The Great Palace of Consciousness

The first question:

Question 1:

Deva Ashoka, the very desire to be free keeps one unfree. Every desire is a chain, a bondage, an imprisonment. No desire can ever be fulfilled. By dropping the desire, its fulfillment happens.

Now, the greatest desire in the world is that of inner transformation. The desire for money is nothing, the desire for more power, prestige, is nothing. The greatest desire is the so-called spiritual desire.

And once you are caught in that desire you will remain miserable forever.

Transformation is possible, but not by desiring it. Transformation is possible only by relaxing into that which is, whatsoever is. Unconditionally accepting yourself brings transformation.

We will have to go deeper into this phenomenon, because this is not only Ashoka's question, it is everybody's.

Man is in misery, man is in anguish. Hence everybody is searching for a state of bliss, a state of unity with existence. Man feels alienated, uprooted. Hence the desire is natural - to get roots into existence again, to be green again, to be blossoming again.

These few things have to be meditated upon. First: to establish that perfect unity, consciousness must first unify itself in terms of all its personal aspects by rejecting nothing which is experientially real in itself. This is the first thing to be understood.

You feel fear. Now the fear is an existential reality, an experiential reality; it is there. You can reject it: by rejecting it you will be repressing it. By repressing it you will create a wound in your being.

You feel cowardice. You can manage not to look at it. But it is a fact, a reality; just by not looking at it, it is not going to disappear. You are behaving like an ostrich: seeing the enemy, seeing the danger of death, the ostrich hides its head in the sand. But by hiding his head in the sand, by closing his eyes, the enemy does not disappear. In fact the ostrich becomes more vulnerable to the enemy.

Thinking that now there is no enemy because nobody is seen, thinking that seeing the enemy is what gives it existence, now the ostrich is relieved of the fear. But he is more in danger: the enemy is more powerful because it has not been noticed.

Something can be done if the ostrich does not hide its head.

And that's what people are doing.You see cowardice, you try not to notice it. But it is a fact. By not noticing it, you have created a part of your being which you will not be able to see. You have divided yourself into segments. Now one day there is something else, anger, and you don't want to accept that there is anger in you. You stop looking at it. Then some other day there is greed, and so on and so forth. And whatsoever you stop looking at remains. But now you go on shrinking. Many more parts of your being become separate from you - you have separated them on your own. And the more fragmentary you are, the more miserable you will be.

The first step towards bliss is to be one. That's what Hakim Sanai is insisting again and again: to be one is so blissful, to be many is to be in hell. So whatsoever is experientially real, accept it. You cannot do anything by denying it. By denying it you create the problem, and the problem becomes more complex - it was simple.

You feel a coward - so what? So "I am a coward." Just see the point: if you can accept cowardice you have already become brave. Only a brave person can accept the fact of being a coward, no coward can do that. You are already on the way to transformation. So the first thing: nothing that is experienced as a fact has to be denied reality.

Second: in order to accomplish that, consciousness must first disidentify from all fixed conceptual selves with which it has identified itself, because if it holds to being some fixed and enduring conceptual self, there will be no tolerance for those experiential realities which are in contradiction with this fixed, conceptual, official self.

If you have a certain idea of how you should be, then you cannot accept the experiential truths of your being. If you have the idea that you have to be a brave man, that bravery is a value, then it is difficult to accept your cowardice. If you have the idea that you have to be a Buddha-like person, compassionate, absolutely compassionate, then you cannot accept your anger. It is the ideal that creates the problem.

If you don't have any ideals then there is no problem at all. You are a coward, so you are a coward.

And because there is no ideal of being a brave man, you don't condemn the fact - you don't reject it, you don't repress it, you don't throw it into the basement of your being so that there is no need for you ever to look at it.

But anything that you throw into your unconscious will go on functioning from there, it will go on creating problems for you. It is like a disease that you have pushed inwards. It was coming to the surface, and from the surface there was a possibility that it might have disappeared. If a wound comes to the surface it is good, it is on the way to being healed, because it is only on the surface that it will be in contact with fresh air and the sun and can be healed. If you force it inwards, if you don't allow it to come to the surface, then it is going to become a cancer. Even a small disease, repressed, can become a dangerous disease. No disease should ever be repressed.

But the repression is natural if you have some ideal. Any ideal will do. If you have the ideal of being a celibate, a BRAHMACHARI, then sex becomes the problem. You can't watch it. If you don't have the ideal of becoming a BRAHMACHARI, a celibate, then sex is not rejected. Then there is no division between you and your sexuality. Then there is communion, and that communion brings joy.

Self-communion is the base of all joy.

So the second thing to remember is: don't carry ideals. Just think, if you have an ideal that you have to have three eyes, a problem immediately arises because you have only two eyes and the ideal says you have to have three, if you don't have three something is missing. Now you hanker for the third. You have created an impossible problem for yourself; it will not be solved. At the most you can paint a third eye on your forehead. But the painted third eye is just a painted third eye; it is hypocrisy.

Ideals create hypocrisy in people. And now look at the absurdity: people have the ideal of not being hypocrites - and hypocrisy comes through ideals. If all ideals disappear there will be no hypocrisy.

How can hypocrisy exist? It is the shadow of the ideal. The bigger the ideal, the bigger the hypocrisy.

Hence in India you will find more hypocrites than anywhere in the world, because India has lived for centuries with great ideals. Strange, berserk ideals...

For example, a Jaina MUNI cannot be satisfied unless he is capable, like the mythological Mahavira, of eating only once in a while. It is said that in twelve years Mahavira ate for only one year. That means once after twelve days: one day eating and twelve days fasting. Now, if this is your ideal you are going to remain in great misery. If this is not your ideal then there is no problem.

See it: the problem arises from the ideal. Now, a Christian monk is not puzzled by this, he has no problem with it. But the Jaina monk is continuously suffering because he cannot attain to the ideal; he falls short. If you are really pure, this is the Jaina idea, your body will not perspire. Now you have a stupid idea there. The body will continue to perspire, and you will continue to suffer.

The more ideals you have, the more will be your suffering and the more will be your hypocrisy, because if you cannot fulfill the ideals then at least you have to pretend. That's how hypocrisy comes in.

The world will not be hypocritical at all if we accept experiential facts without any judgment.

Whatsoever is, is. If we live with the is-ness of existence and not with the oughts and the shoulds, how can hypocrisy arise?

Just the other day, somebody asked, "Beloved Master, are you not a hypocrite? Because you live comfortably, you live in a beautiful house, you move in a beautiful car, you live like a king."

Now, he does not understand what the word 'hypocrisy' means. This is my whole teaching - to live as beautifully as possible. I am not a hypocrite. In fact I am living the way I am teaching. If I was teaching to live in poverty, and I was living in a palace, that would be hypocrisy. But I am not teaching to live in poverty; poverty is not my goal.

You can go and tell Morarji Desai that he is a hypocrite. Or tell Sanjiva Reddy, the president of this country, "You are a hypocrite." You cannot say that to me. You can say to the president, Sanjiva Reddy, "You are a hypocrite, because you teach Gandhiism and you still go on eating meat. You talk about nonviolence and you go on eating meat! This is hypocrisy - pure hypocrisy, unpolluted hypocrisy!"

But you cannot say that to Jesus. He eats meat, but he has never propounded vegetarianism; he has never talked about that kind of nonviolence. You cannot tell him that he is a hypocrite. Jesus drinks win;e you cannot tell him that he is a hypocrite, unless he teaches otherwise.

My whole approach towards life is that of total acceptance, is that of celebration, not of renunciation.

How can you tell me that I am a hypocrite? I may be the only person on this earth who is not a hypocrite, because I have no ideals.

The first necessity for the hypocrite is to have ideals. I have none; I am a nonidealist. I live naturally - and it is very natural to live in comfort and convenience. It is simply stupid, if comfort is available, not to live in it. If it is not available, that is another thing. Then whatsoever is available, live in it comfortably, manage to live in it comfortably.

I have lived in many kinds of situations but I have always lived comfortably. When I was a student I used to walk to the university, four miles every day. But I loved it. I walked those four miles every day with great comfort; I enjoyed it. When I was a teacher I used to go on a bicycle to the university; I enjoyed that too.

Whatsoever has been the situation, whether I have had only a bicycle or a Mercedes Benz, it doesn't make any difference: I have lived in comfort. Comfort is an attitude of mind, it is an approach towards life. I have lived in very very poor houses. When I became a teacher in a university, I started living in one single room with no windows, no ventilation. The rent was just twenty rupees per month. But I loved it, I enjoyed it, it was not a problem at all.

Whatsoever the moment allows, I have squeezed the moment to its totality. I have drunk fully of the moment, I have never repented and I have never desired for something else; if something else started happening I enjoyed that too.

You can never say to me that I am a hypocrite. It is impossible for me to be a hypocrite, because I have no ideals to fulfill, no oughts, no shoulds. The 'is' is all that is, and I live in it.

So the second thing to remember, Ashoka, is: don't have certain ideas about yourself. You must be carrying many ideas of how you should be. Hence the problem arises: CAN COWARDICE AND HYPOCRISY ALSO BE BEAUTIFUL?

Now if you have the idea to be a brave man then it looks ugly to be a coward. But cowardice is a fact, and the ideal is just an ideal, a fantasy of the mind.

Sacrifice fantasies to reality, drop all ideals, and then life starts becoming integrated. All the rejected fragments start coming back home, the repressed starts surfacing. For the first time you start feeling a kind of togetherness; you are no longer falling apart.

For example, if I hold myself to be a "kind" person, I will not be able to permit myself to recognize and accept angry feelings when they arise in consciousness, because kind people just don't get angry.

Therefore, to bring about a personal unity in consciousness, I must first take my stand as being no thing fixed or enduring, but hold myself to be only the moment-to-moment experiential reality which arises in consciousness.

Thus some moments I am angry, then some moments I am sad, then some moments I am jealous, then some moments I am joyful. Moment-to-moment, whatsoever happens is accepted. Then you become one. And this oneness is the most fundamental thing to understand.

The master must help the disciple to confront and integrate with those rejected experiential aspects of self which he actually IS at any given moment instead of trying to help him actualize its compensatory opposite or what the disciple feels that he OUGHT to be, or that which he is trying to protect, enhance or affirm about himself.

My purpose here, my function here, is to take all ideals away from you. You have come here with ideals; you would like me to enhance your ideals, you would like me to support you and help you to become that which you want to become. That may be your motivation in coming here, but that is not my work here.

My work is just the opposite: to help you to accept that which is already the case and to forget all about your fantasies. I want you to become more realistic and pragmatic. I want to give you roots in the earth, and you are hankering for the sky and you have completely forgotten the earth.

Yes, the sky is also available, but only to those whose roots have gone deep into the earth. If a tree wants to rise high in the sky and whisper with the clouds and play with the winds and have some communion with the stars, then the tree will have to send deeper and deeper roots into the earth.

The first thing is sending roots into the earth, the second thing happens of its own accord. The deeper the roots go, the higher the tree goes; there is no need to do anything else.

My effort here is to send your roots deep into the soil of truth. And the truth is that which you are.

Then suddenly things will start happening: you will start rising. The ideals that you have always tried for and have never been able to achieve will start happening of their own accord.

If a person can accept his reality as it is, in that very acceptance all tension disappears. Anguish, anxiety, despair - they all simply evaporate. And when there is no anxiety, no tension, no fragmentariness, no division, no schizophrenia then suddenly there is joy, then suddenly there is love, then suddenly there is compassion. These are not ideals, these are very natural phenomena.

All that is needed is to remove the ideals, because those ideals are functioning as blocks. The more idealistic a person is, the more blocked he is.

As peculiar and contradictory as it may sound, peace is to be found only in the midst of pain and never by struggling against or running away from what is considered to be the negative or painful.

Yes, cowardice gives you pain, fear gives you pain, anger gives you pain - these are negative emotions. But peace can be attained only by accepting and absorbing the painful, not by rejecting it. By rejecting it you will become smaller and smaller and smaller, and you will have less and less power. And you will be in a constant inner war, a civil war, in which one hand will fight with the other, in which you will simply dissipate your energy.

A very fundamental thing to be remembered: only communion with psychological pain opens the door for its liberation and transcendence - only communion with psychological pain. All that is painful has to be accepted; a dialogue has to be created with it. It is you. There is no other way to go beyond it, the only way is to absorb it.

And it has tremendous potential. Anger is energy, fear is energy, so is cowardice. All that happens to you has great momentum, a great quantity of energy hidden in it. Once you accept it, that energy becomes yours. You become stronger, you become wider, you start becoming more spacious. You have a bigger inner world then.

Only a yielding letting-be or full acceptance is its ending. Psychological pain ends only by accepting it in its totality. Psychological pain does not exist just because of the mere presence alone of some stimulus or reality termed "painful". Rather, the pain is produced by the interpretation of the fact or reality which produces the tendency to avoid or resist that fact.

Try to understand it: psychological pain is your own creation. Cowardice is not painful - only your idea that cowardice is wrong, your interpretation that cowardice should not be there.

Ashoka must be saying to himself, "Ashoka, you, a coward? No. How can you be a coward? You are a brave man."

You have a certain ego: that certain ego goes on condemning cowardice. It is because of that condemnation and interpretation that pain arises. And the cowardice is there, so it becomes a wound. You cannot accept it, and you cannot destroy it by rejecting it. Nothing is destroyed by being rejected; sooner or later you will have to cope with it. Again and again it will erupt, again and again it will disrupt your peace.

Only when the mind recoils from a fact or reality is there pain. You are recoiling from the facts of cowardice, fear, anger and sadness. Don't recoil. Recoiling from a fact creates pain.

Psychological pain is part and parcel of the process of escape and resistance. Pain is not inherent in any feeling but arises only after the intent to reject it arises. The moment you decide to reject something pain arises.

Watch it inside yourself, become a lab of great experimentation. Just see: you are feeling fear. It is dark and you are alone, and for miles there is nobody. You are lost in a jungle, sitting under a tree on a dark night, and lions are roaring - and fear is there.

Now there are two possibilities. One is, reject it. Hold yourself tight so you don't start trembling because of the fear. Then the fear becomes a painful thing: it is there and it hurts. Even when you are holding yourself very tight, it is there and it hurts.

The second is, enjoy it. Tremble. Let it become a meditation. It is natural - lions are roaring, the night is dark, danger is so close by, death can happen any moment. Enjoy it! Let the trembling become a dance. Once you accept it then trembling is a dance. Cooperate with the trembling and you will be surprised: if you cooperate with the trembling, if you BECOME the trembling, all pain disappears.

In fact if you tremble, instead of pain you will find a great upsurge of energy arising in you. That's exactly what the body wanted to do. Why in fear does trembling arise? Trembling is a chemical process: it releases energy, it prepares you to fight or take flight. It gives you a great sudden upsurge - it is an emergency measure. When you start trembling you start warming up.

That's why when it is cold you tremble. There is no fear, so why do you tremble when it is cold? The body automatically trembles in the cold so that it becomes warm. It is a kind of natural exercise of the body. The inner tissues start trembling to become warmed up so they can face the cold.

Now, if you repress trembling when you are feeling cold it will become painful. That is exactly the case when you are in fear, the body is trying to prepare: it is releasing chemicals into the blood, it is preparing you to face some danger. Maybe you will need to have a fight, or maybe you will have to run away and take flight. Both will need energy.

See the beauty of fear, see the alchemical work of fear. It is simply trying to prepare you for the situation so that you can accept the challenge. But rather than accepting the challenge, rather than understanding fear, you start rejecting it. You say, "Ashoka, you are such a great man, a great sannyasin, and you are trembling? Remember what Osho used to say, that there is no death, that the soul is immortal. An immortal soul, and trembling? Remember what Krishna said: 'Death cannot destroy you, fire cannot burn you, weapons cannot penetrate you.' Remember! And don't tremble:

hold yourself in control!"

Now you are creating a contradiction. Your natural process is that of fear, and you are bringing in an unnatural process to contradict fear. You are bringing ideals to interfere in the natural process.

There will be pain, because there will be conflict.

Don't bother whether the soul is immortal or not. Right now the truth is that fear is there. Listen to this moment, and let this moment take you totally, allow this moment to possess you. And then there is no pain. Then the fear is a subtle dance of energies in you. And it prepares you - it is a friend, it is not your enemy. But your interpretations go on doing something wrong to you.

Essentially, the feeling of psychological pain is created by the attempt to separate consciousness from itself, the splitting of the unity of consciousness into the duality of a conceptual observing entity which tries to run away from distort or overpower the rejected feeling, and the observed feeling itself. If consciousness in duality is the cause of the pain, then only consciousness in unity can be the elimination of the pain. In unity is the ending of pain.

This split that you create between the feeling - the fear, the anger - and yourself makes you become two. You become the observer and the observed. You say, "I am here, the observer; and there is pain, the observed. And I am not the pain." Now this duality creates pain.

You are not the observed, you are not the observer, you are both. You are the observer and the observed, both.

Don't say, "I am feeling fear"; that is a wrong way of saying it. Don't say, "I am afraid"; that too is a wrong way of saying it. Simply say, "I am fear. In this moment I am fear." Don't create any division.

When you say, "I am feeling fear" you are keeping yourself separate from the feeling. You are there somewhere far away, and the feeling is around you. This is the basic disunity. Say, "I am fear." And watch - that's actually the case! When the fear is there, you ARE fear.

It is not that sometimes you feel love. When love is really there, you are love. And when anger is there, you are anger.

This is what Krishnamurti means when he says again and again, "The observer is the observed."

The seer is the seen, and the experiencer is the experience. Don't create this division of subject and object. This is the root cause of all misery, of all split.

Thus, one must not judge good or bad, one must not label or have any kind of desire or goal in regard to what arises in consciousness. There must be no sense of avoidance, resistance, condemnation, justification, distortion or attachment in regard to what arises but only a choiceless awareness, and self-communion is established.

A choiceless awareness: that is the ultimate key to open the innermost mystery of your being. Don't say it is good, don't say it is bad. When you say something is good, attachment arises, attraction arises. When you say something is bad, repulsion arises. Fear is fear, neither good nor bad. Don't evaluate, just let it be. Let it be so.

When without condemnation or justification you are there, then in that choiceless awareness all psychological pain simply evaporates like dewdrops in the early morning sun. And left behind is a pure space, left behind is virgin space.

This is the One, the Tao, or you can call it God. This One that is left behind when all pain disappears, when you are not divided in any way, when the observer has become the observed, this is the experience of God, samadhi, or whatever you will.

And in this state there is no self as such, because there is no observer-controller-judger. One is only that which arises and changes from moment to moment. Some moments it may be elation, other moments it may be sadness, tenderness, destructiveness, fear, loneliness, etcetera.

One should not say, "I am sad," or "I have sadness," but "I AM sadness" - because the first two statements imply a self separate from that which is. In reality there is no other self to whom the particular feeling is happening. There is only the feeling itself.

Meditate over it: there is only the feeling itself.

There is no Ashoka feeling fear; Ashoka is fear in a certain moment. In certain other moments Ashoka is not fear, but Ashoka is not separate from the moment, from that which is arising.

There is only the feeling itself. Thus, nothing can be done about what is experientially arising in the moment. There is nobody else to do anything.

This communion with pain does not bring greater pain but actually yields liberation and joy. In fact, consciousness in communion with ANYTHING, not just psychological pain of course, yields peace and joy. Be the truth and the truth will set you free.

I will repeat the question again: CAN COWARDICE AND HYPOCRISY ALSO BE BEAUTIFUL?

Everything that is, is beautiful - even ugliness.

CAN I ACCEPT EVEN MY COWARDICE, MY HYPOCRISY, MY MISERLINESS, AND A TENDENCY TOWARDS PRIVACY THAT YOU YOURSELF HAVE CALLED 'IDIOCY'?

Whatsoever is, is, whether you accept it or not. Your acceptance or rejection makes no difference at all. That which is, is. If you accept it you have joy arising in you, if you reject it you have pain.

But the reality still remains the same. You may have pain, psychological pain: that is your creation because you were not able to accept and absorb something that was arising. You rejected truth; in rejection you became a prisoner. The truth liberates, but you rejected it. Hence you are in chains.

Reject truth, and you will remain more and more imprisoned.

The truth remains; it does not matter whether you reject it or accept it. It does not change the fact, it changes your psychological reality. And there are two possibilities: either pain or joy, either dis-ease or health. If you reject it there will be dis-ease, discomfort, because you are cutting a chunk of your being away from you; it will leave wounds and scars on you. If you accept, there will be celebration and health and wholeness.

AND IF I ACCEPT SUCH TENDENCIES, ALL OF WHICH TEND TO BOTTLE ME UP, HOW WILL I GET FREE?

They are not bottling you up, it is your interpretation, Ashoka. No truth ever binds anybody; that is not the quality of truth. But when you reject it, in your rejection you become closed and you ARE bottled up. In that rejection you become a cripple, you become paralyzed.

AND IF I ACCEPT SUCH TENDENCIES," YOU SAY, "ALL OF WHICH TEND TO BOTTLE ME UP, HOW WILL I GET FREE?

That very idea of getting free is again an ideal. Freedom is not an ideal, it is a by-product of accepting whosoever you are. Freedom is a by-product; it is not a goal of your endeavor and effort. It is not arrived at by great effort, it happens when you are relaxed.

And how can you be relaxed if you cannot accept your cowardice? If you cannot accept your fear, if you cannot accept your love, if you cannot accept your sadness, how can you be relaxed?

Why can't people relax? What is the basic cause of their constant chronic tension? This is the basic cause. Down the centuries, your so-called religions have been teaching you to reject and reject.

They have been teaching you to renounce, they have been teaching you that all is wrong: you have to change this, you have to change that, only then will you be acceptable to God. They have created so much rejection that what to say about God? You are not even acceptable to yourself, you are not acceptable to the people you live with: how can you be accepted by God?

God already accepts you, that's why you are in existence. Otherwise you would not be here.

This is my basic teaching to you: God already accepts you. You have not to earn it, you are already worthy. Relax, enjoy the way God has made you. If he has put cowardice in you, Ashoka, then there must be something in it. Trust and accept it. And what is wrong in being a coward? And what is wrong in being afraid? Only idiots don't feel fear, imbeciles are not afraid.

If a snake comes on the path you will jump immediately. Only the imbecile, the stupid, the idiot, will not be afraid of the snake. But if you are intelligent, the more intelligent you are, the faster you will jump. This is part of intelligence! This is perfectly good; this helps your life, it protects you.

But stupid ideologies have been given to man. and even now you are here, you go on persisting in your old patterns. You don't listen to me, to what I am saying. I am saying: Whatsoever you are, unconditionally accept it, and acceptance is the key to transformation.

I am not saying: accept yourself to be transformed - otherwise you have not accepted yourself at all, because deep down the desire is for transformation. You say, "Okay, if this brings transformation then I will accept myself." But this is not acceptance; you have missed the whole point. You are still desiring transformation. That's why in the end you ask: HOW WILL I GET FREE IF I ACCEPT...?

You are asking me, "Can you guarantee that if I accept myself, it will bring freedom?"

If I guarantee it to you, and you accept yourself because of the guarantee, where is the acceptance?

You are using acceptance as a means - the goal is to be transformed, to be free, to attain to God, to nirvana. Where is the acceptance?

Acceptance has to be unconditional, for no reason at all, without any motivation. Only then does it free you. It brings tremendous joy, it brings great freedom, but the freedom does not come as an end. Acceptance itself is another name for freedom. If you have accepted truly, if you have understood what I mean by acceptance, there is freedom - immediately, instantly.

It is not that first you accept yourself, practice acceptance, and then one day there will be freedom - no. Accept yourself, and there is freedom, because psychological pain disappears immediately.

Try it. What I am saying is experimental. You can do it, it is not a question of believing me. You have been fighting with your fear - accept it, and see what happens. Just sit silently and accept it, and say, "I have fear, so I AM fear." In that very meditative state, "I am fear," freedom starts descending.

When the acceptance is total, freedom has arrived.

The second question:

Question 2:

There must be something in you that you are really suspicious of. Unless you can trust yourself you cannot trust your wife or anybody else. If you mistrust yourself you will project your mistrust on people who are around you. The thief thinks that everybody is a thief. It is natural, because he knows himself, and that is the only way of his knowing others.

What you think about others is basically a declaration of what you think about yourself. You know that if your wife is not constantly watching you, you will do something. You will start flirting with some women - you know it. Hence the fear: "If I am in the office, who knows? - the wife may be flirting with the neighbors." You know perfectly well what you are doing with the secretary; that is creating the problem.

That's why you say, "Though I know my wife is innocent, still I am suspicious." You will remain suspicious till something in you drops. It is not a question about the wife; all questions when they arise are really about you.

A traveling man went on the road for a short trip, but kept staying away. Every few weeks he'd send his wife a wire saying, "Can't come home, still buying." Every wire was the same, "Can't come home, still buying." This went on for three or four months, when his wife finally sent him a wire that said, "Better come home, I'm selling what you're buying!"

That's how things happen in life.

The hungover couple talked about the wild party they held the night before.

"Darling, this is rather embarrassing," said the husband, "but was it you I made love to in the library last night?"

His wife looked at him reflectively and asked, "About what time?"

The basic mistrust must be about yourself. You are suspicious of yourself: maybe you are repressing too much? And whenever somebody represses something in him he starts projecting it on others.

It almost always happens that the man who has a murderous instinct in him is always afraid that others are thinking to murder him; he becomes paranoid.

The person who is very violent is always afraid: "Other people are very violent and I have to be constantly on guard."

Because people don't trust themselves, hence they can't trust anybody else - wife, friend, father, mother, son, daughter. People are living in chronic suspicion. But the basic cause is that you have not been able to accept your facticity.

What I was just saying to Ashoka, I would like you to ponder over. Accept whatsoever you are: in that very acceptance you will accept others too. And yes, there is a possibility, if you sometimes become interested in seeing a woman, nothing is impossible, your wife may become interested in some man. But if you understand yourself and accept yourself you will accept your wife too.

If you can accept this, that "Sometimes I become attracted to a woman" then nothing is wrong, then your wife can also become attracted to some man. But if you reject it in your own being, if you condemn it in your own being, you will condemn it in others' beings too.

My criterion of a saint is one who is able to forgive all and everybody, because he knows himself. But your saints are incapable of forgiving. Your saints go on inventing more and more technologically perfect hells. Why? They have not yet been able to accept themselves.

They tell the story about the young good-looking attorney who claimed there never was a woman with whom he couldn't make it. One day the office hired a very good-looking secretary that for weeks every male tried to make and failed in the attempt.

The young attorney boasted that if enough money was bet, he would succeed with her. When they questioned how he would prove it, he said he would record the entire action on his tape-recorder which he would hide under the bed.

When all the betting was made, he proceeded to make a date with her and by the end of the evening, not only was she in his apartment but eventually in his bed - whereupon he reached under and turned on the tape.

In a few moments, in support of his reputation, the secretary was in a state of violent lovemaking, and at its height cried out loudly, Keep kissing it honey, keep kissing it!"

Whereupon the attorney in his best courtroom manner leaned under the bed and dictated into the recorder, "Please let the record reflect, the lady indicated her left breast."

The mind of an attorney - constantly suspicious. Now he must have become afraid: "Keep kissing it honey, keep kissing it!" What? The record will not say anything and there may be suspicions.

But this is the mind of everybody. The mind is cunning, calculating, suspicious. The mind lives constantly in a kind of distrust, in doubt. The mind's whole climate is that of doubt.

So it is not a question of how to trust your wife, it is a question of how to TRUST. Mind lives in the climate of doubt, it feeds on doubt. And unless you know how to put the mind off when it is not needed and descend into the heart, you will not know how to trust.

The climate of the heart is trust. Mind cannot trust; mind is incapable of trusting. And we have all become hung-up in the head. Hence, even though we say that we trust, we don't trust. We insist that we trust, but our very insistence shows that we don't trust. We want to trust, we pretend to trust, we want the other to BELIEVE that we trust, be we don't trust. The head is impotent as far as trust is concerned. The head is the mechanism for doubt; the head is constantly a question-mark.

You will have to know how to come down to the heart, which has been bypassed by the society.

The society does not teach you the ways of the heart, it only teaches you the ways of the mind. It teaches you mathematics and logic and it teaches you science, etcetera, etcetera - but they are all the cultivation of doubt.

Science has grown through doubt, doubt has been a blessing as far as science is concerned. But as science has grown more and more, man has shrunk. Humanity has disappeared, love has almost become a myth. Love is no more a reality on the earth. How CAN it be a reality? The heart itself has stopped beating.

Even when you love, you only THINK that you love; it comes through the head. And the head is not the faculty for love.

Start meditating. Start putting off the constant chattering of the head. Slowly slowly, the mind becomes quiet. Get into things where the mind is not needed - for example, dancing. Dance, and dance to abandon, because in dance the mind is not needed. You can lose yourself in a dance. In losing yourself in a dance, the heart will start functioning again.

Drown yourself in music. And slowly slowly you will see that there is a totally different world of the heart. And in the heart there is always trust. The heart does not know how to doubt, just as the mind does not know how to trust.

The third question:

Question 3:

Man is not what he appears to be, he is far bigger. We know about man only in a very partial way.

You will have to understand these five categories: the first is the conscious mind. The conscious mind is a very tiny mind, just a little bit of you which can reason, think, rationalize, go through logical processes and is a little bit alert. It is a very tiny part of you, and we know man only from that tiny part.

We have looked into the great palace of human consciousness from a very tiny hole, maybe the keyhole. And whatsoever we have seen through the keyhole is not the whole reality.

Man is vast. Just hidden behind the conscious mind there is the unconscious mind. Its discovery is the great contribution of Sigmund Freud to humanity. The unconscious mind is nine times bigger than the conscious mind. It contains all your instincts, it contains all your inner functionings, body mechanisms, emotions and feelings. Except for logic, it contains all of you.

But that is deep in darkness. Freud has defined psychoanalysis as an effort to make the unconscious conscious, so that your consciousness becomes a little bigger. More light has to penetrate into the darkness of the unconscious, because the unconscious is nine times more powerful. Whatsoever you decide through the conscious will not be able to materialize unless it reaches to the unconscious.

That's why hypnosis goes far deeper than any other methodology. Hypnosis works directly on the unconscious. You may try for years to drop a certain habit, and you will not be able to, because you will try only from the conscious mind. And the conscious is very small; it has no power before the unconscious. And the unconscious has no way to know what the conscious is thinking.

But the hypnotist can help you to drop the habit within seconds, or at the most in a few sessions, because he will put the conscious to sleep and will start communicating directly with the unconscious. And if the unconscious agrees to drop the habit, then the habit is dropped. Then there is no way for the conscious to carry it any longer.

All realities change from the unconscious. But the unconscious itself is only a part. There is, still hidden behind, a collective unconscious which contains your whole past. And that is not a small thing. Because you have once been a lion and you have once been a snake and you have once been a tree.

The Eastern idea of passing through eighty-four million births is significant. It may not be exactly accurate but it is significant, it is meaningful. Eighty-four million births before you became a man, and all those births and their experiences are contained in the collective unconscious. It is almost the whole of history, from the very beginning - if there had ever been a beginning.

It goes to Karl Gustav Jung's credit that he brought the idea of the collective unconscious and introduced it to the world of psychology.

But these are only parts, even the collective unconscious is only a part. And Western psychology still has not started moving upwards. This is going downwards; the conscious, below it the unconscious, below that the collective unconscious.

Above the conscious there is the superconscious, nine times bigger than the conscious. Above the conscious, parallel to the unconscious, there is the superconscious. And still above the superconscious there is the cosmic mind - you can call it the divine mind or the God mind or Tao.

That means the ultimate in consciousness: all has become conscious and you are as big as the cosmos.

If you go deeper than the conscious you will be entering into darkness. If you go above the conscious you will be entering into light.

So there are five minds in you. And you are aware only of the small tiny part, the conscious mind.

Now, from the unconscious and from the collective unconscious many thing go on arising. Many things happen in your dreams, and sometimes you feel very puzzled about what kind of dream it was. You cannot make any head or tail of it, you cannot figure out what it was, the whole thing seems to be so absurd. It was from the collective unconscious that something arose and surfaced into the unconscious, and you had the dream.

But sometimes things start filtering from the collective unconscious into the conscious too. Then they are very bizarre, they are perversions. They only LOOK like perversions - they are not really perversions, they are as natural as anything else, but they are very abnormal.

FOR EXAMPLE, you ask, SADOMASOCHISM.

There are people who enjoy torturing others, and there are people who enjoy torturing themselves, and particularly in relation to lovemaking. There are people who would like to torture the beloved person, or people who would like to be tortured by the beloved.

Sadism comes from the name of de Sade. He was incapable of getting into sexual arousal unless he beat the woman. So he used to carry a box with him, just like a doctor's box, with all the instruments of torture in it. And he was a very rich man, he was a duke, so all the women of his territory were available to him. Wherever he would see some beautiful woman he would simply give her a gesture and she had to come to his torture-chambers - they cannot be called love-chambers. And he had all kinds of instruments there in his chamber. The woman would immediately be made naked and he would beat her and do things to her which were very perverted. Unless blood started flowing from her body he would not get sexually aroused.

Now, this is perversion. From where is it coming? It is coming from the deep deep collective unconscious, from those eighty-four million lives. Because there are animals....

For example, there is a certain African spider who is eaten by the woman while he is making love.

He is just on top of the woman, the lady spider, and he is in great ecstasy, total orgasm, and abandoned, he has completely forgotten everything, and the lady starts eating him. And he has not yet even finished his... By the time orgasm is finished, the spider is also finished! So he can make love only once. It is not perversion there, it is natural.

Just like de Sade, there was Masoch, from whose name comes the word 'masochism'. He was just the reverse of de Sade. He would force the woman to hit him, to beat him, to whip him. And unless he was whipped and beaten he would not have any sexual arousal.

Now, these people are suffering from the collective unconscious. Something is coming from the collecting unconscious. Something goes on surfacing into their conscious; they can't understand from where it comes. These are not criminals, they need treatment.

De Sade was forced to live in jail his whole life. That is ugly, that is unjust. He needed some deep hypnotic treatment. We should start feeling compassion for these people; they are sufferers from their past.

These things happen to everybody, but they come only to the unconscious in dreams. These other people are freaks; there is some passage between their unconscious and conscious open so easily that things start floating into their conscious and then they are possessed by them. They cannot avoid it.

And if you look into the habits of millions of animals you will be surprised. Do you know elephants make love in a certain way? The courtship continues for years. Now, if somebody has been an elephant in a past life, and the memory is there, somewhere in the collective unconscious, then the courtship can continue for years, on and on.

The woman elephant makes love only twice in a decade. Now, you will find many women who have that idea: twice in a decade. But it is natural as far as elephants are concerned, because the woman elephant will have to carry the pregnancy for twenty-two months. And it is some pregnancy! Twenty- two months carrying an elephant in your womb... She becomes so afraid of the whole nonsense of lovemaking that for two or three years no playboy can persuade her to go into that trip again. Only after three, four, or five years, when the memory fades, can she be persuaded. So the courtship has to be very long.

And all these things are there inside the collective unconscious. And one thing may not be unnatural in a certain animal but will become unnatural in man. That's how perversions arise.

Do you know? There are such strange practices among animals that if you read about them you will be thrilled! You will not be able to believe what is going on in nature.

You know the common bedbug? The lady bedbug has no genitalia - NO genitalia. Each time the male bedbug has to make love to the woman he has to drill a hole. She has no entry. Now this is dangerous! But nature had given indications: there is a line on the belly of the lady bedbug, because if you drill anywhere else you will kill her! She can be drilled only on a particular line. You can turn over any lady bedbug and know whether she is a virgin or not, or how many times she has been made love to, because those holes will be there, scars will be there.

But if this type of thing surfaces in somebody's mind, if he starts drilling a hole into a woman, it will be a perversion. But this is how it is. There is a great collective unconscious of millions and millions of lives, and all kinds of experiences are stored there. Buddhists call it ALAYA VIGYAN: the storehouse of consciousness. It is infinite.

You ask me: WHAT IS SEXUAL PERVERSION?

It is something surfacing from the collective unconscious.

AND WHY DO STRANGE SEXUAL HABITS EVOLVE, AND FROM WHERE?

They evolve from the collective unconscious. And a few people have openings; those openings are freak openings. It is as if a child is born with six fingers, or a child is born blind - these are exceptions, so are perverted people.

Just the other night, I was reading a book on Satya Sai Baba, the name of the book is LORD OF THE AIR. It is written by people who have lived with Satya Sai Baba for many years; it is based on their personal experience. They say that he is not only a homosexual, he is also a hermaphrodite.

A hermaphrodite is a person who has the genitalia of both male and female.

Now, there are animals in which it is not a perversion, it is natural. There are earthworms which have both genitalia; you cannot decide wither one is male or female because each has both genitalia. So when earthworms make love it is a double-way affair. One functions as a male to the other, and also as a female; each makes love to the other in both the ways. The meeting has two points, so it is difficult to decide who is male. Both are male and both are female. So A makes love as a male to B's female parts, and B makes love as a male to A's female parts. It is a circular love affair, and both will become pregnant.

Nothing is wrong with earthworms, but if it is so with Satya Sai Baba then there is difficulty. And the way he walks, it seems these people must be right. Rarely it happens, but there is nothing to condemn - what can Satya Sai Baba do about it? There are a few children born with both genitalia, very rarely. But they live a very fearful life, afraid, hiding themselves; nobody should know about it.

Man is not yet so enlightened, otherwise there is nothing wrong in it. In fact Satya Sai Baba is far richer than anybody else, because he can enjoy love both the ways, as a man and as a woman.

Perversions can be in the body, perversions can be in the mind, but they both arise from the deep collective unconscious. And they both can be settled, but for that a tremendously deep hypnosis will be needed. No ordinary hypnosis will do; ordinary hypnosis can lead you only to the unconscious.

To go to the collective unconscious a very deep hypnosis will be needed.

In the new commune I am going to give you methods to go to the deep collective unconscious.

But it is a very dangerous trip and great arrangements are needed before somebody can enter the collective unconscious, because so much is there, millions of experiences and they will suddenly explode.

A commune is needed. A closed commune is needed, the closed Garden is needed - because it is not a question for the ordinary masses to know about; they will not be able to understand. And that's why if something reaches to the masses, some naked photographs reach to the masses, they are immediately against me. They cannot understand what is happening here.

We are trying to penetrate into the deepest layers of consciousness. But this is an alchemical lab; the ordinary masses will not be able to understand it. And if they do understand, they will understand it according to themselves.

I am waiting for the new commune: much more has to be done. But then things will become much more bizarre and you will need a field, an energy-field, that surrounds you like a soothing energy, that keeps you anchored with me so that you are not lost into the collective unconscious. Only then can the doors of the collective unconscious be opened.

They CAN be opened, and it is tremendously helpful if they can be opened. If you can know your whole past, you will be freed from it. Knowing something is to be free from it: knowing the truth liberates. If you can be allowed to go into your past, to the very end, you will be finished with everything. Because millions of times you have accumulated wealth, and each time you have failed.

If you can remember your past lives and you can see that millions of times you have been playing the same stupid game, to no point at all, then how can you go on playing it in this life again? It will be impossible.

If you can see all your sexual experiences, it will be so ridiculous to still go on playing the same game.

But for that, a totally secluded atmosphere and a great trust, and absolute trust, will be needed.

Hence I am trying to create a commune which will be a world apart, and where we can go into the deepest possible experiments that have ever been done.

And once you have gone backwards, you become capable of going upwards and forwards, because the process is the same. Backwards, it is easier because it is a known path; you have forgotten about it but it is still a known path, you can go backwards.

Going upwards to superconsciousness and the cosmic mind is an unknown path. If you become capable of going backwards you will have learned how to penetrate the dangerous realms of your being. And then the next step higher can be taken: you can move from the conscious the the superconscious.

It is the superconscious in which all the experiences of angels and DEVATAS and gods and kundalini and chakras and lotuses opening happen; they are all contained in the superconscious. It is a beautiful world, it is psychedelic. Beyond that is the world of the cosmic mind where all experiences disappear - neither ugly nor beautiful, where the experiencer is left alone. Total, absolute aloneness.

And that is the ultimate goal of consciousness, that is where evolution is moving towards.

But before you can take that quantum leap into the world that is above you, you will have to get deeper into the roots, into the dark roots of your unconscious and your past experiences.

Buddha and Mahavira both tried; they did great experiments. Those experiments are called JATI SMARAN: remembering the past. And the past is vast - if you go on remembering it, it goes on revealing secrets.

The man who has gone into his whole past will come back absolutely healthy and psychologically whole. He will not have any perversions. His whole life will be transformed just by going there and coming back. Then all that he can ever imagine doing, he had done many times, and it was all futile and it was all in vain.

That very understanding, and all starts changing. And when you are free from the past you are capable of moving into the present: you can dive deep into the now and the here.

After some months of marriage, a girl wrote the following letter to her doctor.

Dear Doctor, Since I got married, my husband seems to have gone mad. He is after me at breakfast, coffee break, lunch time, even tea time - and then all night, every few hours. Is there anything I can do or give to help him? I await your kind reply.

P.S. Please excuse my shaky handwriting.

So the husband is still after her. "There are many animals which make love that way. Now, something surfacing from those animal worlds...

A woman went to her doctor to complain that her husband's sexual feelings for her seemed to have declined.

The doctor, being an old friend of the family, gave the woman some pills to slip into her husband's tea so that at least the man wouldn't get a complex about being a bit underpowered.

Two days later, the woman was back in the doctor's surgery.

"What happened?" asked the doctor. "Did the pills work?"

"Fantastic!" replied the woman. "I was so eager to see their effects on my husband that I tipped three of them into a cup of coffee, and within seconds of drinking it he got up, kicked the table and pulled me down on the floor and ravished me."

"Oh!" said the doctor. "I hope you weren't too surprised."

"Surprised?" said the woman. "I'll never be able to set foot in that restaurant again!"

That's how animals make love. You can lose your consciousness and you can behave like an animal.

Perversion means you are losing your consciousness and behaving like something below human beings. That capacity is man's: he can fall below the animals and he can rise above the gods. That is the glory of man and his misery too. That is the agony of man and his ecstasy too.

Man is the only animal in the world, the only being, who is capable of reaching to the deepest hell and rising to the highest heaven.

Perversion simply means you are falling backwards. Conversion means you are moving upwards, falling upwards. And if one is not converted towards the upward journey one remains perverted.

Maybe your perversion is not very strange and you can adjust to it. Maybe it is a normal perversion, everybody has it; then it is okay, it can be tolerated. But a few people have exceptional perversions, private perversions, their own, and they cannot adjust to the society.

But remember, there are only two kinds of people: the perverted and the converted. There are only two categories: the perverted and the converted.

Be the converted: start rising above humanity. But the only way to rise above humanity is to accept all the animality that still exists in you and lurks in you.

One who is capable of accepting all that he is, becomes capable of receiving that which he can become.