Enchanted with the unknown

Question 1:

You are going mad!

But that is part of my work too.

Just don't be afraid of going mad, because this is a madness that happens only to very rare individuals; it is not something common. It is not insanity, it is going beyond mind; and the mind feels tremendously afraid, because going beyond means going from the known to the unknown.

From the small space which seems to be lighted, going beyond means entering into darkness. And the mind is trained for everything in life. To go beyond and lose grasp of it feels dangerous.

It is the same danger that every child feels when he is born. The pain of the mother is because of the child, because no child wants to be born. He has lived in a cozy home, self-sufficient, without worries, without responsibilities, in utter blissfulness. Now suddenly he is being thrown out of it. He knows only that small space; that has been his world and he was absolutely happy with it. He is being thrown out of it into something unknown, unfamiliar. It feels almost like death. The child resists getting out of the womb; that resistance creates the pain for the mother. The child does not let go and allow himself to come out of the womb easily - he fights. That is the beginning of struggle.

He will fight his whole life now. And that is also the beginning of the fear of the unknown. There is a valid rationality in it, because the child never gets a better world than he has lost in the womb. He gets a miserable world. He had no idea of misery. He had never known any tension; everything was as it should be. Now everything is as it should not be, and for his whole life his effort will be to create the same comfort that he has lost.

The desire for comfort, for luxury, for a beautiful home, for a loving atmosphere, is nothing but simply creating another womb around yourself - the womb that you have lost. You do everything to create it, but everything fails; nothing succeeds in giving you the womb back. That gives an immense guarantee to your mind: never allow anything unknown; never go beyond the boundary of the known - it is dangerous. And once you have gone beyond it you cannot come back, because you cannot go back to the womb. These are not conscious ideas, it is your unconscious feeling.

So while sitting in silence, you may feel afraid when you come to the borderline. You may cling to anything so you don't lose the known and you don't get lost in the vast unknown. You don't want to commit the same mistake that you had committed when you were born. The unconscious still carries the scar.

In a better educational system we will teach every child that that was not life. You were comfortable, but there was no adventure, there was no challenge. Every trace of the fear of entering into the unknown has to be removed from the unconscious by the right kind of education. Then there will be a totally different approach. Whenever you will come close to the unknown you will feel a tremendous joy, excitement, the challenge to discover. You will not cling.

But this has not been the case up to now. The whole educational system of the world has not even touched your basic psychological problems. It is not concerned with giving you psychological freedom. The question is not even raised.

I have been in conferences of professors, vice-chancellors, educationists, discussing how to make the educational system work better. And I have told every conference, "All that you say is rubbish:

you don't even touch the basic question. Somebody is saying that students are not obedient, that students are not disciplined, that they are not respectful - so how to make them respectful, obedient?

"Your concerns are superficial and more concerned with yourself, your troubles, your problems, than with the vast world of the young generation. You never talk about their psychological freedom.

"And if you can begin a process - which is possible - so that every student becomes psychologically free of the fear of the unknown... Instead of having fear he becomes enchanted with the unknown, in love with the unknown, on a romantic adventure into the world beyond the small mind. If you can manage that, they will be respectful towards you. You have given them such a gift, they cannot be other than respectful. They will be obedient to you because they know you are not going to exploit them. You have been trying to make them psychologically free, how can you exploit them? They will trust you.

"These superficial problems that you go on discussing every year, in every conference... All the solutions are the same every year, and your solutions create more problems because all your solutions are so third-rate. And they are the same: be more strict, expel the students who are not obedient, punish those who are troublemakers. Your solutions make people more disobedient, more against you.

"The situation has come to a point that now students think that they are a class against the class of the teachers. It is a class struggle, just like the poor and the rich. They are making their unions fight, just like other unions, labor unions. Now there are students' unions whose whole purpose is how to protect students and fight against the teachers, against the institutions. You are not solving problems, you are creating them."

They would listen to me, but I always felt I was talking to the walls, because it would not penetrate their thick skulls. It was almost impossible to reach them. They were so full of knowledge that they were not ready to listen, and particularly not to something so new to them.

And it is a simple thing. The birth trauma is one of the most important things in life because it is the beginning, the seed of everything that is going to happen later on; we have to change that trauma. Otherwise humanity is going to remain the same - always afraid of the unknown, fearful, not courageous, not looking for adventure, not looking for and discovering new spaces.

And our conscious mind is a very small space; below it there is a tremendous world, above it there is a tremendous world. Both have to be explored. If you fall below you will be insane, you will be really mad. But if you go beyond, your madness will be the greatest sanity possible.

The person who can reach to the highest peak of consciousness gathers new potentials, and the most important is that now he can go downwards. He has enough light to go into the darker parts, which he was not able to go into before. Before, it was sure madness to fall below the mind, because mind is a small lighted spot. From there if you fall below you can fall only into darkness. And the darkness becomes thicker and thicker and you start losing any ability to come back.

But if you have reached first to the higher levels of mind - superconscious, collective superconscious, cosmic superconscious - then you have so much light, you are light itself. Now you can take a journey into the underworld of unconsciousness, collective unconsciousness, cosmic unconsciousness. And wherever you will go the darkness will disappear. You will become one whole spectrum of seven stages - all full of light. This is what I call enlightenment.

Now you cannot go mad. Now there is no fear for you; even death is not a fear. In fact you have attained your primary desire: you are again in the womb of existence itself, again without worries, without responsibilities, without tensions, utterly relaxed - just trusting existence wherever it leads.

Wherever it leads is good.

You don't have any demands, you don't have any desires, you don't have any goal. You have surrendered all that trouble to existence. You have attained now an eternal womb. That's why an enlightened person can live and can die in absolute relaxation. Now life or death makes no difference; he is part of eternity, he is part of the universal existence itself.

So don't be worried when you come, in silence, close to the boundary line. In silence is the guarantee; in silence you cannot come to a boundary line from where one can fall. In silence you come close to the point from where you can go only beyond.

When your mind is so much in anguish and anxiety, then you are close to the boundary line from where you can fall. So this has to be remembered as a criterion: the more you are full of thoughts, the more you are close to madness - just one step more.

Kahlil Gibran has a story. One of his friends had gone mad. He was a genius, and our geniuses are always in danger of going mad for the simple reason that their genius is used only for more and more intellectualization, and that keeps them near the boundary line. From there just one step down and they lose hold of all sanity.

This genius was in the madhouse and Kahlil Gibran went to see him. They were close friends.

When he went in, the friend was sitting in the garden. He recognized Kahlil Gibran and he asked him to sit by his side on the bench. Before Kahlil Gibran could ask him, "How are you feeling in this madhouse?" he asked Kahlil Gibran, "Tell me something about the madhouse which is outside.

You are coming directly from the big madhouse you call the world. Tell me something about that big madhouse; what is happening there?"

Kahlil Gibran was shocked. He said, "Do you think I am coming from the madhouse? Then where do you think you are?"

The friend said, "I am with the very few sane people left in the world. We are protected by a big wall.

We are taken care of by the doctors and nurses, because only so few people are left. The whole world has gone mad; we are the only hope. Otherwise who cares? We are so much taken care of - that is proof enough.

"It will be good," he whispered in Kahlil Gibran's ear, "that you also pretend to be mad and enter this place. This is a great place. Everybody is minding his own business; nobody is interfering with anybody else.

"There are only a few people here - about fifteen. They all live their own life. They respect each other, so much so that they will not even say ?Good morning' - just not to interfere in your life.

They will not say hello. Everybody is doing his own thing, whatever he wants to do. Nobody asks questions like ?Why are you doing that?' It is none of anybody's business. The person is solely responsible for his own work.

"When somebody is talking, nobody asks ?With whom are you talking?' It is accepted that nobody talks with anybody else. Even in the outside world everybody is talking with himself; the other is just an excuse. Here people are very honest and sincere. They don't need any excuse. They talk alone and they answer for both sides. They are authentic. They simply say the truth.

"I love this place. And you come soon - before you get mad like the whole world. It is dangerous to live there."

Kahlil Gibran went home thinking, "Perhaps he is right, because the world seems to be in a mess."

The madhouse looked saner, more silent. People were doing all kinds of things alone. Somebody was smiling, somebody was laughing, but there was no need for any excuse to smile. You want to smile, you smile. In the outside world first you have to find some excuse to laugh. You cannot laugh without an excuse; otherwise you will be thought mad.

In his diary he writes, "That night I could not sleep. That mad friend disturbed me so much that I started suspecting... who knows, he may be right and we may be wrong. And he was so certain."

Mad people are always very certain. And mad people never suspect that they may be mad - that is not part of madness. Only sane people can get into the anxiety that perhaps they are sane or perhaps they are not sane.

In the world the madman and the sane man don't have any qualitative difference - just a little quantitative difference. The madman has gone into the darkness of the unconscious just a step more than you, two steps more than you, but there is no other difference.

So it is good to be afraid... when you are full of thoughts, too many thoughts, you are very close to madness. But when you are silent then there is no need to be fearful. You are very close to real sanity - just a step more and you will be touching the world of superconsciousness. And once you have experienced, tasted, just a little bit of superconsciousness, then you cannot remain satisfied with that. It will create more and more thirst for more and more consciousness. It will be complete only when you have reached to the cosmic consciousness, beyond which there is nothing - and from there you can have a journey backwards through the unconscious.

This is where Western psychology and psychoanalysts are wrong. I cannot agree with them. They are telling people to enter directly into the unconscious, to bring out dreams from the unconscious.

Unknowingly they are playing with fire.

And this you can see: in the West more people go mad than in the East, more people commit suicide than in the East, more people are in anxiety and anguish than in the East. It should be just the opposite, because the West has everything and the East has nothing except poverty, starvation, disease, death. But even amongst disease, death, poverty, starvation, there seems to be a contentment, a relaxed state.

The West has everything but there seems to be such tension that thousands decide to die for the simple reason that at least they will get rid of all these tensions of life. And the most talented people, the geniuses, are more vulnerable. Almost every genius in the West has visited the insane asylum once in a while. And most of them have gone through psychoanalysis just to remain normal. Even to remain normal has become a goal.

To talk about enlightenment is to talk about reaching to the stars; even to be normal has become so difficult. People are slipping down below the normal state of mind. They want just to remain normal.

And psychoanalysis at the most can help you over years of time just to be normal, not more than that. And that is not a guarantee that you will remain normal; any small accident and you can slip back.

Even your psychoanalyst is not normal. He goes to another psychoanalyst to keep him normal. All the psychoanalysts keep going to be analyzed by other psychoanalysts so they can remain normal.

I have heard about a man, a very rich man, who was becoming abnormal and was afraid. He had appointments with the costliest psychoanalyst, but he was a rich man so he could pay any amount of money. The money had to be paid according to how much time you took. The rich man had no problem... he would take two-hour, three-hour, four-hour, five-hour, six-hour sessions. Lying on the psychoanalyst's couch he would go on and on talking all kinds of nonsense.

The psychoanalyst was getting afraid. Listening six hours to that man was dangerous because in the night he started repeating his thoughts in his dreams. It was a clear-cut symbol that something had to be done: "This is too much. I cannot manage to keep my own normalness if this man goes on and on. And there seems to be no end; he has enough money so there is no question for him of how much time he takes."

The psychoanalyst tried to manage things in such a way that he wouldn't lose the patient because he was really a treasure, but he didn't want to lose his normalness either because then what would he do with the treasure? Then he would have to give all the money to other psychoanalysts to clean his mind. So he said to the rich man, "Because you need so much time, I cannot look after other patients. And you need that much time so I am not saying to cut it. I have found a way: I will put my tape recorder here so that you can go on talking as long as you want, and in the night when I am free I will listen to the tapes."

The rich man said, "That is perfect. For me it makes no problem."

The next day as the psychoanalyst was entering his office he saw the rich man coming out. He said, "What happened? Just now the office has opened, and you used to leave in the evening."

He said, "I thought that I also have to look after so many businesses, industries, factories, so in the night when I had time I talked to my tape recorder and now my tape recorder is talking to your tape recorder. In the night you can listen. So you have saved your time and I have saved my time."

But this way the man cannot be helped. Tape recorders talking to each other, listening to each other, are not going to help. But time is precious. And psychoanalysts, although they get paid the most, are always in danger because they are with dangerous people, with dangerous ideas - they can catch them. And mind catches ideas. Sometimes you can have some idea that you want to get rid of, and you cannot.

One man had the idea that strange creatures were crawling all over his body. Nobody could see them except him, but he was throwing them away all the time, talking and throwing them away.

Finally people were tired. His family was tired: "There is nothing that you are throwing. We can see there is nothing, no creatures."

He said, "You don't understand. They are invisible; how can you see them? It is my misfortune that I can see them. What can I do?" And he would be continuously throwing them away because they were crawling all over him. His family took him to the psychoanalyst who said, "Don't be worried, I have cured many such people."

On the seventh day the psychoanalyst was still insisting that these are just imagination. He had been repeating for seven days continuously, "This is just your imagination. There are no creatures.

I don't see them; nobody sees them. Just be a little more alert and they will disappear."

The man said, "I will try," but he was still throwing them away - and he was sitting by the side of the psychoanalyst. Suddenly the psychoanalyst said, "You idiot. Stop! You are throwing them on me!

Last night I started seeing them. The whole night I could not sleep. They were crawling all over me.

It is your doing. And just forgive me; you find some other psychoanalyst, because I have children and a wife and old parents to look after. I cannot look after these invisible creatures. And you have some nerve! Just in front of me you are throwing them over me" - and the psychoanalyst was also throwing them away.

If you go on listening to an insistent madman, and madmen are very insistent and very strong in their assertion - they are all fanatics - sooner or later they can create a conviction in you. Who knows?

- he may be right: there are invisible creatures. And one night suddenly in the darkness of the night you can feel something crawling, and the idea gets into your mind... and then it is very difficult to get rid of it.

The whole difficulty with psychoanalysis is that it has started going downwards first. In the East we have tried just the opposite: first go upwards, on the lighter planes, on the radiant planes. And when you are absolutely together so that nothing can disturb you - your silence is a solid rock - then you can move to the realms below the conscious mind, and with you will be light.

So in each chamber of unconsciousness you will be bringing light. You can discover treasures there too, but those treasures can be discovered only by a man who has reached to the highest consciousness. Only he has the eyes and the intelligence to find the treasures of the unconscious.

There is no need for you to worry. If in silence you come to a place where it seems you are going mad - go mad, with all my blessings. Just go mad, because nobody can go mad through silence.

Silence is so protective that you can only be sane and more sane; you cannot go mad. But when you are full of thoughts then be alert, be aware - you are very close to the madman.

Once you have crossed the line of normality, it seems it becomes easier for you to slip back into abnormal, insane spaces, and you become less and less capable of control. Just a small thing can trigger it and you can sink into unconsciousness, because it is always there within you.

In those moments when you are too full of thoughts, meditate. Try to be watchful so those thoughts disappear. And when you are silent, and the call from the unknown comes, follow it. Go wherever it leads.

Question 2:

Latihan is a good method, but it is closer to Dynamic Meditation than self-hypnosis. Its function is to bring you into a state where you surrender yourself totally to existence and let your body energy move, not according to your mind but according to the universal spirit.

Just stand in an empty room, relaxed, with your eyes closed, and wait. And suddenly you will feel your hand is moving, or your head is moving - then don't stop it, then just go with it. Don't exaggerate either. If the hand is moving only this much, then don't move it more than that, because then you have again become the doer.

Latihan is a let-go. Your bodily energy falls in tune with the universal energy and things start happening in your body: you may start dancing, you may start whirling, your hands may start moving, your legs may start moving. You may start saying words and you don't understand what their meaning is or whether there is any meaning in them, or whether they belong to some other language that you don't know.

But you are not to interfere, either to check or to help the process; either way you will be disturbing.

You just have to leave... and it seems to be dangerous when it happens for the first time. Just as you were afraid of madness you will be afraid, because you will look mad. Suddenly you are sticking your tongue out for no reason, moving your head for no reason, jumping, dancing, doing strange exercises that you have never imagined or thought of.

But just a forty minute latihan will give you a tremendous feeling of well-being. Nothing else can give you that well-being. And if you add one thing more which is not in latihan... That's why I had to create Dynamic Meditation - it is latihan plus something more, because in latihan you are lost completely.

I want you to remain a witness. Don't be a doer. Don't push any action, don't force anything, don't prevent anything. One thing which is missing in latihan - it is an Indonesian method... One thing is missing in it and that is the witness, because without the witness it can be dangerous.

Latihan has proved dangerous to many people. You may not be able to stop at forty minutes; the whirlwind of the energy may be too strong. You may get afraid that you cannot stop. You may get exhausted if you do it more than forty minutes. And if you get exhausted - it is great physical exercise - rather than giving you well-being, you can fall unconscious. And when you wake up you will not find yourself refreshed, you will find your whole body aching. You will find yourself feeling sick, feeling like you want to vomit; your whole stomach has been disturbed. You will not find yourself strengthened by it, but weakened. And sometimes people have gone mad doing it - they would not stop.

And the danger is... because you have not been a witness, it can start sometimes when you are not prepared to do it - on the street, in a shop, anywhere. You are not the master of the method because you were not the witness of it. There has not been anyone above it. So any situation can create it - anywhere, any place - and that will look really strange and awkward. If you want to prevent it that will look very awkward, and if you do it that will also look very awkward.

So I am not in favor of latihan alone. It is a good method, but witnessing has to be joined to it so you can stop when you want, you can start when you want, so it cannot happen anywhere, any time, on its own. And if witnessing is there, then the body is relaxing its tensions, throwing away its tensions.

You will be surprised that our bodies also collect tension: for example you wanted to hit someone and you did not hit him. Your body was ready, your muscles were ready, because your body and muscles just listen to your mind. Your mind wanted to hit the person, your hand was ready to hit the person, but your mind is always in a split. Your religions say: this is not good, this is violence; do not do it.

One part of your mind says, "This is criminal. You may unnecessarily get into trouble." Another part of the mind says, "You can hit the person, but the other person is stronger than you. He will not just stand there and take it and say goodbye to you and go home. He will jump upon you and you will be unnecessarily beaten, so why create such a situation?"

But your hand was ready. The energy has reached to your muscles, to your fingers, to your hand.

You stopped for any reason: nonviolence, fear, he is your superior, he is your boss - for any reason you stopped. But what will happen to the tension?

Your hand was ready; the energy cannot go back. There is no system for any energy that has become ready to be expressed to go back to its original source. It will remain in your wrist, it will remain in your fingers, it will remain in your hand. This kind of energy accumulates in different parts of your body - that's why latihan works. In latihan this kind of energy starts moving and you may start hitting an enemy who is not there.

But the witness is absolutely needed so that your body is relieved of all the collecting tensions and you will feel fresh, a beautiful feeling of well-being. Secondly those forty minutes of witnessing are even more important because you will see more easily that you are not the body; you are not controlling it, you are not doing anything, you are not preventing anything. You can see that it has nothing to do with you, it is going on its own. You can disidentify yourself more easily. That is the superiority of Dynamic Meditation over latihan.

Latihan can help somebody who has not much tension in his body, has not much repression in his mind, but now to find such people is very difficult. It is an old method. Now everybody is full of tensions. So there was a time, just twenty years ago... latihan became a worldwide movement and it appealed to everybody, but then slowly it has disappeared. It had to disappear because it created more problems than it solved. It made many more people insane than it helped.

The basic thing was missing for the simple reason that to the man who introduced latihan to the world it had happened naturally: just being alone in the forest one day, he found some movements were happening. And just being interested what these movements were and why they were happening, he allowed them to happen. But he had not many tensions in him. He was a simple man - and particularly men like that are always simple - he was a woodcutter.

Now a woodcutter never collects any violence in him. He is doing so much violence every day, cutting wood, that there is no possibility that his hands will ever collect any energy to hit anybody.

Woodcutters, fishermen, farmers - for them latihan may be perfectly good, because already their body is doing so much. So there is nothing left over. Within ten or fifteen minutes the latihan is over and they feel good. And their work is such that even if it happens on their farm or on the lake or in the forest... it is not a problem if it starts happening on its own.

But in the world, if it starts happening in your office and you suddenly jump on your table and start doing latihan the police will soon be called. Latihan will have you end up in jail, and you will not be able to explain to anybody that it is something spiritual. Nobody is going to understand your spirituality - it was sheer madness, you could have done anything. You are a dangerous man.

And the repressed energy is so much because in the modern civilization people are sitting the whole day in their chairs. Bodies were not made for that. Man is basically a hunter. His body was made to follow deer when they run. Have you seen deer running? They go like an arrow, and the hunters were able to follow them. The body was made to work hard - eight hours, twelve hours - and the question of tensions in the body was out of the question. Latihan would have been good for these people. Perhaps a few minutes and they would have felt very fresh, just like a shower - but not the modern man.

You are collecting so much that you may go on doing latihan for hours... and there is nothing to control you, because you have dropped yourself completely. You are not to check, you are not to do anything, so you will be almost in a state of having a fit. And you will continue for hours and then fall down, maybe in a coma, unconscious. You may wake up mad or you may wake up really good, but it is a chance and I don't want anybody to take such chances.

It is better to keep the witness which can always prevent you, which will allow you to be able to be always in control, with mastery, so it does not start happening just anywhere. Then it will give more benefit to your body - the whole benefit that latihan can give - and for yourself a forty minute witnessing is a tremendous benediction.

Latihan will be forgotten soon, but witnessing will remain with you forever and forever. It is your nature.

Question 3:

That I know without your saying it. But I would like the whole world to recognize it because in that very recognition there will be a transformation of the whole humanity.

You will be transformed, but the world is big. Millions of people are clinging to their ignorance, superstitions, stupidities, and they are clinging so hard that it seems difficult to detach them, to make them aware of their situation: that they are the source of their misery, of their darkness - that they have created a hell on the earth, and the same earth could have been a heaven. It can still be a heaven.

You love me, so you can understand me, but the world at large has closed its doors against me.

This is the same thing they have been doing all through history. To whoever was capable of bringing a change in them, of creating something new in them, they closed their doors. This has become almost an autonomous habit.

So when I asked who is going to recognize such a man as awakened, liberated, enlightened, and as even having gone beyond all these categories, my question was addressed to this world which has closed its doors to all the buddhas in every century, in every country. It is so difficult to open their doors.

You can see it happening. It has never happened on such a large scale because nobody has worked on such a large scale. Every day news is brought to me that two or three more countries have also passed a resolution that I cannot enter their country.

Last night Hasya was crying because we are running out of countries. I said, "Don't be worried. It is a good sign; it is a recognition. They have recognized one thing for certain: that if they allow this man in their country their whole structure is going to collapse."

But how long can they prevent me? I am preparing you all. They can prevent me, but they cannot prevent you. Soon I will be sending people who are ready to do my work. I will find ways.

Just today Vivek was crying and saying, "You say that existence takes care, but existence is not taking care." It has to be understood because that question may be in many people's minds.

Whenever we think such things we always have a demand, and if it is fulfilled then existence is taking care. Vivek gave examples where existence did not take care: "Socrates, Jesus, al-Hillaj Mansoor...

They were crucified and killed and existence did not take care. Soon you will be crucified. How can we believe that existence takes care?"

The problem is very significant. I would like to say to you: this is the way existence took care.

Socrates had no demand. And perhaps this was the best way for Socrates to die - because if he had died in another way his teaching would have died too. His teaching is far more important than his physical body. And that physical body was going to die any day; it was not going to last forever.

Perhaps it was going to die exactly the same day without poisoning. But the poisoning made one thing clear to the whole world - that his teaching will be preserved, that his teaching has been recognized as dangerous to all old rotten lies. And it is still contemporary.

Many great thinkers have happened after Socrates, but they are not still contemporary. Existence has taken care - but it takes care in its own way, not according to your desires, because if you have desires, demands, you are not trusting existence. Trust simply means that whatever is happening and is going to happen is perfectly right.

Existence is wiser than any individual, because an individual has a small consciousness. Even if he is enlightened he is still just a dewdrop in this vast ocean of existence. And what existence feels is right. If it feels that al-Hillaj Mansoor should be killed, it is right. If it feels that Jesus should be crucified, it is right.

Trust simply means that whatever happens we are with it, joyously, not reluctantly, not unwillingly - then you miss the whole point - but dancingly, with a song, with laughter, with love. Whatever happens is for the good.

Existence cannot go wrong.

If it does not fulfill our desires, that simply means our desires were wrong.