Dynamic Meditation

Question 1:

The first thing to be understood about Dynamic Meditation is that it is a method of creating a situation through tension in which meditation can happen. If your total being is completely tense, the only possibility that remains is relaxation. Ordinarily one cannot go directly into relaxation, but if your whole being is at a peak of total tension then the second step comes automatically, spontaneously:

silence is created.

The first three stages of the technique are done in order to achieve this climax of tension throughout all the layers of your being. The first layer is the physical body. Beyond that is the prana sharir, the vital body: this is your second body, the etheric body. Beyond it is the third body, the astral body.

Your vital body takes in breath as its food. If the normal intake of oxygen is changed, the vital body is bound to change. Deep, fast breathing for ten minutes in the first stage of the technique is a means of changing the whole chemistry of your vital body.

The breathing must be both deep and fast - as deep as possible and as fast as possible. If you cannot do both, then it must be fast. Fast breathing becomes a sort of hammering on the vital body and something which is asleep begins to wake: the reservoir of your energies breaks open. The breathing is like a flood of electricity throughout the whole nervous system.

So you must do the first step as vigorously, as intensely as possible. You must be in it totally; not a single fragment of you should be outside of it. Your whole being should be in the breathing in the first step.

You are just an anarchy: breathing in, breathing out. Your total mind is in the process - breath going out, breath coming in. If you are totally in it, thoughts will cease because none of your energy is available to move into thought - there is no energy left to keep them alive.

Then, when the body electricity begins to work in you, the second step begins. When bioenergy begins revolving in you, working through your nervous system, many things are possible for your body. You must be free to let the body do anything it wants to do.

This second step will be not only a state of letgo but a state of positive cooperation too. You must cooperate with your body, because the language of the body is a symbolic one which has ordinarily been lost. If your body wants to dance, you cannot feel the message. So if there is a slight tendency toward dancing in the second stage, cooperate with it; only then will you understand the language.

Whatsoever happens in this second ten-minute stage, do to your maximum. Throughout the whole process of the technique, nothing should be done below the maximum. You may begin to dance, jump, laugh, or cry. Anything that happens to you, however the energy wants to express itself, cooperate with it. It will just be a hunch in the beginning, just a mild temptation - so mild that if you want to suppress it, it will not come to the conscious level at all. It can be suppressed unknowingly.

So if there is any hunch, any flickering, any indication in the mind, then cooperate with it and do it to your maximum, to the very extreme.

There is tension only at the extreme, not otherwise. If the dance is not at its maximum then it will not be effective, it will lead nowhere; people dance so many times, but it leads nowhere. So the dance must be at its maximum - and unplanned, just done instinctively or intuitively; your reason or your intellect must not come in between.

In the second step just become the body, totally one with it, identified with it - just as in the first step you just become the breath. The moment you bring your activity to the maximum a new, fresh feeling will surge up in you. Something will be broken: you will see your body as something apart from you; you will become just a witness to it. You do not have to try to be a witness, you just have to be identified with the body totally and allow the body to do whatever it wants to do and go wherever it wants to go.

The moment the activity is at its maximum - dancing, crying, laughing, being irrational, doing any nonsense - then there is a happening: you become a witness. Now you are just watching; there is no identification, just a witnessing consciousness which comes on its own. You don't have to think about it, it just happens.

This is the second step of the technique. Only when the first step has been done totally, completely, can you move into the second step. It is just like the gears in a car: the first gear can be changed into the second only when the speed in first gear is at its maximum, not otherwise. It is only possible to change from second gear into the third when the speed in second gear is at its maximum. What we are involved with in Dynamic Meditation are the gears of the mind. If the physical body, the first gear, is brought to its maximum extreme through breathing, then you can change into second gear.

Then the second must be completely intense: involved, committed, with nothing remaining behind.

When you practice Dynamic Meditation for the first time this will be difficult, because we have suppressed the body so much that a suppressed pattern of life has become natural to us. It is not natural! Look at a child: he plays with his body in quite a different way. If he is crying, he is crying intensely. The cry of a child is a beautiful thing to hear, but the cry of an adult is ugly. Even in anger a child is beautiful; he has a total intensity. But when an adult is angry he is ugly; he is not total. And any type of intensity is beautiful.

This second step is only difficult because we have suppressed so much in the body, but if you cooperate with the body then the forgotten language is remembered again. You become a child.

And when you become a child again a new feeling comes to you: you become weightless - an unsuppressed body becomes weightless.

When the body becomes totally unsuppressed, suppressions that have been accumulated throughout your life are thrown out. This is catharsis. A person who goes through this catharsis can never become insane; it is impossible. And if an insane person can be persuaded to do it he will return to normality. A person who has gone through this process has gone beyond madness: the potential seed has been killed, has been burnt out through all this catharsis.

This second step is psychotherapeutic. One can only go into meditation by going through catharsis.

One must be cleansed completely; everything nonsensical must be thrown out. Our civilization has taught us to suppress, to keep things inside, so that everything goes into the unconscious and becomes part and parcel of the soul and creates much havoc throughout the whole being.

Every ghost that has been suppressed becomes a potential seed for insanity. This must be eliminated. As man becomes more civilized, he becomes potentially more mad. One who is uncivilized is potentially less mad because he still understands the language of the body, he still cooperates with it. His body is not suppressed; his body is the flowering of his being.

This second step must be done totally. You must not be outside the body; you must be in it. When you are doing something, do it completely: be the doing, not the doer. That is what is meant by totality: be the doing, become the act; don't be an actor. An actor is always outside his acting, he is never in it. When I love you I am in it, but when I act lovingly I am outside the act.

In the second step so many things are possible - something different will happen to each individual.

One person will begin to dance, another person will begin to cry. One will become naked, another will begin to jump and yet another will begin to laugh. Anything is possible.

Move from within, move totally, and then you can proceed to the third stage.

The third stage is reached as a result of an inherent sequence. In the first stage, the body electricity, or you can call it Kundalini, is awakened. It begins to revolve and move. Only then can the body be in a total letgo, not before. Only when the inner movement has begun are outer movements possible.

When the catharsis of the second stage is brought to a peak, to a climax, the third ten-minute stage begins. Begin to repeat vigorously the Sufi mantra: Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! The energy that has been awakened through breathing and expressed through catharsis now begins to move inward and upward; the mantra rechannels the energy. Before it was moving downward and outward; now it begins to move inward and upward.

Go on hammering the sound within - Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! - until the whole being becomes nothing but the sound. You must exhaust yourself completely; only then does the fourth stage, the meditation, happen.

The fourth stage is nothing - only silence and waiting. If you have moved into the first three stages totally, completely, holding nothing back, then in the fourth stage you will automatically fall into a deep relaxation. The body is exhausted; all suppressions have been thrown out, all thoughts have been thrown out. Now relaxation comes spontaneously - you need not do anything to make it happen. This is the beginning of meditation.

The situation has been created: you are not there. Now meditation can happen. You are open, waiting, receptive. And the happening happens.

Question 2:

Such people cling to discipline, but the primary need of an unstill mind is to be anarchic; only then can it transcend itself. You can ordain discipline, but discipline is an outward conditioning - the inner being remains the same. There will be anarchy within and discipline without: anarchy remains in the heart while the discipline forms a part of the cultivated personality. So first let tension, confusion, anarchy reach a climax. Then there will be an explosion, and discipline will come as the result.

Tell the people who come to you for spiritual guidance about this method. They will feel the change that happens through it themselves, the transformation. Let them practice it as an experiment - with their unstill minds, with their doubts - and if something happens through it, then the practice will continue by itself; there will be no need to convince them.

The anarchy within must be exploded. It should not be stilled or pushed down, it must he expressed in total intensity. Calmness, serenity, nirvana, come not by stilling the mind but by explosion. Then the stillness comes by itself; it is not a cultivated composure.

You must express what you are totally. Of course, that will mean madness, because you are mad.

If you allow yourself to express what is inside you, the madness will come out. You will feel strange about it: what will be expressed is something which is unknown even to you. But it is your expression - the authentic expression of what is within you.

So many things that must be expressed have been suppressed in the unconscious. They have been suppressed for centuries, through many past births. The anarchic being that is within each of us is unknown even to ourselves. It must come out, the ghost inside us must come out. And it can come out only when it is expressed - expressed in total intensity from the innermost core of being. First one has to become mad in order to transcend one's inner madness.

Let Dynamic Meditation be tried as an experiment by those who come to you. Tell them that the emphasis is not on believing it, but that they should do it, then they will know what happens. And things are bound to happen, because this madness that I am talking about is within everyone.

Question 3:

The moment a person begins to experiment with this method there is no question of belief or faith, there is no question of hypnosis. The contrary is the case: we have hypnotized ourselves into believing that we are normal and sane human beings. This is the hypnosis! The whole world is a great madhouse and we have hypnotized ourselves into thinking that we are sane, normal. But the insanity that is hidden in the background always tries to come out: it erupts, it explodes out of us in dreams.

It explodes out of us when we are intoxicated. LSD or mescaline cause an explosion of madness, but the explosion does not come from the LSD or mescaline, and dreams do not create the madness either. Drugs or dreams just uncover your self, the authentic being that is within you. That is why, for a sadhaka, a seeker, it has been an essential part of many old traditions to know the self through drugs: various intoxicants are known to have been used in order to know the inner being, to know that which is within.

It is total nonsense even to try to discipline the mind. You have not known the innermost core, you are cultivating discipline from the outside - you will become disciplined but the madness will always remain within you. The ultimate outcome will be schizophrenia: there will be two beings living simultaneously within you, your whole being will be split. There will be continuous indecision and conflict within. And remember, conflict dissipates energy. So the first step toward a harmony and unity of the being is not discipline but knowledge of that which is within.

The within has been so suppressed for centuries, for millennia, that this suppression has become a part of your self. And not only you but the whole of humanity has suppressed what is within; you are just a part of the process. You have not suppressed what is within you consciously, knowingly - it is part of your heritage to do that.

That is the reason for the fear about this technique. The inhibited, suppressed, collective mind is the basis of all insanity, all tensions, all conflicts, all disharmony. There is a lurking fear that if we allow ourselves to let go, something which has been hitherto suppressed will emerge. And it is bound to happen. This fear creates a doubt about the technique, and the doubt then becomes another instrument for suppression.

So tell your students not to believe in the technique but just try it as an experiment for fifteen days.

Let them try it for an hour a day - beginning with ten minutes of deep, fast breathing - and things will begin to move.

The breath should be both deeper and faster than bhastrika breathing. No rhythm is to be used with the breathing. If you try to use any rhythmic method, the explosion will not take place because you will still be disciplining yourself. So let the breathing be as anarchic as it can be: the only emphasis is on rapidity, intensity, and depth. Don't remain outside the breathing. The total being must be involved in it - a total commitment with no holding back.

When you are totally involved in it your whole body and mind begin to vibrate, the body electricity begins to move. When you feel something in your body that you have never felt before then the technique has reached you. Then no doubt remains, because you have experienced something which you have never known before.

We never feel our body electricity. That too is a suppressed part of our personality: not only the mind is suppressed but the body also. We are not in our bodies as much as nature has prescribed; we have suppressed our body wisdom.

Once someone begins to vibrate because of the deep, fast breathing done in the first stage of the technique, his body electricity begins to move. In that moment he moves out of the grip of society:

his bioenergy is so powerful that you cannot force him to conform. When the energy grows to its own awakening you never feel that you are just existing, that you are a slave to your condition. You feel yourself to be something unbounded, something unlimited, something powerful. In this moment, people have declared themselves to be God: AHAM BRAHMASMI, "I am Brahman."

The first feeling of "Aham Brahmasmi, I am God," comes from feeling the movement of electricity that is ordinarily lying dormant in the body stimulated by the deep, fast, intense breathing. Then every experience that comes through the body becomes authentic.

We call something real because we feel it through the body. I say that you are real because I can see you, I can touch you. If I cannot touch you then you are a hallucination; I cannot believe in you.

If I cannot touch you I cannot show you to others. Our reality is that which can be validated through the body.

Any technique that opens up a new dimension of experience for the body becomes real to us. Then there is no more doubt about the technique and one can proceed further.

That is why I emphasize the breathing in the first step. Then, in the second step, the breathing will continue on its own. Meanwhile there will be many reactions in the body; they may take many forms, but they will all be happenings, they will not come through discipline. And so many things will happen!

Question 4:

You can sit in any position but it is better if you are standing. The eyes should be closed and the technique should be done on an empty stomach.

In the second step, relax the body. Give it freedom; don't suppress it. Go on breathing and allow the body to move, to vibrate, to dance, weep, laugh. Let whatever happens, happen: the body will take its own course and many things will begin to happen. Then, in the third step, while still breathing intensely and allowing your body to do whatsoever it wants to do, begin to repeat the Sufi mantra - Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! - with no gaps between the sound. This must be done as vigorously as possible - so that you know you are not withholding any energy. Involve yourself totally. By and by, the repetition of the sound will become more and more vigorous, more and more intense.

During the first step, the total attention must be on the breathing. And when you breathe deeply the second step will emerge as an outcome of the first: the body begins to move. You are not to relax even for a moment; continuous effort is to be there. Then relax into the second stage, allowing your body the freedom to express whatever has been held back in the past. The body will begin to move, to dance, etcetera, and soon you will begin to feel that you are something separate from the body. You will see the body weeping, laughing, crying so clearly that you will not be able to identify yourself with the one who is doing all this. You will see yourself jumping, dancing: something is happening mechanically. You will begin to see the body as a separate entity. It is only when the body becomes an automaton that the consciousness feels itself to be separate; until then there is always identification with the body.

Question 5:

You are totally identified with your body because normally there is no gap between you and your body. What you are doing, your body is doing, and vice versa. You and the doings of your body are identified as one and the same. But when the body takes its own course, it becomes an automaton.

Things begin to happen which you had never planned, which you never thought possible. "Am I doing this? Am I feeling this?" And you know that you are not doing it. You did not will it but still the dance goes on - and vigorously, too.

Then there is a gap. The gap between the doer and the doing is there: you are not doing it. Now the body has become an automaton.

Consciousness cannot identify itself with an automaton. You cannot identify yourself with a machine unless the machine works according to your will. If I tell this microphone to move and it begins to move, there is every possibility that I may identify myself with it. Now it has become part and parcel of me: it moves when I ask it to move. The hand moves when I tell it to move, and when I tell it not to move it does not. That is the basis of identification: through the movement, the mover and the moved have become one.

But when the body moves without your conscious exertion then it becomes a separate machine.

Only then can you see that you are separate from the body. This is such a distinct feeling that no confusion remains.

That is why I emphasize body movement. Let it happen. Whatever happens, let go. You will see that your body has become like that of a madman, or an animal, or a machine, and you will not be able to identify with it, so you remain aloof. Now you begin to be a witness.

In the second step of the technique you begin to witness all that is happening. The body is moving, the hands are moving, forming many mudras - mudras that you have never known or planned. Your inner witness comes into being. You begin to see the happenings as something outside yourself; now you are not the doer but just a seer. There is no question of your doing anything; you begin to see.

In the beginning the identification with the body may be there, but as you allow yourself to let go more and more into the technique, action vanishes. If the body falls to the ground you will not think that you have fallen but that the body has fallen.

Then, in the third step you are to shout Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! with total intensity. You must become completely mad. Move deeper and deeper into the sound. Bring your effort to a peak, because only from the peak can you fall to the very depths of your being. The more mad you become, the higher the peak of intensity that you reach, the deeper will be the depths that you fall into and the more sanity there will be.

Real sanity is that which comes after the transcendence of madness. Relaxation comes only when you have come to a peak of tension. Then the fourth stage is reached: the mind becomes calm, quiet.

Now, having gone through the three previous stages of ten minutes each, you are just to relax for ten minutes. Stop everything that you have been doing in the first three stages and just fall down or stop, remaining frozen in whatever position you are in. Now there is nothing to do. There is no question of doing anything because you will be completely exhausted, your whole being will be tired.

Now letgo becomes an automatic process.

The technique is a sequence of stages, each following automatically from the preceding stage. If you continue the technique and do not add the fourth stage it will come by itself as a natural consequence of what has gone before. It is bound to - a moment is bound to come when everything is exhausted and you fall down. There is nothing left to do.

The fourth stage is the moment of nondoing. That is what I call dhyana, meditation. The first three stages are only steps; the fourth stage is the door. Then you are. There is nothing to do, neither breathing nor movement nor sound, just silence.

The three previous stages must be "done" in a sense, but the fourth stage comes of its own accord.

Then something happens that is not your doing. It comes as a grace: you have become a vacuum, an emptiness, and something fills you. Something spiritual pours into you when you are not.

You are not there because there is no doing; the ego disappears when there is no doer. The doer is the ego. So you can be in the first three steps because you are doing something - breathing, moving, shouting - but now, in the fourth stage, you cannot be, because there is no doing.

The ego is nothing but an accumulation of your memories of past actions, so the more a person has done, the more egocentric he is. Even if your doing has been in social service or religious work, whatsoever you have done becomes part of the ego. Ego is not an entity but the memory of your doings, so in those moments when there is no doing, you are not. Then something happens. Even though you are not doing anything you are totally conscious. Silent, but conscious. Exhausted, but conscious. Only consciousness is there: a consciousness of your deep letgo, a consciousness that now everything has disappeared.

When the fourth stage has ended, when it becomes a memory, then you can recollect it. But in the moment itself there is nothing, there is only consciousness. Because only nothingness is there, you cannot be conscious of anything. Afterward you recognize that there has been a gap. Your mind functioned until a particular moment; then there was a gap, and then it began again. You feel this gap afterward: the gap, the interval, becomes a part of your memory.

Our memory records events and this gap is a great event, it is a great phenomenon. Mind is a mechanism. It records everything; it is just like the tape recorder that we are using here. The recorder will record two things: when we speak, the words are recorded; and when we are not speaking, the silence, the gap, is also recorded. Even when we are not speaking, something is being recorded - the silence, the gap. In the same way, the mechanism of the mind is always there recording everything. In fact, it is even more keen, more sensitive, when there is a gap. The tape recorder can blur what I am saying, but it cannot blur my silence. The gap will be recorded more intensely; there is no possibility of error.

So the gap is remembered - and the gap is blissful. In a way a memorable event is a burden, a tension, while the gap is a calm, blissful interval. This gap is dhyana, meditation.

Question 6:

Experience, as such, is psychic. There is no such thing really as "spiritual experience." It is only a gap. The experiencer is not there, so you cannot use the terminology of experience. You experience a moment which is of no-experience. As far as language can indicate it, I can only say that it is a gap.

Every type of indication is bound to be negative. Language is for events, it is not for silence. If I try to express what happens in meditation through the medium of language, the terms I will use will depend on me - and one term will be as meaningless as any other because the experience cannot be indicated by words. So you may call it Brahman, you may call it nirvana, or anything you like, but it will just be a choice between different names.

Every name is as meaningless as any other, so every type of religious language - Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist - will be equally meaningless. The only similarity, the essential unity in all religions, is that their languages are equally erroneous. They are bound to be so. This is not a condemnation, it is a fact - because the gap cannot be expressed, it can only be felt. And feeling has no language; it has no words.

Question 7:

The ego returns, because the whole mechanism is still there. It has not died; the whole past is still there. For a while you were not part of it, for a few minutes you transcended the mind, the ego. You were beyond it. You left the house; now you have come back. But you cannot come back as the same person who left it because you now have known something beyond. You cannot be the same again, but still you come back.

The easier it becomes to go out and come in, the more likely it is that a new stage will begin in which you are neither out nor in: you transcend both. This is the culmination, because then you can be out when you want to go out and you can be in when you want to come in. You are neither in nor out; you transcend both. This is samadhi.

When I can come or go as I choose, when I can be in or out, when it becomes easier and easier for the mind to be here or not to be here according to my preference, then both the inner and the outer can be transcended. Only then is the innermost core reached. That is samadhi. What happens in the fourth stage is only a glimpse of it. In Zen Buddhism, this glimpse is called satori. Satori is not samadhi, satori is just a glimpse, because you can still come back from it. But you cannot come back from samadhi: it is the point of no return.

Question 8:

If you say "somebody reaches," then somebody is there. Only when somebody is not there, is absent, does he reach. Somebody moves into meditation, somebody comes out of meditation - that is the feeling of the soul. But nobody reaches samadhi, because when samadhi is reached, nobody is there.

There are many religions which have stopped at the point reached in the fourth stage of Dynamic Meditation, so they say that there is a soul, the atman, because all they have known is the coming in and the going out of the soul. But the fourth stage is just a glimpse. You go out - you leave the body, the mind, the ego - and you come back again. It is not the point of no return; there is every possibility of coming back.

You come back because the whole mechanism is still there waiting for you. You come back and again the whole thing begins to work. All that is left then is the memory of the gap. But that gap calls you back again and again.

Some religions such as Zen have mistaken this satori, this glimpse, for the ultimate experience, for samadhi. It is not samadhi because there is still a possibility of coming back. The ego did not die, you only jumped away from it temporarily. For a moment you were out of its grip, but now you are back again. Satori is just a jump. Don't become attached to it.

You can become attached to the outward jump very easily because it is so blissful there. Each time you move into the experience it gives you a certain freshness, it thrills you. But then you go on repeating the experience of going into meditation, feeling its bliss, and coming back. By and by it becomes a routine, and when you come back you think that you have achieved the ultimate experience possible because the experience was so blissful. But you have not yet known something beyond bliss, so each experience of meditation becomes part of the same repetitive, mechanical, routine groove. Now even the gap, even meditation, becomes part of your mechanical functioning.

There are religions that have stopped at this point; hence they say that there is a soul, an individual soul; they cannot conceive of Brahman. Brahman only comes after you have gone beyond the fourth stage - when you can go out and come back in and do not become attached to the bliss of the gap.

And once you begin to witness this going out and coming in, the meditative state of mind and non- meditative state of mind, you have reached the most delicate point. Then you know that this too is a habit which you can prolong for many lives. It is not samadhi, it is not ultimate awareness; it is satori.

When you start observing this, a silent awareness begins to descend in you. Silent awareness, choiceless awareness, is possible only at this point, never before.

Question 9:

Yes. Only after satori, never before that. When you become silently aware of the going out and the coming in of the ego, the ultimate explosion can happen. You go beyond out and in; you dissolve in the explosion.

This is the point of nirvana, brahma-upalabdhi, moksha, or whatever you want to call it. It has never been recorded by the mind; it can never be recorded because the mechanism itself has dissolved.

Question 10:

Certainly, because the working of the body is another process. It has a process of its own; one can live in it or one can go out of it. To others it seems as though one is still living in the house, but for the resident the house is no longer there. The whole universe becomes the body.

Question 11:

No. It only seems so to others. If I try to talk about it, to verbalize it, then the whole thing becomes a problem. Whenever we talk about what happens when one goes beyond meditation, it becomes a paradox. It can never be explained because any type of explanation will create new paradoxes, new contradictions.

This fifth stage is an explosion of everything that has been. Now nothing remains. It is an explosion of the totality that you were: your memory, your intellect, your ego, your personality, your being, your soul. Everything that you were is now not; you just go beyond. There is no you; you become everything. That is the point of Brahman, cosmic consciousness.

Dynamic Meditation can lead you only up to the fourth stage, satori. The fifth is beyond method.

Guidance is possible only up to the fourth stage. That is why Krishnamurti talks of no-guidance. The fifth stage is beyond guidance. Silent awareness is always beyond guidance. Either it happens, or it doesn't happen.

This fifth stage is existence itself.

Every day Buddha was asked the same question: "What happens to an enlightened person? Where does he go? Does he exist or not?"

When Buddha was asked this same thing persistently, he said, "It is irrelevant. Do not ask. This is a question that must not be asked." He listed eleven questions which he could not be asked, and this question was one of them. It is not that Buddha did not know; he would not answer because any type of statement was bound to create new problems.

Question 12:

Life is a mystery which cannot be solved. If it could be solved, it would not be a mystery. There is no mission in life, because there can be no mission in a mystery; there can simply be playfulness, a leela.

This whole existence is just a play of energy. Play means something that is purposeless or something that is its own purpose. There is nothing to be achieved; the very act is the achievement.

Life has no mission, because living itself is the achievement. So you can live in many ways, you can do many things.

It is all just an outflow of energy, a purposeless cosmic play. That is why it is a mystery.

The West is more intent on discovering new things than the East. It is more curious, more inquiring, but it could never develop a religious consciousness because it could never conceive of life as being purposeless. We have been able to see sense in nonsense, we have been able to see no-purpose as having its own purpose, its own intrinsic value. Life is, that's all. Existence is; it is enough. Why ask for more? How can there be anything more than existence?

When you reach satori this feeling of the purposelessness of life begins to dawn upon you: life becomes a play. That is why Zen monks are happy and not serious. A serious person is one who has never felt the miraculous, the mysterious, so a serious person can never be religious. At the stage where satori has begun to happen, you become playful. Life becomes just a joke; there is no seriousness about it. You can laugh at it. A Zen monk can even laugh at the Buddha. And it is beautiful, so beautiful - nothing like it has ever been achieved anywhere else.

Question 13:

It disturbs because society is created by people suffering from the disease called seriousness. The whole of society is dominated by this particular disease. It has dominated everything: everything has been put into a pattern, categorized, everything has been demarcated.

Play cannot be demarcated. When I love somebody it is play. But when it becomes a marriage then the play has gone; it has become a serious affair. Love is always playful, that's why it is always momentary; it comes and goes. But marriage is something static; it comes and never goes. It is a plan, a demarcation, a fixed pattern.

Question 14:

It cannot be. Marriage can never be spiritual because it is a fixed thing. But I have used marriage just as an example. In fact, the whole of society can never be spiritual because it is based on rules.

Rules are always serious; you cannot be playful about them.

When Bodhidharma reached China, he put one shoe on his head and the other on his foot. The emperor asked, "What are you doing? What nonsense!"

Bodhidharma said, "I am joking."

The emperor said, "But we never expected a joking, laughing sadhu."

Bodhidharma said, "How is it possible for a sadhu to be serious? God is not serious, he is so unceasingly playful!"

Creativity comes out of playfulness; hence so much creativity is born out of satori.

Question 15:

The desire for inner knowledge, the desire for this experience or that experience, is part and parcel of the seriousness disease. The serious mind even tries to categorize religious experience; it wants to become the authority: "I have inner knowledge. I know, and you don't know. I will teach you."

Again, the mind is attempting to recreate the pattern of the serious society. Do you see it? Religious societies have been created only for this purpose. Sects, ashrams, monasteries, etcetera, are alternative societies.

But the spiritual person is always playful. His life is just play, he is not serious about anything that he does.

And nothing new ever comes out of seriousness. Seriousness can only repeat the old because it always thinks in terms of security, in terms of rules; and rules come from the old, from tradition - they cannot be invented daily. A playful mind is spontaneous. It has no rules, so it is always insecure; it is always on the verge of losing everything, because there is no security.

Once a person has begun to experience satori, every type of seriousness becomes nonsense. That is the only indication there is that meditation has happened, and that is why a person who achieves satori becomes rebellious. There is no other reason. He becomes rebellious because he has to rebel against all types of seriousness.

Question 16:

It is the very concept of control that has made the whole world a mess. The moment you think in terms of control, you begin to suppress and you begin to destroy individuals and create types. And, paradoxically, when you destroy individuals and create patterns and types, much disorder follows.

But this disorder is not because of rebellious minds, it is just a reaction against the dead order.

If the rebellious mind wins even for a single day, there will be no disorder because there will be no order; order and disorder are two sides of the same coin. A person who tries to create order creates disorder: the attitude, the mind that tries to ordain discipline creates indiscipline, too.

Your ego reacts against a person who is trying to discipline you, but this is reaction not rebellion.

Rebellion only emerges after satori, so there are not many rebellious persons - only a Jesus, a Buddha, a Socrates, very few. But there are many reactionaries. For example, the communists - people like Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, or Mao - are all reactionaries, they are not rebellious. A rebellious person is a phenomenon: only when you are rebellious are you really alive. And if the whole world were to become rebellious....

Every type of invention, every discovery, always comes out of playfulness. Einstein, Archimedes, Newton, and others were all playing. Many things happen when you are not serious, when you are not concentrating, when your mind is in a letgo.

Newton was sitting under an apple tree. An apple fell, and something happened. Archimedes was lying in his bathtub, and something happened. He jumped out of the tub crying, "Eureka! Eureka!

I've found it, I've found it!" Einstein was very fond of playing with soap bubbles. His concept of the expanding universe came to him through playing with soap bubbles, watching them expanding and dissolving.

The history of humanity is not the history of the masses, the conformists, the serious, the lawgivers, the ruled and the rulers. The masses have not created a single masterpiece - neither invention nor painting nor poetry nor music. But a few evolved ones who were not serious about their lives have been creative. Discovery has always come through unknown people who were just playing with their lives. If they had been serious they would have preferred to do business, to start a factory or something.

So the first thing is to play with your life. Then so many phenomenal things happen. Religion, science, art - everything comes out of a nonserious, playful mind.

There is no purpose in life, no mission in life. Life is enough! It is more than enough. Every sense of mission must go because it is anti-life: all propaganda is nothing but politics in the garb of religion, a mission, an ideal. Leadership, gurus, disciples - all this is nonsense. If you practice Dynamic Meditation, if you allow yourself to pass through a catharsis and move into a total letgo your concept of a mission in life is bound to go.

So practice Dynamic Meditation. Do it to your fullest capacity - take it to a peak. You must go mad completely; only then will authentic sanity come, and only then will others begin to be helped by you.