MEDICINE AND MEDITATION
Osho Speaks to the Indian Medical Association
My beloved ones,
Man is a disease. Diseases come to man, but man himself is also a disease. That is his problem, and that is also his uniqueness; that is his good fortune, and that is also his misfortune. No other animal on earth is such a problem, such an anxiety, such a tension, such a disease, such an illness as man is.
But this very condition has given man all his growth, all his evolution, because disease means that one cannot be happy with where one is; one cannot accept what one is. This very disease has become man’s dynamism, his restlessness—but at the same time it is also his misfortune, because he is agitated, unhappy, and in suffering.
No other animal except the human being is capable of becoming mad. Unless a human being drives an animal insane, it does not go mad on its own, does not become neurotic. Animals in the jungle are not mad, but they become crazy in a circus. In the jungle, the life of an animal is not warped; it becomes perverted in a zoo. No animal commits suicide; only man can commit suicide.
Two methods have been tried in order to understand and cure the disease called man. One is medicine, the other is meditation. Both of them are treatments for the same disease. It will be good to understand here that medicine takes a micro view of man—considers each disease in man separately, as a separate happening—and meditation considers man as a whole to be a disease. Meditation considers that the personality of man is the disease; medicine considers that diseases come to man—that they are something foreign, alien to man. But slowly this difference has diminished and medical science has also started saying, “Don’t treat the disease, treat the patient.”
This is a very important statement, because this means that disease is nothing but an indication of the way in which a patient is living his life. Every person does not fall sick in the same way. Diseases also have their own individuality, their own personalities. It is not that if I suffer from tuberculosis and you also suffer from tuberculosis, we will both be the same kind of patients. Even our TBs will present themselves in two different ways—because we are two different individuals. It can also happen that the treatment that cures my TB does not bring any relief to your TB. So deep down the patient is at the roots, not the disease.
Medicine catches the diseases in a person superficially. Meditation gets hold of a person from deep within. In other words, it can be said that medicine tries to bring health to a person from the outside, and meditation tries to make the person healthy from deep within. Neither can the science of meditation be complete without medicine, nor can the science of medicine be complete without meditation, since man is both body and soul.
In fact, it is basically a linguistic mistake to say man is both. For thousands of years we have thought that the body and the soul of a person were separate entities. This thinking gave birth to two very dangerous outcomes. One was that some people considered that only the soul was the person, and they neglected the body. Such people brought about developments in meditation but not in medicine: medicine could not become a science; the body was totally disregarded. In contrast, some people considered the person as only the body and negated the soul. They did a lot of research and made great development in medicine but took no steps towards meditation.
But man is both at the same time. And it is also a linguistic mistake to say “both at the same time”; it gives the impression that there are two things that are connected together, whereas, in fact, the body and the soul of man are two ends of the same pole. Seen in the right perspective, we will not be able to say that man is body and soul. It is not so. Man is psychosomatic or somatopsychic—mind-body or body-mind.
According to me, that part of the soul that is within the grasp of our senses is the body, and that part of the body that is beyond the grasp of the senses is the soul. The invisible body is the soul; the visible soul is the body. They are not two different things; they are not two separate entities: they are two different states of vibration of the same entity.
Actually, the very notion of duality has harmed mankind badly. We always think in terms of two, and land up with problems. Initially, we used to think in terms of matter and energy; now we do not. Now we cannot say that matter and energy are separate. Now we say that matter is energy. The reality is that use of the old language is creating difficulties. Even to say that matter is energy is not right. There is something—let us call it X—that seen from one end is matter, while seen from the other end is energy. They are not two; they are two forms of the same entity.
Similarly the body and the soul are two ends of the same entity. Illness can begin from any of the two ends. It can start from the body and reach to the soul; in fact, the vibrations of whatsoever transpires in the body are felt in the soul. That is why it sometimes happens that a person is physically cured of a disease but still goes on feeling ill. The disease has left the body, the doctor says there is no disease, but the patient still feels ill and refuses to believe that he is not sick. All the various investigations and tests indicate that clinically everything is alright, but the patient keeps on saying that he does not feel well.
These types of patients have really bothered doctors a lot, because all the modes of investigation indicate that there is no disease. But having no disease does not mean that you are healthy. Health has its own positivity. Absence of diseases is only a negative state. We might be able to say that there is no thorn, but that does not mean the presence of a flower. There is no thorn only indicates the absence of thorns. The presence of a flower is an altogether different matter.
So far the science of medicine has not been able to achieve anything in the dimension of what health is. Its whole work has been in the dimension of what disease is. If you question the science of medicine about diseases, it tries to give definitions, but if you ask it what health is, then it tries to deceive you. It says that when there is no disease, what remains is health. This is a deception, not a definition. How can you define health in relation to disease? It is like defining a flower in relation to thorns; it is like defining life in relation to death or light in relation to darkness. It is like defining a man in relation to a woman, or vice versa.
No, so far the science of medicine has not been able to say what health is. It can only tell us what disease is. Naturally, there is a reason for this. The reason is that the science of medicine only grasps the outer, and from the outside only disease can be understood. Health is only understood from where man’s innermost being is, from where his soul is. In this respect, the Hindi word swasthya is really wonderful. The English word “health” is not synonymous to swasthya. “Health” is derived from the word “healing.” Illness is associated with it: health means healed—one has recovered from illness.
Swasthya does not mean that; swasthya means one has settled within oneself, one has reached to oneself, to the deepest point. And swastha, “healthy,” means one has become rooted in oneself. That is why swasthya is not just “health.”
Actually there is no word in any other language in the world comparable to the word swasthya. All the other languages of the world have words that are synonyms to disease or to no-disease. The very concept of health that we carry is that of no-illness. In reality, having no-illness is necessary, but not enough for swasthya. Something more is required, something that is possible from the other end of the pole, where our inner being resides. Even if a disease starts from the outside, its vibrations echo all the way to the soul.
Suppose I throw a stone into a calm lake: a disturbance occurs only at the place where the stone hits the water, but the ripples produced reach the banks of the lake where the stone did not hit. Similarly, the ripples of whatsoever happens to our bodies reach our souls. And if clinical medicine treats only the body, then what will happen to those ripples that have reached the faraway banks? If we throw a stone in the lake and only pay attention to the place where the stone has hit the water, creating a momentary impression, what will happen to all those ripples that now have their own existence, independent of the stone?
Once a man falls ill, the vibrations of the disease travel all the way to his soul, and that is why the disease often persists even after the body has been given treatment and is cured. The disease persists because its vibrations echo all the way to the person’s innermost being—and for this, medical science has no solutions so far.
So medical science will always remain incomplete without meditation. We will be able to cure the disease, but we will not be able to cure the patient. Of course, it is in the interest of the doctors that the patient is not cured, that only the disease is cured but the patient should keep coming back!
Disease can also originate from the other end. Actually, because of the state man is in, diseases are already present there; because of the state man is in, there is a lot of tension inside him. I have already said that no other animal is dis-eased in this manner, is restless in this manner, is in such a tension—and there is a reason for this. No other animal’s mind has this idea of “becoming.” A dog is a dog; it does not have to become one. But a man has to become a human being; he is not one already. That is why we cannot say to a dog that he is a little less than a dog. All dogs are equally dogs. But in the case of man, we can reasonably say of a person that he is a little less of a human. Man is never born in his completeness.
Man is born in an incomplete state. All other animals are born in their completeness. It is not so with man. There are certain things he will have to do in order to become complete. This state of incompleteness is his disease. That is why man is troubled twenty-four hours a day. It is not—as we commonly think—that only a poor man is in trouble because of his poverty. What we do not realize is that in becoming rich, only the level of trouble changes, but the trouble remains.
The truth is that a poor man never gets into such anxiety as a rich man, because the poor man has at least a justification for his problems—that he is poor. A rich man does not even have that justification; he cannot even pinpoint the reason for his anxiety. And when anxiety is without any apparent cause, it becomes terrible. A reason gives you some relief, some consolation, because then you have some hope that you may be able to remove the reasons. But when some trouble arises without any reason, then the difficulties increase.
Poor nations have suffered a lot, but the day they become rich they will realize that rich countries have their own sufferings.
I would like you to choose a rich man’s sufferings, not a poor man’s. If it is a question of choosing sufferings, then it is better to choose those of a rich man. But the intensity of restlessness will be heightened.
Today, America faces a greater level of restlessness and anxiety than any other country in the world. Although no other society has ever had the facilities that are available in America today, it is in America that, for the first time, disillusionment has taken place and illusions have been broken. Man used to think he was in anxiety because of some reason. In America, it has become clear that man is not in anxiety for any reason; man himself is the anxiety—he invents new anxieties for himself. The personality within him goes on continuously demanding things that are not there, and that which he does have goes on becoming more meaningless every day. That which has already been achieved becomes meaningless, futile; that which he doesn’t have, attracts. There is a continuous striving for those things which he does not have.
Nietzsche has said somewhere that man is a bridge stretched between two impossibilities: always eager to achieve the impossible, always eager to become complete. It is out of this eagerness to become complete that all the religions have been born.
It will be useful to note that there was a time on the earth when the priest was also the physician, when the religious leader was also the doctor; he was both the priest and the doctor. And it will not be surprising if we end up with the same situation again tomorrow. There will only be a slight difference: now the one who is a physician will be the priest! This has started happening in America, because for the first time it has become clear that the question is not of the body alone. And also it has come to light that if the body is completely healthy, then there is a manifold increase in problems, because for the first time the person starts perceiving the diseases that are present within him at the opposite pole from the body.
Our perceptions, too, need causes. It is only when a thorn pricks your foot that you feel it. As long as no thorn pricks it, you remain unaware of your foot. But when there is a thorn in your foot, your whole being becomes like an arrow pointed toward your foot: it notices the foot and nothing else—naturally. And if the thorn is removed from the foot, then, too, the being notices something.
If your hunger is satisfied, good clothes are available to wear, your house is in proper order, you get the wife you wanted … Although there is no bigger calamity in this world than this! There is no end to the sufferings of a person who gets the wife he wanted. If you do not get the wife you want, then at least you can derive some happiness out of hope. That, too, is lost once you get the wife you want.
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I have heard about an asylum. A man had gone to see the asylum, and the superintendent took him around on a tour. Stopping in front of a particular cell, the man asked the superintendent what was wrong with the inmate.
The superintendent replied that the man had gone mad because he could not get the woman he was in love with.
In another cell the inmate was trying to break the bars, was beating his chest, was pulling at his hair. When asked what was wrong with this man, the superintendent replied, “This man got the same woman the other one could not get—and he became mad!”
But because he could not get his beloved, the first person used to keep her photograph near his heart and was happy in his madness, while the second person was beating his head against the bars.
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Fortunate are those lovers who do not get their beloveds!
In fact, we hope for whatever we have not achieved so we can go on living in that hope. Once we have achieved it, our hopes are shattered and we become empty. The day doctors make people free from their physical problems, they have to take on the other part of the work. The day we become free from bodily diseases, we are provided with the situation in which we can become aware of our inner diseases. For the first time the person will be troubled inside and will wonder why, if everything on the surface is alright, nothing seems to be really right.
It is not surprising that in India, twenty-four tirthankaras were the sons of kings; and Buddha was a king’s son; Rama and Krishna were all from royal families. For these people, troubles had disappeared at the bodily level; being troubled had begun from within.
Medicine tries to free man from diseases superficially, at the level of the body. But remember, even when he is freed from all his diseases, man does not become free from the basic disease of being human. That disease of being human is the desire for the impossible. The disease of being human means not being able to be satisfied with anything, that disease of being human means making all that one achieves futile and attaching significance to whatever one has not got.
The cure for the disease of being human is meditation. Physicians have the cure, medicine has the cure for all other diseases, but for this particular disease of being man, only meditation has the cure. Medical science will be complete the day we understand the inner side of man and start working with that, too, because according to my understanding, the dis-eased person who is sitting within us creates a thousand and one illnesses at the level of the body outside.
As I have already said, whenever the body becomes ill, the vibrations, the ripples, reach up to the inner being. Similarly, if the inner being is diseased, then the ripples reach the outer level, the body.
This is why there are so many “pathies”—systems of medicine—in the world. It would not be so if pathology, the study of the essential nature of diseases, were a complete science. But it becomes possible because man has thousands of types of diseases. Some types of diseases cannot be cured with the help of allopathy. For those diseases that originate in the interiority of man and travel to his periphery, allopathy is useless. For those diseases that start on the outside and move toward the interiority, allopathy is very successful. Those diseases that reach the outside from within are not bodily diseases at all; they simply manifest at the body level. Their level of origin is always psychological, or still deeper—spiritual.
Now, if a person is suffering from a disease in his psyche, this means no physical medication can give him any relief. In fact, it may be harmful, because the medication will try to do something, and in that process, instead of giving relief, it is bound to do some harm. Only those medicines that actually have no potential for giving relief to the physical illness also have no potential for causing any harm. For example, homeopathy does not harm anyone, because there is no question of any relief from it, either.
But homeopathy does give relief. It has no actual potential for providing relief, but that does not mean that people do not get relief. But to get relief is one story; to give relief is an entirely different story. These two things are two separate phenomena. People get relief because if the person is creating the disease at the level of his psyche, then all he needs is some placebo for it: he needs some placebo for his disease. He needs some consolation, some assurance from the placebo. His confidence has to be regained: that he is not actually sick but is just carrying the idea that he is sick. That is all. This is why this end result can also be achieved with ashes from some mendicant, can also be achieved with some holy water from the Ganges.
Nowadays a lot of experimentation is going on with what you may call illusory medicine, placebos. If nine patients are suffering from the same disease, and if three of them are treated allopathically, three with homeopathy, and three with naturopathy, then an interesting result is seen: each of these “pathies” is affecting the same percentage of people for good and for bad. There is not much difference in the proportions. This does produce some food for thought.
What is going on?
According to me, allopathy is the only scientific medicine. But since something in the human being is unscientific, scientific medicine alone will not do. Only allopathy deals with the human body in a scientific manner, but allopathy cannot cure one hundred percent because man, in his inner being, is also imaginative, inventive, and projective. Actually a person on whom allopathy does not work is sick because of some unscientific reason.
What does it mean to be ill due to some unscientific reason? These words may sound very strange. You know that there can be scientific medical treatment and there can also be unscientific medical treatment. I am saying to you that there can also be scientific sickness and unscientific sickness—unscientific ways of falling sick. All the diseases that start at the level of the psyche of a person and manifest at the level of the body cannot be cured in a scientific way.
I know a young woman who went blind. But the blindness was psychological: actually her eyes were not affected. Eye specialists said that the eyes were alright, the girl was deceiving everyone. But the girl was not deceiving anyone, because even if you led her towards the fire, she would go into the fire; she would stumble against a wall and injure her head. The girl was not pretending; she really could not see with her eyes. But this disease was beyond the physicians.
This girl was brought to me and I tried to understand her. I came to know that she was in love with someone but her family members had stopped her from seeing that person. When I repeatedly questioned her, she replied that she had no desire to see anyone else in the world except her lover. This determination not to see anything except her lover. And if this sort of intensity is present in a person’s determination, the eyes can become psychologically blind. The eyes will become blind, the eyes will stop seeing anything. This cannot be understood by seeing the anatomy of the eyes, because the anatomy is normal, the mechanism of seeing is functional—but the seer who used to be behind the eyes has slipped away, has removed herself from there. We experience this in our day-to-day life, only we are not aware of it. The mechanism of our body functions only while our presence is there behind it.
Now consider a young man playing hockey who gets injured in his leg. He is bleeding but he does not realize it. Others can see that he is bleeding, but he himself has no inkling of it. Then, when the play is over after half an hour, suddenly he grasps his leg in pain, asking when he got hurt; it is hurting a lot. Now half an hour has passed since he was injured. The injury in his leg is a reality; the sensory mechanisms in his leg are working absolutely well—it is they who finally informed him about the pain after half an hour. So why was this information not conveyed earlier?
His attention was not there with the leg; his attention was on the play. And so great was his attention on the play that there was nothing of it left to notice his leg. The leg must have kept on informing him—the muscles, the nerves must have sent impulses; the leg must have knocked on all possible doors, it must have rung the exchange—but the man at the exchange was asleep. He was fast asleep, or he was present somewhere else. He was absent, he was not present. When he returned after half an hour, then he noticed that there was an injury to his leg.
I told the girl’s family to do one thing. I told them that since she is not allowed to see the person she wants to see, she has committed a partial suicide—a suicide of her eyes: “Nothing else is the matter with her except that she has gone into a phase of partial suicide. Let her lover meet her.”
They said, “What has that got to do with the eyes?”
I asked them to just try it for once. And as soon as she was informed that she would be allowed to meet her lover and that he would arrive at five o’clock, she came and stood at the door. Her eyes were alright.
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No, this is not deception. Experiments in hypnosis have shown us that there is no place for deception. I am telling you this from my own experiments. If a deeply hypnotized person is given an ordinary pebble in his hand and told that it is a piece of hot coal, he will behave exactly the way he would with a hot ember in his hand. He will throw it away, he will start shouting, wailing, that he has been burned. Up to this point, it can be easily understood. But he will also get blisters on his hands—and then the difficulty arises. If you can get blisters merely from the idea that there is burning coal in your hand, then it is dangerous to begin the treatment of these blisters at the level of the body. The treatment for these blisters should start at the level of the mind.
Since we consider only one end of man, we have been able to slowly eliminate diseases that affect the body, but the diseases originating from the mind have increased.
Today, even those who think only in terms of science have started agreeing that at least fifty percent of diseases are of the mind. This is not so in India, because for diseases of the mind, first a strong mind is required. In India we still see that about ninety-five percent of diseases are of the body, but in America, the proportion of diseases of the mind are increasing.
Diseases of the mind usually begin from within and spread to the periphery; they are outgoing diseases, while those of the body are ingoing. If you try to treat the bodily manifestations of the mental disease, then it will immediately find some other means of manifestation. We may be able to stop small trickles of mental disease from one place or a second or a third, but it will certainly manifest at a fourth or fifth place. It will try to manifest from the weakest spot in the personality of the individual. That is why so many times a physician is not only unable to treat a disease, on the contrary, he helps it multiply into various forms. What could have been eliminated through one location starts coming out in various places, in various ways, because we go on creating obstructions to it.
According to me, meditation is the cure at the other end of the human being. Naturally, medicines depend on matter, their chemical constituents; meditation depends on the consciousness. There can be no tablets for meditation, though people are trying: LSD, mescaline, marijuana—thousands of things are being tried. Thousands of efforts are going on to produce pills for meditation. But you can never have any meditation pills. Actually, trying to make such pills is the same old stubbornness of only treating from the level of the body, of making all the treatments only from the outside. Even if our psyche is affected inside, we will still treat from the outside, never from within. Drugs like mescaline and LSD can only produce an illusion of inner health; they cannot create inner health. We cannot reach man’s innermost being through any chemical means. The deeper we go within, the more the chemical activities lessen. The deeper we go within man, the less meaningful the physical and material approach starts becoming. Only a nonmaterial approach, or we could say a psychic approach, has meaning there.
But it has not been achieved so far because of some prejudices, some bias. Interestingly, doctors are one of the two or three most orthodox professions in the world. Professors and medical doctors list highest among the most orthodox people. They do not let go of old ideas easily. There are reasons for this—perhaps quite natural reasons. The most prominent among them is that if doctors and professors drop old ideas quickly, easily, and become flexible, then they will have a difficult time teaching youth. If things are fixed, then they are able to teach efficiently. Ideas should be definite, solid, not shaky and fluid; then they have confidence while teaching them.
Even criminals do not require the amount of confidence that a professor requires. He should have self-confidence that what he is saying is absolutely right. But whosoever has the professional need of being absolutely right becomes orthodox. Teachers become orthodox. This does great harm, because education should be the least orthodox in every sense; otherwise there will be obstacles in the path of progress. This is the reason why usually no teacher is an inventor. There are so many professors in al1 the universities, but inventions, discoveries, are made by the people outside. More than seventy percent of the Nobel Prize winners are people from outside the universities.
The other profession that is full of orthodoxy is that of the doctors. That, too, has its professional reason. Doctors have to make decisions very fast. If they start contemplating when the patient is on his deathbed, then only the ideas will remain, the patient will be dead. If the doctor is very unorthodox, liberal, and practices new theories or does new experiments every time, then, too, there is a danger. All those who have to make instant decisions rely mainly on past knowledge, old knowledge; they do not want to get caught up in new ideas.
Those people who are making decisions on the spot every day have to rely on past knowledge, and that is why the medical profession runs behind medical research by about thirty years. This results in many patients dying unnecessarily, because what should not be practiced today is actually being followed. But this is a professional hazard. And so some of doctors’ concepts are deep down very fundamentalist. One of them is their faith in medicine more than in the man himself—more faith in the chemicals than in the consciousness, more importance given to chemistry than to consciousness. The most dangerous outcome of this attitude is that as long as chemistry is given sole importance, no experiments will be done on consciousness.
Here I would like to talk about a few such examples, so that you might get some idea.
To have painless labor during the birth of a child has been a very old problem; how to bear a child without pain has been a question for a long time. Of course the priests are against this. Actually, the priests are against the very idea that the world should be free from pain and suffering, because they will be out of job if there is no pain in this world; their profession will have no meaning. If there is pain, suffering, and misery, then there is a call, a prayer. Maybe even God might get totally neglected if there is no suffering in the world. People may hardly pray, because we remember God only in suffering. Priests have always been against painless labor. They say that the pain during labor is a natural process.
But it should not be there. To call it an arrangement of God is a false idea. No God wants to give pain during childbirth. The doctor believes that for the painless birth of a child some medicine should be given, some chemicals should be arranged, anesthesia should be given. All these doctors’ remedies start at the level of the body, meaning that we get the body in such a state that the mother does not realize that she is in pain.
Naturally women themselves have been experimenting with this on their own for centuries. That is why seventy-five percent of babies have to take birth during the night. It is difficult in the daytime because a woman is very active and aware at that time. During the night she goes to sleep, she is more relaxed. And so, seventy-five percent of babies do not get a chance to be born when the sun is shining; they have to be born in the darkness. When the woman is sleepy, she is more relaxed and it is easier for the baby to be born. A mother starts creating obstacles for the child right from the moment it is about to be born. Of course, later on she manages to create so many obstacles for the child, but she begins causing hindrances for the child even before it is born.
One of the remedies is to do something through medication so that the body becomes relaxed as it is during sleep. These remedies are being followed, but they have their own drawbacks. The biggest drawback is that we do not trust at all in the consciousness of the person. And as this trust in the human consciousness goes on decreasing, the consciousness starts disappearing.
A doctor called Lamaze has trusted in human consciousness and has managed thousands of painless deliveries of babies for women. This method is of conscious cooperation—that the mother tries to cooperate meditatively, consciously, during the delivery, that she welcomes it, does not fight against it or try to resist it. The pain that is produced is not because of the childbirth but because of the fight the mother makes against it. She tries to constrict the whole mechanism of childbirth. She is in fear that it will be painful; she is afraid of the labor. This fear-centered resistance is preventing the child from being born while the child is trying to be born; there is a tussle between the two; there is a clash between the mother and the baby. This conflict is responsible for the pain. This pain is not natural; it is only from the clash, from the resistance.
There are two possible ways to solve this problem of resistance. You can sedate the mother, if you are working at the level of the body. But the thing to remember here is that a mother who delivers her child in a state of unconsciousness can never become a mother in the fullest sense. And there is a reason for this. When a child is born, not only is a child born but a mother is also born. The birth of a child actually is two births: on the one hand a child is born, and on the other an ordinary woman becomes a mother. And if the baby is born in the state of unconsciousness, we have managed to distort the basic relationship between the mother and the child. The mother will not be born; only a nurse will be left behind in the process.
I am not in favor of delivering a child by sedating the mother with the help of chemicals or using superficial means. The mother should be fully conscious during the delivery, because in that very consciousness the mother is born, too. If you realize the truth of this matter, then it means that the mother’s consciousness should be trained for the delivery. The mother should be able to take the childbirth meditatively.
Meditation has two meanings for the mother. One is that she should not resist, should not fight. She should cooperate with whatever is going on. Just like a river that flows wherever there is a depression in the earth, just as the winds are blowing, just like the falling of the leaves—no one gets an inkling of it and the dry leaf just falls off the tree—similarly she should be in total cooperation with the process that is unfolding. And if the mother gives her total cooperation during the delivery, does not fight against it, does not become afraid, becomes fully and meditatively immersed in the event, then there will be painless birth: the pain will simply vanish.
What I am telling you has a scientific basis. Many experiments have been done using this method. She will become free from pain. And remember, this will have far-reaching results.
Firstly, we start harboring an ill feeling towards the thing or person that produces pain in us from the very first moment of contact. We fall into a sort of enmity with the person with whom we encounter a struggle in our very first experience. This becomes an obstacle to forming a friendly relationship. It is difficult to create a bridge of cooperation with a person with whom we fell into conflict from the very beginning. It will be superficial. But that moment when we will be able to deliver a child with cooperation and in full awareness … This is very interesting: until now we have only heard the expression “labor pains”; we have never heard the expression “labor bliss”—because it has not taken place so far. But if there is full cooperation, then “labor bliss” will also happen.
So I am not in favor of painless birth; I am in favor of blissful birth. With help from medical science, at the most we can achieve painless birth, but never blissful birth. But if we approach it from the side of consciousness, then we can have blissful birth. And right from the first moment we will be able to build a conscious inner connection between the mother and the child.
This was only an example to put across to you that something can be done from within, too. Whenever we fall sick, we are trying to fight the sickness only from the outside. The question is: Is the patient really ready to fight the sickness from the inside? We never bother to find this out. It is quite possible that it is a self-invited disease. The number of self-invited sicknesses is large. Actually, very few diseases come on their own; most of them are invited. Of course, we had invited them long before they came; hence we are unable to see any connection between their arrival and our invitation.
For thousands of years many societies in this world could not form a connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth because the time difference was big—nine months. It was difficult for them to relate such a distant cause and effect. And then not all intercourse lead to childbirth, so obviously there was no reason for thinking in terms of connecting the two. It was much later on that man understood that what had happened nine months ago was resulting in a childbirth today. He could form a cause-and-effect relationship. The same happens to us regarding illness. We invite it at some time, but it will come later on. Much time passes between the two events, and that is the reason we are unable to see any connection between the two.
* * *
I have heard of a man who was on the verge of becoming bankrupt. He was afraid to go to the market, to his shop. He was afraid even to walk on the streets. One day as he was coming out of his bathroom he fell down and was paralyzed. Now all sorts of treatments are being given to him, but we do not want to accept that the man wanted to become paralyzed. He did not think about this consciously, but that is not the point. Nor does it matter whether he did or didn’t conceptualize to get paralyzed in his mind; most probably he never thought of it. But somewhere, deep inside his mind, in his unconscious, he must have wanted not to have to go to the market or to the shops or walk on the streets. This is the first thing.
Secondly, he also wanted the hostilities towards him to stop in some way and for some sympathy to begin instead. These were his deep desires. Obviously his body would support him. The body always follows the mind like a shadow; it will always support the mind. The mind makes the arrangements. Actually we never realize what arrangements the mind makes for us. If you have fasted for the whole day, then you will have a meal in the night—the mind will see to that. It will say to you that you have fasted for the whole day, you must be uncomfortable: “Let’s go to a feast at the king’s palace!” And you will eat there in the night in your dreams.
The mind arranges for everything that the body cannot do. So most of the dreams we see are just like these—just substitutes. What we could not do in the day, we do in the night. Mind arranges all these things. If suddenly in the night you feel like going to the bathroom, then it means that the mind is sounding an alarm. It can send you to the bathroom in your dream and you will feel less strain on your bladder. You will think that that is alright and that you have been to the bathroom. The mind arranges things so that your sleep is not disturbed. Throughout the day and night, the mind is constantly making arrangements so that all your known and unknown desires are fulfilled.
This man had an attack of hemiplegia and he fell down. Now we are trying to treat that. But actually the medicines might harm him, because he does not have hemiplegia; he has brought the disease upon himself. Even if we treat his paralysis, then he will manifest a second or a third, or maybe a fourth disease. Actually, until he gathers courage to go to the market, he will suffer from one disease or another. And as soon as he falls ill, he realizes that the whole situation has changed. Now he has some justification for going bankrupt. “What can I do?—I am paralyzed!” Now he can tell his creditors, “How can I repay you? You can see the condition I am in.” Actually, when the creditor will come to him, he himself will feel ashamed to ask for the money. His wife will take better care of him, his children will serve him better, his friends will come to meet him, people will surround his bed.
In fact, we show our love to anyone until he falls sick. So whoever wants to be loved has to fall sick. Once we realize this, and if this gets fixed in our minds, then every time we want some sympathy we will fall sick. Actually it is dangerous to show sympathy to a sick person; you should only treat the person’s illness. It is dangerous because through sympathy you may be making his disease more palatable, and this will be harmful.
No medicine will cure this person who has had paralysis; at the most he will keep changing diseases, because in reality he does not have the disease, it is just deep auto-suggestion: his hemiplegia is mental in origin.
* * *
There is a similar story about another man who was also suffering from hemiplegia. He was suffering for two years and he could not even get up. One day his house caught fire and everybody ran out of the house. Suddenly they panicked and wondered what would happen to the sick man. But then they saw him coming out—he was running—and this person could not even sit up before. And when his family pointed out to him that he could walk, he said that that it couldn’t be possible, and he collapsed then and there.
What happened to this man? He is not fooling anybody. His disease was mind-oriented, not body-oriented. That is the only difference, and that is the reason why, when a physician tells a patient that his disease is in the mind, the patient does not like it because it seems to convey that he is unnecessarily pretending to be sick. Now this is not right. No one wants to pretend that he is ill. There are mental reasons for falling sick, and these reasons are as important or maybe more important than reasons for falling sick because of some actual physical problem. And it will be mistreatment on the part of the physician to tell someone, even by mistake, that he is mentally ill. The patient will not feel better with this statement; in fact, he will feel bitter towards the doctor.
We haven’t yet been able to develop a kindly attitude towards mind-oriented diseases. If my leg is hurt, then everyone will be sympathetic, but if my mind is hurt, then people will say that this is a mental disease—as if I have done something wrong. If my leg is hurt, then I get sympathy, but if I have a mind-oriented disease, then I am blamed as if it is my fault! No, it is not my fault.
Mind-oriented diseases have their own place, but physicians don’t accept this. This reluctance is because they only have treatment for body-oriented diseases, for no other reason. It is beyond the doctor, so he just says that this is not a disease. Actually, he should say that this is beyond his scope. He should advise you to find a different type of doctor—or he himself should try to become a different type of doctor. This person actually needs a treatment that will start from within and then move outward. And it is possible that a very small thing can change his inner life.
According to me, meditation is a treatment that spreads from the inside out.
* * *
One day somebody went to Buddha and asked, “Who are you? Are you a philosopher or a thinker or a saint or a yogi?”
Buddha replied, “I am only a healer, a physician.”
This answer of his is truly marvelous: “I am a physician; I know something about the inner diseases, and that is what I discuss with you.”
The day we understand that we will have to do something about these mind-oriented diseases, otherwise we will never be able to eradicate all the body-oriented diseases completely, we will see that religion and science have begun to come closer to each other. That day we will see that medicine and meditation have begun to come nearer to each other. My own understanding is that no other branch of science will help as much as medicine in bridging this gap.
As yet, chemistry does not have any reason to come close to religion. Similarly, physics and mathematics have no reason to come close to religion as yet. Mathematics can survive without religion, and I think this will remain true forever, because I do not see a situation where mathematics will need the help of religion. I cannot conceive of a moment when mathematics will feel that it cannot develop without religion. That day will never come. Mathematics can keep its game going for eternity, because mathematics is only a game, it is not life.
But a physician is not playing a game; he is dealing with life. Most probably it is the medical doctor who will become the first bridge between religion and science.
Actually, it has already started happening, especially in the more developed and understanding nations. The reason is that the doctors have to deal with human lives. It is what Carl Gustav Jung said just before dying. He said that based on his experience of being a physician, the illnesses of all the patients who came to him after the age of forty were because of a lack of religion. It is a very surprising point. If somehow we can give them some kind of religion, then they will become healthy.
This is worth understanding. Until the age of thirty-five the life of a person is on the rise, then it starts moving down. Thirty-five is the peak. So it is possible that up to the age of thirty-five a person may not find any value in meditation, because until then people are body-oriented; the body is still on the rise. Perhaps all the diseases in this stage are of the body, but after the age of thirty-five the diseases will take a new turn, because now life has started moving toward death. And when life grows it spreads toward the outside, but when a person dies he shrinks withinward. Old age means to have shrunk withinward.
The truth is that most probably all the diseases of old people are deep down rooted in death.
Usually people say that such and such a person died because of such and such a sickness. But I think it would be more appropriate to say that such and such a person is sick because of death. What happens is that the possibility of death makes a person vulnerable to all kinds of diseases. As soon as a person feels that he is moving toward death, all the doors open up to various diseases and he starts catching hold of them. Even if a healthy person comes to know for sure that he is going to die tomorrow, he will fall sick. Everything was alright, all the reports were normal, the X-ray was normal, the blood pressure was within normal limits, the pulse was alright; the stethoscope was conveying that everything was perfect. But if somebody becomes convinced completely that tomorrow he is going to die, then you will see that he starts catching a variety of diseases. He will catch as many diseases in twenty-four hours as it would be difficult to catch in twenty-four lifetimes.
What has happened to this person? He has opened himself up to all kinds of diseases. He has stopped resisting. Since he was sure of his death, he has moved away from his consciousness, which was within him acting as a wall and forming a barrier against all the diseases. Now he has become ready for his death and the diseases start coming. And that is why so many retired people die soon.
So everybody wishing to retire should understand this before they retire. They might die earlier by as much as five or six years. The one who would have died at the age of seventy will die when he is only sixty-five; the one who would have died at the age of eighty will die when he is seventy-five. Those ten, fifteen years of retirement will be spent in preparing for death; he will not accomplish anything else, because now he knows that he is of no use in life. There is no work for him, no one greets him on the road.
It was different when he was in the office. Now no one even looks at him, because now they have to greet someone else. Everything works on economics. New people are there in the office, so people will have to greet them. They cannot afford to go on greeting this man as well. They will forget him. Now he suddenly realizes that he has become useless. He feels uprooted. He is of no use to anybody. Even the children are busy with their wives, going out to movies. The people he knew have slowly started ending up in the cemetery. He has become useless for the very people who needed him earlier. Suddenly he becomes vulnerable; he opens up completely for death.
When is the consciousness of man healthy from within? First, when he starts feeling his inner consciousness. Usually we do not feel the inner; all we feel is the body—the hand, the leg, the head, the heart. There are no feelings of that which we are. Our whole awareness is focused on the house and not on the dweller of the house.
This is a very dangerous situation, because if the house starts falling down tomorrow, then I will think that I am falling, and this itself will become my sickness. But if I come to know that I am separate from the house—I am only residing in it, even if the house collapses I will still remain—then this will make a big difference, a basic difference. Then the fear of death will fade away.
Without meditation the fear of death never vanishes. So the first meaning of meditation is awareness of oneself. As long as we are in consciousness, our consciousness is always an awareness about something, it is never about itself. That is why when we are sitting alone we start feeling sleepy, because there is nothing to do. If we are reading a paper or listening to the radio, then we feel a little alert. If we leave a person alone in a dark room, then he will feel sleepy, because since you cannot see anything you do not require your consciousness. If you cannot see anything, then what can you do except sleep? There does not seem to be any other solution. If you are alone, there is darkness, no one to talk to, nothing to think about, then sleep will envelop you. There is no other way.
Remember that sleep and meditation are alike in one sense and different in another. Sleep means that you are alone but you are in a slumber. Meditation means that you are alone but awake. This is the only difference. If you can remain awake about yourself when you are alone …
* * *
One day a person sitting with Buddha was fidgeting with his big toe. Buddha asked him, “Why are you moving your toe?”
The person replied, “Forget it, it was just moving. I was not even aware of it.”
Buddha said, “Your toe is moving and you do not even know? Whose toe is it? Is it yours?”
The man said, “It is mine—but why have you deviated from what you were saying? Please continue.”
Buddha said, “I will not continue with my talk anymore because the person I was talking to is unconscious. And remain aware of your toe movement in future. That will create double awareness in you. In the awareness of the toe will be born the awareness of the watcher as well.”
* * *
Awareness is always double-pointed. If we experiment with it, then one side of it will go outward and the other inward.
So the first meaning of meditation is that we start becoming aware of our bodies and ourselves. And if this awareness can increase, then the fear of death will fade away.
And a medical science that cannot free man from the fear of death can never cure this disease that is man. Of course, medical science tries hard; it tries to accomplish this by increasing our life span. But without meditation, increasing your life span increases only the waiting period for death and nothing else. And it is better to wait for a shorter period of time than a longer one. You make death even more pitiful by increasing the life span.
Do you know, there is a movement going on in those countries where medical science has increased the life span of people? This movement is for euthanasia. Old people are demanding that the constitution should give them the right to die. They say that life has become arduous for them, and you are just keeping them hanging on in the hospitals. It has become possible: you can put a man on an oxygen cylinder and keep him hanging on endlessly. You can keep him alive, but that life will be worse than death. Only goodness knows how many people in Europe and America are lying in hospitals in upside-down and other strange positions, hooked up to oxygen cylinders. They do not have the right to die, and they are demanding to be given the right to die.
My understanding is that soon most of the developed countries in the world will have the right to die added as man’s birthright to their constitutions, because a doctor has no right to keep a person alive against his wishes.
By increasing the age of a person you cannot remove the fear of death from him. By making a person healthy you can make his life more happy but not fearless. Fearlessness comes in only one situation: when man comes to know that there is something in him that never dies. This understanding is absolutely essential.
Meditation is the realization of this immortality. That which is my interiority never dies, and that which is my outside always dies. And that is why you should treat the outer, the body, medically so that as long as it lives it lives happily, and kindle the remembrance of that which is within you so that even if death is at your doorstep, you are not afraid. Meditation from within and medication on the outside can make the medical science a complete science.
According to me, meditation and medicine are two poles of the one science, but their connecting links are, as yet, missing. But slowly, slowly they are coming closer to each other. Today, in most of the major hospitals of America, a hypnotherapist has become essential. Hypnosis is not meditation, but this is a good step. At least it shows that there is an understanding that something needs to be done about the consciousness of man, and that just treating the body is not enough.
As I see it, if hypnotherapists are coming into hospitals today, meditation will come tomorrow. It will come later; it will take a little time. After hypnotherapy every hospital will have a department of meditation. This should happen, then we will be able to treat man as a whole. The body will be taken care of by the doctors, the mind by the psychologists and psychiatrists, and the soul by meditation.
The day that hospitals accept man as a whole, as a totality, and then treat him as such, will be a day of great benediction in man’s life. I ask you to think in this direction so that this day may come soon.
I am grateful that you listened to my talk with such love and silence. Please accept my greetings.
* * *
It is an interesting coincidence that your meditation technique of release through intense chaotic breathing evolved at the same time that certain chaotic therapy techniques were happening in the West, such as R. D. Laing’s theory that schizophrenia is not something to be fought, but something to be experienced voluntarily. Laing has said that you cannot be sane until you have been non-sane or insane. Then there is Wilhelm Reich’s use of sexual energy to release body blocks that coincide with neurosis; this technique was the inspiration for the therapy that is called bioenergetics, as well as the primal scream therapy. Is there a significance in this coincidence?
Man as such is neurotic. It is not that just a few men are neurotic, but humanity is neurotic. It is not a question of correction for a few persons; it is a question of curing humanity as such. Neurosis is the “normal” condition. As you are born, you are born neurotic. There are reasons for it. Understand the reasons that make man “normally neurotic.”
The neurosis is inborn. The first reason is that man is the only animal that is born not totally evolved in the womb. Every human birth is immature. Except for man, nearly every animal is born mature; the mother is not really very much needed. The human child is totally helpless. Without mother, without family, without parents, he cannot survive. He is born unmatured.
Scientists say the nine months is only half the necessary period. The human child needs eighteen months in the womb. But there are problems: women cannot carry a child for eighteen months. Thus, every birth is abortive. This happens because man is the only animal who is standing on two feet, erect. The womb, the human body, was not made for an erect posture. This erect posture creates problems, and the child has to be born before he is really mature and ready to be born. That gives a neurotic beginning—an unevolved child.
Secondly, even if the situation could be changed, there would be problems. And some day we will be able to change it. When we are able to give a scientifically created womb to the future humanity, then only will we be able to change it. But even then there will be problems. The second problem, which goes even deeper than physiology, is a psychological one. No animal is cultured, but man is cultured. He has to pass through training, conditioning. He is not allowed just to be whatsoever he is; he has to be molded into a particular pattern. That pattern creates neurosis.
You are not allowed to be yourself. The society gives you a pattern, a mold. You are cultured into a certain shape and form. That means repression. The remaining part of your being is repressed. Only a fragment is allowed to be expressed. This creates a division, a schizophrenia. A fragment of your mind is allowed to be expressed at the cost of the whole. The major part is not allowed to be expressed. It is not even allowed to be alive. It must move into the darker corners of your being.
But it remains there, and then there is a constant conflict. The fragment that society allows and the major part that society doesn’t allow are in tension, in conflict—in constant internal conflict. So you are against yourself: that is the neurosis.
No man is for himself; every man is against himself. Man is against himself. That is how society cultures you, cultivates you, conditions you. This repression has many implications. You can never be at ease, because your major part is not even allowed to exist, not even allowed to be conscious. The major part of your being is in bondage. And remember that a fragment can never be free. Can you make a branch of a tree free while the whole tree is in slavery? The fragment is basically be part of the whole, so even the fragment enjoys only a very illusionary freedom. And the part that is suppressed goes on fighting for expression.
Life needs expression, life is expression. If you do not allow life, then you are creating, accumulating, explosive forces. They will explode and you will go to bits. This division in you is schizophrenia. So every man is schizophrenic, divided—divided against himself. He cannot be at ease; he cannot be silent; he cannot be blissful. Hell is always there, and unless you become whole, you cannot be freed from this hell.
So if you understand me, man as such is schizophrenic, neurotic. So something has to be done that releases this neurosis, brings your divided parts nearer. The unexpressed has to be expressed, and this constant repression of your mind, of the conscious upon the unconscious, has to be withdrawn.
All the old meditation techniques do not take this into consideration; that is why they have been failures. Meditation techniques have been in existence for a long time; they have been known throughout history, but a Buddha, a Jesus, a Mahavira have all been failures. I don’t mean that they themselves didn’t realize. They realized, but they were exceptions, and exceptions only prove rules. Buddha was enlightened, but he couldn’t help the greater portion of humanity to be enlightened. He was simply an exception.
Why could religion not be a great help? The reason is this: we have been taking man for granted, and we were teaching meditative techniques to help man as he is. But all these techniques can help only to a certain extent, and only on the surface. The inner division remains; you have not done anything to dissolve it.
For example, there are Zen techniques, and Mahesh Yogi’s transcendental meditation, and other techniques. They can help you to a certain extent. They can calm you down, your surface can become more peaceful, but nothing happens to your inner being. It cannot! And, in a way, that surface calm is dangerous, because in one way or another you will explode again. Basically nothing has happened. You have simply trained your conscious mind to be in a more still state.
You can still your mind easily through mantras, through constant chanting, through many things. Anything that creates an inner boredom will help you to calm down. For example, if you constantly repeat “Ram, Ram, Ram,” this constant repetition creates a certain sleepiness, a boredom, and your mind begins to fall into sleep. You can feel that sleepiness as calmness, as stillness, but it is not. Really, it is a sort of dullness. But you can tolerate your life more through it; at least on the surface you will feel more contented. But the forces, the neurotic forces, will go on boiling within; any day they will disrupt the surface and you will fall down dead.
These methods are conciliatory, and very few people can be helped through them. And those who can be helped through them can be helped without any technique. Those are exceptions—fortunate ones who are not born neurotic. Many things are implied in that, but as a rule, humanity is not so fortunate.
So my technique accepts your neurosis as it is and tries to release it. My technique basically starts with catharsis. Whatever is hidden must be released. You must not go on repressing; rather, choose expression as the path. Do not condemn yourself. Accept what you are, because every condemnation creates division.
Just by condemning nothing is destroyed. If you say sex is bad, you condemn it, but you cannot destroy it. Just by condemning it, it is not destroyed. Rather, it may become a more dangerous force, because when repressed, it may struggle to be expressed. And if you go on struggling with it, not allowing it, it will become perverted. Repression will make you more sexual, and the sex energy will struggle and will try to come out in any way, in any form.
All the perversions, all over the world—homosexuality or sadomasochist perversions—are basically by-products of so-called religions, particularly Christianity: because the more they repress, the more the energy has to find paths of its own. Natural sex is beautiful; perverted sex is just ugliness. Natural sex can be made hallowed and holy, but perverted sex cannot be made holy, because it is twice removed from the original source.
Sex is there; do not condemn it. Accept it. Do not create a division in your being, between parts of your being. Anger is there; accept it. Greed is there, or whatsoever; accept it. I do not mean be greedy. Rather, on the contrary, the moment you accept you go beyond, because acceptance creates a unity, and when you are united within you have the energy to go beyond.
When you are divided within, your energy is fighting with itself; it cannot be used for any transformation. So let there be an acceptance of what you are—not condemnation. Whatsoever you have been doing up until now is just repressing. That all has to be released. If you become consciously neurotic, one day you will come to a point where you are no more neurotic.
This may seem paradoxical, but those who repress their neurosis become more and more neurotic, while those who express it consciously throw it out. So unless you become consciously insane, you can never become sane. R. D. Laing is right. He is one of the most sensitive men in the West. He says, “Allow yourself to be insane.” You are insane, so something has to be done about it. What I say is to become conscious of it. What do old traditions say? They say repress it; do not allow it to come out, otherwise you will become insane. I say allow it to come out; that is the only way toward sanity. Release it! Inside, it will become poisonous. Throw it out, remove it from your system totally. Expression is what is moral. And to do this catharsis, you have to approach it in a very systematic, methodical way, because it is becoming mad with a method—consciously mad.
You have to do two things: remain conscious of what you are doing, and then do not suppress anything. In our minds, consciousness means suppression. That is the problem. The moment you become conscious of certain things in yourself, you start suppressing them. This is the discipline and this has to be learned: to be conscious and nonsuppressive; on the contrary, to be conscious and expressive.
You are feeling miserable; what will you do? Either you will try some escape so that you can forget, or you will try something that brings you out of your misery, or something that calms you down. Whatsoever you do will be a subtle repression, and the misery will be accumulated and it will remain in your system. The more it remains there, the more poisonous it becomes; the longer, the more poisonous. It is not only in your mind. It moves into your body, into your blood, into your bones, into your physiology. It creates many diseases.
At least fifty percent of diseases are mental and have their origin in the mind. And this statistic I am giving is a very conservative statistic—fifty percent. Those who work with mind and body, they know that ninety percent of diseases are mind-created. So the more you repress your energies, the more diseased you will become in mind and body—both. You have to go inside yourself with a deep transforming method.
* * *
My system of Dynamic Meditation starts with breathing, because breathing has deep roots in the being. You may not have observed that breathing is very special in many ways. Your body has two types of systems. One system is voluntary, another system is nonvoluntary. I can move my hand voluntarily, but I cannot influence my blood circulation. That is nonvoluntary. Your body is made of these two types of systems—the voluntary and the nonvoluntary. You can do something with it: you can take deep breaths; you can take slow breaths. You can change the rhythm; you can even stop breathing for a few minutes or a few seconds. But it is still in between. You cannot stop it forever. It is a link between the voluntary and nonvoluntary systems of your body.
If you can change your breathing, you can change many things with it. If you can observe your breathing minutely, you can detect in yourself many things. When you are angry you have a different rhythm of breathing; when you are in love a totally different rhythm comes to you. When you are relaxed you breathe differently; when you are tense you breathe differently. You cannot breathe the way you do when you are relaxed and be angry at the same time. That is impossible.
When you are sexually aroused your breathing changes. If you do not allow the breathing to change, your sexual arousal will drop automatically. That means that breathing is deeply related to your mental state. If you change your breathing, you can change the state of your mind. Or, if you change the state of your mind, breathing will change.
So I start with breathing, and I suggest chaotic breathing for ten minutes in the beginning of the technique. And by chaotic breathing I mean just taking the breath in and throwing it out without any rhythm—without any rhythm. Just taking it in and throwing it out, as much as you can.
This chaotic breathing is to create a chaos within your repressed system. Whatever you are, you are with a certain type of breathing. A child breathes in a different way, and when the child becomes sexually aware, or is made aware by parents or society, he starts to breathe again in a different way. If you are sexually afraid, you cannot breathe deeply because every deep breath hits the sex center. So if you are sexually afraid, you cannot take deep breaths. And we make the child sexually afraid. If a child is touching or playing with his sex organs, we will stop him. When you stop him, his breath will become shallow. He cannot breathe deeply; he has become afraid. In fear, you cannot take deep breaths; fear creates shallow breathing.
This chaotic breathing is to destroy all your systems of the past. Whatsoever you have made out of yourself, it is to destroy it. This creates a chaos within you, because unless a chaos is created, you cannot release your repressed emotions; and those emotions have now moved into the body.
Ten minutes of chaotic breathing is wonderful. But it must be chaotic. It is not a type of pranayama, yogic breathing; it is simply creating chaos through breathing. And it creates chaos for many reasons.
Deep, fast breathing gives you more oxygen. The more oxygen in the body, the more alive you become, the more animallike. Animals are alive and man is half-dead, half-alive. You have to be made into an animal again; only then can something higher develop in you. You are false, and if you are only half-alive, nothing can be done with you.
So this chaotic breathing will make you like an animal: alive, vibrating, vital—with more oxygen in your blood, more energy in your cells. Your body cells become more alive and this oxygenation helps to create body electricity, or you can call it bioenergy. When there is electricity in the body you can move deep within, beyond yourself, because this electricity will work within you. As you are, you are just dead, or half-dead.… Because even to be completely dead is good. Something complete is always good, but this half-deadness is bad.
The body has its own electrical sources. If you hammer them with more breathing and more oxygen, they begin to flow. And if you become really alive, then you are no more a body. When you are alive you feel yourself as energy, not matter. You feel yourself to be a body because you are half-dead. That is why you feel so much weight. That half-deadness gives you weight and a feeling of being pulled down by gravity. You feel you have to carry yourself somehow. You are just heavy. This heaviness is because of your half-deadness. The more alive you become, then the more energy flows in your system, and the less you will feel yourself physically. You will feel more like energy and less like matter.
And whenever it happens that you are more alive, in those moments you are not body-oriented. If sex has so much appeal, one of the reasons is that if you are really in the act, totally moving, totally alive, then you are no longer a body—just energy. To feel this energy is very necessary if you are to move further.
* * *
Then my second step is a catharsis. I tell you to be consciously insane, and whatever comes to your mind—whatever—allow it expression and cooperate with it. No resistance, just a flow of emotions …
If you want to scream, then scream; cooperate with it. A deep scream, a total scream in which your whole being becomes involved, is very therapeutic, deeply therapeutic. Many things, many diseases, will be released just by the scream. If the scream becomes total, then your whole being is in it. Allow yourself expression through crying, dancing, weeping, jumping, “freaking out,” as they say. This second step is also for ten minutes, and within a few days you will come to feel what it is.
In the beginning it may be just forced, an effort, or it may even be just acting. We have become so false that nothing real or authentic can be done by us. We have not laughed, we have not cried, we have not screamed authentically; everything is just a facade, a mask. So when you start to do it, in the beginning it may be forced. It may need effort, there may be just acting, but do not bother about it, go on. Soon you will touch those sources where you have repressed many things. You will touch those sources, and once they are broken you will feel unburdened; a new life will come to you, a new birth will take place. This unburdening is basic, and without it there can be no meditation for man as he is. I am not talking about the exceptions; they are irrelevant.
With this second step, when things are thrown out you become vacant. And this is what is meant by emptiness—to be empty of all repressions. Then in this emptiness something can be done.
* * *
Then in the third step I use the sound hoo. Many sounds have been used in the past; each sound has something specific to do. For example, Hindus have been using the sound aum. It may be very familiar to you, but I won’t suggest aum. It never goes deeper than the heart. It just touches the heart and moves back; it cannot go deeper.
Sufis have used hoo, and if you say hoo loudly, it goes deep to the sex center. So this sound is used just as a hammering within. When you have become vacant and empty, only then can this sound move within you. The movement of the sound is possible only when you are empty. If you are filled with repressions, nothing will happen. And sometimes it is even dangerous to use any mantra or sound when you are filled with repressions, because each repression will change the sound inside, and the ultimate result may be something of which you never dreamed, never expected, never wished for, because each layer of repression will change the path of the sound. You need a vacant mind; only then can a mantra be used.
So I never suggest a mantra to anyone as he is. There were certain mantras in old India that were used only by sannyasins, never by householders. They were never allowed to be used by householders because householders have a different system within. That sound hoo could disturb them. So only a sannyasin was allowed to use certain sounds.
In the old days, particularly in Tibet, whenever a mantra was given to a sannyasin, he had to touch a flower, a live flower on a branch. And if the flower became dead, dulled by his touch, only then was the mantra given to him because that mantra was going to create a subtle death within him. It should not be used by a householder because then death will start hovering around him. It should not be done without first doing the first two steps. It should never be done without them. If you are neurotic and the neurosis is not released, then if you do hoo, you will become more neurotic. So only in the third step, for ten minutes, is this hoo to be used—as loudly as possible. Bring your total energy to it. This is a hammering. When you are empty, this hoo goes deep down and hits the sex center.
The sex center can be hit in two ways. The first is naturally. Whenever you are attracted to a member of the opposite sex, the sex center is hit from without. And, really, that hit is also a subtle vibration. A man is attracted to a woman or a woman is attracted to a man. Why are they attracted? What is there in a man and what is there in a woman? A positive or negative electricity hits them, a subtle vibration; it is a sound, really. You may have observed in birds that they use sound for sex appeal. All of their singing is sexual; they are repeatedly hitting each other with particular sounds. These sounds hit the sex centers of birds of the opposite sex.
Subtle vibrations of electricity are hitting you from without. When your sex center is hit from without, your energy begins to flow out. That causes reproduction, birth: someone else will be born out of you.
This hoo is hitting the same center of energy from within; and when the sex center is hit from within, the energy starts to flow within. This inner flow of energy changes you completely. You become transformed; you give birth to yourself.
You are transformed only when your energy moves in a totally opposite direction. Right now it is flowing out, but then it begins to flow within; now it is flowing down, but then it flows upward. This upward flow of energy is what is known as kundalini. You will feel it in your spine—actually flowing—and the higher it moves, the higher you will move with it. And when this energy reaches to your head center, to the last, the seventh center, you are the highest man possible—what Gurdjieff calls “man number seven.”
You are “man number one” when your energy is just at the sex center. When some energy comes to your heart center, you are “man number two,” the man of emotion. When some energy moves to the intellect, you are “man number three,” a man of the intellect. These are ordinary men—all neurotic in their own ways. Someone is emotionally neurotic, someone is bodily neurotic, someone is intellectually neurotic. These three men are just ordinary men.
“Man number four” is one who is trying to move his energy within: the man who is meditating, the man who is making efforts to dissolve his neurosis, divisions, and schizophrenia. This is “man number four.” And as this energy moves upward and inward, a higher man is created in you. That higher man will be less neurotic, less schizophrenic, more sane.
Then a moment comes when that energy is released from your last center into the cosmos. You become a superman, or then you are no longer man. And when that moment comes, when you are no longer man, only then are you no longer mad.
Man is bound to be mad somehow or other because he is not a being; he is, rather, a facade. Man is not an end; rather, he is a process—something midway. He is no longer animal, and he is still not that which he was meant to be. He is just a midway thing, a phase. That creates neurosis.
You are no longer an animal. With all the animality within you, you are no more an animal. The animal is there, but you are no more animal. The animal goes on pulling you down. There is nothing bad in it; the animal cannot do anything else. It goes on pulling you down to the sex center, and you move around it continuously. But that is your first center, not your ultimate possibility. Your ultimate possibility is the superman—going beyond humanity, transcending man. That goes on pulling you upward.
These two pulls create schizophrenia. So one moment you are pulled to the higher and you are like a saint, and the next moment you are behaving like an animal; you are pulled down. Now the mind becomes confused. You cannot be an animal wholeheartedly because of the higher possibility. The seed is there, and it goes on hitting you and challenging you. So you cannot be at ease with the animal, but you cannot remove the animal. It is there, it is your heritage. So you divide yourself in two. You place the animal part of you in the unconscious, and consciously you identify yourself with your higher possibility, which you are not.
This higher possibility is the ideal, the end. Consciously you identify with the end; unconsciously you remain with the beginning. These two points create conflict. So unless you go beyond man, you cannot go beyond madness. Man is madness.
In the third step I use hoo as a vehicle to bring your energy upward. These first three steps are cathartic. Really, they are not meditation but just the preparation for it. They are a getting ready to take the jump, not the jump itself.
* * *
The fourth step is the jump. In the fourth step I tell you just to be a witness—have a conscious alertness: not doing anything, but just remaining a witness, just remaining with yourself; not doing anything—no movement, no desire, no becoming, but just remaining then and there, silently witnessing whatsoever is happening.…
That remaining in the center, in yourself, is possible because of the first three steps. Unless these three are done, you cannot remain with yourself. You can go on talking about it, thinking about it, dreaming about it, but it will not happen, because you are not ready.
These first three steps will make you ready to remain with the moment; they will make you aware. That is meditation, and in that meditation something happens that is beyond words. And once it happens you will never be the same again; it is impossible. It is a growth. It is not simply an experience; it is a growth.
And that is the difference between false techniques and real techniques. With false techniques you can have an experience, remember, then you will fall back again. It was just a glimpse; it was not a growth. So with LSD this can happen: you will have a glimpse. With other techniques this can happen: you can have a glimpse, you can have an experience, but again you will fall down because you have not grown. The experience has happened to you; you have not happened to the experience. You have not grown. When you grow, you cannot fall down.
If a child dreams that he has become a young man, he can have a glimpse of being a young man, but it is a dream. The dream will be broken and he will be a child again because it was not a growth. But if you have grown and become a young man, you cannot fall down and become a child; it is a real growth. So this is the criterion to judge whether a method, a technique, has been real or false.
There are false techniques that are easier to do; they never lead you anywhere. And if you are just after experiences, you will fall prey to any false technique. A real technique is not concerned with experiences as such; a real technique is concerned with real growth. Experiences happen; that is irrelevant. My concern is with growth, not with experiences. Experiences will be there as just part and parcel of the growth, but I am not concerned.…
You must grow to become one, to become whole, to become sane. And this sanity cannot be forced upon you. It is being forced by society, so you remain insane within and the sanity is just a facade.
I am not going to force sanity upon you. Rather, I am going to bring out your insanity. When it is pulled out completely, thrown into the wind, sanity will happen to you. You will grow.
And you ask, Why this coincidence? Because in the West, also, many techniques are being developed just similar to what I am saying. But they are just similar, not the same. There are many differences. But it has become now very much an emergency situation. The whole world is in the grip of a long-postponed insanity. We have been postponing and postponing, and now the last point, the evaporation point, has come.
There are now only two possibilities: one is that humanity may commit a collective suicide, because this insanity can no more be accumulated. Religions have helped, moralists have helped, teachers have helped, the so-called great men have helped to make man more and more insane. And now the last point has come where we may commit a collective suicide through atom bombs or hydrogen bombs or something else.
Man as such cannot be tolerated on the earth now. He has become intolerable. And with him, he is murdering the whole earth. Not only is he suicidal, he has become murderous; he is killing everything. Man is killing everything on the earth. There is nothing alive that he likes now; only dead things appeal to him. And the deader the better, because then you can possess them, manipulate them.
So he is killing nature and everything on earth. He cannot be tolerated, and his own inner insanity is bringing him to the evaporating point. Because of this, the time is coming nearer and nearer. And all over the world, those who think and those who feel and those who know are searching for methods, they are devising methods, to help humanity to transcend madness. That is the only way.
Either man will commit suicide or man will take a jump into higher realms of being. If this transformation is not going to come, then nothing can be done: man will commit suicide. That is why all over the world spiritual energies are gathering, spiritual forces are joining together, many esoteric groups are working—and sometimes it may not be so obvious, but deep down in the very center of the human mind. Languages differ, ways differ, approaches differ, but everywhere there is a groping for something that can become an alchemy to change humanity.
* * *
And you ask about Wilhelm Reich’s use of sexual energy to release body blocks that coincide with neurosis: I am wholly in agreement with Wilhelm Reich’s approach. Really, sex is the problem; all other problems are by-products. And unless man comes to a deep understanding of sex energy, it is impossible to help him.
It is very difficult because a basic mechanism has been used to make man a slave. You cannot make a man a slave unless you make him feel guilty. Guilt is the trick to enslave anyone. First make him guilty. And you can make anyone guilty only with something that is so natural that he cannot go beyond it easily. And sex is the most natural thing because it is the source of life.
You are born of sex. Your every body cell is a sex cell, all your energy is sex energy. So if religions teach that sex is bad, sex is sin, they have condemned you completely. And not only have they condemned you, now you will condemn yourself. Now you cannot go beyond it and you cannot leave it, and now it is a sin. You are divided; you start fighting with yourself. And the more this guilt can be created in you—over the concept that sex is something unholy—the more neurotic you will become.
But when you are neurotic, you can be possessed. Priests can possess you, kings can possess you. But if you are not neurotic, you will not go to priests. Then there is no need. You go because you are afraid of a certain energy that is there, and the priests say they know the way how to help you. So first they create the guilt, then they say that now they are going to help you. Then they can exploit you. A society that is sexually free and at ease with sex will not go to temples, to mosques, to churches—no! It is impossible! If you are at ease with your sex, then this so-called religion cannot continue business. Then you are not guilty; so what is the need to go anywhere?
And sex can give you such deep contentment! That too can become a problem. If you are contented, then you are not hankering after any heaven or something beyond life. Then you are here and now—so contented. Then you need not go ask someone about life after death. Then life is here.
So sex was used as an exploitative thing. And kings can use you only if you suppress your sex, because suppressed sex becomes violence. You cannot create soldiers, you cannot create militaries, you cannot create wars if you do not suppress sex. A suppressed man is always in the mood to fight. That is the only way to release his sex.
So kings, emperors, they cannot allow soldiers to have a sex life. And if American soldiers prove everywhere to be failures, the reason is only this: they cannot succeed anywhere with sex-starved people. Americans can never succeed, because sex-starved soldiers are mad; you cannot fight with them. So whenever a society becomes affluent, easygoing, it is defeated easily. Anyone can defeat it. A higher civilization is always defeated by a lower civilization.
India was defeated continuously because of her higher civilization. People were more at ease, not in the mood to fight; they were enjoying life. Those who are not enjoying life, they are ready to fight. If life is beautiful, you can bless everyone. If your life is in difficulty, in turmoil, you can kill, you can become destructive. So hippies are right when they say, “Make love, not war.” They are very consistent. If you make love, wars will become impossible. And if you cannot love, then the energy will move another way. It has to move. Then it will move toward wars.
So Wilhelm Reich was right, absolutely right, that sex is the problem and all other problems are just by-products of it, branches of it. And if you go on tackling branches, nothing can happen. Nothing can happen unless you tackle the roots. This is my understanding also—not only mine, but the whole understanding of Tantra.
But Tantra was always suppressed. It was never allowed to exist anywhere visibly. Tantra had to go underground, because whenever a Tantra teacher was there and he would say these things, he was killed—because the whole society is based on something he was destroying.
So Wilhelm Reich was attacked in every way. It was forcibly declared that he was mad. They put him into prison, and he died an unknown man. And this century has not given birth to a parallel genius. He was a modern Tantrika, and there was an esoteric group that was helping him. But it was difficult. It is very difficult to bring truths to humanity, because humanity is based on lies.
Humanity is neurotic. It is suffering because of its lies. But everyone thinks these are truths. The moment you say you are suffering because of a particular lie, society will kill you, because then you are taking away the whole foundation. Society wants that one should not suffer and also that its lies should not be challenged. But that is not possible, so you cannot be helped.
This is my experience: every day I come across people, and they come and they say they are searching for God. The more I analyze them, the more I find that sex is the problem. But if I say that sex is the problem, it is insulting to them, ego-deflating. And sex is the problem; unless it is solved, no search for God is possible.
This is my attitude: unless you are at ease with the earth, you cannot enter heaven. Be at ease with the earth, be at ease with your body, be at ease with your energies. Only then can you become masters. Only then can you “persuade” your energies. And they cannot be fought, they can only be persuaded. You cannot force them. A master is one who can persuade his earthly energies to move upward.
So I take sex as the basic problem. And if your sex problem is solved, you are a different man or a different woman, because then all the perversions simply are no more. You have resolved the base. And when sex is solved and it is not a problem for you, not a fight, when you have deeply accepted it and said a deep yes to it, then you can transform it—because that is the energy that is alive in you. When you are dead, that energy will go on and on, more and more. You are just a wave in a sex ocean: the ocean continues, and the waves go on, die, and disappear. The ocean continues. Sex is the Brahman. If you go deep into sex, then it is the very life. If you forget it, then you remain on the surface. Then it is ugly. If you do not fight with it or sink into it, but drop into it, dissolve into it, melt into it, when you allow sex to become life, then suddenly it is transformed into love. That is how the mechanism automatically works. If you fight it, sex becomes hate. So those who are filled with hatred are those who are fighting with their sex.
If you do not fight it, if you accept it and melt into it, it becomes love. So love and hate are two faces of sex. If it is perverted, it becomes hate. If accepted deeply, it will become love. And you can create love out of your sex energies. If those energies transform into love, then you are at ease in the world, at home with the earth. That at-homeness is basic.
And this is the beauty: if you accept sex, you will not reject anything else. That is why there is so much emphasis on it. If you reject sex, you will have to reject many things. Sex is the root rejection. If you reject sex, you will reject many things. Food will be rejected, then clothes will be rejected, then everything will be rejected. It is a long sequence, and in that sequence you will have to reject and reject, because the whole life is sexual. If you reject sex you will go on and on rejecting, and ultimately you will reject life. Then suicide is the only thing worth doing, because even to take a breath is sexual. It goes to your sex cells and gives them life. To be alive is to be sexual. If you are against sex, then you will be against everything. And a person who is against everything is bound to be neurotic, mad, and you cannot help him.
I am for everything, and everything can be hallowed—can be made sacred. You must know the technique, you must know the Tantra, you must know the way to make everything sacred. Every poison can become an elixir, it depends on you. And my whole approach is to help you, to give you a method through which you can change your life energies. It is a deeply scientific approach.
You ask, “I would also like to ask how do the people around you, the sannyasins, function in this neurotic world now that they are practicing something else that is supposed to bring them out of their inner neurosis?”
If you are sane, then there is no problem. You can move in this neurotic world very easily—if you are sane. If you are insane, then it is a problem.
Ordinarily, it may look very difficult to be non-neurotic in a neurotic world. It is difficult in a way. If you get too serious, it is very difficult. If you start fighting with insane men and you start fighting with everything they have created, it will be difficult. But you can fight only if you are still insane. Otherwise you will laugh; there is no need to fight. There is no need to fight! You will laugh!
Then you will act. A wise man is an actor; he is not serious because there is no need to be serious. You know that all around you are madmen, so there is no need to be serious with them. You can act, and only if you act can you help them.
There is a proposal of R. D. Laing’s that doctors in asylums for the mad should not be there as doctors but as madmen. That means they should act. Then they will be more helpful because there will be more affinity; as doctors, they are against the mad. They should remain in the asylum as madmen. No one should know that they are doctors; then they can help more. This proposal is absolutely worth trying. I am working that way already!
You must act, and a man must be cunning. When I say “cunning,” I mean this: he must act.
Gurdjieff used to say a wise man must be sly. He must act, otherwise he cannot help. He must not be too serious, like Krishnamurti. That seriousness gives unnecessary sadness to you. And then anger comes, because a serious person is angry against everyone. There is no need. If you already know that someone is insane, there is no need. So help them. You can, but be a madman among them. Do not fight them. This is the way of the wise man.
There are many teachers that propose that they are teachers, and perhaps many are false teachers. How can a real seeker distinguish a real teacher from one who is involved with his own ego power?
It is difficult, very difficult, in a way, impossible. But there is no need, either. You need not try to distinguish, you need not try! Even a false teacher will help you to know falsity. Do not worry too much about distinguishing. If you happen to be with a false teacher, be with him as wholeheartedly as possible. You will know, and when you know you will have grown, and then no other false teacher will be able to catch you.
And life is known only through experience. I cannot give you any criteria to judge whether someone is a false teacher or someone is a true one, because all the criteria can be used by those false teachers also—and they have used all. And sometimes it happens—rather, it has happened more often than not—that you will find it difficult to judge a real teacher, because a real teacher will not bother about your criteria. But a false teacher will always move according to the criteria.
If the society says that a real teacher will be an ascetic one, then anyone can manage to be ascetic; it is not difficult. So anything can be managed. And a seeker is not even aware of himself, so how can he judge? But there is no need. If this is made a basic need—first to judge whether a teacher is real or not—then you will never proceed, because this first thing cannot be fulfilled. You will remain where you are. So I say move. If you happen to be with a false teacher, good: move with him; live with him. Whatsoever he teaches, try it. You will come to know through your own experience that the man is false. But do not go against him. There is no need. He has trained you for a particular thing. You have known something which is good to know—what falsity is. Now you will be more aware. So go on moving, go on moving!
Everything in life is a learning. Make everything a learning and do not try to be wise before experience; you cannot be. Experience will show you more. And the real search is not for a real teacher; the real search is for a “real seeker.” So you will become a real seeker through your search. And false or real, all teachers will help you.
Everyone helps if you are ready to take the help. So do not think of the other, whether the teacher is real or not. Your search must be real and authentic, that is all. If yours is a real, authentic search, no false teacher can deceive you. And if otherwise, there is no way. So remain authentic with your search. Those teachers will fall down by themselves.
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