Nothing is boring, nothing is repetitive and monotonous—you are, and you bring your quality to everything that you do. No act is boring in itself, and no act can be nonboring in itself—it is you who make it boring or non-boring. And the same act can be boredom to you this moment and the next moment it may become a blissful thing.
Not that the act has changed; your mood, the quality you bring to the act, has changed. So remember, you are not bored because repetitive acts have to be done. Rather, on the contrary, you are bored—that’s why they appear repetitive.
For instance, children want to repeat things. They go on playing the same game again and again. You get bored. What are they doing? The same game again and again? They go on asking for the same story. They enjoy it again and again, and they say, ‘Tell me that story again.’
What is the matter? You cannot conceive it. It looks stupid. It is not. They are so alive that nothing is repetitive for them. You are dead and everything is repetitive for you. They go on repeating the same game. The whole day they can go on, and if you stop them they will scream and cry and they will resist you, saying, ‘Don’t destroy our game.’ And you cannot understand what they are doing the whole day.
They have a different quality of consciousness. Nothing is repetitive for them. They enjoy it so much that the very enjoyment changes the quality, and then they enjoy it again -- and they enjoy it more, because now they know the know-how. The third time they enjoy it even more, because now they are acquainted with everything. They go on enjoying; their enjoyment goes on increasing. Your enjoyment goes on decreasing. What is the matter? Is the act itself boring, or is something wrong with your mode of being, your mode of consciousness?
Look at it from another angle. Two lovers will go on repeating the same acts every day. They will kiss and they will hug—they are the same acts. And they would like to go on doing that ad infinitum. If you give them time, they will go on repeating to the very end of existence. Looking at two lovers, you will get bored. What are they doing? -- the same thing every day? And if you give them the whole day, they will go on hugging, loving, embracing, kissing. What are they doing?
Lovers have again become children. That’s why love is so innocent—it makes you a child again. Now they are enjoying the game.
They are again children. The whole nonsense of maturity they have thrown. They are playing with each other’s body, and to them nothing is repetitive. Each kiss is something absolutely new, unique. It was never so before, it will never be the same again. Each moment of love has its own individual existence, non-repetitive; that’s why they goon enjoying.
The economic law of diminishing returns doesn’t apply to it. For love, there is no law of diminishing returns; rather, increasing returns. That’s why economists cannot understand love, mathematicians cannot understand love. All those who are efficient in calculation cannot understand love, because this is absurd: it defies all laws, all mathematics—it goes on increasing.
Two lovers appear to us as if they are repeating. To them, they are not repeating. But to a prostitute the law of economics will apply, because for her, love is not love, it is a commodity—something to be sold, something which can be purchased. So if you go and kiss a prostitute, for her it is boredom, repetition, and some day she will say. ‘This is nonsense. I am bored of being kissed and kissing the whole day. It is intolerable.’ She will say that it is a repetitive act.
That’s what I want to show you—the distinction. For a lover it is not repetitive; for a prostitute it is repetitive. So, really, the act itself is not repetitive; it is your quality that you bring to it. Whatsoever you do, if you love it, it will never be repetitive. If you love your doings, your acts, there will be no boredom. But you don’t love. I go on talking to you every day. I can go on ad infinitum. I love it. It is not repetitive for me. From eternity to eternity I can go on talking with you. Communication, to communicate with your heart, is love to me. It is not a repetitive act, otherwise I would get bored.
If your act becomes creation, you will not be bored. And your act becomes creation if you love it. But the basic difficulty is that you cannot love whatsoever you do because you hate yourself—that’s the problem. So whatsoever you do, you hate it, because basically you hate yourself. You have not yet accepted yourself, you have not yet thanked existence for your existence.
You have not accepted yourself so how can you accept your acts? Love yourself. Accept yourself as you are. Because action is secondary—it flows from your being. If I love myself then whatsoever I do, I love it. And if I don’t love it, I stop it. What is the need to continue?
But you don’t love, and the source is unloved so the products of that source cannot be loved.
Whatsoever you do—you may be an engineer or you may be a doctor or a chemist or a scientist—whatsoever you do, you will bring hate to it. Your hate makes it repetitive. You hate it, and you go on finding excuses for why you are doing it. You say, ‘I am doing it for my wife, for my children.’ And your father was doing it for you, and his father was doing it for him, and your children will do it for their children, and no one will enjoy life.
These are tricks. You are simply a coward. You cannot escape from it, because it gives you security, safety, income, bank balance. Because you are a coward, you cannot stop doing it and you cannot start doing that which you love. Then you go on putting everything on your children, on your wife, and they are also doing the same.
No one is really existing for himself. No one loves himself enough to exist for himself. Then everything goes wrong. The source is poisoned, and then all that comes out of that source is poisoned. And don’t think that if you change your job, you will love it. No, you will bring your quality to the new job also. In the beginning it may be a sensation, something new, but sooner or later you will settle down and it will be the same.
Change yourself, love yourself, and love whatsoever you do; howsoever small it makes no difference.
Look at life—life enjoys repetition. The seasons move in a circle. The sun moves in a circle—every day, every morning, it arises. And the summer comes and the winter comes and the rains come and they go on moving. In a deep way the whole existence is repetitively moving. It seems creation is just like a child’s play. The trees are not bored, and the sky is not bored. The sky never says, ‘Now, again the clouds?’ For so many, many millennia the sky has been seeing the clouds—every rainy season the clouds come and they start moving. Look at life? It is repetitive.
The word is not good; the word ‘repetitive’ is not good. Rather it will be better to say it goes on playing the same game. It enjoys it so much that it wants to repeat it again. And it goes on increasing; it goes on moving towards a climax. Why does man get bored with repetition? Not because repetition is boring, but because you are so bored that everything will be boring.
So really it is not a question that this act makes you bored or that act makes you bored, or repetition or monotony or tedious jobs make you bored. The real thing is that you are bored whether you do something or not. If you are simply relaxing in a chair you will be bored. Not doing anything you will be bored. You will say, ‘There is nothing to do and I am bored. Nothing to do—I am bored.’
The whole week you are bored because of the tedious job, and on the week-end you are bored because there is nothing to do. The whole life you are bored because of doing a repetitive job in a factory, in an office, in a shop. Then when you retire you are bored, because now there is nothing to do. It is not a question of anything else. Something is not creating boredom in you; you are bored, and you go on bringing your boredom to everything that you touch.
You have heard of King Midas—whatsoever he touched became gold. You are also a King Midas—whatsoever you touch becomes boredom. You have an alchemical touch: you can change everything into boredom; everything, I say.
Don’t think of changing jobs, actions; think of changing the quality of your consciousness. Be more loving to yourself. The first thing to remember is to be more loving to yourself.
The moralists have poisoned the whole world. They say, ‘Don’t love yourself. This is selfishness.’ They say, ‘Love others, don’t love yourself. The love of the self is sin.’
And I say to you that this is absolute nonsense—and not only nonsense; it is dangerous nonsense. Unless you love yourself you cannot love anybody, it is impossible, because a man who is not in love with himself cannot be in love with anybody. If you are in love with yourself, only then can your overflowing love reach somebody. A man who has not loved himself will hate himself, and if you hate yourself, how can you love anybody? You will hate others also. You can only pretend. And when you cannot love yourself, how do you expect others to love you?
Everyone is condemned in his own eyes. The whole moralistic teaching gives you only one thing: techniques of self condemnation—how to condemn yourself, how you are bad, a criminal, guilty, a sinner.
If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love anybody. The love must happen at home first—you are the home—and only when it overflows can it reach to others. And when it overflows, it overflows into your acts, into whatsoever you do. Whether you paint or make a shoe or anything—just cleaning the street—whatsoever you do, if you are in deep love, if you are in deep love with yourself, it flows into everything you do. It flows even when you are not doing anything. It goes on flowing, it becomes your very existence, and then nothing is boring.
People come to me; sometimes very sympathetically some friends ask me, ‘The whole day you are sitting in one room, not even looking out of the window. Don’t you get bored?’ I am with myself. Why should I get bored? They say, ‘Just sitting alone, don’t you get bored?’
If I hate myself I will get bored, because you cannot live with a person you hate. You get bored with yourself. You cannot be alone. Even if you are alone for a few moments you get fidgety, you get uncomfortable, an uneasiness comes into your being. You long to meet someone, because you cannot remain with yourself. The company is so boring—your own company. You cannot look at your own face. You cannot touch your hand lovingly; no—impossible.
They ask me—and their asking is relevant to their own reference, because they will get bored if they are alone—they ask me, ‘Don’t you go out sometimes?’ There is no need. Sometimes they ask me, ‘People come to you with the same problem again and again. Don’t you get bored?’
Because everyone has the same problem. You are so unoriginal you cannot even create an original problem. Everyone has the same problem. Some are related with your love, with your sex, with your peace of mind, with your confusion, or something else—some psychology, some pathology, something. So friends ask me, ‘Don’t you get bored?’ I never get bored, because each individual is unique to me, and because of the individual, the problem he brings is not a repetition because the context is different, the individual is different. You come with your love problem, another comes with his love problem: both look similar but they are not, because two individuals are so different—their difference changes the quality of the problem.
Each individual is so unique that he cannot be put with anyone else. No category can be made. But then you have to have a very keen awareness to penetrate to the very root where the individual is unique. Otherwise, on the surface everyone is alike. Just on the surface everyone is alike, with the same problems, but if you penetrate deep, if you are alert and ready to move with the person to the deeper core of his being, the deeper you go, the more original, individual and unique a phenomenon comes into being. If you can see to the very center, this person before you is unrepeatable. He has never been before, he will never be again. He is just unique. And the mystery then overfills you -- the mystery of the unique person.
Nothing is a repetition if you know how to penetrate, how to be loving and alert. Otherwise everything is repetitive. You are bored because you have a consciousness which creates boredom. Change the consciousness, and there will be no boredom. But you go on changing objects—that will not make any difference.
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Excerpted from Osho’s The Book of Secrets, discourses on the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, the book of 112 meditation techniques
Friday, April 16, 2010
Work, Play and Meditation
Here is something beautiful from Osho’s discourses on Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, the book of 112 meditation techniques.
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GRACIOUS ONE, PLAY. THE UNIVERSE IS AN EMPTY SHELL WHEREIN YOUR MIND FROLICS INFINITELY.
This technique is based on the dimension of play. That has to be understood. If you are inactive, it is good to fall into deep emptiness, into the inner abyss. But you cannot be empty the whole day and you cannot be passive the whole day. You will have to do something. Activity is a basic requirement, otherwise you cannot be alive. Life means activity. So you can be inactive for a few hours, but for twenty-four hours you will have to be active. And meditation should be something which becomes your style of life, it should not be a fragment. Otherwise you will gain it and lose it.
If you are inactive one hour then for twenty-three hours you will be active. The active forces will be more, and they will destroy whatsoever you attain in your inactivity. The active forces will destroy it.
And the next day you will again do the same: for twenty-three hours you will accumulate the doer and in one hour you will have to drop it. It will be difficult. So your mind must change its attitude about work and activity. Hence the technique.
Work should be considered as play, not as work. Work should be considered as play, just a game. You should not be serious about it; you should be just like children playing. It is meaningless, nothing is to be achieved; just the very activity is enjoyed. You can feel the distinction if you play sometimes.
When you work it is different: you are serious, burdened, responsible, worried, anxious, because the result, the end-result, is the motive. The work itself is not worth enjoying. The real thing is just in the future, in the result. In play there is no result, really. The very process is blissful. And you are not worried, it is not a serious thing. Even if you look serious, it is just pretending. In play you enjoy the very process; in work the process is not being enjoyed – the goal, the end, is important. The process has to be tolerated anyhow. It has to be done because the end has to be achieved. If you could achieve the end without this, you would drop activity and jump to the end.
But in play you would not do that. If you could achieve the end without playing, then the end would be futile. It has meaning only through the process. For example, two football teams are on the playing-ground. Just by throwing a coin they can decide who will win and who will be defeated. Why go through so much effort, unnecessarily exerting yourself? The thing can be decided very easily just by tossing a coin. The end will be there. One team can win, another can be defeated. Why work for it? But then there will be no meaning, no significance. The end is not meaningful, the very process is the meaning. Even if no one wins and no one is defeated the game was worth it. The activity in itself is enjoyed.
This dimension of play has to be applied to your whole life: whatsoever you are doing, be there in that activity so totally that the end is irrelevant. It may come, it has to come, but it is not on your mind. You are playing, you are enjoying.
That’s what Krishna means when he tells Arjuna to leave the future in the hands of the Divine. The result of your activity is in the hands of the Divine, you simply do. This simply doing becomes a play. That’s what Arjuna finds difficult to understand, because he says that if it is just play, then why kill, why fight? He understands what work is but he cannot understand what play is.
And Krishna’s whole life is just a play. You cannot find such a non-serious man anywhere. His whole life is just a play, a game, a drama. He is enjoying everything but he is not serious about it. He is enjoying it intensely but he is not worried about the result. What happens is irrelevant.
It is difficult for Arjuna to understand Krishna because he calculates, he thinks in terms of the end result.
He says in the beginning of the Gita,”This whole thing seems to be absurd. On both sides my friends and my relatives are standing to fight. Whosoever wins, it will be a loss, because my family, my relatives, my friends, will be destroyed. Even if I win, it will not be worth anything because to whom am I going to show my victory? Victories are meaningful because friends, relatives, family will enjoy them. But there will be no one, the victory will be just over dead bodies. Who will appreciate it? Who will say, ‘Arjuna, you have done a great deed’? So whether I am victorious or I am defeated, it seems absurd. The whole thing is nonsense.” He wants to renounce. He is deadly serious. And anyone who calculates will be that deadly serious.
The setting of the Gita is unique: war is the most serious affair. You cannot be playful about it, because lives are involved, millions of lives are involved – you cannot be playful. And Krishna insists that even there you have to be playful. You don’t think about what will happen in the end, you just be here and now. You just be a warrior playing. Don’t get worried about the result because the result is in the hands of the Divine. And it is not even the point if the result is in the hands of the Divine or not. The point is that it should not be in your hands. You should not carry it. If you carry it then your life cannot become meditative.
This technique says, GRACIOUS ONE, PLAY. Let your whole life be just a play. THE UNIVERSE IS AN EMPTY SHELL WHEREIN YOUR MIND FROLICS INFINITELY.
Your mind goes on playing infinitely: the whole thing is just like a dream in an empty room. While meditating, one has to look at the mind just frolicking, just like children playing, jumping out of overflowing energy, that’s all. Thoughts jumping, frolicking, just a play – don’t be serious about them. Even if a bad thought is there, don’t feel guilty. Or, if there is a very great thought, a very good thought – that you want to serve humanity and transform the whole world; and you want to bring heaven onto earth – don’t get too much ego through it, don’t feel that you have become great. This is just a frolicking mind. Sometimes it goes down, sometimes it comes up – it is just overflowing energy, taking many shapes and forms. Mind is just an overflowing spring, nothing else.
Be playful, Shiva says, Gracious one, play. The attitude of the player means he is enjoying the activity, it is good in itself. No profit motive is involved; he is not calculative. Just look at a businessman. Whatsoever he is doing, he is calculating about the profit, what he is going to attain out of it. A customer comes. The customer is not a person, he is just a means. What can be profited out of him? How can he be exploited? Deep down he is calculating what is to be said, what is to be done. Everything is calculated just to manipulate, just to exploit. He is not concerned with this person, he is not concerned with the deal, he is not concerned with anything – he is concerned only with the future, the profit.
Look at the East: in the villages still, a businessman is not just a profit-maker, and the customer has not come just to purchase something. They enjoy it. I remember my old grandfather. He was a cloth merchant and I and my whole family was puzzled because he enjoyed it so much. For hours together it was a game with the customers. If something was worth ten rupees, he would ask fifty rupees for it, and he knew this was absurd. And his customers knew it too, they knew that it must be near about ten rupees, and they will start from two rupees. Then a long haggling would follow – hours together. My father and my uncles would get angry. ”What is going on? Why don’t you simply say what the price is?” But he had his own customers. When they came, they would ask, “Where is Dada, where is grandfather? Because with him it is a game, a play. Whether we lose one rupee or two, whether it is more or less, that is not the point!”
They enjoyed it. The very activity in itself was something worth pursuing. Two persons were communicating through it. Two persons were playing a game and both knew it was a game – because of course a fixed price was possible.
In the West now they have fixed prices because people are more calculating and more profit motivated.
They cannot conceive of wasting time. Why waste time? The thing can be settled within minutes. There is no need. You can just write the exact price. Why fight for hours together? But then the game is lost and the whole thing becomes a routine. Even machines can do it. The businessman is not needed; the customer is not needed.
I have heard about a psychoanalyst who was such a busy man and who had so many patients that it was difficult to have personal contact with everyone. So he would feed his tape-recorder for a particular patient and the tape-recorder would say whatsoever that psychoanalyst wanted to say to the patient.
Once it happened that it was the appointed time of a patient who was a very rich man. The psychoanalyst was entering a hotel. Suddenly he saw the patient sitting there. So he asked,”What are you doing here? It was your time with me.” The patient said,”I am so busy that I have fed my words to my own tape-recorder. Both the tape-recorders are talking to each other. Whatsoever you have to say to me, my tape-recorder has recorded, and whatsoever I have to say to you, your tape-recorder has recorded it from my tape-recorder. This same time, and we are both free.”
If you are too calculating then persons disappear, and more and more mechanization comes in.
Even now in villages in India the haggling goes on. It is a game and worth enjoying. You are playing.
It is a match between two intelligences, and two persons come in deep contact. But it is not timesaving.
Games can never be time-saving. And in games you don’t worry about the time. You are carefree, and whatsoever is going on, you enjoy it right in that moment. Being playful is one of the deepest bases of all meditative processes. But we are businesslike; we are trained for it. So even when we meditate, we are looking for the end, for the result. And whatsoever happens, you will be unsatisfied.
People come to me and they say,”Yes, meditation is growing, progressing. I’m feeling more happy, a little more silent, at east, but nothing else is happening.” What nothing else? I know that people like this are bound to come some day and say,”Yes, I am feeling nirvana, but nothing else is happening.
I am blissful, but nothing else is happening.” What nothing else? He is looking for some profit and unless some very visible profit comes into his hands, something which he can deposit in a bank, he cannot be satisfied. Silence and happiness are so vague, you cannot possess them, you cannot show them to anyone.
Every day it happens that people come to me and they say that they are sad. They are expecting something which should not be expected even in businesses – and they are expecting in their meditations. The business mind comes into meditation with the whole training of business – what profit can be made out of it?
The businessman is not playful. And if you are not playful, you cannot be meditative. Be more and more playful. Waste time in play. Just playing with children will do. Even if there is no one, you can jump and dance alone in the room and be playful. Enjoy. But your mind will go on insisting,”What are you doing, wasting time? You can earn something out of this time. You can do something, and you are just jumping, singing, and dancing. What are you doing? Have you gone mad?” Try it. Snatch whatsoever time you can get out of your business, and be playful. Whatsoever. You can paint, you can play on a sitar, anything you like – but be playful. Look for no profit out of it, see no future in it, just the present. And then, then you can be playful inside also. Then you can jump on your thoughts, play with them, throw them here and there, dance with them, but not be serious about them.
Many people are just unconscious as far as their mind is concerned. Whatsoever happens in their mind, they are unconscious about it; they are drifting in it without knowing where the mind leads them. If you can be aware of any track of the mind you will be puzzled at what is happening. Mind moves through associations. A dog barks on the street. The bark comes to your head – and now you have started. You may move to the very end of the world through this barking of the dog. You may remember some friend who had a dog. Then this dog is dropped and that friend has come into the mind and he had a young wife and the wife was beautiful... and now you are moving. You can go to the very end of this world and you will never remember that just a dog played a trick on you; it just barked, and put you on the track, and you started to move.
You will feel very awkward at what scientists say about this. They say that this track is fixed in your mind. If the same dog in the same situation barks again, you will follow this track again: the friend, the dog, the wife – the beautiful wife – you will go the same way again.
Now they have tried many experiments with electrodes in the human brain. They touch a particular spot in the brain and then a particular memory is released. Suddenly you see that you are five years old, playing in a garden, running after a butterfly. Then the whole sequence is there: you feel pleasant, everything is nice, the air, the garden, the smell, everything comes alive. It is not simply memory, you relive it. Then the electrode is pulled out and the memory stops. If the electrode again touches the same spot, again the same memory comes again. It is just as if you are remembering something mechanical. And it always starts from a certain beginning and ends at a particular end; and then starts from the beginning... just as you record something on a tape-recorder. Your brain has millions of memories, millions of cells recording, and it is all mechanical.
These experiments on the human brain are very strange and very revealing. Memories can be revived again and again, again and again. One experimenter tried three hundred times and the memory was the same – it was recorded. The person on whom the experiment was done became aware and he felt that it was very, very weird because he was not the master, he could not do anything. When the electrode touched the place, the memory started and he had to see it. During three hundred times he by and by became a witness. He started seeing the memory but then he became aware that he was different and this memory was different. This experiment can be helpful, very helpful, for meditators, because when you know your mind is nothing but a mechanical recording around you, you are separate.
This mind can be touched. Now scientists say that sooner or later we will cut all the centers which give you anguish, anxiety, because again and again the same thing is touched and the whole thing has to be relived.
I have been trying many experiments with many disciples. Do the same thing and they move in the same vicious circle, again and again, again and again – unless they become a witness that this is a mechanical thing. You are aware that if you say the same thing to your wife each week, the same thing, she will react. After seven days, when she has forgotten, say the same thing: she will react.
Then record – the reaction is going to be the same. You know, your wife knows, a pattern becomes fixed – and it goes on. Even a dog can start your pattern just by barking. Something is touched, an electrode has entered. You have started on a journey.
If you are playful in life then you can be playful inside with the mind also. Then be as if you are watching something on a TV screen: you are not involved, you are just a spectator, an onlooker.
Look, and enjoy it. Don’t say good, don’t say bad, don’t condemn, don’t appreciate, because these are serious things. If a naked woman comes onto your screen, don’t say that this is bad, that some devil is playing a trick on you. No devil is there to play a trick upon you. Look at it as if it is just on the screen, a film screen. And be playful about it: say to the lady,”Wait”. Don’t try to push her out because the more you push her out, the more she will come in – ladies are difficult. And don’t follow her. If you follow then you will be in trouble. Don’t follow, don’t fight – this is the rule. Just look and be playful. Just say “hello” or ”good morning”. Just look and don’t be disturbed at all. Let the lady wait. She will go by herself, as she came: she moves on her own. She is not related to you, she is just something in the memory. Struck by some situation she came there, just a picture. Be playful with it. If you can be playful with your mind it will drop very soon, because mind can be there only if you are serious. Seriousness is the link, the bridge.
GRACIOUS ONE, PLAY. THE UNIVERSE IS AN EMPTY SHELL WHEREIN YOUR MIND FROLICS INFINITELY.
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Excerpted from The Book of Secrets, by Osho.
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GRACIOUS ONE, PLAY. THE UNIVERSE IS AN EMPTY SHELL WHEREIN YOUR MIND FROLICS INFINITELY.
This technique is based on the dimension of play. That has to be understood. If you are inactive, it is good to fall into deep emptiness, into the inner abyss. But you cannot be empty the whole day and you cannot be passive the whole day. You will have to do something. Activity is a basic requirement, otherwise you cannot be alive. Life means activity. So you can be inactive for a few hours, but for twenty-four hours you will have to be active. And meditation should be something which becomes your style of life, it should not be a fragment. Otherwise you will gain it and lose it.
If you are inactive one hour then for twenty-three hours you will be active. The active forces will be more, and they will destroy whatsoever you attain in your inactivity. The active forces will destroy it.
And the next day you will again do the same: for twenty-three hours you will accumulate the doer and in one hour you will have to drop it. It will be difficult. So your mind must change its attitude about work and activity. Hence the technique.
Work should be considered as play, not as work. Work should be considered as play, just a game. You should not be serious about it; you should be just like children playing. It is meaningless, nothing is to be achieved; just the very activity is enjoyed. You can feel the distinction if you play sometimes.
When you work it is different: you are serious, burdened, responsible, worried, anxious, because the result, the end-result, is the motive. The work itself is not worth enjoying. The real thing is just in the future, in the result. In play there is no result, really. The very process is blissful. And you are not worried, it is not a serious thing. Even if you look serious, it is just pretending. In play you enjoy the very process; in work the process is not being enjoyed – the goal, the end, is important. The process has to be tolerated anyhow. It has to be done because the end has to be achieved. If you could achieve the end without this, you would drop activity and jump to the end.
But in play you would not do that. If you could achieve the end without playing, then the end would be futile. It has meaning only through the process. For example, two football teams are on the playing-ground. Just by throwing a coin they can decide who will win and who will be defeated. Why go through so much effort, unnecessarily exerting yourself? The thing can be decided very easily just by tossing a coin. The end will be there. One team can win, another can be defeated. Why work for it? But then there will be no meaning, no significance. The end is not meaningful, the very process is the meaning. Even if no one wins and no one is defeated the game was worth it. The activity in itself is enjoyed.
This dimension of play has to be applied to your whole life: whatsoever you are doing, be there in that activity so totally that the end is irrelevant. It may come, it has to come, but it is not on your mind. You are playing, you are enjoying.
That’s what Krishna means when he tells Arjuna to leave the future in the hands of the Divine. The result of your activity is in the hands of the Divine, you simply do. This simply doing becomes a play. That’s what Arjuna finds difficult to understand, because he says that if it is just play, then why kill, why fight? He understands what work is but he cannot understand what play is.
And Krishna’s whole life is just a play. You cannot find such a non-serious man anywhere. His whole life is just a play, a game, a drama. He is enjoying everything but he is not serious about it. He is enjoying it intensely but he is not worried about the result. What happens is irrelevant.
It is difficult for Arjuna to understand Krishna because he calculates, he thinks in terms of the end result.
He says in the beginning of the Gita,”This whole thing seems to be absurd. On both sides my friends and my relatives are standing to fight. Whosoever wins, it will be a loss, because my family, my relatives, my friends, will be destroyed. Even if I win, it will not be worth anything because to whom am I going to show my victory? Victories are meaningful because friends, relatives, family will enjoy them. But there will be no one, the victory will be just over dead bodies. Who will appreciate it? Who will say, ‘Arjuna, you have done a great deed’? So whether I am victorious or I am defeated, it seems absurd. The whole thing is nonsense.” He wants to renounce. He is deadly serious. And anyone who calculates will be that deadly serious.
The setting of the Gita is unique: war is the most serious affair. You cannot be playful about it, because lives are involved, millions of lives are involved – you cannot be playful. And Krishna insists that even there you have to be playful. You don’t think about what will happen in the end, you just be here and now. You just be a warrior playing. Don’t get worried about the result because the result is in the hands of the Divine. And it is not even the point if the result is in the hands of the Divine or not. The point is that it should not be in your hands. You should not carry it. If you carry it then your life cannot become meditative.
This technique says, GRACIOUS ONE, PLAY. Let your whole life be just a play. THE UNIVERSE IS AN EMPTY SHELL WHEREIN YOUR MIND FROLICS INFINITELY.
Your mind goes on playing infinitely: the whole thing is just like a dream in an empty room. While meditating, one has to look at the mind just frolicking, just like children playing, jumping out of overflowing energy, that’s all. Thoughts jumping, frolicking, just a play – don’t be serious about them. Even if a bad thought is there, don’t feel guilty. Or, if there is a very great thought, a very good thought – that you want to serve humanity and transform the whole world; and you want to bring heaven onto earth – don’t get too much ego through it, don’t feel that you have become great. This is just a frolicking mind. Sometimes it goes down, sometimes it comes up – it is just overflowing energy, taking many shapes and forms. Mind is just an overflowing spring, nothing else.
Be playful, Shiva says, Gracious one, play. The attitude of the player means he is enjoying the activity, it is good in itself. No profit motive is involved; he is not calculative. Just look at a businessman. Whatsoever he is doing, he is calculating about the profit, what he is going to attain out of it. A customer comes. The customer is not a person, he is just a means. What can be profited out of him? How can he be exploited? Deep down he is calculating what is to be said, what is to be done. Everything is calculated just to manipulate, just to exploit. He is not concerned with this person, he is not concerned with the deal, he is not concerned with anything – he is concerned only with the future, the profit.
Look at the East: in the villages still, a businessman is not just a profit-maker, and the customer has not come just to purchase something. They enjoy it. I remember my old grandfather. He was a cloth merchant and I and my whole family was puzzled because he enjoyed it so much. For hours together it was a game with the customers. If something was worth ten rupees, he would ask fifty rupees for it, and he knew this was absurd. And his customers knew it too, they knew that it must be near about ten rupees, and they will start from two rupees. Then a long haggling would follow – hours together. My father and my uncles would get angry. ”What is going on? Why don’t you simply say what the price is?” But he had his own customers. When they came, they would ask, “Where is Dada, where is grandfather? Because with him it is a game, a play. Whether we lose one rupee or two, whether it is more or less, that is not the point!”
They enjoyed it. The very activity in itself was something worth pursuing. Two persons were communicating through it. Two persons were playing a game and both knew it was a game – because of course a fixed price was possible.
In the West now they have fixed prices because people are more calculating and more profit motivated.
They cannot conceive of wasting time. Why waste time? The thing can be settled within minutes. There is no need. You can just write the exact price. Why fight for hours together? But then the game is lost and the whole thing becomes a routine. Even machines can do it. The businessman is not needed; the customer is not needed.
I have heard about a psychoanalyst who was such a busy man and who had so many patients that it was difficult to have personal contact with everyone. So he would feed his tape-recorder for a particular patient and the tape-recorder would say whatsoever that psychoanalyst wanted to say to the patient.
Once it happened that it was the appointed time of a patient who was a very rich man. The psychoanalyst was entering a hotel. Suddenly he saw the patient sitting there. So he asked,”What are you doing here? It was your time with me.” The patient said,”I am so busy that I have fed my words to my own tape-recorder. Both the tape-recorders are talking to each other. Whatsoever you have to say to me, my tape-recorder has recorded, and whatsoever I have to say to you, your tape-recorder has recorded it from my tape-recorder. This same time, and we are both free.”
If you are too calculating then persons disappear, and more and more mechanization comes in.
Even now in villages in India the haggling goes on. It is a game and worth enjoying. You are playing.
It is a match between two intelligences, and two persons come in deep contact. But it is not timesaving.
Games can never be time-saving. And in games you don’t worry about the time. You are carefree, and whatsoever is going on, you enjoy it right in that moment. Being playful is one of the deepest bases of all meditative processes. But we are businesslike; we are trained for it. So even when we meditate, we are looking for the end, for the result. And whatsoever happens, you will be unsatisfied.
People come to me and they say,”Yes, meditation is growing, progressing. I’m feeling more happy, a little more silent, at east, but nothing else is happening.” What nothing else? I know that people like this are bound to come some day and say,”Yes, I am feeling nirvana, but nothing else is happening.
I am blissful, but nothing else is happening.” What nothing else? He is looking for some profit and unless some very visible profit comes into his hands, something which he can deposit in a bank, he cannot be satisfied. Silence and happiness are so vague, you cannot possess them, you cannot show them to anyone.
Every day it happens that people come to me and they say that they are sad. They are expecting something which should not be expected even in businesses – and they are expecting in their meditations. The business mind comes into meditation with the whole training of business – what profit can be made out of it?
The businessman is not playful. And if you are not playful, you cannot be meditative. Be more and more playful. Waste time in play. Just playing with children will do. Even if there is no one, you can jump and dance alone in the room and be playful. Enjoy. But your mind will go on insisting,”What are you doing, wasting time? You can earn something out of this time. You can do something, and you are just jumping, singing, and dancing. What are you doing? Have you gone mad?” Try it. Snatch whatsoever time you can get out of your business, and be playful. Whatsoever. You can paint, you can play on a sitar, anything you like – but be playful. Look for no profit out of it, see no future in it, just the present. And then, then you can be playful inside also. Then you can jump on your thoughts, play with them, throw them here and there, dance with them, but not be serious about them.
Many people are just unconscious as far as their mind is concerned. Whatsoever happens in their mind, they are unconscious about it; they are drifting in it without knowing where the mind leads them. If you can be aware of any track of the mind you will be puzzled at what is happening. Mind moves through associations. A dog barks on the street. The bark comes to your head – and now you have started. You may move to the very end of the world through this barking of the dog. You may remember some friend who had a dog. Then this dog is dropped and that friend has come into the mind and he had a young wife and the wife was beautiful... and now you are moving. You can go to the very end of this world and you will never remember that just a dog played a trick on you; it just barked, and put you on the track, and you started to move.
You will feel very awkward at what scientists say about this. They say that this track is fixed in your mind. If the same dog in the same situation barks again, you will follow this track again: the friend, the dog, the wife – the beautiful wife – you will go the same way again.
Now they have tried many experiments with electrodes in the human brain. They touch a particular spot in the brain and then a particular memory is released. Suddenly you see that you are five years old, playing in a garden, running after a butterfly. Then the whole sequence is there: you feel pleasant, everything is nice, the air, the garden, the smell, everything comes alive. It is not simply memory, you relive it. Then the electrode is pulled out and the memory stops. If the electrode again touches the same spot, again the same memory comes again. It is just as if you are remembering something mechanical. And it always starts from a certain beginning and ends at a particular end; and then starts from the beginning... just as you record something on a tape-recorder. Your brain has millions of memories, millions of cells recording, and it is all mechanical.
These experiments on the human brain are very strange and very revealing. Memories can be revived again and again, again and again. One experimenter tried three hundred times and the memory was the same – it was recorded. The person on whom the experiment was done became aware and he felt that it was very, very weird because he was not the master, he could not do anything. When the electrode touched the place, the memory started and he had to see it. During three hundred times he by and by became a witness. He started seeing the memory but then he became aware that he was different and this memory was different. This experiment can be helpful, very helpful, for meditators, because when you know your mind is nothing but a mechanical recording around you, you are separate.
This mind can be touched. Now scientists say that sooner or later we will cut all the centers which give you anguish, anxiety, because again and again the same thing is touched and the whole thing has to be relived.
I have been trying many experiments with many disciples. Do the same thing and they move in the same vicious circle, again and again, again and again – unless they become a witness that this is a mechanical thing. You are aware that if you say the same thing to your wife each week, the same thing, she will react. After seven days, when she has forgotten, say the same thing: she will react.
Then record – the reaction is going to be the same. You know, your wife knows, a pattern becomes fixed – and it goes on. Even a dog can start your pattern just by barking. Something is touched, an electrode has entered. You have started on a journey.
If you are playful in life then you can be playful inside with the mind also. Then be as if you are watching something on a TV screen: you are not involved, you are just a spectator, an onlooker.
Look, and enjoy it. Don’t say good, don’t say bad, don’t condemn, don’t appreciate, because these are serious things. If a naked woman comes onto your screen, don’t say that this is bad, that some devil is playing a trick on you. No devil is there to play a trick upon you. Look at it as if it is just on the screen, a film screen. And be playful about it: say to the lady,”Wait”. Don’t try to push her out because the more you push her out, the more she will come in – ladies are difficult. And don’t follow her. If you follow then you will be in trouble. Don’t follow, don’t fight – this is the rule. Just look and be playful. Just say “hello” or ”good morning”. Just look and don’t be disturbed at all. Let the lady wait. She will go by herself, as she came: she moves on her own. She is not related to you, she is just something in the memory. Struck by some situation she came there, just a picture. Be playful with it. If you can be playful with your mind it will drop very soon, because mind can be there only if you are serious. Seriousness is the link, the bridge.
GRACIOUS ONE, PLAY. THE UNIVERSE IS AN EMPTY SHELL WHEREIN YOUR MIND FROLICS INFINITELY.
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Excerpted from The Book of Secrets, by Osho.
Seven Robbers: A Parable from Tibet
Once a group of seven robbers came across a dead elephant lying in a valley. The robbers were delighted. "Just look at the meat, we will stay here a few days and eat," they said. But they must have water too and nobody wanted to go and fetch it. Each wanted the other to go. Finally they got three of them to go. They had to go a long way over the mountain after the water. In the meantime, the four who were left said, "We will fix up three nice pieces of meat and put some poison in it for them when they get back, and we four will have all this meat." So they fixed up the poisoned meat for the three men who were gone. The three who carried the water said, "Those four fellows are bad men, we are doing all the work carrying this water for them, so we will put some poison in it, then we can have all the meat." When they got back the others were very thirsty and took a big drink, and in a little while they were all dead. "Now," said the three, "we will have all this meat and stuff to ourselves." So the three took the meat already cut and ate that, and in a little while they too were dead.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna talks of Daivi Sampad and Asuri Sampad – the noble and demonic qualities. Daivi Sampad is described as qualities such as fearlessness, inner purity, generosity, sense restraint, sacrifice, austerity, honesty; nonviolence, truthfulness, absence of anger, renunciation, equanimity, compassion for all creatures and so on and what constitutes Asuri Sampad is hypocrisy, arrogance, pride, anger, harshness, ignorance and so on.
Daivi Sampad and Daivi people create a Daivi world – a world love, of laughter, of dance, of music, of joy. Asuri Sampad and people endowed with Asuri Sampad create an Asuri world. In their blindness, Asuri people believe they can be happy at the cost of others. But the truth is that in an Asuri world no one is happy, there is no possibility of happiness for anyone.
What we have in the Tibetan parable of the seven robbers is a picture of what happens the Asuri World.
The death may not always be a physical death. But spiritual death is worse than physical death.
There is only one possibility in the Asuri World: everyone’s unhappiness. Both the perpetrators of Asuri acts as well as their victims become unhappy.
Gunther Grass’ The Tin Drum shows the life of Germans in Nazi Germany. And as we go through the book, we realize that it is not only the Jews of Germany [and neighbouring lands] that are plunged into a world of darkness by Hitler’s Asuri ambitions and policies, but also the German’s themselves. They too sink into unspeakable darkness, and there is no light anywhere.
This is precisely what Krishna means when he says he shall throw people endowed with Asuri Sampad into hell. Unfortunately, it is not only they that go to hell; they take the rest of the world too with them.
There is no joy in the Asuri world. There is no light there. There is no music or poetry there. There is no love, no dance, no laughter, nothing that makes life worth living.
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In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna talks of Daivi Sampad and Asuri Sampad – the noble and demonic qualities. Daivi Sampad is described as qualities such as fearlessness, inner purity, generosity, sense restraint, sacrifice, austerity, honesty; nonviolence, truthfulness, absence of anger, renunciation, equanimity, compassion for all creatures and so on and what constitutes Asuri Sampad is hypocrisy, arrogance, pride, anger, harshness, ignorance and so on.
Daivi Sampad and Daivi people create a Daivi world – a world love, of laughter, of dance, of music, of joy. Asuri Sampad and people endowed with Asuri Sampad create an Asuri world. In their blindness, Asuri people believe they can be happy at the cost of others. But the truth is that in an Asuri world no one is happy, there is no possibility of happiness for anyone.
What we have in the Tibetan parable of the seven robbers is a picture of what happens the Asuri World.
The death may not always be a physical death. But spiritual death is worse than physical death.
There is only one possibility in the Asuri World: everyone’s unhappiness. Both the perpetrators of Asuri acts as well as their victims become unhappy.
Gunther Grass’ The Tin Drum shows the life of Germans in Nazi Germany. And as we go through the book, we realize that it is not only the Jews of Germany [and neighbouring lands] that are plunged into a world of darkness by Hitler’s Asuri ambitions and policies, but also the German’s themselves. They too sink into unspeakable darkness, and there is no light anywhere.
This is precisely what Krishna means when he says he shall throw people endowed with Asuri Sampad into hell. Unfortunately, it is not only they that go to hell; they take the rest of the world too with them.
There is no joy in the Asuri world. There is no light there. There is no music or poetry there. There is no love, no dance, no laughter, nothing that makes life worth living.
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Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Healing and Shamanistic Wisdom: A Brief Encounter
Native American Shamanism has held a great fascination for me so long as I can remember. I have used a couple of shamanistic exercises in modified forms in some of my training programmes. Here is something I just read in Tony Samara’s Shaman’s Wisdom: Reclaim Your Lost Connection with the Universe. The brief passage made me think about the way we habitually react to misfortunes and those who are victims of misfortunes, and I thought of sharing it with the readers of the blog.
Before we go on to the passage, here is something about Tony Samara from his website.
After living for several years in a Zen Buddhist monastery, Tony Samara ventured to the jungles of South America - to the Amazon and to the Andes – where he lived and studied among a community of Shamans.
After many years he was initiated in the sacred healing ways of these ancient peoples, and left South America to teach and share this deep wisdom with the world.
Tony Samara is now visited by people from all parts of the world and from all walks of life, seeking spiritual guidance or simply the experience of being in his presence.
He is a mirror of what is possible, a shining reminder of the endless potential of being human.
The completely natural state of joy and wisdom experienced as the heart opens to life is the remarkable path he expounds. The path that is free for everyone to experience.
Verbal dialogue is not the essence of his teachings, but he explains in a direct and simple way that everyone can understand, how each individual can practically integrate greater acceptance, peace and joy into their daily lives.
Tony teaches with humour, humility and with infinite patience, empowering the individual with courage, trust and inner strength to continue on this journey back into wholeness, a path that leads towards real freedom.
Like many spiritual teachers, Tony Samara is concerned with practical inner work and liberation. He teaches by personal example and instruction, guiding the seeker to realise bliss here and now, through growing spiritual awareness rather than mental effort.
Part of Tony's teachings remind us that food and eating are fundamental to our inner well being, as well as to our physical health. He explains in his many programmes that the body is our temple and that the food we eat helps us to create a strong foundation that allows inner work and transformation to take place. He also explains that food is not just a physical substance which nourishes the body but that it also contains spiritual and emotional energy. Hence the importance of being conscious and taking the time to be present when we are eating and to become more sensitive to what will nourish our body, our temple rather than eat only what we feel like eating.
Tony also encourages a balanced vegetarian diet which includes organic products that are full of life force.0o0
Here is the passage from Tony Samara’s Shaman’s Wisdom:
My first intense experience of the Amazon, in this dimension and in another totally extraordinary dimension of consciousness, took place a few days after my arrival. I was in a canoe, which was going down a river. There were many people staring at me and I had many thoughts going through my head. Time appeared to have come to a standstill. It rained a lot. The sounds of nature were everywhere. I was full of fears and doubts. I thought I was very well prepared for the rainforest. I had spent six months improving my physical fitness at a gymnasium. I had immersed myself in the Spanish language with the help of books and language tapes. I had bought a machete, a hammock and a compass but oh, how the mosquitoes constantly bit me. Our canoe had been a tree a little time before and, in order to avoid sinking, we had to bail out the water continuously. Every time we hit a rock or a log I felt it was going to tip over. I began to wonder if this was the sanest thing to be doing at this time of my early twenties.
My westernized mind was full of fearful thoughts: “What if I have to go to hospital? How would I get there? Why are these people so satisfied with their life? Is this the paradise that I envisioned?” While I was seeking thousands of excuses to leave the Amazon and to return to “civilization,” a man at the front of the canoe pushed a tree branch away and was stung by a swarm of vicious bees. My initial reaction was to think “How lucky that it was not me,” a feeling accompanied with pity and concern for the man who was suffering. The other people on the canoe laughed and behaved in a way that was incomprehensible to me. I was in a culture very different from all that I had known before. I asked my fellow travellers: “Why laugh at suffering?” (If they were not all shamans, they lived in a shamanic culture.) They answered my question with another question: “Can true compassion be understood through feelings of fear, negativity and doubt?” It was explained to me that the energy body of the man mortally stung by the bees was already in fear and pain and that my own fears and doubts brought only more negativity to his energetic body; that true compassion consists in helping the person to free himself from pain.
“By laughing, we helped to pull the fear out from the body of this man who was already in a state of shock and in danger of dying. If all of the passengers in the canoe had reacted as you did, their egocentric thoughts would have fed this negativity and the man would certainly have died,” said one of my companions.
I realized that each one in the canoe except me had been present to the situation from a healing point of view rather than from the ego. Their laughter was an expression of this healing energy. My cultural programming had been different and from that moment, I seriously began to question my beliefs about this culture that the Western world would describe as “primitive.”
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As I finished reading the passage, I thought how a group of children would have reacted to the situation. In all probability, they would have laughed out spontaneously. Later their reaction would have been different – they would realize the seriousness of the situation and become serious. But the initial reaction would have been laughter.
Just as they do in the shamanistic culture.
I also wondered how a group of school children of today who have had their lessons in moral science would have reacted. They would have reacted exactly as Tony Samara reacted. They would have suppressed the laughter even if it arose in them because they have been taught it is cruel to laugh at another person’s misfortune. They would have gone and expressed their solemn concern to the stung friend.
I am not saying such behaviour is not appropriate. But there seems to be a different kind of wisdom in the light laughter of the Native Americans.
True, the stung man might even feel hurt by the laughter. But there is a possibility he would have able to handle his pain better when his friends took it so lightly.
Of course, we are talking of light-hearted mirth and not cruel laughter. We are talking of laughing at life’s misfortunes.
And I am sure the man’s Native friends would have been as helpful to him as the modern school children.
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A related thought. It is only where there is no love that such spontaneous laughter at a misfortune hurts. A husband or a wife, for instance, can spontaneously laugh at something like this happening to the other, so long as there is love between the two. But when there is no love between the two, the laughter becomes cruel and it hurts like hell.
The Mahabharata tells us that one of the major reasons behind the epic battle was Draupadi’s laughter. While going round the newly constructed magnificent palace of the Pandavas at Indraprastha, Duryodhana sees a door where there is none and bangs his head on it. He mistakes solid ground for water due to the illusions created by Maya, the architect, and mistakes water for solid ground. As he falls into the water taking a step seeing solid ground before him, Draupadi, along with her friends, laughs out spontaneously in mirth. And Duryodhana feels so humiliated he would take his vengeance by humiliating her in the dice hall of Hastinapura later.
Of course there was no love between Draupadi and Duryodhana.
Love gives everything a different hue.
When there is love, you can laugh at the discomfiture of a friend – and he might join in your laughter. I do not think anything could be more healing than that laughter of his.
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Thursday, April 1, 2010
The Myth of Sisyphus and Prati Prasav
Ancient Greece has told some of the most beautiful stories ever told by man. And among the many such incredibly beautiful stories, one of the most powerful is the myth of Sisyphus.
He was the son of king Aeolus of Thessaly and Enarete, the myth tells us. As a king, he promoted navigation and commerce and did a lot of other good things. However, his weakness was power greed. And such was his greed for power and position that he would stop at nothing. Offering hospitality to visitors, he enjoyed killing them if that allowed him to improve his position in any way. And he was crafty. Lying, deceit, betrayals, all came naturally to him. He seduced his own niece, he took the throne that belonged to his brother. At one time he was cursed by Zeus because he was revealing the god’s secrets. In a fury, Zeus ordered Thanatos [god of death] to chain Sisyphus to a rock in Tartarus. Sisyphus innocently asked Death to demonstrate how the chains worked. And when Thanatos demonstrated it, he locked the god of death in chains and death was no more able to visit the world of men.
Sisyphus soon achieved the dubious fame of being the cleverest man in the world. And so proud of his cunning was Sisyphus that he believed himself not only an equal to the gods, but smarter than the gods themselves – smarter even than Zeus, the lord of Gods, himself. When Zeus kidnapped Aegina, the daughter of the river god Asopus, and kept her in hiding, Sisyphus revealed the truth to Asopus – not out of moral outrage at Zeus’ behaviour, not out of a feeling for justice but just to show he was cleverer than Zeus.
It was the anger of the gods in general and of Zeus in particular that brought Sisyphus’ curse upon him. And the curse was for all time to come. For all eternity, Sisyphus was cursed to roll up a huge boulder up a hill. And when the boulder reached the top, it will roll down by itself and then Sisyphus had to roll it up again.
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The myth of Sisyphus could be understood at several levels. It is the story of man and his life at many, many levels. For the time being, let us look at it from the standpoint of prati prasava, the ancient Indian practice of travelling back into past lifetimes.
Prati prasava literally means reverse birth. What we do in the process is travel back into our previous lifetimes through the process of meditation. Incidentally, whether we do it deliberately or not, according to the Buddha, every single one of us passes through a process of past life recollection/reliving as the process of meditation advances. Used as a technique, prati prasava is very much like past life regression as, say, practiced by Brian Weiss. Those who are interested in the process are welcome to read his Many Lives, Many Masters or better still his Through Time Into Healing, which I find the better of the two books. Through Time Into Healing also has a script attached to it in the appendices, which one could use for journeying back into past life times.
Today prati prasava or past life regression is mostly used for resolving unresolved conflicts that we carry with us from our past lifetimes and for healing. But prati prasava could also be used for remembering our past learning and sadhanas, for starting from where we left in the last times.
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I remember reading a short story some time back. The woman in the story has the history of a chain of abusive marriages. Each of her marriages has gone exactly the same way. It begins beautifully with rich romance, both she and her lover falling deeply in love with each other. They get married and soon the relationship between the two begins to change. In a short while she finds herself abused verbally, attacked physically, humiliated constantly and reduced to the status of a sexual slave. As the story ends, the woman is once again in exactly the same relationship, this time with the new young waiter who has just joined the hotel where she is hiding. The boy has a criminal record – he has killed his own father. What began as the woman in the commanding position doing sexual favours to the boy ends up by her becoming his slave.
We repeat our own unique life patterns endlessly in our life. Some of us repeat patterns of success, others of failure; some of acceptance, others of rejection; some of happiness and others of pain.
And it is not only in one lifetime that we repeat the same pattern again and again. We do that in lifetime after lifetime. There are stories that past life regression has revealed, in which two individuals continue the victim-perpetrator relationship in lifetime after lifetime, one of which I have discussed in some detail in an article called Reincarnation, Transactional Analysis and Karma elsewhere on this blog. [Please see http://innertraditions.blogspot.com/2009/05/reincarnation-transactional-analysis.html]
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Sisyphus rolls the stone up all the way to the top of the hill and then it comes crashing down. He climbs down and picking it up, begins rolling it up the hill again.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Bardo Thodal, speaks of how after death the disembodied soul becomes hungry for the same experiences as he has lived for when he was in the body and returns to the world of embodied living to begin it all, all over again.
Most of us are like Sisyphus and do precisely the same thing in lifetime after lifetime. We repeat the same patterns and do exactly the same things we have done in the past. Life after life we live like the bullock that is tied to the oil mill that walks the same circle day after day – and that circle does not take it anywhere.
Prati prasava can connect us with our learnings in past life times and with the spiritual journeys made in past existences.
In the Bhagavad Gita there is an interesting discussion between Krishna and Arjuna about this possibility. In Chapter Six of the Gita, Arjuna asks about the fate of the practitioner of yoga who falls on the way and Krishna assures him that no harm comes to him. One of the possibilities is that such a man is reborn in the home of pure and spiritual people, or of intelligent yogis and there he is united with the memories of his past lifetimes and making fast progress, reaches his goal.
What Krishna says here is that this happens on its own. But there are also ways of doing this through yogic processes. Prati prasava is one such method.
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Albert Camus, the Nobel Prize willing writer, has written an essay called The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he says that “If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious.” Camus is right, in a way. The day the bullock realizes the absurdity of its life, it will perhaps go mad. If the bullock does not realize its situation, it could only be called a blessing.
But at the same time, at least in the case of man, his unconsciousness is a tragedy too. That he is unconscious of his situation is a blessing in the sense that the day he becomes conscious of it, there is every possibility he will go mad. But it is a tragedy because his unconsciousness also prevents him from ever waking up. So long as he does not become conscious of his situation, there is no possibility that he will wake up. It is only the consciousness of his situation that will make it possible for him to wake up.
There is a beautiful story about Narada and Maya.
One day, says the story, Sage Narada was walking across a vast desert with God as his companion. Suddenly Narada asked God, “Bhagavan, tell me, what is Maya?”
God smiled but made no reply. They continued their walk.
After a while God told Narada, "The sun is hot today, and I am thirsty. Ahead you will find a village. Go there and fetch me some water."
Narada set off to carry out God’s errand. Arriving at the village, he approached the first house he saw and knocked on the door. A beautiful young woman came and opened the door. The sage looked into her eyes and he forgot all about his errand. The woman’s loveliness was intoxicating.
The woman ushered Narada into the house, telling it is hot outside. He was warmly welcomed by her family. It was as if everyone in their household had been expecting him. The sage was asked to eat with the family, and then to stay the night, which Narada accepted gladly, enjoying the family's warm hospitality. All the while his mind was toying with the young woman’s incredible beauty. He wanted to make her his own and to give himself to her.
A week went by, then two. The sage wanted to pay back for their hospitality. He began to share in the household chores.
And then one day, unable to resist the temptation any more, Narada asked for the woman's hand in marriage. The family had been expecting this and they are overjoyed.
The sage and his young wife settled down in her family's house, where she soon bore him a child, and then two more – two sons and a daughter.
Years passed. When his wife's mother and father passed away, the sage took over as head of the household. He opened a small shop in the village and it prospered. Before long he was an honoured member of the community. Giving himself up to the age-old joys and sorrows of village life, Narada lived there contentedly for many years.
Then it happened. One night during the monsoon season a violent storm broke overhead, and the river rose so high from the sudden rains it began to flood. Narada gathered his family and led them through the dark night toward higher ground. But the winds blew so violently and the rain pelted down with such force that one of his sons was washed away by the torrent.
Narada reached for the boy, but in so doing let go of his second son. A moment later a gale tore his daughter from his arms. Then his beloved wife was also washed away into the roaring darkness.
The sage wailed helplessly. But his cries were drowned by a towering wave that rose from the depths of the terrible night and washed him headlong into the river.
Everything went black. Hours passed. Slowly, painfully, Narada came to his senses, only to discover that he had been washed onto a sandbank far down the river. It was daytime now and the storm had passed. But there was no sign of his family anywhere, nor, for that matter, of any living creature.
For a long time the sage remained lying on the sand almost mad with grief. Bits of wreckage floated past him in the river. The smell of death was on the wind.
Everything had been taken from him now; everything has disappeared into the swirling waters. There was little he could do but weep.
Then, suddenly, the sage heard a voice behind him that made the blood stop in his veins. "Narada," the voice asked, "where is the water you went to fetch?" The sage turned and saw God standing at his side. The river had vanished, and once again he and God were alone in the empty desert. "Where is my water?" God asked again. "I have been waiting for you to bring it now for several minutes."
The sage threw himself at God’s feet and begged for forgiveness. "I forgot!" Narada cried again and again. “I forgot what you asked of me, God! Forgive me!”
God smiled and said, "Do you now understand the power of Maya, Narada?”
Such is the power of Maya, even great sages become slaves to her. Under her power, we forget things again and again and live the life we have lived a thousand times over.
Maya is both a blessing and a curse. But for her blessing which makes us forget our past, we will not be able to go through the same things a thousand times. But Maya is a curse because but for her power to delude us, perhaps we would have become conscious that we are living the life of the bullock yoked to the oil mill – kolhoo ka bail.
Prati prasava helps us see with our own eyes the lives we have lived in the past and its repetitive patterns.
0o0
Great masters use unusual techniques to teach the world. Naranath Bhranthan was one such great master who lived in Kerala a long while ago. What Sisyphus was cursed to do, Naranath chose to do as a teaching device. The great master lived in a burial ground and every morning he went to the nearby hill and began rolling up a stone to the top. As soon as the stone reached the hilltop, he would let it go and standing on top, clap his hands and laugh. Most people thought him mad – hence the name Bhranthan, meaning Mad. But to those who had eyes to see, there was a great lesson in his actions. What we do in each lifetime is the mad thing he was doing every day. And what we do life after life too is nothing but repeating that madness.
But we are so busy rolling up boulders uphill, we have no time to stop and think about what we are doing. And since we have no time to stop and think, it goes on forever and ever.
O0O
Hua Hu Ching: The Other Wisdom Book of Lao Tzu
Mainstream Chinese tradition says that Tao Te King [Dao de Jing] is the only book ever written by the Chinese sage Lao Tzu [Laozi]. Several stories, or rather several versions of a story, are told about how he wrote Tao Te King. Here is one version of the story, perhaps the most popular one.
Laozi had grown old – really old. He was in his nineties. And yet not many people knew of him, unlike his younger contemporary Confucius, whom everybody knew. But those who knew him knew he was the greatest. Men like him are born once in many centuries. Confucius himself said of Laozi: I have known the way of the mighty elephants that walk on the earth, I have known the way of the whales that swim in the high seas, and I have known the way of the mighty birds that fly in the boundless skies. But this man is neither of the earth, nor of the seas, nor of the skies; he is a dragon that moves about in limitless space.
Knowing his greatness, and realizing that he might soon leave the world, the Chinese emperor requested him to put down his thoughts on paper for the guidance of future generations. Laozi refused, saying that the Tao that can be spoken about is not the real Tao, the Tao that can be written about is not the real Tao. But the emperor would not listen to him. And when the emperor’s insistence grew, one night Laozi ran away from the hut in which he was living under the cover of darkness. He wanted to cross the Himalayas and reach India, where he knew he would be able to live the rest of his days in peace, free from the emperor’s demands.
But when he reached the western borders of China, he found the emperor waiting for him there. And the emperor said: “If you want to cross the borders, pay the toll.” And when Laozi asked what the toll was, the emperor told him: “Write a book.”
And, says the tradition, Tao Te King is the book Laozi wrote under protest, to escape the emperor’s insistence. And that is the only book he ever wrote.
However, a second tradition says he wrote one more book: Hua Hu Ching. Another incredibly beautiful book, and a book that has the same fragrance as Tao Te King. Here are a few beautiful excerpts from the translation of Hua Hua Ching by Brian Walker.
I find the translation excellent.
Brian Walker has chosen to use “she” as the universal third person pronoun in place of the more common “he,” as you will find in the excerpts given below. The use of she is in keeping with the spirit of the Tao, to which the feminine is the greater of the two sexes, though it is ultimately a philosophy of the blending of the masculine and the feminine and transcending both.
0o0
Those who wish to embody the Tao should embrace all things. To embrace all things means first that one holds no anger or resistance toward any idea or thing, living or dead, formed or formless. Acceptance is the very essence of the Tao. To embrace all things means also that one rids oneself of any concept of separation; male and female, self and other, life and death. Division is contrary to the nature of the Tao. Foregoing antagonism and separation, one enters in the harmonious oneness of all things.
0o0
Do you imagine the universe is agitated? Go into the desert at night and took out at the stars. This practice should answer the question. The superior person settles her mind as the universe settles the stars in the sky. By connecting her mind with the subtle origin, she calms it. Once calmed, it naturally expands, and ultimately her mind becomes as vast and immeasurable as the night sky.
0o0
The Tao gives rise to all forms, yet it has no form of its own. If you attempt to fix a picture of it in your mind, you will lose it. This is like pinning a butterfly: the husk is captured, but the flying is lost. Why not be content with simply experiencing it?
0o0
I confess that there is nothing to teach: no religion, no science, no body of information which will lead your mind back to the Tao. Today I speak in this fashion, tomorrow in another, but always the Integral Way is beyond words and beyond mind. Simply be aware of the oneness of things.
0o0
The ego is a monkey catapulting through the jungle: Totally fascinated by the realm of the senses, it swings from one desire to the next, one conflict to the next, one self-centered idea to the next. If you threaten it, it actually fears for its life. Let this monkey go. Let the senses go. Let desires go. Let conflicts go. Let ideas go. Let the fiction of life and death go. Just remain in the center, watching. And then forget that you are there.
0o0
The tiny particles which form the vast universe are not tiny at all. Neither is the vast universe vast. These are notions of the mind, which is like a knife, always chipping away at the Tao, trying to render it graspable and manageable. But that which is beyond form is ungraspable, and that which is beyond knowing is unmanageable. There is, however, this consolation: She who lets go of the knife will find the Tao at her fingertips.
0o0
Can you dissolve your ego? Can you abandon the idea of self and other? Can you relinquish the notions of male and female, short and long, life and death? Can you let go of all these dualities and embrace the Tao without skepticism or panic? If so, you can reach the heart of the Integral Oneness. Along the way, avoid thinking of the Oneness as unusual, exalted, sublime, transcendental. Because it is the Oneness, it is beyond all that. It is simply the direct, essential, and complete truth.
0o0
Most of the world's religions serve only to strengthen attachments to false concepts such as self and other, life and death, heaven and earth, and so on. Those who become entangled in these false ideas are prevented from perceiving the Integral Oneness. The highest virtue one can exercise is to accept the responsibility of discovering and transmitting the whole truth. Some help others in order to receive blessings and admiration. This is simply meaningless. Some cultivate themselves in part to serve others, in part to serve their own pride. They will understand, at best, half of the truth. But those who improve themselves for the sake of the world – to these, the whole truth of the universe will be revealed. So seek this whole truth, practice it in your daily life, and humbly share it with others. You will enter the realm of the divine.
0o0
Do not go about worshipping deities and religious institutions as the source of the subtle truth To do so is to place intermediaries between yourself and the divine, and to make of yourself a beggar who looks outside for a treasure that is hidden inside his own breast. If you want to worship the Tao, first discover it in your own heart. Then your worship will be meaningful.
0o0
There is no one method for attaining realization of the Tao. To regard any method as the method is to create a duality, which can only delay your understanding of the subtle truth. The mature person perceives the fruitlessness of rigid, external methodologies; Remembering this, he keeps his attitude unstructured at all times and thus is always free to pursue the Integral Way. He studies the teachings of the masters. He dissolves all concepts of duality. He pours himself out in service to others. He performs his inner cleansing and does not disturb his teacher with unnecessary entanglements, thus preserving the subtle spiritual connection with the teacher's divine energy. Gently eliminating all obstacles to his own understanding, he constantly maintains his unconditional sincerity. His humility, perseverance, and adaptability evoke the response of the universe and fill him with divine light.
0o0
I find Hua Hu Ching incredibly beautiful. It reminds me of the Upanishads. Hua Hu Ching has their directness, their elemental quality and their mystery. Like the Upanishads, they touch you somewhere deep within where nothing else can reach. And like the Upanishads, again, Hua Hu Ching is trying to communicate the incommunicable.
All words are just that – words. And to reach the truth, we have to go beyond the words. When we go beyond words, we get glimpses of that from which words return, unattained, along with the mind: yato vacho nivartante, aprapya manasa saha. They show us the moon hidden among the leaves of the palm tree. And when we look beyond the palm tree, we see the moon.
0o0
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Patanjali Yoga Sutras: Atha 3
Continued from Patanjali Yoga Sutras – Atha 2
Atha means when man has realized he is all periphery with no centre.
One of my former management students sent me a mail a while back. He had a wonderful job, he said. It was not too demanding, considering the pay they were giving him, which was to the tune of about a lakh and a half a month. He had everything he could desire for at his workplace. He had recently married a beautiful young girl, an MBA like himself. They loved each other, his parents loved him, his in-laws loved him, everything was fine. But with all that he was not happy with his life, he wrote to me. He felt something was missing. He felt a deep sense of meaninglessness – a kind of existential angst.
This is what happens when your life has no deep core. Modern society, modern civilization, takes away that deep core from our lives and gives us everything at the periphery. The periphery is wonderful, but there is no centre.
Abraham Maslow speaks of the eight dimensions of human needs in his revised theory of needs and motivations [the original theory had only five]: physical and physiological needs, security needs, belongingness needs, esteem needs, cognitive needs, aesthetic needs, self-actualization needs and self-transcendence needs. In the case of an educated, employed young man like the student who wrote to me, his physical and physiological needs, he security needs, his belonging needs, his esteem needs and even his aesthetic needs are well taken care of. But when it comes to the other three dimensions, he is perhaps poorer than his predecessors.
Our younger generation today frequently take ‘working hard and partying harder’ as their motto. And the work is often not really meaningful, though it is productive and pays extremely well. And the parties provide for very superficial satisfactions. Intimacies are of very tentative nature – frequently of the kind Eric Jong wrote about in her blockbuster Fear of Flying. They do not give meaning to life. True, in the case of the young man who wrote to me his belonging needs are satisfied because of his satisfying relations with his wife and family and perhaps with his colleagues. But when it comes to his deeper meaning needs – cognitive needs – there was a big question mark there.
Victor Frankl, once an inmate of Nazi concentration camps for Jews and later the founder of logotherapy made an interesting observation – the people who perished in the concentration camps were the ones who had lost meaning in life and the survivors were invariably the ones who found meaning in life even under the unimaginably cruel conditions of the concentration camps. Man needs meaning to live by, as deeply as he needs anything else, if not more deeply than most other things.
Barring the case of a few individuals, our society and civilization, our lifestyle, does not satisfy our meaning needs.
And along with meaning needs, most of our self-actualization needs are left unfulfilled.
And when it comes to the highest of our needs, self-transcendence needs, in its truest sense, our society and our jobs do very little to satisfy them.
For these reasons, we live at the periphery, instead of leaving at the centres. For it is only when you have a meaning to your life and when you achieve self-actualization and self-transcendence that your life has a centre. Otherwise it has only peripheries.
What modern civilization does is deny man his centre and give him lots of peripheries.
It is like watering the leaves of the plant and leaving the roots hungry.
Yoga is for people who have realized this truth about modern life and want to live at the centre, from the centre.
0o0
Here is a story I love.
A young little bird used to fly so beautifully that the sky would be moved. One day he came across a man who sold termites. “Give a feather, take a termite,” the salesman said. And there was a scheme – buy one, get one free. The bird gave the man a feather, bought a termite, got one free. He ate the termites, and he liked their taste. The next day the salesman came and the bird gave another feather and got two termites. Soon the bird grew addicted to eating termites. One by one, he kept giving his feathers.
The blue of the sky soon became a rare thing for him. Somehow he could manage to fly up to the trees.
And then came a time when all he could do was hop on the ground.
One day he came across a huge termite hill. He thought he would give back two times the termites he had eaten and buy back his wings. Maybe three or four times, if needed. He saw the man who sold termites passing by. When he offered termite again, the bird said: “Enough. I have had enough of termites. You take your termites back and give back my feathers. In fact, I will give you three termites for a feather. Or even four.”
The man who sold termites said: “I sell termites for feathers; I don’t buy termites paying feathers.”
It was too late. The young bird had forever lost his freedom. He had given away his sky.
Yoga is for people who realize they have lived their life like the little young bird. It is for those who realize that they have been giving away their feathers for termites. It is for those who realize when you give your feathers away for termites, you lose the sky.
0o0
Richard Bach tells a story in his bestselling book Illusions. Here is the story narrated in Biblical language.
Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river.
The current of the river swept silently over them all – young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self.
Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth.
But one creature said at last, “I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.”
The other creatures laughed and said, “Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom.”
But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.
Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.
And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, “See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all!”
And the one carried in the current said, “I am no more Messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.”
But they cried the more, “Saviour!” all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone and they were left alone making legends of a Saviour. “
Yoga is for the potential messiah who has realized he can let go and enjoy the journey and it is far better to let go than cling to the twigs and rocks at the bottom of the river.
It is also for the creatures who bound by unthinking habits cling to the twigs and rocks at the bottom of the crystal river. But of course, they have to realize the futility of their clinging, the absurdity of it, the total meaninglessness of it.
In fact, it is they who require yoga more than the messiah.
0o0
To be continued on Patanjali Yoga Sutras Atha 4
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