Nothing to lose

Question 1:

The system of George Gurdjieff is a little bit strange, and it is certainly different from all other, old approaches. His whole work was concentrated on creating an absolute feeling of distinction between the body and consciousness - not just as a philosophical idea but as an actual experience.

It happens to everybody in death, but most people die unconsciously. The consciousness separates completely from the body to go on its pilgrimage which is eternal. The journey of the body is very small, but it all happens in unconsciousness. It is a natural surgery.

A surgeon cannot remove a small piece of your body while you are conscious. He has to make you unconscious, then he can remove anything. He can kill you; you will never know about it. But if you are conscious, then the pain of a deep-rooted identity being broken is so terrible, so unbearable, that you won't allow him to do it. It has happened only once in India just at the beginning of this century.

The maharaja of Varanasi had to go through an operation to remove his appendix. The best surgeons from all over the world were attending him. But a great problem arose: he was not ready to take anything from which he loses his consciousness. His whole life's work was exactly like Gurdjieff's: he was trying to be conscious and to be separate from the body. And he said, "You can remove the appendix. I will not disturb you."

But surgeons cannot believe a patient. And such an operation... removing his appendix while he is conscious! He may jump off the table, he may do something; he may destroy not only the operation but even his life.

But on both sides there was a problem. If the operation was delayed there was a danger that the appendix would explode and then death was certain. And because he was no ordinary man, they could not force him. He was ready to die, but he was not ready to take any anesthesia which would make him unconscious.

Finally the surgeons decided, "There is no harm in taking a chance; let him remain awake. Anyway he is going to die. If we don't operate, he will die. But there is a possibility that perhaps he is right.

He may have attained that quality of consolidation such that his consciousness is separate from the body and he may be saved. So it is worth taking a chance. And he is a stubborn man, he won't listen; he has never listened to anyone."

And the decision had to be made within minutes; otherwise it would be out of the question. So finally they decided to operate on him.

He remained conscious. The operation was done, the appendix removed, and he remained as if nothing was happening. It was an unprecedented phenomenon in the whole history of medicine. It was a miracle.

Gurdjieff's whole work consisted of separating the consciousness from the body and making the consciousness such a solid force that the body cannot drag it, that the body becomes only a servant and is not a master. And he was trying many kinds of experiments.

For example, he used to drink alcohol. One cannot imagine such a quantity of alcohol... but he would remain perfectly conscious. No quantity of alcohol was able to make him unconscious. His disciples and he, they all would start drinking together, and within a few minutes all were flat on the ground - and he was still drinking.

He was trying in different ways to feel where he was still attached to the body. He would fast, he would not eat for many days - and this was not anything religious, it was purely scientific experimentation. He would eat too much, so much that the whole body would be saying, "Stop!"

and he would go on eating just to make the body completely understand that he was not under its control: he would do what he wanted, he was not going to listen to the body.

The car accident was the very culmination of his experiments. It is wrong to say it was an accident; it was not. He did it - purposely, consideredly, consciously. It looked like an accident to everybody.

He always used to drive very fast. All those who were sitting inside the car were just trembling: any moment the car was going to crash with something or other. But that day he was alone in the car, and he knowingly put it on full speed and crashed it into a big tree. He had multiple fractures - the car was completely finished. Doctors said it was unimaginable how he got out of it. He got out of it with all those fractures, blood all over his body, and he walked to the ashram - which was almost one and a half miles from there - and said, "Call some doctors to check what has happened in the body."

The doctors could not believe it when they saw the car. Nobody could remain alive after that; the accident was absolutely total. And with so many fractures, he was not unconscious; with so much blood gone, he was not unconscious. He managed to walk one and a half miles... which was absolutely miraculous. He was not supposed to be able to do it!

It was not an accident; he did it on purpose, and within three weeks he was perfectly okay. He wanted to know death before death. That was the purpose of the accident. He wanted to know that even if the body goes through such torture, it is not going to affect his consciousness. And he was immensely happy that he had succeeded, that he had attained what, in his terminology, is ?crystallization'. Now death meant nothing and now he could die consciously, watching what was happening.

The way he had chosen was a long and hard way. But he was a strange type of man: for him, it was neither long nor hard, for him it was perfectly natural and normal.

The car accident should be remembered as a voluntary entering into death. He had almost died, but just through his crystallized consciousness he managed not to die. He refused to die. It is a beautiful experiment, although outlandish.

What he tried to do with it can be done very easily by just becoming aware of your day-to-day activities: walking, sitting, eating, sleeping. They will not be so dramatic, but they will be more simple, more human, more sane.

And Gurdjieff is not a normal human being. He should be taken as an exception, not the rule.

Nobody should try to follow him because he will be in trouble. That kind of person cannot be followed, that kind of person is born. You can understand much from their life, but you should never try to imitate them.

And it is not only so with Gurdjieff. There have been many other people in the East, who have died unknown... A few are known, but even the normal Eastern humanity has tried to forget them because their experiments looked outrageous.

In India there are eighty-four siddhas. In the whole history of India there have been eighty-four people who could have talked with Gurdjieff in the same language, who tried all kinds of experiments.

Perhaps in a few experiments Gurdjieff may not have been able to compete with those people.

I have been to one of the monasteries of the siddhas. Their monasteries have gone underground.

Because of their experiments, the masses were so against them that they have burned their literature, killed their masters, tried to erase... saying that they are not part of the heritage of the East.

In Ladakh, in the Himalayas, there is a small monastery hidden deep in the mountains. They don't tell anybody that it belongs to the siddhas. There are a few others in India. But unless they trust you, they will not tell you about other monasteries. They are all linked.

In this monastery I saw one experiment that will help to explain Gurdjieff's experiment to you. They start drinking poison in small quantities, and slowly slowly they increase the quantity every day. The poison is so dangerous that just a single dose is enough to finish a person. But they come to a point where they can take any quantity of poison and it does not affect their consciousness at all. They remain absolutely normal. And they have absorbed so much poison that if they bite you you will die; they are full of poison.

And in the monastery they keep big cobra snakes, which have the most dangerous poison. Out of one hundred snakes there are only three percent which have real poison; ninety-seven are just hypocrites, they don't have real poison. But they can make you freak out if you see them because they look like real snakes. They are snakes, only one thing is missing: they don't have the poison.

The cobra is the best as far as poison is concerned. And these siddhas, as they are called, have come to a point where drinking poison from the outside, ordinary poison, is just meaningless. They make the cobra bite on their tongue, and the cobra turns upside down and pours all its poison in their mouth. And you will be surprised that the cobra dies! - because that man is so full of poison.

The cobra has only very little poison in a small bag attached in his mouth. That's why the Chinese eat snakes just as a vegetable. Just cut the head off and it is all vegetable!

There is a famous story about a master who was sitting with his disciples and a guest master. And as the cobra is a very delicious dish, cobra was prepared. But the master was suddenly shocked, seeing on the guest master's plate, the head of the cobra. So he took away the plate and called the cook, who was also a monk and proved to be not only a monk but a master.

The master was very angry, but before he could show his anger the cook said, "What is the matter?"

The master said, "Look what the matter is. You have cooked even the head of the cobra!"

The cook said, "Don't be worried." He took the head and gulped it down in front of everybody else.

And he said, "Now you can eat. Don't be worried; I have taken care of the head." There was utter silence and shock. But perhaps he was connected with a certain secret school of siddhas in China too, so there was no danger. He did not die.

These experiments are certainly outrageous, but they have proved that a man is capable of becoming so conscious that there is nothing that can make him unconscious again. He has achieved the ultimate in consciousness. That's the meaning of Gurdjieff's experiment. Don't call it an accident.

Question 2:

The last category, energy as awareness, is the closest to the very center of existence. Then thinking goes a little far away, then expression goes a little farther away. In turning back from expression to thinking, and from thinking to non-thinking and just pure awareness, you are closest to yourself and to existence itself.

In emotions, in thoughts, in expressions, it is the same energy, but it is moving towards the periphery, the circumference, not towards the center. The closer you are to the circumference, the farther you are away from yourself.

Drop backwards step by step. It is a journey to the source, and the source is all that you need to experience... because it is not only your source, it is the source of the stars and the moon and the sun. It is the source of all.

You can move towards the periphery. That's what people are doing. It is the same energy, just the direction is different - the energy going outward, going further away from your self. It is the same energy. Remember, I am not saying that it is different energy, but it is going further away from your self. You will come to know many things, but you will never know yourself.

Coming closer to yourself, it is the same energy. And to know oneself should be a singular goal for every intelligent person in the world; otherwise, you can know the whole world and yet remain ignorant about yourself. Your whole knowledge is futile. You may not know anything, but if you know yourself, your life will be of peace, love, silence, and of great ecstasy.

The choice is yours.

Question 3:

CAN YOU PLEASE TELL ME HOW TO DISCRIMINATE BETWEEN THESE TWO?

You already know it. Your question contains the discrimination. You know perfectly well when you are ignoring and when you are suppressing.

Ignoring simply means not paying attention to it. Something is there; let it be there. You are unconcerned this way or that, whether it should remain or go. You have no judgment. You have simply accepted it is there, and it is none of your business whether it should be there or not.

In suppressing you are taking an active part. You are wrestling with that energy, you are forcing it into the unconscious. You are trying not to be able to see it anywhere. You want to know that it is no longer there.

For example, anger is there. Just sit silently and watch that the anger is there. Let it remain. How long can it remain? Do you think it is something immortal, eternal? Just as it has come, it will be gone. You simply wait. You don't do anything about it, for or against. If you do something for, you are expressing it, and when you are expressing it you are getting into a mess because the other person may not be a meditator - most probably he will not be. He will also react with greater rage. Now you are in a vicious circle.

You are angry, you made the other angry, and you go on becoming angry with each other more and more. Sooner or later your anger will become almost a solid rock of hatred, violence, and while you are moving in this vicious circle you are losing consciousness. You may do something for which you will repent later on. You may murder, you may kill or at least you may attempt to. And after the episode is over you may wonder: "I had never thought that I could murder somebody!" But you created the energy, and energy can do anything. Energy is neutral: it can create, it can destroy; it can light your house, it can set your house on fire.

Ignoring means you are not doing anything about it. The anger is there. Just take note of it, that anger is there, just the way you see a tree is there outside. Do you have to do something about it?

A cloud is moving in the sky; do you have to do something about it? Anger is also a cloud moving on the screen of your mind. So watch; let it move.

And it is not a question of being on a razor's edge. Don't make small things into big things. This is a very small thing and can be done very simply; you just have to accept that it is there. Don't try to remove it, don't try to act upon it, and don't feel ashamed that you are angry. Even if you feel ashamed, you have started acting. Can't you be a non-doer?

Sadness is there, anger is there: just watch. And be ready for a surprise; if you can watch, and your watchfulness is uncontaminated, is pure - you are really not doing anything but simply looking - the anger will slowly pass by. The sadness will disappear, and you will be left with such a clean consciousness.

You were not so clean before because the possibility of anger was there. Now that possibility has become actual and it is gone with the anger. You are far cleaner. You were not so silent, so peaceful; now you are. Sadness had taken up some energy. It would not have allowed you a deep sense of happiness, it would have clouded your consciousness.

And all the other negative emotions are eating your energy. They are all there because you have repressed them, and they are repressed so you don't let them out. You have closed the door and you have put them in the basement; they cannot escape. Even if they want to escape, you won't let them out. And they will disturb your whole life. In the night they will become nightmares, ugly dreams. In the day they will affect your actions.

And there is always a possibility that some emotion may become too big to control. You have been repressing and repressing and repressing, and the cloud is becoming bigger. And a point comes when you cannot control it anymore. Then something happens, which the world will see as you doing, but only those who know can see you are not doing it: you are under a very great impulsive force. You are behaving like a robot; you are helpless.

You are murdering, you are raping, you are doing something ugly, but in fact you are not doing it.

You have collected all that material which has become so powerful that now it can force you to do things - things in spite of you, things against you. Even while you are doing it you know it is not right. You know, "I should not be doing it. Why am I doing it?" but still you will do it.

Many murderers in many courts of the world have said very honestly that they have not murdered.

But the court cannot believe it, the law cannot believe it. I can believe it - because the courts and the law are all primitive. They have not come to maturity. They are not yet psychologically based.

They are simply the revenge of the society - put into beautiful words, but it is really nothing but the same thing the man has done... he has murdered, now the society wants to murder him.

He was alone. But the society has the law, the court, the police, the jail. And it will go through a long ritual to prove to itself, "We are not murdering the man, we are simply trying to prevent crime." But this is not the fact. If you want to prevent crime, then your law should be based more on psychology, psychoanalysis, meditation. Then you will be able to see that no man has ever done anything wrong, just your whole society is wrong.

The society is wrong because it teaches people to repress, and when they repress there comes a point when what they have repressed starts overflowing and they are simply helpless. They are victims. All your criminals are victims, and all your judges and all your politicians and priests are criminals. But this has been going on for centuries so it has become accepted.

Don't do anything, just ignore... and it is not difficult, it is a very simple phenomenon. For example, this plant is here. Can't you ignore it? Do you have to do something about it? There is no need to do anything about it.

Just take a look at the contents of your mind from a distance, just a little distance, so that you can see, "This is anger, this is sadness, this is anguish, this is anxiety, this is worry," and so on and so forth. Let them be there. "I am unconcerned. I am not going to do anything for or against." And they will start disappearing.

And if you can learn a simple thing, of letting these things disappear from the conscious, you will have such a clarity of consciousness... your vision will be so penetrating, your insight so far-reaching that not only will it change your individuality, it will allow the repressed contents in the unconscious to surface. Seeing that you have learned not to repress, things are moving out. They want to go out into the world.

Nobody wants to live in your basement in the darkness. Seeing that you are allowing things to move out, they need not wait for the night when you are asleep; they will start coming up. You will see them coming up from the basement of your being and moving out from your consciousness. Slowly your unconscious will be empty.

And this is the miracle, the magic: if the unconscious is empty, the wall between the conscious and unconscious collapses. It all becomes consciousness. First you had only one-tenth of your mind conscious; now you have all ten parts together conscious. You are ten times more conscious. And the process can go deeper; it can release the collective unconscious. The key is the same. It can release the cosmic unconscious.

And if you can clean all the unconscious parts below your consciousness, you will have such a beautiful awareness that to enter into the superconscious will be as easy as a bird taking wing.

It is your open sky. It is just that you were so loaded... so much weight that you could not fly. Now there is no weight. You are so light that gravitation loses its force over your mind; you can fly to the superconscious, to the collective conscious, to the cosmic conscious.

Godliness is within your reach. You just have to release the devils you have been keeping in your consciousness, forcing them into unconsciousness. Release those devils, and godliness is within your reach. And both things can happen together: as the lower part is cleaned, the upper world becomes available to you. And remember, again I say, it is a simple process.

Question 4:

I know Sri Chinmoy and his teachings, and I know his so-called master, Shivananda. He has written hundreds of books. He would write one book in one night, and in every one of his books you will find a hilarious picture: he is standing and by his side is a pile of books higher than him - to show how many books he has written. And all are rubbish. His so-called master, Shivananda, has also done the same.

And this stupidity of physical torture is so ancient that it is taken for granted as being spirituality.

What I am teaching to you is so new, so fresh, that the politicians, the religious leaders, simply cannot believe... People have been doing idiotic things for so long.

This man has done somersaults for only twelve miles; in India there are people who are doing it for thousands of miles. The farther you do it, the closer you reach to God. They go to their holy pilgrimage doing somersaults. And not only are they reaching closer to God, wherever they pass, people are bringing food and sweets and presents to them because they have become spiritual.

For five hundred miles a man somersaults the whole day. In the night he stops, in the morning he begins again. It will take him months to reach a place which you could have reached within an hour.

But he will become a saint. When he comes back he will not be considered an ordinary man, he will be worshipped.

In Varanasi you will find many people lying down on a bed of nails on the bank of the Ganges. Their only spirituality is that they can lie on a bed of nails. And they are worshipped - they have thousands of followers - and nobody ever asks the question, "What has spirituality to do with lying down on nails?"

And it is not a great thing. You can do it - because on your back not all of the skin is sensitive to pain. You can tell somebody to take a needle and try it on a few points. Just tell them to go on pricking your back, and you have to say where it feels painful and where it doesn't feel painful. And you will be surprised that there are hundreds of points where you cannot feel the needle; there is no sensitive nerve there. So those beds of nails are made in a certain way to fit that man.

It is an ancient art; only very few people know how to make them. First they will find out the whole chart of your back - where you feel pain, where you don't. Where you feel pain will be left empty; where you don't, the nail will be there. So they are not in any pain or any torture. But they have become saints.

People are doing all kinds of things which have no relationship to inner growth, but all societies will support them because they are not dangerous. In fact they are very supportive to a dying society, to a dying tradition: they keep the old ideas alive. And the masses are influenced by them. That way the masses remain centuries old; and that's what all the people who are in power want, that the masses should not become intelligent. They should not be able to think, they should remain retarded. All these people are helpful, and because they are helpful the politicians pay respect to them, the society pays respect to them.

Sri Chinmoy has been given a special hall in the U.N. building to teach his disciples, particularly the foreign diplomats and ambassadors who come for meetings in the U.N. and have become his disciples. And he has such stupid things to teach: "Do somersaults for miles, and the farther you go, the better."

America is very happy with Sri Chinmoy because he is not talking against anything upon which the American society or religion or state is based. In fact, he is taking people's attention away from the real problems of life.

Karl Marx was right on this point, that religions have been nothing but opium to the people. All societies need to insure that nobody looks at their roots because they are rotten, that nobody looks into their closet because every closet has many skeletons. So there need to be people who help the masses to take their attention away from reality. And the best way is to keep them retarded; the best way is to keep them conditioned by the old, by the ancient.

People like Sri Chinmoy are agents of the dead. These are the guards of graveyards, protectors of all kinds of phoniness. And people become interested when leaders of the society, when great diplomats, ambassadors, presidents, prime ministers, go to listen to him - someone who has nothing to teach. But they go just so that the masses are impressed, so that the masses continue to go there.

The whole effort is somehow not to allow people to know in what a rotten society they are living.

They cannot allow me because I am against retardedness and I am against all rottenness and I am against all stupidities. Unless I can prove scientifically to you a certain relationship between two things, I will not teach it to you.

Now what can somersaults do to make you spiritual? In fact, they will make you more stupid. If you had any intelligence before, that may also be lost. And once you get the taste... a twelve-mile-long somersault gives you so much publicity and so many people come to see you as spiritual, you may go on for a longer one. You have found a beautiful profession! You are nobody's employee, and yet without doing anything you go on becoming more and more spiritual. Soon this man will start teaching others.

I have heard that one man's wife was very dangerous - as usual. One day he came home late. He was a hen-pecked husband - just the common lot; I have never come across any other kind. He used to come at exactly the time his wife had told him, but that day his friends got drunk and he also got drunk. And when you are drunk, you forget that you are a hen-pecked husband: he became a lion! And he came home in the middle of the night, knocked loudly on the door and said, "Open the door!"

The wife could not believe it. This was not her husband. He used to come in like a rat - he's now roaring like a lion in the middle of the night! But she was not a woman to be defeated. She took a knife, opened the door and cut off the nose of the man. As his nose was cut off he came back to consciousness, all alcohol gone - his wife in front of him, his nose gone, he became sober.

He said, "But what have you done?"

She said, "You are asking me what I have done. I could have killed you! This is nothing. Next time you do something... You were roaring like a lion!"

But now it was a problem: what to do with his nose gone? The whole night the man thought about what he was going to say, and before his wife was awake, he escaped from the house. He went to another town and sat under a tree with closed eyes, very silently in the lotus posture.

A few people gathered. They said, "Seems to be a new saint. But what happened to the poor man's nose?"

Somebody said, "We should ask him." More people gathered, and they asked, "What happened to your nose?"

He said, "It is a private secret. This is the whole secret of my spirituality. I cannot talk about it to curious mobs. Those who are sincere seekers should come in the night."

One sincere seeker appeared in the night. He said, "I am ready. Whatever has to be done I am ready; I am a sincere seeker."

The man said, "Then get ready" - and he cut off the nose of the man.

The other man said, "What are you doing? You have cut off my nose! I have come here to find truth!"

The first man said, "Wait. This is the way to find the truth. You have found it."

"I found nothing!"

"If you say that - that you have found nothing - people will say that you are an idiot: you lost your nose and you have found nothing! Sit silently and think quietly, and tell people that you have found truth. That's the only way to save your face; otherwise it is up to you. I have also not found truth, but what else to do?"

The other man thought about it and he said, "It seems logical: what else to do?"

The first man said, "Go and spread the message." So the man went into the town and he said, "That man has a great secret!"

"But," they said, "what happened to your nose?"

He said, "That is the secret. Those who are sincere seekers should not miss this chance, because in our poor city never has such a great man come. Just within seconds I found the truth!"

A few more seekers came. Every night seekers came, and by and by almost half of the city were without noses, and everybody was talking about the beauties of truth and the ecstasies of truth.

Finally the king became interested. He said, "So many people have found truth, and I am their king:

it doesn't look right that I should remain ignorant."

His prime minister tried to tell him, "Don't go to that man."

But he wouldn't listen. He said, "Nose or no nose, truth has to be attained. And who knows about tomorrow? If I die tomorrow, you will burn me - my whole body and my nose too. And just by cutting off the nose... he does something and a man realizes the truth."

It was very difficult for the prime minister, but he was a very sharp and shrewd man. He said, "You wait. Just give me three days, and if I cannot find out what is really happening, then you can go; but three days you give to me."

And he went that night with a few policemen and caught hold of the man. The man said, "What are you doing? I'm a spiritual man, head of all those who have found the truth!"

But they wouldn't listen. They brought him to the prime minister's house, gave him a good beating, and told him, "Tell the truth! Otherwise... our prime minister is dangerous, he simply takes out both eyes."

He thought, "My God! I have lost my nose, but somehow I am trying to manage my life, and things are going perfectly well. Now if two eyes are also gone then it will be very difficult to convince people that to find truth you have to lose both eyes and your nose. I don't think I will be able to; even to convince people about the nose is so difficult. But if he is such a dangerous man it is better to tell the truth."

So he told the truth: "The reality is that my wife cut my nose off and now there is no other way for me."

The prime minister said, "That's perfectly okay. Now you come with me to the king and tell the whole story to the king."

The king could not believe it. The prime minister said, "Now, if you had gone you would have also found truth. Once your nose was cut off, then there was no way other than finding the truth! This man should be put into jail, and everybody who has found the truth should be brought to the court, given a good beating, and made to tell the reality about what they have found. Nobody has found anything."

They asked the people, "Then why were you saying you have found the truth?"

The people said, "What else to do? When the nose is gone, to say to people that the nose is gone and we have been fools and truth has not been found... they will simply laugh at us. There is no point in it. Right now they are worshipping us - even our own wives are worshipping us!"

Man has lived with all kinds of stupid ideas, and the society has never objected to these people.

On the other hand, whenever there is somebody who really takes you to a clear vision, the vested interests become afraid. That man is a danger to their existence, to their power: that man should be finished.

So all bogus idiots are having a good day, but they have been having a good day for centuries. Kings, emperors, have been worshipping them for qualities which have nothing to do with spirituality.

But a man like me is dangerous because I am not talking any nonsense. I don't tolerate any nonsense. I am simply bringing out all the skeletons that they are hiding. I am trying to make the youth of the world aware of the deception that the older generation has been playing on them, forcing on them - conditioning them, making their minds in such a way that they cannot discover by themselves that what they are worshipping is meaningless; that their religions are nothing but all kinds of superstitions; that their gods are false and their prayers are all lies. But to say it is to risk your life.

I am ready to risk my life because whatever I had to get out of my life, I have got. I have nothing to lose. But I am determined to expose all hypocrisies that are prevalent all over the world.