pay any attention to it. There is a prostitute: she is selling her body – that is her business. You don’t have condemnation in you, otherwise you will be attracted towards her. […]

What you are outwardly is not the question. What your inner hypnosis is will decide your future course of life. Be indifferent to evil. Indifference does not mean apathy – remember. These are subtle distinctions. Indifference doesn’t mean apathy. It does not mean that close your eyes, because even if you close you have taken a standpoint, attitude. It does not mean don’t bother, because there also is a subtle condemnation. Indifference simply means as if it doesn’t exist, as if it is not there. No attitude indifference means. You pass as if it is not happening.

Upeksha, the word Patanjali uses, is very beautiful. It is neither apathy nor antagonism nor escape. It is simple indifference without any attitude – remember, without any attitude, because you can be indifferent with an attitude. You can think it is not worth – it is not worthy of me to think about it. No, then you have an attitude, and a subtle condemnation is hidden in it. Indifference means simply, “Who are you to decide, to judge?” You think about you, “Who are you? How can you say what is evil and what is good? Who knows?”

Because life is such a complexity the evil becomes good, the good becomes evil – they change. Sinners have been known to reach the ultimate; saints have been known to be thrown into hell. So who knows? And who are you? Who is asking you? You take care of yourself. [Even] if you can do that, enough you have done. You be more mindful and aware; then an indifference comes to you without any attitude. […]

So don’t take any attitude: that is the meaning of being indifferent.

The mind also becomes tranquil by alternating expelling and retaining the breath.

Patanjali gives other alternatives also. If you can do this – being happy with happy people, friendly; compassion with the miserable; joy with the virtuous; indifference with the evil ones – if you can do this, then you enter from [through] the transformation of the mind towards the supermind. If you cannot do – because it is difficult, not easy – then there are other ways. Don’t feel depressed.

Says Patanjali:

The mind also becomes tranquil by alternating expelling and retaining the breath.

Then you enter through the physiology. This is entering through the mind – the first: the second is entering through the physiology.

Breathing and thinking are deeply connected, as if they are two poles of one thing. You also sometimes become aware, if you are a little mindful, that whenever the mind changes, the breathing changes. For example, you are angry: immediately the breathing changes, the rhythm is gone. The breathing has a different quality. It is non-rhythmic.

When you have passion, lust, sex takes over, the breathing changes; it becomes feverish, mad. When you are silent, just not doing anything, just feeling very relaxed, the breathing has a different rhythm. If you watch, and Patanjali must have watched very deeply . . . he says if you watch deeply, you can find what type of breathing and its rhythm creates what type of mind. If you feel friendly, the breathing is different. If you feel antagonistic, angry, the breathing is different. So either change the mind and the breathing will change, or you can do the opposite: change the breathing and the mind will change. Change the rhythm of breathing, and the mind will immediately change.

When you feel happy, silent, joyous, remember the rhythm of the breathing. Next time when anger comes, you don’t allow the breathing to change; you retain the rhythm of breathing as if you are happy. Anger is not possible then because the breathing creates the situation. The breathing forces the inner glands in the body which release chemicals in the blood.

That’s why you become red when you are angry: certain chemicals have come into the blood, and you become feverish. Your temperature goes high. The body is ready to fight or take flight; the body is in an emergency. Through hammering of the breathing, this change comes.

Don’t change the breathing. Just remain as if you are silent; just the breathing has to follow a silent pattern – you will feel it impossible to become angry. When you are feeling very passionate, lust, sex takes over. Just try to be tranquil in the breathing, and you feel sex has disappeared.

Here he suggests a method:

The mind also becomes tranquil by alternating expelling and retaining the breath.

You can do two things: whenever you feel the mind is not tranquil – tense, worried, chattering, anxiety, constantly dreaming – do one thing: first exhale deeply. Always start by exhaling. Exhale deeply: as much as you can, throw the air out. With the throwing of the air the mood will be thrown out, because breathing is everything.

And then expel the breath as far as possible. Take the belly in and retain for few seconds – don’t inhale. Let the air be out, and you don’t inhale for few seconds. Then allow the body to inhale. Inhale deeply – as much as you can. Again, stop for few seconds. The same should be the gap as you retain the breath out – if you retain for three seconds, retain the breath in for three seconds. Throw it out; retain for three seconds. Take in; retain for three seconds. But it has to be thrown out completely. Exhale totally and inhale totally, and make a rhythm. Retain, in; retain, out. Retain, in; retain, out. Immediately you will feel a change coming into your whole being. The mood is gone. A new climate has entered into you.

What happens? Why is it so? For many reasons: one, when you start creating this rhythm, your mind is completely diverted. You cannot be angry, because a new thing has started, and mind cannot have two things together. Your mind is now filled with exhaling, inhaling, retaining, creating a rhythm. You are completely absorbed in it, the cooperation with anger is broken: one thing.

This exhaling, inhaling, cleanses the whole body. When you exhale out and retain for three seconds or five seconds – as much as you want, as much as you can – what happens inside? The whole body throws all that is poisonous into the blood. Air is out and the body gets a gap. In that gap all the poisons are thrown out. They come to the heart, they accumulate there – poisonous gases, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, they all gather together there.

You don’t give a chance for them to gather together. You go on breathing in and out. There is no gap, no pause. In that pause, a gap is created, an emptiness. In that emptiness, everything flows and fills it. Then you take a deep inhalation and then you retain. All those poisonous gases become mixed with the breathing; then you again exhale and throw them out. Again pause. Let the poisons gather. And this is a way of throwing things out.

Mind and breath are so much connected – have to be, because breathing is life. A man can be without mind, but cannot be without breathing. Breathing is deeper than mind. Your brain can be operated completely; you will be alive if you can breathe. If the breathing continues, you will be alive. The brain can be taken out completely. You will vegetate, but you will be alive. You will not be able to open the eyes and talk or do anything, but on the bed, you can be alive, vegetating for many years. But mind cannot. If the breathing stops, mind disappears.

Yoga found this basic thing – that breathing is deeper than thinking. If you change breathing, you change thinking. And once you know the key, that breathing has the key, you can create any climate that you want: it is up to you. The way you breathe it depends on it. Just you do one thing: for seven days, you just make a notebook of the different types of breathing that happen with different moods. You are angry: take a notebook and just count breathing – how much you inhale and how much you exhale. Five counts you inhale, three counts you exhale – note it down.

Sometime you are feeling very, very beautiful – note it down, what is the proportion of inhalation and exhalation, what is the length, is there any pause – note it down. And for seven days just make a diary to feel your own breathing, how it is connected with your moods. Then you can sort it out. Then whenever you want to drop a mood, just use the opposite pattern. Or, if you want to bring a mood, then use the pattern.

Actors, knowingly, unknowingly, come to know it because sometimes they have to be angry without being angry. So what they will do? They will have to create the breathing pattern. They may not be aware, but they will start breathing as if they are angry, and soon the blood rushes in and poisons are released. And without being angry their eyes are red, and they are in a subtle anger state without being angry. They have to make love without being in love; they have to show love without being in love. How do they do it? They know a certain secret of yoga.

That’s why I always say a yogi can become the most perfect actor. He is. His stage is vast, that’s all. He is acting – not acting on the stage, but on the stage of the world. He is an actor; he is not a doer. And the difference is that he is taking part in a great drama, and he can remain a witness to it, and he can remain aloof and detached.

When meditation produces extraordinary sense perceptions, the mind gains confidence, and this helps perseverance.

If you work out your breathing pattern, and you find the secret keys how to change the climate of the mind, how to change the moods . . . and if you work from both the poles, that will be better. And try to be friendly towards the happy, indifferent towards the evil, and continue the change and transformation of your breathing patterns also. Then there will be extraordinary sense perceptions.

If you have taken LSD, marijuana, hashish, then you know extraordinary sense perceptions happen. You look at ordinary things, and they become extraordinary. Aldous Huxley remembers that when he took LSD for the first time, he was sitting before an ordinary chair, and when he became more and more deep with the drug, when he was on, the chair immediately started changing color. Radiant it became: an ordinary chair – he had never paid any attention to it – became so beautiful, many colors coming out of it, as if it is made of diamonds. Such beautiful shapes and nuances that he couldn’t believe his eyes what is happening. Later on he remembered this must have happened to Van Gogh, because he has painted a chair almost exactly the same.

A poet need not take LSD. He has an inbuilt system of throwing LSD in the body. That is the difference between a poet and an ordinary man. That’s why they say a poet is born, not made: because he has an extraordinary body structure. The chemicals in his body have a different quantity and quality to them. That’s why where you don’t see anything he sees miracles. You see an ordinary tree, and he sees something unbelievable. You see ordinary clouds: a poet, if he really is a poet, never sees anything ordinary; everything is extraordinarily beautiful.

The same happens to a yogi: because when you change your breathing and your attitudes, your body chemistry changes its pattern; you are going through a chemical transformation, and then your eyes become clear, a new perceptivity happens. The same old tree becomes absolutely new. You never knew the shade of its green: it becomes radiant. The whole world all around you takes a new shape. It is a paradise now – not the ordinary old rotten earth.

People around you are no more the same. Your ordinary wife becomes a most beautiful woman. Everything changes with your clarity of perception. When your eyes change, everything changes.

Says Patanjali,

When meditation produces extraordinary sense perceptions, the mind gains confidence and this helps perseverance.

Then you become confident that you are on the right path. The world is becoming more and more beautiful; the ugliness is disappearing. The world is becoming more and more a harmony; the discord is disappearing. The world is becoming more and more home; you are feeling more and more at ease in it. It is friendly. It is a love affair with you and the universe. You become more confident, and more perseverance comes to your effort.

Also, meditate on the inner light which is serene, beyond all sorrow.

This can be done only when you have attained a certain quality of perceptivity. Then you can close the eyes and you can find a flame – a beautiful flame near the heart, a blue light. But right now you cannot see it. It is there, it has always been there. When you die, that blue light goes out of your body. But you cannot see it because when you were alive you couldn’t see it.

And others will also be not able to see it, that something is going out; but Kirlian in Soviet Russia, he has taken photographs with very sensitive film. When a person dies, something happens around. Some body energy, some light-like thing, leaves, goes and disappears into the cosmos. That light is always there: that is your center of being. It is near the heart – with a blue flame.

When you have some perception, you can see the beautiful world all around you – when your eyes are clear. You close them and you move nearer the heart; you try to find what is there. First you will feel darkness. It is just like as you come from the outside on a hot sunny day inside the room, and you feel everything is dark. But wait. Let the eyes be attuned with the darkness, and soon you start seeing things in the house.

You have been outside for millions of lives. When for the first time you come in, nothing is there except darkness, emptiness. But wait. It will take few days – even a few months, but just wait, close the eyes and look down in the heart. Suddenly, one day it happens: you see a light, a flame. Then concentrate on that flame.

Nothing is more blissful than that. Nothing is more dancing, singing, musical, harmonious as that inner blue light within your heart. And the more you concentrate, the more you become tranquil, silent, calm, collected. Then there is no darkness for you. When your heart is filled with light, the whole universe is filled with light.

Also, meditate on the inner light which is serene, beyond all sorrow.

Also, meditate on one who has attained desirelessness.

That too! All alternatives Patanjali is giving you. A veetraga, one who has gone beyond all desires – also meditate on him. Mahavira, Buddha, Patanjali – your own – Zarathustra, Mohammed, Christ or anybody you feel an affinity and love for . . . . Meditate on one who has gone beyond desires. Meditate on your Master, on your guru, who has gone beyond desires. How it will help? It helps, because when you meditate on someone who has gone beyond desires, he becomes a magnetic force in you. You allow him to enter within you; he pulls you out of yourself. This becomes your availability to him.

If you meditate on someone who has gone beyond desires, you will become like him sooner or later, because meditation makes you like the object of meditation itself. If you meditate on money, you will become just like money. Go and look at a miser; he has no more a soul. He has only a bank balance; he has nothing inside. If you listen, you will just hear notes, rupees: you will not find any heart there. Whatsoever you pay your attention to, you become like it. So be aware. Don’t pay attention to something you would not like to become. Only pay attention to something you would like to become, because this is the beginning. The seed is sown with the attention, and soon it will become a tree.

You sow the seeds of hell, and when it becomes a tree then you say, “Why I am so miserable?” You always pay attention to the wrong; you always look to that which is negative. You always pay attention to the fault; then you become faulty.

Don’t pay attention to the fault. Pay attention to the beautiful. Why count the thorns? Why not see the flower? Why count the nights? Why not count the days? If you count the nights, then there are two nights and only one day between the two. If you count the days, then there are two days and only one night in between. And it makes a lot of difference. Look at the light side if you want to become light; look at the dark if you want to become dark.

Says Patanjali:

Also, meditate on one who has attained desirelessness.

Seek a Master; surrender to a Master. Be attentive to him. Listen, watch, eat and drink him. Let him enter you; allow your heart to be filled with him. Soon you will be on a journey, because the object of attention ultimately becomes the goal of your life. And attention is a secret relationship. Through attention you become the object of your attention.

Krishnamurti goes on saying, “The observer becomes the observed.” He is right: whatsoever you observe, you will become. So be alert. Beware! Don’t observe something which you would not like to become, because that is your goal; you are sowing the seeds.

Live near a veetraga – a man who is beyond desires. Live near a man who has no more to fulfill here, who is fulfilled. His very fulfilledness will overflood you, and he will become a catalyst.

He will not do anything, because a man who is beyond desires cannot do anything. Even he cannot help you because help is also a desire. Much help comes through him, but he doesn’t help you. He becomes a catalyst without doing anything, if you allow him; he drops into your heart and his very presence crystallizes you.

-Osho

From The Heart of Yoga, Discourse #9; Yoga: The Science of the Soul, V.2, (previously titled Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega).

This discourse is the Listening Meditation in the third 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.

Practice and Desirelessness – Osho

The first state of vairagya, desirelessness – cessation from self-indulgence in the thirst for sensuous pleasures, with conscious effort.

The last state of vairagya, desireless – cessation of all desiring by knowing the innermost nature of purusha, the supreme self.

–Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras

Abhyasa and vairagya – constant inner practice and desirelessness: these are the two foundation stones of Patanjali’s yoga. Constant inner effort is needed not because something has to be achieved, but because of wrong habits. The fight is not against nature, the fight is against habits. The nature is there, every moment available to flow in, to become one with it, but you have got a wrong pattern of habits. Those habits create barriers. The fight is against these habits, and unless they are destroyed, the nature, your inherent nature, cannot flow, cannot move, cannot reach to the destiny for which it is meant to be.

So remember the first thing: the struggle is not against nature. The struggle is against wrong nurture, wrong habits. You are not fighting yourself; you are fighting something else which has become fixed with you. If this is not understood rightly, then your whole effort can go in a wrong direction. You may start fighting with yourself, and if once you start fighting with yourself you are fighting a losing battle. You can never be victorious. Who will be victorious and who will be defeated? – because you are both. The one who is fighting and the one with whom you are fighting is the same.

If my both hands start fighting, who is going to win? Once you start fighting with yourself you are lost. And so many persons, in their endeavors, in their seeking for spiritual truth, fall into that error. They become victims of this error; they start fighting with themselves. If you fight with yourself, you will go more and more insane. You will be more and more divided, split. You will become schizophrenic. This is what is happening in the West.

Christianity has taught – not Christ, Christianity – has taught to fight with oneself, to condemn oneself, to deny oneself. Christianity has created a great division between the lower and the higher. There is nothing lower and nothing higher in you, but Christianity talks about the lower self and the higher self, or body and the soul. But somehow Christianity divides you and creates a fight. This fight is going to be endless; it will not lead you anywhere. The ultimate result can only be self-destruction, a schizophrenic chaos. That’s what is happening in the West.

Yoga never divides you, but still there is a fight. The fight is not against your nature. On the contrary, the fight is for your nature. You have accumulated many habits. Those habits are your achievement of many lives wrong patterns. And because of those wrong patterns your nature cannot move spontaneously, cannot flow spontaneously, cannot reach to its destiny. These habits have to be destroyed, and these are only habits. They may look like nature to you because you are so much addicted with them. You may have become identified with them, but they are not you.

This distinction has to be clearly maintained in the mind, otherwise you can misinterpret Patanjali. Whatsoever has come in you from without and is wrong has to be destroyed so that which is within you can flow, can flower. Abhyasa, constant inner practice, is against habits.

The second thing, the second foundation stone, is vairagya, desirelessness. That too can lead you in the wrong direction. And remember, these are not rules, these are simple directions. When I say these are not rules, I mean they are not to be followed like an obsession. They have to be understood – the meaning, the significance. And that significance has to be carried in one’s life.

It is going to be different for everyone, so it is not a fixed rule. You are not to follow it dogmatically. You have to understand its significance and allow it to grow within you. The flowering is going to be different with each individual. So these are not dead, dogmatic rules, these are simple directions. They indicate the direction. They don’t give you the detail. […]

And there are many people who are rule-obsessed. They follow blindly. Patanjali is not interested in giving you rules. Whatsoever he is going to say are simple directions – not to be followed, but to be understood. The following will come out of that understanding. And the reverse cannot happen – if you follow the rules, understanding will not come; if you understand the rules, the following will come automatically, as a shadow.

Desirelessness is a direction. If you follow it as a rule, then you will start killing your desires. Many have done that; millions have done that. They start killing their desires. Of course, this is mathematical, this is logical. If desirelessness is to be achieved, then this is the best way: to kill all desires. Then you will be without desires.

But you will be also dead. You have followed the rule exactly, but if you kill all desires, you are killing yourself, you are committing suicide – because desires are not only desires, they are the flow of life energy. Desirelessness is to be achieved without killing anything. Desirelessness is to be achieved with more life, with more energy – not less.

For example, you can kill sex easily if you starve the body, because sex and food are deeply related. Food is needed for your survival, for the survival of the individual, and sex is needed for the survival of the race, of the species. They are both food in a way. Without food the individual cannot survive and without sex the race cannot survive. But the primary is individual. If the individual cannot survive, then there is no question of the race.

So if you starve your body, if you give so little food to your body that the energy created by it is exhausted in day-to-day routine work – your walking, sitting, sleeping – no extra energy accumulates, then sex will disappear because sex can be there only when the individual is gathering extra energy, more than he needs for his survival. Then the body can think of the survival of the race. If you are in danger, then the body simply forgets about sex.

Hence, so much attraction for fasting, because if you fast, sex disappears – but this is not desirelessness. This is just becoming more and more dead, less and less alive. Zen monks in India, they have been fasting continuously just for this end, because if you fast continuously and you are constantly on a starvation diet, sex disappears; nothing else is needed – no transformation of the mind, no transformation of the inner energy. Simply starving helps.

Then you become habitual for the starvation. And continuously if you do it for years, you will simply forget that sex exists. No energy is created; no energy moves to the sex center. There is no energy to move! The person exists just as a dead being. There is no sex.

But this is not what Patanjali means. This is not a desireless state. It is simply an impotent state; energy is not there. Give food to the body . . . You may have starved the body for thirty or forty years – give right food to the body and sex reappears immediately. You are not changed. The sex is just hidden there waiting for energy to flow. Whenever energy flows, it will become again alive.

So what is the criterion? The criterion has to be remembered. Be more alive, be more filled with energy, vital, and become desireless. Only then, if your desirelessness makes you more alive, then you have followed the right direction. If it makes you simply a dead person, you have followed the rule. It is easy to follow the rule because no intelligence is required. It is easy to follow the rule because simple tricks can do it. Fasting is a simple trick. Nothing much is implied in it; no wisdom is going to come out of it. […]

When you have more energy, you move in more dimensions. When you are filled with overflowing energy, your overflowing energy leads you in many, many desires. Desires are nothing but outlets for energy. So two ways are possible. One is: your desire changes; the energy remains, or energy is removed, desire remains. Energy can be removed very easily. You can simply be operated on, castrated, and then sex disappears. Some hormones can be removed from your body. And that’s what fasting is doing – some hormones disappear; then you can become sexless.

But this is not the goal of Patanjali. Patanjali says that energy should remain, and the desire disappears. Only when desire disappears, and you are filled with energy, can you achieve that blissful state that yoga aims at. A dead person cannot reach to the divine. The divine can be attained only through overflowing energy, abundant energy, an ocean of energy.

So this is the second thing to remember continuously – don’t destroy energy, destroy desire. It will be difficult. It is going to be hard, arduous, because it needs a total transformation of your being. But Patanjali is for it. So he divides his vairagya, his desirelessness, in two steps. . . We will enter the sutra.

The first:

The first state of vairagya – desirelessness: cessation from self-indulgence in the thirst for sensuous pleasures, with conscious effort.

Many things are implied and have to be understood. One, the indulgence in sensuous pleasures. Why you ask for sensuous pleasures? Why the mind constantly thinks about indulgence? Why you move again and again in the same pattern of indulgences?

For Patanjali and for all those who have known, the reason is that you are not blissful inwardly; hence, the desire for pleasure. The pleasure-oriented mind means that as you are, in yourself, you are unhappy. That’s why you go on seeking happiness somewhere else. A person who is unhappy is bound to move into desires. Desires are the way of the unhappy mind to seek happiness. Of course, nowhere this mind can find happiness. At the most he can find a few glimpses. Those glimpses appear as pleasure. Pleasure means glimpses of happiness. And the fallacy is that this pleasure-seeking mind thinks that these glimpses and pleasure is coming from somewhere else. It always comes from within.

Let us try to understand. You are in love with a person. You move into sex. Sex gives you a glimpse of pleasure; it gives you a glimpse of happiness. For a single moment you feel at ease. All the miseries have disappeared; all the mental agony is no more. For a single moment you are here and now, you have forgotten all. For a single moment there is no past and no future. Because of this – there is no past and no future, and for a single moment you are here and now– from within you the energy flows. Your inner self flows in this moment, and you have a glimpse of happiness.

But you think that the glimpse is coming from the partner, from the woman or from the man. It is not coming from the man or from the woman. It is coming from you! The other has simply helped you to fall into the present, to fall out of future and past. The other has simply helped you, to bring you to the nowness of this moment.

If you can come to this nowness without sex, sex, by and by will become useless, it will disappear. It will not be a desire then. If you want to move in it you can move into it as fun, but not as a desire. Then there is no obsession in it because you are not dependent on it.

Sit under a tree someday – just in the morning when the sun has not arisen, because with the sun arising your body is disturbed, and it is difficult to be at peace within. That is why the East has always been meditating before the sunrise. They have called it brahmamuhurt – the moments of the divine. And they are right, because with the sun, energies rise, and they start flowing in the old pattern that you have created.

Just in the morning, the sun has not yet come on the horizon, everything is silent, and the nature is fast asleep – the trees are asleep, the birds are asleep, the whole world is asleep; your body also inside is asleep – you have come to sit under a tree. Everything is silent. Just try to be here in this moment. Don’t do anything; don’t even meditate. Don’t make any effort. Just close your eyes, remain silent, in this silence of nature. Suddenly you will have the same glimpse which has been coming to you through sex or even greater, deeper. Suddenly you will feel a rush of energy flowing from within. And now you cannot be deceived because there is no other; it is certainly coming from you. It is certainly flowing from within. Nobody else is giving it to you; you are giving it to yourself.

But the situation is needed – a silence, energy not in excitement. You are not doing anything, just being there under a tree, and you will have the glimpse. And this will not really be the pleasure, it will be the happiness, because now you are looking at the right source, the right direction. Once you know it, then through sex you will immediately recognize that the other was just a mirror; you were just reflected in him or in her. And you were the mirror for the other. You were helping each other to fall into the present, to move away from the thinking mind to a non-thinking state of being.

The more mind is filled with chattering, the more sex has appeal. In the East, sex was never such an obsession as it has become an obsession in the West. Films, stories, novels, poetry, magazines, everything has become sexual. You cannot sell anything unless you can create a sex appeal. If you have to sell a car you can sell it only as a sex object. If you want to sell toothpaste, you can sell only through some sex appeal. Nothing can be sold without sex. It seems that only sex has the market, nothing else has significance.

Every significance comes through sex. The whole mind is obsessed with sex. Why? Why has this never happened before? This is something new in human history. And the reason is now the West is totally absorbed in thoughts – no possibility of being here and now, except sex. Sex has remained the only possibility, and even that is going.

For the modern man even this has become possible – that while making love he can think of other things. And once you become so capable that while making love you go on thinking of something – of your accounts in the bank, or you go on talking with a friend, or you go on being somewhere else while making love here – sex will also be finished. Then it will just be boring, frustrating, because sex was not the thing. The thing was only this – that because sexual energy is moving so fast, your mind comes to a stop; the sex takes over. The energy flows so fast, so vitally, that your ordinary patterns of thinking stop. […]

A constant chattering mind does not allow any happiness, any possibility of happiness, because only a silent mind can look within, only a silent mind can hear the silence, the happiness, that is always bubbling there. But it is so subtle that with the noise of the mind you cannot hear it.

Only in sex the noise sometimes stops. I say “sometimes”. If you have become habitual in sex also, as husbands and wives become, then it never stops. The whole act becomes automatic, and the mind goes on its own. Then sex also is a boredom. Anything has appeal if it can give you a glimpse. The glimpse may appear to be coming from the outside; it always comes from within. The outside can only be just a mirror. When happiness flowing from within is reflected from the outside, it is called pleasure. This is the definition of Patanjali’s – happiness flowing from within reflected from somewhere in the outside, the outside functioning as a mirror. And if you think that this happiness is coming from the outside, it is called pleasure. We are in search of happiness, not in search of pleasure. So unless you can have glimpses of happiness, you cannot stop your pleasure-seeking efforts. Indulgence means search for pleasure.

A conscious effort is needed for two things. One: whenever you feel a moment of pleasure is there, transform it into a meditative situation. Whenever you feel you are feeling pleasure, happy, joyful, close your eyes and look within, and see from where it is coming. Don’t lose this moment; this is precious. If you are not conscious you may continue thinking that it comes from without, and that’s the fallacy of the world.

If you are conscious, meditative, if you search for the real source, sooner or later you will come to know it is flowing from within. Once you know that it always flows from within, it is something that you have already got, indulgence will drop, and this will be the first step of desirelessness. Then you are not seeking, not hankering. You are not killing desires, you are not fighting with desires, you have simply found something greater. Desires don’t look so important now. They wither away.

Remember this: they are not to be killed and destroyed; they wither away. Simply you neglect them because you have a greater source. You are magnetically attracted towards it. Now your whole energy is moving inwards. The desires are simply neglected. You are not fighting them. If you fight with them, you will never win. It is just like you were having some stones, colored stones, in your hand. And now suddenly you have come to know about diamonds, and they are lying about. You throw the colored stones just to create space for the diamonds in your hand. You are not fighting the stones. When diamonds are there, you simply drop the stones. They have lost their meaning.

Desires must lose their meaning. If you fight, the meaning is not lost. Or even, on the contrary, just through fight you may give them more meaning. Then they become more important. This is happening. Those who fight with any desire, that desire becomes their center of the mind. If you fight sex, sex becomes the center. Then, continuously, you are engaged in it, occupied with it. It becomes like a wound. And wherever you look, that wound immediately projects, and whatsoever you see becomes sexual.

Mind has a mechanism, an old survival mechanism, of fight or flight. Two are the ways of the mind: either you can fight with something, or you can escape from it. If you are strong, then you fight. If you are weak, then you take flight, then you simply escape. But in both the ways the other is important, the other is the center. You can fight or you can escape from the world – from the world where desires are possible; you can go to the Himalayas. That too is a fight, the fight of the weak. […] If you are strong, then you are ready to fight. If you are weak, then you are ready to fly, to take flight. But in both the cases, you are not becoming stronger. In both cases the other has become the center of your mind. These are the two attitudes fight or flight – and both are wrong because through both the mind is strengthened.

Patanjali says there is a third possibility: don’t fight and don’t escape. Just be alert. Just be conscious. Whatsoever is the case, just be a witness. Conscious effort means, one: searching for the inner source of happiness, and second: witnessing the old pattern of habits – not fighting it, just witnessing it.

The first state of vairagya, desirelessness – cessation from self-indulgence in the thirst for sensuous pleasures, with conscious effort.

“Conscious effort” is the key word. Consciousness is needed, and effort is also needed. And the effort should be conscious because there can be unconscious efforts. You can be trained in such a way that you can drop certain desires without knowing that you have dropped them.

For example, if you are born in a vegetarian home, you will be eating vegetarian food. Non-vegetarian food is simply not the question. You never dropped it consciously. You have been brought up in such a way that unconsciously it has dropped by itself. But this is not going to give you some integrity; this is not going to give you some spiritual strength. Unless you do something consciously, it is not gained.

Many societies have tried this for their children to bring them up in such a way that certain wrong things simply don’t enter in their lives. They don’t enter, but nothing is gained through it because the real thing to gain is consciousness. And consciousness can be gained through effort. If without effort something is conditioned on you, it is not a gain at all.

So in India there are many vegetarians. Jains, Brahmins, many people are vegetarians. Nothing is gained because just by being born in a Jain family, being a vegetarian means nothing. It is not a conscious effort; you have not done anything about it. If you were born into a non-vegetarian family, you would have taken to non-vegetarian food similarly.

Unless some conscious effort is done, your crystallization never happens. You have to do something on your own. When you do something on your own, you gain something. Nothing is gained without consciousness, remember it. It is one of the ultimates. Nothing is gained without consciousness! You may become a perfect saint, but if you have not become so through consciousness, it is futile, useless. You must struggle inch by inch because through struggle more consciousness will be needed. And the more consciousness you practice, the more conscious you become. And a moment comes when you become pure consciousness.

The first step is:

Cessation from self-indulgence in the thirst for sensuous pleasures, with conscious effort.

What to do? Whenever you are in any state of pleasure – sex, food, money, power, anything that gives you pleasure – meditate on it. Just try to find it, from where it is coming. You are the source, or the source is somewhere else? If the source is somewhere else, then there is no possibility of any transformation because you will remain dependent on the source.

But fortunately, the source is not anywhere else, it is within you. If you meditate, you will find it. It is knocking every moment from within, that “I am here!” Once you have the feeling that it is there knocking every moment – and you were creating only situations outside in which it was happening – it can happen without situations. Then you need not depend on anybody, on food, on sex, on power, anything. You are enough unto yourself. Once you have come to this feeling, the feeling of enoughness, indulgence – the mind to indulge, the indulgent mind – disappears.

That doesn’t mean you will not enjoy food. You will enjoy more. But now food is not the source of your happiness, you are the source. You are not dependent on food; you are not addicted to it.

That doesn’t mean you will not enjoy sex. You can enjoy more, but now it is fun, play; it is just a celebration. But you are not dependent on it, it is not the source. And once two persons, two lovers, can find this – that the other is not the source of their pleasure – they stop fighting with the other. They start loving the other for the first time.

Otherwise, you cannot love a person upon whom you are dependent in any way. You will hate, because he is your dependence. Without him you cannot be happy. So he has the key, and a person who has the key to your happiness is your jailer. Lovers fight because they look [think] that the other has the key and, “He can make me happy or unhappy.” Once you come to know that you are the source and the other is the source of his own happiness, you can share your happiness; that’s another thing, but you are not dependent. You can share. You can celebrate together. That’s what love means: celebrating together, sharing together – not deriving from each other, not exploiting each other.

Because exploitation cannot be love. Then you are using the other as a means, and whomsoever you use as a means, he will hate you. Lovers hate each other because they are using, exploiting each other, and love – which should be the deepest ecstasy – becomes the ugliest hell. But once you know that you are the source of your happiness, no one else is the source, you can share it freely. Then the other is not your enemy, not even an intimate enemy. For the first time friendship arises, you can enjoy anything.

And you will be able to enjoy only when you are free. Only an independent person can enjoy. A person who is mad and obsessed with food cannot enjoy. He may fill his belly but cannot enjoy. His eating is violent. It is a sort of killing. He is killing the food; he is destroying the food. And lovers who feel that their happiness depends on the other are fighting, trying to dominate the other, trying to kill the other, to destroy the other. You will be able to enjoy everything more when you know that the source is within. Then the whole life becomes a play, and moment-to-moment you can go on celebrating infinitely.

This is the first step, with effort. Consciousness and effort, you achieve desirelessness. Patanjali says this is the first because even effort, even consciousness, is not good, because it means that some struggle, some hidden struggle, is on still.

The second and last step of vairagya, the last state of desirelessness:

Cessation of all desiring by knowing the innermost nature of purusha, the supreme self.

First you have to know that you are the source of all happiness that happens to you. Second, you have to know the total nature of your inner self. First, you are the source. Second, “What is this source?” First, just this much is enough, that you are the source of your happiness. And second, what this source is in its totality, this purusha, inner self is: “Who am ‘I’?” in its totality.

Once you know this source in its totality, you have known all. Then the whole universe is within, not only happiness. Then all that exists, exists within – not only happiness. Then God is not somewhere sitting in the clouds, he exists within. Then you are the source, the root source of all. Then you are the center.

And once you become the center of existence, once you know that you are the center of existence, all misery has disappeared. Now desirelessness becomes spontaneous, sahaj. No effort, no striving, no maintaining is needed. It is so; it has become natural. You are not pulling it or pushing it. Now there is no “I” who can pull and push.

Remember this: struggle creates ego. If you struggle in the world, it creates a gross ego: “I am someone with money, with prestige, with power.” If you struggle within, it creates a subtle ego: “I am pure; I am a saint, I am a sage,” but “I” remains with struggle. So there are pious egoists who have a very subtle ego. They may not be worldly people. They are not; they are otherworldly. But struggle is there. They have achieved something. That achievement still carries the last shadow of “I”.

The second step and the final step of desirelessness for Patanjali is total disappearance of the ego. Just nature flowing. No “I”, no conscious effort. That doesn’t mean you will not be conscious; you will be perfect consciousness – but no effort implied of being conscious. There will be no self-consciousness – pure consciousness. You have accepted yourself and existence as it is.

A total acceptance – this is what Lao Tzu calls Tao, the river flowing toward the sea. It is not making any effort; it is not in any hurry to reach the sea. Even if it doesn’t reach, it will not get frustrated. Even if it reaches in millions of years, everything is okay. The river is simply flowing because flowing is its nature. No effort is there. It will go on flowing.

When desires for the first time are noted and observed effort arises, a subtle effort. Even the first step is a subtle effort. You start trying to be aware, “From where my happiness is coming?” You have to do something, and that doing will create the ego. That’s why Patanjali says that is only the beginning, and you must remember that is not the end. In the end, not only have desires disappeared, you also have disappeared. Only the inner being has remained in its flow.

This spontaneous flow is the supreme ecstasy because no misery is possible for it. Misery comes through expectation, demand. There is no one to expect, to demand, so whatsoever happens, it is good. Whatsoever happens, it is a blessing. You cannot compare with anything else; it is the case. And because there is no comparing with the past and with the future – there is no one to compare – you cannot look at anything as misery, as pain. Even if pain happens in that situation, it will not be painful. Try to understand this. This is difficult. […]

You have a pain in the leg or in the head you have headache. You may not have observed the mechanism of it. You have headache, and you constantly struggle and resist. You don’t want it. You are against it, you divide. You are somewhere standing within the head and the headache is there. You are separate and the headache is separate, and you insist that it should not be so. This is the real problem.

You try once not to fight. Flow with the headache; become the headache. And say, “This is the case. This is how my head is at this moment, and at this moment nothing is possible. It may go in future, but in this moment headache is there.” Don’t resist. Allow it to happen; become one with it. Don’t pull yourself separate, flow into it. And then there will be a sudden upsurge of a new type of happiness you have not known. When there is no one to resist, even headache is not painful. The fight creates the pain. The pain means always fighting against the pain – that’s the real pain.

Jesus accepts. This is how his life has come to the cross. This is the destiny. This is what in the East they have always called fate, bhagya, the kismat. So there is no point in arguing with your fate, there is no point in fighting it. You cannot do anything; it is happening. Only one thing is possible for you – you can flow with it or you can fight with it. If you fight, it becomes more agony. If you flow with it, the agony is less. And if you can flow totally, agony has disappeared. You have become the flow.

Try it when you have a headache, try it when you have an ill body, try it when you have some pain – just flow with it. And once, if you can allow, you will have come to one of the deepest secrets of life-that pain disappears if you flow with it. And if you can flow totally, pain becomes happiness.

But this is not something logical to be understood. You can comprehend it intellectually, but that won’t do. Try it existentially. There are everyday situations. Every moment something is wrong. Flow with it, and see how you transform the whole situation. And through that transformation you transcend it.

A Buddha can never be in pain; that is impossible. Only an ego can be in pain. Ego is a must to be in pain. And if the ego is there you can transform your pleasures also into pain; if the ego is not there you can transform your pains into pleasures. The secret lies with the ego.

The last state of vairagya, desirelessness: cessation of all desiring by knowing the innermost nature of purusha, the supreme self.

How it happens? Just by knowing the innermost core of yourself, the purusha, the dweller within. Just by knowing it! Patanjali says, Buddha says, Lao Tzu says, just by knowing it all desires disappear.

This is mysterious, and the logical mind is bound to ask how it can happen just by knowing themselves all desires disappear? It happens because not knowing themselves all desires have arisen. Desires are simply the ignorance of the self. Why? All that you are seeking through desires is there, hidden in the self. If you know the self, desires will disappear.

For example, you are asking for power. Everybody is asking for power. Power creates madness in everybody. It seems to be human society has just existed in such a way that everybody is power addicted. […] Many lives are simply wasted. And even if you get power, what you are going to do? […]

Now what to do? What to do with this power? If the wish is fulfilled you are frustrated. If the wish is not fulfilled you are frustrated, and it cannot be fulfilled absolutely, because no one can be so powerful that he can feel, “Now it is enough” – no one! The world is so complex that even a Hitler feels powerless in moments, even a Napoleon will feel powerless in moments. Nobody can feel absolute power, and nothing can satisfy you.

But when somebody comes to know one’s self, one comes to know the source of absolute power. Then the desire for power disappears because you were already a king and you were only thinking that you were a beggar. And you were struggling to be a bigger beggar, a greater beggar, and you were already the king. Suddenly you come to realize that you don’t lack anything. You are not helpless. You are the source of all energies; you are the very source of life. That childhood feeling of powerlessness was created by others. And it is a vicious circle they created in you because it was created in them by their parents, and so on and so forth.

Your parents are creating the feeling in you that you are powerless. Why? Because only through this they can feel they are powerful. You may be thinking that you love children very much. That doesn’t seem to be the case. You love power, and when you get children, when you become mothers and fathers, you are powerful. Nobody may be listening to you; you may be nothing in the world, but at least in the boundaries of your home you are powerful. You can at least torture small children.

And look at fathers and mothers: they torture! And they torture in such a loving way that you cannot even say to them that “You are torturing.” They are torturing for “their own good”, for the children’s own good! They are helping them to grow. They feel powerful. Psychologists say that many people go to the teaching profession just to feel powerful, because thirty children at your disposal, you are just a king. […] Look! Go into a school! The teacher sitting on his chair – and absolute power, just the master of everything that is happening there. People want children not because they love, because if they love, really, the world will be totally different. If you love your child, the world will be totally different.

You will not help him to be helpless, to feel helpless, you will give him so much love that he would feel he is powerful. If you give love, then he will never be asking for power. He will not become a political leader; he will not go for elections. He will not try to accumulate money and go mad after it, because he knows it is useless – he is already powerful; love is enough.

But nobody is giving love, then he will create substitutes. All your desires, whether of power, of money, prestige, they all show that something had been taught to you in your childhood, something has been conditioned in your bio-computer and you are following that conditioning without looking inside, that whatsoever you are asking is already there.

Patanjali’s whole effort is to put your bio-computer in silence so that it doesn’t interfere. This is what meditation is. It is putting your bio-computer, for certain moments, into silence, into a non-chattering state, so that you can look within and hear your deepest nature. Just a glimpse will change you because then this biocomputer cannot deceive you. This bio-computer goes on saying that, “Do this, do that!” It goes on continuously manipulating you, that “You must have more power, otherwise you are nobody.”

If you look within, there is no need to be anybody; there is no need to be somebody. You are already accepted as you are. The whole existence accepts you, is happy about you. You are a flowering – an individual flowering, different from any other, unique, and God welcomes you; otherwise you could not be here. You are here only because you are accepted. You are here only because God loves you or the universe loves you or the existence needs you. You are needed.

Once you know your innermost nature, what Patanjali calls the purusha – the purusha means the inner dweller . . . The body is just a house. The inner dweller, the inner-dwelling consciousness, is purusha. Once you know this inner-dwelling consciousness, nothing is needed. You are enough, more than enough. You are perfect as you are. You are absolutely accepted, welcomed. The existence becomes a blessing. Desires disappear; they were part of self-ignorance. With self-knowledge, they disappear, they evaporate.

Abhyasa, constant inner practice, conscious effort to be more and more alert, to be more and more master of oneself, to be less and less dominated by habits, by mechanical, robot-like mechanisms – and vairagya, desirelessness: these two attained, one becomes a yogi; these two attained, one has attained the goal.

I will repeat, but don’t create a fight. Allow all this happening to be more and more spontaneous. Don’t fight with the negative. Rather, create the positive. Don’t fight with sex, with food, with anything. Rather, find out what it is that gives you happiness, from where it comes – move in that direction. Desires, by and by, go on disappearing.

And second: be more and more conscious. Whatsoever is happening, be more and more conscious. And remain in that moment and accept that moment. Don’t ask for something else. You will not be creating misery then. If pain is there, let it be there. Remain in it and flow in it. The only condition is, remain alert. Knowingly, watchfully, move into it, flow into it. Don’t resist!

When pain disappears, the desire for pleasure also disappears. When you are not in anguish, you don’t ask for indulgence. When anguish is not there, indulgence becomes meaningless. And more and more you go on falling into the inner abyss. And it is so blissful, it is such a deep ecstasy, that even a glimpse of it and the whole world becomes meaningless. Then all that this world can give to you is of no use.

And this should not become a fighting attitude – you should not become a warrior; you should become a meditator. If you are meditating, spontaneously things will happen to you which will go on transforming and changing you. Start fighting and you have started suppression. And suppression will lead you into more and more misery. And you cannot deceive.

Many people are there who are not only deceiving others; they go on deceiving themselves. They think they are not in misery; they go on saying they are not in misery. But their whole existence is miserable. When they are saying that they are not in misery, their faces, their eyes, their heart, everything, is in misery. […]

It isn’t needed whether you say or not. Your face, your very being, shows everything. You may say you are not miserable, but the way you say it, the way you are, shows you are miserable. You cannot deceive, and there is no point – because no one can deceive anybody else, you can only deceive yourself.

Remember, if you are miserable, you have created all this. Let it penetrate deep in your heart that you have created your sufferings because this is going to be the formula, the key. If you have created your sufferings, only then can you destroy it. If someone else has created them, you are helpless. You have created your miseries; you can destroy them. You have created them through wrong habits, wrong attitudes, addictions, desires.

Drop this pattern! Look fresh! And this very life is the ultimate joy that is possible to human consciousness.

-Osho

From The Path of Yoga, Discourse #9; Yoga: The Science of the Soul, V.1 (previously titled Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega).

This discourse is the Listening Meditation in the second 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.

Yoga is the Cessation of Mind – Osho

Now the discipline of yoga.
Yoga is the cessation of mind.
Then the witness is established in itself.
In the other states there is identification with the modifications of the mind.

–Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras

Yoga is pure science, and Patanjali is the greatest name as far as the world of yoga is concerned. This man is rare. There is no other name comparable to Patanjali. For the first time in the history of humanity, this man brought religion to the state of a science: he made religion a science, bare laws; no belief is needed.

Because so-called religions need beliefs. There is no other difference between one religion and another; the difference is only of beliefs. A Mohammedan has certain beliefs, a Hindu others, a Christian others. The difference is of beliefs.

Yoga has nothing as far as belief is concerned; yoga doesn’t say to believe in anything. Yoga says experience. Just like science says experiment, yoga says experience. Experiment and experience are both the same, their directions are different. Experiment means something you can do outside; experience means something you can do inside. Experience is an inside experiment.

Science says: Don’t believe, doubt as much as you can. But also, don’t disbelieve, because disbelief is again a sort of belief. You can believe in God; you can believe in the concept of no-God. You can say God is, with a fanatic attitude; you can say quite the reverse, that God is not with the same fanaticism. Atheists, theists, are all believers, and belief is not the realm for science. Science means experience something, that which is; no belief is needed. So the second thing to remember: Yoga is existential, experiential, experimental. No belief is required, no faith is needed – only courage to experience. And that’s what’s lacking. You can believe easily because in belief you are not going to be transformed. Belief is something added to you, something superficial. Your being is not changed; you are not passing through some mutation. You may be a Hindu; you can become Christian the next day. Simply, you change: you change Gita for a Bible. You can change it for a Koran, but the man who was holding Gita and is now holding the Bible, remains the same. He has changed his beliefs.

Beliefs are like clothes. Nothing substantial is transformed; you remain the same. Dissect a Hindu, dissect a Mohammedan, inside they are the same. He goes to a temple; the Mohammedan hates the temple. The Mohammedan goes to the mosque and the Hindu hates the mosque, but inside they are the same human beings.

Belief is easy because you are not required really to do anything – just a superficial dressing, a decoration, something which you can put aside any moment you like. Yoga is not belief. That’s why it is difficult, arduous, and sometimes it seems impossible. It is an existential approach. You will come to the truth, but not through belief, but through your own experience, through your own realization. That means you will have to be totally changed. Your viewpoints, your way of life, your mind, your psyche has to be shattered completely as it is. Something new has to be created. Only with that new will you come in contact with the reality.

So yoga is both a death and a new life. As you are you will have to die, and unless you die the new cannot be born. The new is hidden in you. You are just a seed for it, and the seed must fall down and be absorbed by the earth. The seed must die; only then the new will arise out of you. Your death will become your new life. Yoga is both a death and a new birth. Unless you are ready to die, you cannot be reborn. So it is not a question of changing beliefs.

Yoga is not a philosophy. I say it is not a religion, I say it is not a philosophy. It is not something you can think about. It is something you will have to be; thinking won’t do. Thinking goes on in your head. It is not really deep into the roots of your being; it is not your totality. It is just a part, a functional part; it can be trained. And you can argue logically, you can think rationally, but your heart will remain the same. Your heart is your deepest center, your head is just a branch. You can be without the head, but you cannot be without the heart. Your head is not basic.

Yoga is concerned with your total being, with your roots. It is not philosophical. So with Patanjali we will not be thinking, speculating. With Patanjali we will be trying to know the ultimate laws of being: the laws of its transformation, the laws of how to die and how to be reborn again, the laws of a new order of being. That is why I call it a science.

Patanjali is rare. He is an enlightened person like Buddha, like Krishna, like Christ, like Mahavira, Mohammed, Zarathustra, but he is different in one way. Buddha, Krishna, Mahavira, Zarathustra, Mohammed no one has a scientific attitude. They are great founders of religions. They have changed the whole pattern of human mind and its structure, but their approach is not scientific.

Patanjali is like an Einstein in the word of Buddhas. He is a phenomenon. He could have easily been a Nobel Prize winner like an Einstein or Bohr or Max Planck, Heisenberg. He has the same attitude, the same approach of a rigorous scientific mind. He is not a poet; Krishna is a poet. He is not a moralist; Mahavira is a moralist. He is basically a scientist, thinking in terms of laws. And he has come to deduce absolute laws of human being, the ultimate working structure of human mind and reality.

And if you follow Patanjali, you will come to know that he is as exact as any mathematical formula. Simply do what he says and the result will happen. The result is bound to happen; it is just like two plus two, they become four. It is just like you heat water up to one hundred degrees and it evaporates. No belief is needed: you simply do it and know. It is something to be done and known. That’s why I say there is no comparison. On this earth, never a man has existed like Patanjali.

You can find in Buddha’s utterances, poetry – bound to be there. Many times, while Buddha is expressing himself, he becomes poetic. The realm of ecstasy, the realm of ultimate knowing, is so beautiful, the temptation is so much to become poetic, the beauty is such, the benediction is such, the bliss is such, one starts talking in poetic language.

But Patanjali resists that. It is very difficult. No one has been able to resist. Jesus, Krishna, Buddha they all become poetic. The splendor, the beauty, when it explodes within you, you will start dancing, you will start singing. In that state you are just like a lover who has fallen in love with the whole universe.

Patanjali resists that. He will not use poetry; he will not use a single poetic symbol even. He will not do anything with poetry; he will not talk in terms of beauty. He will talk in terms of mathematics. He will be exact, and he will give you maxims. Those maxims are just indications what is to be done. He will not explode into ecstasy; he will not say things that cannot be said; he will not try the impossible. He will just put down the foundation, and if you follow the foundation, you will reach the peak which is beyond. He is a rigorous mathematician – remember this.

The first sutra:

Now the discipline of yoga – athayoganushasanam.

Now the discipline of yoga. Each single word has to be understood because Patanjali will not use a single superfluous word.

Now the discipline of yoga.

First try to understand the word “now.” This “now” indicates to the state of mind […] if you are disillusioned, if you are hopeless, if you have completely become aware of the futility of all desires, if you see your life as meaningless – whatsoever you have been doing up to now has simply fallen dead nothing remains in the future, you are in absolute despair – what Kierkegaard calls anguish. If you are in anguish, suffering, not knowing what to do, not knowing where to go, not knowing to whom to look, just on the verge of madness or suicide or death, your whole pattern of life suddenly has become futile. If this moment has come, Patanjali says, now the discipline of yoga. Only now you can understand the science of yoga, the discipline of yoga.

If that moment has not come, you can go on studying yoga, you can become a great scholar, but you will not be a yogi. You can write theses upon it, you can give discourses upon it, but you will not be a yogi. The moment has not come for you. Intellectually you can become interested, through your mind you can be related to yoga, but yoga is nothing if it is not a discipline. Yoga is not a shastra; it is not a scripture. It is a discipline. It is something you have to do. It is not curiosity; it is not philosophic speculation. It is deeper than that. It is a question of life and death.

If the moment has come where you feel that all directions have become confused, all roads have disappeared; the future is dark, and every desire has become bitter, and through every desire you have known only disappointment; all movement into hopes and dreams has ceased:

Now the discipline of yoga.

This “now” may not have come. Then I may go on talking about yoga but you will not listen. You can listen only if the moment is present in you.

Are you really dissatisfied? Everybody will say “yes”, but that dissatisfaction is not real. You are dissatisfied with this, you may be dissatisfied with that, but you are not totally dissatisfied. You are still hoping. You are dissatisfied because of your past hopes, but for the future you are still hoping. Your dissatisfaction is not total. You are still hankering for some satisfaction somewhere, for some gratification somewhere.

Sometimes you feel hopeless, but that hopelessness is not true. You feel hopeless because certain hopes have not been achieved, certain hopes have fallen. But hoping is still there: hoping has not fallen. You will still hope. You are dissatisfied with this hope, that hope, but you are not dissatisfied with hope as such. If with hope as such you are disappointed, the moment has come and then you can enter yoga. And then this entry will not be entering into a mental, speculative phenomenon. This entry will be an entry into a discipline.

What is discipline? Discipline means creating an order within you. As you are, you are a chaos. As you are, you are totally disorderly. Gurdjieff used to say – and Gurdjieff is in many ways like Patanjali: he was again trying to make the core of religion a science – Gurdjieff says that you are not one, you are a crowd, not even when you say “I”, is there any “I.” There are many “I’s” in you, many egos. In the morning, one “I”; in the afternoon, another “I”; in the evening, a third “I”, but you never become aware of this mess because who will become aware of it. There is not a center who can become aware.

“Yoga is discipline” means yoga wants to create a crystallized center in you. As you are, you are a crowd and a crowd has many phenomena. One is, you cannot believe a crowd. Gurdjieff used to say that man cannot promise. Who will promise? You are not there. If you promise, who will fulfill the promise? Next morning the one who promised is no more. […]

Gurdjieff used to say, “This is the chief characteristic of man, that he cannot promise.” You cannot fulfill a promise. You go on giving promises, and you know well you cannot fulfill, because you are not one: you are a disorder, a chaos. Hence, Patanjali says, now the discipline of yoga. If your life has become an absolute misery, if you have realized that whatsoever you do creates hell, then the moment has come. This moment can change your dimension, your direction of being.

Up until now you have lived as a chaos, a crowd. Yoga means now you will have to be a harmony, you will have to become one. A crystallization is needed; a centering is needed. And unless you attain a center, all that you do is useless. It is wasting life and time. A center is the first necessity, and only a person can be blissful who has got a center. Everybody asks for it, but you cannot ask. You have to earn it! Everybody hankers for a blissful state of being, but only a center can be blissful. A crowd cannot be blissful, a crowd has got no self. There is no atman. Who is going to be blissful?

Bliss means absolute silence, and silence is possible only when there is harmony-when all the discordant fragments have become one, when there is no crowd, but one. When you are alone in the house and nobody else is there, you will be blissful. Right now everybody else is in your house, you are not there. Only guests are there, the host is always absent. And only the host can be blissful.

This centering Patanjali calls discipline – anushasanam. The word “discipline” is beautiful. It comes from the same root from where the word “disciple” comes. “Discipline” means the capacity to learn, the capacity to know. But you cannot know, you cannot learn, unless you have attained the capacity to be. […]

Now the discipline of yoga.

Discipline means the capacity to be, the capacity to know, the capacity to learn. We must understand these three things.

The capacity to be. All the yoga postures are not really concerned with the body, they are concerned with the capacity to be. Patanjali says if you can sit silently without moving your body for few hours, you are growing in the capacity to be. Why do you move? You cannot sit without moving even for a few seconds. Your body starts moving. Somewhere you feel itching; the legs go dead; many things start happening. These are just excuses for you to move.

You are not a master. You cannot say to the body, “Now for one hour I will not move.” The body will revolt immediately. Immediately it will force you to move, to do something, and it will give reasons: “You have to move because an insect is biting.” You may not find the insect when you look. You are not a being; you are a trembling – a continuous hectic activity. Patanjali’s asanas, postures, are concerned not really with any kind of physiological training, but an inner training of being, just to be – without doing anything, without any movement, without any activity, just remain. That remaining will help centering.

If you can remain in one posture, the body will become a slave; it will follow you. And the more the body follows you, you will have a greater being within you, a stronger being within you. And, remember, if the body is not moving your mind cannot move, because mind and body are not two things. They are two poles of one phenomenon. You are not body and mind, you are body-mind. Your personality is psychosomatic – body-mind both. The mind is the most subtle part of the body. Or you can say the reverse, that body is the most gross part of the mind.

So whatsoever happens in the body happens in the mind, and the vice versa: whatsoever happens in the mind happens in the body. If the body is non-moving and you can attain a posture, if you can say to the body “Keep quiet,” the mind will remain silent. Really, the mind starts moving and tries to move the body, because if the body moves then the mind can move. In a nonmoving body, the mind cannot move; it needs a moving body.

If the body is non-moving, the mind is non-moving, you are centered. This non-moving posture is not a physiological training only. It is just to create a situation in which centering can happen, in which you can become disciplined. When you are, when you have become centered, when you know what it means to be, then you can learn, because then you will be humble. Then you can surrender. Then no false ego will cling to you because once centered you know all egos are false. Then you can bow down. Then a disciple is born.

A disciple is a great achievement. Only through discipline you will become a disciple. Only through being centered you will become humble, you will become receptive, you will become empty, and the guru, the Master, can pour himself into you. In your emptiness, in your silence, he can come and reach to you. Communication becomes possible.

A disciple means one who is centered, humble, receptive, open, ready, alert, waiting, prayerful. In yoga, the Master is very, very important, absolutely important, because only when you are in close proximity to a being who is centered will your own centering happen.

That is the meaning of satsang. You have heard the word satsang. It is totally wrongly used. Satsang means in close proximity of the truth; it means near the truth, it means near a Master who has become one with the truth – just being near him, open, receptive and waiting. If your waiting has become deep, intense, a deep communion will happen.

The Master is not going to do anything. He is simply there, available. If you are open, he will flow within you. This flowing is called satsang. With a Master you need not learn anything else. If you can learn satsang, that’s enough – if you can just be near him without asking, without thinking, without arguing: just present there, available, so the being of the Master can flow in you. And being can flow. It is already flowing. Whenever a person achieves integrity, his being becomes a radiation. He is flowing. Whether you are there to receive or not, that is not the point. He flows like a river. If you are empty like a vessel, ready, open, he will flow in you.

A disciple means one who is ready to receive, who has become a womb – the Master can penetrate into him. This is the meaning of the word satsang. It is not basically a discourse; satsang is not a discourse. Discourse may be there, but discourse is just an excuse. You are here and I will talk on Patanjali’s sutras. That is just an excuse. If you are really here, then the discourse, the talk, becomes just an excuse for your being here, for you to be here. And if you are really here, satsang starts. I can flow, and that flow is deeper than any talk, any communication through language, than any intellectual meeting with you.

While your mind is engaged, if you are a disciple, if you are a disciplined being, your mind is engaged in listening to me, your being can be in satsang. Then your head is occupied, your heart is open. Then on a deeper level, a meeting happens. That meeting is satsang, and everything else is just an excuse, just to find ways to be close to the Master.

Closeness is all, but only a disciple can be close. Anybody and everybody cannot be close. Closeness means a loving trust. Why we are not close? Because there is fear. Too close may be dangerous, too open may be dangerous, because you become vulnerable and then it will be difficult to defend. So just as a security measure we keep everybody away, never allowed to enter a certain distance.

Everybody has a territory around him. Whenever somebody enters your territory, you become afraid. Everybody has a space to protect. You are sitting alone in your room. A stranger enters in the room. Just watch when you become really scared. There is a point. If he enters that point, beyond that point, you will become scared, you will be afraid. A sudden trembling will be felt. Beyond a certain territory he can move.

To be close means now no territory of your own. To be close means to be vulnerable, to be close means whatsoever happens you are not thinking in terms of security.

A disciple can be close for two reasons. One: he is a centered one; he is trying to be centered. A person who is trying even to be centered becomes unafraid; he becomes fearless. He has something which cannot be killed. You don’t have anything, hence the fear. You are a crowd. The crowd can disperse any moment. You don’t have something like a rock which will be there whatsoever happens. Without a rock, without a foundation you are existing – a house of cards, bound to be always in fear. Any wind, any breeze even, can destroy you, so you have to protect yourself.

Because of this constant protection, you cannot love, you cannot trust, you cannot be friendly. You may have many friends but there is no friendship, because friendship needs closeness. You may have wives and husbands and so-called lovers, but there is no love, because love needs closeness, love needs trust. You may have gurus, Masters, but there is no disciplehood because you cannot allow yourself to be totally given to somebody’s being, nearness to his being, closeness to his being, so that he can overpower you, overflood you.

A disciple means a seeker who is not a crowd, who is trying to be centered and crystallized, at least trying, making efforts, sincere efforts to become individual, to feel his being, to become his own master. All discipline of yoga is an effort to make you a master of yourself. As you are, you are just a slave of many, many desires. Many, many masters are there, and you are just a slave – and pulled in many directions.

Now the discipline of yoga.

Yoga is discipline. It is an effort on your part to change yourself. Many other things have to be understood. Yoga is not a therapy. In the West many psychological therapies are prevalent now, and many western psychologists think that yoga is also a therapy. It is not! It is a discipline. And what is the difference? This is the difference: a therapy is needed if you are ill, a therapy is needed if you are diseased, a therapy is needed if you are pathological. A discipline is needed even when you are healthy. Really, when you are healthy only a discipline can help then.

It is not for pathological cases. Yoga is for those who are completely healthy as far as medical science is concerned, normal. They are not schizophrenic; they are not mad; they are not neurotic. They are normal people, healthy people with no particular pathology. Still, they become aware that whatsoever is called normality is futile, whatsoever is called health is of no use. Something more is needed, something greater is needed, something holier and whole is needed. […]

Yoga is not therapy; yoga is not trying in any way to make you adjusted to the society. If you want to define yoga in terms of adjustment, then it is not adjustment with the society, but it is adjustment with existence itself. It is adjustment with the divine!

So it may happen that a perfect yogi may appear mad to you. He may look out of his senses, out of his mind, because now he is in touch with the greater, with a higher mind, higher order of things. He is in touch with the universal mind. It has happened always so: a Buddha, a Jesus, a Krishna, they always look somehow eccentric. They don’t belong to us; they seem to be outsiders.

That’s why we call them avatars, outsiders. They have come as if from some other planet; they don’t belong to us. They may be higher, they may be good, they may be divine, but they don’t belong to us. They come from somewhere else. They are not part and parcel of our being, mankind. The feeling has persisted that they are outsiders; they are not. They are the real insiders because they have touched the innermost core of existence. But to us they appear [as outsiders].

Now the discipline of yoga.

If your mind has come to realize that whatsoever you have been doing up to now was just senseless, it was a nightmare at the worst or a beautiful dream at the best then the path of discipline opens before you. What is that path?

The basic definition is, Yoga is the cessation of mind – chittavrittinirodha.

I told you that Patanjali is just mathematical. In a single sentence, now the discipline of yoga, he is finished with you. This is the only sentence that has been used for you. Now he takes it for granted that you are interested in yoga, not as a hope, but as a discipline, as a transformation right here and now. He proceeds to define:

Yoga is the cessation of mind.

This is the definition of yoga, the best. In many ways yoga has been defined; there are many definitions. Some say yoga is the meeting of the mind with the divine; hence, it is called yoga – yoga means meeting, joining together. Some say that yoga means dropping the ego: ego is the barrier; the moment you drop the ego you are joined to the divine. You were already joined, only because of the ego it appeared that you were disjoined. And there are many, but Patanjali’s is the most scientific. He says,

Yoga is the cessation of mind.

Yoga is the state of no-mind. The word “mind” covers all – your egos, your desires, your hopes, your philosophies, your religions, your scriptures. “Mind” covers all. Whatsoever you can think is mind. All that is known, all that can be known, all that is knowable, is within mind. Cessation of the mind means cessation of the known, cessation of the knowable. It is a jump into the unknown. When there is no mind, you are in the unknown. Yoga is a jump into the unknown. It will not be right to say “unknown”; rather, “unknowable”.

What is the mind? What is the mind doing there? What is it? Ordinarily we think that mind is something substantial there inside the head. Patanjali doesn’t agree – and no one who has ever known the inside of the mind will agree. Modern science also doesn’t agree. Mind is not something substantial inside the head. Mind is just a function, just an activity.

You walk and I say you are walking. What is walking? If you stop, where is walking? If you sit down, where has the walking gone? Walking is nothing substantial; it is an activity. So while you are sitting, no one can ask, “Where you have put your walking? Just now you were walking, so where has the walking gone?” You will laugh. You will say, “Walking is not something substantial, it is just an activity. I can walk. I can again walk, and I can stop. It is activity.”

Mind is also activity, but because of the word “mind,” it appears as if something substantial is there. It is better to call it “minding” – just like “walking.” Mind means “minding”, mind means thinking. It is an activity.” […]

Yoga is the cessation of mind.

This is Patanjali’s definition. When there is no mind, you are in yoga; when there is mind you are not in yoga. So you may do all the postures, but if the mind goes on functioning, if you go on thinking, you are not in yoga. Yoga is the state of no-mind. If you can be without the mind without doing any posture, you have become a perfect yogi. It has happened to many without doing any postures, and it has not happened to many who have been doing postures for many lives.

Because the basic thing to be understood is: when the activity of thinking is not there, you are there; when the activity of the mind is not there, when thoughts have disappeared, they are just like clouds, when they have disappeared, your being, just like the sky, is uncovered. It is always there – only covered with the clouds, covered with thoughts.

Yoga is the cessation of mind.

In the West now, there is much appeal for Zen – a Japanese method of yoga. The word “zen” comes from dhyana. Bodhidharma introduced this word dhyana in China. In China the word dhyana became jhan and then chan and then the word traveled to Japan and became zen.

The root is dhyana. Dhyana means no-mind, so the whole training of Zen in Japan is of nothing but how to stop minding, how to be a no-mind, how to be simply without thinking. Try it! When I say try it, it will look contradictory, because there is no other way to say it. Because if you try, the very try, the effort is coming from the mind. You can sit in a posture and you can try some japa chanting, mantra – or you can just try to sit silently, not to think. But then not to think becomes a thinking. Then you go on saying, “I am not to think; don’t think; stop thinking,” but this is all thinking.

Try to understand. When Patanjali says, no-mind, cessation of mind, he means complete cessation. He will not allow you to make a japa, “Ram-Ram-Ram.” He will say that this is not cessation; you are using the mind. He will say, “Simply stop!” but you will ask, “How? How to simply stop?” The mind continues. Even if you sit, the mind continues. Even if you don’t do, it goes on doing.

Patanjali says just look. Let mind go, let mind do whatsoever it is doing. You just look. You don’t interfere. You just be a witness, you just be an onlooker not concerned, as if the mind doesn’t belong to you, as if it is not your business, not your concern. Don’t be concerned! Just look and let the mind flow. It is flowing because of past momentum, because you have always helped it to flow. The activity has taken its own momentum, so it is flowing. You just don’t cooperate Look, and let the mind flow.

For many, many lives, millions of lives maybe, you have cooperated with it, you have helped it, you have given your energy to it. The river will flow awhile. If you don’t cooperate, if you just look unconcerned – Buddha’s word is indifference, upeksha: looking without any concern, just looking, not doing anything in any way – the mind will flow for a while and it will stop by itself. When the momentum is lost, when the energy has flowed, the mind will stop. When the mind stops, you are in yoga: you have attained the discipline. This is the definition: yoga is the cessation of mind.

Then the witness is established in itself.

When the mind ceases, the witness is established in itself.

When you can simply look without being identified with the mind, without judging, without appreciating, condemning, without choosing – you simply look and the mind flows, a time comes when by itself, of itself, the mind stops.

When there is no mind, you are established in your witnessing. Then you have become a witness – just a seer-a drashta, a sakshi. Then you are not a doer, then you are not a thinker. Then you are simply being, pure being, purest of being. Then the witness is established in itself.

In the other states there is identification with the modifications of the mind.

Except witnessing, in all states, you are identified with the mind. You become one with the flow of thoughts, you become one with the clouds: sometimes with the white cloud, sometimes with the black cloud, sometimes with a rain-filled cloud, sometimes with a vacant, empty cloud, but whatsoever, you become one with the thought, you become one with the cloud, and you miss your purity of the sky, the purity of space. You become clouded, and this clouding happens because you get identified, you become one.

A thought comes. You are hungry, and the thought flashes in the mind. The thought is simply that there is hunger, that the stomach is feeling hunger. Immediately you get identified; you say, “I am hungry.” The mind was just filled with a thought that hunger is there; you have become identified and you say, “I am hungry.” This is the identification.

Buddha also feels hunger, Patanjali also feels hunger, but Patanjali will never say that, “I am hungry.” He will say “The body is hungry”; he will say, “My stomach is feeling hungry”; he will say, “There is hunger. I am a witness. I have come to witness this thought, which has been flashed by the belly in the brain, that ‘I am hungry.’” The belly is hungry; Patanjali will remain a witness. You become identified, you become one with the thought.

Then the witness is established in itself.

In the other states there is identification with the modifications of the mind.

This is the definition:

Yoga is the cessation of mind.

When mind ceases, you are established in your witnessing self. In other states, except this, there are identifications. And all identifications constitute the samsar; they are the world. If you are in the identifications, you are in the world, in the misery. If you have transcended the identifications, you are liberated. You have become a siddha, you are in nirvana. You have transcended this world of misery and entered the world of bliss.

And that world is here and now-right now, this very moment! You need not wait for it a single moment even. Just become a witness of the mind, and you have entered. Get identified with the mind, and you have missed. This is the basic definition.

Remember everything, because later on, in other sutras, we will enter details what is to be done, how it is to be done – but always keep in mind this is the foundation.

One has to achieve a state of no-mind: that is the goal.

-Osho

From The Path of Yoga, Discourse #1; Yoga: The Science of the Soul, V.1 (previously titled Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega).

This discourse is the Listening Meditation in the first 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.

Yoga Means the Growth of Consciousness – Osho

The evolution of life is to become more and more conscious, but the consciousness is always other oriented: you are conscious of some thing, some object. Yoga means to be evolving in the dimension where there is no object and only consciousness remains. Yoga is the method of evolving toward pure consciousness; not being conscious of something, but being consciousness itself.

When you are conscious of something, you are not conscious of being conscious. Your consciousness has become focused on something; your attention is not at the source of consciousness itself. In yoga the effort is to become conscious of both the object and the source. The consciousness becomes double arrowed. You must be aware of the object, and you must be simultaneously aware of the subject. Consciousness must become a double arrowed bridge. The subject must not be lost, it must not become forgotten when you are focused on the object.

This is the first step in yoga. The second step is to drop both the subject and the object and just be conscious. This pure consciousness is the aim of yoga.

Even without yoga man grows toward becoming more and more conscious, but yoga adds something, contributes something, to this evolution of consciousness. It changes many things and transforms many things. The first transformation is a double-arrowed awareness, remembering yourself at the very moment that there is something else to be conscious of.

The dilemma is this: either you are conscious of some object or you are unconscious. If there are no outside objects, you fall into a sleep; objects are needed in order for you to be conscious. When you are totally unoccupied you feel sleepy – you need some object to be conscious of – but when you have too many objects to be conscious of, you may feel a certain sleeplessness. That is why a person who is too obsessed with thoughts cannot go into sleep. Objects continue to be there; thoughts continue to be there. He cannot become unconscious; thoughts go on demanding his attention. And this is how we exist.

With new objects you become more conscious. That is why there is a lust for the new, a longing for the new. The old becomes boring. The moment you have lived with some object for a while, you become unconscious of it. You have accepted it, now your attention is not needed; you become bored. For example, you may not have been conscious of your wife for years because you have taken her for granted. You no longer see her face; you can’t remember the color of her eyes; for years you have not really been attentive. Only when she dies will you again become aware that she was there. That is why wives and husbands become bored. Any object that is not calling your attention continuously creates boredom.

In the same way, a mantra, a repeated sound vibration, causes deep sleep. When a particular mantra is being repeated continuously, you are bored. There is nothing mysterious about it. Constantly repeating a particular word bores you, you cannot live with it anymore. Now you will begin to feel sleepy, you will go into a sort of sleep; you will become unconscious. The whole method of hypnosis, in fact, depends upon boredom. If your mind can be bored with something then you go into a sleep, sleep can be induced.

Our whole consciousness depends on new objects. That is why there is so much longing for the new – for new sensations, a new dress, a new house – for anything that is new, even if it is not better. With something different, you feel a sudden upsurge of consciousness.

Because life is an evolution of consciousness – this is good. As far as life is concerned, it is good. If a society is longing for new sensations, life progresses, but if it settles down with the old, not asking for the new, it becomes dead; consciousness cannot evolve.

For example, in the East we try to be content with things as they are. This creates a boredom because nothing is ever new. Then for centuries everything goes on continuously as it is. You are just bored. Of course, you can sleep better – the West cannot sleep; insomnia is bound to exist when you are constantly asking for the new – but there is no evolution. And these are the two things that seem to happen: either the whole society becomes sleepy and dead, as has happened in the East, or else the society becomes sleepless, as has happened in the West.

Neither is good. You need a mind that can be aware even when there are no new objects. Really, you need a consciousness that is not bound with the new, not bound with the object. If it is bound with the object, it is going to be bound with the new. You need a consciousness that is not bound with the object at all, which is beyond object. Then you have freedom: you can go to sleep when you like, and you can be awake when you like; no object is needed to help you. You become free, really free, from the objective world.

The moment you are beyond object you go beyond subject also, because they both exist co-jointly. Really, subjectivity and objectivity are two poles of one thing. When there is an object, you are a subject, but if you can be aware without the object, there is no subject, no self.

This is to be understood very deeply: when the object is lost and you can be conscious without objects – just conscious – then the subject is also lost. It cannot remain there. It cannot! Both are lost, and there is simply consciousness, unbounded consciousness. Now there are no boundaries. Neither the object is the boundary nor the subject.

Buddha used to say that when you are in meditation there is no self, no atman, because the very awareness of one’s self isolates you from everything else. If you are still there, objects are still there. “I am,” but “I” cannot exist in total loneliness; “I” exists in relationship with the outside world. “I” is a relata. Then the self, the “I am,” is just something inside you that exists in relationship to something outside. But if the outside is not there this inside dissolves; then there is simple, spontaneous consciousness.

This is what yoga is for, this is what yoga means. Yoga is the science of freeing yourself from subject and object boundaries, and unless you are free from these boundaries, you will fall into either the unbalance of the East or the unbalance of the West.

If you want contentment, peace of mind, silence, sleep, then it is good to remain with the same objects continuously. For centuries and centuries there should be no visible change. Then you are at ease, you can sleep better, but this is nothing spiritual; you lose much. The very urge to grow is lost, the very urge for adventure is lost, the very urge to inquire and to find is lost. Really, you begin to vegetate, you become stagnant.

If you change this, then you become dynamic but also diseased: you become dynamic but tense, dynamic but mad. You begin to find the new, to inquire for the new, but you are in a whirlwind. The new begins to happen, but you are lost.

If you lose your objectivity, you become too subjective and dreamy, but if you become too obsessed with objects, you lose the subjective. Both situations are unbalanced. The East has tried one; the West has tried the other.

And now the East is turning Western and the West is turning Eastern. In the East the attraction is for Western technology, Western science, Western rationalism. Einstein, Aristotle, and Russell have taken hold of the Eastern mind, while in the West quite the opposite is happening: Buddha, Zen and yoga have become more significant. This is a miracle. The East is turning communist, Marxist, materialist, and the West is beginning to think in terms of expanding consciousness – meditation, spirituality, ecstasy. The wheel can turn and we can change our burdens. It will be illuminating for a moment, but then the whole nonsense will begin again.

The East has failed in one way and the West has failed in another way, because they both tried denying one part of the mind. You have to transcend both parts and not be concerned with one while denying the other. Mind is a totality; you can either transcend it totally or you cannot transcend it. If you go on denying one part, the denied part will take its revenge. And, really, the denied part in the East is taking its revenge in the East, and the denied part in the West is taking its revenge in the West.

You can never go beyond the denied; it is there, and it goes on gathering more and more strength. The very moment when the part you have accepted succeeds is the moment of failure. Nothing fails like success. With any partial success – with the success of one part of you – you are bound to go into deeper failure. That which you have gained becomes unconscious and that which you have lost comes into awareness.

Absence is felt more. If you lose a tooth, your tongue becomes aware of the absence and goes to the absent tooth. It has never gone there before – never – but now you can’t stop it; it continually moves to the vacant place to feel the tooth that is not there.

In the same way, when one part of the mind succeeds, you become aware of the failure of the other part – the part that could have been and is not. Now the East has become conscious of the foolishness of not being scientific: it is the reason why we are poor, it is the reason why we are “no one.” This absence is being felt now and the East has begun to turn Western, while the West is feeling its own foolishness, its lack of integration.

Yoga means a total science of man. It is not simply religion. It is the total science of man, the total transcendence of all the parts. And when you transcend parts, you become whole. The whole is not just an accumulation of the parts; it is not a mechanical thing in which all the parts are put in alignment and then there is a whole. No, it is more than a mechanical thing; it is like something artistic.

You can divide a poem into words but then the words mean nothing, and when the whole is there, it is more than words; it has its own identity. It has gaps as well as words, and sometimes gaps are more meaningful than words. A poem becomes poetry only when it says something that has not really been said, when something about it transcends all the parts. If you divide and analyze it, then you have only the parts, and the transcendental flower that was really the thing is lost.

So consciousness is a wholeness. By denying a part you lose something – something that was really significant. And you gain nothing; you gain only extremes. Every extreme becomes a disease, every extreme becomes an illness inside, then you go on and on in turmoil; there is an inner anarchy.

Yoga is the science of transcending anarchy, the science of making your consciousness whole – and you become whole only when you transcend parts. So yoga is neither religion nor science. It is both. Or, it transcends both. You can say it is a scientific religion or a religious science. That is why yoga can be used by anyone belonging to any religion; it can be used by anyone with any type of mind.

In India, all the religions that have developed have very different – in fact, antagonistic – philosophies, concepts, perceptions. They have nothing in common. Between Hinduism and Jainism there is nothing in common; between Hinduism and Buddhism there is nothing in common. There is only one common thing that none of these religions can deny: yoga. […]

-Osho

From Meditation: The Art of Ecstasy, Chapter 1

For a related post see Consciousness, Witnessing and Awareness.

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.

A Still Mind: The Door to the Divine – Osho

Nishal-gyanam asanam.

Non-wavering knowing is asana – the posture.

Man is neither a body, nor a mind alone – he is both. Even to say that he is both is wrong in a way because body and mind are separate only as two words. Existence is one. Body is nothing but the outermost core of your consciousness, the grossest expression of consciousness. And consciousness, on the other hand, is nothing more than the subtlest body, the most refined part of the body. You exist in between.

These are not two things, but two ends of one thing. So whenever knowing becomes non-wavering, body is also affected; non-wavering knowing creates a non-wavering body. But the vice versa is not true. You can impose non-wavering on the body, but the knowing will not become non-wavering. It can help – a very little. It can be helpful, but not much.

Body posture became very important because we are body oriented. Even those who say that we are not bodies think in terms of body. Even those who say, “We are not bodies,” their thinking, their mind, remains tethered to the body. Even they begin with body postures. Asana means giving your body a posture in which the body becomes non-wavering, still. It is supposed that if the body is still, then the mind will go into stillness.

This is not true – the contrary is true! If the mind becomes still, then the body becomes still. And then a very mysterious phenomenon happens: if the mind is still, you can go on dancing but your body will remain still. And if your mind is not still, you can be just dead but still the body will be wavering, because the mind wavering creates subtle vibrations which come to the body and the body goes on wavering inside. Try it. You can sit just like a statue – dead, stonelike. Close your eyes and feel. Outwardly, no one can say that your body is wavering, but inwardly you will know that it is. A subtle trembling is there. Even if it cannot be detected from the outside, you can feel it from the inside.

If your mind is totally still, then even if you are dancing you will feel from inside that the body is still. A Buddha is still even when he is walking, and a non-Buddha is not still even when he is dead. The vibrations come from your center, they originate from you, and then they spread towards the body. The body is not the originator, it is not the source, so you cannot stop them from the periphery. You can impose, you can practice, but inside there will be turmoil – and this imposing will create more conflict than stillness.

So this sutra says that to practice meditation, posture – a still posture – is needed. But what do we mean by a posture? This sutra says that “a non-wavering knowing” is the posture. If the mind is non-wavering, then you are in the right posture. In that right posture everything can happen.

So don’t deceive yourself by creating bodily imitations. You can create them; that is very easy. On the circumference, on the periphery, to impose stillness is very easy. But that is not your stillness. You remain in turmoil, you remain wavering. From the center the waves must not come.

What is this non-wavering knowledge? It is one of the deepest secrets. To understand it we will have to go deep into the very construction of mind, so let us begin.

Mind has many types of thoughts. Every thought is a wavering, every thought is a wave. If there are no thoughts, then the mind will be non-wavering. A single thought, and you have trembled. A single thought, and you are not still. And a single thought is not a single thought: it is a very complex phenomenon. A single thought is created by many waves; a single word even is created by many waves. So only when many waves are there in the mind is a single word created, and a single thought has many words. Thousands and thousands of ripples create one thought.

Thought is the outermost, but waves have preceded. You become aware only when waves become thoughts because your awareness is so gross. You cannot be aware when waves are pure waves still in the formation of becoming a thought. The more you will become aware, the more you will feel that thought has many layers. Thought form is the last. Before thought there are seed waves which create the thought, and before the seed waves there are still deeper roots which create seeds.

Seeds create thought. At least three layers are very easily visible for a conscious mind. But we are not conscious: we are asleep. So we become aware only when waves take the grossest form – thought. As far as we know, thought seems to be the most subtle thing. It is not. Thought really has become a thing. When there are pure waves, you cannot even detect what is going to happen, what thought is going to be created in you. So we become aware only when waves become thought.

A single thought implies thousands of waves, so we can conceive how much we are wavering – continuous thinking, not a single moment of no thought, one thought followed by another constantly, no gap. So we are really a wavering, a trembling phenomenon. Soren Kierkegaard has said that man is a trembling – just a trembling and nothing else. And he is right in a way. As far as we are concerned, man is a trembling. A Buddha may not be, but then Buddha is not a man.

This thought process is the process of wavering. So non-wavering means a no-thought state of mind. Really, the sutra says “non-wavering knowing” – mind is not even mentioned. So first, three layers of mind have to be distinctly understood.

One is the conscious mind, and one type of thought belongs to the conscious level. These thoughts are the least important. They constitute moment-to-moment reactions, reflexes. You are on the road and a snake passes and you jump. The snake gives you a stimulus and you respond. So one type of thought is like this: stimulus outside and a response from the periphery. Really, you don’t think: you just act. A snake is there: you act; you become aware and you act. You don’t go inside to ask what to do. The house is on fire and you run. This is a peripheral reaction.

So one type of thought is the moment-to-moment reflex type. Even a Buddha has to react in this way. This is natural; nothing is wrong with it. If you react moment-to-moment, then nothing is wrong with the mind – but that is not the only layer.

Then there is a second layer. This second layer is the subconscious. Religions call it “conscience.” Really, this second layer is created by the society; it is a society in you. Society penetrates everyone, because society cannot control you unless it penetrates you; so it becomes a part of you. The upbringing, the education, the parents, the teachers – what are they doing? They are doing one thing: they are creating the subconscious mind. They are giving you thoughts. structures, ideals, values. These thoughts belong to the second layer They are helpful, they have their utility, but they are harmful also. They are instruments to move easily, conveniently in the society, but they are barriers also.

This second layer has to be understood more. This second layer consists of ideas within, fixed ideas, fixations. So whenever your peripheral mind is working moment-to-moment, it is not pure. Only a child is pure, innocent – he is working moment-to-moment. There is no subconscious to interfere.

You are not working moment-to-moment. The subconscious is constantly interfering. It is giving you choice: what to choose, what not to choose. Every moment it is making you narrow. You become just unaware of many things because of the subconscious. It will not allow you to be aware of everything. And about many things you become too much aware because this subconscious mind forces you constantly to be aware of them.

Every society creates a different type of subconscious, so, really, one’s being a Hindu or a Christian or a Jain belongs to the subconscious mind. As far as the peripheral mind is concerned, everyone reacts in the same way; it is natural. But the subconscious mind is not natural; it is a social product. So we behave in different ways. You see a church. A Hindu can pass without even becoming aware that there is a church. He need not be aware. But a Christian cannot pass without becoming aware that there is a church. He may even be anti-Christian – consciously he may even be like Bertrand Russell who can write a book called Why I am not a Christian – but he will become aware. The subconscious is working there.

A Brahmin, he can intellectually understand that the problem of untouchability is just violent, cruel, and intellectually he can think that it is not good, but this is the conscious mind. The subconscious is working there. If you ask him to marry a Sudra girl, somewhere deeply he is struck. He cannot conceive of it. Even to eat with an untouchable becomes difficult. Intellectually he understands nothing is wrong in it, but the subconscious goes on projecting and pushing. And he cannot react naturally: the subconscious distorts, perverts.

This subconscious is supplying you constantly with many ideas which you think are your own. They are not. They have been fed to you just like a computer is fed. You can get information out of a computer only if you have previously fed it. The same is the case with man also, with mind also. Whatsoever you are getting out is just because of what has been fed in before. Everything has been fed in. This is what we mean by education, the so-called education: feeding information. So it is ready in the unconscious every moment. It is so ready, really, that even when you don’t need it, it comes up. It constantly overfloods your mind, and it becomes a constant wavering, a constant trembling. This subconscious mind is the root cause of so many social evils.

Really, the world could be one if there were no subconscious mind. Then there would be no distinction between a Hindu and a Mohammedan. The distinction is of the subconscious feeding, and it goes so deep that you cannot even feel how it works. You cannot go behind it. It goes so deep that you always remain in front and you feel helpless. But the society is also helpless. It is a substitute – a poor substitute, but a substitute. Unless man becomes totally aware, the society cannot dispense with the subconscious.

For example, if a man becomes totally aware, he cannot be a thief. But man, as he is, is not aware at all, so society has to create a substitute for awareness: it must put a strong suggestion inside that theft is bad, evil, sin, that you must not be a thief. This idea must be put deep in the subconscious so that when you begin to think of theft the subconscious comes up and says, “No. this is sin,” and you are stopped. This is a social substitute for awareness – and unless man comes to awareness the society cannot dispense with the subconscious, because it has to give you some rules. Unless you are so aware that rules are not needed at all, the subconscious will have to be maintained.

So each society has to create a subconscious. And I call that society good – remember it – I call that society good which creates a subconscious that can be dispensed with very easily; and I call a society bad which creates such a subconscious that cannot be dispensed with: because if it cannot be dispensed with, then it becomes a hindrance when you try to be aware. And, really, no such good society exists now which gives you a dispensable substitute, a dispensable subconscious, which gives you a subconscious as a utilitarian instrument so that the moment you become aware, you can throw it.

To me, that society is good and religious which gives you an inherent freedom about the subconscious. But no society gives it. so. no society is religious, really. Every society is totalitarian, and every society takes your mind in such a way that you become just an automaton – and you go on thinking and deceiving yourself that your thoughts are yours. They are not! Even the very language we use is contaminated, the words we use are contaminated. We cannot use a single word without the subconscious being there. It comes suddenly. Society uses it very cunningly, and then your reactions, your reflexes, are not spontaneous. […]

This subconscious mind is constantly working, day and night. The mind’s working is double. One working belongs to your conscious mind. It is concerned with how to control the subconscious consciously, constantly. Then the subconscious is controlling the conscious mind. It is working to control your reactions, your actions, your reflexes, everything. Whatsoever you are doing must be controlled! This is the society’s grip on you. You are just moving in society’s hands. No value is yours. How can it be? How can a value be yours when you are not at all aware? Only awareness can give you authentic, individual values.

All these values are supplied. If the society is vegetarian, then you have vegetarian values. If the society is non-vegetarian, then you have non-vegetarian values. If the society believes in this, then you are a believer in it. If the society doesn’t believe, then you are a disbeliever. But you are not; only society is there.

This is a double control: one control is on your conscious mind, your behavior. Another control is more deep and more dangerous, and that is the control on your instinctive nature. The first part is conscious, the second is subconscious. The subconscious is created by society. And the third is the instinctive. which is given by biological nature: that which you really are biologically, that which you are born with. That’s a third part, the deepest: the biological instinctive nature.

This second, subconscious mind is controlling outward behavior and also controlling inward instincts. Nothing should be allowed to come up to the conscious mind from your instinctive nature if the society is against it. Nothing should be allowed to come up – even up to your consciousness. So this subconscious creates a great barrier for the instinctive nature.

For example, sex is an instinct, the deepest, because without it life cannot exist on earth. So life depends on sex. It is not easily dispensable; obviously, it must not be – otherwise life will become just impossible. So it has a deep grip. But the society is anti-sex; it is bound to be. The more a society is organized, the more it will be anti-sex – because if your sex instinct can be controlled then everything can be controlled, and if your sex instinct cannot be controlled then nothing can be controlled. So it becomes a fighting ground.

You must be aware that whenever a society becomes sexually free, that society cannot exist. It is defeated. When Greek culture became sexually free, Greek civilization had to die. When Roman civilization became sexually free, it had to die. Now America cannot exist anymore. America has begun to be sexually free. The moment a society becomes sexually free, the individual is not in its grip. You cannot force him.

Really, unless you suppress sex you cannot force your youth to war. It is impossible. You can force your youth into war only if you suppress sex. So the hippie slogan is really meaningful: “Make love, not war!” So society has to suppress the deepest instinct. Once it is suppressed, you can never rebel. Many things have to be understood about it.

Children, when they mature sexually, begin to be rebellious – never before. The moment a boy is mature he will begin to be rebellious against his parents, never before – because with sex comes individuality. With sex he really becomes a man, never before. Now he can be independent. Now he has the initial energy with him, because he can propagate, he can reproduce. Now he is complete.

At fourteen, a boy is complete, a girl is complete. They can be independent of their fathers and mothers, so rebellion begins to take shape. If the society has to control them, sex must be suppressed. All instincts have to be suppressed because we have not been able yet to create a society in which freedom is not against all, in which one individual’s freedom is not against all. We have not yet been able!

We are still primitive, not yet civilized, because a society can be called civilized and cultured only when each individual grows to his total potentiality, is not suppressed. But politics will not allow it, religions will not allow it, because once you give total freedom to instinctive nature, then churches and temples and the so-called religious business cannot continue. Religion will be there, more authentic, but religions cannot continue: because if you cannot create fear, then no one will come to this religious business.

People come because of fear; and if you suppress their instincts, they become fearful – fearful of themselves. A child feels existential fear for the first time when his sex is suppressed. He feels guilty. He begins to feel that something is wrong, and he begins to feel also that “No one has this evil that I am having inside. I am guilty.” You create guilt; then you can control. Then he feels inferior inside, afraid. This fear is then exploited by religious heads, by political leadership, because they all want to dominate.

You can dominate only when people are fearful. And how can you create fear? If you can convince them that something which is constantly within them is sin, they will be fearful. They will be fearful! All the time sex will be there, and they will become afraid – afraid of themselves and guilty. They cannot enjoy anything then. Then the whole life becomes a frustration. Then they go on seeking somewhere help, guidance, someone to take away their responsibility, someone to lead them to heaven, someone to protect them from hell.

This third, instinctive layer is the unconscious. The subconscious is controlling it every moment – every moment! And it controls so fanatically that everything is destroyed – or at least distorted. We never feel from the third layer what real instinct is. We never feel! Everything is distorted. From this subconscious mind – the most suppressed, the most distorted, the most destroyed – come all the miseries. All the miseries, all the paranoia, all the schizophrenia, all mental diseases, they come from this third layer.

These three – conscious, subconscious and unconscious – these are the three types of thoughts. The deeper the layer from where the thought comes, the more irrelevant it looks. So if you just write down your thoughts as they happen, you will feel that you are just mad. What is going on in your mind? What type of thinking is going on? Most of it looks irrelevant. It is not! It is relevant, only with missing links – because the subconscious will not allow everything to come up. Something escapes and comes to the mind, and the gaps are there.

That’s why you cannot understand your dreams: because even in dreams the subconscious is always alert not to allow everything, and the unconscious has to try symbolic routes. It has to change everything just to escape the censor of the subconscious. So it goes on giving you messages in symbolic, pictorial forms.

Your mind is flooded: first, with outward reactions and reflections which are natural; second, by subconscious thoughts which have been produced by the society; and third, by instinctive nature which has been suppressed totally. These three constantly flood the mind. And because of these you are constantly wavering – constantly wavering and trembling. You cannot even sleep. Dreams will continue; that means mind will continue wavering. Twenty-four hours a day, the mind is just a mad thing going round and round and round.

In this state of affairs, how can you be still? How can you attain the posture, the non-wavering mind? How can you achieve it? And when the rishi says that non-wavering knowing is the posture – the right posture – he means that unless these layers are broken and the contents released, you will never be in a state of pure knowing. The mind will not be cleansed; you will not attain the purity of perception. So what to do? What to do to achieve this non-wavering knowing?

Three things: one, whenever you are living moment-to-moment, don’t allow your subconscious to interfere constantly. Sometimes, just drop the subconscious and live in the moment. It is not needed. sometimes it is needed. When you are driving, the subconscious is needed, because the skill of driving becomes a part of the subconscious. That’s why you can talk and you can smoke and you can think and you can drive. The driving is now not a conscious effort. It has been taken over by the subconscious. So it is good to use it whenever it is needed, but when it is not needed, just drop it – put it aside! Without any murmur, just put it aside and be in the moment.

There are many moments when the subconscious is not needed, but only because of old habit you go on using it. You have come back from the office and you are sitting in your garden: why should the subconscious come in now? You can listen to the birds just as once you listened when you were a child without a subconscious.

Relax in these moments, and just be there near the reality. Don’t allow your subconscious mind to come in. Just put it aside! Play with children, put the subconscious aside.

A father who cannot play with his children as their equal cannot really be a right father, because no communication is possible unless you are equal to them. A mother cannot really be a mother unless she can become a child again with her child. Then there is a rapport. Then both become equal. Then there is a friendship. Then a different quality of love comes in. So, really, a child never feels independent, free, at liberty with his parents – never! He begins to feel freedom for the first time when he goes to his chums – not with his parents.

So remember constantly that whenever you can relax your subconscious, relax it! It is not needed to be there every moment.

There are many moments, but you will not relax it even in your bed. You have gone to sleep and it is working. You want to sleep and it will not allow you. It says, “I am to do much work.” It goes on thinking; it goes on working. You can put off the light – mm? – that means you stop the first, the peripheral mind. Now there will be no light; you will not be able to see. You can close the doors. Now there will be no noise, no sound. You have completely closed yourself off from outside stimuli. That means now you need not react, so the first layer of the mind is relaxed.

But what to do with the second layer? You put off the light, close the doors, close your ears, close your eyes, but it goes on working – because you have never allowed it not to work. And, really. A man is not the master of his mind unless he achieves this: that when he wants to work with the mind he works; when he doesn’t want to work the mind, he doesn’t. And the second capacity is the greater. […]

It needs only the breaking of an old habit. But you have never tried it. You have used your subconscious constantly; your subconscious mind doesn’t have any memory of when you have allowed it not to work. So the first thing to do is to allow your subconscious mind sometimes to be put aside. Don’t use it, and soon you will have a less wavering mind. You can become capable of this, and it is not difficult. You must only become conscious of your subconscious workings. Don’t allow – just relax sometimes and tell your subconscious mind: “Stop!”

One thing more to remember: never fight with it; otherwise, you will never be capable of this nonwavering. Never fight with it, because when a master begins to fight with his servant, he accepts equality. When a master begins to fight with a servant, he has accepted him as the master. So please remember: never fight with the subconscious mind; otherwise, you will be defeated. Just order it – never fight.

Know the difference – what I mean when I say just order it. Just say to it, “Stop!” and begin to work. Never fight with it! This is a mantra, and the mind begins to follow it. Just say, “Stop!” Nothing more, nothing less. Say, “Stop totally!” and begin to behave as if the mind had stopped. And soon you will become capable, and you will be just wonder-struck at how this mind stops by just saying “Stop!” It is because mind has no will.

You might have seen someone in a hypnotic trance. What happens? In a hypnotic trance, the hypnotist goes on simply giving orders and the mind follows – the man follows. Absurd orders, and the man begins to follow, the hypnotized subject follows them. Why? Because the conscious mind has only been put to sleep, and the subconscious mind has no will of its own. Just tell it to do something and it will do it.

But we are not aware of our own capacity, so rather than ordering we go on begging, or, at the most, we begin to fight. When you fight, you are divided. Your own will begins to fight with you. The subconscious mind has no will at all. So, if you want to stop smoking, don’t try. Just order and stop. Don’t try at all. If you fall in the trap of trying you will never win, because you have accepted something which is not there. You just say to the mind, “Now I stop this very moment,” and soon you will become aware that things begin to happen. It is natural! Nothing is strange about it: it is just natural. Once you have to be aware of it, that’s all. So just put the subconscious mind aside and begin to live in the moment.

Then the second thing you have to do is: when you have become capable of putting the mind aside when something outside is working as a stimulus, then try the other way – when some instinct is coming up, just put the subconscious mind aside. It will be a bit difficult, but when the first thing is achieved it will not be difficult at all. Just see now that again the sex is coming up, the anger is coming up, and just say to the subconscious mind, “Let me face it directly. Don’t come in – let me face it directly! You are not needed.” Just order the mind and face the instinct directly. And once you begin to encounter your own instincts directly, you will be the master without the need of any control.

When you need control, you are really not the master. A master never needs control. If you say, “I can control my anger,” you are not the master – because a controlled thing can erupt any moment, and you will remain constantly in fear of that which you have controlled. There will be a constant fight. In any weak moment you will be defeated. So, please, don’t control. Be a master! – don’t control. These are two completely different dimensions.

When I say be a master, this mastery comes only when you encounter your nature, your biological nature as it is, in its purity. I wonder, have you ever seen your sex in its purity without moral teachings coming in, without the gurus and mahatmas dropping in, without the scriptures? Have you seen your sex instinct in its purity, in its pure fire? If you have seen it, you will become the master of it. If you have not seen it, you will remain a cripple and you will remain a defeated one. And howsoever you try to control, you will never be able to control it. That is impossible!

Control is impossible: mastery is possible. But mastery has a different root. Mastery means knowledge; control means fear. When you fear something, you begin to control. When you know something, you become the master: there is no need to control. And knowledge means direct encounter. Instincts should be known in their purity. Drop the subconscious, because it is a constantly disturbing factor. It goes on distorting things; it will never allow you to see things as they are. It will always put the society in between, and you will see things through the society as they are not.

Really, this is the miracle of the subconscious mind – that if you look through it things begin to be as you see them. The subconscious mind can impose any color, any shape on things. Just put it aside; face your biological nature directly. It is beautiful! It is wonderful! Just face it directly. It is Divine! Don’t allow any moralistic nonsense to distort it. See it as it is.

Science observes things, and the basis of its observation is that the observer must not come in: he must remain just an observer. And whatsoever the thing reveals should be allowed. The observer must not come in to disturb and destroy or distort or give a shape or a color. A scientist is working in his lab: even if something comes up which destroys his whole concept, his whole philosophy, his whole religion, he must not allow his mind to come in. He must allow the truth to be revealed as it is.

The same goes for inner working, inner research: allow your biological nature to reveal itself in its pure being. And once you know it you will be the master – because knowledge means mastery, knowledge means power. Only ignorance is weak. And through control there is no knowledge, because the whole concept of control is brought in by the subconscious, by the society.

So if you can do two things with your subconscious: one, allowing the fact of the outside Existence to come to you directly; and then, two, allowing the “facticity” of the inside Existence to be realized in its purity, in its innocence – then a miracle happens. It is a miracle, and that miracle is this: that subconscious and unconscious drop. Then mind is not divided in three. Then mind becomes one. That oneness of mind, undivided oneness, is what the Upanishads call “the knowing” – because even the knower is not there. When these three divisions have dropped, when even this division of knower is not there, then only pure knowing, only mirrorlike knowing remains.

With this knowing, you have two centers: one, the outside periphery where you unite with the universe; and another, the inside where again you unite with the universe. And this knowing joins both the inner and the outer – the atma and the brahma.

This pure knowing is without any trembling. This pure knowing is the posture, the right posture, in which the Enlightenment happens, the Realization happens, in which you become one with Truth. This is the door – but how to cleanse? It is not simply a theory; it is not a theoretical statement at all. It is just a scientific procedure; it is a process. Do something to dissolve the divisions of the mind. And if you want to dissolve the mind, concentrate on the subconscious, the middle portion of the mind, which is society. Drop it!

It is, of course, necessary for a child to be brought up in a society. It is necessary! So the subconscious is a necessary evil: the society has to teach him many things – but they should not become fetters. That’s why I say that a better society, a real, moral society, will also teach, side by side, how to break this subconscious. A better society will give its children the subconscious with a conscious methodology of how to drop it when it is not needed and how to be free of it.

It is needed up to the point when you become aware, when you achieve an awakened state of mind. Until then it is needed. It is just like a blind man’s staff. A staff cannot substitute for eyes: it is just a groping in the dark. But a blind man needs it, and it is helpful – but a blind man can become so much attached to his staff that when his eyes are healed and he has begun to see, he still cannot throw away his staff, and goes on groping. Because groping is easier when the eyes are closed, he remains with closed eyes and goes on groping with his staff.

This subconscious is like a blind man’s staff. A child is born, but he is not born aware. The society has to give him something so that he can move and grope – some values, some ideals, some thoughts. But they should not become the eyes. And what I am saying is: if you drop the divisions and create more awareness within yourself, you will have eyes, and with those eyes this staff is not needed.

But it is a related thing. If you drop the subconscious, you will become aware; if you become aware then the subconscious will drop. So begin from anywhere. You can begin by being more aware, then the subconscious will drop. Mm? This is a samkhya process, this is a samkhya methodology: just be aware and, by and by, the subconscious will drop. The yoga process is a second way – the other, the contrary: drop the subconscious, and you will become more aware. Both are related.

So wherever you want to begin, the important thing is to begin. Begin from anywhere, either from being more conscious or from being less obsessed with the subconscious. And when these divisions drop, you will have a pure knowing. That pure knowing is the posture. With that pure knowing, with that non-wavering knowing, your body will achieve a stillness you have not known at all.

We are not aware: that’s why we don’t know how disturbed we are in our bodies. You cannot sit still, and if you try to sit still then for the first time you will become aware of subtle movements in the body: the leg will begin to say something, the hand will begin to say something, the neck will begin to say something, every part of the body will begin to give you information. Why? It is not that when you sit still the body begins to move; it is moving every moment. It is only because you are otherwise occupied that you are not aware. There are subtle movements continuously: your body is constantly moving and moving. This constant wavering really doesn’t belong to your body. It belongs to your mind. The body only reflects. […]

A Buddha sits just like a statue. It is not that he has forced his body to be still. The mind is still, and the body need not reflect because there is nothing to reflect.[…]

Unless one can be so silent, one can never feel what Existence means, what life means, what the bliss of it is, the benediction. Only in such silence does life descend. You become aware of the music, of the nectar. You begin to feel it, but only in silence. And that silence comes only when you are non-wavering. If you are wavering, if the mind is just wavering and there is trembling inside, you cannot feel that silence.

You cannot attain silence directly: you have to attain non-wavering, then silence comes as a shadow. If non-wavering comes, then silence comes. […]

Silence never divides, silence joins you.

For example, if we are sitting here and everyone becomes so silent that not a thought has any existence, not a single ripple is there in the mind, everyone silent, totally silent, will you be different from anyone else? Will you be different from your neighbors? How can you be different? The feeling of difference is a thought. Do I mean you will feel one with them? No, because the feeling of oneness is a thought. You will simply be one, not a feeling. Really, there will be no one here – just silence. […]

When you begin to be silent you begin to be in deep communion with Existence. Thoughts and thoughts are noises. Waves and waves are thoughts and tremblings inside. They create a barrier, they disrupt – they make you alone. Then you begin to be alone in this whole universe, and that loneliness creates meaninglessness. The more lonely you are, the more you will feel meaningless, futile, useless, and then you will begin to fill yourself with more noise. With radio, television, with anything, you will try to fill yourself, to be occupied. You run from here to there, from this club to that club. Go on running! Don’t leave any gap in which you might become aware of your loneliness! So this whole life just becomes a running from one point to another. This is madness, and the whole earth has become a madhouse.

So attain to this posture – and don’t begin with the body. Begin with the subconscious mind, and then your body will reflect what is happening within. Even now it is reflecting what is happening within. The body is a mirror; it is transparent. Those who have eyes, they know that the body is transparent. You enter here, and I know what is happening inside you – because you cannot enter without showing it. You look at me, and I know what is happening inside your eyes – because how can you raise your eyes without expressing that which is within? It is being shown every moment!

Every moment is an indication. It is related; nothing is irrelevant. Your body is showing every moment, but you don’t know the body language. The body has a language of its own, and it shows – everything! You cannot deceive. You can deceive with your language. but not with your body – not with your body! You can smile, but your lips will say that there is no smile within. You can show something by your face, you can try, but still the face will give hints that this is false.

This body is just giving information every moment. You cannot change it. You can try, but you cannot change it. And even if you succeed in changing your body, you can succeed only in deceiving others not yourself, because the inside cannot change by the outside change. It is not basic. You can cut a tree by the roots, but not by the leaves. If you cut the leaves, new leaves will come up again and one leaf will be replaced by two. Cut two, and four leaves will come out of that spot. The tree will take revenge, the roots will take revenge. They will say, “You are cutting one leaf – we will put two. We are capable of constantly supplying – infinitely.”

So don’t be bothered by leaves. And body has only leaves: roots are deep within. Cut the roots, and the leaves will wither away by themselves. When there are no roots to feed, the leaves will drop by themselves. Your body will change. Change the mind and the body will change. Mind is the root!

Attain a non-wavering knowing, and the door will be open, and you will be able to have a glimpse into the unknown. The unknown is not far off: only you are closed. The unknown is here, but you are running. The unknown is here, but you are in such a hurry and in such speed that you cannot look at it.

Stand still! I don’t mean your body: let your mind stand still, your consciousness, and suddenly you will become aware of something which has always been there. You have been seeking for it, seeking and searching, lives and lives running for it – and it was here. It is so near, and that’s why you have missed it. It is just by the corner, and you have sought it everywhere except this place where you are standing.

Non-wavering reveals to you the here and now. That standing still in consciousness reveals to you the presence which is here.

-Osho

From The Ultimate Alchemy, V.1, Discourse #5

For a related post see Encountering the Unconscious.

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.

Master of Your Own Mind – Osho

Those who have purified the mind by the practice of sannyas and yoga, and those who have come to understand the exact meaning of the spiritual science indicated in the Upanishad’s Vedant, they in the end become capable of attaining brahmalok – the world of brahman. And liberating themselves from everything, they strive to achieve immortality.

– Kaivalya Upanishad

The basic problem before a spiritual seeker is not how to know, but how to be. Knowing is not the problem, it is easy. The real problem is how to be, how the being should be strengthened. Knowing can grow easily; knowing has its own ways of growing. But knowing is a parasitic growth.

Knowing grows in the memory, and memory is just mechanical. That’s why we now have mechanical devices which can be fed with memory – we have computers, and a computer is more efficient than any human brain. A computer can do anything that a human brain can do – and a computer can do many more things which a human brain cannot do. Sooner or later, human memory is going to be replaced by mechanical devices. A mechanical device can do whatsoever your mind is doing, and more efficiently, and in less time. A computer can do a mathematical problem in seconds for which you would need an Einstein, or a person of the caliber of Einstein, to work on for at least three months.

Mind is just a mechanical device. It can grow – you go on feeding it with knowledge, with information, and it can grow. You may not be aware of it, but nothing comes out of your mind which has not been put in it before – nothing. Nothing comes out of your mind which is original. In that way, nothing is original as far as mind is concerned; everything is just repetition. Mind is the most repetitive mechanism. You have to feed it, give it something: it will reproduce it. Not a single thought comes to you which is your own – it has been given to you by society, by education, by study, but always it has been given to you. At the most you can make new combinations, that’s all. Nothing more can be done with the mind. This is one growth, a parasitic growth at the cost of your being.

By being, I mean the consciousness with which you are born. And by mind, I mean all the accumulation that has come to your consciousness through society, through education, through culture. You are not born with a mind; you are born with a consciousness. Mind is a later growth. That’s why if a person is not taught, if a person is not educated, then he has a lesser mind, a poor mind. If no language is taught to you, you will know no language. If nothing is taught to you, you will know nothing. Mind is a social growth.

Consciousness is part of you, but mind is not part of you; mind is given to you. The whole process of social cultivation, of social imposition, is to produce a mind in you. That’s why a Christian mind is different from a Hindu mind – because a Hindu society is feeding something and a Christian society is feeding something else. A Mohammedan mind is totally different from a Hindu, or a Christian, or a Jaina mind. But a Hindu consciousness or a Mohammedan consciousness or a Christian consciousness, are not different.

Really, a consciousness cannot be called Christian or Hindu or Mohammedan – but minds are. So unless you go beyond your society – you are imprisoned in your upbringing. This mind, which the society gives to everyone . . . it is a necessity; a society has to give it to you. It is good as far as it goes, but it must not become an imprisonment. A moment must be attained where you are freed from your own mind. Then mind begins to work as a mechanical thing in you; you can use it but you are not identified with it.

Of course one has to use language, one has to use mathematics, one has to know history and geography and everything. But it must not be identified with your consciousness. You must remain a witness to it. You must remain separate, unidentified, different from your own mind. This is what meditation means: how to be not identified with the mind – how to create a space between yourself and your own mind. It is difficult because we never make any separation. We go on thinking in terms that the mind means me: mind and me are totally identified. If they are totally identified, then you will never be at peace; then you will never be able to enter the divine, because the divine can be entered only when the social has been left behind.

When whatsoever the society has given you has been renounced, only then you enter the divine, because only then, you enter pure consciousness. Mind is an overgrowth; it must be put aside. By renunciation, I mean renunciation of the social. And your mind is nothing but a social by-product, it depends on your society.

This mind can go on growing. Then you grow in knowledge; go on studying, go on learning new things, more things, and your mind goes on growing. And a mind is infinitely capable to grow; yet scientists cannot say to what extent this mind can grow. It can go on growing, the process seems infinite. It has so much potentiality – seventy million cells working in the mind, and a single cell can have millions of bits of information in it. A single cell of the mind can have so much information stored in it, and the mind has seventy million cells in it. We are not using even a single cell’s capacity – ordinarily, we are not using a single cell’s capacity – and we have seventy million cells. And each cell seems to be capable of infinite accumulation of information. The mind seems to be infinite in its own way – and it is not you! It is just something which has been given to you.

It is useful, it is utilitarian; that’s why we become identified with it. One has to use one’s mind constantly, and one has to use it so constantly that there is no gap. You don’t remember any moment when you were not your mind, that’s the problem: to remember it, and to create a space, a gap, when you are not your mind. You are yourself and mind is just a device which can be used or not used, and you are the master to choose whether to use it or not.

Ordinarily, the mind is the master and you have to follow it. The mind gives you something to think about and you have to think about it. The mind gives you some dream and you have to dream it. And the mind goes on . . . And sometimes even if you say to your mind, “Stop!” it is not going to stop, it is not going to listen to you at all. Because you have cooperated with it so much, and you have given it your energy and identification so much, that the mind doesn’t remember your mastery at all. You are just a slave.

Meditation means to create a gap so that you can become master, master of your own mind. And mastery means that you are not identified.

I can order my hand to do anything – to move or not to move. Why? – because I am not identified with the hand; otherwise, who is going to order and who is going to be ordered? I can order my hand to move; it moves. But if my hand begins to move and I say, “Stop!” and it is not stopping, what does it mean? It means only one thing: my order is impotent because of too much identification with the hand. The hand has become a master in its own right – it goes on moving. It says, “I am not going to follow your order at all.”

This has happened with the mind. The mind goes on working in its own way; no order can be given to it. There is no intrinsic impossibility – it is only because you have never ordered it, so it doesn’t know that you are the master. The master has remained so silent, has remained so hidden, that the slave has begun to feel himself the master.

If one goes on growing in this mind, one goes on more and more hidden deep down. And the mind becomes such a great thing, it is difficult to assert your consciousness. That’s why a very ordinary villager with a lesser mind, is with more consciousness. An ordinary person – not very educated, not knowing much – has always, of course, less mind but more consciousness. So sometimes a person who has more mind may behave very foolishly, because he has less consciousness. A person who has a developed mind can work very wisely, behave very wisely if the situation is such that the mind knows what to do and what not to do. Then he can behave, work, do anything very efficiently. But any new situation in which the mind is not aware, and he will be stupid, he will behave stupidly.

A villager — an uneducated person, a primitive, with less mind — will behave more consciously in a new situation, because for him new situations are occurring daily, every moment. With no developed mind, he has to work with his consciousness. That’s why the more the world has grown knowledgeable, the less wise it has become. It is difficult not to produce a Buddha, not because we are more ignorant, but because we know more. It is difficult to produce a Jesus, not because anything is lacking — on the contrary, something has grown too much. Knowledge has grown too much, and if knowledge grows too much, the being begins to feel poor.

We value a person because of what he has: knowledge, wealth, power. We never value a person for what he is. If I am a powerful man, then I am valued; if I am a wealthy man, then I am valued; if I am a man of knowledge, then I am valued – but never simply for what I am. If wealth is lost, then my influence will be lost; if knowledge is lost, the my influence will be lost; if power is lost, my influence will be lost, because I was never valued for what I am. Something which I have – having has become so important, and knowledge is a subtle having.

Being means: the purity of my inner existence, nothing added by the outside – neither wealth, nor knowledge, nor anything else – just my inner consciousness in its purity.

This is what I mean, what this Upanishad means by the growth of being. This being can be achieved only by two methods: renunciation – sannyas – and yoga, the science of positive growth. One must renounce identification: one must come to know that I am not the body, I am not the mind. One must renounce all that which is mind, but I am not. One must come to the center point which cannot be renounced.

A Western thinker, Rene Descartes, begins his theosophical speculation with doubt, and he goes on doubting. He goes on doubting everything that can be doubted. He was a very keen penetrating intellectual; really, he was the father of modern Western philosophy. He goes on doubting everything, he makes it a point that “I will not stop doubting unless a moment comes and I encounter something which cannot be doubted. If I can doubt, I will continue to doubt, unless I stumble upon some fact which is indubitable.” So God can be doubted very easily. It is difficult to have faith; it is very easy to doubt, because for doubt you have only to say no. Nothing else is needed.

“No” is a very non-involving word. If you say yes, you are committed. If I say “Yes, God is,” then I cannot remain the same. If I say, “No, God is not,” I will continue to be the same. “No” is the easiest word in a way: you say it, you are not involved, you remain outside. If you say yes, you are involved. You have come in; now you are committed. To say no to anything is very easy, because then you need not prove anything. If you say yes then you have to prove it – and proofs are, of course, very difficult. Even if things are, proofs are very difficult. Time is. We know time is, everyone feels time is – but can prove that time is?

Saint Augustine says, “Don’t ask about time, because when you don’t ask, I know it is. When you ask, I begin to hesitate – whether it is or not? And if you persist, I become doubtful.” Can we prove time? It is; everyone knows it is. We cannot prove it.

Can we prove love? Everyone knows it is. Even if one has not felt love, one has felt very deeply its absence. Love is felt – either as a presence of absence, but no one can prove it. So anyone can say, “Love is not,” and you cannot disprove their statement.

Descartes goes on denying, doubting: God is denied, then the world itself is denied – even the world which is here and now. You are here, but I can doubt; it may be just a dream to me. And how can I tell the difference whether it is a dream or not? – because sometimes I have dreamt about talking to people. And when I was dreaming and talking, those who were present were as real as you are – and really, in a way more real, because in a dream you cannot doubt. But if you are really present, I can doubt: it may be just a dream, you may not be there at all, but just a dream, a dream happening to me. And I am dreaming that you are, and I am talking to you, to my dream construct. How can I prove that you are really there? There is no way. There is no way to prove that you are. I can touch you . . . but I can touch someone in a dream, and even in dream I can feel someone’s body.

It is difficult – really, in a way, impossible to make a distinction between reality and dreaming. That’s why Berkeley says that this whole world is just a dream, or a Shankara says that this whole world is just a dream. They can say it and they cannot be disproved.

So Descartes says, “This world is not. It is only a thought, a dream. God is not.” Then he goes on denying everything. Ultimately, he comes to himself, and then he begins to thin “whether I am, or not.” Now there is a fact which cannot be denied, because even if all is dreaming, someone is needed to dream. Even if everything is dubitable, someone is needed to doubt. Even if Descartes says “I am not,” this statement has to be made by someone – even to doubt, he is needed. Then he says, “Now I have come upon a point which indubitable. I can doubt everything, but I cannot doubt myself. If I doubt, the doubt proves me. So he gives a very meaningful formula: He says, “Cogito ergo sum. I think – I doubt – therefore I am.”

This “I-am-ness” must be broken apart from mentation, from mind, one has to renounce all that can be renounced – just like Descartes who says, “I must doubt all that can be doubted, unless I come to a point which cannot be doubted.” Just in the same way, one has to continue renouncing – renouncing all that which can be renounced, unless you come to a point which cannot be renounced.

You cannot renounce your being; all else can be renounced. All else you can say, “This I-am.” All that you can say, “This is I,” you can renounce. You can say, “No, this is not I-am. This body, I am not; this world, I am not, this thought, I am not; this thinking, I am not.” Go on, go on denying. Then comes a moment when you cannot deny more. Simple “I-am-ness remains. Not even “I-am-ness,” but only “am-ness.” That “am-ness” is the existential jump.

This is the first part of the sutra: renunciation, sannyas.

So sannyas is a negative process. One has to go on eliminating: “This is I-am-not.” Go on – “This, that, I am not.” This is renouncing, a negative process, elimination. But this is only a part: you have renounced whatsoever you are not; then you have to grow that which you are – that is yoga; that needs the positive, of growth. That is yoga. Now you have to grow that which is in you. How to grow it? – we have been discussing that – by faith, by devotion, by meditation, by practices, bodily and other. That is yoga.

Sannyas plus yoga means religion. Renounce that which you are not, and grow in that, create in that, which you are. Only by such negative and positive processes in a deep harmony, the brahma, the ultimate, is achieved.

-Osho

From That Art Thou, Discourse #21.

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.

Self-consciousness is Not Consciousness of the Self – Osho

For years I am most of the time witnessing and I feel like it is a disease. So is it that there are two kinds of witnessing and mine is wrong? Tell me.

It must be wrong; otherwise it cannot be felt like a disease. Self-consciousness is not consciousness of the self, and there is the problem. Consciousness of the self is totally different. It is not self-consciousness at all; in fact, self-consciousness is a barrier for consciousness of the self. You can try to watch, observe with a very self-conscious mind. That is not awareness; that is not witnessing, because this will make you tense. […]

If you are continuously thinking in terms of the ego, then even your witnessing will become a disease, then your meditation will become a disease, then your religion will become a disease. With the ego everything, becomes a disease. The ego is the great inconvenience in your being. It is like a thorn in the flesh; it goes on hurting. It is like a wound.

So, what to do? The first thing, when you are trying to watch, the first thing that Patanjali says is: concentrate on the object and don’t concentrate on the subject. Start from the object – dharana, concentration. Look at the tree, and let the tree be there. You forget yourself completely; you are not needed. Your being there will be a continuous disturbance in the experience of the greenery, of the tree, of the rose. You just let the rose be there. You become completely oblivious of yourself – you focus on the rose. Let the rose be there: no subject, just the object. This is the first step of samyama.

Then the second step: drop the rose, drop the emphasis on the rose. Now emphasize consciousness of the rose – but still no subject is needed, just the consciousness that you are watching, that there is watching.

And only then can the third step be taken, which will bring you close to what Gurdjieff calls self-remembering, or Krishnamurti calls awareness, or the Upanishads call witnessing. But first the two steps have to be fulfilled; then the third comes easy. Don’t start doing the third immediately. First the object, then the consciousness, then the subject.

Once the object is dropped and the emphasis on the consciousness is no longer a strain, the subject is there but there is no subjectivity in it. You are there but there is no “I” in it, just being. You are, but there is no feeling that “I am.” That confinement of “I” has disappeared; only amness exists. That amness is divine. Drop the “I” and just be that amness. […]

-Osho

Excerpt from Secrets of Yoga, Discourse #10, Q3 (Previously titled Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, V.8)

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.

Love and Meditation, Yoga and Tantra – Osho

The ultimate search is individual, but can you explain the integral part of the beloved in tantra and the search for our inner self?

A very intricate, complex thing has to be understood:
If you are not in love, you are lonely.
If you are in love, really in love, you become alone.

Loneliness is sadness; aloneness is not sadness. Loneliness is a feeling of incompleteness. You need someone and the needed one is not available. Loneliness is darkness, with no light in it. A dark house, waiting and waiting for someone to come and kindle the light.

Aloneness is not loneliness. Aloneness means the feeling that you are complete. Nobody is needed, you are enough. And this happens in love. Lovers become alone – through love you touch your inner completeness. Love makes you complete. Lovers share each other, but that is not their need, that is their overflowing energy.

Two persons who have been feeling lonely can make a contract, can come together. They are not lovers, remember. They remain lonely. Now, because of the presence of the other, they don’t feel the loneliness – that’s all. They somehow deceive themselves. Their love is nothing but a deception to deceive oneself: I am not lonely – somebody else is there. Because two lonely persons are meeting, their loneliness basically is doubled, or even multiplied. That’s what happens ordinarily.

You feel lonely when you are alone, and when you are in relationship you feel miserable. This is an everyday observation. When people are lonely they feel lonely, and they are in a deep search for somebody to be related to. When they are related to somebody, then misery starts; then they feel it was better to be lonely – this is too much. What happens?

Two lonely persons meet – that means two gloomy, sad, miserable persons meet. The misery is multiplied. How can two uglinesses become beautiful? How can two lonelinesses coming together become completion, totality? Not possible. They exploit each other, they somehow try to deceive themselves through the other. But that deception doesn’t go far. By the time the honeymoon is finished, the marriage is also finished. It is very temporary. It is just an illusion.

Real love is not a search to go against loneliness. Real love is to transform loneliness into aloneness. To help the other – if you love the person, you help him to be alone. You don’t fill him or her. You don’t try to complete the other in some way by your presence. You help the other to be alone, to be so full out of her or his own being that you will not be a need.

When the person is totally free, then out of that freedom sharing is possible. Then he gives much, but not as a need; he gives much, but not as a bargain. He gives much because he has much. He gives because he enjoys giving.

Lovers are alone, and a real lover never destroys your aloneness. He will always be totally respectful about the aloneness of the other. It is sacred. He will not interfere in it, he will not spoil that space.

But ordinarily, lovers, so-called lovers, are very much afraid of the other and the other’s aloneness, independence; they are very much afraid – because they think if the other is independent then they will not be needed, then they will be discarded. So the woman goes on trying… that the husband should remain dependent, always in need, so that she can remain valuable. And the husband goes on trying in every way so that the woman always remains in need, so that he remains valuable. This is a bargain and there is continuous conflict, struggle. The struggle is that everybody needs his freedom.

Love allows freedom; not only allows, but strengthens freedom. And anything that destroys freedom is not love. It must be something else. Love and freedom go together, they are two wings of the same bird. Whenever you see that your love is going against your freedom, then you are doing something else in the name of love.

Let this be your criterion: freedom is the criterion; love gives you freedom, makes you free, liberates you. And once you are totally yourself, you feel grateful to the person who has helped you. That gratefulness is almost religious. You feel in the other person something divine. He has made you free, or she has made you free, and love has not become a possessiveness.

When love deteriorates it becomes possessiveness, jealousy, struggle for power, politics, domination, manipulation – a thousand and one things, all ugly. When love soars high, to the purest sky, it is freedom, total freedom. It is moksha – it is absolute freedom.

Now the question: “The ultimate search is individual, but can you explain the integral part of the beloved in Tantra and the search for our inner self?”

Tantra is purest love. Tantra is the methodology of purifying love of all its poisons. If you are in love, the love I am talking about, your very love will help the other to be integrated. Your very love will become a cementing force for the other. In your love the other will come together, because your love will give freedom; and under the shade of your love, under the protection of your love, the other will start growing.

All growth needs love – but unconditional love. If love has conditions then growth cannot be total, because those conditions will come in the way. Love unconditionally. Don’t ask anything in return. Much comes on its own – that’s another thing. Don’t be a beggar. In love be an emperor. Just give it and see what happens… a thousand fold it comes back. But one has to learn it. Otherwise one remains a miser; one gives a little and waits for much to come back, and your waiting, your expectation, destroys the whole beauty of it.

When you are waiting and expecting, the other feels that you are manipulating. He may say it or not, but he feels you are manipulating. And wherever you feel manipulation, one wants to rebel against it – because it is against the inner need of the soul, because any demand from the outside disintegrates you. Any demand from the outside divides you. Any demand from the outside is a crime against you, because your freedom is polluted. Then you are no more sacred. You are no more the end – you are being used as a means. And the greatest immoral act in the world is to use somebody as a means.

Each being is an end unto himself. Love treats you as an end unto yourself. You are not to be dragged into any expectations. Tantra is the highest form of love. Tantra is the science, the yoga of love.

So a few things to be remembered. One: love, but not as a need – as a sharing. Love, but don’t expect – give. Love, but remember your love should not become an imprisonment for the other.

Love, but be very careful; you are moving on sacred ground. You are going into the highest, the purest and holiest temple. Be alert! Drop all impurities outside the temple. When you love a person, love the person as if the person is a god, not less than that. Never love a woman as a woman and never love a man as a man, because if you love a man as a man your love is going to be very, very ordinary. Your love is not going to be more than lust. If you love a woman as a woman, your love is not going to soar very high. Love a woman as a goddess, then love becomes worship.

In Tantra, the man who is going to make love to the woman has to worship her for months as a goddess. He has to visualize in the woman the mother-goddess. When the visualization has become total, when no lust arises, when seeing the woman sitting naked before him he simply feels thrilled with a divine energy, no lust arises, the very form of the woman becomes divine, and all thoughts stop and only reverence is felt – then he is allowed to make love.

It looks a little absurd and paradoxical. When there is no need to make love, then he is allowed to make love. When the woman has become a goddess, then he is allowed to make love – because now love can soar high, love can become a climax, a crescendo. Now it will not be of the earth, it will not be of this world; it will not be of two bodies, it will be of two beings. It will be a meeting of two existences. Two souls will meet, merge and mingle, and both will come out of it tremendously alone.

Aloneness means purity. Aloneness means that you are just yourself and nobody else. Aloneness means that you are pure gold; just gold and nothing else… just you. Love makes you alone. Loneliness will disappear, but aloneness will arise.

Loneliness is a state when you are ill with yourself, bored with yourself, tired of yourself, and you want to go somewhere and to forget yourself into somebody else. Aloneness is when you are thrilled just by your being. You are blissful just by being yourself. You need not go anywhere. Need has disappeared. You are enough unto yourself. But now, a new thing arises in your being. You have so much that you cannot contain it. You have to share, you have to give. And whosoever accepts your gift, you will feel grateful towards him that he accepted. He could have rejected it.

Lovers feel grateful that their love has been accepted. They feel thankful, because they were so full of energy and they needed someone to pour that energy into. When a flower blooms and releases its fragrance to the winds it feels grateful to the winds – the fragrance was growing more and more heavy on it. It was becoming almost a burden. It was just as if a woman is pregnant and nine months have passed and the child is not being born, is delaying. Now she is so much burdened; she wants to share the child with the world. That is the meaning of birth.

Up to now she has been carrying the child in herself. It was nobody else’s but her own. But now it is too much; she cannot contain it. It has to be shared; the child has to be shared with the world. The mother has to drop her miserliness. Once the child is out of the womb, it is no more only of the mother; by and by it will go away, and far away. It will become part of the great world. The same happens when a cloud comes full of rain water ready to shower, and when it showers, rains, the cloud feels unburdened and happy and grateful to the thirsty earth because it accepted.

There are two types of love. One: love when you are feeling lonely – as a need, you go to the other. Then love when are not feeling lonely, but alone. In the first case you go to get something; in the second case you go to give something. A giver is an emperor.

Remember, Tantra is not ordinary love. It has nothing to do with lust. It is the greatest transformation of lust into love. The ultimate search is individual – but love makes you individual. If it doesn’t make you individual, if it tries to make you a slave, then it is not love – it is hate pretending love. Pretending to be love, it is hidden hatred just managing somehow; managing somehow and pretending that it is love.

Love of this type kills, destroys the individuality. It makes you less of an individual. It pulls you down. You are not enhanced, you don’t become graceful. You are being pulled into the mud. And everybody starts feeling that he is settling with something dirty. Love should give you freedom – never settle for less. Love should make you a white cloud, completely free, a wanderer in the sky of freedom, with no roots attached anywhere. Love is not an attachment; lust is.

Meditation and love are the two ways to attain to that individuality I am talking about. Both are very, very deeply related together. In fact they are both aspects of the same coin: love and meditation.

If you meditate, sooner or later you will come upon love. If you meditate deeply, sooner or later you will start feeling a tremendous love arising in you that you have never known before – a new quality to your being, a new door opening. You have become a new flame and you want to share now.

If you love deeply, by and by you will become aware that your love is becoming more and more meditative. A subtle quality of silence is entering in you. Thoughts are disappearing, gaps appearing – silences. You are touching your own depth.

Love makes you meditative if it is on the right lines.

Meditation makes you loving if it is on the right lines.

And there are only two types of people in the world, basically: those who will find their meditation through love, and those who will find their love through meditation.

For those who will find their meditation through love, it is Tantra; that is their science. For those who will find love through their meditation, for them it is Yoga; that is their science.

Tantra and Yoga, these are the only two ways – basically, very foundational. But both can go wrong if you don’t understand well. And the criterion is – listen – if you meditate and it doesn’t become love, know well you have gone wrong somewhere. And you will find ninety-nine yogis out of a hundred have gone wrong. The more they enter into their meditation, the more they become against love. They become, in fact, afraid of love. They start thinking of love as a distraction. Then their meditation is not real meditation. A meditation out of which love does not arise is not meditation at all. It is an escape, not a growth. It is as if a seed has become afraid of becoming a plant and blossoming in flowers, and has become afraid of releasing its fragrance to the winds – a seed has become a miser.

You will find this type of yogi all over India. Their meditation has not come to bloom. Their meditation got constipated somewhere on the way. They are stuck. You will not find grace on their faces, and you will not find intelligence in their eyes. You will see around them a certain climate of dullness and stupidity. You will not find them alert, aware, alive. A certain deadness… because if you are alive you have to become loving. To avoid love they avoid life.

And these people will always be escaping towards the Himalayas, anywhere where they can remain without others. Their aloneness will not be aloneness, it will be a loneliness – you can read it on their faces. They are not happy being alone. On their faces you will see a certain type of martyrdom – which is foolishness! – As if they have been sacrificing. Ego you will find there; humbleness, no – because whenever humbleness comes, love comes. If the ego becomes too strong, then love can be destroyed completely. Ego is the opposite of love.

Yoga is in the hands of the wrong people. And the same happened with Tantra. In the name of Tantra, people started just fulfilling their lust and sex and their perversions. It never became meditative. It became a subtle rationalization of lust, sex and passion. It became a trick; you can hide behind it. For all sorts of perversions, Tantra became a blanket to hide behind.

So remember this. Man is very cunning. He has destroyed Yoga, he has destroyed Tantra. Remain alert! Both are good, both are tremendously beneficial, but the criterion to remember is that if you are doing one rightly, the other is to follow as a shadow. If the other is not following, then you are wrong somewhere.

Move back, start again. Go into your mind, analyze your mind. Somewhere you have tricked yourself. And it is not difficult – because you can deceive others, but you cannot deceive yourself. That is impossible. If you just go within and watch, you will come to know where you have been deceiving. Nobody can deceive himself; it is impossible. How can you deceive yourself?

-Osho

From The Search, Discourse #6

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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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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Samyama: A Synthesis of Consciousness – Osho

What is samyama? That has to be understood. Samyama is the greatest synthesis of human consciousness, the synthesis of three: dharana, dhyan, samadhi.

Ordinarily, your mind is continuously jumping from one object to another. Not for a single moment are you in tune with one object. You go on jumping. Your mind goes on constantly moving; it is like a flux. This moment something is in the focus of the mind, next moment something else, next moment still something else. This is the ordinary state of mind.

The first step out of it is dharana. Dharana means concentration – fixing your whole consciousness on one object, not allowing the object to disappear, bringing again and again your consciousness on the object so that the unconscious habit of the mind of continuous flux can be dropped; because once the habit of continuous change can be dropped, you attain to an integrity, to a crystallization. When there are so many objects moving continuously, you remain so many. Understand it. You remain divided because your objects are divided.

For example, you love one woman today, another woman tomorrow, another woman the third day. That will create a division in you. You cannot be one; you will become many. You will become a crowd. Hence the Eastern insistence to create a love in which you can remain for a longer period, as long as possible. There have been experiments in the East in which a couple has remained a couple for many lives together. Again and again the same woman, the same man: that gives an integrity. Too much change erodes your being, splits you. So if in the West the schizophrenia is becoming almost a normal thing, it is not something to be wondered at. It is not strange; it is natural. Everything is changing.

I have heard that one film actress in Hollywood got married to her eleventh husband. She came home, introduced the new dad to the children. The children brought a register, and they said to the dad, “Please sign it, because today you are here, tomorrow you may be gone; and we are accumulating the signatures, autographs, of all our dads.”

You go on changing houses; you go on changing everything. In America the average limit of a person’s job is three years. The job is also continuously changing. The house – the average limit of a person staying in one town is also three years. And the average limit of marriage is also three years. Somehow three years seems to be very important. It seems if you remain the fourth year with the same woman there is fear that you may get settled. If you remain in the same job more than three years there is fear that you may get settled. So people go on; they have become almost vagabonds. That creates divisions inside you.

In the East we tried to give a job to a person as part of his life. A man was born in a Brahmin house: he remained a Brahmin. That was a great experiment to give stability. A man was born in a shoemaker’s house: he remained a shoemaker. The marriage, the family, the job, the town–people were born in the same town and they would die in the same town. Lao Tzu remembers, “I have heard that in the ancient days people had not gone beyond the river.” They had heard dogs barking on the other side, the other shore. They had inferred that there must be a town because in the evening they had seen smoke rising – people must be cooking. They had heard dogs barking, but they had not bothered to go and see. People were so harmoniously settled.

This constant change simply says that your mind is feverish. You cannot stay longer at anything; then your whole life becomes a life of continuous change – as if a tree is being uprooted again and again and again and never gets the right time to send its roots deep down into the earth. The tree will be alive only for the name’s sake. It will not be able to bloom, not possible, because before flowers come, the roots have to settle.

So, concentration means bringing your consciousness to one object and becoming capable of retaining it there – any object. If you are looking at a rose flower, you continuously look at it. Again and again the mind wanders, goes here and there; you bring it back. You tame the mind – you tame the bull. You bring it back to the rose. The mind goes again; you bring it back. By and by, the mind starts being with the rose for longer periods. Once your mind remains with the rose for a long period, you will be able for the first time to know what a rose is. It is not just a rose: God has flowered in it. The fragrance is not only of the rose; the fragrance is divine. But you never were en rapport with it for long.

Sit with a tree and be with it. Sit with your boyfriend or girlfriend and be with him or her, and bring yourself again and again. Otherwise, what is happening? Even if you are making love to a woman, you are thinking of something else – maybe moving in a totally different world. Even in love you are not focused. You miss much. A door opens, but you are not there to see it. You come back when the door is closed again.

Each moment there are millions of opportunities to see God, but you are not there. He comes and knocks at your doors, but you are not there. You are never found there. You go on roaming around the world. This roaming has to be stopped; that’s what is the meaning of dharana. Dharana is the first step of the great synthesis of samyama.

The second step is dhyan. In dharana, in concentration, you bring your mind to a focus: the object is important. You have to bring again and again the object in your consciousness; you are not to lose track of it. The object is important in dharana. The second step is dhyan, meditation. In meditation the object is not important anymore; it becomes secondary. Now, the flow of consciousness becomes important – the very consciousness which is being poured on the object. Any object will do, but your consciousness should be poured in a continuity; there should not be gaps.

Have you watched? If you pour water from one pot to another, there are gaps. If you pour oil from one pot to another, there are not gaps. Oil has a continuity; water falls discontinuously. Dhyan means, meditation means, your consciousness should be falling on any object of concentration in a continuity. Otherwise it is flickering. It is constantly flickering; it is not a continuous torch. Sometimes it is there, then disappears; then again is there, then disappears; then again is there. In dhyan you have to make it a continuity, an absolute continuity.

When consciousness becomes continuous, you become tremendously strong. For the first time you feel what life is. For the first time, holes in your life disappear. For the first time you are together. Your togetherness means the togetherness of consciousness. If your consciousness is like drops of water and not a continuity, you cannot be really there. Those gaps will be a disturbance. Your life will be very dim and faint; it will not have strength, force, energy. When consciousness flows in a continuous, river like phenomenon, you have become a waterfall of energy.

This is the second step of samyama, the second ingredient; and then is the third ingredient, the ultimate, that is samadhi. In dharana, concentration, the object is important because you have to choose one object amidst millions. In dhyan, meditation, consciousness is important; you have to make consciousness a continuous flow. In samadhi the subject is important: the subject has to be dropped.

You dropped many objects. When there were many objects, you were many subjects, a crowd, a poly-psychic existence – not one mind, many minds. People come to me and they say, “I would like to take sannyas, but….” That “but” brings the second mind. They think they are the same, but the “but” brings another mind. They are not one. They would like to do something and, at the same time, they would not like to do it – two minds. If you watch you will find many minds in you – almost a marketplace.

When there are too many objects, there are too many minds corresponding to them. When there is one object, one mind arises – focused, centered, rooted, grounded. Now this one mind has to be dropped; otherwise you will remain in the ego. The many has been dropped; now drop the one also. In samadhi this one mind has to be dropped. When one mind drops, the one object also disappears because it cannot be there. They always are together.

In samadhi only consciousness remains, as pure space.

These three together are called samyama. Samyama is the greatest synthesis of human Consciousness.

-Osho

Excerpt from Secrets of Yoga, Discourse #1 (Originally published as Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, V.8).

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.

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