You are not to be somebody

Question 1:

The conscious mind represses memory contents into the unconscious. The unconscious mind has no interest as far as repression is concerned; in fact it wants to express everything so that it can be unburdened. The whole investment comes from the conscious mind because the conscious mind is in contact with the society, with education, with religion.

It is the conscious mind which learns what is right and what is wrong. The right has to be kept in the conscious and the wrong has to be thrown into the basement, underneath in the darkness of the unconscious. The conscious mind uses the unconscious mind only as a basement, and because it is dark, once things are repressed there, slowly the conscious mind tends to forget them. As time passes, the conscious mind can become completely certain that it has never repressed anything.

There is no way for the unconscious to release any of its repressed memory contents directly. It is closed. The only way is to bring them back to the conscious mind. But if the conscious mind remains of the same opinion as before - even through psychoanalysis you can fetch a few unconscious repressions and bring them back to the conscious mind - it is not going to help much, because the mind still remains with the same idea of what is wrong and what is right.

So for the moment, it may recognize what is wrong and may not repress it under the influence of the psychoanalyst, but this influence is not as deep as the social conditioning. Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow again the same repression will happen. That's why no psychoanalysis is ever completed.

It cannot be completed. You can bring something out today; tomorrow the mind goes on functioning again in the old way.

Psychoanalysis does not change the conscious mind. And if the conscious mind keeps the same opinion, it does not matter if you take out some content; it is released, but life brings so much every day, and the mind will again function in the old way: repress that which is bad.

The psychoanalyst says that there is nothing wrong with sex. Under his influence, and under the necessity of being cured of some neurosis, the person is willing to release it, but this release is not going to become such a strong force in him that he will not repress sexuality again. Tomorrow he will repress it again, and tomorrow psychoanalysis will be needed again. And this is an unending process.

Where psychoanalysis is missing is that it does not change the conscious mind's attitudes. It keeps the conscious mind as it is, and in fact if it tried to change the conscious mind, the society would not accept psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis would be in the same trouble as I am. It wouldn't be a respected profession; it would be rejected. And the church would do the same with psychoanalysts as it has done with witches; it would burn them alive.

The society, the church, the state, all are perfectly happy if you don't change the conscious mind.

Then go on doing anything you want to do - it is all play, because you are not going to destroy the old, the past, the traditional... its roots are in the conscious mind. The society has trained the conscious mind, and it protects its training.

The only way is to go a little higher than the conscious mind, where society has not conditioned anything, has not approached... which is absolutely pure and innocent. And this is a natural phenomenon, that the superconscious is more powerful than the conscious; and it is innocent, as innocent as the unconscious - with only one difference: the unconscious is dark, and the superconscious is alert, full of light. It can see things in its own light, it does not need any borrowed insights.

So the only possibility to create a new psychoanalysis is to bring the superconscious in. Then the conscious mind cannot do anything. The superconscious mind can relieve the conscious mind of its conditionings. It can allow the unconscious mind to release, through the conscious, all its repressed contents.

And the miracle is that the moment the unconscious mind has released all its contents, it loses darkness, it is no longer unconscious. Then you have a great energy which is conscious. Now three parts of your mind - unconscious, conscious and superconscious - are one. And the dominant factor will remain the superconscious. Now it is possible with this energy to penetrate into the collective unconscious. It will still be difficult, but it is possible.

The easier way would be to enter first into the collective conscious with this energy. Once the collective conscious opens its doors, the collective unconscious is very easy. Before the higher, the lower loses all power. As the master comes in, the servant immediately recognizes where he belongs.

With the collective unconscious and the collective conscious also joining, you have a really great power of alertness, of awareness, that you have never felt before. You can directly approach the cosmic unconscious; it is going to be difficult, but possible. My suggestion is, why unnecessarily go the hard way? That's why I say my way is the lazy man's way to enlightenment. When you can go more easily, without any conflict, then there is no need to create an unnecessary fight. Go first to the cosmic conscious; once you have reached there you have so much power that the cosmic unconscious will open its doors on its own. The very weight of your consciousness now is so much, the very energy is so much, that the cosmic unconscious cannot remain closed.

And all these levels have some kind of repressions. The collective unconscious also has repressions and they have gone deeper than the unconscious. When the conscious represses, it has the capacity to repress them to the unconscious, but the unconscious is very close; they can surface in any relaxed moment. That's why in dreams they start floating up. But the unconscious can suppress them to the collective unconscious; then even in dreams you will not be able to find them. Then some special methods are needed to fill your dreams with the collective unconscious. Carl Gustav Jung has worked on those methods, and in the right direction.

Ordinarily dreams won't help because dreams are a very superficially repressed part. The society tries on many levels, and there are a few things which just have to be repressed superficially. For example, your anger is repressed, but it is very superficially repressed - just skin-deep. Scratch a little bit, and it is there; there is no need for a dream.

Society cannot repress your anger more deeply because it needs your anger sometimes. In wartime your anger, your violence, will be needed. And for your own self-protection against a society which is barbarous, anger and violence will be needed. So society cannot repress such things; it can keep them just on the surface, so they can be called back without any difficulty.

But there are a few things which it represses to the collective unconscious, for example that you should not make love to your mother. Every boy wants to do it, and every girl wants to make love to her father. Society represses it so deeply and makes it such a great sin even to think of it, even to dream of it...

Ordinarily dreams are authentic and true, but as far as the contents of the collective unconscious are concerned, sometimes when you have a dream it changes it in a subtle way. For example you want to make love to your father - even in a dream you will make love to your uncle, not to your father. That much... because the uncle looks like the father.

The unconscious sometimes allows the collective unconscious... if something is forcing very hard to come up: for example, you should not make love to your own sister. Every society in the whole world has repressed it for thousands of years; it is no longer in the unconscious. So psychoanalysis cannot free you of it. Even if it surfaces to the dream world, it will come with a mask: it will not be your sister, it may be your sister's friend - someone who looks like your sister, but not really your sister.

And then there are the ultimate repressions which are part of the cosmic unconscious. For example, you have been told from your very birth that this is the only life that you have. Only in the East - because there people have reached to the cosmic superconscious - have they found in the cosmic unconscious repressed contents about past lives. It is the deepest repression. Even if sometimes it comes into your dreams, you cannot recognize that it is from your past life. It is just a dream, like any other dream.

Once in a while it happens that in a certain situation the cosmic conscious is also trying to relate to you. It wants to convey the message to you that you are living in a false world with false knowledge:

the reality is not that there is only one life. It is the deepest part of your mind. But it is very difficult because it has to pass the barriers of collective unconscious, of unconscious, and it will be distorted at every barrier. By the time it reaches to the dreaming stage you will not recognize it.

Gautam Buddha told many stories about his past lives. Mahavira has done the same. Those men are pioneers in opening the doors of a tremendous phenomenon which the whole of humanity has been denied.

And why is the society so interested in there being no past life and no future life, that you will simply go either to hell or to heaven? Why are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam so persistent? Their reason is that once you know that you have eternity available in both directions, then their religions will have to change dramatically. If you are an eternal being, then what will happen to creation? You were never created. What will happen to God, who is a creator? If there has never been a creation, there is no need of a creator. So much is at stake. If they open the doors, they are afraid their whole religion as it is will collapse.

Jainism and Buddhism could not believe in God and the reason is this. It is not a logical refutation of the hypothesis of God, it is an existential experience that our eternal being is a proof that we were never created - and if we were never created, existence was never created.

We have been here always.

Existence has been here always.

God becomes absolutely meaningless.

Any ideology that is centered basically on God will be very afraid of what Jainism and Buddhism are saying. They are saying each one of you is a god in your own right. Some gods are asleep, a few gods are awake - but that does not make a difference in the quality. One day ultimately all will become awake.

So there is no question of there being one god; there will be as many gods as there are beings - infinite will be the number, because not only man but animals, trees, and even rocks have a being.

And they are all slowly evolving at their own different pace.

Nobody has bothered to look into the psychology of Jainism and Buddhism, into why these two religions simply dropped the idea of God. It is not a philosophical refutation of God; they have never done that. But if eternity is available in the past, then your life gains a certain individuality: you have to function according to the experience that you have gained in thousands of lives. There is no other doctrine for you; you are carrying your doctrine within yourself. Both religions are not dogmatic, and whatever their discipline is, is based on an inner experience.

Mahavira and Buddha continually repeat, "Don't go on in a vicious circle. Just look into your past lives and see whether you have been doing this kind of thing always, for eternity. Do you have any mind or not? any intelligence or not?" Just being reminded that you have been after money for thousands of years and you have attained money in many lives and there was only frustration and nothing else; that you have been after power and you became powerful many times, but after reaching the last rung of the ladder you saw that there is nothing - that you have been befooled by the society, that ambition is nonsense.

You are not to be somebody.

You are what you are.

There is no question of climbing a ladder and you will be better.

Because these experiences of past lives will change the whole character, it is better to repress them. And when there is the future, eternity, you cannot make people afraid. And all three Western religions are based on fear, that if you miss the opportunity... And the opportunity is very small - most people are going to miss: in a life of seventy years I don't think anybody will be able to fulfill all the qualifications to reach heaven. There is not time enough. So they have fallen upon belief, faith, which does not need time: you simply believe. You have faith in Jesus Christ, and on the last day he will sort out his sheep and take them to paradise. The others will fall down into abysmal darkness for eternity.

It was easy to convert people by creating fear. It was easy to convert people by giving them greed - that if you are faithful, you will attain paradise with all its pleasures. But your personality remains the same - fake. No transformation comes to you through these things.

In the East, when they came to know that there is eternal time in the future, of course they could not create the same kind of hurry; they are very patient. Looking back, they learned not to repeat the same mistakes; looking ahead they are patient. There is no need to be tense and worried.

This is the psychology of why you find that even the poorest man in the East is utterly non-tense. He may be hungry, he may be dying, but he is not against anybody; he is not revengeful to the society which has brought him to this point. No, he is not losing anything: if he dies, he dies. The next life is there - the journey will continue, only the trains change. Death is a kind of change of trains.

The Eastern religions are non-convertive. They don't convert anybody; they don't go out of the way to convert somebody. If somebody feels like... tries to understand and wants to enter, even then they are not very enthusiastic. They say, "You understand it; you can do it remaining in your own religion." But if somebody is insistent he is allowed in.

Once the archbishop in Japan went to see Nan Sen, a very great master. He took the BIBLE with him and he read a few sentences from The Sermon on the Mount. He had read just a few when Nan In said, "That's enough; that man is just on the verge of enlightenment." In Buddhist terminology he said, "He is a bodhisattva. Whoever has written it - it doesn't matter who - he is a bodhisattva and there is no need to read anymore: these sentences are enough proof."

The archbishop misunderstood: he thought he was saying that Jesus is a buddha. He had said he is a bodhisattva. Bodhisattva means almost ready but the thing has not yet happened. He is coming near the boundary, he is feeling the fresh air; in his sentences you can see that he is not far away.

The archbishop had come to convert Nan In, and he said, "If he is also a buddha then why don't you preach the BIBLE?"

Nan In said, "You misunderstood me. I said bodhisattva, and bodhisattva means essentially he is a buddha, but not actually. And why should I preach...?" he asked. "I am a buddha; that's why I can see the poor guy is just close by... trying hard to reach. He may reach, may not reach, because people can go astray even when the goal is just one foot more, one step more. People can go astray:

they can take a wrong turn, they can stop, they can think they have arrived."

He said, "I can see the poor guy. He is doing well; don't be worried, he will reach. But why should I be bothered about him? I am not a bodhisattva. I used to be, but those days are past."

The archbishop was very hurt. First he was very happy that Nan In, a great master, accepts Jesus as a buddha, but that was his misunderstanding. And now he says, "The poor guy is trying, I can see that; those few sentences are enough. A buddha cannot say those sentences. Only one who is stumbling on the path, with all the possibilities - he may reach, he may not reach... But he is very close, so something reflects in his sentences, resounds in his sentences."

The East has a certain contentment, because there is eternity ahead. "If I am not able to reach now, I need not be miserable; life after life will be available." To repress these things into the cosmic unconscious is to create a certain kind of tension, hurry, greed, fear. It is spiritual exploitation. But if you reach to the cosmic conscious, you are capable of reaching to the cosmic unconscious, and immediately your whole being is suddenly lit with a light which is immeasurable.

Kabir sings, "As if thousands of suns have arisen in me... I cannot count them, the light is so dazzling." And he is saying it exactly right. He is not the only one; many have used the same simile of a thousand suns together suddenly having arisen. We have seen mornings, but to see that morning of a thousand suns arising within you is the greatest mystery.

Question 2:

Self-hypnosis takes a little longer time, but there is no need to repeat or say the images, because that becomes a disturbance. You simply let them pass by. You just watch and go on relaxing more and more. A moment will come that all those images are gone, and for a period of time that you have decided beforehand you will not be alert. In that gap you have entered into the unconscious.

Coming out of the unconscious, you will feel immensely refreshed.

So first don't repeat the images, so that you can enter into the unconscious. When you have become capable of entering into the unconscious for a period of time and you simply lose track of where you have been - you cannot give any account of it... That time is simply not recorded by your memory, because the memory system is in the conscious mind. The unconscious has no memory system, and the unconscious has no idea of the calendar, the time, the day, the date - nothing.

So first let that happen. And when you wake up, in the first moment when you feel that you are out of the unconscious, repeat three times, "Next time when I do the experiment, I will go faster into it, deeper into it."

When it becomes a small thing to you, no problem at all - you just relax and go into it - then you can do the second part. After coming out of the unconscious, the first thing you have to repeat is, "Now I will remember whatever I see in the unconscious. I will not be unconscious. I will be in the unconscious but a small consciousness will be with me, so I can see what is there." That will be the second part.

With that second part you can start releasing, because some part of the conscious enters into the unconscious. Then there is a way for memories that are repressed to be released. Then coming out of the unconscious you will not only feel refreshed, you will feel relieved, unburdened. Those subtle feelings have to be remembered. First you will only feel refreshed, as after a good night's sleep.

Second you feel unburdened. Something was on your chest; it was heavy, and now it is no longer there - or is less there. Then continue in that way, and go on repeating, "I will be more and more conscious, so more and more unconscious can be released."

And in the third stage you should repeat, "I should be completely conscious so that the barrier between consciousness and unconsciousness is broken." When you come out of it, then you will feel not only freshness, not only unburdened, but an absolute freedom - as if you had been chained, handcuffed, and they have been removed.

Self-hypnosis takes a little longer time, but it is good. You are totally your own master. But don't repeat the images, because repeating them, you will not fall into unconsciousness; just let them pass. Your whole effort right now should be how to move from the conscious to the unconscious through relaxing, through being silent, through just witnessing. And everything has to be done in a very soft way - even witnessing.

If you stare, that will not allow you to enter into the unconscious. Just see by the way; just as if you are sitting by the side of the road and by the way people are passing - you don't even care who is passing, whether he is a man or a woman. You just see them because you are looking that way, but no staring.

So you have done everything right - just the repeating was wrong. That you should not do. And then slowly, slowly, as I described in three parts, keep going.

Question 3:

There is no home, unless we find it in ourselves. But if you are close to a person who has found the home and you are open to the person, available, receptive, then you will also share the feeling that you are at home. After all, your master's home is your home too.

So what has been happening is perfectly right. You go far away; you miss the feeling of being at home and you feel that something is not right. It is perfectly as it should be. But it is only the beginning of a journey.

You feel at home when you are close to me. Let this feeling grow deeper; don't let it be superficial.

Allow it to sink to your very being; then wherever you are, I will be with you. Right now you have to be with me to make it possible for me to be with you wherever you are. Then you will not be missing; then everywhere will be home. The whole question is one of closeness, of trust, of love... so much that it is almost a melting, a merging.

The Sufi story is that Bayazid, one of the most important Sufi masters, used to say to his disciples, "You are very impatient. You don't know what happened to me when I was with my master. For three years he did not even look at me - as if I was not there. And he was right. Now I know I was not there. Physically I was sitting there, but my mind was wandering all over the world. And I was feeling very hurt. For him to ask anything about me was out of the question; he did not look at me.

After three years, one morning he looked at me for the first time. And I know that that was the first time I was there.

"Then three years passed again; he didn't say anything to me. I was hoping, desiring - now that he has looked and recognized that I am here, he will say something to me. But by and by that desire and that hope disappeared: that man seems to be strange; he will talk to others, even strangers, who keep coming the whole day, and I am sitting here the whole day, from morning till evening. After another three years he looked at me and smiled.

"Now I know why he had not been looking at me or smiling at me - it was because of my desire.

That was a barrier. It happened in the first moment I dropped the hope: he is a strange man; there is no point. I completely forgot the desire, the hope; it became just a habit to be there because I enjoyed it. His presence was enough.

"Three years passed again, and for the first time he looked at me and said, ?Bayazid, how are you?'

"And now I know why he asked that after twelve years. People ask each other, ?How are you?' when they meet - but not after twelve years! But he was right, because only that evening when he called me by my name ?Bayazid' and asked, ?How are you?' - that was the first time that I was not, only he was.

"These twelve years have been a constant melting, disappearing. And what a strange man: when I was, he never asked, and when I am not, he asks me, ?How are you?'

"The same day my master said, ?Now you are ready. You can go anywhere, you can spread the word. And because you are no more, I will be with you; you have vacated the place for me.' Since then he is speaking through me. Since then he is doing things through me. Since then I have no responsibility in the world, no problem in the world; he has taken everything on himself."

So what is happening to you is perfectly good. Just melt a little more, disappear a little more. Be absent a little more, so only I can be present in you. Then you will not miss me anywhere, and you will not feel that you are not at home. Wherever you are, you will find it is your home.

Question 4:

It is a totally different thing. The husband died, and the shock was such that the girl became paralyzed. There is no question of unconscious here; it is all conscious. The shock was conscious, and the paralysis was conscious. The paralysis simply happened because there was no point in living; there was nowhere to go. In a way the conscious mind felt, "This is death." She loved the man so much that without him she could not live. This flashed into her conscious mind, although she did not die - death is not so easy. But she became half dead; she became paralyzed.

But everything was conscious. Nothing was repressed. It was a conscious understanding that now life is meaningless, now this body is meaningless. She simply died as far as she was concerned.

The body continued to breathe, and the heart continued to beat - but that's another matter. The shock was tremendous, but it was all conscious.

Repression happens only when you feel that something is not right; then you throw it into the unconscious. But for her, what she was feeling was absolutely right. To live, to desire to live, would have been wrong. So there is no repression at all in it. That's why it was so easy for her to run out when the house caught on fire. It was simply a question of forgetting that she is paralyzed.

Now another shock - that of the house catching on fire. This was fresh; she simply forgot the old shock and that she cannot run because she is paralyzed.

There was no time: instantly, as everybody was running out of the house, she also ran out of the house. She recognized it only when people saw her running out of the house and said, "Hey, you have been paralyzed for years!" She simply, immediately, fell down on the ground and was again paralyzed.

But it was all conscious - not that she was pretending, not that she was posing. The first shock was older; the new shock was newer, fresher - and everybody was running. Just for a moment she forgot that first incident which had made her paralyzed. But the moment they reminded her, she immediately fell down paralyzed. But nothing has gone into the unconscious; the whole thing has remained in the conscious.

Psychoanalysis cannot help her - only a new love, a new meaning, can help her. Only a new desire to live can again bring her limbs back to life. That too will be in the conscious. All that she needs is something to live for, something that can give meaning to her life, something that can replace the old love and can bring a fresh breeze so that she would like to dance again and sing again. And everything will be different.

No psychoanalysis is needed. Psychoanalysis cannot do anything because in her dreams no clue will be found; the clue is apparent, clear. It is the depth of her love that has left her meaningless, and it has affected her body because mind has tremendous control over the body.

You can try it: sometimes just put your fingers this way, locked together, and just repeat, "Even if I want to open them, I cannot open them." Just for five minutes go on repeating, "Even if I want to open them, I cannot open them." And after five minutes you say, "I will count up to seven, and then I will try to open them and I know I cannot open them." And count up to seven, and after seven try to open them, and you will not be able to open them. At least thirty-three percent of the people will not be able to open them. The more they try, the more they will find it is impossible: the hands are completely locked.

And it is all conscious because there is no question of the unconscious. You will have to repeat the whole process; otherwise you cannot open them. They are locked. You will have to repeat, "I will count to seven and slowly it will be possible... I can open them."

Count to seven slowly, and then without making much effort slowly open them. If you make an effort, that will create trouble. You just slowly open them, and you will be surprised what the mind has done. And if this is possible, then you can create paralysis. It is simply the same process: "My legs will not be able to move."

You can do anything with the body - the mind has immense control over the body - but it is all conscious. There is nothing that has to do with the unconscious.

You try with your fingers, and whoever succeeds just tell me!