Watchfulness is the greatest magic

Question 1:

The phenomenon of dreaming and watchfulness are totally different things. Just try one thing: every night, going to sleep, while you are just half awake, half asleep, slowly going deeper into sleep, repeat to yourself, "I will be able to remember that it is a dream."

Go on repeating it till you fall asleep. It will take a few days, but one day you will be surprised: once this idea sinks deep into the unconscious, you can watch the dream as a dream. Then it has no grip over you. Then slowly, as your watchfulness becomes more sharp, dreams will disappear. They are very shy; they don't want to be watched.

They exist only in the darkness of the unconscious. As watchfulness brings light in, they start disappearing. So go on doing the same exercise, and you can get rid of dreams. And you will be surprised. Getting rid of dreams has many implications. If the dreams disappear then in the daytime your mind chattering will not be so much as it used to be.

Secondly, you will be more in the moment -- not in the future, not in the past. Thirdly, your intensity, your totality of action will increase.

Dream is a disease.

It is needed because man is sick. But if dreams can be completely dropped you will attain a new kind of health, a new vision, and part of your unconscious mind will become conscious. So you will have a stronger individuality. Whatever you do, you will never repent, because you will have done it with such consciousness that repentance has no relevance.

Watchfulness is the greatest magic that one can learn, because it can begin the transformation of your whole being. It is only through watchfulness that resurrection happens... you are reborn.

Question 2:

There are many reasons possible. The most important is, if the person's intelligence quotient is very low he will not be able to understand what hypnosis is, and what he is supposed to do. Idiots cannot be hypnotized. It is something to be remembered, that animals can be hypnotized, but idiots cannot be hypnotized. Animals may not have our kind of intelligence, but they are not idiots.

The idiot is one whose mind has not grown at all, who is zero. He cannot understand what is being said, where it is going to lead him, and why he should do it. Intelligent conversation is impossible. The idiot looks like man, but inside he is far behind even the animals.

First, the idiot cannot be hypnotized. Second, the man who is always suspicious of everything, who has an ingrained suspicion, cannot be hypnotized. His suspicion will not allow him to go with the hypnotist. Thirdly, the people who think they are intellectuals, who are full of borrowed knowledge, but don't have any intelligence of their own, cannot be hypnotized, because they have an idea that intellectuals cannot be hypnotized -- and they are intellectuals. Finally and basically, a man who cannot trust.

It needs total trust, because you are going into darkness, the unknown, and you don't know what the intentions of the man are, and you don't know what he can make you do while you are under hypnosis.

Once I was in Bombay, staying with a very rich family, and they insisted to me, "You are always working, involved with people, meetings, committees; this evening you keep free.

We are going to invite a great hypnotist and he is going to show us a few tricks of hypnotism -- you will enjoy it."

Not for entertainment, but just to see what kind of person this great hypnotist was, I remained. They had in the house itself a small auditorium. They had invited their rich friends, so there were at least two hundred people. And the hypnotist called for five people -- "Anybody can come."

Five people went up. He hypnotized them and then told them, "Just in front of you cows are standing. Now start milking them." And they immediately sat in the Indian way and started milking the cows. There were no cows, and people were laughing and enjoying, but the hypnotized person could not hear anybody. Things like this he did.

After the show he was introduced to me. I told him, "You stop this nonsense. Hypnotism is condemned because of people like you. Now the people who have seen how you befooled the ones who had come to be hypnotized will never be able to be hypnotized.

They have lost trust. You will make a laughingstock of them. You are not doing any service to the science of hypnosis. You are an enemy. You find some other job. You don't see the simple point that two hundred people are seeing you befooling five people. Now these people will carry this idea in their minds."

All the intellectuals all over the world have this idea that intellectuals cannot be hypnotized. But the real reason is because they cannot trust. Trust needs a man of heart, of feelings, not of thoughts. And all these people who are using hypnotism as an entertainment should be stopped by law -- it is a crime. They are spoiling a tremendously valuable science.

Only a master should be allowed -- and then too, he should hypnotize only his own disciples. And not to make a mockery of it, but to increase the consciousness of the disciples, to increase the intelligence of the disciples, to change their wrong habits to make them more integrated, more consolidated, to give them more courage and stamina.

And when other students, other disciples will see that hypnotism can be a blessing -- the same man who was so much afraid has lost all fear, even the fear of death; the same man who was always miserable has lost his misery and is always in a state of joy -- more trust will be created, more and more people will be ready to be hypnotized. That readiness, that trust, that receptivity is missing because for centuries hypnotism has been misused.

People like magicians, showmen, entertainers -- the wrong kind of people -- have made hypnosis condemned.

It can become such a great benediction to humanity. You need trust, you need receptivity, you need intelligence to go into it. And all these things will be strengthened when you attain new dimensions, new talents, new genius. And then you will be more able to go back into it.

And soon everybody who has been hypnotized by a loving compassionate master, who cannot harm you, who cannot imagine hurting you... after a few sessions of your being hypnotized, he will start a new phase: self-hypnosis.

In deep hypnotic states he will tell you, "Now you are able to hypnotize yourself -- you don't need me, you don't need anyone else." So he is not going to use hypnosis to create a spiritual slavery. He will use it to give you more spiritual freedom than you ever had before. And the day you can hypnotize yourself is a great day; something valuable has been achieved.

Then you can do miracles with it, upon yourself. You can change things that you have always been trying to change; but the more you try to change them, the more difficult it becomes.

I used to stay in Calcutta with an old man, Sonalal. He was famous all over India as the greatest gambler. He never paid a single cent to the government in taxation because he never kept any books. I was surprised at how he maintained all his businesses -- gamble winnings of millions -- how he kept the accounts. And when I stayed in his house, I asked him. He took me to his bathroom -- all over his bathroom were his books, on the walls.

So no income tax officer can conceive that on his walls in the bathroom he keeps all the accounts from different countries, of different people -- where, in which bank, what number, telephone numbers... everything. He said, "This is my accounts office."

And even in his bathroom he had six telephones. He was continuously on the phone...

two phones always in his hands. You could not talk with him easily; it was so difficult.

He told me that he belonged to a certain religion which values celibacy as the greatest spiritual thing. He had taken the vow of celibacy three times. One man was with me and he was very much impressed. When Sonalal had gone for some work inside the house he said, "This is a great man -- three times!"

I said, "You are an idiot. When he is saying three times he took a vow for celibacy, that simply means that the fourth time he never took it. He understood that it is impossible."

He said, "But... I never thought about it. I simply thought, `Three times!'" Sonalal came back and I asked him, "What happened the fourth time?"

He said, "I could not gather the courage, because three times I failed, and each time I became more guilty, ashamed of myself. And I am old." He was at that time seventy years old. "In the first place, to stand up in the congregation and take the vow for celibacy, people laugh -- they see this seventy year old... and that too for the fourth time."

I said, "There is no need. Your religion and your religious leaders don't know. Celibacy is possible without repression, and at such a stage I will not call it a crime, but it has to be done through self-hypnosis. There is no need for any vow to be taken."

He was immensely excited. He said, "Do whatever... but I want to be celibate before I die, because this is the only thing in which I have failed in my life. I have never failed in anything." He gave millions of dollars to the freedom movement. So all the leaders who became prime ministers, and presidents and cabinet ministers looked to him as a father figure.

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, who was the prime minister, told him, "It was okay not to give taxes to the British government, but now it is your own government."

He said, "Remember, it does not matter to me which government it is. I can donate twice the amount that you think I should pay in taxation, but taxation? -- that I cannot do. And you cannot catch hold of me, because I don't have any books. Except for me, nobody knows how much money I have, how much money is invested, where it is invested, how it is invested. I don't even have a secretary. So never ask for any tax.

"You can always ask for a donation. If your government needs a donation, I am ready.

Just as I was giving to you when you were fighting for freedom, I can give to you now, when your government needs it." And he never gave any tax, even to the independent Indian government.

He said, "I have my own principles. I am nobody's servant. But about this celibacy there is a wound in me. Three times I have failed. And I don't want to die a failure in anything." And he was a man of rare courage. I have seen people of different kinds, but I have never found any man of that courage.

When he had met me first in Jaipur -- that was his home town -- listening to me, he came, touched my feet and gave me ten thousand rupees. But I said, "I don't need rupees, because I am simply traveling alone and my friends can take care of my expenses, traveling, food, accommodation. There is no need."

Tears came to his eyes, and he said, "Don't refuse. Don't hurt me, because I am a poor man. I don't have anything I can give to you -- I have only money. You can't find a more poor man than me -- just money and nothing else. So when somebody refuses money, he is refusing me, because I don't have anything else. Don't refuse. If you want to throw it you can throw it; once I have given it to you, it is none of my concern."

I gave that money to the institution that was organizing my lectures in Jaipur, and from that day -- he was very old -- he became very friendly to me, and he said, "I have houses in all the big cities of India. So wherever you go, you can stay in my house. And just inform me so I will be there."

He had beautiful mansions everywhere -- Bombay, Hyderabad, Madras, Simla, Calcutta.

He said, "I have earned enough, just this celibacy is heavy on me."

I said, "That's a very simple matter. At this age it is perfectly right." I hypnotized him two, three times while I was with him. And then I gave him a posthypnotic suggestion:

now you will be able to hypnotize yourself.

And once that posthypnotic suggestion is given, the person becomes able to hypnotize himself. Any strategy can be used: Count from one to seven, or one to ten, and tell yourself, "I will be back in ten minutes" -- never forget that, because otherwise there is nobody to wake you up. You will not die, but you may spend almost the same period under hypnosis as in sleep -- six to eight hours. If you have time then there is no need to say that, because the hypnotic sleep has a totally different beauty: it is so soft, so silent; it is as if you are no more. And suddenly you come back.

I said, "Before going into hypnosis, repeat three times, `I want to remain celibate,' and that's enough."

After six months I met him again in Madras, and I asked him, "What about celibacy?"

He said, "This is a wonder. Without any vow, without going to a spiritual head, confessing, it has simply disappeared. I simply wonder why sex so dominated me. I don't even remember it."

You will be surprised to know that in hypnosis even operations can be done; without any anesthesia, big operations, dangerous operations can be done. It is an unexplored science, unnecessarily condemned by a few idiots who have been making an entertainment of it.

Trust is the foundation to begin with. You can even start by yourself, but the problem is, you don't trust yourself; otherwise there is no problem, there is no need for anybody else to hypnotize you. You can hypnotize yourself. But that is the difficulty: nobody trusts himself. You know yourself, you know how deceptive you are, you know how cunning you are, you know you say one thing and you don't mean it. You know that you decide that tomorrow morning you will get up early, and when you are deciding it, even at that time you know that it is not going to happen.

So you cannot trust yourself -- that is the problem. That's why somebody else is needed, somebody you can trust, somebody in whose hands you can leave yourself without any fear. And the person who hypnotizes you, if he really loves you, would like you to get into self-hypnosis as soon as possible, because then you are totally free. Then you can do whatsoever you want to do with it.

If you want to stop smoking you can do it so easily. If you want to change anything in you which you think is impossible, you can give it a try -- nothing is impossible. You have decided many times to change this, to change that, but you have always failed, because the decision remains in the conscious and the action comes from the unconscious -- they don't meet.

The unconscious never hears anything that the conscious is deciding, and the conscious cannot control the unconscious -- the unconscious is so vast.

The secret of hypnosis is that it takes you to the unconscious, and then you can put the seed of anything in the unconscious, and it will grow, blossom. The blossoming will happen in the conscious, but the roots will remain in the unconscious.

As far as I am concerned, hypnosis is going to be one of the most significant parts of the mystery school. Such a simple method, which only demands a little trust, a little innocence, can bring miraculous changes in your life -- and not in ordinary things only.

Slowly it can become the path of your meditation.

You meditate, but you don't succeed. You don't succeed in watching; you get mixed up with thoughts, you forget watching. You remember later on, "I was going to watch, but I am thinking." Hypnosis can help you; it can make the watcher and the thoughts separate.

For spiritual growth I don't think there is anything more important than hypnosis.

Question 3:

It has begun. And truth is both: it is pragmatic and it is esoteric.

I was emphasizing that it was pragmatic, because in those phases I did not want my people to be involved in any esoteric work. The pragmatic work is the right foundation.

Without that foundation, esoteric work is just dreaming. So I was continuously against esoteric work.

I am a very mathematical person, in the sense that when the foundation is being laid, you should not talk about the temple that is going to be built upon it, and how it is going to be, what kind of architecture -- because all that will disturb the work on the foundation. I wanted you to be totally concerned only with the foundation, so that later on we can forget the foundation and we can start building the temple.

Truth is a mystery, and it can be discovered only in a mystery school. And this phase is going to be the most valuable. All that we have done before was a preparation. The mystery school will create the purification, and the outcome will be perfection.

That's why people who look at me only intellectually will find contradictions. But those who have a more comprehensive view of life will not find any contradiction. I have denied esoteric work, knowing perfectly well that one day I will have to introduce you to the esoteric work. But everything in its time, not before; otherwise it can simply create confusion.

And if esoteric work is introduced to you without any foundation, you are not going to work for the foundation, because that is not interesting. The esoteric work is really very interesting, but I don't want you to make a temple without a foundation. It has happened many times; then the temple falls and destroys those who were building it.

The word `esoteric' simply means: you cannot put it objectively, scientifically. It is something inner, something subjective, something so mysterious, so miraculous that you can experience it but you cannot explain it. You can have it, but still you cannot explain it. It remains beyond explanation. And it is good that there is something in life which you cannot bring down to language, which you cannot bring down to the objective world...

something which remains always beyond. You can become one with it -- and that is going to be the work of the school.

I have been spontaneous in my work, but these are the mysteries of life, that existence itself has taken care. I have left it to existence, "Whatever you want me to do, I will do." I am not the doer; I am just a passage for existence to reach people. So I have never planned, but existence functions in a very planned way. So all the phases that have passed were necessary, and now we are ready to enter into the last phase -- the ultimate ecstasy.

Ecstasy cannot be pragmatic.

Love cannot be pragmatic.

Trust cannot be pragmatic.

All that is valuable is esoteric.

Question 4:

I have told you the story of the Sufi mystic who was thought to be a little eccentric. Even his disciples were afraid that he could create a situation which would be very embarrassing to them.

Once it happened... He was going to the mosque to deliver a religious discourse and he sat on his donkey in such a way that the whole city laughed. And the disciples were just feeling ashamed, because he was not facing the way the donkey was going; he was sitting with his back towards the mosque where the donkey was going and he was facing his students who were following him.

Naturally people came out of the shops, out of their houses and laughed and they said, "This man is really mad. It is strange that a few people think he is a master. Now look at what nonsense he is doing. Is this the way to sit on a donkey?"

And all the students were feeling very badly: to go with the master anywhere is a trouble.

When they had reached the mosque the students asked, "Before we enter we want some explanation: Why did you do this?"

He said, "I thought over it very much, meditated over it. If I sit the way people sit on their animals then my back will be towards you, and that is insulting; that is not being respectful towards you."

One student said, "Then you should have told us. We could have been ahead of you."

He said, "Then it would have been insulting towards me. Your back towards me? -- that would be even worse. So finally I figured out that the best way is that I sit facing you, and you follow me. And there is no religious scripture in which it is written that you should always sit on the donkey in such a way. It is not irreligious. There is no book of etiquette in which it is written how to sit on a donkey.

"It is our donkey and nobody has the right to be bothered about it. And I have found absolutely the right way: I am facing you, you are facing me; nobody is being disrespectful towards anybody else. What is wrong in it?"

This master was staying with a devotee, and they were worried that he may do something... "He is bound to do something to create a scene, and the neighbors will gather. It is good that he has come in the night. We should put him in the basement and lock it so no problem arises -- at least in the night -- so we can sleep silently and the neighbors can sleep silently."

But in the middle of the night they heard roaring laughter coming from the roof. They said, "My God, how has he managed to reach the roof?"

They rushed up, and he was laughing and rolling around, and he said, "It is such a great experience. You did well to put me in the basement, otherwise I would have missed."

They said, "Please tell us, what has happened?"

He said, "I started falling upwards. The whole credit goes to the roof. Somehow I clung to the roof, otherwise you would not have found me. I was falling upwards so fast. I have heard that things only fall downwards -- this is a new experience of falling upwards."

The whole neighborhood was there and everybody was coming with lamps, and they started asking, "What has happened?" And the people of the house could not even say what had happened.

The master said, "Don't be worried, I will explain; these people cannot. I started falling upwards."

They all laughed and they said, "We have been telling these people, `Don't get involved with that madman. He can create any situation and make you all look foolish.'" But it is a famous Sufi statement, that one can fall upwards. The state you are asking about, when you found that my words became sound, that my voice became music, that in the gaps between, you felt you were rising upwards... this is what the Sufis mean by falling upwards. The story is just symbolic -- nobody can fall from the basement to the roof, but it says much.

Just look at what you felt: my words became sound. Sound is the source. Sound is meaningless; when a sound is given then it becomes a word. Words are secondary; sound is the source.

That is why I have criticized the Biblical story that there was word in the beginning. That is impossible, because word cannot be in the beginning. Word means it has to be meaningful. But who will give it meaning? There was nobody else.

In the East they are far more profound. Each ancient Hindu scripture begins with OM.

That is a sound; it is not a word. OM does not mean anything. It would have been better to say, "In the beginning there was sound."

You say, "Then your voice became music." That means you are listening totally, so totally that you are not even thinking about what is being said. Naturally meaning will disappear, words will become sound. And if meaning disappears, then the voice will become music. And in the gaps between the sound and the music, the silent gaps, you felt you were rising upwards.

In the East we have, and science has to accept it sooner or later, the opposite idea to gravitation. It is called levitation: just as things fall downwards, things can rise upwards.

Gravitation is a way downwards; levitation is a way upwards. In utter silence you are no longer confined to your body. Your body is under the impact of gravitation; it cannot fall upwards.

But you are not the body, you are pure consciousness. In fact it is a miracle that you are in the body. Because of the gravitation that affects the body, you remain attached to the earth. But in absolute silence, suddenly all your attachment to the body disappears, your attachment to the mind disappears -- because now words have become sound. The mind cannot conceive it. The voice has become music. For the mind to figure it out is not possible, and because the mind is in a state where it cannot control, your connections with the body become loose.

Mind is your connection, and in that looseness you can feel as if you are floating upwards. Your body is still sitting on the ground, so if you open your eyes you will be puzzled. But what you have experienced is not imagination; it is as true as gravitation, it is just invisible. You can feel it, but you cannot see it. Don't be afraid of it. Let it happen more and more. Suddenly one day you will find you are close to the stars and not to the earth.

The same thing can be possible through hypnosis. If a person is deeply hypnotized -- that means he has been hypnotized many times and has become more and more trusting...

And there are ways to check whether he has come to the point where you can experiment.

You can simply say to him, "Come out of the body. You will be able to remember whatever you see."

Your consciousness, your soul, or whatever name you give to it, will float above you like a balloon, still attached to your navel with a very shiny cord, looking like silver. And you can see your body lying on the bed.

In a mystery school we will need places where nobody disturbs. If such an experiment is being done, any disturbance can be dangerous. The cord can be broken -- then the soul cannot enter the body again; then the person is dead. No harm to the soul, but to the world you have killed a person. There should be no disturbance of any kind.

The soul can see everything from above, and then you can say, "Now slowly come back to the body." And you can feel that you are settling back into the body, slowly spreading into different parts of the body. Because you are told that you will remember everything, you will be able to tell about it when you wake up and you are asked -- you will tell the whole thing, what has happened.

And this has been experimented with for at least ten thousand years, and it has been always the same. That's why I say it is the science of the interior, of your inner being, because there has been no exception. All the reports from people who have gone out of the body are exactly the same. For example, they all feel that they are connected by a silver cord to the navel.

Out of this experience scientists may think that life is centered in the heart, that if the heart stops you are dead. It is not true. There have been experiments proving certainly that the heart can be stopped and the person does not die. After ten minutes he comes back, and the heart starts again. According to the spiritual science, life is just two inches below the navel. The child was joined by the navel to the mother. And the navel was nursing the source inside, two inches below... It has been cut from the mother's life, but it is still joined with the universe from the same place. It is not in the heart, it is just two inches below the navel.

And because of this, in Japan a certain thing developed: hara-kiri. Hara-kiri is a special kind of suicide. Hara is the name of the center below the navel, where life is. And only in Japan has it been possible to locate it exactly. A certain development in Japanese tradition led to this point: if you want to kill yourself, the best, the quickest, and the most comfortable way is just to put a knife in the center of the hara, so the cord is cut. That happens within seconds, and the person is dead, but he does not suffer any agony.

And the science of health, medicine, has to take note of it, because if it is the real center of life, then it should be nourished when a person is dying or sick. Rather than working on other places which are only offshoots, work at the center. Perhaps a totally new science of medicine and health can come out of it.

The hara has not been recognized anywhere except Japan. But Japan has proved it, that there is the center of life, because within a second the person is finished -- and with no agony, no anguish. His face is as it was when he was alive -- not even any tension.

Hara-kiri developed for a strange reason. It is part of the samurai training in Japan. The samurai is a special kind of warrior. He is a meditative warrior. Life and death are equal to him, but honor, respectability, dignity, is higher than anything else. So if anything happens that he feels is humiliating, then it is not worth living, and he commits hara-kiri.

It is not good to translate it as suicide, but there is no other way.

Thousands of samurai have committed hara-kiri. You cannot hurt the integrity of any samurai. It is dangerous -- he will not kill you, he will kill himself. Life has lost meaning; if people cannot respect him, there is no reason why he should live. And he lives with dignity. The samurai is a special development of human individuality, and utterly devoted to freedom. Anything hurting him, or anything destroying his freedom or his honor...

In the second world war it was a danger, that you can destroy Japan but you cannot win.

It was the atomic bombs which changed the situation; otherwise the ordinary war...

Just a few years ago, thirteen years after the second world war, a man was found hiding in a forest, still fighting. Whenever he could find an opportunity, he would kill an American and then go back to the forest. He was caught thirteen years after the second world war, and when he was told that Japan had been defeated, he could not believe it.

He said, "That is impossible. Japan can be destroyed, but cannot be defeated. It is a land of samurais. We live with dignity, we die with dignity." He could not believe it -- thirteen years had passed, and he was still fighting for Japan, alone.

Meditation and swordsmanship, or archery, or other ways of the warrior, have been joined together. To us it seems too much, that a person should destroy himself, but to those thousands who have committed hara-kiri it is not the case. They are not destroying themselves, they are simply leaving this life -- this life is not worth living, something has gone wrong. It is against their honor to be here.

Through hypnosis we can make a person aware of how this rising upwards happens, and how he can enter the body again. And once you have done it, a posthypnotic suggestion can be given, that you can do it on your own, any time you want. And it is a tremendously beautiful experience, for the simple reason that for the first time you find that the prison is not you. Your body is one thing; you are totally different: you are eternal, immortal.

Bodies have come and gone; you have been here since eternity, and you will be here until eternity.