The Fourth Question:
No, Patanjali's YOGA SUTRAS are absolutely pure. No one has ever interpolated anything in them. There are reasons it cannot be done.
First, Patanjali's YOGA SUTRAS is not a popular scripture. It is not a gita, it is not a ramayana, it is not a Bible. Common masses have never been interested in it. When common masses are interested in something, they make it impure. It is bound to be so because then the scripture has to be dragged down to their level. Patanjali's YOGA SUTRAS has remained only for experts. Only a few chosen ones will get interested in them. Everybody is not going to be interested. And if, by chance, you happen accidentally to have Patanjali's YOGA SUTRAS, you can read only a few pages and then you will throw it away. It is not for you. It is not a story, it is not a drama, it is not an allegory. It is a simple, scientific treatise - only for few.
And the way it has been written is such that those who are not ready for it will turn their back automatically. A similar case has happened in this century with Gurdjieff. For thirty years continuously, he was preparing one book. A man of the caliber of Gurdjieff can do that work in three days. Even three days may be more than enough.
Lao Tzu had done it: in three days the whole TAO TEH CHING was written. Gurdjieff can do it in three days; there is no difficulty. But for thirty years he was writing his first book. And what he was doing? He will write one chapter, and then he will allow it to be read before his disciples. Disciples will be listening to the chapter, and he will be looking to the disciples. If they can understand, he will change it. That was the condition: if they can understand, he will change it. If he sees that they are following it, then it is wrong. Continuously, for thirty years, every chapter was read a thousand and one times, and every time he was watching. When the book became completely impossible, that no one can read and understand it...
Even a very intelligent person will have to read it at least seven times; then glimpses of meaning will start coming. And that too will be just glimpses. If he wants to penetrate more, then he will have to practice whatsoever he has said, and through practice meanings will become clear. And it will take at least one's whole life to come to the total understanding what he has written.
This type of book cannot be interpolated. Really, his first book, it is said that very few people have read it completely. It is difficult - one thousand pages. So when the first edition was published, he published it with a condition: only hundred pages, the introductory part, were cut. All other pages were not cut; they were uncut. Only hundred pages were cut, and a note was given on the book that "If you can read the first hundred pages and still think to read ahead, then cut other pages. Otherwise, return the book to the publisher and take your money back."
It is said that there are very few people alive who have read the whole book completely. It is written in such a way that you will get fed up. Reading twenty, twenty-five pages, it is enough; and this man seems to be mad.
These are sutras, Patanjali's sutras. Everything has been condensed in a seed. Somebody was asking me that, "Patanjali has condensed sutras..." Just the other day somebody came and asked me, "... and you speak so much on those sutras." I have to, because he has made a tree a seed, and I have to make the seed again a tree.
Each sutra is condensed, totally condensed. You cannot do anything in it, and no one is interested to. Just to keep the book always pure, this was one of the methods. And for many thousands of years the book was not written, it was just memorized by disciples; it was given from one to other just as a memory. It was not written, so nobody can do anything to it. It was a sacred memory, preserved. And even when the book was written, it was written in such a way that if you put something in it, it will be found immediately.
Unless a person of the caliber of Patanjali tries that, you cannot do it. Just think, if you had one Einstein formula, what can you do to it? If you do anything, it will be immediately caught. Unless a mind like Einstein tries to play with it, you cannot do anything. The formula is complete - nothing can be added; nothing can be deleted. In itself, it is a unit. Whatsoever you do, you will be caught.
These are seed formulas. If you add a single word, anyone who is working on the path of yoga will immediately come to know that this is wrong.
I will tell you one anecdote.
It happened just in this [last] century. One of the greatest poets of India, Rabindranath Tagore, translated his own book, GITANJALI, from Bengali to English. He himself translated it, and then he was a little hesitant whether the translation is okay or not. So he asked C. F. Andrews, one of the friends and disciples of Mahatma Gandhi that, "Just go through it. How the translation has come to be?" C.F. Andrews was not a poet, he was an Englishman-well educated, knowing the language, the grammar and everything - but he was not a poet.
So on four spots, on four points, he told Rabindranath to change certain words: "They are ungrammatical, and English people will not follow them." So Rabindranath simply changed whatsoever Andrews suggested. Four words in all he changed in his translation. Then he went to London, and for the first time, in a poet's gathering... One of the English poets of his time, Yeats, has arranged that gathering. It was read for the first time, the translation.
When the whole translation was read, everybody listened, and Rabindranath asked, "Have you any suggestions? Because this is just a translation and English is not my mother tongue.
And it is very difficult to translate poetry. Yeats, who was a poet of the same caliber of Rabindranath, he said, "Only at four points something is wrong." And exactly those were the four words Andrews has suggested!
Rabindranath couldn't believe it. He said, "How, how you could find? Because these are the four words I have not translated. Andrews suggested and I have put them." Yeats said, "The whole poetry is a flow; only these four are like stones. The flow is broken. It seems somebody else has done the work. Your language may not be grammatical, your language is not hundred percent right. It cannot be; that we can understand. But it is hundred percent poetry. These four words have come from a school master. Grammar has become right, but poetry has gone wrong."
With Patanjali you cannot do anything. Anyone who is working on yoga will find it immediately that someone else who doesn't know anything has interpolated something. There are very few books which are still pure, and the purity has been retained. This is one of them. Nothing has been changed, not a single word. Nothing has been added; it is as Patanjali meant it to be.
This is a work of objective art. When I say, "a work of objective art" I mean a certain thing. Every precaution has been taken. While these sutras were condensed every precaution has been taken so that they could not be destroyed. They have been constructed in such a way that anything foreign, any foreign element will become a jarring note. But I say if a man like Patanjali tries, he can do that.
But a man like Patanjali will never try such a thing. Only lesser minds always try to interpolate. And lesser minds can try that, and the thing can continue, interpolated, only when it becomes a mass thing. Masses are not aware, cannot be aware. Only Yeats became aware that something is wrong. There were many others present in the gathering; no one was aware.
This is a secret cult, a secret heritage. And even the book is written, but the book form has not been thought to be reliable. There are still persons alive who have got Patanjali's sutras directly from their Master, not from the book. And the tradition has remained alive yet, and it will continue because books are not reliable. Sometimes books can be lost. Many things can go wrong with books.
So a secret tradition is there. And that tradition has been maintained, and continuously those who know through words of their Master go on checking whether in the book form something is wrong or whether something has been changed.
This has not been maintained for other scriptures. Bible has too much interpolations, that if Jesus comes back, he will not be able to understand what has happened, how these things have come in. Because for two hundred years when Jesus died... After two hundred years, for the first time, the Bible was recorded. In these two hundred years many things disappeared. Even his disciples have different stories to tell.
Buddha died. After five hundred years, after his death, his words were recorded. There are many schools, many scriptures, and no one can say which is true and which is false. But Buddha was talking to the masses, so he is not condensed like Patanjali. He was talking to the masses, to the ordinary common people. He was elaborating things in detail. In those details many things can be added, many things can be deleted, and no one will become aware that something has been done.
But Patanjali was not talking to the masses. He was talking to a very select few, a group - a group of very few persons, just like Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff never talked before the masses. A very selected group of his disciples was able to listen to him, and that too with many conditions. No meeting was ever declared before. If he was going to talk this night, eight-thirty, then nearabout eight o'clock you will get the indication that somewhere Gurdjieff is going to talk. And you have to reach immediately because at eight-thirty the doors will be closed. And these thirty minutes were never enough. And when you reach, you may find that he has cancelled. Next day, again...
Once he cancelled for seven days continuously. The first day four hundred people had come, the last day only fourteen. By and by they got discouraged. And then it seemed impossible that he is going to talk. The last day, only fourteen people... when he looked, he said, "Now the right amount of people is left. And you could wait for seven days and you were not discouraged, so now you have earned it. Now I will speak, and only these fourteen will be able to listen to this series. Now no one is to be informed that I have started speaking."
This type of work is different. Patanjali worked with a very closed circle. That's why no religion has come out of it, no organization. Patanjali has no sect. Such a tremendous force, but he remained closed within a small group. And he worked it out in such a way that the purity should be maintained. It has maintained up to now.
The last question:
The awareness is not total, the awareness is just intellectual. Logically you follow that "Whatsoever I am doing is leading me to misery," but this is not your existential experience. Just rationally you understand. If you were reason alone, then there would have been no problem, but you are "unreason" also. If you had only conscious mind then it was okay. You have unconscious mind also. Conscious mind knows that you are going into misery every day by your own efforts; you are creating your own hell. But the unconscious is not aware, and the unconscious is nine times more than your conscious mind. And that unconscious goes on persisting in its own habits.
You decide not to be angry again because anger is nothing but poisoning your own system. It gives you misery. But next time, when someone insults you, the unconscious will put aside your conscious reasoning, will erupt, and will be angry. And that unconscious has not known about your decision at all, and that unconscious remains the active force.
The conscious mind is not active, it only thinks. It is a thinker; it is not a doer. So what has to be done? Just by thinking consciously that something is wrong, you are not going to stop it. You will have to work at a discipline, and through discipline this conscious knowledge will penetrate like an arrow into the unconscious.
Through discipline, through yoga, through practice, the conscious decision will reach into the unconscious. And when it reaches into the unconscious, only then it will be of any use. Otherwise you will go on thinking something, and you will go on doing something quite the contrary.
St. Augustine says that, "Whatsoever good I know - and I always think to do it - but whenever the opportunity to do it comes, I will always do whatsoever is wrong." This is the human dilemma.
And yoga is the path to bridge the conscious with the unconscious. And when we will go deeper into the discipline you will become aware how this can be done. This can be done So don't rely on the conscious, it is inactive. The unconscious is the active. Change the unconscious; only then your life will have a different meaning. Otherwise you will be in more misery.
Thinking something, doing something else, will constantly create chaos - and by and by you will lose self-confidence. By and by you will feel that you are absolutely incapable, impotent, you cannot do anything. A self-condemnation will arise. You will feel guilty. And guilt is the only sin.
The Sutras:
Man is not only his conscious mind. He has also nine times more than the conscious, the unconscious layer of the mind. Not only that, man has the body, the soma, in which this mind exists. The body is absolutely unconscious. Its working is almost non-voluntary. Only the surface of the body is voluntary. The inner sources are non-voluntary; you cannot do anything about them. Your will is not effective.
This pattern of man's existence has to be understood before one can enter into oneself. And the understanding should not remain only intellectual. It must go deeper. It must penetrate the unconscious layers; it must reach to the very body itself.
Hence, the importance of abhyasa - constant inner practice. These two words are very significant: abhyasa and vairagya. Abhyasa means constant inner practice, and vairagya means non-attachment, desirelessness. The coming sutras of Patanjali are concerned with these two most significant concepts, but before we enter the sutras, the pattern of human personality is not totally intellectual, this has to be firmly grasped.
If it was only intellect, then there would be no need for abhyasa - constant, repetitive effort. You can understand immediately anything, if it is rational, through the mind, but just that understanding won't do. You can understand easily anger is bad, poisonous, but this understanding is not enough for the anger to leave you, to disappear. In spite of your understanding the anger will continue, because the anger exists in many layers of your unconscious mind - not only in the mind, but in your body also.
The body cannot understand just by verbal communication. Only your head can understand, but the body remains unaffected. And unless understanding reaches to the very roots of the body, you cannot be transformed. You will remain the same. Your ideas may go on changing, but your personality will persist. And then a new conflict will arise. And you will be in more turmoil than ever, because now you can see what is wrong and still you persist doing it; you go on doing it.
A self-guilt and condemnation is created. You start hating yourself; you start thinking yourself a sinner. And the more you understand, the more condemnation grows, because you see how it is difficult, almost impossible, to change yourself.
Yoga does not believe in intellectual understanding. It believes in bodily understanding in a total understanding in which your wholeness is involved. Not only you change in your head, but the deep sources of your being also change.
How they can change? Constant repetition of a particular practice becomes non-voluntary. If you do a particular practice constantly - just repeating it continuously by and by it drops from the conscious, reaches to the unconscious and becomes part of it. Once it becomes part of the unconscious, it starts functioning from that deep source.
Anything can become unconscious if you go on repeating it continuously. For example, your name has been repeated so constantly from your childhood. Now it is not only part of the conscious, it has become part of the unconscious. You may be sleeping with one hundred persons in a room, and if somebody comes and calls "Ram? Is Ram there?" ninety-nine persons who are not concerned with the name will go on sleeping. They will not be disturbed. But the person who has the name "Ram" will suddenly ask, "Who is calling me? Why are you disturbing my sleep?"
Even in sleep, he knows his name is Ram. How this name has reached so deep? Just by constant repetition. Everybody is repeating his name; everybody is calling he himself, introducing himself. Continuous use. Now it is not conscious. It has reached to the unconscious
The language, your mother tongue, becomes a part of the unconscious. Whatsoever else you learn later on will never be so unconscious; it will remain conscious. That's why your unconscious language will continuously affect your conscious language.
If a German speaks English, it is different; if a Frenchman speaks English, it is different; if an Indian speaks English, it is different. The difference is not in English, the difference is in their innermost patterns. The Frenchman has a different pattern - unconscious pattern. That affects. So whatsoever you learn later on will be affected by your mother tongue. And if you fall unconscious, then only your mother tongue can penetrate.
I remember one of my friends who was a Maharashtrian. He was in Germany for twenty years or even more. For twenty years he was using German language. He has completely forgotten his own mother tongue, Marathi. He couldn't read it, he couldn't talk in it. Consciously, the language was completely forgotten because it was not used.
Then he was ill. And in that illness sometimes he would become unconscious. Whenever he will become unconscious, a totally different type of personality will evolve. He will start behaving in a different way. In his unconscious he will utter words from Marathi, not from German. When he was unconscious, then he will utter words which are from Marathi language. And after his unconscious, when he will come back to the conscious, for few minutes he will not be able to understand German.
Constant repetition in the childhood goes deeper because the child has no conscious really. He has more of unconscious just near the surface; everything enters into the unconscious. As he will learn, as he will get educated, the conscious will become a thicker layer - then less and less penetration towards the unconscious.
Psychologists say that almost fifty percent of your learning is finished by the seventh year of your age. The seventh year of your life, you have almost known half of the things that you are ever going to know. Your half education is finished, and this half is going to be the base. Now everything else will be just imposed on it. And the deeper pattern will remain of the childhood.
That's why modern psychology, modern psychoanalysis, psychiatry, they all try to penetrate in your childhood, because if you are mentally ill, somewhere the seed is to be found in your childhood , not in the now. The pattern must be located there in your childhood. Once that deep pattern is located, then something can be done and you can be transformed.
But how to penetrate it? Yoga has a method. That method is called abhyasa. Abhyasa means constant, repetitive practice of a certain thing. Why, through repetition, something becomes unconscious? There are few reasons for it.
If you want to learn something, you will have to repeat it. Why? If you read a poem just once, you may remember few words here and there, but if you read it twice, thrice, many more times, then you can remember lines, paragraphs. If you repeat it a hundred times, then you can remember it as a whole pattern. If you repeat it even more, then it may continue, persist in your memory for years. You may not be able to forget it.
What is happening? When you repeat a certain thing, the more you repeat, the more it is engraved on the brain cells. A constant repetition is a constant hammering. Then it is engrained. It becomes a part of your brain cells. And the more it becomes a part of your brain cells, less consciousness is needed. Your consciousness can move; now it is not needed.
So whatsoever you learn deeply, for it you need not be conscious. In the beginning, if you learn driving, how to drive a car, then it is a conscious effort. That's why it is so much trouble, because you have to be alert continuously, and there are so many things to be aware - the road, the traffic, the mechanism, the wheel, the accelerator, the brakes, and everything, and the rules and regulations of the road. You have to be constantly aware of everything. So you are so much involved in it, it becomes arduous, it becomes a deep effort.
But by and by, you will be able to completely forget everything. You will drive; driving will become unconscious. You need not bring your mind to it, you can go on thinking anything you like, you can be anywhere you like, and the car will move unconsciously. Now your body has learned it. Now the whole mechanism knows it. It has become an unconscious learning.
Whenever something becomes so deep that you need not be conscious about it, it falls into the unconscious. And once the thing has fallen into the unconscious, it will start changing your being, your life, your character. And the change will be effortless now; you need not be concerned with it. Simply you will move in the directions where the unconscious is leading you.
Yoga has worked very much on abhyasa, constant repetition. This constant repetition is just to bring your unconscious into work. And when unconscious starts functioning, you are at ease. No effort is needed; things become natural. It is said in old scriptures that a sage is not one who has a good character, because even that consciousness shows that the "anti" still exists, the opposite still exists. A sage is one who cannot do bad, cannot think about it. The goodness has become unconscious; it has become like breathing. Whatsoever he is going to do will be good. It has become so deep in his being that no effort is needed. It has become his life. So you cannot say a sage is a good man. He doesn't know what is good, what is bad. Now there is no conflict. The good has penetrated so deeply that there is no need to be aware about it.
If you are aware about your goodness, the badness still exists side by side. And there is a constant struggle. And every time you have to move into action, you have to choose: "I have to do good; I have not to do bad." And this choice is going to be a deep turmoil, struggle, a constant inner violence, inner war. And if conflict is there, you cannot be at ease, at home.
Now we should enter the sutra. The cessation of mind is yoga, but how can the mind, and its modifications, cease?
Two things - how the mind can cease with all its modifications: one - abhyasa, persistent inner practice, and second - non-attachment. Non-attachment will create the situation, and persistent practice is the technique to be used in that situation. Try to understand both.
Whatsoever you do, you do because you have certain desires. And those desires can be fulfilled only by doing certain things. Unless those desires are dropped your activities cannot be dropped. You have some investment in those activities, in those actions. This is one of the dilemmas of human character and mind, that you may want to stop certain actions because they lead you into misery.
But why you do them? You do them because you have certain desires, and those desires cannot be fulfilled without doing them. So these are two things. One, you have to do certain things. For example, anger. Why you get angry? You get angry only when somewhere, somehow, someone creates a hindrance. You are going to achieve something, and someone creates a hindrance. Your desire is obstructed. You get angry.
You can get angry even with things. If you are moving, and you are trying to reach somewhere immediately, and a chair comes in the way, you get angry with the chair. You try to unlock the door and the key is not working, you become angry with the door. It is absurd, because to be angry with a thing is nonsense. Anything that creates any type of obstruction creates anger.
You have a desire to reach, to do, to achieve something. Whosoever comes in between you & your desire will appear to be your enemy. You want to destroy him. This is what anger means: you want to destroy the obstacles. But anger leads into misery; anger becomes an illness. So you want not to be angry.
But how you can drop anger if you have desires goals? If you have desires and goals, then anger is bound to be there because life is complex; you are not alone here on this earth. Millions of people striving for their own desires, they criss-cross each other; they come into each other's path. If you have desires, then anger is bound to be there, frustration is bound to be there, violence is bound to be there. And whosoever comes in your path your mind will think to destroy.
This attitude to destroy the obstacle is anger. But anger creates misery, so you want not to be angry. But just wanting not to be angry will not be of much help because anger is part of a greater pattern of a mind which desires, a mind which has goals, a mind which wants to reach somewhere. You cannot drop anger.
So the first thing is not to desire. Then half of the possibility of anger is dropped; the base is dropped. But then too it is not necessary that anger should disappear because you have been angry for millions of years. It has become a deep-rooted habit.
You may drop desires, but anger will still persist. It will not be so forceful, but it will persist because it is now a habit. It has become an unconscious habit. For many, many lives you have been carrying it. It has become your heredity. It is in your cells; the body has taken it. It is now chemical and physiological. Just by your dropping your desires your body is not going to change its pattern. The pattern is very old. You will have to change this pattern also.
For that change, repetitive practice will be needed. Just to change the inner mechanism, repetitive practice will be needed - a reconditioning of the whole body-mind pattern. But this is possible only if you have dropped desiring.
Look at it from another point of view. One man came to me and he said, "I don't want to be sad, but I am always sad and depressed. Sometimes, I cannot even feel what is the reason why I am sad, but I am sad. No visible cause, nothing that I can pinpoint that this is the reason. It seems that it has just become my style to be sad. I don't remember," he said, "that I was ever happy. And I don't want to be sad. It is a dead burden. I am the unhappiest person. So how I can drop it?"
So I asked him, "Have you got any investment in your sadness?" He said, "Why I should have any investment?" But he had. I knew the person well. I knew the person for many years, but he was not aware that there is some vested interest in it. So he wants to drop sadness, but he is not aware why the sadness is there. He has been maintaining it for some other reasons which he cannot connect.
He needs love, but to be loving... If you need love you need to be loving. If you ask for love, you have to give love, and you have to give more than you can ask. But he is a miser; he cannot give love. Giving is impossible; he cannot give anything. Just the word "giving", and he will shrink within himself. He can only take; he cannot give. He is closed as far as giving is concerned.
But without love you cannot flower. Without love you cannot attain any joy; you cannot be happy. And he cannot love because love looks like giving something. It is a giving, wholehearted giving of all that you have, your being also. He cannot give love, he cannot receive love. Then what to do? But he hankers, as everybody hankers for love. It is a basic need just like food. Without food your body will die and without love your soul will shrink. It is a must.
Then he has created a substitute, and that substitute is sympathy. He cannot get love because he cannot give love, but he can get sympathy. Sympathy is a poor substitute for love. So he is sad. When he is sad people give him sympathy. Whosoever comes to him feels sympathetic because he is always crying and weeping. His mood is always that of a very miserable man. But he enjoys! Whenever you give him sympathy he enjoys it. He becomes more miserable, because the more he is miserable, the more he can get this sympathy.
So I told him, "You have a certain investment in your sadness. This whole pattern, just sadness, cannot be dropped. It is rooted somewhere else. Don't ask for sympathy. But you can stop asking for sympathy only when you start giving love, because it is a substitute. And once you start giving love, love will happen to you. Then you will be happy. Then a different pattern is created."
I have heard...
One man entered one car-park. He was in a very ridiculous posture. It looked almost impossible how he was walking, because he was crouching as if he was driving a car. His hands on some invisible wheel, moving, his feet on some invisible accelerator, and he was walking. And it was so difficult, so impossible, how he was walking. A crowd gathered there. He was doing something impossible. And they asked the attendant, "What is the matter? What this man is doing?"
The attendant said, "Don't ask loudly. The man in his past loved cars. He was one of the best drivers. He has even won a national prize in car races. But now, due to some mental deficiency, he has been debarred. He is not allowed to drive a car, but just the old hobby."
The crowd said, "If you know that, then why don't you say to him,'You don't have a car. What are you doing here?' " The man said, "That's why I said, 'Don't say so loudly.' I cannot do, because one rupee per day he gives me to wash the car. That I cannot do. I cannot say that 'You have no car.' He is going to park the car, and then I will wash."
That one rupee investment, the vested interest, is there. You have many vested interests in your misery also, in your anguish also, in your illness also. And then you go on saying, "We don't want. We don't want to be angry, we don't want to be this and that." But unless you come to see how all these things have happened to you, unless you see the whole pattern, nothing can be changed.
The deepest pattern of the mind is desire. You are whatsoever you are because you have certain desires, a group of desires. Patanjali says, "First thing is non-attachment." Drop all desires; don't be attached. And then, abhyasa.
For example, someone comes to me and he says, "I don't want to collect more fat in my body, but I go on eating. I want to stop it, but I go on eating."
The wanting is superficial. There is a pattern inside, why he goes on eating more and more. And even for a few days he stops, then again with more gusto he eats. And he will collect more weight than he has lost through few days fasting or dieting. And this has been continuously, for years. It is not just a question of eating less. Why he is eating more? Body doesn't need, then somewhere in the mind food has become a substitute for something.
He may be afraid of death. People who are afraid of death eat more because eating seems to be the base of life. The more you eat, the more alive. This is the arithmetic in their mind. Because if you don't eat you die. So non-eating is equivalent to death and more eating equivalent to more life. So if you are afraid of death you will eat more, or if nobody loves you, you will eat more.
Food can become a substitute for love, because the child, in the beginning, comes to associate food and love. The first thing the child is going to be aware is mother, the food from the mother and the love from the mother. Love and food enter in his consciousness simultaneously. And whenever the mother is loving, she gives more milk. The breast is given happiness. But whenever mother is angry, non-loving, she snatches her breast away.
Food is taken away whenever mother is non-loving; food is given whenever she is loving. Love and food become one. In the mind, in the child's mind, they become associated. So whenever the child will get more love, he will reduce his food, because if love is so much, then food is not so needed. Whenever love is not there, he will eat more because a balance has to be kept. If there is no love at all, then he will fill his belly.
You may be surprised - whenever two persons are in love, they lose fat. That's why girls start gathering fat the moment they are married. When love is settled, they start getting fat because now there is no need. The love and the world of attaining love is, in a way, finished.
In the countries where divorce has become more prevalent, the women are showing better figures. In the countries where divorce is not prevalent, women don't bother at all about their figures, because if divorce is possible then the women will have to find new lovers; they are figure conscious. The search for love helps the body figure. When love is settled, it is finished in a way. You need not worry about the body; you need not take any care.
So this person may be afraid of death; perhaps he is not in any deep, intimate love with anyone. And these two things are again connected. If you are in deep love, you are not afraid of death. Love is so fulfilling that you don't care what is going to happen in the future. Love itself is the fulfillment. Even if death comes, it can be welcomed. But if you are not in love, then death creates a fear; because you have not even loved yet and death is approaching near. And death will finish and there will be no more time and no future after it.
If there is no love, the fear of death will be more. If there is love, less is the fear of death. If total love, death disappears. These are all connected inside. Even very simple things are deeply rooted in greater patterns.
Mulla Nasrudin was standing before his veterinary doctor with his dog and insisting that, "Cut the tail of my dog." The doctor was saying, "But why, Nasrudin? If I cut the tail of your dog, this beautiful dog will be destroyed. He will look ugly. And why you are insisting this?" Nasrudin said, "Between you and me, don't say this to anybody: I want the dog's tail to be cut because my mother-in-law is going to come soon and I don't want any sign of welcome in my house. I have removed everything. Only this dog, he can welcome my mother-in-law."
Even a dog's tail has a bigger pattern of so many relationships. If Nasrudin cannot welcome even through his dog his mother-in-law, he cannot be in love with his wife; it is impossible, If you are in love with your wife, you will welcome the mother-in-law. You will be loving towards her.
Simple things on the surface are deeply rooted in complex things, and everything is interrelated. So just by changing a thought nothing is changed. Unless you go to the complex pattern, uncondition it, recondition it, create a new pattern, only then a new life can arise out of it. So these two things have to be done: non-attachment, non-attachment about everything.
That doesn't mean that you stop enjoying. That misunderstanding has been there, and yoga has been misinterpreted in many ways. One is this: it seems that yoga is saying that you die to life because non-attachment means then you don't desire anything. If you don't desire anything, if you are not attached to anything, if you don't love anything, then you will be just a dead corpse. - No, that is not the meaning.
Non-attachment means don't be dependent on anything, and don't make your life and happiness dependent on anything. Preference is okay, attachment is not okay. When I say preference is okay, I mean you can prefer, you have to prefer. If many persons are there, you have to love someone, you have to choose someone, you have to be friendly with someone. Prefer someone, but don't get attached.
What is the difference? If you get attached, then it becomes an obsession. If the person is not there, you are unhappy. If you miss the person, you are in misery. And attachment is such a disease that if the person is not there you are in misery, and if the person is there you are indifferent. Then it is okay; it is taken for granted. If the person is there it is okay - no more than that. If the person is not there, then you are in misery. This is attachment.
Preference is just the reverse. If the person is not there, you are okay; if the person is there, you feel happy, thankful. If the person is there, you don't take it for granted. You are happy, you enjoy it, you celebrate it. But if the person is not there, you are okay. You don't demand, you are not obsessed. You can also be alone and happy. You would have preferred that the person was there, but this is not an obsession.
Preference is good, attachment is disease. And a man who lives with preference lives life in deep happiness. You cannot make him miserable. You can only make him happy, more happy. But you cannot make him miserable. And a person who lives with attachment - you cannot make him happy, you can only make him more miserable. And you know this. You know this well. If your friend is there you don't enjoy much; if the friend is not there you miss much.
Just a girl came a few days before to me. She had seen me two months before also with her boyfriend. And they were constantly fighting with each other and the fight has become just an illness, so I told them to be separate for a few weeks. They said it was impossible to live together, so I sent them away separately.
So the girl was here on Christmas Eve, and she said, "These two months, I have missed my boyfriend so much! I am thinking of him constantly. Even in my dreams he has started to appear. Never before it has happened. When we were together, never I have seen him in my dreams. In my dreams I was making love to other men. But now, constantly, my boyfriend is in my dreams. And now, allow us to live together again."
So I told her, "It is okay with me; you can live together again. But just remember this: that you were living together just two months before and you were never happy."
Attachment is a disease. When you are together, you are not happy. If you have riches, you are not happy. You will be miserable if you are poor. If you are healthy, you never feel thankfulness. If you are healthy, you never feel grateful to existence. But if you are ill you are condemning whole life and existence. Everything is meaningless, and there is no God.
Even an ordinary headache is enough to cancel all gods. But when you are happy and healthy, you never feel like going to a church or a temple just to be thankful.
Mulla Nasrudin once fell in a river, and he was just going to be drowned. He was not a religious man, but suddenly, at the verge of death, he cried loudly, "Allah, God, please save me, help me, and from today, now I will pray and I will do whatsoever is written in the scriptures."
While he was saying this "God help me", he caught hold of a branch hanging over on the river. And when he was grabbing and, coming toward safety, he felt relaxed, and he said, "Now it is okay. Now you need not worry." He told again to God, "Now you need not worry. Now I am safe." Suddenly the branch broke, and he fell again. So he said, "Can't you take a simple joke?"
But this is how our minds are moving. Attachment will make you more and more miserable; preference will make you more and more happy. Patanjali is against attachment, not against preference. Everybody has to prefer. You may like one food, you may not like another. But this is just a preference. If the food of your liking is not available, then you will choose the second food and you will be happy because you know the first is not available, and whatsoever is available had to be enjoyed. You will not cry and weep. You will accept life as it happens to you.
But a person who is constantly attached with everything never enjoys anything and misses always. The whole life becomes a continuous misery. If you are not attached, you are free; you have much energy; you are not dependent on anything. You are independent, and this energy can be moved into inner effort. It can become a practice. It can become abhyasa. What is abhyasa? Abhyasa is fighting the old habitual pattern. Every religion has developed many practices, but the base is this sutra of Patanjali.
For example, whenever you get angry, make it a constant practice that before entering into the anger you will take five deep breaths. A simple practice, apparently not related to anger at all. And somebody can even laugh, "How it is going to help?" But it is going to help. Whenever you feel anger is coming, before you express it take five deep exhalations, inhalations.
What it will do? It will do many things. Anger can be only if you are unconscious, and this is a conscious effort. Just before anger you consciously breathe in and out five times. This will make your mind alert, and with alertness anger cannot enter. This will not only make your mind alert, it will make your body also alert, because more oxygen in the body, the body is more alert. In this alert moment, suddenly you will feel that the anger has disappeared.
Secondly, your mind can be only one-pointed. Mind cannot think of two things simultaneously; it is impossible for the mind. It can change from one to another very swiftly, but it cannot have two points together in the mind simultaneously. One thing at a time. Mind has a very narrow window; only one thing at a time. So if anger is there, anger is there. If you breathe in and out five times suddenly the mind is with breathing. It has diverted. Now it is moving in a different direction. And even if you move again to anger, you cannot be the same again because the moment has been lost.
Gurdjieff says that, "When my father was dying, he told me to remember only one thing: 'Whenever you are angry wait for twenty-four hours, and then do whatsoever you like. Even if you want to murder, go and murder, but wait for twenty-four hours.'"
Twenty-four hours is too much, twenty-four seconds will do. Just the waiting changes you. The energy that was flowing towards anger has taken a new route. It is the same energy. It can become anger, it can become compassion. Just give it a chance.
So old scriptures say, "If a good thought comes to your mind, don't postpone it; do it immediately. And if a bad thought comes to your mind, postpone it; never do it immediately." But we are very cunning or very clever, we think. Whenever a good thought comes we postpone it.
Mark Twain has written in his memoirs that he was listening to a priest in a church for ten minutes. The lecture was just wonderful, and he thought in his mind that, "Today I am going to donate ten dollars. The priest is wonderful. This church must be helped!" He decided for ten dollars he is going to donate after the lecture. Ten minutes more and he started thinking that ten dollars would be too much, five would do. Ten minutes more, and he thought, "This is not even worth five, this man."
Now he is not listening. He is worried about those ten dollars. He has not told anybody, but now is convincing himself that this is too much. "By the time", he says, "the lecture finished, I decided not to give anything. And when the man came before me to take the donations, the man who was moving, even I thought to take a few dollars and escape from the church!"
Mind is continuously changing. It is never static; it is a flow. If something bad is there, wait a little. You cannot fix the mind, mind is a flow. Just wait! Just wait a little, and you will not be able to do bad. If some good is there and you want to do it, do it immediately because mind is changing, and after a few minutes you will not be able to do it. So if it is a loving and kind act, don't postpone it. If it is something violent or destructive, postpone it a little.
If anger comes, postpone it even for five breaths, and you will not be able to do it. This will become a practice. Every time anger comes, first you breathe five times in and out. Then you are free to do. Go on continuously. It becomes a habit; you need not even think. The moment anger enters, immediately your mechanism starts breathing fast, deep. Within years it will become absolutely impossible for you to be angry. You will not be able to be angry.
Any practice, any conscious effort, can change your old patterns. And this is not a work which can be done immediately; it will take time - because you have created your pattern of habits in many, many lives. Even in one life you can't change it-it is too soon.
My sannyasins come to me and they say, "When it will happen?" and I say, "Soon." And they say, "What do you mean by your 'soon', because for years you have been telling us 'soon'."
Even in one life it happens - it is soon. Whenever it happens, it has happened before its time because you have created this pattern in so many lives. It has to be destroyed, recreated. So any time, even lives, is not too late.
The essence of abhyasa is to be centered in oneself. Whatsoever happens, you should not move immediately. First you should be centered in yourself, and from that centering you should look around and then decide.
Someone insults you and you are pulled by his insult. You have moved without consulting your center. Without even for a single moment going back to the center and then moving, you have moved.
Abhyasa means inner practice. Conscious effort means, "Before I move out, I must move within. First movement must be toward my center; first I must be in contact with my center. There, centered, I will look at the situation and then decide." And this is such a tremendous, such a transforming phenomenon. Once you are centered within, the whole thing appears different; the perspective has changed. It may not look like an insult. The man may just look stupid. Or, if you are really centered, you will come to know that he is right, "This is not an insult. He has not said anything wrong about it."
I have heard...
Once it happened - I don't know whether it is true or not, but I have heard this anecdote - that one newspaper was continuously writing against Richard Nixon, continuously! - defaming him, condemning him. So Richard Nixon went to the editor and said, "What are you doing? You are telling lies about me and you know it well!" The editor said, "Yes, we know that we are telling lies about you, but if we start telling truths about you, you will be in more trouble!"
So if someone is saying something about you he may be lying, but just look again. If he is really true, it may be worse. Or, whatsoever he is saying may apply to you. But when you are centered, you can look about yourself also dispassionately.
Patanjali says that of these two, abhyasa - the inner practice - is the effort for being firmly established in oneself. Before moving into act, any sort of act, move within yourself. First be established there - even if for only a single moment - then your action will be totally different. It cannot be the same unconscious pattern of old. It will be something new, it will be an alive response. Just try it. Whenever you feel that you are going to act or to do something, move first within, because whatsoever you have been doing up until now has become robot-like, mechanical. You go on doing it continuously in a repetitive circle.
Just note down in a diary for thirty days - from the morning to the evening, thirty days, and you will be able to see the pattern. You are moving like a machine; you are not a man. Your responses are dead. Whatsoever you do is predictable. And if you study your diary penetratingly, you may be able to decipher the pattern - that Monday, every Monday, you are angry; every Sunday you feel sexual; every Saturday you are fighting. Or in the morning you are good, in the afternoon you feel bitter, by the evening you are against the whole world. You may see the pattern. And once you see the pattern then you can just observe that you are working like a robot. And to be a robot is what is the misery. You have to be conscious, not a mechanical thing.
Gurdjieff used to say that, "Man is machine, as he is. You become man only when you become conscious. And this constant effort to be established in oneself will make you conscious, will make you non-mechanical, will make you unpredictable, will make you free. Then someone can insult you and you can still laugh; you have never laughed before. Someone can insult you and you can feel love for the man; you have not felt that before. Someone can insult you and you can be thankful towards him. Something new is being born. Now you are creating a conscious being within yourself.
But the first thing to do before moving into act, because act means moving outward, moving without, moving toward others, going away from the Self. Every act is a going away from the Self. Before you go away, have a look, have a contact, have a dip into your inner being. First be established.
Before every moment, let there be a moment of meditation: this is what abhyasa is. Whatsoever you do, before doing it close your eyes, remain silent, move within. Just become dispassionate, non-attached, so you can look on as an observer, unprejudiced - as if you are not involved, you are just a witness. And then move!
One day, just in the morning, Mulla Nasrudin's wife said to Mulla that, "In the night, while you were asleep, you were insulting me. You were saying things against me, swearing against me. What do you mean? You will have to explain." Mulla Nasrudin said, "But who says that I was asleep? I was not asleep. Just the things I want to say, I cannot say in the day. I cannot gather so much courage."
In your dreams, in your waking, you are constantly doing things, and those things are not consciously done - as if you are being forced to do them. Even in your dreams, you are not free. This constant mechanical behavior is the bondage. So how to be established in oneself? Through abhyasa.
Sufis use continuously. Whatsoever they say, do; they sit, stand, whatsoever... Before a Sufi disciple stands, he will take Allah's name. First he will take God's name. He will sit, he will take God's name. An action is to be done - even sitting is an action - he will say, "Allah!" So, sitting, he will say, "Allah!" Standing he will say, "Allah!" If it is not possible to say loudly, he will say inside. Every action is done through the remembrance. And by and by, this remembrance becomes a constant barrier between him and the action - a division, a gap.
And the more this gap grows, the more he can look at his own action as if he is not the doer. Continuous repetition of Allah, by and by, he starts seeing that only Allah is the doer. "I am not the doer. I am just a vehicle or an instrument." And the moment this gap grows, all that is evil falls. You cannot do evil. You can do evil only when there is no gap between the actor and the action. Then good flows automatically.
Greater the gap between the actor and the action, more the good. Life becomes a sacred thing. Your body becomes a temple. Anything that makes you alert, established within yourself, is abhyasa.
Two things. "Continuous practice for a long time." How much long? It will depend. It will depend on you, on each person, how long. The length will depend on the intensity. If the intensity is total, then very soon it can happen, even immediately. If the intensity is not so deep, then it will take a longer period.
I have heard one Sufi mystic, Junaid, was walking, just taking a walk outside his village in the morning. One man came running and asked Junaid that, "The capital of this kingdom... I want to reach the capital, how much long I will still have to travel? How much time it will take?"
Junaid looked at the man and, without answering him, again started walking. And the man was also going in the same direction, so the man followed. The man thought, "This old man seems to be deaf," so a second time asked more loudly that, "I want to know how much time it will take for me to reach the capital!"
But Junaid still continued walking. After walking two miles with that man, Junaid said, "You will have to walk at least ten hours." The man said, "But you could have said that before!" Junaid said, "How can I say it? I first must know your speed. It depends on your speed. So for these two miles I was watching, what is your speed. Only then I can answer." It depends on your intensity, your speed.
The first thing is continued practice for a long time without interruption. This has to be remembered. If you interrupt, if you do for some days and then leave for some days, the whole effort is lost. And when you start again, it is again a beginning.
If you are meditating and then you say for a few days there is no problem, you feel lazy, you feel like sleeping in the morning, and you say, "I can postpone, I can do it tomorrow," - even one day missed, you have undone the work of many days, because you are not doing meditation today, but you will be doing many other things. Those many other things belong to your old pattern, so a layer is created. Your yesterday and your tomorrow is cut off. Today has become a layer, a different layer. The continuity is lost, and when tomorrow you start again it is again a beginning. I see many persons starting, stopping, again starting. The work that can be done within months they take years.
So this is to be remembered: without interruption. Whatsoever practice you choose, then choose it for your whole life, and just go on hammering on it, don't listen to the mind. Mind will try to persuade you, and mind is a great seducer. It can give all kinds of reasons that today it is a must not to do because you are feeling ill, there is headache, you couldn't sleep in the night, you have been so much tired so you can just rest today. But these are tricks of the mind.
Mind wants to follow its old pattern. Why the mind wants to follow its old pattern? Because there is least resistance; it is easier. And everybody wants to follow the easier path, the easier course. It is easy for the mind just to follow the old. The new is difficult.
So mind resists everything that is new. If you are in practice, in abhyasa, don't listen to the mind, you go on doing. By and by this new practice will go deep in the mind, and mind will stop resisting it, because then it will become easier. Then for mind it will be an easy flow. Unless it becomes an easy flow, don't interrupt. You can undo a long effort by a little laziness. So it must be uninterrupted.
And, second, with reverent devotion. You can do a practice mechanically, with no love, no devotion, no feeling of holiness about it. Then it will take very long, because through love things penetrate easily in you. Through devotion you are open, more open. Seeds fall deeper.
With no devotion you can do the same thing. Look at a temple, you can have a hired priest. He will do prayers continuously for years, with no result, with no fulfillment through it. He is doing as it is prescribed, but it is a work with no devotion. He may show devotion, but he is just a servant. He is interested in his salary - not in the prayer, not in the puja, not in the ritual. It is to be done - it is a duty; it is not a love. So he will do it, years. Even for his whole life he will be just a hired priest, a salaried man. In the end, he will die as if he has never prayed. He may die in the temple praying - but he will die as if he has never prayed, because there was no devotion.
So don't do abhyasa, a practice, without devotion, because then you are unnecessarily wasting energy. Much can come out of it if devotion is there. What is the difference? The difference is in duty and love. Duty is something you have to do; you don't enjoy doing it. You have to carry it on somehow; you have to finish it soon. It is just an outward work. If this is the attitude, then how it can penetrate in you?
A love is not a duty, you enjoy. There is no limit to its enjoyment; there is no hurry to finish it. The longer it is, the better. It is never enough. Always you feel something more, something more. It is always unfinished. If this is the attitude, then things go deep in you. The seeds reach to the deeper soil. Devotion means you are in love with a particular abhyasa, a particular practice.
I observe many people; I work with many people. This division is very clear. Those who practice meditation as if they are doing just a technique, they go on doing it for years, but no change happens. It may help a little, bodily. They may be more healthy; their physiques will get some benefits out of it. But it is just an exercise. And then they come to me and they say "Nothing is happening."
Nothing will happen, because the way they are doing, it is something outside, just like a work - as they go to the office at eleven and leave the office at five. With no involvement, they can go to the meditation hall. They can meditate for one hour and come back, with no involvement. It is not in their heart.
The other category of people is those who do it with love. It is not a question of doing something. It is not quantitative, it is qualitative - how much you are involved, how much deeply you love it, how much you enjoy it - not the goal, not the end, not the result, but the very practice.
Sufis say repetition of the name of God - repetition of the name of Allah - is in itself the bliss. They go on repeating and they enjoy. This becomes their whole life just the repetition of the name.
Nanak says, nam smaran - remembering the name is enough. You are eating, you are going to sleep, you are taking your bath, and continuously your heart is filled with the remembrance. Just go on repeating "Ram" or "Allah" or whatsoever, but not as a word, as a devotion, as a love.
Your whole being feels filled, vibrates with it, it becomes your deeper breath. You cannot live without it. And by and by it creates an inner harmony, a music. Your whole being starts falling into harmony. An ecstasy is born, a humming sensation, a sweetness surrounds you. By and by this sweetness becomes your nature. Then whatsoever you say, it becomes the name of Allah; whatsoever you say, it becomes the remembrance of the divine.
Any practice WITHOUT INTERRUPTION AND WITH REVERENT DEVOTION... for the Western mind it is very difficult. They can understand practice; they cannot understand REVERENT DEVOTION. They have completely forgotten that language, and without that language practice is just... mechanical. Western seekers come to me and they say, "Whatsoever you say we will do," and they follow it exactly as it is said. But they work on it just as if they were working on any other know-how, a technique. They are not in love with it; they have not become mad in love with it; they are not lost in it. They remain manipulating.
They are the master, and they go on manipulating the technique just as any mechanical device they will manipulate. Just as you can push the button and the fan starts - there is no need of any reverent devotion for the button or for the fan. And everything in life you do like that, but abhyasa cannot be done that way. You have to be so deeply related with your abhyasa, your practice, that you become secondary and the practice becomes primary, that you become the shadow and the practice becomes the soul - as if it is not you who is doing the practice. But the practice is going on by itself, and you are just a part of it, vibrating with it. Then it may be that no time will be needed.
With deep devotion, results can follow immediately. In a single moment of devotion, you can undo many lives of the past. In a deep moment of devotion, you can become completely free from the past.
But it is difficult how to explain it - that reverent devotion. There is friendship, there is love, and there is a different quality of friendship plus love which is called reverend devotion. Friendship and love exist between equals. Love between opposite sex, freindship with the same sex, but on the same level - you are equals.
Compassion is just the opposite of reverent devotion. Compassion exists from a higher source towards a lower source. Compassion is like a river flowing from the Himalayas to the ocean. A Buddha is compassion. Whosoever comes to him, his compassion is flowing downwards. Reverence is just the opposite, as if the Ganges is flowing from the ocean towards the Himalays, from the lower to the higher.
Love is between the equals, compassion from the higher to the lower; devotion is from the lower to the higher. Compassion and devotion both have disappeared; only friendship has remained. And without compassion and devotion friendship is just hanging in between, dead, because two poles are missing. And it can exist, living, only between those two poles.
If you are in devotion, then sooner or later compassion will start flowing towards you. If you are in devotion, then some higher peak will start flowing towards you. But if you are not in devotion, compassion cannot flow towards you, you are not open to it.
All abhyasa, all practice, is to become the lowest so the highest can flow in you - to become the lowest. As Jesus says, "Only those who stand last will become the first in my kingdom of God."
Become the lowest, the last. Suddenly, when you are the lowest, you are capable of receiving the highest. And to the lowest depth only is the highest attracted, pulled. It becomes the magnet. "With devotion" means you are the lowest. That is why Buddhists choose to be beggars, Sufis have chosen to be beggars - just the lowest, the beggars. And we have seen that in these beggars the highest has happened.
But this is their choice. They have put themselves in the last. They are the last ones - not in competition with anybody, just valley-like, low, lowest.
That's why, in the old Sufi sayings it is said, "Become a slave of God" - just a slave, repeating his name, constantly thanking him, constantly feeling gratitude, constantly filled with so many blessings that he has poured upon you.
And with this reverence, devotion, uninterrupted abhyasa, practice. Patanjali says these two, vairagya and abhyasa, they help the mind to cease. And when mind ceases you are, for the first time, really that which you are meant to be, that which is your destiny.
The Tree is Hidden in the Seed
The First Question:
The beginning and the end are not two things. The beginning is the end, so don't divide them and don't think in terms of duality. If you want to be silent in the end, you will have to be in silence from the very beginning. In the beginning the silence will be like a seed; in the end it will become a tree. But the tree is hidden in the seed, so the beginning is just the seed.
Whatsoever the ultimate goal, it must be hidden here and now, just in you, in the very beginning. If it is not there in the beginning, you cannot achieve it in the end. Of course, there will be a difference - in the beginning it can only be a seed; in the end it will be the total flowering. You may not be able to recognize it when it is a seed, but it is there whether you recognize it or not. So when Patanjali says non-attachment is needed in the very beginning of the journey, he is not saying that it will not be needed in the end.
Non-attachment in the beginning will be with effort; non-attachment in the end will be spontaneous. In the beginning you will have to be conscious about it; in the end there will be no need to be conscious about it. It will be just your natural flow.
In the beginning you have to practice it. Constant alertness will be needed. A struggle will be there with your past, with your patterns of attachment; fight will be there. In the end there will be no fight, no alternative no choice. You will simply flow in the direction of desirelessness. That would have become your nature.
But, remember, whatsoever is the goal, it has to be practiced from the very beginning. The first step is also the last. So one has to be very careful about the first step. If the first is in the right direction, only then the last will be achieved. If you miss the first step, you have missed all.
This will come again and again to your mind, so understand it deeply because many things Patanjali will say which look like ends. Non-violence is the end - when a person becomes so compassionate, so deeply love-filled, that there is no violence, no possibility of violence. Love or non-violence is the end. Patanjali will say to practice it from the very beginning.
The goal has to be in your view from the very beginning. The first step of the journey must be absolutely devoted to the goal, directed to the goal, moving towards the goal. It cannot be the absolute thing in the beginning, neither Patanjali expects it. You cannot be totally non-attached, but you can try. The very effort will help you.
You will fall many times; you will again and again get attached. And your mind is such that you may even get attached with non-attachment. Your pattern is so unconscious, but effort, conscious effort, by and by will make you alert and aware. And once you start feeling the misery of attachment then there will be less need for the effort, because no one wants to be miserable, no one wants to be unhappy.
We are unhappy because we don't know what we are doing, but the longing in every human being is for happiness. No one longs for misery; everybody creates misery because we don't know what we are doing. Or we may be moving in desires towards happiness, but the pattern of our mind is such that we actually move towards misery.
From the very beginning, a child is born, is brought up, wrong mechanisms are fed in his mind, wrong attitudes are fed. No one is trying to make him wrong, but wrong people are all around. They cannot be anything else; they are helpless.
A child is born without any pattern. Only a deep longing for happiness is present, but he doesn't know how to achieve it; the how is unknown. He knows this much is certain, that happiness is to be attained. He will struggle his whole life, but the means, the methods how it is to be achieved, where it is to be achieved, where he should go to find it, he doesn't know. The society teaches him how to achieve happiness, and the society is wrong.
A child wants happiness, but we don't know how to teach him to be happy. And whatsoever we teach him, it becomes the path towards misery. For example, we teach him to be good. We teach him not to do certain things and to do certain things without ever thinking that it is natural or unnatural. We say, "Do this; don't do that." Our "good" may be unnatural - and if whatsoever we teach as good is unnatural, then we are creating a pattern of misery.
For example, a child is angry, and we tell him, "Anger is bad. Don't be angry." But anger is natural, and just by saying, "Don't be angry," we are not destroying anger, we are just teaching the child to suppress it. Suppression will become misery because whatsoever is suppressed becomes poisonous. It moves into the very chemicals of the body; it is toxic. And continuously teaching, that "Don't be angry," we are teaching him to poison his own system.
One thing we are not teaching him: how not to be angry. We are simply teaching him how to suppress the anger. And we can force him because he is dependent on us. He is helpless; he has to follow us. If we say, "Don't be angry," then he will smile. That smile will be false. Inside he is bubbling, inside he is in turmoil, inside there is fire, and he is smiling outside.
A small child - we are making a hypocrite out of him. He is becoming false and divided. He knows that his smile is false, his anger is real, but the real has to be suppressed and the unreal has to be forced. He will be split. And by and by, the split will become so deep, the gap will become so deep, that whenever he smiles he will smile a false smile.
And if he cannot be really angry, then he cannot be really anything because reality is condemned. He cannot express his love, he cannot express his ecstasy - he has become afraid of the real. If you condemn one part of the real, the whole reality is condemned, because reality cannot be divided and a child cannot divide.
One thing is certain: the child has come to understand that he is not accepted. As he is, he is not acceptable. The real is somehow bad, so he has to be false. He has to use faces, masks. Once he has learned this, the whole life will move in a false dimension. And the false can only lead to misery, the false cannot lead to happiness. Only the true, authentically real, can lead you towards ecstasy, towards peak experiences of life - love, joy, meditation, whatsoever you name.
Everybody is brought up in this pattern, so you long for happiness, but whatsoever you do creates misery. The first thing towards happiness is to accept oneself, and the society never teaches you to accept yourself. It teaches you to condemn yourself, to be guilty about yourself, to cut many parts. It cripples you, and a crippled man cannot reach to the goal. And we are all crippled.
Attachment is misery, but from the very beginning the child is taught for attachment. The mother will say to the child, "Love me; I am your mother." The father will say, "Love me; I am your father" - as if someone is a father or a mother so he becomes automatically lovable.
Just being a mother doesn't mean much or just being a father doesn't mean much. To be a father is to pass through a great discipline. One has to be lovable. To be a mother is not just to reproduce. To be a mother means a great training, a great inner discipline. One has to be lovable.
If the mother is lovable, then the child will love without any attachment. And wherever he will find that someone is lovable, he will love. But mothers are not lovable, fathers are not lovable; they have never thought in those terms - that love is a quality. You have to create it; you have to become.
You have to grow. Only then can you create love in others. It cannot be demanded. If you demand it, it can become an attachment, but not love. So the child will love the mother because she is his mother. The mother or the father, they become the goals. These are relationships, not love. Then he becomes attached to the family, and family is a destructive force because the family of the neighbor is separate. It is not lovable because you don't belong to it. Then your community, your nation... but the neighboring nation is the enemy.
You cannot love the whole humanity. Your family is the root cause. And the family has not been bringing you to be a lovable person, and a loving person. It is forcing some relationships. Attachment is a relationship, and love - love is a state of mind. Your father will not say to you, "Be loving," because if you are loving you can be loving to anybody. Even sometimes the neighbor may be more lovable than your father, but the father cannot accept this - that anybody can be more lovable than him, because he is your father. So relationship has to be taught, not love.
This is my country; that's why I have to love this country. If simply this is taught: that love - then I can love any country. But the politician will be against it, because if I love any country, if I love this earth, then I cannot be dragged into war. So the politicians will teach, "Love this country. This is your country. You are born here. You belong to this country; your life, your death, belongs to this country." So he sacrifices you for it.
The whole society is teaching you relationships, attachments, not love. Love is dangerous because it knows no boundaries. It can move; it is freedom. So your wife will teach you, "Love me because I am your wife." The husband is teaching the wife, "Love me because I am your husband." Nobody is teaching love.
If simply love is taught, then the wife can say, "But the other person is more lovable." If the world was really free to love, then just being a husband cannot carry any meaning, just by being a wife, doesn't mean anything. Then love will freely flow. But that is dangerous; the society cannot allow it, the family cannot allow it, religions cannot allow it. So in the name of love they teach attachment, and then everybody is in misery.
When Patanjali says "non-attachment", he is not anti-love. Really, he is for love. Non-attachment means be natural, loving, flowing, but don't get obsessed and addicted. Addiction is the problem. Then it is like a disease. You cannot love anybody except your child - this is addiction. Then you will be in misery. Your child can die; then there is no possibility for your love to flow. Even if your child is not going to die, he will grow. And the more he grows, the more he will become independent. And then there will be pain. Every mother suffers, every father suffers.
And the child will become adult, he will fall in love with some woman. And then the mother suffers: a competitor has entered. But this is because of attachment. If a mother really loved the child, she will help him to be independent. She will help him to move in the world and to make as many love contacts as possible, because she would know that the more you love, the more you are fulfilled. And when her child falls in love with a woman, she will be happy; she will dance with joy.
Love never gives you misery because if you love someone you love his happiness. If you are attached to someone, you don't love his happiness, you love only your selfishness; you are concerned only with your own egocentric demands.
Freud discovered many things. One of them is mother or father fixation. He says the most dangerous mother is that which forces the child to love her so much that he becomes fixed, and he will not be able to love anybody else. So there are millions of people suffering because of such fixations.
As far as I have been trying to study many people... Almost all the husbands, at least ninety-nine percent, are trying to find their mothers in their wives. Of course, you cannot find your mother in your wife; your wife is not your mother. But a deep fixation with the mother, and then they are dissatisfied with the wife because she is not mothering them. And every wife is searching for the father in the husband. No husband is your father. And if she is not satisfied with the fathering, then she is dissatisfied.
These are fixations. In Patanjali's language, he calls them attachments. Freud calls them fixations. The words differ, but the meaning is the same. Don't get fixed; be flowing. Non-attachment means you are not fixed. Don't be like ice cubes, be like water - flowing. Don't be frozen.
Every attachment becomes a frozen thing, dead. It is not vibrating with life; it is not a constantly moving response. It is not moment to moment alive, it is fixed. You love a person - if it is love, then you cannot predict what is going to happen next moment. It is impossible to predict; moods change like weather. You cannot say the next moment also your lover will be loving to you. Next moment he may not feel like loving. You cannot expect.
If he in the next moment also loves you, it is good, you are thankful. If he is not loving in the next moment, nothing can be done; you are helpless. You have to accept the fact that he is not in the mood. Nothing to cry about, simply there is no mood! You accept the situation. You don't force the lover to pretend, because pretension is dangerous.
If I feel loving towards you, I say, "I love you," but the next moment I can say, "No, I don't feel any love in this moment." So there are only two possibilities - either you accept my non-loving mood, or you force that "Whether you love me or not, at least show that you love me." If you force me, then I become false and the relationship becomes a pretension, a hypocrisy. Then we are not true to each other. And two persons who are not true to each other how can they be in love? Their relationship will have become a fixation.
Wife and husband, they are fixed, dead. Everything is certain. They are behaving towards each other as if they are things. You come to your home, your furniture will be the same because furniture is dead. Your house will be the same because house is dead. But you cannot expect your wife to be the same, she is alive, a person. And if you expect her to be the same as she was when you left the house, then you are forcing her to be just a piece of furniture, just a thing. Attachment forces the persons related to be things and love helps the persons to be more free, to be more independent, to be more true. But truth can only be in constant flow, it can never be frozen.
When Patanjali says "non-attachment, he is not saying to kill your love. Rather, on the contrary, he is saying, "Kill all that poisons your love, kill all the obstacles, destroy all the obstacles that kill your love." Only a yogi can be loving. The worldly person cannot be loving, he can be attached.
Remember this: attachment means fixation - and you cannot accept anything new in it, only the past. You don't allow the present, you don't allow the future to change anything. And life is change. Only death is unchanging.
If you are unattached, then moment to moment you move without any fixation. Every moment life will bring new happinesses, new miseries. There will be dark nights and there will be sunny days, but you are open; you don't have a fixed mind. When you don't have a fixed mind even a miserable situation cannot give you misery, because you don't have anything to compare it. You were not expecting something against it, so you cannot be frustrated.
You get frustrated because of your demands. You were thinking that when you will come back home, your wife will be just standing outside to welcome you. And if she is not standing there outside to welcome you, you cannot accept it. And this gives you frustration and misery. You demand, and through demand you create misery. And demand is possible only if you are attached. You cannot demand with persons who are strangers to you. Only with attachment demand comes in. That is why all attachments become hellish.
Patanjali says be non-attached. That means be flowing, accepting, whatsoever life brings. Don't demand and don't force. Life is not going to follow you. You cannot force life to be according to you. It is better to flow with the river rather than pushing it. Just flow with it! Much happiness becomes possible. There is already much happiness all around you, but you cannot see it because of your wrong fixations.
But this non-attachment in the beginning will only be a seed. In the end, non-attachment becomes desirelessness. In the beginning non-attachment means non-fixation; in the end non-attachment will mean desirelessness, no desire. In the beginning no demand; in the end no desire.
But if you want to reach to this end of no-desire, start from no-demand. Even for twenty-four hours try Patanjali's formula. Just for twenty-four hours, flowing with life, not demanding anything. Whatsoever life gives, feeling grateful, thankful. Just moving for twenty-four hours in a prayerful state of mind - not asking, not demanding, not expecting - and you will have a new opening. Those twenty-four hours will become a new window. And you will feel how ecstatic you can become.
But you will have to be alert in the beginning. It cannot be expected that non-attachment, for the seeker, can be a spontaneous act.
The Second Question:
No, it is never possible because the group has got no soul, the group has got no Self. Only the individual can be the recipient, the receiver, because only the individual has the heart. Group is not a person.
You are here, I am talking, but I am not talking to the group because with the group there can be no communication. I am talking to each individual here. You have gathered in a group, but you are not hearing me as a group; you are hearing me as individuals. Really, the group doesn't exist. Only individuals exist. "Group" is just a word. It has no reality, no substance. It is just the name of a collectivity.
You cannot love a group, you cannot love a nation, you cannot love humanity. But there are persons who claim that they love humanity. They deceive themselves because there is no one like humanity anywhere, only human beings are there. Go and search; you will never find humanity somewhere.
Really, these are the persons who claim that they love humanity; these are the persons who cannot love persons. They are incapable of being in love with persons. Then big names - humanity, nation, universe. They may even love God, but they cannot love a person, because to love a person is arduous, difficult. It is a struggle. You have to change yourself. To love humanity, there is no problem - there is no humanity; you are alone. Truth, beauty, love or anything that is significant always belongs to the individual. Only individuals can be recipients.
Ten thousand monks were there when Buddha poured his being into Mahakashyap, but the group was incapable. No group can be capable, because consciousness is individual, awareness is individual. Mahakashyap rose to the peak where he could receive Buddha. Other individuals can also become that peak, but no group.
Religion basically remains individualistic, and it cannot be otherwise. That is one of the basic fights between communism and religion. Communism thinks in terms of groups, societies, collectivities, and religion thinks in terms of the individual person, Self. Communism thinks that the society can be changed as a whole, and religion thinks only individuals can be changed. Society cannot be changed as a whole because society has no soul, it cannot be transformed. In fact, there is no society, only individuals.
Communism says there are no individuals, only society. Communism and religion, they are absolutely antagonistic, and this is the antagonism - if communism becomes prevalent, then individual freedom disappears. Then only the society exists. Individual is not allowed really to be there. He can exist only as a part, as a cog in the wheel. He cannot be allowed to be a Self.
I have heard one anecdote.
One man reported into a [Soviet] Moscow police station that his parrot is missing. So he was directed to the clerk concerned. The clerk wrote, and the clerk asked, "Does the parrot speak also? He talks?" The man became afraid, a little troubled, uncomfortable. The man said, "Yes, he talks. But whatsoever political opinion he expresses, those political opinions are strictly his own!"
A parrot! This individual was afraid because parrot means those political opinions must belong to his master. A parrot simply imitates.
No individuality is allowed. You cannot have your opinions. Opinions are the concern of the state, the group mind. And group mind is the lowest thing possible. Individuals can reach to the peaks; no group has ever become Buddha-like or Jesus-like. Only individual peaks.
Buddha is giving his whole life's experience to Mahakashyap because there is no other way. It cannot be given to any group. It cannot be; it is just impossible. Communication, communion can only be between two individuals. It is a personal, deeply personal faith. Group is impersonal. And remember that group can do many things - madness is possible with the group, but Buddhahood is not possible. A group can be mad, but a group cannot be enlightened.
Lower the phenomenon, the group can participate in it more. So all great sins are committed by the group not by individuals. An individual can murder few people, but an individual cannot become "Fascism", he cannot murder millions. Fascism can murder millions, and with good conscience!
After the Second World War all the war criminals confessed that they are not responsible: they were just ordered from above, and they followed the orders. They were just part of the group. Even Hitler and Mussolini were very much sensitive in their private lives. Hitler used to listen to music; loved music. Even sometimes he used to paint; loved painting. Seems impossible, Hitler loving painting and music, so sensitive, and killing millions of Jews without any inconvenience, without any discomfort in his conscience, not even a prick. He was "not responsible". Then he was just the leader of a group.
When you are moving in a crowd, you can commit anything because you feel "The crowd is doing it. I am just part of it." Alone, you would think thrice whether to do it or not. In the crowd responsibility is lost, your individual thinking is lost, your discrimination is lost, your awareness is lost. You have become just a part of a crowd. Crowds can go mad. Every country knows, every period knows crowds can go mad, and then they can do anything. But it has never been heard that crowds can become enlightened.
The higher states of consciousness can be achieved only by individuals. More responsibility has to be felt - more individual responsibility, more conscience. The more you feel you are responsible, the more you feel you have to be aware, the more you become individual.
Buddha communicates with Mahakashyap his silent experience, his silent sambodhi, his silent enlightenment, because Mahakashyap also has become a peak, a height, and two heights can meet now. And this will always be so. So if you want to reach higher peaks, don't think in terms of groups, think in terms of your own individuality. A group can be helpful in the beginning, but the more you grow, less and less group can be helpful.
A point comes when group cannot be of any help, you are left alone. And when you are totally alone and you start growing in your aloneness, for the first time you are crystallized. You become a soul, a self.
The Third Question:
Society conditions you to make a slave out of you, an obedient member, so the question seems valid - how a continuous reconditioning of the mind can make you liberated? The question seems valid only because you are confusing two types of conditioning.
You have come to me, you have traveled a path. When you will be going back, you will travel the same path again. The mind can ask, "The path which brought you here, how it can take you back, the same path?" The path will be the same, your direction will be different - quite the opposite. While you were coming towards me you were facing towards me, when going back you will be facing the opposite direction - the path will be the same.
The society conditions you to make an obedient member, to make you a slave. Just a path. The same path has to be traveled to make you free, only the direction will be the opposite. The same method has to be used to "uncondition" you.
I remember one parable. Once Buddha came to his monks; he was going to deliver a sermon. He sat under his tree. He was having a handkerchief in his hand. He looked at the handkerchief. The whole congregation also looked what he was doing. Then he binds five knots in the handkerchief and then he asks, "What should I do now to unknot this handkerchief? What should I do now?" And he asked two questions. One: "Is the handkerchief the same when there were no knots on it or is it different?"
One bhikkhu, one monk, says that, "In a sense it is the same because the quality of the handkerchief has not changed. Even with knots, it is the same, the same handkerchief. The inherent nature remains the same. But in a sense it has changed because something new has appeared. Knots were not there, now knots are there. So superficially it has changed, but deep down it has remained the same."
Buddha says, "This is the situation of human mind. Deep down it remains unknotted. The quality remains the same." When you become a Buddha, an enlightened one, you will not have a different consciousness. The quality will be the same. The difference is only that now you are a knotted handkerchief; your consciousness has a few knots.
Second thing Buddha asked: "What I should do to unknot the handkerchief?" Another monk says, "Unless we know what you have done to knot it we cannot say anything, because the reverse process will have to be applied. The way you have knotted it has to be known first, because that will be the way again in the reverse order to unknot." So Buddha says, "This is the second thing. How you have come into this bondage, this has to be understood. How you are conditioned in your bondage, this has to be understood, because the same will be the process, in reverse order, to uncondition you."
If attachment is the conditioning factor, then non-attachment will become the unconditioning factor. If expectation leads you in misery, then non-expectation will lead you into non-misery. If anger creates a hell within you, then compassion will create a heaven. So whatsoever the process of misery, the reverse will be the process of happiness.
Unconditioning means you have to understand the whole knotted phenomenon of human consciousness as it is. This whole process of yoga will be nothing understanding the complex knots and then unknotting them, unconditioning them. It is not a reconditioning, remember. It is simply unconditioning; it is negative. If it is a reconditioning, then you will become a slave again - a new type of slave in a new imprisonment. So this difference has to be remembered: it is unconditioning, not reconditioning.
Because of this, many problems have arisen. Krishnamurti goes on saying that if you do anything it will become a reconditioning, so don't do anything. If you do anything it will become a reconditioning. You may be a better slave, but you will remain a slave. Listening to him, many people have stopped all efforts. But that doesn't make them liberated. They are not liberated. The conditioning is there. They are not reconditioning. Listening to Krishnamurti, they have stopped, they are not reconditioning. But are they also not unconditioning. They remain the slaves.
So I am not for reconditioning, neither is Patanjali for reconditioning. I am for unconditioning, and Patanjali is also for unconditioning. Just understand the mind. Whatsoever its disease, understand the disease, diagnose it, and move in the reverse order.
What is the difference? Take some actual example. You feel anger. Anger is a conditioning; you have learned it. Psychologists say that it is a learning; it is a programmed thing. Your society teaches it to you. There are societies even now which never get angry, the members never get angry. There are societies, small tribal clans still in existence, which have never known any fight, no war.
In Philippines, a small aboriginal tribe exists. For three thousand years it has not known any fight, not a single murder, not a single suicide. What has happened to it? And they are the most peace-loving people, the most happy possible. Their society from the very beginning never conditions them for anger. In that tribe, even in your dream if you kill someone, you have to go and ask his forgiveness - even in dream. If you are angry with someone and fighting, next day you have to declare to the village that you have done something wrong. Then the village will gather together, and the wise men of the village will diagnose your dream and they will suggest what is to be done now - even small children!
I was reading their dream analyses. They seem to be one of the most penetrating people. A small child dreams. In dream he sees the boy of the neighbor, very sad. So he tells the dream to his father so in the morning that "I have seen the boy of the neighbor very sad."
So the father thinks over it, closes his eyes, meditates, and then he says, "If you have seen him sad, that means somehow his sadness is related to you. No one else has dreamed about him that he is sad, so either knowingly or unknowingly you have done something which creates his sadness. Or, if you have not done, in the future you are going to do. So the dream is just a prediction for the future. You go with many sweets, many gifts. Give sweets and gifts to the boy and ask for his forgiveness - either of something done in the past or something which you are going to do in the future."
So the boy goes, gives the fruits, sweets, gifts, and asks his forgiveness because somehow, in the dream, he is responsible for his sadness. From the very beginning the children are brought up in this way. If this tribe has existed without strife, fight, murder, suicide, there is no wonder. They cannot conceive. A different type of mind is functioning there.
Psychologists say that hate or anger are not natural. Love is natural: hate and anger are just created. They are hindrances in love, and society conditions you for them. Unconditioning means whatsoever the society has done, it has done. There is no use going on condemning it; it is already the case. And by simply saying the society is responsible, you are not helped. It has been done. Now - right now what you can do, you can uncondition. So whatsoever your problems, look deep in the problem. Penetrate it, analyze it, and look how you are conditioned for it.
For example, there are societies which never feel competitive. Even in India, there are aboriginal tribes - no competition exists. Of course, they cannot be very progressive in our measurement, because our progress can only be through competition. They are not competitive. Because they are not competitive, they are not angry, they are not jealous, they are not so hate-filled, they are not so violent. They don't expect much, and whatsoever their life gives to them they feel happy and grateful.
To you, whatsoever life gives... you will never feel grateful. You will always be frustrated because you can always ask more. And there is no end to your expectations and desires. So if you feel miserable, look into the misery and analyze it. What are the conditioning factors which are creating the misery? And there is not much difficulty to understand. If you can create misery, if you are so capable of creating misery, there is no difficulty in understanding it. If you can create it, you can understand it.
Patanjali's whole standpoint is this: looking into the misery of man, it is found that man himself is responsible. He is doing something to create it. That doing has become habitual, so he goes on doing it. It has become repetitive, mechanical, robot-like. If you become alert, you can drop out of it. You can simply say, "I will not cooperate." The mechanism will start working.
Someone insults you. You just stand still, remain silent. The mechanism will start; it will bring the past pattern. The anger will be coming, the smoke will arise, and you will feel just on the verge of getting mad. But you stand. Don't cooperate and just look what the mechanism is doing. You will feel wheels within wheels within you, but they are impotent because you are not cooperating.
Or, if you feel it impossible to remain in such a still state, then close your door, move into the room, have a pillow before you, and beat the pillow. And be angry with the pillow. And when you are beating on, getting angry and mad with the pillow, just go on watching what you are doing, what is happening, how the pattern is repeating itself.
If you can stand still, that's the best. If you feel it is difficult, you are pulled, then move into a room and be angry on the pillow. Because with the pillow, your madness will be totally visible to you; it will become transparent. And the pillow is not going to react; you can watch more easily. And there is no danger, no safety problem. You can watch. Slowly, the rising of the anger and the decline of the anger.
Watch both, the rhythm. And when your anger is exhausted, you don't feel like beating the pillow any more, or you have started laughing or you feel ridiculous, close your eyes, sit on the floor, and meditate on what has happened. Do you still feel anger for the person who has insulted you, or it is thrown onto the pillow? You will feel a certain calmness falling on you. And you will not feel angry now with the person concerned. Rather, you may even feel compassion for him.
One young American boy was here two years before. He had escaped from America only because of one problem, one obsession: he was continuously thinking of murdering his father. The father must have been a dangerous man; must have suppressed this boy too much. In his dreams he was thinking of murdering, in his daydreams also he was thinking of murdering his father. He escaped from his home only just so that the father is not there. Otherwise, any day something can happen. The madness is there; it can erupt any moment.
He was here with me. And I told him, "Don't suppress it." I gave him a pillow and said, "This is your father. Now do whatsoever you like." At first he started laughing, laughing in a mad way. And he said, "It looks ridiculous." I told him, "Let it be ridiculous. If it is in the mind, let it come out." For fifteen days continuously he was beating and tearing the pillow, and doing it. On the sixteenth day he came with a knife. I had not told him. So I asked him, "Why this knife?"
He said, "Now don't stop me. Let me kill. Now the pillow is not pillow for me. The pillow has actually become my father." That day he killed his father. And then he started crying; tears came through his eyes. He became calmed down, relaxed, and he told me, "I am feeling much love for my father, much compassion. Now allow me to go back."
He is back now. The relationship has totally changed. What has happened? Just a mechanical obsession is released.
If you can stand still when some old pattern grips your mind, it is good. If you cannot, then allow it to happen in a dramatic way, but alone, not with someone. Because whenever you enact your pattern, allow your pattern with someone, it creates new reactions and it is a vicious circle.
The most significant point is to be watchful of the pattern - whether you are standing silently or acting your anger and hate out - watchful, looking how it uncoils. And if you can see the mechanism, you can undo it.
All the steps in yoga are just for undoing something which you have been doing. They are negative; nothing new is to be created. Only the wrong is to be destroyed, and the right is already there. Nothing positive is to be done, only something negative. The positive is hidden there. It is just like a stream is there, hidden under a rock. You are not to create the stream. It is already there, knocking; wants to be released and to become free and flowing. A rock is there. The rock has to be undone. Once the rock is removed, the stream starts flowing.
Bliss, happiness, joy or whatsoever you call it is there already flowing in you. Only some rocks are there. Those rocks are the conditionings of the society. Uncondition them. If you feel attachment is the rock, then make efforts for non-attachment. If you feel anger is the rock, then make efforts for non-anger. If you feel greed is the rock, then make efforts for non-greed. Just do the opposite. Don't suppress greed. Just do the opposite: do something which is non-greed. Just don't suppress anger; do something which is non-anger.
In Japan, when someone gets angry, they have a traditional teaching. If someone gets angry, immediately he has to do something which is non-anger. And the same energy which was going to move into anger moves into non-anger. Energy is neutral. If you feel angry with someone and you want to slap his face, give him a flower and see what happens.
You wanted to slap his face; you wanted to do something - that was anger. Give him a flower and just watch what is happening within you - you are doing something which is of non-anger. And the same energy which was going to move your hand will move your hand. And the same energy which was going to hit him is now going to give the flower. But the quality has changed. You have done something. And the energy is neutral. If you don't do something, then you suppress - and suppression is poisonous. Do something, but just the opposite. And this is not a new conditioning, it is just to uncondition the old. When the old has disappeared, the knots have disappeared, you need not worry for anything to do. Then you can flow spontaneously.
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The last question:
I am not interested in the Western mind or the Eastern mind. These are just two aspects of one mind. I am interested in the mind. And this Eastern-Western dichotomy is not very meaningful, not even significant now. There are Eastern minds in the West and there are Western minds in the East. And now the whole thing has become a mess. East is now also in a hurry. The old East has disappeared completely.
I am reminded of one Taoist anecdote.
Three Taoists were meditating in a cave. One year passed. They were silent, sitting, meditating. One day one horseman passed nearby. They looked. One of the three hermits said, "The horse he was riding was white." The other two remained silent. After one year again, the second hermit said, "The horse was black, not white." Then one more year passed again. The third hermit said, "If there are going to be discussions, I am leaving. If there is going to be any bickering, I am leaving. I am leaving! You are disturbing my silence!"
What did it matter whether the horse was white or black? Three years! But this was the flow in the East. Time was not. East was not conscious of time at all. East lived into eternity, as if time was not passing. Everything was static.
But that East no longer exists. West has corrupted everything; the East has disappeared. Through Western education everybody is now Western. Only few island-like people are there who are Eastern - they can be in the West, they can be in the East, they are not in any way confined to the East. But the world as a whole, the earth as a whole, has become Western.
Yoga says... and let it penetrate you very deeply because it will be very meaningful... Yoga says that the more you are impatient, the more time will be needed for your transformation. The more in hurry, the more you will be delayed. Hurry itself creates such a confusion that delay will result.
The less in a hurry, earlier will be the results. If you are infinitely patient, this very moment transformation can happen. If you are ready to wait forever, you may not wait even for the next moment. This very moment the thing can happen, because it is not a question of time, it is a question of the quality of your mind.
Infinite patience. Simply not hankering for results gives you much depth. Hurry makes you shallow. You are in such a hurry that you cannot be deep. This moment you are not interested here in this moment, but what is going to happen in the next. In result you are interested. You are moving ahead of you; your movement is mad. So you may run too much, you may travel too much, you will not reach anywhere because the goal to be reached is just here. You have to drop into it, not to reach anywhere. And the dropping is possible only if you are totally patient.
I will tell you one Zen anecdote.
One Zen monk is passing through a forest. Suddenly he becomes aware one tiger is following him, so he starts running. But his running is also of a Zen type; he is not in a hurry. He is not mad. His running also is smooth, harmonious. He is enjoying it. And it is said that the monk thinks in the mind, "If the tiger is enjoying it, then why not I?"
And the tiger is following him. Then he comes near a precipice. Just to escape from the tiger he hangs with the branch of a tree. And then he looks downwards. One lion is standing there in the valley, waiting for him. Then the tiger has reached, he is standing just near the tree on the hilltop. He is hanging in between, just with a branch, and another lion is waiting for him, deep down.
He laughs. Then he looks. Two mice are just cutting that branch... one white, one black. Then he laughs very loudly. He says, "This is life. Day and night, white and black mice cutting. And wherever I go, death is waiting. This is life!" And it is said that he achieves a satori - the first glimpse of enlightenment. This is life! Nothing to worry about; this is how things go. Wherever you go death is waiting, and even if you don't go anywhere day and night are cutting your life. So he laughs loudly.
Then he looks around, because now it is fixed. Now there is no worry. When death is certain, what is the worry? Only in uncertainty there is worry. When everything is certain, there is no worry; now it has become a destiny. So he looks for these few moments how to enjoy. He becomes aware just by the side of the branch some strawberries, so he picks a few strawberries, eats them. They are the best of his life. He enjoys them, and it is said he becomes enlightened in that moment.
He has become a Buddha because death is so near even then he is not in any hurry. He can enjoy a strawberry. It is sweet! The taste of it is sweet! He thanks God. It is said in that moment everything disappears - the tiger, the lion, the branch, he himself. He has become the cosmos.
This is patience, absolute patience! Wherever you are, in that moment enjoy without asking for the future. No futuring in the mind - just the present moment, the nowness of the moment, and you are satisfied. Then there is no need to go anywhere. Wherever you are, from that very point you will drop into the ocean; you will become one with the cosmos.
But the mind is not interested in here and now. The mind is interested somewhere in the future in some results. So the question is, in a way, relevant for such a mind, the modern mind it will be better to call it rather than Western. The modern mind is constantly obsessed with the future, with the result, not with the here and now.
How this mind can be taught yoga? This mind can be taught yoga because this future orientation is leading nowhere. And this future orientation is creating constant misery for the modern mind. We have created a hell, and we have created too much of it. Now either man will have to disappear from this planet earth, or he will have to transform himself. Either humanity will have to die completely - because this hell cannot be continued any more - or we will have to go through a mutation.
Hence, yoga can become very meaningful and significant for the modern mind because yoga can save. It can teach you again how to be here and now - how to forget past, how to forget future, and how to remain in the present moment with such intensity that this moment becomes timeless; the very moment becomes eternity.
Patanjali can become more and more significant. As this century will come to its closure, techniques about human transformation will become more and more important. They are already becoming all over the world - whether you call them yoga or Zen or you call them Sufi methods or you call them Tantra methods. In many, many ways, all the old traditional teachings are erupting. Some deep need is there, and those who are thinking, anywhere, in any part of the world, they have become interested to find again how humanity in the past existed with such beatitude, such bliss. With so poor conditions, how such rich men existed in the past, and we, with such a rich situation, why we are so poor?
This is a paradox, the modern paradox. For the first time on the earth we have created rich, scientific societies, and they are the most ugly and most unhappy. And in the past there was no scientific technology, no affluence, nothing of comfort, but humanity was existing in such a deep, peaceful milieu - happy, thankful. What has happened? We can be more happy than anyone, but we have lost contact with existence.
And that existence is here and now, and an impatient mind cannot be in contact with it. Impatience is like a feverish, mad state of mind; you go on running. Even if the goal comes, you cannot stand there because the running has become just the habit. Even if you reach the goal you will miss it, you will pass it because you cannot stop. If you can stop, the goal is not to be searched.
Zen Master Hui-Hai, has said that, "Seek, and you will lose; don't seek, and you can get it immediately. Stop, and it is here. Run, it is nowhere."
THE FIRST STATE OF VAIRAGYA, DESIRELESSNESS - CESSATION FROM SELF- INDULGENCE IN THE THIRST FOR SENSUOUS PLEASURES, WITH CONSCIOUS EFFORT.
THE LAST STATE OF VAIRAGYA, DESIRELESSNESS - CESSATION OF ALL DESIRING BY KNOWING THE INNERMOST NATURE OF PURUSHA, THE SUPREME SELF.
Abhyasa and vairagya - constant inner practice and desirelessness: these are the two foundation stones of Patanjali's yoga. Constant inner effort is needed not because something has to be achieved, but because of wrong habits. The fight is not against nature, the fight is against habits.
The nature is there, every moment available to flow in, to become one with it, but you have got a wrong pattern of habits. Those habits create barriers. The fight is against these habits, and unless they are destroyed, the nature, your inherent nature, cannot flow, cannot move, cannot reach to the destiny for which it is meant to be.
So remember the first thing: the struggle is not against nature. The struggle is against wrong nurture, wrong habits. You are not fighting yourself; you are fighting something else which has become fixed within you. If this is not understood rightly, then your whole effort can go in a wrong direction. You may start fighting with yourself, and if once you start fighting with yourself you are fighting a losing battle. You can never be victorious. Who will be victorious and who will be defeated? - because you are both. The one who is fighting and the one with whom you are fighting is the same.
If my both hands start fighting, who is going to win? Once you start fighting with yourself you are lost. And so many persons, in their endeavors, in their seeking for spiritual truth, fall into that error. They become victims of this error; they start fighting with themselves. If you fight with yourself, you will go more and more insane. You will be more and more divided, split. You will become schizophrenic. This is what is happening in the West.
Christianity has not taught Christ. Christianity has taught to fight with oneself, to condemn oneself, to deny oneself. Christianity has created a great division between the lower and the higher. There is nothing lower and nothing higher in you, but Christianity talks about the lower self and the higher self, or body and the soul. But somehow Christianity divides you and creates a fight. This fight is going to be endless; it will not lead you anywhere. The ultimate result can only be self-destruction, a schizophrenic chaos. That's what is happening in the West.
Yoga never divides you, but still there is a fight. The fight is not against your nature. On the contrary, the fight is for your nature. You have accumulated many habits. Those habits are your achievement of many lives' wrong patterns. And because of those wrong patterns your nature cannot move spontaneously, cannot flow spontaneously, cannot reach to its destiny. These habits have to be destroyed, and these are only habits. They may look like nature to you because you are so much addicted with them. You may have become identified with them, but they are not you.
This distinction has to be clearly maintained in the mind, otherwise you can misinterpret Patanjali. Whatsoever has come in you from without and is wrong has to be destroyed so that which is within you can flow, can flower. Abhyasa, constant inner practice, is against habits.
The second thing, the second foundation stone, is vairagya, desirelessness. That too can lead you in the wrong direction. And, remember, these are not rules, these are simple directions. When I say these are not rules, I mean they are not to be followed like an obsession. They have to be understood - the meaning, the significance. And that significance has to be carried in one's life.
It is going to be different for everyone, so it is not a fixed rule. You are not to follow it dogmatically. You have to understand its significance and allow it to grow within you. The flowering is going to be different with each individual. So these are not dead, dogmatic rules, these are simple directions. They indicate the direction. They don't give you the detail.
I remember once Mulla Nasrudin was working as a doorkeeper in a museum. The first day he was appointed, he asked for the rules: "What rules have to be followed?" So he was given the book of the rules that were to be followed by the doorkeeper. He memorized them; he took every care not to forget a single detail.
And the first day when he was on duty, the first visitor came. He told the visitor to leave his umbrella there outside with him at the door. The visitor was amazed. He said, "But I don't have any umbrella." So Nasrudin said, "In that case, you will have to go back. Bring an umbrella because this is the rule. Unless a visitor leaves his umbrella here outside, he cannot be allowed in."
And there are many people who are rule-obsessed. They follow blindly. Patanjali is not interested in giving you rules. Whatsoever he is going to say are simple directions - not to be followed, but to be understood. The following will come out of that understanding. And the reverse cannot happen - if you follow the rules, understanding will not come, if you understand the rules, the following will come automatically, as a shadow.
Desirelessness is a direction. If you follow it as a rule, then you will start killing your desires. Many have done that, millions have done that. They start killing their desires. Of course, this is mathematical, this is logical. If desirelessness is to be achieved, then this is the best way: to kill all desires. Then you will be without desires.
But you will be also dead. You have followed the rule exactly, but if you kill all desires you are killing yourself, you are committing suicide-because desires are not only desires, they are the flow of life energy. Desirelessness is to be achieved without killing anything. Desirelessness is to be achieved with more life, with more energy - not less.
For example, you can kill sex easily if you starve the body, because sex and food are deeply related. Food is needed for your survival, for the survival of the individual, and sex is needed for the survival of the race, of the species. They are both food in a way. Without food the individual cannot survive and without sex the race cannot survive. But the primary is individual. If the individual cannot survive, then there is no question of the race.
So if you starve your body, if you give so little food to your body that the energy created by it is exhausted in day-to-day routine work - your walking, sitting, sleeping - no extra energy accumulates, then sex will disappear because sex can be there only when the individual is gathering extra energy, more than he needs for his survival. Then the body can think of the survival for the race. If you are in danger, then the body simply forgets about sex.
Hence, so much attraction for fasting, because if you fast, sex disappears - but this is not desirelessness. This is just becoming more and more dead, less and less alive. Zen monks in India, they have been fasting continuously just for this end, because if you fast continuously and you are constantly on a starvation diet, sex disappears; nothing else is needed - no transformation of the mind, no transformation of the inner energy. Simply starving helps.
Then you become habitual for the starvation. And continuously if you do it for years, you will simply forget that sex exists. No energy is created; no energy moves to the sex center. There is no energy to move! The person exists just as a dead being. There is no sex.
But this is not what Patanjali means. This is not a desireless state. It is simply an impotent state; energy is not there. Give food to the body... You may have starved the body for thirty or forty years - give right food to the body and sex reappears immediately. You are not changed. The sex is just hidden there waiting for energy to flow. Whenever energy flows, it will become again alive.
So what is the criterion? The criterion has to be remembered. Be more alive, be more filled with energy, vital, and become desireless. Only then, if your desirelessness makes you more alive, then you have followed the right direction. If it makes you simply a dead person, you have followed the rule. It is easy to follow the rule because no intelligence is required. It is easy to follow the rule because simple tricks can do it. Fasting is a simple trick. Nothing much is implied in it; no wisdom is going to come out of it.
There was one experiment in Oxford. For thirty days a group of twenty students was totally starved, young, healthy boys. After the seventh or eighth day they started losing interest in girls. Nude pictures will be given to them and they will be indifferent. And this indifference was not just bodily, even their minds were not interested - because now there are methods to judge the mind.
Whenever a young boy, healthy boy, looks at a nude picture of a girl, his pupils of the eyes become big. They are more open to receive the nude figure. And you cannot control your pupils; they are not voluntary. So you may say that you are not interested in sex, but a nude picture will show whether you are interested or not. And you cannot do anything voluntarily; you cannot control your pupils of the eyes. They expand because something so interesting has come before them, that they open more, the shutters open more to take more in. No, women are not interested in nude men they are interested in small babies, so if a beautiful baby's picture is given to them, their eyes expand.
Every precaution was taken whether they are interested - no interest. By and by the interest was declining. Even in their dreams they stopped seeing girls, sexual dreams. By the second week, fourteenth or fifteenth day, they were simply dead corpses. Even if a beautiful girl comes nearby, they will not look. If someone says a dirty joke, they will not laugh. For thirty days they were starved. On the thirtieth day, the whole group was sexless. There was no sex in their mind, in their body.
Then food was given to them again. The very first day they became again the same. The next day they were interested, and the third day all that starving for thirty days had disappeared. Now not only they were interested, they were obsessively interested - as if this gap had helped. For a few weeks they were obsessively sexual, only thinking of girls and nothing else. When the food was in the body, girls became important again.
But this has been done in many countries all over the world. Many religions have followed this fasting. And then people start thinking that they have gone beyond sex. You can go beyond sex, but fasting is not the way. That's a trick. And this can be done in every way. If you are on fast you will be less angry, and if you become habitual to fasting, then many things from your life will simply drop because the base has dropped: food is the base.
When you have more energy, you move in more dimensions. When you are filled with overflowing energy, your overflowing energy leads you in many, many desires. Desires are nothing but outlets for energy. So two ways are possible. One is: your desire changes; the energy remains, or energy is removed, desire remains. Energy can be removed very easily. You can simply be operated, castrated, and then sex disappears. Some hormones can be removed from your body. And that's what fasting is doing - some hormones disappear; then you can become sexless.
But this is not the goal of Patanjali. Patanjali says that energy should remain and the desire disappears. Only when desire disappears and you are filled with energy can you achieve that blissful state that yoga aims at. A dead person cannot reach to the divine. The divine can be attained only through overflowing energy, abundant energy, an ocean of energy.
So this is the second thing to remember continuously - don't destroy energy, destroy desire. It will be difficult. It is going to be hard, arduous, because it needs a total transformation of your being. But Patanjali is for it. So he divides his vairagya, his desirelessness, in two steps. Next, we will enter the sutra.
Many things are implied and have to be understood. One, the indulgence in sensuous pleasures. Why you ask for sensuous pleasures? Why the mind constantly thinks about indulgence? Why you move again and again in the same pattern of indulgences?
For Patanjali and for all those who have known, the reason is that you are not blissful inwardly; hence, the desire for pleasure. The pleasure-oriented mind means that as you are, in yourself, you are unhappy. That's why you go on seeking happiness somewhere else. A person who is unhappy is bound to move into desires. Desires are the way of the unhappy mind to seek happiness. Of course, nowhere this mind can find happiness. At the most he can find few glimpses. Those glimpses appear as pleasure. Pleasure means glimpses of happiness. And the fallacy is that this pleasure-seeking mind thinks that these glimpses and pleasure is coming from somewhere else. It always comes from within.
Let us try to understand. You are in love with a person. You move into sex. Sex gives you a glimpse of pleasure; it gives you a glimpse of happiness. For a single moment you feel at ease. All the miseries have disappeared; all the mental agony is no more. For a single moment you are here and now, you have forgotten all. For a single moment there is no past and no future. Because of this - there is no past and no future, and for a single moment you are here & now. From within you, the energy flows. Your inner self flows in this moment, and you have a glimpse of happiness.
But you think that the glimpse is coming from the partner, from the woman or from the man. It is not coming from the man or from the woman. It is coming from you! The other has simply helped you to fall into the present, to fall out of future and past. The other has simply helped you, to bring you to the now-ness of this moment.
If you can come to this now-ness without sex, sex will become, by and by, useless, it will disappear. It will not be a desire then. If you want to move in it you can move into it as a fun, but not as a desire. Then there is no obsession in it, because you are not dependent on it.
Sit under a tree some day - just in the morning when the sun has not arisen, because with the sun arising your body is disturbed, and it is difficult to be at peace within. That is why the East has always been meditating before the sunrise. they have called it brahmamuhurt, the moments of the divine. And they are right, because with the sun, energies rise and they start flowing in the old pattern that you have created.
Just in the morning, the sun has not yet come on the horizon, everything is silent and the nature is fast asleep - the trees are asleep, the birds are asleep, the whole world is asleep; your body also inside is asleep - you have come to sit under a tree. Everything is silent. Just try to be here in this moment. Don't do anything; don't even meditate. Don't make any effort. Just close your eyes, remain silent, in this silence of nature. Suddenly you will have the same glimpse which has been coming to you through sex or even greater, deeper. Suddenly you will feel a rush of energy flowing from within. And now you cannot be deceived because there is no other; it is certainly coming from you. It is certainly flowing from within. Nobody else is giving it to you; you are giving it to yourself.
But the situation is needed - a silence, energy not in excitement. You are not doing anything, just being there under a tree, and you will have the glimpse. And this will not really be the pleasure, it will be the happiness, because now you are looking at the right source, the right direction. Once you know it, then through sex you will immediately recognize that the other was just a mirror; you were just reflected in him or in her. And you were the mirror for the other. You were helping each other to fall into the present, to move away from the thinking mind to a non-thinking state of being.
The more mind is filled with chattering, more sex has appeal. In the East, sex was never such an obsession as it has become an obsession in the West. Films, stories, novels, poetry, magazines, advertisements - everything has become sexual. You cannot sell anything unless you can create a sex appeal. If you have to sell a car you can sell it only as a sex object. If you want to sell toothpaste, you can sell only through some sex appeal. Nothing can be sold without sex. It seems that only sex has the market, nothing else - a significance.
Every significance comes through sex. The whole mind is obsessed with sex. Why? Why this has never happened before? This is something new in human history. And the reason is: now the West is totally absorbed in thoughts - no possibility of being here & now, except in sex. Sex has remained the only possibility, and even that is going.
For the modern man even this has become possible - that while making love, he can think of other things. And once you become so capable that while making love you go on thinking of something else - of your accounts in the bank, or you go on talking with a friend, or you go on being somewhere else while making love - sex will also be finished. Then it will just be boring, frustrating, because sex was not the thing. The thing was only this: because sexual energy is moving so fast, your mind comes to a stop; the sex takes over. The energy flows so fast, so vitally, that your ordinary patterns of thinking come to a stop.
I have heard:
Once it happened that Mulla Nasrudin was passing through a forest. He came upon a skull. Just curious, as he always was, he asked the skull, "What brought you here, sir?" And he was amazed because the skull said, "Talking brought me here, sir." He couldn't believe it, but he had heard it so he ran to the court of the king. He told there that "I have seen a miracle! A skull, a talking skull, lying just near our village in the forest."
The king also couldn't believe, but he was also curious. The whole court followed. They went into the forest. Nasrudin went near the skull and asked again the same question, "What brought you here, sir." But the skull remained silent. He asked again and again and again, but the skull was dead silent.
The king said, "I knew it before, Nasrudin, that you are a liar. But now this is too much. You have played such a joke that you will have to suffer for it." He ordered his guard to cut his head and throw the head near the skull for the ants to eat. When everybody went - the king, his court - the skull started talking again. And she asked, "What brought you here, sir?" Nasrudin answered, "Talking brought me here, sir."
And talking has brought man here - the situation that is today. A constant chattering mind does not allow any happiness, any possibility of happiness, because only a silent mind can look within, only a silent mind can hear the silence, the happiness, that is always bubbling there. But it is so subtle that with the noise of the mind you cannot hear it.
In sex the noise sometimes stops. I say "sometimes". If you have become habitual in sex also, as husbands and wives become, then it never stops. The whole act becomes automatic and the mind goes on its own. Then sex also is a boredom.
Anything has appeal if it can give you a glimpse. The glimpse may appear to be coming from the outside; it always comes from within. The outside can only be just a mirror. When happiness flowing from within is reflected from the outside, it is called pleasure. This is the definition of Patanjali's - happiness flowing from within reflected from somewhere in the outside, the outside functioning as a mirror. And if you think that this happiness is coming from the outside, it is called pleasure. We are in search of happiness, not in search of pleasure. So unless you can have glimpses of happiness, you cannot stop your pleasure-seeking efforts. Indulgence means search for pleasure.
A conscious effort is needed. For two things. One: Whenever you feel a moment of pleasure is there, transform it into a meditative situation. Whenever you feel you are feeling pleasure, happy, joyful, close your eyes and look within, and see from where it is coming. Don't lose this moment; this is precious. If you are not conscious you may continue thinking that it comes from without, from somewhere else, from someone else, and that's the fallacy of the world.
If you are conscious, meditative, if you search for the real source, sooner or later you will come to know it is flowing from within. Once you know that it always flows from within, it is something that you have already got, indulgence will drop, and this will be the first step of desirelessness. Then you are not seeking, not hankering. You are not killing desires, you are not fighting with desires, you have simply found something greater. Desires don't look so important now. They wither away.
Remember this: desires are not to be killed and destroyed; they wither away. Simply you neglect them because you have found a greater source. You are magnetically attracted towards it. Now your whole energy is moving inwards. The desires are simply neglected.
You are not fighting them. If you fight with them you will never win. It is just like you were having some stones, colored stones, in your hand. And now suddenly you have come to know about diamonds, and they are lying about. You throw the colored stones just to create space for the diamonds in your hand. You are not fighting the stones. When diamonds are there you simply drop the stones. They have lost their meaning.
Desires must lose their meaning. If you fight, the meaning is not lost. Or even, on the contrary, just through fight you may give them more meaning. Then they become more important. This is happening. Those who fight with any desire, that desire becomes their center of the mind. If you fight sex, sex becomes the center. Then, continuously, you are engaged in it, occupied with it. It becomes like a wound. And wherever you look, that wound immediately projects, and whatsoever you see becomes sexual.
Mind has a mechanism, an old survival mechanism, of fight or flight. Two are the ways of the mind: either you can fight with something or you can escape from it. If you are strong, then you fight. If you are weak, then you take flight, then you simply escape. But in both the ways the other is important, the other is the center. You can fight or you can escape from the world - from the world where desires are possible; you can go to the Himalayas. That too is a fight, the fight of the weak.
Once Mulla Nasrudin was shopping in a village. He left his donkey on the street and went into a shop to purchase something. When he came out he was furious. Someone has painted his donkey completely red, bright red. So he was furious, and he inquired, "Who has done this? I will kill that man!"
A small boy was standing there. He said, "One man has done this, and that man just has gone inside the pub." So Nasrudin went there, rushed there, angry, mad. He said, "Who has done this? Who the hell has painted my donkey?"
A very big man, very strong, stood and he said, "I did. What about it?" So Nasrudin said, "Thank you, sir. You have done such a beautiful job. I just came to tell you that the first coat is dry."
If you are strong, then you are ready to fight. If you are weak, then you are ready to fly, to take flight. But in both the cases, you are not becoming stronger. In both cases the other has become the center of your mind. These are the two attitudes fight or flight - and both are wrong because through both the mind is strengthened.
Patanjali says there is a third possibility: don't fight and don't escape. Just be alert. Just be conscious. Whatsoever is the case, just be a witness. Conscious effort means, one: searching for the inner source of happiness, and, second: witnessing the old pattern of habits - not fighting it, just witnessing it.
"Conscious effort" is the key word. Consciousness is needed, and effort is also needed. And the effort should be conscious because there can be unconscious efforts. You can be trained in such a way that you can drop certain desires without knowing that you have dropped them.
For example, if you are born in a vegetarian home you will be eating vegetarian food. Non-vegetarian food is simply not the question. You never dropped it consciously. You have been brought up in such a way that unconsciously it has dropped by itself. But this is not going to give you some integrity; this is not going to give you some spiritual strength. Unless you do something consciously, it is not gained.
Many societies have tried this for their children to bring them up in such a way that certain wrong things simply don't enter in their lives. They don't enter, but nothing is gained through it because the real thing to gain is consciousness. And consciousness can be gained through effort. If without effort something is conditioned on you, it is not a gain at all.
So in India there are many vegetarians. Jains, Brahmins, many people are vegetarians. Nothing is gained because just by being born in a Jain family, being a vegetarian means nothing. It is not a conscious effort; you have not done anything about it. If you were born into a non-vegetarian family, you would have taken to non-vegetarian food similarly.
Unless some conscious effort is done, your crystallization never happens. You have to do something on your own. When you do something on your own, you gain something. Nothing is gained without consciousness, remember it. It is one of the ultimates. Nothing is gained without consciousness! You may become a perfect saint, but if you have not become through consciousness, it is futile, useless. You must struggle inch by inch because through struggle more consciousness will be needed. And the more consciousness you practice, the more conscious you become. And a moment comes when you become pure consciousness.
What to do? Whenever you are in any state of pleasure - sex, food, money, power, anything that gives you pleasure - meditate on it. Just try to find it, from where it is coming. You are the source, or the source is somewhere else? If the source is somewhere else, then there is no possibility of any transformation because you will remain dependent to the source.
But, fortunately, the source is not anywhere else, it is within you. If you meditate, you will find it. It is knocking every moment from within, that "I am here!" Once you have the feeling that it is there knocking every moment - and you were creating only situations outside in which it was happening - it can happen without situations. Then you need not depend on anybody, on food, on sex, on power, anything. You are enough unto yourself. Once you have come to this feeling, the feeling of enoughness, then indulgence - the mind to indulge, the indulgent mind - it disappears.
That doesn't mean you will not enjoy food. You will enjoy more. But now food is not the source of your happiness, you are the source. You are not dependent on food, you are not addicted to it.
That doesn't mean you will not enjoy sex. You can enjoy more, but now it is fun, play; it is just a celebration. But you are not dependent on it. It is not the source. And once two persons, two lovers, can find this - that the other is not the source of their pleasure - they stop fighting with the other. They start loving the other for the first time.
Otherwise you cannot love a person upon whom you are dependent in any way. You will hate, because he is your dependence. Without him you cannot be happy. So he has the key, and a person who has the key of your happiness is your jailer. Lovers fight because they look that the other has the key and, "He can make me happy or unhappy." Once you come to know that you are the source and the other is the source of his own happiness, you can share your happiness; that's another thing, but you are not dependent. You can share. You can celebrate together. That's what love means: celebrating together, sharing together - not driving from each other, not exploiting each other.
Because exploitation cannot be love. Then you are using the other as a means, and whomsoever you use as a means, he will hate you. Lovers hate each other because they are using, exploiting each other, and love - which should be the deepest ecstasy - becomes the ugliest hell. But once you know that you are the source of your happiness, no one else is the source, you can share it freely. Then the other is not your enemy, not even an intimate enemy. For the first time friendship arises, you can enjoy anything.
And you will be able to enjoy only when you are free. Only an independent person can enjoy. A person who is mad and obsessed with food cannot enjoy. He may fill his belly, but cannot enjoy. His eating is violent. It is a sort of killing. He is killing the food; he is destroying the food. And lovers who feel that their happiness depends on the other are fighting, trying to dominate the other, trying to kill the other, to destroy the other. You will be able to enjoy everything more when you know that the source is within. Then the whole life becomes a play, and moment-to-moment you can go on celebrating infinitely.
This is the first step, with effort. Consciousness and effort, you achieve desirelessness. Patanjali says this is the first because even effort, even consciousness, is not good, because it means that some struggle, some hidden struggle, is ongoing still.
The second and last step of vairagya, the last state of desirelessness:
First you have to know that you are the source of all happiness that happens to you. Second, you have to know the total nature of your inner self. First, you are the source. Second, "What is this source?"
First, just this much is enough, that you are the source of your happiness. And second, what this source is in its totality, this purusha, inner self is: "Who am 'I'?" in its totality.
Once you know this source in its totality, you have known all. Then the whole Universe is within, not only happiness. Then all that exists, exists within - not only happiness. Then God is not somewhere sitting in the clouds, he exists within. Then you are the source, the root source of all. Then you are the center.
And once you become the center of Existence, once you know that you are the center of Existence, all misery has disappeared. Now desirelessness becomes spontaneous, sahaj. No effort, no striving, no maintaining is needed. It is so; it has become natural. You are not pulling it or pushing it. Now there is no "I" who can pull and push.
Remember this: struggle creates ego. If you struggle in the world, it creates a gross ego: "I am someone with money, with prestige, with power." If you struggle within, it creates a subtle ego: "I am pure; I am a saint, I am a sage," but "I" remains with struggle. So there are pious egoists who have a very subtle ego. They may not be worldly people. They are not; they are otherworldly. But struggle is there. They have achieved something. That achievement still carries the last shadow of "I".
The second step and the final step of desirelessness for Patanjali is total disappearance of the ego. Just nature flowing. No "I", no conscious effort. That doesn't mean you will not be conscious, you will be perfect consciousness - but no effort implied of being conscious. There will be no self-consciousness - just pure consciousness. You have accepted yourself and existence as it is.
A total acceptance - this is what Lao Tzu calls Tao, the river flowing toward the sea. It is not making any effort; it is not in any hurry to reach the sea. Even if it doesn't reach, it will not get frustrated. Even if it reaches in millions of years, everything is okay. The river is simply flowing because flowing is its nature. No effort is there. It will go on flowing.
When desires for the first time are noted and observed, effort arises, a subtle effort. Even the first step is a subtle effort. You start trying to be aware, "From where my happiness is coming?" You have to do something, and that doing will create the ego. That's why Patanjali says that is only the beginning, and you must remember that is not the end. In the end, not only have desires disappeared, you also have disappeared. Only the inner being has remained in its flow.
This spontaneous flow is the supreme ecstasy because no misery is possible for it. Misery comes through expectation, demand. There is no one to expect, to demand, so whatsoever happens, it is good. Whatsoever happens, it is a blessing. You cannot compare with anything else, it is the case. And because there is no comparing with the past and with the future - there is no one to compare - you cannot look at anything as misery, as pain. Even if pain happens in that situation, it will not be painful. Try to understand this. This is difficult.
Jesus is being crucified. Christians have painted Jesus very sad. They have even said that he never laughed, and in their churches they have the sad figure of Jesus everywhere. This is human; we can understand it, because a person who is being crucified must be sad. He must be in inner agony; he must be in suffering.
So Christians go on saying that Jesus suffered for our sins - but he suffered. This is absolutely wrong! If you ask Patanjali or me, this is absolutely wrong. Jesus cannot suffer. It is impossible for Jesus to suffer. And if he suffers, then there is no difference between you and him.
Pain is there, but he cannot suffer. This may look mysterious, but this is not; this is simple. Pain is there. As far as we can see from the outside he is being crucified, insulted; his body is destroyed. Pain is there, but Jesus cannot suffer. Because in this moment when Jesus is crucified, he cannot ask. He has no demand. He cannot say, "This is wrong. This should not be so. I must be crowned, and I am crucified."
If he has this in this mind - that "I must be crowned and I am crucified" - then there will be pain. If he has no futuring in the mind that "I should be crowned," no expectation for the future, no fixed goal to reach, wherever he has found himself is the goal then. And he cannot compare. This cannot be otherwise. This is the present moment that has been brought to him. This crucifixion is the crown.
And he cannot suffer, because suffering means resistance. You must resist something, only then you can suffer. Try it. It will be difficult for you to be crucified, but there are daily crucifixions, small. They will do.
You have a pain in the leg or in the head you have headache. You may not have observed the mechanism of it. You have headache, and you constantly struggle and resist. You don't want it. You are against it, you divide. You are somewhere standing within the head and the headache is there. You are separate and the headache is separate, and you insist that it should not be so. This is the real problem.
You try once not to fight. Flow with the headache; become the headache. And say, "This is the case. This is how my head is at this moment, and at this moment nothing is possible. It may go in future, but in this moment headache is there." Don't resist. Allow it to happen; become one with it. Don't pull yourself separate, flow into it. And then there will be a sudden upsurge of a new type of happiness you have not known. When there is no one to resist, even headache is not painful. The fight creates the pain. The pain means always fighting against the pain - that's the real pain.
Jesus accepts. This is how his life has come to the cross. This is the destiny. This is what in the East they have always called fate, bhagya, the kismat. So there is no point in arguing with your fate, there is no point in fighting it. You cannot do anything; it is happening. Only one thing is possible for you - you can flow with it or you can fight with it. If you fight, it becomes more agony. If you flow with it, the agony is less. And if you can flow totally, agony has disappeared. You have become the flow.
Try it when you have a headache, try it when you have an ill body, try it when you have some pain - just flow with it. And once, if you can allow, you will have come to one of the most deepest secrets of life - that pain disappears if you flow with it. And if you can flow totally, pain becomes happiness.
But this is not something logical to be understood. You can comprehend it intellectually, but that won't do. Try it existentially. There are everyday situations. Every moment something is wrong. Flow with it, and see how you transform the whole situation. And through that transformation you transcend it.
A Buddha can never be in pain; that is impossible. Only an ego can be in pain. Ego is a must to be in pain. And if the ego is there, you can transform your pleasures also into pain; if the ego is not there, you can transform your pains into pleasures. The secret lies with the ego.
How it happens? Just by knowing the innermost core of yourself, the purusha, the dweller within. Just by knowing it! Patanjali says, Buddha says, Lao Tzu says, just by knowing it, all desires disappear.
This is mysterious, and the logical mind is bound to ask how it can happen just by knowing themselves all desires disappear. It happens because now knowing themselves all desires have arisen. Desires are simply the ignorance of the self. Why? All that you are seeking through desires is there, hidden in the Self. If you know the Self, desires will disappear.
For example, you are asking for power. Everybody is asking for power. Power creates madness in everybody. It seems to be just human society has existed in such a way that everybody is power-addicted.
The child is born; the child is helpless. This is the first feeling you all carry always with you. The child is born, he is helpless, and a helpless child wants power. That's natural because everybody is more powerful than him. The mother is powerful, the father is powerful, the brothers are powerful, everybody is powerful, and the child is absolutely helpless. Of course, the first desire that arises is to have power - how to grow powerful how to be dominating. And the child starts being political from that very moment. He starts learning tricks how to dominate.
If he cries too much, he comes to know that he can dominate through crying. He can dominate the whole house just by crying. He learns crying. And women continue it even when they are not children. They have learned the secret, and they continue it. And they have to continue it because they remain helpless. That's power politics.
He knows a trick, and he can create disturbance. And he can create such a disturbance that you have to accept and compromise with him. And every moment he feels deeply that the only thing that is needed is power, more power. He will learn, he will go to school, he will grow he will love, but behind everything - his education, love, play - he will be finding how to get more power.
Through education he will want to dominate, how to come first in the class so he can be dominating, how to get more money so he can be dominating, how to go on growing the influence and the territory of domination. The whole life he will be after power.
Many lives are simply wasted. And even if you get power, what you are going to do? Simply a childish wish is fulfilled. So when you become a Napoleon or a Hitler, suddenly you become aware that the whole effort has been useless, futile. Just a childish wish has been fulfilled, that's all. Now what to do? What to do with this power? If the wish is fulfilled you are frustrated. If the wish is not fulfilled you are frustrated, and it cannot be fulfilled absolutely, because no one can be so powerful that he can feel, "Now it is enough" - no one! The world is so complex that even a Hitler feels powerless in moments, even a Napoleon will feel powerless in moments. Nobody can feel absolute power, and nothing can satisfy you.
But when somebody comes to know one's Self, one comes to know the Source of absolute power. Then the desire for power disappears because you were already a king and you were only thinking that you were a beggar. And you were struggling to be a bigger beggar, a greater beggar, and you were already the king. Suddenly you come to realize that you don't lack anything. You are not helpless. You are the source of all energies, you are the very source of life. That childhood feeling of powerlessness was created by others. And it is a vicious circle they created in you because it was created in them by their parents, and so on and so forth.
Your parents are creating the feeling in you that you are powerless. Why? Because only through this they can feel they are powerful. You may be thinking that you love children very much. That doesn't seem to be the case. You love power, and when you get children, when you become mothers and fathers, you are powerful. Nobody may be listening to you; you may be nothing in the world, but at least in the boundaries of your home you are powerful. You can at least torture small children.
And look at fathers and mothers: they torture! And they torture in such a loving way that you cannot even say to them that "You are torturing." They are torturing for "their own good", for the children's own good! They are helping them to grow. They feel powerful. Psychologists say that many people go to the teaching profession just to feel powerful, because thirty children at your disposal, you are just a king.
It is reported that Aurangajeb was imprisoned by his son. When he was imprisoned, he wrote a letter and he said, "Only one wish, if you can fulfill, it will be good, and I will be very happy. You just send thirty children to me so that I can teach them in my imprisonment."
The son has been reported to have said, "My father has always remained a king, and he cannot lose his kingdom. So even in the prison he needs thirty children so he can teach them."
Look! Go into a school! The teacher sitting on his chair-and absolute power, just the master of everything that is happening there. People want children not because they love, because if they love, really, the world will be totally different. If you love your child the world will be totally different.
You will not help him to be helpless, to feel helpless, you will give him so much love that he would feel he is powerful. If you give love, then he will never be asking for power. He will not become a political leader; he will not go for elections. He will not try to accumulate money and go mad after it, because he knows it is useless - he is already powerful; love is enough.
But nobody is giving love, then he will create substitutes. All your desires, whether of power, of money, prestige, they all show that something had been taught to you in your childhood, something has been conditioned in your bio-computer and you are following that conditioning without looking inside, that whatsoever you are asking is already there.
Patanjali's whole effort is to put your bio-computer in silence so that it doesn't interfere. This is what meditation is. It is putting your bio-computer, for certain moments, into silence, into a non-chattering state, so that you can look within and hear your deepest nature. Just a glimpse will change you because then this biocomputer cannot deceive you. This bio-computer goes on saying that, "Do this, do that!" It goes on continuously manipulating you, that "You must have more power; otherwise you are nobody."
If you look within, there is no need to be anybody; there is no need to be somebody. You are already accepted as you are. The whole existence accepts you, is happy about you. You are a flowering - an individual flowering, different from any other, unique, and God welcomes you; otherwise you could not be here. You are here only because you are accepted. You are here only because God loves you or the universe loves you or the existence needs you. You are needed.
Once you know your innermost nature, what Patanjali calls the purusha - the purusha means the inner dweller... The body is just a house. The inner dweller, the inner-dwelling consciousness, is purusha. Once you know this inner-dwelling consciousness, nothing is needed. You are enough, more than enough. You are perfect as you are. You are absolutely accepted, welcomed. The existence becomes a blessing. Desires disappear; they were part of self-ignorance. With self-knowledge, they disappear, they evaporate.
Abhyasa, constant inner practice, conscious effort to be more and more alert, to be more and more master of oneself, to be less and less dominated by habits, by mechanical, robot-like mechanisms - and vairagya, desirelessness: these two attained one becomes a yogi; these two attained one has attained the goal.
I will repeat: but don't create a fight. Allow all this happening to be more and more spontaneous. Don't fight with the negative. Rather, create the positive. Don't fight with sex, with food, with anything. Rather, find out what it is that gives you happiness, from where it comes - move in that direction. Desires, by and by, go on disappearing.
And second: be more and more conscious. Whatsoever is happening, be more and more conscious. And remain in that moment, and accept that moment. Don't ask for something else. You will not be creating misery then. If pain is there, let it be there. Remain in it and flow in it. The only condition is, remain alert. Knowingly, watchfully, move into it, flow into it. Don't resist!
When pain disappears, the desire for pleasure also disappears. When you are not in anguish, you don't ask for indulgence. When anguish is not there, indulgence becomes meaningless. And more and more you go on falling into the inner abyss. And it is so blissful, it is such a deep ecstasy, that even a glimpse of it and the whole world becomes meaningless. Then all that this world can give to you is of no use.
And this should not become a fighting attitude - you should not become a warrior, you should become a meditator. If you are meditating, spontaneously things will happen to you which will go on transforming and changing you. Start fighting and you have started suppression. And suppression will lead you into more and more misery. And you cannot deceive.
Many people are there who are not only deceiving others, they go on deceiving themselves. They think they are not in misery; they go on saying they are not in misery. But their whole existence is miserable. When they are saying that they are not in misery, their faces, their eyes, their heart, everything, is in misery.
I will tell you one anecdote, and then finish. I have heard:
Once it happened that twelve ladies reached purgatory. The officiating angel asked them,"Were any of you unfaithful to your husbands while on earth? If someone was unfaithful to her husband, she should raise her hand." Blushingly, hesitating, by and by eleven ladies raised their hands. The officiating angel took his phone, called into the phone, "Hello! Is that hell? Have you got room for twelve unfaithful wives there? - one of them, stone deaf!"
It isn't needed whether you say or not. Your face, your very being, shows everything. You may say you are not miserable, but the way you say it, the way you are, shows you are miserable. You cannot deceive, and there is no point - because no one can deceive anybody else, you can only deceive yourself.
Remember, if you are miserable, you have created all this. Let it penetrate deep in your heart that you have created your sufferings because this is going to be the formula, the key. If you have created your sufferings, only then can you destroy it. If someone else has created them, you are helpless. You have created your miseries, you can destroy them. You have created them through wrong habits, wrong attitudes, addictions, desires.
Drop this pattern! Look fresh! And this very life is the ultimate joy that is possible to human consciousness.
The First Question:
It looks paradoxical, it is not - because you can understand only when you have transcended. While you are in a certain state of mind, you cannot understand that state of mind; you are so involved in it, you are so much identified with it. For understanding, space is needed, a distance is needed, and there is no distance. When you transcend a state of mind, only then you become able to understand it because then there is distance. You are standing aloof, separate. You can look now, unidentified. There is perspective now.
While you are in love you cannot understand love. You may feel it, but you cannot understand it. You are so much in it. For understanding, aloofness, detached aloofness is needed. For understanding, you need to be an observer. While you are in love, the observer is lost. You have become a doer; you are a lover. You cannot be a witness to it. Only when you transcend love, when you are enlightened and gone beyond love, you will be able to understand it.
A child cannot understand what childhood is. When childhood is lost, you can look back and understand. Youth cannot understand what youth is. Only when you have become old and are capable of looking back, aloof, distant, then you will be able to understand it. Whatsoever is understood, is understood only by transcendence. Transcendence is the base of all understanding. That's why it happens every day - you can give advice, good advice, to somebody else who is in trouble; in the same trouble, if you are, you cannot give that good advice to yourself.
Somebody else is in trouble, you have space to look, observe; you can witness. You can give a good advice. When you are in the same trouble, you will not be so capable. You can be if even then you can be detached. You can be, if even then, you can look at the problem as if you are not in the problem, but outside, standing on a hill, and looking down.
Any problem can be solved if even for a single moment you are out of it and can look at it as a witness. Witnessing solves everything. But while you are deep in any state it is difficult to be a witness. You are so much identified. While in anger you become anger. No one is left behind who can see, observe, watch, decide. No one is left behind. While in sex you have moved completely. There is no center now, uninvolved.
In Upanishads it is said that a person who is watching himself is like a tree upon which two birds are sitting - one bird just jumping, enjoying, eating, singing, and another bird just sitting on the top of the tree looking at the other bird.
If you can have a witnessing self on the top which goes on looking at the drama below where you are the actor, where you participate, dance and jump and sing and talk and think and get involved; if somebody deep in you can go on looking at this drama; if you can be in such a state where you are also playing as an actor on the stage and simultaneously sitting in the audience looking at it; if you can be the actor and the audience both - then witnessing has come in. This witnessing will make you capable of knowing, of understanding, of wisdom.
So it looks paradoxical. If you go to Buddha he can move into deep details of your problems, not because he is in the problem, only because he is not in the problem. He can penetrate you. He can put himself in your situation and still remain a witness.
So those who are in the world cannot understand the world. Those who have gone beyond it, only they understand it. So whatsoever you want to understand, go beyond it. This appears paradoxical. Whatsoever you want to know, go beyond it - only then knowledge will happen. Moving as an insider in anything you may collect much information, but you will not become a wise man.
You can practice it moment to moment. You can do both: be the actor and be the audience both. When you are angry you can shift the mind. This is a deep art, but if you try, you will be able. You can shift.
For a single moment you can be angry. Then get detached, look at the anger, at your own face in the mirror. Look what you are doing; look what is happening around you; look what you have done to the others, how they are reacting. Look for a moment, then again be angry, move into the anger. Then, again, become an observer. This can be done, but then very deep practice is needed.
You try it. While eating, for one moment become the eater. Enjoy, become the food, become the eating - forget that there is anyone who can look at it. When you have moved enough, then for a single moment move away. Go on eating, but start looking at it - the food, the eater, and you standing above looking at it.
Soon you will become efficient, and you can shift the gears of the mind from the actor to the audience, from the participant to the onlooker. And then this will be revealed to you, that through participation nothing is known; only through observation things become revealed and known. That's why those who have left the world, they have become the guides. Those who have gone beyond, they have become the Masters.
Freud used to say to his disciples... It is very difficult because Freud's disciples, the psychoanalysts, they are not men who have transcended. They live in the world. They are just experts. But even Freud has suggested to them that while listening to a patient, to someone who is ill, mentally ill, "You remain detached. Don't get emotionally involved. If you get involved, then your advice is futile. Just remain a spectator."
Even it looks very cruel. Somebody is crying, weeping, and you can also feel because you are a human being. But Freud said, "If you are working as a psychiatrist, as a psychoanalyst, you remain uninvolved. You look at the person as if he is just a problem. Don't look at him as if he is a human being. If you look at him as a human being, you are immediately involved; you have become a participant, then you cannot advise. Then whatsoever you say will be prejudiced. Then you are not outside it."
It is difficult, very difficult, so Freudians have been doing it through many ways. The Freudian psychoanalyst will not face the patient directly, because when you face a person it is difficult to remain uninvolved. If you look in the eyes of a person, you enter him. So the Freudian psychoanalyst sits behind a curtain, and the patient lies on a couch.
That too is very significant, because Freud came to understand that if a person is lying down and you are sitting or standing, not looking at him, there is less possibility to get involved. Why? A person lying down becomes a problem, as if on the surgeon's table. You can dissect him. And ordinarily, this never happens. If you go to meet a person, he will not talk to you lying down and you sitting, unless he is a patient, unless he is in the hospital.
So Freud insists that his patient should lie down on the couch. So the psychoanalyst goes on feeling that the person is a patient, ill. He has to be helped. He is rot really a person but a problem, and you need not get involved with him. And he should not face the person, he should not face the patient - just hiding behind a curtain, he will listen to him. Freud says don't touch the patient, because if you touch, if you take the patient's hand in your hand, there is possibility you may get involved.
These precautions had to be taken because psychoanalysts are not enlightened persons. But if you go to a Buddha, there is no need for you to lie down, there is no need to hide you behind a curtain. There is no need for Buddha to remain conscious that he is not to get involved; he cannot get involved. Whatsoever the case, he remains uninvolved.
He can feel compassion for you, but he cannot be sympathetic, remember this. And try to understand the distinction between sympathy and compassion. Compassion is from a higher source. Buddha can remain compassionate towards you. He understands you - that you are in a difficulty - but he is not sympathetic with you because he knows it is because of your foolishness that you are in difficulty, it is your stupidity that you are in difficulty.
He has compassion; he will try in every way to help you to come out of your stupidity. But your stupidity is not something with which he is going to sympathize. So in a way he will be very warm and in a way he will be very cold. He will be warm as far as his compassion is concerned and he will be absolutely cold as far as sympathy is concerned.
And, ordinarily, if you go to Buddha you will feel he iS cold - because you don't know what compassion is and you don't know the warmth of compassion. You have known only the warmth of sympathy, and he is not sympathetic. He looks cruel, cold. If you cry and weep, he is not going to cry and weep with you. And if he cries, then there is no possibility that help can come from him to you. He is in the same position. He cannot cry, but you will feel hurt that, "I am crying and weeping, and he remains just like a statue, as if he has got no heart." He cannot sympathize with you. Sympathy is from the same mind towards the same mind. Compassion is from a higher source.
He can look at you. You are transparent to him, totally naked; and he knows why you are suffering. You are the cause, and he will try to explain the cause to you. And if you can listen to him, the very act of listening will have helped you much.
It looks paradoxical; it is not. Buddha has also lived like you. If not in this life, then in some previous lives. He has moved through the same struggles. He has been stupid like you, he has suffered like you, he has struggled like you. For many, many lives he was on the same path. He knows all the agony, all the struggle, the conflict, the misery. He is aware, more aware than you, because now all the past lives are before his eyes - not only his, but yours also. He has lived all the problems that any human mind can live, so he knows. And he has transcended them, so now he knows what are the causes and he also knows how they can be transcended.
And he will help in every way to make you understand that you are the cause of your miseries. This is very hard. This is the most difficult thing to understand that "I am the cause of my miseries." This hits deep; one feels hurt. Whenever someone says someone else is the cause, you feel okay. And that person looks sympathetic. If he says, "You are a sufferer, a victim, and others are exploiting you, others are doing damage, others are violent," you feel good. But this goodness is not going to last. It is a momentary consolation, and dangerous, at a very great cost, because he is helping your cause of misery.
So those who look sympathetic towards you are your enemies really, because their sympathy helps your cause to be strengthened. The very source of misery is strengthened. You feel that you are okay and the whole world is wrong - misery comes from somewhere else.
If you go to a Buddha, to an enlightened person, he is bound to be hard, because he will force you to the fact that you are the cause. And once you start feeling that you are the cause of your hell, the transformation has already started. The moment you feel this, half work is already done. You are already on the path; you have already moved. A great change has come over you.
Half the miseries will suddenly disappear once you understand that you are the cause, because then you cannot cooperate with them. Then you will not be so ignorant to help to strengthen the cause which creates miseries. Your cooperation will break. Miseries will still continue for a while just because of old habits.
Once Mulla Nasrudin was forced to come to the court because he has been found again drunk on the street. The magistrate said, "Nasrudin, I remember seeing you so many times for this same offence. Have you got any explanation for your habitual drunkenness?" Nasrudin said, "Of course, your Honor. I have an explanation for my habitual drunkenness. This is my explanation: habitual thirst."
Even if you become alert, the habitual pattern will force you for a while to move in the same direction. But it cannot persist for long; the energy is no more there. It can continue as a dead pattern, but by and by it will wither away. It needs every day to be fed, it needs every day to be strengthened. Your cooperation is needed continuously.
Once you become alert that you are the cause of your miseries, the cooperation has dropped. So whatsoever I say to you is just to make you alert of a single fact - that wherever you are, whatsoever you are, you are the cause. And don't get pessimistic about it, this is very hopeful. If somebody else is the cause, then nothing can be done.
Because of this, Mahavira denies God. Mahavira says there is no God because if there is God, then nothing can be done. Then he is the cause of everything, then what can I do? Then I become helpless. He has created the world; he has created me. If he is the creator then only he can destroy. And if I am miserable, then he is responsible and I cannot do anything.
So Mahavira says if there is God, then man is helpless. So he says, "I don't believe in God." And the reason is not philosophical; the reason is very psychological. The reason is so that you cannot make anybody responsible for you. Whether God exists or not, that is not the question.
Mahavira says, "I want you to understand that you are the cause of whatsoever you are." And this is very hopeful. If you are the cause, you can change it. If you can create the hell, you can create the heaven. You are the master.
So don't feel hopeless. The more you make others responsible for your life, the more you are a slave. If you say, "My wife is making me angry," then you are a slave. If you say your husband is creating trouble for you, then you are a slave. Even if your husband is creating trouble, you have chosen that husband. And you wanted this trouble, this type of trouble - it is your choice. If your wife is making hell, you have chosen this wife.
Somebody asked Mulla Nasrudin, "How you came to know your wife? Who introduced you?" He said, "It just happened. I cannot blame anybody."
Nobody can blame anybody. And it is not just happening, it is a choice. A particular type of man chooses a particular type of woman. It is not accident. And he chooses for particular reasons. If this woman dies, he will again choose the same type of woman. If he divorces this woman, again he will marry the same type of woman.
You can go on changing wives, but unless the husband changes there can be no real change - only names change - because this man has a choice. He likes a particular face, he likes a particular nose, he likes particular eyes, he likes particular behavior.
And that's a complex thing. If you like a particular nose - because a nose is not just a nose. It carries anger, it carries ego, it carries silence, it carries peace, it carries many things - if you like a particular nose, you may be liking a person who can force you to be angry. An egotist person has a different type of nose. It may look beautiful. It looks beautiful only because you are in search of somebody who can create a hell around you. And sooner or later things will follow. You may not be able to connect, you may not be able to link. Life is complex, and you are so much involved in it that you cannot connect. You will be able only to see when you transcend.
It is just like as you flying in an aircraft over and above Bombay. The whole Bombay appears, the whole pattern. If you live in Bombay and move in the streets, you cannot look at the whole pattern. The whole Bombay cannot be seen by those who live in Bombay. It can be seen only by those who fly above. Then the whole pattern appears. Then things fall into a pattern. Transcendence means going beyond human problems. Then you can enter and see.
I have looked through many, many persons. Whatsoever they do, they are not aware what they are doing. They become aware only when results come. They go on dropping the seed in the soil; they are not aware. But only when they will have to crop they will become aware. And they cannot connect that they are the source and they are the reapers.
Once you understand that you are the cause, you have moved on the path. Now many things become possible. Now you can do something about the problem that is your life. You can change it. Just by changing yourself, you can change.
One woman came to me - belongs to a very rich family, a very good family, cultured, refined, educated. She asked me, "If I start meditating, will it in any way disturb my relationship with my husband?" And she herself said, before I answered her, "I know it is not going to disturb because if I become better more silent and more loving - how it can disturb my relationship?"
But I told her that, "You are wrong. The relationship is going to be disturbed. Whether you become good or bad, that is irrelevant. You change, one partner changes - the relationship is to be disturbed. And this is the miracle; that if you become bad, the relationship will not be disturbed so much. If you become good and better, the relationship is just going to be shattered, because when one partner falls down and becomes bad, the other feels better comparatively. It is not a hurt to the ego. Rather, it is ego-satisfying."
So a wife feels good if the husband starts drinking because now she becomes a moral preacher. Now she dominates him more. Now, whenever he enters in the house he enters like a criminal. And just because he drinks, everything that he is doing becomes wrong. That much is enough because the wife can bring that argument again and again from anywhere. So everything is condemned.
But if a husband or a wife becomes meditative, then there will be even deeper problems because the other's ego will be hurt - one is becoming superior, and the other will try in every way not to allow this to happen. He will create all troubles possible. And even if it happens, he will try not to believe in it, that it has happened. He will prove that this has not happened yet. He will go on saying that, "You are meditating for years and nothing has happened. What is the use of it? Useless. You still get angry, you still do this and that, you remain the same." The other will try to force that nothing is happening. This is a consolation.
And if really something has happened, if the wife or the husband has really changed, then this relationship cannot continue. It is impossible unless the other is also ready to change. And to get ready to change oneself is very difficult because it hurts the ego. It means whatsoever you are, you are wrong. Only then a need for change is there.
So nobody ever feels that he has to change: "The whole world has to change, not I. I am the right, absolute right, and the world is wrong because it doesn't suit to me." All the effort of all the Buddhas is very simple: it is to make you aware that wherever you are, whatsoever you are, you are the cause.
The Second Question:
It is absolutely unnecessary - not only unnecessary, it creates all types of hindrances on the path of yoga. The warrior-like attitude is the greatest hindrance possible because there is no one to fight with. Inside, you are alone. If you start fighting, you are splitting yourself.
And this is the greatest disease: to be divided, to become schizophrenic. And the whole struggle is useless because it is not going to lead anywhere. No one can win. On both the sides you are. So at the most you can play; you can play a game of hide and seek. Sometimes part A wins, sometimes part B wins; again part A, again part B. In this way you can move. Sometimes that which you call good wins. But fighting with the bad, winning over the bad, the good part has become exhausted and the bad part has gathered energy. So sooner or later the bad part will come up, and this can go on infinitely.
But why this warrior-like attitude happens? Why with most people fighting starts? The moment they think of transformation, they start fighting. Why? Because you know only one method of winning, and that is fight.
In the world outside, in the outside world, there is one way to be victorious and that is fight - fight and destroy the other. This is the only way in the outside world to be victorious. And you have lived in this outside world for millions and millions of years and you have been fighting - sometimes getting defeated if you don't fight well, sometimes getting victorious if you fight well. So it has become a built-in program that "Fight strongly." There is only one way to be victorious and that is a hard fight.
When you move within, you carry the same program because you are acquainted only with this. And in the world within, just the reverse is the case: fight and you will be defeated - because there is no one to fight with. In the inner world, let-go is the way to be victorious, surrender is the way to be victorious, allowing the inner nature to flow, not fighting, is the way to be victorious. Letting the river flow, not pushing it, is the way as far as the inner world is concerned. This is just the reverse. But you are acquainted only with the outside world, so this is bound to be so in the beginning. Whoever moves within, he will carry the same weapons, the same attitudes, the same fighting, the same defense.
Machiavelli is for the outside world; Lao Tzu, Patanjali and Buddha are for the inside world. And they teach different things. Machiavelli says attack is the best defense: "Don't wait. Don't wait for the other to attack, because then you are already on the losing. Already you have lost, because the other has started. He has already gained, so it is always better to start. Don't wait to defend; always be the aggressor. Before somebody else attacks you, you attack him and fight with as much cunningness as possible, with as much dishonesty as possible. Be dishonest, be cunning and be aggressive. Deceive, because that is the only way." These are the means that Machiavelli suggests. And Machiavelli is an honest man; that's why he suggests exactly whatsoever Is needed.
But if you ask Lao Tzu, Patanjali or Buddha, they are talking of a different type of victory - the inner victory. There, cunningness won't do, deceiving won't do, fighting won't do, aggression won't do, because whom you are going to deceive? Whom you are going to defeat? You alone are there. In the outside world you are never alone. The others are there; they are the enemies. In the inside world you alone are there. There is no other. There is no enemy, no friend. This is a totally new situation for you. You will carry the old weapons, but those old weapons will become the cause of your defeat. When you change the world from without to within, leave all that you have learned from without. That is not going to help.
Somebody asked Ramana Maharshi that, "What I should learn to become silent, to know myself?" Ramana Maharshi is reported to have said that, "For reaching to the inner self you need not learn anything. You need unlearning, learning won't help. It helps to move without. Unlearning will help."
Whatsoever you have learned, unlearn it, forget it, drop it. Move inside innocently, childlike - not cunningness and cleverness, but childlike trust and innocence; not thinking in terms that someone is going to attack you. There is no one, so don't feel insecure and don't make any arrangements for defense. Remain vulnerable, receptive, open. That's what shraddha, trust, means.
Doubt is needed outside because the other is there. He may be thinking to deceive you, so you have to doubt and be skeptical. Inside, no doubt, no skepticism is needed. Nobody is there to deceive you. You can remain there just as you are.
That's why everybody carries this warrior-like attitude, but it is not needed. It is a hindrance, the greatest hindrance. Drop it outside. You can make it a point to remember that whatsoever is needed outside will become a hindrance inside. Whatsoever, I say unconditionally. And just the reverse has to be tried.
If doubt helps outside in [scientific] research, then faith will help inside in religious inquiry. If aggressiveness helps outside in the world of power, prestige, others, then non-aggressiveness will help inside. If cunning, calculating mind helps outside, then innocent, non-calculating, childlike mind will help inside.
Remember this: whatsoever helps outside, just the reverse will do inside. So read Machiavelli's "PRINCE". That is the way for outside victory. And just make a reverse of Machiavelli's PRINCE, and you can reach inside. Just make Machiavelli stand upside down, and he becomes Lao Tzu - just in shirshasan, in the headstand. Machiavelli standing on his head becomes Patanjali.
So read his "PRINCE"; it is beautiful - the clearest statement for the outside victory. And then read Lao Tzu's "TAO TEH CHING" or Patanjali's "YOGA SUTRAS" or Buddha's "DHAMMAPADA" or Jesus' "SERMON ON THE MOUNT". They are just the contradictory, just the reverse, just the opposite.
Jesus says, "Blessed are those who are meek because they will inherit the earth" - meek, innocent, weak, not strong in any sense. "Blessed are the poor because they will enter the kingdom of my God." And Jesus makes it clear, "poor in spirit". They have nothing to claim. They cannot say, "I have got this." They don't possess anything - knowledge, wealth, power, prestige. They don't possess anything, they are poor. They cannot claim that, "This is mine."
We go on claiming, "This is mine, that is mine. The more I can claim, the more I feel, 'I am.' " In the outside world, the greater the territory of your mind, the more you are. In the inner world, lesser the territory of mind, the greater you are. And when the territory disappears completely and you have become a zero, then - then you are the greatest. Then you are the victorious. Then the victory has happened.
Warrior-like attitudes - struggle fight, over-concern with strict rules, regulations, calculations, planning - this mind is carried inside because you have learned it and you don't know anything else. Hence, the necessity of a Master. Otherwise you will go on trying your ways which are absolutely absurd there.
Hence, the necessity of initiation. Initiation means somebody who can show you the path where you have never traveled, somebody who can give you a glimpse through him of a world, of a dimension, that is absolutely unknown to you. You are almost blind to it. You cannot see it because eyes can see only whatsoever they have learned to see.
If you come here and if you are a tailor, then you don't look at faces, you look at dresses. Faces don't mean much; just looking at the dress you know what type of man is there. You know a language.
If you are a shoemaker, you need not even look at the dress; shoes will do. And a shoemaker can just go on looking on the street, and he knows who is passing, whether he is a great leader - just looking at the shoe - whether he is an artist, a Bohemian, a hippie, a rich man, whether he is cultured, educated, uneducated, a villager - who he is just by looking at the shoe because shoe gives all indications. He knows the language. Whether a man is winning in life, the shoe has a different shine. If he is defeated in life, the shoe is defeated. Then the shoe is sad, not cared for. And the shoemaker knows it. He need not look at your face. The shoe will tell everything that he wants to know.
Everything we learn and then we become fixed in it. Then that's what we see. You have learned something, and you have wasted many lives in learning it. And it is now deep-rooted, imprinted. It has become part of your brain cells. So when you move within there is simply darkness, nothing, you cannot see anything. The whole world that you know has disappeared.
It is just like you know one language and suddenly you are transported to a land where no one understands your language and you cannot understand anybody's language. And people are talking and chattering, and you feel simply that they are mad. It looks they are talking gibberish, and it looks very noisy because you cannot understand. And they seem to be talking too loudly. If you can understand it, then the whole thing changes; you become part of it. Then it is not gibberish; it becomes meaningful.
When you enter within you know the language of the without. There is darkness within. Your eyes cannot see, your ears cannot hear, your hands cannot feel. Somebody is needed somebody to initiate you, to take your hand in his hand and to move you onto this unknown path until you become acquainted, until you start feeling, until you become aware of some light, some meaning, some significance around you.
Once you have the first initiation, things will start happening. But the first initiation is a difficult thing because this is quite an about-turn, a total about-turn. Suddenly your world of meaning disappears. You are in a strange world. You don't understand anything - where to move, what to do and what to make out of this chaos. A Master only means someone who knows. And this chaos, inside chaos, is not chaos for him, it has become an order, a cosmos, and he can lead you into it.
Initiation means looking through the inner world through someone else's eyes. Without trust it is impossible because you won't allow your hand to be taken, you won't allow anybody to lead you into the unknown. And he cannot give you any guarantee. No guarantee will be of any use. Whatsoever he says, you have to take it on trust.
In the old days, when Patanjali was writing his sutras, trust was very easy, because in the outside world also, particularly in the East and especially in India, they had created an outside pattern of initiation. For example, trades, professions, belonged to families through heredity. A father will initiate the child into the profession, and a child naturally believes in his father. The father will take the child to the farm if he is a peasant and a farmer, and he will initiate him into his farming. Whatsoever trade, whatsoever business he is doing, he will initiate the child.
In the outside world also, initiation was there in the East. Everything was to be initiated - someone who knows will take you. This helped very much because you were acquainted with initiation, someone leading you. So, when the time came for inner initiation, you could trust.
And trust, shraddha, faith, was easier in a world which was non-technological. A technological world needs cunning, calculation, mathematics, cleverness - not innocence. In a technological world, if you are innocent you will look foolish; if you are cunning you will look clever, intelligent. Our universities are doing nothing but this: they make you clever, cunning, calculating. The more calculating, the more cunning, the more successful you will be in the world.
Quite the reverse was the case in the East in the past. If you were cunning it was impossible for you to succeed even in the outside world. Only innocence was accepted. Technique was not valued too much, but inner quality was valued too much.
If a person is cunning and he makes a better shoe nobody will go to him in the East in the past. They will go to the person who is innocent. He may not be making such better shoes, but they will go to the person who is innocent because a shoe is not just something, it carries the quality of the person who has made it. So if there was a cunning and clever technician, nobody will go to him. He will suffer; he will be a failure. But if he was a man of qualities, character, innocence, then people will go to him. Even for worse things, people will value his things more.
Kabir was a weaver and he remained a weaver. When even he attained enlightenment, he continued weaving. And he was so ecstatic, that his weaving could not be very good. He was singing and dancing and weaving! There were many mistakes and many errors, but his things were valued, super-valued.
Many people will just wait when Kabir brings something - that was not just a thing, a commodity, it was from Kabir! The very thing in itself has an intrinsic quality, it has come from Kabir's hands. Kabir has touched it. And Kabir was dancing around it while he was weaving it. And continuously he was remembering the divine, so the thing - the cloth or the dress or anything - has become sacred, holy. The quantity was not the question, the quality! The technical side was secondary; the human side was the primary.
So even in the outside world in the East, they had managed a pattern so that when you turn inwards, you will not be totally unacquainted with that world; something you will know, some guidelines, some lights in your hand. You will not be moving into total darkness.
And this trust in outside relationships was everywhere. A husband couldn't believe that his wife can be unfaithful. It was almost impossible. And if the husband dies, the wife will die with him because the life was such a shared phenomenon. Now it is meaningless to live without someone with whom life has become such a shared thing.
It became ugly later on, but in the beginning it was one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened on earth. You loved someone and he has disappeared - you would like to disappear with him. To be without him will be worse than death. Death is better and worth choosing - such was trust in outside things also. The relationship of wife and husband is an outside thing. The whole society was moving around trust, faith, authentic sharing, then it was helpful. When once time came to move within, all these things will help him to be initiated easily - to trust someone, to surrender.
Fight, struggle, aggressiveness are hindrances. Don't carry them. When you move inwards, leave them on the door. If you carry them, you will miss the inner temple; you will never reach it. With those things you cannot move inwards.
Divine Messages are All Around, One Needs Proper Tuning to Receive Them
The Third Question:
Vairagya is enough, desirelessness is enough. Then no discipline is needed. But where is that desirelessness? It is not there. To help it, discipline is needed. Discipline is needed only because that desirelessness is not in its wholeness within you.
If desirelessness is there, then there is no question of practicing anything: no discipline is needed. You will not come to listen to me; you will not go to read Patanjali's sutras. If desirelessness is complete, Patanjali is useless. Why waste your time with Patanjali's sutras? I am useless, why come to me?
You are in search of a discipline. You are moving in search of some discipline which can transform you. You are a disciple, and "disciple" means a person who is in search of a discipline. And don't deceive yourself. Even if you go to Krishnamurti, you are in search of a discipline - because one who is not in need will not go. Even if Krishnamurti says that no one needs to be a disciple and no discipline is needed, why you are there? And these words will become your discipline, and you will create a pattern, and you will start following that pattern.
Desirelessness is not there, so you are in suffering. And nobody likes to suffer, and everybody wants to transcend suffering. How to transcend it? This is what discipline will help you to do. Discipline only means: to make you ready for the jump, for the jump into desirelessness. Discipline means a training.
You are not yet ready. You have a very gross mechanism. Your body, your mind, they are gross. They cannot receive the subtle. You are not tuned. To receive the subtle you will have to be tuned. Your grossness has to disappear. Remember this - to receive the subtle you will have to become subtle. As you are, the divine may be around you, but you cannot be in touch with it.
It is just like a radio, here in this room, but not functioning. Some wires are wrongly connected or some wires are broken or some knob is missing. The radio is here, the radio waves are continuously passing, but the radio is not tuned-in. And it cannot become receptive.
You are just like that radio, not in the state where it can function. Many things are missing, many things are wrongly joined. A "discipline" means to make your radio functioning, receptive, tuned. The divine waves are all around you. Once you are tuned they become manifest. And they can become manifest only through you, and unless they become manifest through you, you cannot know them. They may have become manifest through me, they may have become manifest through Krishnamurti or anybody else, but that cannot become your transformation.
You cannot know really what is happening in a Krishnamurti, in a Gurdjieff - what is happening inside, what type of tuning is happening, how their mechanism has become so subtle that it receives the subtlest message of the universe, the existence starts manifesting itself through it.
Discipline means to change your mechanism, to tune it, to make it a fit instrument to be expressive, receptive. Sometimes without discipline also, this can accidentally happen. The radio can fall from the table. Just by falling, just by accident, some wires may get connected or disconnected. Just by falling, the radio may get connected to a station. Then it will start expressing something, but it will be a chaos.
It has happened many times. Sometimes through accident people have come to know the divine and feel the divine. But then they go mad because they are not disciplined to receive such a great phenomenon. They are not ready. They are so small, and such a great ocean falls in them. This has happened. In the Sufi system they call such persons madmen of the God - masts, they call.
Many people, sometimes without discipline - through some accident, through some Master, through the grace of some Master or just through the presence of some Master - get tuned. Their whole mechanism is not ready, but a part starts functioning. Then they are out of order. Then you will feel they are mad, because they will start saying things which look irrelevant. And they can also feel that they are irrelevant, but they cannot do anything. Something has begun in them; they cannot stop it.
They feel a certain happiness. That's why they are called masts - the happy ones. But they are not Buddhalike, they are not enlightened. And it is said that for masts, for these happy ones who have gone mad, a very great Master is needed because now they cannot do anything with themselves. They are just in confusion - happily in it, but they are a mess. They cannot do anything on their own.
In old days, great Sufi Masters will move all around the earth. Whenever they will hear that somewhere a mast is, a madman is, they will go and they will just help that man to get tuned.
In this past century, only Meher Baba has done that work - a great work of its own type, a rare work. Continuously, for many years, he was traveling all over India, and the places he was visiting were madhouses, because in madhouses many masts are living. But you cannot make any distinction, who is mad and who is mast; they both are mad. Who is really mad & who is mast - just because of a divine accident, because of some tuning that has happened through some accident! You cannot make any distinction.
Many masts are there. Meher Baba traveled and he will live in madhouses, and he will help and serve the masts, the mad ones. And many of them came out of their madness and started their journey toward enlightenment.
In the West many people are in madhouses, mad asylums, many who don't need any psychiatric help because psychiatrists can only make them again normally abnormal.
They need the help of someone who is enlightened, not a psychiatrist, because they are not ill. Or, if they are ill, they are ill by a divine disease. Your health is nothing before that illness. That illness is better - worth losing all your "health". Discipline is needed.
In India this phenomenon has not been so great as it has been in Mohammedan countries. That's why Sufis have special methods to help these mast people, the mad people of the God.
But Patanjali has created such a subtle system that there is no need of any accident. The discipline is so [scientific] that if you pass through this discipline you will reach to Buddhahood without getting mad on the path. It is a complete system.
Sufism is still not a complete system. Many things are lacking in it, and they are lacking because of the stubborn attitude of Mohammedans. They won't allow it to evolve to its peak. And the Sufi system has to follow the pattern of Islam religion. Because of that structure of Mohammedan religion, the Sufi system couldn't go beyond it.
Patanjali follows no religion, he follows only truth. He will not make any compromise with Hinduism or Mohammedanism or any other 'ism'. He follows the [scientific] truth. Sufis had to make compromise, and they had to. Because there were some Sufis who tried not to make any compromise; for example, Bayazid of Bistham, or Al-Hillaj Mansoor they didn't make any compromise; then they were killed, they were murdered.
So Sufis went into hiding. They made their science completely secret, and they will allow only fragments to be known, only those fragments which fit with Islam and its pattern. All other fragments were hidden. So the whole system is not known; it is not working. So many people, through fragments, go mad.
Patanjali's system is complete, and discipline is needed. Before you move into this unknown world of the within, a deep discipline is needed so no accident is possible. If you move without discipline, then many things are possible.
Vairagya is enough, but that "enough" vairagya is not there in your heart. If it is there, then there is no question. Then close Patanjali's book and bur it. It is absolutely unnecessary. But that "enough vairagya is not there. It is better to move on a disciplined path, step by step, so you don't become a victim of any accident. Accidents... the possibility is there.
Many systems are working in the world, but there is no system so perfect as Patanjali's because no country has worked for so long. And Patanjali is not the originator of this system, he is only the systematiZer. Before Patanjali, for thousands of years, the system was developed. Many people worked. Patanjali has given just the essence of thousands of years work.
But he has made it in such a way that you can move safely. Just because you are moving inwards, don't think that you are moving in a safe world. It can be unsafe. It is dangerous also; you can be lost in it. And if you are lost in it, you will be mad. That's why teachers like Krishnamurti who insist that no teacher is needed are dangerous, because people who are uninitiated may take their standpoint and may start working on their own.
Remember, even if your wristwatch goes wrong, you have the tendency and the curiosity - because it comes from the monkeys - to open it and do something. It is difficult to resist it. You cannot believe that you don't know anything about it. You may be the owner. Just by being the owner of the watch doesn't mean you know anything. Don't open it! It is better to take it to a right person who knows about these things. And a watch is a simple mechanism; the mind is such a complex mechanism. Never open it on your own because whatsoever you do will be wrong.
Sometimes it happens that your watch has gone wrong - you just shake it and it starts. But that is not a science. Sometimes it happens that something you do, and just by luck, accident, you feel something happening. But you have not become a Master. And if it has happened once don't try it again, because if you next shake your watch it may stop. This is not a science.
Don't move by accidents. Discipline is only a safeguard. Don't move by accidents! Move with a Master who knows what he is doing, and he knows if something goes wrong he can bring it to the right path, who is aware of your past and who is also aware of your future, and who can join together your past and future.
Hence, so much emphasis on Masters in Indian teachings. And they knew, and they meant it, because there is no mechanism so complex as human mind, no computer so complex as human mind.
Man has not been able yet to evolve anything comparable to the mind - and I think it is not ever going to be evolved, because who will evolve it? If human mind can evolve something, it is going always to be lower and lesser than the mind that creates. At least one thing is certain that whatsoever human mind creates, that created thing cannot create human mind. So the human mind remains the superior-most, the supreme-most complex mechanism.
Don't do anything just because of curiosity or just because others are doing it. Get initiated, and move with someone who knows the path well. Otherwise madness can be the result. And it has happened before; it is happening to many people right now.
Patanjali doesn't believe in accidents. He believes in a [scientific] order. So he has given one-by-one step. These two he makes his base: vairagya, desirelessness and abhyasa, constant, conscious inner practice. Abhyasa is the means and vairagya is the goal. Desirelessness is the goal, and constant, conscious inner practice is the means.
But the goal starts from the very beginning and the ends are hidden in the beginning. The tree is hidden in the seed, so the beginning implies the end. That's why he says desirelessness is needed in the beginning also. The beginning has the end in it and the end will also have the beginning in it.
So when even a Master has become complete, total, he continues practicing. This will look absurd to you. You have to practice because you are in the beginning and the goal has not been achieved, but when the goal is achieved even then the practice continues. It becomes now spontaneous, but it continues. It never stops. It cannot, because the end and the beginning are not two things. If the tree is in the seed, then in the tree again will come seeds.
Someone asked Buddha - one of his disciples, Purnakashyap - he asked that, 'We see, bhante, you still follow a certain discipline."
Buddha, still following a certain discipline. He moves in a certain way, he sits in a certain way, he remains alert, he eats certain things, he behaves, everything seems to be disciplined.
So Purnakashyap says that, "You have become enlightened, but we feel that you have still a certain discipline." Buddha says, "It has become so engrained that now I am not following it, it is following me. It has become a shadow. I need not think about it. It is there, always there. It has become a shadow."