Meditation: watchfulness, awareness, alertness - the real trinity

Question 1:

THERE are not many ways, there is but one: the way of awareness.

Man is almost unconscious. I say "almost" - there are moments, situations where he becomes conscious, but they are momentary.

For example, suddenly your house is on fire. You will feel a flare-up within you, a sense of alertness that was not there before. You may have been tired, you may not have slept for a few days, you may have been traveling and you were hoping that as you reached your house, the first thing you were going to do was to fall asleep - but the house is on fire!

All tiredness disappears. You forget the whole nightmare of the journey, and inside you find something new which perhaps you will miss because the house is on fire; so you will become not alert of your alertness, but alert of the fire that is burning your house.

In ordinary life also, there are moments when people touch a higher state of consciousness, but miss because that higher state comes as an emergency, and they have to tackle first the emergency that is facing them. And that cannot be the circumstance where they can start exploring what is happening inside them.

But if you can remember - even as a memory - some moments in your life when suddenly you were more aware than you usually are, it will be a great help to understand what I am going to say to you.

I have told you that modern psychology has moved below the so-called human consciousness. And when people like Sigmund Freud found that just underneath your thin layer of consciousness there is another layer, it was a great discovery for him, and for the West. And his whole life he devoted to exploring the underground, the basement of your consciousness.

That's why he became interested in the analysis of dreams, because when you are conscious you can pretend, you can be a hypocrite. You can say something that you don't mean, you can do something that you never wanted to do. You can smile, and inside you want to cry, weep. You can cry and weep, and inside you are enjoying, you are rejoicing.

So your consciousness has been so polluted by the society, it is not reliable. This was one of the most significant contributions of Sigmund Freud: that your consciousness is not reliable. Strange, that he feels your unconsciousness is more reliable than your consciousness.

Nothing can be a greater condemnation of the whole human civilization, the whole human history of all the religions.

What else can be a greater condemnation than this: that your consciousness is not reliable; that your society, your tradition, your religion, your convention, have made it unreliable.

In one of Kahlil Gibran's stories, the mother and her daughter are both sleepwalkers. The daughter one night walks in her sleep, goes into the garden and starts saying nasty things about her mother.

And just by accident her mother also sleepwalks behind her and starts saying ugly things about her.

But the cold wind outside suddenly wakes them both. And the daughter says, "Mum, you don't have anything warm around you, you should not come out at your age. You make me so worried."

And the mother says, "My beloved daughter, in this whole world there is nobody except you whom I can call mine."

This much is the story, but it contains the whole discovery of Sigmund Freud: while they were asleep they were saying really what they feel about each other. When they wake up they are saying what they are supposed to say to each other. And they will not become aware of their two sides.

And if there were only two sides things would have been far easier, but there are many more sides.

I have told you - it will be good to be reminded - consciousness is a very thin layer where we are existing. Below it is the subconscious mind; that is half-conscious, half-unconscious. That's why you remember dreams only of the later part of the night. You don't remember all your dreams from the whole night because in eight hours of sleep, for six hours you are dreaming.

Now this is a scientifically proved fact. Only here and there for a few minutes you fall into deeper sleep where dreams are no more; the total is two hours. But the dream total is six hours. You don't remember in the morning six hours' dreams - almost the length of three movies. At the most you remember some fragment, or sometimes a whole dream, but that dream was the last dream when you were waking up.

The subconscious mind has two sides. One is connected with the unconscious, the bottom part.

When you are deeply asleep, dreams are moving at the bottom part of the subconscious. The conscious is very far away. But when you are waking up in the morning, you are coming closer to the conscious mind, then the top layer of the subconscious is dreaming.

That's why your consciousness can hear little bits and pieces of dreaming, and in the morning you can remember something. But that is only the tail of the elephant. The whole elephant has disappeared, you have no notion of it. And of course the tail makes no sense because the elephant is not there.

Hence the psychoanalyst is needed to find out the elephant: what kind of elephant it was, whether it was an elephant or a camel or a cow or a horse, because you have only a tail - perhaps not even the whole tail, a few hairs of the tail.

The whole function of psychoanalysis is to put those hairs together and to figure out whose tail this can be; to dig you from this corner and from that corner, and hit you from this point and that point, so something comes up which is there, but of which you are not aware. The psychologist almost makes the whole animal on the basis of the few hairs of the tail. That's why there are so many schools of psychoanalysis.

It was bound to be so. Sigmund Freud wanted psychoanalysis to remain one integrated movement.

It was impossible, because the work of the psychoanalyst is more or less imagination: he has a few things in his hand but those things can lead to any conclusion.

If you go to Sigmund Freud then those same hairs will prove you are sexually obsessed: that is his elephant. And once he has found the elephant you will start seeing according to his vision, and you will find explanations that perhaps he is right. And perhaps he is right.

If you go to Adler, he has a different kind of imagination: will-to-power. For Sigmund Freud it is will-to-sex, will-to-reproduction. To Sigmund Freud it is more of a biological phenomenon than to Adler.

To Adler it is more of a political phenomenon: will-to-power. If you take the same hairs to Sigmund Freud he will manage to figure out and discover perversions of sex in you. And I am saying perhaps he is right, and I also want to say perhaps Adler is also right.

If you go to Jung then he will find through those same hairs some mythological phenomenon. It will not be biological, it will not be political, it will be mythological. And I want to say: perhaps he is also right.

All these three continually quarreled, not knowing that man's mind has multi-aspects, that it is not exhausted by one explanation, that not only are there these three, there are more possibilities. Just a few more Freuds, Jungs and Adlers are needed who have some poetic imagination, and some scientific way of explanation.

Man's mind is multidimensional.

And every dimension is connected.

For example: sexuality is part of his will-to-power, it is not separate. Through sex also he is trying to be powerful, to be a creator, to give birth, to possess a woman or a man. And you can look at any couple: they are continually in a power conflict - who possesses whom?

The wife is trying in every possible way... and she has some natural capacity which she uses. If you are not allowing her to be more powerful than you then she will deprive you of sex, and she knows that you cannot starve as far as sex is concerned. You are going to beg her, you are going to persuade her: you are going to bring chocolates and ice cream and beautiful clothes. She understands that this is all bribery. You also understand it, that this is trying to make a coexistence possible.

But your effort is also continuously to dominate her.

One of my friends was in love with a woman but was not ready to marry her. Now the woman was troubled; she came to me and she told me, "This is strange. Now my family is after me saying, 'If he loves you then he should marry you, otherwise you are passing the marriageable age.'"

And in India it is then difficult to find a young man of your age available. They will already be married.

Then you will have to be married to somebody who is far older than you - perhaps once or twice married before, and whose wives fortunately went on dying and who is still a bachelor. "So, they are after me: 'Either he marries you or we choose somebody else.'"

I said, "Let me ask him what is the problem."

And he told me, "I cannot hide it from you. I really love her, but when the question of marriage arises, the trouble is she is taller than me."

I said, "What kind of trouble is that? I don't see any trouble in it. If she is taller, you can stand up on a stool and kiss her - at the most a stool is needed!"

I showed him a picture - just that day it was in the newspaper and the newspaper was lying there - of Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, who was a very tall man, with the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was only five feet five. So when he gave the oath to Jawaharlal it would have looked really bad: the prime minister would have looked very small, the viceroy really tall. He must have been six and a half feet, or even more, so they arranged it in the picture....

I showed him, "You see the management. Jawaharlal is standing on a step, the steps that lead to the throne. He is standing on a step, and Mountbatten is standing on the floor so they seem almost equal in size." I said, "Can you see the trick? It is not much of a problem. You can have a folding stool which you can always have in the back of your car, so wherever you need you take your stool."

He said, "You are making a laughingstock of me. I am serious, because wherever I go, she will be taller and I cannot continually walk with the stool. And in the marriage ceremony when I am taking the seven rounds around the sacred fire, I will be ahead of her looking almost like her child she is so tall. I love her, but I cannot marry her because everybody will laugh."

And in the marriage ceremony in India all the relatives and friends from faraway gather. It is a gathering of thousands of people. And they were rich people, so everybody would come and everybody would see only one thing: the tallness of the wife. Love had to fail before the power instinct.

I said, "What does it matter? You can tell them, 'I am not taller than my wife.""

But you can look around the whole world, and you will find the husband always taller than the wife.

How has it been managed? Why have women remained smaller than the man? It is simply a question that for millions of years that was the choice: the man will always choose a wife smaller than himself Slowly, by sheer selection, the taller women went out of existence; it was difficult for them to find a husband. They became prostitutes, they became part of the marketplace, available to all. They could not live a respectable life unless they happened to meet a man taller than them.

But the man was always taller; slowly, slowly, this is how it happened. You can enquire of those people who crossbreed animals. After generations of this continual crossbreeding: taller husband- smaller wife, taller husband-smaller wife....

If the woman is so tall that she cannot find a husband, she becomes a prostitute, she goes out of the biological market, she is a dropout. She will not be creating children any longer, because a prostitute cannot afford children. So her line dies out; that branch grows no further It is not natural that women have to be smaller.

It is the power instinct, the will-to-power.

But sexuality and the will-to-power are not two separate things, not as separate as Adler and Freud think.

The people who become very much power-oriented start losing interest in sex because their whole energy moves into the will-to-power.

The people who are very deeply interested in exploring their sexuality cannot go into politics; they don't have any energy left.

You can see it in actuality in many places. We don't allow soldiers to have their wives on the battlefield. The general can, because the general remains behind; he is not really fighting, he is simply ordering people to fight. And he is perfectly defended; if any danger is there, he will be the first to get out of it. He is far behind the forces. He is allowed to have a wife there because there is no problem, he is not going to fight. But the soldiers are not allowed to. Why? For the simple reason that if their energy goes into sex, they don't feel like fighting.

You can observe it in yourself. If you are deeply in love with a woman, you don't feel like fighting with anybody. But if you cannot find any outlet for your is standing on a step, the steps that lead to the throne. He is standing on a step, and Mountbatten is standing on the floor, so they seem almost equal in size." I said, "Can you see the trick? It is not much of a problem. You can have a folding stool which you can always have in the back of your car, so wherever you need you take your stool."

He said, "You are making a laughingstock of me. I am serious, because wherever I go, she will be taller and I cannot continually walk with the stool. And in the marriage ceremony when I am taking the seven rounds around the sacred fire, I will be ahead of her looking almost like her child she is so tall. I love her, but I cannot marry her because everybody will laugh."

And in the marriage ceremony in India all the relatives and friends from faraway gather. It is a gathering of thousands of people. And they were rich people, so everybody would come and everybody would see only one thing: the tallness of the wife. Love had to fail before the power instinct.

I said, "What does it matter? You can tell them, 'I am not taller than my wife.""

But you can look around the whole world, and you will find the husband always taller than the wife.

How has it been managed? Why have women remained smaller than the man? It is simply a question that for millions of years that was the choice: the man will always choose a wife smaller than himself. Slowly, by sheer selection, the taller women went out of existence; it was difficult for them to find a husband. They became prostitutes, they became part of the marketplace, available to all. They could not live a respectable life unless they happened to meet a man taller than them.

But the man was always taller; slowly, slowly, this is how it happened. You can enquire of those people who crossbreed animals. After generations of this continual crossbreeding: taller husband- smaller wife, taller husband-smaller wife....

If the woman is so tall that she cannot find a husband, she becomes a prostitute, she goes out of the biological market, she is a dropout. She will not be creating children any longer, because a prostitute cannot afford children. So her line dies out; that branch grows no further It is not natural that women have to be smaller.

It is the power instinct, the will-to-power.

But sexuality and the will-to-power are not two separate things, not as separate as Adler and Freud think.

The people who become very much power-oriented start losing interest in sex because their whole energy moves into the will-to-power.

The people who are very deeply interested in exploring their sexuality cannot go into politics; they don't have any energy left.

You can see it in actuality in many places. We don't allow soldiers to have their wives on the battlefield. The general can, because the general remains behind; he is not really fighting, he is simply ordering people to fight. And he is perfectly defended; if any danger is there, he will be the first to get out of it. He is far behind the forces. He is allowed to have a wife there because there is no problem, he is not going to fight. But the soldiers are not allowed to. Why? For the simple reason that if their energy goes into sex, they don't feel like fighting.

You can observe it in yourself. If you are deeply in love with a woman, you don't feel like fighting with anybody. But if you cannot find any outlet for your sexual energy then you will become a criminal, you may kill somebody. You may be constantly searching for some excuse to fight.

It is not just a coincidence that all the religions have preached that their monks remain celibate, because once they are celibate then their whole energy starts moving towards an imaginary God - then God becomes their sexual object.

And you can see it in the songs of the devotees. They talk of God almost as if they are talking of a beloved or of a lover. Meera, one of the most famous mystics in India, must have been studied by Sigmund Freud. If he did not study her, he will have to be born again, because those two have to meet and come to an understanding. Freud never heard about Meera, otherwise he would have found all the great explanations that he needed and searched and looked for - and was unable to find.

Meera talks of Krishna almost in sexual terms. She sleeps with the statue of Krishna. She calls Krishna "my husband". And the words she uses are exactly those romantic words which lovers use for each other. The same is true about the Sufi mystics who think of God as a beloved, a woman.

And you have to see their description of the beauty of God, the youthfulness of God.

When Fitzgerald, a very talented poet, translated Omar Khayyam, a Sufi mystic, he did something almost impossible, because Omar Khayyam, in the original, does not seem to be so impressive as he becomes in the translation of Fitzgerald. And the reason is, Fitzgerald had no idea that Omar Khayyam was talking about God, not about a woman.

The Sufis call God saki. Saki is the woman in the pub who pours wine for the customers. Particularly in the Arabic and Persian nations, the sakis are chosen just as in the West you choose Miss World, Miss universe, Miss America. The saki is chosen just like that. The most beautiful girl in the city will become the saki. The most beautiful women move into the profession of being the saki. And Sufis call God "saki".

Fitzgerald had no idea that saki means, to a Sufi, God. He simply translated literally that saki is a woman, and when Omar Khayyam says, "Saki, fill my cup full," he thinks he is asking a woman to fill his cup full. And when Omar Khayyam says, "Even the wine is not so sweet as your kiss,"

he is thinking of a woman; hence, his poetry becomes more romantic, more colorful. One who understands the Sufi terminology will not find much in Omar Khayyam.

You will be surprised that in Persia, Omar Khayyam is not known as a great poet. But in the whole world, Omar Khayyam is Persia's most important poet, and this miracle has happened because of Fitzgerald. And you would not have enjoyed Omar Khayyam. He was a mathematician; that was the first mistake that Fitzgerald made: he did not realize that Omar Khayyam was a mathematician.

Now, a mathematician writing poetry - you understand, it cannot be juicy. From where can a mathematician get juice? Then over and above that, he is a Sufi, a seeker of God. There is no place for any woman in his life; he lived a celibate life.

Fitzgerald never bothered about the man's life. Before he translated his poetry he should at least have looked to see whether this man was capable of writing poetry about women. He was a celibate mathematician! A Sufi! But Sufis remaining celibate think of God as a woman, dream of God as a woman, the most beautiful woman of course - there can be no comparison with God. So they pour all their sexuality on the image of God, the beloved. He is not a man.

In Omar Khayyam's book - it is an illustrated book - naturally Fitzgerald saw the most beautiful pictures of women pouring wine. He thought that this was really a woman. And he looked at the poetry; it talks about the woman. Sufis are very angry: Fitzgerald made Omar Khayyam world famous, while their real poets of Persia are unknown to the world. This man was not thought to be a poet at all. Once you understand that this woman is not a real woman but God looked at through the eyes of a celibate Sufi... it is an hallucination.

Religions understood it: that if you stop sexual energy moving in its natural way, then the man can manage to see God, to meet Jesus, to talk to Krishna; anything is possible. The sexual energy is a kind of drug, the most powerful drug that nature has invented. That's why, when you fall in love with a woman, you start seeing in that woman things that nobody sees. It is your projection, it is your drug, your chemicals, your hormones which are creating the hallucination around the woman. The woman is just an object, a screen, on which you are projecting your picture.

And once your sex is satisfied with the woman, you are going to be very disappointed. You will find that this is not the same woman: you had fallen in love with somebody else. This is not the woman...

but you know that this is the woman. So there is some deception, this woman deceived you. You are being deceived by biology, not by this woman.

This woman was also projecting on you. And once the honeymoon is over, the projection is over.

Now she looks at you and finds just an ordinary man, nothing special about you. Everything was special before: the way you walked, talked, everything had something unique. Now you are just an Oregonian, nothing more. There is great frustration on both sides. Now you are standing face to face, seeing each other without any projection; hence the continuous fight. It is bound to be so.

In India, where even today ninety percent of marriages, or even more, are arranged marriages, this kind of frustration never happens. In an arranged marriage you are not given the chance of hallucinating. From the very beginning you are just standing on the earth, and there is no romance.

You cannot even see the woman before you get married to her.

The very cultured families now allow the picture of the woman to be seen. Now a picture of the woman, and with all the photographic tricks - and that too only if you ask.... You are going against the heritage, the culture, you are not supposed to ask. And particularly the girl cannot even see the picture of the man she is going to be married to. And even after marriage, they are not going to see each other in sunlight. They will meet each other in the darkness of the night. Of course, they remain to each other mysterious.

The mystery lingers longer in India than anywhere else. In the day they cannot talk to each other because in India there are joint families. They cannot talk in front of the children because that is a bad example, they cannot talk in front of the elders because that is disrespectful. And there are so many elders in the house, and there are so many dozens of children in the house... there is no possibility.

You will be surprised that the father of a child cannot take the child in his hands in front of others: that is disrespectful. I was told by my father, "I took you in my hands only when you were five years old."

The grandfather can, that's why I became friendly with my grandfather. Naturally, he was acquainted with me, and me with him, from the very beginning. The father came after five years; he remained a stranger for five years. He never talked to me for five years.

I have asked my mother. There was no possibility of their talking or meeting or seeing. They did not see each other for years after their marriage. Children were born, but they had not seen each other because they would meet only in the darkness of the night. And in India, in a joint family, there are sometimes forty people, fifty people in the house. And those houses are just like Noah's ark.

For example, my grandfather used to have his horse tied to his cot in the night too. And I told him "The smell of the horse is so much that even if I want to meet you, your horse prevents me." Cows in the house, elders, children, everybody in the house - how Indians manage to make love is a mystery.

How they manage to produce dozens of children is simply mystifying. It all happens in darkness, without whispering a single word. What to say of loving chitchat and foreplay and afterplay. There is no possibility only the play is enough! Fore and after does not exist; and the play has to be quick - so nobody comes to know.

I was staying with my grandfather in the house of one of his friends - and when a very close guest is there, in India, you don't allow him to sleep in a separate room, that is not hospitality. My grandfather and I were sleeping in the same room where my grandfather's friend, his son, and his son's wife were sleeping. And what I learned.... My grandfather was old so once in a while he would cough; his friend was even older than him, and once in a while he would cough. And because of their coughing my sleep was difficult, so once in a while I would wake up. And once in a while I would see the son of my grandfather's friend making love to his wife... then I would cough.

That was enough! That was enough; he would jump into his own bed. And while I remained there I did not allow him to sleep with his wife. On the day we were leaving he pulled me aside and said, "You rascal!"

I said, "What? Why are you calling me a rascal?"

He said, "You coughed exactly at the time... do you sleep or not? Those two old men, I know they cough - but not exactly at the time. I am so happy that you are going because for these two months I have not met my wife, because the moment I started moving towards her bed you would start coughing." And coughing is such a thing that when I started then those two old men would hear it and start; it is infectious. One person starts, then the other starts feeling a temptation too.

Stop the sexual energy of people, then it will find some other outlet. Religions learned the trick: stop sexual energy - it moves, and gives the movement towards God. The military generals found it very soon: stop the sexual energy and the man is ready to fight, to quarrel; he is just hankering to fight.

In fact Sigmund Freud's explanation for all weapons is just sexual. He says that when you throw a knife into somebody's body, it is sexual penetration. A bullet is a sexual penetration from a faraway distance. He is a little bit obsessed with sex, but there is some truth in it, because sexually fulfilled people have not discovered weapons. There was no need.

So all these explanations are about your dreams because your dreams are truer than your waking life. In waking life you don't beat your teacher, but in dreams you can. That's your real desire. If you were allowed, or if you were powerful enough you would have done it. But it is not possible, not practical. In dreams you are free to do it; it is a kind of substitute.

So below the conscious is the subconscious, which is the field of your dreaming. Below the subconscious is the unconscious, which is the field of your dreamless sleep, when you are in a kind of coma. You reach the same state as you were in your mother's womb; hence the relaxation, hence the feeling of rejuvenation. After a deep sleep, when you wake up you are fresh, young, full of energy.

If those two hours have been missed then you may have tossed and turned and dreamed a thousand and one things, but in the morning you will find yourself as tired as when you had gone to bed, perhaps more tired. That coma is needed, because in that coma your mind stops functioning and your body takes over When you are conscious, it is mind over body; when you are unconscious, it is body over mind. And the body has a wisdom because the body is far more ancient. Mind is a very late development, a very new comer, just amateurish. Hence, anything important nature has not left to mind.

Everything important has been left to the body, because body will take care more proficiently, more professionally, more wisely, without any mistakes, errors.

For example, breathing has not been left to the mind; otherwise sometimes you may forget, particularly in sleep. What will you do? - when deep sleep comes breathing will stop. No, breathing is not left to the mind. It is a body function because it is so essential for your life. And the mind is so amateurish and so stupid, because it is just trying to wake up, it is still not awake.

Nature has given every power to the body, all essential powers to the body. Your mind can be put aside and your body will go on functioning perfectly well.

In fact, mind is always a hindrance in everything. He tries to overcome body, because mind is a power tripper, he wants to control everything.

What do these people go on doing in the name of yoga? They are trying to control even their pulses, they are trying to control even their heartbeat. For what? - what do they gain out of it? I have seen people practising for forty years how to stop the heartbeat; and certainly if they do that much practice they can stop the heartbeat for a time.

But what is the gain? You cannot see anything. I have seen these people: you don't see any aura, you don't see any fragrance. You don't see in their eyes that there has been any vision of reality.

You don't see in their life any impact of the higher consciousness.

But they have immense power over the body. I have seen people lying down and a car passing over their body; they will simply stop their breath and the car passes over with no harm. I have seen one man stopping the body of a railway engine just with his hands. And all that he was doing was stopping his breath. By stopping his breath he was capable of stopping a railway engine or any car.

Strangely... it was as if he had become a rock, so heavy that it was impossible for the car, a four horsepower or six horsepower car, to push the man aside. With his breathing disappearing, it was as if all his hollowness had disappeared and he had become a solid rock. The earth and its gravitation is functioning perhaps ten times more on that person than it functions on you.

It is just like when you are in water: the gravitation functions less on you; that's why you can float on water. In water you can take a big rock in your hands without any trouble. The same rock outside the water you cannot pick up.

Water cuts somehow the power of gravitation. The water has the quality of levitation, of taking things up; levitation against gravitation. That's why you can take a bigger man's body in your hands in water, just like a child, as if he is a child. Outside the water you cannot do the same, he is so heavy.

Perhaps by stopping the breathing - the quality of air must give a great levitation - the person becomes so heavy, and the power of gravitation is almost eight times more that he can manage normally. The wheels go on moving, but the car cannot move a single inch.

But what is the point of it? I have asked these people, "Yes, you have done a great job, but to me it seems idiotic. What is the point? How have you become more spiritual by this? You have simply proved that you are eight horsepower. The car is six horsepower, so you now have eight horses"

power in you."

We still measure with horsepower because man takes a long time to forget old language. Now horses are disappearing, horse-drawn buggies are disappearing. There are cars, there are airplanes, there are trains, but still we measure their power through the horse. An eight horsepower car means there are eight horses in your chariot.

"So of course you are more powerful than the car, but is that your goal - to become a powerful engine in a car? And you wasted forty years in learning the trick!" Yes, it influences people because everybody is a power tripper. It shows what great power this man has. It makes you feel inferior; he becomes suddenly superior.

Why do so many millions of people go on watching boxing matches? For what? Two fools beating each other for no reason at all.... If there is any argument, sit down and settle it, negotiate. But there is no argument, no problem; the problem is only who is more powerful. That too can be decided in a more human way: just toss a coin and be finished. But why beat each other and break each other's bones? And the noses are bleeding, and the eyes are red, and millions of people are clapping, enjoying somehow a certain identity.

There are fans of Muhammad Ali, and there are fans of other Alis. So these two fools are doing their stupidity, and a million fools are there to support and give them the idea that they are doing something important. I cannot see that in a little bit more enlightened humanity things like boxing can exist.

Boxing simply looks so primitive, so ugly, so inhuman; but these millions of people.... And these are not the only people: millions more will be sitting in front of their television. It seems the whole humanity is somehow after power. So whoever shows some power of any kind: power of money, power of body, power of politics, position, status, anything....

Sheela has just brought to me two days ago the news that since Indira Gandhi's assassination, her son Rajiv has been fighting the election to become the prime minister. He has chosen people very cleverly: he has chosen many of the film stars as his candidates. Poor Vinod missed! If he had been in India he would have been in the prime minister's cabinet next month. His rival in the film world, Amitabh Bachchan... these two were the topmost actors of the Indian film world. And you will be surprised that India produces more films than Hollywood. Hollywood is number two, India is number one as far as film production is concerned.

These two persons, Amitabh and Vinod, were the top two. He has chosen Amitabh as one of his candidates, and Amitabh is going to be in his cabinet, absolutely certainly. And he will win, because film actors have a certain power, a glamour, as if they are superhuman. He has chosen old descendants of royal families. One is a very strange fellow, but he will be elected.

Mysore was one of the richest states in India because Mysore jungles are jungles of sandalwood, and that is the costliest wood in the whole world. All the jungles were the private property of the maharajah of Mysore. And Mysore has the greatest population of elephants, so Mysore's maharajah has the biggest tusks of elephants in his palace. It is unique, because for thirty-six generations they have been kings.

Now this descendant - the estate is no more there, but he has his private property: a palace worth fifty million or more dollars, a vast palace all made of Italian marble. His throne must be priceless because it has so many diamonds, so many sapphires, so many rubies, emeralds, because Mysore has many mines, and the king had first rights to all the best stones found in those mines. Just the gold is worth nearabout fifty million dollars. The gold of the throne and all these diamonds and rubies and sapphires and emeralds - there is no way to count how much they will be worth. But that kind of throne is just one of its kind, there is no other.

This young man weighs three hundred and fifty pounds. He never goes out of the palace. He speaks in a nasal tone, almost inaudible. He has never spoken in public in his whole life because how can he speak? What he says is almost inaudible; perhaps only a few servants who are continuously with him understand him. He has an imported dog; his name is Kinky - and all that he does is go on playing with Kinky.

Now he has been chosen as a candidate by Rajiv. He will win the election, because in Mysore, who can win against him? In Mysore the royal family are thought to be the descendants of God. And thirty-six uninterrupted generations of royal blood - and no small quantity: three hundred and fifty pounds! There is no need for him to make a public speech. He cannot, he may not even go out of his palace, but he will win. And he has been chosen just because he has status and people worship him. So it is impossible for anybody to stand against him. And he has money, so he will give money to the election campaign, as much as they want.

People are not conscious of what they are doing. Now the people who are going to vote for this man, will you call them human beings? Perhaps Kinky is far more intelligent than the man who goes on playing with him: he is an utter idiot. He has not done anything else in his life; but just to belong to a royal family is enough. And he has money, and money is power. Perhaps he may become a cabinet minister.

You are in your unconscious mind when you are fast asleep with no dreams. Freud had reached the unconscious just by analyzing dreams. If you are on the right track and you analyze a dream rightly, the miracle is, once the dream is analyzed completely - that means you become aware of its reason, why it happens, why it is, of what it is constituted - once you become aware of a dream, its total structure, root and all, it disappears.

To summarize: to be aware of a dream is the death of the dream.

And after a few years of psychoanalysis when all your dreams slowly disappear.... Then Freud became aware that there is still another depth. He died before he could penetrate the other depth, but he had found it, discovered it: the unconscious.

Jung tried to go as deep into the unconscious as possible. It is easier in hypnosis to reach the unconscious of any person, very easy. Hence in the future hypnosis is going to become part and parcel of every psychology. In India it always has been, because three years of psychoanalysis is a wastage of time. Within three minutes you can be hypnotized and all your dreaming process can be put aside; then there is direct entry into the unconscious.

Because Jung was interested in hypnosis, Freud condemned him as unscientific. It is not right.

Hypnosis is a scientific method of digging deep into you. And when Jung tried to go deep into the unconscious, there is still another layer: the collective unconscious, the unconscious of the whole humanity.

Everybody has it; and sometimes from that collective unconscious you get ideas, but because they come from so far away from your conscious, you think that they are coming from somewhere outside you. When Jesus hears the voice of God, it is not God speaking, it is the collective unconscious.

But it is so far away that poor Jesus can be forgiven. He simply is mistaken, and he had no idea that there are depths within depths depths behind depths.

This collective unconscious is to do with the mythological. Hence, Jung became interested in mythology to discover its existence, just as Freud became interested in dreams to discover the existence of the subconscious. Mythologies are dreams dreamed by the whole of humanity over thousands of years, but those mythologies carry some idea, some significance. For example, the Indian mythology that life for the first time appeared as a fish. The first incarnation of God is matsyavatar: incarnation as a fish. A strange mythology - how did they figure it out?

Out of this vast world of animals, why did they fall upon the fish? - some indication from their collective unconscious. Now science says that perhaps life was born first in the ocean. It comes very close to the fish. And the child in the beginning, in the mother's womb, looks like a fish. He moves from there and passes through all the stages that man has passed through in millions of years - there is a point where he looks like a monkey.

Jung's discovery of mythology and its connection with the collective unconscious is of immense importance. But he stopped there because he was afraid, and obsessed with death, just as Sigmund Freud was himself obsessed with sex. Anything you brought to him - I say anything, and I mean anything - he would immediately manage to make it sexual. Whatever it was, it did not matter; he was capable of making it sexual.

Freud's whole mind was focused on one point; but perhaps that's the only way. In a small life, what can a man do? If he can work out only one idea in its totality, then he needs to be obsessed; otherwise it is difficult, life is so vast. If you go on jumping all around on everything, then it is difficult for you to move in one direction to the very end.

Hence all scientists, all philosophers, all thinkers, are obsessed with one particular idea. And then they try to fit everything into that idea. That's where they go wrong. If they were a little more alert they would see that life is vast. Their idea is meaningful, but meaningful only from a certain aspect.

Jung was very much afraid of death; he was death-obsessed. Just as Sigmund Freud was sex- obsessed, jung was death-obsessed. And both obsessions are not very different. Sex is the beginning of life and death is the end of life. Sex is the A and death is the Z; it is one alphabet, connected. It is not different but distant, so distant that neither Freud nor Jung could see that they were both concerned with one thing; but the poles were so far apart that they were unable to join them.

Jung was very much afraid of death, and as he came closer to another layer behind the collective unconscious he backed out. He tried many times to approach the idea of death. He went to India because in India people have been thinking about every possible aspect of life for thousands of years. Of course, about death India has thought much more than anybody else - but he avoided the man who could have been of some help.

He was asking people who were educated in the West - professors in the universities who had western degrees, doctors who had western degrees - because he had a fixed idea that East and West can never meet. The idea was old; it was given by an English poet, Rudyard Kipling, that East and West can never meet: "East is East, West is West, and never the twain shall meet."

Somewhere in Jung's mind that idea remained his whole life, and he was continually insisting to his disciples that the West had to discover its own methods; it should not use eastern methods, because they could prove dangerous: "They are not our heritage."

Now, this is a strange situation and a strange argument. A man who discovers the collective unconscious still believes in East and West.. Then there are two collective unconsciouses: eastern collective unconscious and western collective unconscious. He never became aware of the simple fact that if you talk about collective unconscious then East is no more East and West is no more West. And if you think they cannot meet then you can come and see here in Rajneeshpuram: they are meeting. They have met!

Just a few days ago one man from South Africa declared a new conflict. He said the real conflict is not between East and West, it is between North and South. That was never thought of before, it is a real discovery. But it has a point in it. There is a conflict, just like the one between East and West which has become famous and well known. But South and North are also in conflict, which has not become so well known. But then there will be four collective unconsciouses, and it is going to be very difficult.

But Jung was not aware. One thing he was certain of: eastern methods were not to be used. So he avoided the only man alive in India, Raman Maharishi, who could have taken him to the lowest level which Buddha called the cosmic unconscious. But that is almost a death. It is a death, because you are no more there.

The cosmos is, but you are no more there.

The seeker disappears; he has found what he was seeking, but he is no more there.

That's a quantum leap.

The subconscious, unconscious, collective and cosmic unconscious - these four layers are under your conscious. Above are also four layers. The question is how to reach the higher states of consciousness.

The method is a very strange one, but there is only one way. You have to go down first. You have to enter the cosmic unconscious. Unless you disappear into the cosmic unconscious, you cannot enter into the superconscious, the first level above conscious.

What actually happens: as you enter the cosmic unconscious, your subconscious, your unconscious, your collective unconscious all disappear, just like small rivers falling in the ocean - a vast ocean of cosmic darkness. It is a death. And unless you are born again you will not enter the kingdom of God.

Jesus must have heard that statement somewhere in India from a Buddhist monk, because it has no source in Jewish religion. Its only source can be a Buddhist source, because that's what Buddha was teaching: that you dive deep into the cosmic unconscious, and as you enter into it, all is darkness, you are lost completely. But wait - don't be in a hurry and don't back out. Don't run back, because where will you go? You will go back again to the same routine world in which you had lived.

Don't run. Wait, wait a moment. And the darkness as you wait starts becoming less and less dark.

It is almost as if you are coming from the outside in the hot sun, and enter in the house and you suddenly see darkness because your eyes are focused for the light outside. The sunlight is so bright that your pupils shrink. They cannot bear that much light going in, so they become small, very small.

And then suddenly you enter your house; it takes a little time for your eyes to adjust to the new situation; the sun is no more there. Your pupils start becoming bigger. When they become bigger then the house has more light.

That's how thieves who come into your house in the night when everything is dark.... You yourself in your own house cannot move; you may stumble into this desk, that table, this chair. But a thief who has never been in your house, who knows nothing about the house enters in darkness, and without stumbling into anything finds exactly the place where you are keeping all your treasure. It needs training; it is an art. Of course it is a crime. That's another aspect; I am not concerned with that. But it is an art.

The famous Zen story is: a very great Master who was also a master thief was getting old. His son asked him, "Before you die, please teach me your art of stealing."

He said, "I was just waiting for you to ask because we never impose; art is something that you should have a feel for. If you are ready, I am ready. Today is the beginning of your teaching. Tonight you come with me."

The old man takes the young man. The young man is trembling, his heart is throbbing. He is looking from side to side, but the father is moving as if going for a morning walk, at ease. He cuts a hole in the wall - the son is perspiring and it is a cold winter night. And the father is doing his work so silently, and so artfully, the son is amazed.

The father goes in, calls the son in. They move inside the house. The father has the master key, he opens the doors. They reach the innermost chamber of the palace. The father opens a cupboard, a walk-in cupboard, and tells the son to get in. The son is trembling, just trembling. He gets in and asks, "What I am supposed to do?"

He said, "You simply get in. You are not supposed to do anything. You simply get in and then whatsoever happens, happens."

He got into it. The father locked the door and ran out leaving the son inside the cupboard, and while he was leaving the house, he shouted, "Thief! Thief!" so the whole house woke up. All the servants were running here and there, and were searching with torches everywhere. And they found the hole in the wall... certainly somebody has come in. A maidservant watching closely on the floor found some foot marks and went exactly near the wardrobe.

The son is aware; he cannot even breathe. He knows now that somebody is there, and is coming in with a torchlight: "Soon they will open it and I am caught. And this old man... in what unfortunate moment I asked him to teach me the art; and is this a way of teaching? He finished me in the first lesson!"

But suddenly - and that is God's voice - he heard somebody inside him saying, "Make the sound of scratching, as if a rat is inside scratching or eating." He could not believe it - who was speaking inside? He had never heard such a thing: making a scratching noise like a rat? But he made the scratching noise, and the woman opened the door... certain there was a rat inside. She opened the door, and he came out.

She was holding just a candle in her hand. He blew the candle out and ran away. When he was running out, people followed. He could not figure out who had said to him: "Blow the candle out." He had heard the voice say, "Blow the candle out and run away," but it was not his thinking because he had heard it; it was coming from somewhere.

And now in the dark night, he is running and people are following him, and they are coming closer and closer and they are shouting, "He is there! Catch him!" - they can see him.

He comes near a well, and the voice inside him says, "Take a rock and throw it in the well." So he takes a rock.... There is no time to question why, and "Who are you?" and "What purpose will it serve?" These are questions which you ask when you are conveniently, comfortably seated in a classroom, when there is no hurry for the answer - neither do you mean that you really need the answer. But in such a situation when he is just being caught, the voice speaks and he follows.

He throws a rock into the well and runs away. Certainly, the rock falling in the well makes a big noise, and all the people who are following him stop near the well - they think that the man has jumped into the well. So now some arrangement has to be made: more light has to be brought, somebody has to go down and find out who this man is, whether he is alive or dead. Now their whole mind is diverted.

He reaches his home, really angry, almost ready to kill the father. And the father is sound asleep, covered with his blanket... it was a cold night. He pulls off his blanket, and he says, "Is this the way to teach your own son?"

He said, "Are you back? That's enough; you have learned the art. Now go to sleep, we will discuss it in the morning."

But he said, "You should ask me how...."

He said, "That does not matter. You are back; about the 'how', we will discuss in the morning. And I know how, because the same voice that has been speaking in you has been speaking in me my whole life. That's why I was the master thief. It was not the working of the brain, it was not the working of the mind; it was from my very depths. I have followed only the deepest in me, and I have never gone wrong.

"You are back; that simply means you heard it, and that's the whole secret of the art. There is no other lesson. The first lesson is the last lesson. If you were not back it meant the student was not able to survive the first lesson: finished. He was not capable."

You have to take a jump. First it will be dark, very dark.

Rest in that darkness.

Darkness has a beauty of its own.

You have known the beauty of light, and the beauty of flowers and trees, and men and women: that is all beauty in light, through light. It is all light reflected: different colors, different faces, different flowers, but it is all the world of light.

You have not known the silence, the depth, the unboundedness of darkness. It also has its own beauty, totally different.

It is the beauty of death.

And once you have allowed it to happen, once you relax in it, you say, "Okay. If it is death then let it be death, but I am not going back." Once you relax in this darkness of the cosmic unconscious, slowly it starts becoming lighter.

And the first glimpse of light is the beginning of the superconscious.

When it becomes even lighter, so that you can see the tremendous emptiness, then it is the supersuperconscious. When it becomes so strong a light that it becomes unbearable - again you may feel like escaping - it is the collective conscious. It is not only your conscious, it is the consciousness of all human beings, of the whole history, in totality, condensed. Hence it is too bright.

Just as darkness makes you afraid, too much brightness also makes you blind and afraid. Don't be afraid, there is nothing to be afraid of It is your nature; there is nothing to be afraid of, it is your being.

If you allow this tremendous intensity of light of the collective conscious, you enter into the cosmic conscious.

Cosmic consciousness is neither dark nor light.

If you can find just the middle point between light and darkness - very soothing, warm from the side of light, cool from the side of darkness - it is the meeting, the ultimate meeting of the polar opposites.

And this cosmic consciousness is what I call enlightenment.

In darkness you were lost, but the fear, the trembling, the death surrounding you kept something of you still there: a very subtle ego which you cannot catch hold of You feel you are lost but there you are still, because you are afraid. If you are not there, who is afraid? The darkness is so much that you are focused on darkness, and you are not in your focus at all.

In the cosmic consciousness you are really lost. There is no fear, there is no way of going back, or of going anywhere. Hence I call this the arrival - from where you had never departed in fact. It was always there above you, hanging above you, for millions of lives, just waiting, waiting. But to reach it first you will have to go deep down to the very roots.

Friedrich Nietzsche again... because this man I find tremendously insightful. On the whole he is a mess, but in fragments he has such penetrating insight, which is rarely available anywhere else.

He says, "Before you can reach heaven, you have to reach to hell. Unless you have fathomed hell completely, there is no way to heaven."

It looks very absurd. And he used to write in maxims; he never wrote essays explaining anything, that was not his way. Insights never come in essays, in theses; they never come for Ph.D., D.Litt.

degrees. No. For a Ph.D. degree you have to sit in a library and do a clerical job, just collecting from here and there. You can simply take a pair of scissors and if you can cut from this book and that book, this journal and that journal, and just go on collecting them in a file, sooner or later you will be a Ph.D. There is not much more to it.

Men like Nietzsche only write maxims. One day suddenly he will write a maxim, and then for months he will not write. This is the meaning of what he says.... Now, Jesus cannot understand it. Jesus says, "If you want to avoid hell, come follow me, I will take you to heaven. That's the only way to avoid hell." Nietzsche is saying, "If you avoid hell, heaven is already avoided, because heaven is a second step. You have missed the first step."

In another passage, a similar passage, Nietzsche says, "Before you can reach to the top of a tree and can understand the flowers blossoming there, you will have to go deep to the roots, because the secret lies there. And the deeper the roots go, the higher the tree goes." So the greater your longing for understanding, for cosmic consciousness - because that is the ultimate lotus, the lotus paradise - then the further you will have to go to the deepest roots in the darkest underground; and the way is only one.

Call it meditation, call it awareness, call it watchfulness - it all comes to the same: that you become more alert, first about your conscious mind, what goes on in your conscious mind.... And it is a beautiful experience. It is really hilarious, a great panorama.

In my childhood in my town there were no movies, talkies. There was no cinema hall. Now there is, but in my childhood there was not. The only thing that was available was that once in a while a wandering man would come with a big box. I don't know what it is called. There is a small window in it. He opens the window, you just put your eyes to it and he goes on moving a handle and a film inside moves. And he goes on telling the story of what is happening.

Everything else I have forgotten but one thing I cannot forget for a certain reason. The reason, I know, was because it was in all those boxes that came through my village. I had seen every one, because the fee was just one paise. Also the show was not long, just five minutes. In every box there were different films, but one picture was always there: the naked washerwoman of Bombay.

Why did it used to be in every one? - a very fat naked woman, the naked washerwoman of Bombay.

That used to be always there... perhaps that was a great attraction, or people were fans of that naked washerwoman; and she was really ugly. And why from Bombay?

If you start looking... just whenever you have time, just sit silently and look at what is passing in your mind. There is no need to judge, because if you judge, the mind immediately changes its scenes according to you. The mind is very sensitive, touchy. If it feels that you are judging, then it starts showing things that are good. Then it won't show you the naked washerwoman of Bombay, that picture will be missed out. So don't judge, then that picture is bound to come.

Don't judge, don't make any condemnation, don't make any appreciation. Be indifferent. You just sit silently looking at things, whatsoever is happening. And absurd things will be happening: a horse becomes a man.... Now you need not ask why, there is no need to ask, you simply see it.

For anything that is happening, you have only to be a seer.

And that's the strategy that helps the whole scenery to slowly disappear from the conscious mind.

And when the conscious mind disappears from the screen, the subconscious is very colorful, much more meaningful, much more truthful.

But remember not to judge; otherwise the subconscious will slip down and you will be back into the conscious.

So two things: no judgment, just simple alertness.

Soon you will find these pictures also disappearing. Then the unconscious appears, which has very strange things to say to you, very mysterious. No need to be afraid; they are voices from the past, of your past lives and of other people's past lives. Now you are moving into a denser forest, of a tremendous magnitude. Don't become afraid. The voices are very strong, and it is not only voices....

The unconscious remembers not only the voices, not only the pictures, it remembers all the experiences of all your senses. You will smell things that you have never smelled... but sometime in a past life somewhere, you must have smelled that smell; it is still there. You may hear music that is not known to you. You may hear languages which you are absolutely unaware of. You may feel the taste of strange foods. All the five senses will supply experiences of many, many lives. You have simply to remain a seer, no judgment. Then these start disappearing.

And when the collective unconscious opens, then animals and trees and birds - all are available to you. You are not separate from them. Stories like Saint Francis can be right. But there is no miracle in it. This man is perhaps the most important man in the whole of Christian history, because he talked to birds, animals, and they understood it. He would just sit on the bank of a river and start calling the fishes, and the fishes would start jumping all around him, listening to him. And he would talk to them. He would say, "Sisters, how are you?" His disciples would think he was mad, but they could not say that, because they could see that the fishes were listening, nodding their heads. Even the donkey on which he used to move he used to call "brother donkey". He just had to say, "Brother donkey, move right" - and the donkey would move right.

When he was dying, his last words were not said to any man, they were said to the donkey. He said, "Thank you, brother donkey; you have carried me your whole life and I am immensely grateful" - and there were tears in the donkey's eyes. As Francis died the donkey died. He could not bear the separation.

Now, there is nothing miraculous in it. This man has moved through the collective unconscious; perhaps just one life more and he will be able to enter the cosmic unconscious; and from there begins the upward flight.

It's very strange: if you want to go above consciousness, you have to go below consciusness. But there is only one method.

My name for it is meditation.

But meditation is equivalent to watchfulness, awareness, alertness.