Meditation: The Art of Ecstasy

Awareness means a mind that is conscious but not focused. Concentration is a choice. It excludes all except its object of concentration. It is a narrowing. Children, as they are, are never focused. Their consciousness is open from all sides. Everything is coming in, nothing is being excluded.  The moment you narrow the mind you become particularly conscious of one thing and simultaneously unconscious of so many other things. The more narrowed the mind is, the more successful it will be. You will become a specialist, you will become an expert, but the whole thing will consist of knowing more and more about less and less. The narrowing is an existential necessity. It is utilitarian but just to survive is not enough. The more utilitarian the approach – the more one is in business life – the less he is living, the less he is ecstatic. Meditation is not something to be done to achieve some goal (peace, bliss...) but something to be enjoyed as an end in itself. In business, the result is important. In festivity, the act is important. If you can make any act significant in itself, then you become festive and you can celebrate it. Survival needs conditioning, but survival is not the end, so you must be able to put your conditioning on and take it off – just like clothes. Every religion is based on a lie device. All methods are lies; they just create a situation. they are not causal. New devices can be created; new religions can be created. Your mind is the imprisonment. It is the slavery. Any life that is one sided is crippled. Society creates a narrowed consciousness, but consciousness itself, means expansion. It is unlimited. Both are needs, and both should be fulfilled. Use your mind as a means; do not make it an end. Come out of it the moment you are alone, come out of it, take it off. Then celebrate the moment, celebrate existence itself, Being itself. A person who is obsessed with thoughts cannot go into sleep. Objects continue to be there, thoughts continue to be there. He cannot become unconscious, thoughts go on demanding his attention. Any object that is not calling your attention continuously creates boredom. With something different you feel a sudden upsurge of consciousness. If the major portion of your potentialities remains unfulfilled, your life will be a frustration. Intelligence, the narrowing of the mind, is a means toward survival, but nor toward life. Survival is not life. Survival is a necessity – to exist in the material world is a necessity – but the end is always to come to a flowering of the potential, of all that is meant by you. If you are fulfilled completely, if nothing remains in seed form, if everything becomes actual, if you are a flowering, then and only then can you feel the bliss, the ecstasy, of life. Mind is a totality. You can either transcend it totally or you cannot transcend it at all. If you go on denying one part that part will take its revenge. With Yoga, you have to proceed rationally – but only in order to jump into the irrational. The end is bound to be irrational. That which you can understand – the rational- cannot be the source because it is finite. The source must be greater than you. The source from which you have come, from which everything has come, the whole universe has come – and where it goes down and disappears again – must be greater than you. The source from which you have come, from which everything has come, the whole universe has come – and where it goes down and disappears again- must be more than this. Anyone who is authentically rational has to come to a point where the irrational is felt. If you proceed with reason toward the ultimate, the boundary will be felt. Whenever there has been an authentic, logical mind, it comes to the point. There have been Christian mystics who have been trying to prove God. What nonsense! If even God can be proved, you leave nothing unproved ... and the unproved is the source. A real mystic is never annoyed with reason. He can play with it. And he can play with reason because he knows reason cannot destroy the mystery of life. Tertullian said: I believe in God because I cannot prove Him; I believe in God because it is impossible to believe. This is how a real mystic will feel: If it is possible, then there is no need to believe. It becomes just a concept, an ordinary concept. Faith is a jump into the impossible. You come to point that reason cannot go beyond ... and the beyond remains. You know that existence is beyond the boundary of reason. Body and mind are not two things, they are one energy. The energy is more dense in the body than it is in the mind – the density differs; the frequency of the wavelength differs – but it is the same wave, the same flow of energy. Meditation is always passive; the very essence of it is passive. It cannot be active because the very nature of it is non- doing, really meditation is just passive awareness. If you have become meditation, you will no longer need it. Then you can be active, but even in that activity you are always the passive onlooker. Buddha, Jesus, Mahivara realized, they achieved their own enlightenment but they were failures in that they couldn’t help the greater portion of humanity to reach enlightenment.  Whatever is done with your body reaches to the mind and whatever is done with the mind reaches to the body. Body and mind are two ends of the same entity. Animals are full alive and man is half dead, half alive. The 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 actually flowing in your spine...and the higher it moves, the higher you will move with it. When this energy reaches the Brahmarandhra, the seventh center, located at the top of your head, you are the highest man possible. Man one in the sex center, man number two in the heart center, the man of emotion, and man number three the man of intellect, are all neurotic. Man number four is the one who is trying to move his energy within: the man who is meditating and making efforts to dissolve his neurosis and divisions. Then a moment comes when the energy is released from your last center into the cosmos. You become a superman. I never suggest anything that can create frustration, depression, sadness ... anything that will allow you to be too aware of all the insanity that is inside you. You must be allowed to get to know certain things gradually. Knowledge is not always good. It must unfold itself slowly, as your capacity to absorb it grows. I begin with your insanity, not with a sitting posture. I allow your insanity. .if you dance madly the opposite happens within you. With a mad dance you begin to be aware of a silent point within you. With sitting silently you begin to be aware of madness. Be angry without the person with whom you would like to be angry. Weep without finding a cause. Laugh, just laugh, without anything to laugh at. Within moments you can be unburdened of the whole life – of lives even. When someone has the crown out many things out, he may begin to try to stand on his head. Pictures of Buddha sitting on a flower are just symbolic. It is symbolic of what happens inside Buddha. When just sitting happens from the inside, you feel like the opening of a flower. Yoga is the path of will, Tantra is the path of surrender. You can sit and force a particular rhythm on your body, you can create a fallacious Buddha like posture, but you will just be dead. You will become dull, stupid. It has happened to so many monks, their eyes have no light of intelligence, their faces are just idiotic, with no inner light, no inner flame. You can create a silence that is a dead silence. Silence must be alive, dynamic. Relaxation can come only as a by product, as a shadow of intense activity. To practice relaxation is a contradiction in terms. Every practice is a practice of tension. Relaxation means non doing. You can only come to it, you can only arrive at it. In this no action state, the cosmic and the individual come nearer. They become intimate: they lose their identities, they overlap each other. Something penetrates you from the cosmic and something of you penetrates into the cosmic. Finally a moment comes when you have lost the boundaries and you never regain them again. Then there begins to exist a human being without boundaries, a mind without frontiers, a consciousness without any limitations. That is the cosmic, that is the divine, that is wholeness. You must become more and more liquid and flowing. And unless you become flowing, river like, you can never know the divine because it is not a thing: it is an event. Seek and you will not find at all, because the very seeking, becomes the barrier. So do not seek something that is not known to you. Rather, go deep into that which is known to you. Do not long for the unknown For example you cannot seek the divine, but if you have loved, then you have known love. So go deep into love. Time is really a by product of desiring. The more you desire, the more time you need. You can deal with this in two ways. One is to conceive of life after life, time not ending at all. Another is the western way: to be more conscious of time and to do many things in the allotted time period. Whenever you desire, you create time. Time is a fourth dimension of space. All the devices and all the methods I use are just to make you more and more intense here and now, to help you to forget the past and the future. Any movement of your body or mind can be used as a jumping board. Books are bound to be fake. They cannot change you; they cannot be in touch with you; they cannot move you. Only a master can be liquid. He can change anything. With him, even methods can be no methods, while with scriptures, traditions, even no methods become methods, because the moment something is written, it is dead. A master is needed for continuously disturbing his own past assertions so that nowhere does fixedness come in. The liquidity of the phenomenon must be there. If every center does its own work, there is relaxation. You are being educated as if you have only one center: the mind, the mathematical, the rational. Life is not only rational. On the contrary, the greater part of life is irrational. Reason is just like a small lighted island in the vast, dark, and mysterious ocean of irrationality. And this island is rooted in the ocean of mystery – the great ocean of mystery. But your spiritual being is never tense. I divide you into body, mind and spirit as a method only. You are not divided – these boundaries do not, in fact exist, but in order to help you to understand things, the division will be useful. The spiritual realm is never tense, but you are not in contact with it. A person who is in contact with his body can never be in contact with his spirit because it is a deeper realm. Bodily tension has been created by those who in the name of religion have been preaching anti body attitudes. In the West, Christianity has been emphatically antagonistic toward the body. A false division, a gulf, has been created between you and your body. Then your total attitude becomes a tension. The body is the enemy, but you cannot exist without it. You must remain with it, you must live with your enemy, so there is constant tension. You can never relax. Body is not your enemy nor is it in any way unfriendly or even indifferent to you. The very existence of the body is bliss. And the moment you take the body as a gift, as a divine gift, you will come back to the body. You will love it, you will feel it, and subtle are the ways of its feeling. Even if you seem to care, you do not really care. You are caring for some other reason – for the opinion of others, for the look in someone else’s eyes. You never care for your body for yourself; you do not love your body. Love your body and you will feel a relaxation such as you have never felt before. Love is relaxing. When there is love, there is relaxation. If you love someone – if between you and him or you and her, there is love – then with love comes the music of relaxation. When you are relaxed with someone that is the only sign of love. If there is no love flowing between two people the other is hell, but if there is love flowing in between, the other is heaven. Whenever you are in love, a silence comes. Language is lost, words become meaningless. You have much to say and nothing to say at the same time. You only remember a dead love, a living love is never remembered. it is living, there is no gap to remember it, there is no space to remember it. It is not wrong, it is not narcissistic, to be in love with your own body. In fact it is the first step toward spirituality. Your body is not so conditioned as your mind. Remember this: your mind is conditioned, but your body is still part of nature. all religions and religious thinkers who have been basically cerebral) are against the body because with the body, with the senses the mind and its conditioning are lost. That is why they all have been afraid of sex. With sex, the conditioning mind is lost. You again become part of the greater biological sphere, the biosphere. You become one with it. The fear of sex is basically the fear of the body because with sex, the whole body becomes vibrating, vital, living. The moment sex takes over the body, the whole mind is pushed back. It is not there, Breathing takes it over; the breathing becomes vigorous, vital. Your inner life has an individuality, so when you acquire something through theoretical knowledge it is not going to help – it may hinder – because it is not about you. You will only know about yourself when you go within. With sexual maturity the face becomes fixed, but there is another maturity where the eyes become fixed. One has to feel the chakras, not know about them. The world without is illusory but not as illusory as the one you can create inside. Blood is the circulation of your physiological body; Kundalini is the circulation of your etheric body. When the moment is so intense that you know in one second it will be beyond you, when you know that should a second be lost, you will not be able to come back again, be aware and then jump. Whenever I know you it is in a roundabout way, by knowing myself. To a Hindu, God is seen through the environment. The nature is beautiful, the soil is fertile. The race is deeply rooted in the earth. Everything is flowing and the movement is very slow like the Ganges. Ignorance has no beginning, but it ends. Enlightenment has a beginning, but it never ends. It is not that you have solved it: It is not like there is a mathematical formula and everything is known. Rather the knowing of enlightenment means that you have come to a point where the mystery has become ultimate. So the enlightened personality is without any mind – a no mind personality: living, but without any conceptions, doing but not thinking about it, loving but without the concept of love, breathing but without any meditation. So living will be moment to moment and one with the Total, but mind will not be there in between. Initiation means to be in intimate contact with one who is awakened. Buddha said that the test of an enlightened one is that he is always the same, just like the sea water. Anywhere, everywhere it is salty. Whenever a Buddha passes, those who are on the border line of sleep can recognize that there is something different about this man. He behaves differently, he speaks differently, he lives differently, he walks differently. Something has happened to him. Those who are on the border line can feel it. But they are asleep, and this borderline awareness is not permanent. They may fall back into sleep at any moment... The whole running of the modern mind is because of the fear of death. For the first time man is so fearful of death because for the first time man has become absolutely unaware of the deathless. we are only conscious of the body that is going to die, we are not conscious of the inner consciousness that is deathless. People who are conscious of the deathless create an atmosphere in which there is no hurry, then initiation is easy. Life is just an overflowing of energy without any purpose. Life live as a play, not as a work, then you have renounced. When you use the same robe and the same color, you will soon become unaware of clothing. We feel the constant changing of clothes to be something beautiful. But, in a non changing robe you can attain a graceful beauty that can never be attained with a changing robe. With a changing robe you are hiding ugliness, nothing else, but with a non changing robe everything about you as you are is revealed. When you change your clothes, others become aware of your clothes. But when you are constantly in one robe, no one asks about your clothes, then one looks at you, not at your clothes. When you are at ease a certain grace comes. Beauty is to be as you really are and to be totally relaxed in it. The moment you accept yourself, others will begin to accept you. If someone asks for love, he will not get love because the very asking makes him unlovely, ugly. The very fact of asking becomes the barrier. No one can love you if you are asking for love. You can be loved only when there is no asking. The very fact of not asking makes you beautiful, makes you relaxed. With an open fist all the air is there and you are the master. With a closed fist you are the loser. Logic says: Close it better, you have lost all the air. You have lost it because you did not close your fist so well, somewhere you are at fault. This is how it happens. If I love someone, I become possessive. I begin to close in. The more I close in, the more love is lost. The mind says “Arrange to be even closer” and it makes more arrangements, but this is how love is being lost. Only with an open hand can love be possessed, only with a non closing mind, can love become a flowering. Buddha, with no lust for life – lives ardently. He flowers into aliveness perfectly, totally. Non desiring is the not the opposite of desiring. It is simply the absence of desiring, not the opposite. If you make it the opposite, you begin to desire again (you are desiring non desire), and when this happens, you are back in the same circle. When desire just drops and no object is replaced, substituted, desire just becomes absent. And this absence becomes life eternal. If I simply try not to possess you so that love can flower, this trying not to possess will become an effort. An effort can only possess. In essence I am saying: Love me more because I am not trying to possess you. The mind is desiring. The mind cannot do anything without desire. By consciousness I mean a total aliveness. You are never totally alive. Sometimes you are more alive and when you are more alive you feel happy. If you  love someone, then you become more alive, when you encounter nature you are more alive, when you are on a mountain you become  more alive. With a woman you feel more alive. With a man you feel less alive because nothing is pulling you out. You are enclosed, the opposite energy pulls you out. When we use the word soul we mean total aliveness: total aliveness not with someone else but with yourself. The ocean is not there but you become oceanic, the beloved is not there and you are just love and nothing else. If you begin to love, or if you can be happy without a reason, then you are a soul, not a body. You are groping in the dark with an ego because you have no soul. The moment you have become totally alive the ego is just lost. Religion says Whatever you do, something in the very foundation of existence will remain unknowable – a mystery. Science is going to destroy the whole meaning of life. If there is no mystery, the whole meaning and beauty of life is destroyed. The unknowable is the beauty, the meaning, the aspiration, the goal. When everything is known, then everything is flat. To penetrate the unknowable is possible, but to explain it is not. The feeling is possible, the explanation is not. Let reason work in its own field, but remember continuously that there are deeper realms which reason cannot understand and higher realms that reason is incapable of conceiving. Each type of duality is mental.. Awareness is non dual, so awareness means the state of “no mind”. Satori happens to almost everyone. And this happening is the source of all spiritual seeking. Psychologists agree that the whole concept of spiritual seeking comes from the blissful experience in the mother’s womb. There is not even a single ray of tension. There is no worry, nothing to do. You do not even have to breathe, your mother breathes for you. You exist exactly as it is interpreted that one exists when Moksha is achieved. Everything just is...and to be is blissful. Nothing has to be done to achieve it. Satori becomes a promise that leads you toward Samadhi. Conservation of energy is always blissful. Wastage of energy is only a relief, it is not blissful. You have unburdened yourself, you have alleviated something that was troubling you. The feeling of emptiness that is overtaking the whole Western mind is just because of sexual wastage. Life seems to be empty, because you have been simply unburdening yourself. If something is conserved it becomes a richness: if your upward door is open and energy is goes upward, not only do you feel relieved, not only is the straining point relieved, but now it is not vacant. It is overflowing. The petals of the Saharar are just a symbol for the feelings that occur when energy overflows. The overflowing is a flowering, just like a flower it is an overflowing. It is just a feeling but the feeling corresponds to the truth. Thought itself is energy. In the mental body the energy manifests as the coming of thought and the going of thought. The happiness of being a leader, of being a public man, a crowd watched personality, is because of the feeling of vitality that comes through people’s observation. Consciousness is the eye of the soul. Aloneness is the presence of oneself. When you see someone beautiful, lovely, someone who is your beloved, and you want to touch her, touch with the outgoing breath and you will feel nothing. but touch her with the ingoing breath and you will feel a fascination. A child who has been raised without a mother or who has not been touched and fondled by his mother is lacking something. The mother’s touch is food for the child.