MEDITATION TECHNIQUES : THE ART OF ECSTASY (1-2)

                          MEDITATION 

Meditation: The Art of Ecstasy 

We train a child to focus his mind, to concentrate, because without concentration he will not be able to cope with life. Life requires it; the mind must be able to concentrate. But the moment the mind becomes able to concentrate, it becomes less aware. Awareness means a mind that is conscious but not focused. Awareness is a consciousness of all that is happening. Concentration is a choice. It excludes all except its object of concentration; it is a narrowing. If you are walking on the street, you will have to narrow your consciousness in order to walk. You cannot ordinarily be aware of all that is happening because if you are aware of everything that is happening you will become unfocused. So concentration is a need. Concentration of the mind is a need in order to live--to survive and exist. That is why every culture, in its own way, tries to narrow the mind of the child. Children, as they are, are never focused; their consciousness is open from all sides. Everything is coming in, nothing is being excluded. The child is open to every sensation, every sensation is included in his consciousness. And so much is coming in! That is why he is so wavering, so unstable. A child's unconditioned mind is a flux--a flux of sensations--but he will not be able to survive with this type of mind. He must learn how to narrow his mind, to concentrate. 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; no one is responsible for it. As life exists, it is needed, but it is not enough. It is utilitarian, but just to survive is not enough; just to be utilitarian is not enough. So when you become utilitarian and the consciousness is narrowed, you deny your mind much of which it was capable. You are not using the total mind, you are using a very small part of it. And the remaining -- the major portion -- will become unconscious. In fact, there is no boundary between conscious and unconscious. These are not two minds. "Conscious mind" means that part of the mind that has been used in the narrowing process. "Unconscious mind" means that portion that has been neglected, ignored, closed. This creates a division, a split. The greater portion of your mind becomes alien to you. You become alienated from your own self; you become a stranger to your own totality. A small part is being identified as your self and the rest is lost. But the remaining unconscious part is always there as unused potentiality, unused possibilities, unlived adventures. This unconscious mind--this potential, this unused mind--will always be in a fight with the conscious mind; that is why there is always a conflict within. Everyone is in conflict because of this split between the unconscious and the conscious. But only if the potential, the unconscious, is allowed to flower can you feel the bliss of existence; otherwise not. If the major portion of your potentialities remains unfulfilled, your life will be a frustration. That is why the more utilitarian a person is, the less he is fulfilled, the less he is blissful. The more utilitarian the approach-- the more one is in business life--the less he is living, the less he is ecstatic. The part of the mind that cannot be made useful in the utilitarian world has been denied. The utilitarian life is necessary but at a great cost: you have lost the festivity of life. Life becomes a festivity, a celebration, if all your potentialities come to a flowering; then life is a ceremony. That is why I always say that religion means transforming life into a celebration. The dimension of religion is the dimension of the festive, the nonutilitarian. The utilitarian mind must not be taken as the whole. The remaining, the greater--the whole mind--should not be sacrificed to it. The utilitarian mind must not become the end. It will have to remain there, but as a means. The other--the remaining, the greater, the potential--must become the end. That is what I mean by a religious approach. With a nonreligious approach, the businesslike mind, the utilitarian, becomes the end. When this becomes the end, there is no possibility of the unconscious actualizing the potential; the unconscious will be denied. If the utilitarian becomes the end, it means that the servant is playing the role of the master. Intelligence, the narrowing of the mind, is a means toward survival, but not 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 inside 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. The denied part of you, the unconscious part, can become active and creative only if you add a new dimension to your life--the dimension of the festive, the dimension of play. So meditation is not a work, it is a play. Praying is not a business, it is a play. Meditation is not something to be done to achieve some goal--peace, bliss--but something to be enjoyed as an end in itself. The festive dimension is the most important thing to be understood--and we have lost it totally. By festive, I mean the capacity to enjoy, moment to moment, all that comes to you. We have become so conditioned and habits have become so mechanical that even when there is no business to be done, our minds are businesslike. When no narrowing is needed, you are narrowed. Even when you are playing, you are not playing, you are not enjoying it. Even when you are playing cards, you are not enjoying it. You play for the victory and then the play becomes a work; then what is going on is not important, only the result. 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. Whenever you are in celebration, the limits, the narrowing limits are broken. They are not needed, they are thrown. You come out of your straitjacket, the narrowing jacket of concentration. Now you are not choosing; everything that comes, you allow. And the moment you allow the total existence to come in, you become one with it. There is a communion. This communion--this celebration, this choiceless awareness, this nonbusinesslike attitude--I call meditation. The festivity is in the moment, in the act, not in the bothering about the results, not in achieving something. There is nothing to be achieved, so you can enjoy that which is here and now. You can explain it in this way: I am talking to you; if I am concerned about the result, then the talk becomes a business, it becomes a work. But if I talk to you without any expectations, without any desire about the result, then the talk becomes a play. The very act, in itself, is the end. Then narrowing is not needed. I can play with the words, I can play with the thoughts. I can play with your question, I can play with my answer; then it is not serious, then it is lighthearted. And if you are listening to me without thinking about getting something out of it, then you can be relaxed; then you can allow me to be in communion with you and your consciousness will not be narrowed. Then it is open-- playing, enjoying. Any moment can be a business moment, any moment can be a meditative moment; the difference is in the attitude. If it is choiceless, if you are playing with it, it is meditative. There are social needs and there are existential needs that are to be fulfilled. I will not say, "Do not condition children." If you leave them totally unconditioned, they will be barbaric. They will not be able to exist. 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. You can put them on, go out and do your business, and then come home and take them off. Then you are. If you are not identified with your clothes, with your conditioning, if you do not say, for example, "I am my mind," it is not difficult; then you can change easily. But you become identified with your conditioning. You say, "My conditioning is me," and all that is not your conditioning is denied. You think, "All that is not conditioned is not me, the unconscious is not me; I am the conscious, the focused mind." This identification is dangerous. This should not be. A proper education is not conditioned, but is conditioned with the condition that conditioning is a utilitarian need; you must be able to take it on and off. When it is needed you put it on, and when you do not need it you can take it off. Until it is possible to educate human beings so that they do not become identified with their conditionings, human beings are not really human beings. They are robots -- conditioned, narrowed. To understand this is to become aware of that part of the mind, the greater part, which has been denied light. And to become aware of it is to become aware that you are not the conscious mind. The conscious mind is just a part. "I" am both, and the greater part is unconditioned. But it is always there, waiting. My definition of meditation is that it is simply an effort to jump into the unconscious. You cannot jump by calculation because all calculation is of the conscious and the conscious mind will not allow it. It will caution:

"You will go mad. Do not do it." The conscious mind is always afraid of the unconscious because if the unconscious emerges, all that is calm and clear in the conscious will be swept away. Then everything will be dark, as in a forest. It is like this: you have made a garden, a garden with a boundary. Very little ground has been cleared, but you have planted some flowers and everything is okay--ordered, clear. Only, the forest is always nearby. It is unruly, uncontrollable, and the garden is in constant fear of it. At any moment the forest can enter and then the garden will disappear. In the same way, you have cultivated a part of your mind. You have made everything clear. But the unconscious is always around, and the conscious mind is always in fear of it. The conscious mind says, "Don't go into the unconscious. Don't look at it, don't think about it." The path of the unconscious is dark and unknown. To reason, it will look irrational; to logic, it will look illogical. So if you think in order to go into meditation, you will never go--because the thinking part will not allow you to. This becomes a dilemma. You cannot do anything without thinking, and with thinking you cannot go into meditation. What to do? Even if you think, "I am not going to think," this is also thinking. It is the thinking part of the mind that is saying, "I shall not allow thinking." Meditation cannot be done by thinking; this is the dilemma--the greatest dilemma. Every seeker will have to come to this dilemma; somewhere, sometime, the dilemma will be there. Those who know say, "Jump! Do not think!" But you cannot do anything without thinking. That is why unnecessary devices have been created--I say unnecessary devices, because if you jump without thinking, no device is needed. But you cannot jump without thinking, so a device is needed. You can think about the device, your thinking mind can be put at ease about the device, but not about meditation. Meditation will be a jump into the unknown. You can work with a device and the device will automatically push you into the unknown. The device is necessary only because of the training of the mind; otherwise, it is not needed. Once you have jumped you will say, "The device was not necessary, it was not needed." But this is a retrospective knowing; you will know afterward that the device was not needed. That is what Krishnamurti is saying: "No device is needed; no method is needed." The Zen teachers are saying, "No effort is needed; it is effortless." But this is absurd for one who has not crossed the barrier. And one is mainly talking with those who have not crossed the barrier. So I say that a device is artificial. It is just a trick to put your rational mind at ease so that you can be pushed into the unknown. That is why I use vigorous methods. The more vigorous the method, the less your calculative mind will be needed. The more vigorous it becomes, the more total, because vitality is not only of the mind--it is of the body, of the emotions. It is of your full being. Sufi dervishes have used dance as a technique, as a device. If you go into dance you cannot remain intellectual, because dance is an arduous phenomenon; your whole being is needed in it. And a moment is bound to come when dance will become mindless. The more vital, the more vigorous, the more you are in it, the less reason will be there. So dance was devised as a technique to push. At some point you will not be dancing, but the dance will take over, will take you over; you will be swept away to the unknown source. Zen teachers have used the koan method. Koans are puzzles that by their very nature are absurd. They cannot be solved by reason; you cannot think about them. Ostensibly, it looks as if something can be thought about them; that is the catch. It seems as if something can be thought about koans, so you begin to think. Your rational mind is put at ease; something has been given to it to be solved. But the thing given to it is something that cannot be solved. The very nature of it is such that it cannot be solved because the very nature of it is absurd. There are hundreds of puzzles. The teacher will say, "Think about a soundless sound." Verbally, it seems as though it can be thought about. If you try hard, somehow, somewhere, a soundless sound can be found; it may be possible. Then, at a certain point-- and that point cannot be predicted; it is not the same for everyone--the mind just goes flat. It is not there. You are, but the mind, with all its conditioning, is gone. You are just like a child. Conditioning is not there, you are just conscious; the narrowing concentration is not there. Now you know that the device was not necessary--but this is an afterthought, it should not be said beforehand. No method is causal; no method is the cause of meditation. That is why so many methods are possible. Every method is just a device, but every religion says that its method is the way and no other method will do. They all think in terms of causality. By heating water, the water evaporates. Heat is the cause: without the heat, the water will not evaporate. This is causal. Heat is a necessity that must precede evaporation. But meditation is not causal, so any method is possible. Every method is just a device; it is just creating a situation for the happening; it is not causing it. For example, beyond the boundary of this room is the unbound, open sky. You have never seen it. I can talk with you about the sky, about the freshness, about the sea, about all that is beyond this room, but you have not seen it. You do not know about it. You just laugh; you think I am making it up. You say, "It is all fantastic. You are a dreamer." I cannot convince you to go outside because everything that I can talk about is meaningless to you. Then I say, "The house is on fire!" This is meaningful to you; this is something that you can understand. Now I do not have to give you any explanations. I just run; you follow me. The house is not on fire, but the moment you are outside you don't have to ask me why I lied. The meaning is there; the sky is there. Now you thank me. Any lie will do. The lie was just a device; it was just a device to bring you outside. It did not cause the outside to be there. 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. Old devices become flat, an old lie becomes flat, and new ones are needed. You have been told so many times that the house is on fire when it is not, that the lie has become useless. Now someone has to create a new device. If something is the cause of something else, it is never useless. But an old device is always useless; new devices are needed. That is why every new prophet will have to struggle with the old prophets. He is doing the same work that they are doing, but he will have to oppose their teachings because he will have to deny old devices that have become flat and meaningless. All the great ones--Buddha, Christ, Mahavira--have, out of compassion, created great lies just to push you out of the house. If you can be pushed out of your mind through any device, that is all that is needed. Your mind is the imprisonment, your mind is fatal; it is the slavery. As I have said, this dilemma is bound to happen--the nature of life is such. You will have to learn to narrow the mind. This narrowing will be helpful when you move outward, but it will be fatal inside. It will be utilitarian with others; it will be suicidal with oneself. You have to exist with others and with yourself. Any life that is one-sided is crippled. You must exist among others with a conditioned mind, but you must exist with yourself with a totally unconditioned consciousness. Society creates a narrowed consciousness, but consciousness itself means expansion; it is unlimited. Both are needs, and both should be fulfilled. I call a person wise who can fulfill both needs. Either extreme is unwise; either extreme is harmful. So live in the world with the mind, with your conditioning, but live with yourself without mind, without training. Use your mind as a means, do not make it an end; come out of it the moment you have the opportunity. The moment you are alone, come out of it, take it off. Then celebrate the moment; celebrate the existence itself, being itself. Just to be is such a great celebration if you know how to take the conditioning off. This "taking off" you will learn through Dynamic Meditation. It will not be caused; it will come to you uncaused. Meditation will create a situation in which you will come to the unknown; by and by you will be pushed from your habitual, mechanical, robotlike personality.

Be courageous: practice Dynamic Meditation vigorously and all else will follow. It will not be your doing, it will be a happening. You cannot bring the divine, but you can hinder its coming. You cannot bring the sun into the house, but you can close the door. Negatively, mind can do much; positively, nothing. Everything positive is a gift, everything positive is a blessing; it comes to you, while everything negative is your own doing. Meditation, and all meditation devices, can do one thing: push you away from your negative hindrances. It can bring you out of the imprisonment that is the mind, and when you have come out you will laugh. It was so easy to come out, it was right there. Only one step was needed. But we go on in a circle and the one step is always missed... the one step that can bring you to the center. You go on in a circle on the periphery, repeating the same thing; somewhere the continuity must be broken. That is all that can be done by any meditation method. If the continuity is broken, if you become discontinuous with your past, then that very moment is the explosion! In that very moment you are centered, centered in your being, and then you know all that has always been yours, all that has just been awaiting you. 

Meditation: The Art of Ecstasy

 Chapter #1 

Chapter title: Yoga: the Growth of Consciousness 

  The purpose of life is to become conscious. It is not only the purpose of yoga; the very evolution of life itself is to become more and more conscious. But yoga means something still more. The evolution of life is to become more and more conscious, but the consciousness is always other oriented: you are conscious of some thing, some object. Yoga means to be evolving in the dimension where there is no object and only consciousness remains. Yoga is the method of evolving toward pure consciousness; not being conscious of something, but being consciousness itself. When you are conscious of something, you are not conscious of being conscious. Your consciousness has become focused on something; your attention is not at the source of consciousness itself. In yoga the effort is to become conscious of both the object and the source. The consciousness becomes double arrowed. You must be aware of the object, and you must be simultaneously aware of the subject. Consciousness must become a double arrowed bridge. The subject must not be lost, it must not become forgotten when you are focused on the object. This is the first step in yoga. The second step is to drop both the subject and the object and just be conscious. This pure consciousness is the aim of yoga. Even without yoga man grows toward becoming more and more conscious, but yoga adds something, contributes something, to this evolution of consciousness. It changes many things and transforms many things. The first transformation is a double-arrowed awareness, remembering yourself at the very moment that there is something else to be conscious of. The dilemma is this: either you are conscious of some object or you are unconscious. If there are no outside objects, you fall into a sleep; objects are needed in order for you to be conscious. When you are totally unoccupied you feel sleepy -- you need some object to be conscious of -- but when you have too many objects to be conscious of, you may feel a certain sleeplessness. That is why a person who is too 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. And this is how we exist. With new objects you become more conscious. That is why there is a lust for the new, a longing for the new. The old becomes boring. The moment you have lived with some object for a while, you become unconscious of it. You have accepted it, now your attention is not needed; you become bored. For example, you may not have been conscious of your wife for years because you have taken her for granted. You no longer see her face, you can't remember the color of her eyes; for years you have not really been attentive. Only when she dies will you again become aware that she was there. That is why wives and husbands become bored. Any object that is not calling your attention continuously creates boredom. In the same way, a mantra, a repeated sound vibration, causes deep sleep. When a particular mantra is being repeated continuously, you are bored. There is nothing mysterious about it. Constantly repeating a particular word bores you, you cannot live with it anymore. Now you will begin to feel sleepy, you will go into a sort of sleep; you will become unconscious. The whole method of hypnosis, in fact, depends upon boredom. If your mind can be bored with something then you go into a sleep, sleep can be induced. Our whole consciousness depends on new objects. That is why there is so much longing for the new -- for new sensations, a new dress, a new house -- for anything that is new, even if it is not better. With something different, you feel a sudden upsurge of consciousness. Because life is an evolution of consciousness -- this is good. As far as life is concerned, it is good. If a society is longing for new sensations, life progresses, but if it settles down with the old, not asking for the new, it becomes dead; consciousness cannot evolve. For example, in the East we try to be content with things as they are. This creates a boredom because nothing is ever new. Then for centuries everything goes on continuously as it is. You are just bored. Of course, you can sleep better -- the West cannot sleep; insomnia is bound to exist when you are constantly asking for the new -- but there is no evolution. And these are the two things that seem to happen: either the whole society becomes sleepy and dead, as has happened in the East, or else the society becomes sleepless, as has happened in the West. Neither is good. You need a mind that can be aware even when there are no new objects. Really, you need a consciousness that is not bound with the new, not bound with the object. If it is bound with the object, it is going to be bound with the new. You need a consciousness that is not bound with the object at all, which is beyond object. Then you have freedom: you can go to sleep when you like, and you can be awake when you like; no object is needed to help you. You become free, really free, from the objective world. The moment you are beyond object you go beyond subject also, because they both exist co-jointly. Really, subjectivity and objectivity are two poles of one thing. When there is an object you are a subject, but if you can be aware without the object, there is no subject, no self. This is to be understood very deeply: when the object is lost and you can be conscious without objects -- just conscious -- then the subject is also lost. It cannot remain there. It cannot! Both are lost, and there is simply consciousness, unbounded consciousness. Now there are no boundaries. Neither the object is the boundary nor the subject. Buddha used to say that when you are in meditation there is no self, no atman, because the very awareness of one's self isolates you from everything else. If you are still there, objects are still there. "I am," but "I" cannot exist in total loneliness; "I" exists in relationship with the outside world. "I" is a relata. Then the self, the "I am," is just something inside you that exists in relationship to something outside. But if the outside is not there this inside dissolves; then there is simple, spontaneous consciousness. This is what yoga is for, this is what yoga means. Yoga is the science of freeing yourself from subject and object boundaries, and unless you are free from these boundaries, you will fall into either the unbalance of the East or the unbalance of the West. If you want contentment, peace of mind, silence, sleep, then it is good to remain with the same objects continuously. For centuries and centuries there should be no visible change. Then you are at ease, you can sleep better, but this is nothing spiritual; you lose much. The very urge to grow is lost, the very urge for adventure is lost, the very urge to inquire and to find is lost. Really, you begin to vegetate, you become stagnant. If you change this, then you become dynamic but also diseased: you become dynamic but tense, dynamic but mad. You begin to find the new, to inquire for the new, but you are in a whirlwind. The new begins to happen, but you are lost. If you lose your objectivity, you become too subjective and dreamy, but if you become too obsessed with objects, you lose the subjective. Both situations are unbalanced. The East has tried one; the West has tried the other. And now the East is turning Western and the West is turning Eastern. In the East the attraction is for Western technology, Western science, Western rationalism. Einstein, Aristotle, and Russell have taken hold of the Eastern mind, while in the West quite the opposite is happening: Buddha, zen and yoga have become more significant. This is a miracle. The East is turning communist, Marxist, materialist, and the West is beginning to think in terms of expanding consciousness -- meditation, spirituality, ecstasy. The wheel can turn and we can change our burdens. It will be illuminating for a moment, but then the whole nonsense will begin again. The East has failed in one way and the West has failed in another way, because they both tried denying one part of the mind. You have to transcend both parts and not be concerned with one while denying the other. Mind is a totality; you can either transcend it totally or you cannot transcend it. If you go on denying one part, the denied part will take its revenge. And, really, the denied part in the East is taking its revenge in the East, and the denied part in the West is taking its revenge in the West. You can never go beyond the denied; it is there, and it goes on gathering more and more strength. The very moment when the part you have accepted succeeds is the moment of failure. Nothing fails like success. With any partial success -- with the success of one part of you -- you are bound to go into deeper failure. That which you have gained becomes unconscious and that which you have lost comes into awareness. Absence is felt more. If you lose a tooth, your tongue becomes aware of the absence and goes to the absent tooth. It has never gone there before -- never -- but now you can't stop it; it continually moves to the vacant place to feel the tooth that is not there. In the same way, when one part of the mind succeeds, you become aware of the failure of the other part -- the part that could have been and is not. Now the East has become conscious of the foolishness of not being scientific: it is the reason why we are poor, it is the reason why we are "no one." This absence is being felt now and the East has begun to turn Western, while the West is feeling its own foolishness, its lack of integration.

Yoga means a total science of man. It is not simply religion. It is the total science of man, the total transcendence of all the parts. And when you transcend parts, you become whole. The whole is not just an accumulation of the parts; it is not a mechanical thing in which all the parts are put in alignment and then there is a whole. No, it is more than a mechanical thing; it is like something artistic. You can divide a poem into words but then the words mean nothing, and when the whole is there, it is more than words; it has its own identity. It has gaps as well as words, and sometimes gaps are more meaningful than words. A poem becomes poetry only when it says something that has not really been said, when something about it transcends all the parts. If you divide and analyze it, then you have only the parts, and the transcendental flower that was really the thing is lost. So consciousness is a wholeness. By denying a part you lose something -- something that was really significant. And you gain nothing; you gain only extremes. Every extreme becomes a disease, every extreme becomes an illness inside, then you go on and on in turmoil; there is an inner anarchy. Yoga is the science of transcending anarchy, the science of making your consciousness whole -- and you become whole only when you transcend parts. So yoga is neither religion nor science. It is both. Or, it transcends both. You can say it is a scientific religion or a religious science. That is why yoga can be used by anyone belonging to any religion; it can be used by anyone with any type of mind. In India, all the religions that have developed have very different -- in fact, antagonistic -- philosophies, concepts, perceptions. They have nothing in common. Between Hinduism and Jainism there is nothing in common; between Hinduism and Buddhism there is nothing in common. There is only one common thing that none of these religions can deny: yoga. Buddha says, "There is no body, there is no soul," but he cannot say, "There is no yoga." Mahavira says, "There is no body, but there is a soul," but he cannot say, "There is no yoga." Hinduism says, "There is body, there is soul -- and there is yoga." Yoga remains constant. Even Christianity cannot deny it; even Mohammedanism cannot deny it. In fact, even someone who is totally atheistically oriented cannot deny yoga because yoga doesn't make it a precondition to believe in God. Yoga has no preconditions; yoga is absolutely experiential. When the concept of God is mentioned -- and in the most ancient yoga books it was never mentioned at all -- it is mentioned only as a method. It can be used as a hypothesis -- if it is helpful to someone it can be used -- but it is not an absolute condition. That is why Buddha can be a yogi without God, without the Vedas, without any belief. Without any faith, any so-called faith, he can be a yogi. So for theists, or even for an atheist, yoga can become a common ground. It can become a bridge between science and religion. It is rational and irrational simultaneously. The methodology is totally rational, but through the methodology you move deep into the mystery of the irrational. The whole process is so rational -- every step is so rational, so scientific, it is so logical -- that you just have to do it and everything else follows. Jung mentions that in the nineteenth century no Westerner concerned with psychology could conceive of anything beyond the conscious mind or below the conscious mind, because mind means consciousness. So how can there be an unconscious mind? It is absurd, non-scientific. Then, in the twentieth century, as science learned more about the unconscious, a theory of the unconscious mind developed. Then, when they went even deeper, they had to accept the idea of a collective unconscious, not only an individual one. It looked absurd -- mind means something individual, so how could there be a collective mind -- but now they have even accepted the concept of the collective mind. These are the first three divisions of Buddhist psychology, of Buddhist yoga -- the first three. Then Buddha goes on dividing into one hundred and sixty more divisions. Jung says, "Before we denied these three, now we accept them. It may be that others also exist. We have only to proceed step by step, we have only to go into it further." Jung's approach is very rational, one deeply rooted in the West. 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 more than this. The manifestation must be less than the source. A rational mind can feel and understand the manifested, but the unmanifested remains behind. Yoga does not insist that one must be rational. It says, "It is rational to conceive of something irrational. It is rational, really, to conceive of the boundaries of the rational." A true, authentic mind always knows the limitations of reason, always knows that reason ends somewhere. 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. Einstein felt it; Wittgenstein felt it. Wittgenstein's TRACTATUS is one of the most rational books ever written; he is one of the most rationalistic minds. He goes on talking about existence in a very logical way, a very rational way. His expressions -- words, language, everything -- is rational, but then he says, "There are some things about which, there is a point beyond which, nothing can be said, and I must remain silent about it." Then he writes, "That which cannot be said must not be said." The whole edifice falls: the whole edifice! Wittgenstein was trying to be rational about the entire phenomenon of life and existence, and then suddenly a point comes and he says, "Now, beyond this point, nothing can be said." This says something -- something very significant. Something is there now and nothing can be said about it. Now there is a point that cannot be defined, where all definitions simply fall down. Whenever there has been an authentic, logical mind, it comes to this point. Einstein died a mystic -- and more of a mystic than your so-called mystics, because if you are a mystic without ever having tried to follow the path of reason you can never be deep in mysticism. You have not really known the boundaries. I have seen mystics who go on talking about God as a logical concept, as an argument. 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. One who has experienced something of the divine will not try to prove it because the very effort to prove shows that one has never been in contact with the original source of life -- which is unprovable, which cannot be proved. The whole cannot be proved by the part. For example, my hand cannot prove my existence. My hand cannot be more than me; it cannot cover me. It is foolishness to try. But if the hand can cover itself completely, it is more than enough; the moment the hand knows itself, it also knows that it is rooted in something more, that it is constantly one with something more. It is there because that "more" is also there. If I die, my hand will also die; it only existed because of me. The whole remains unproved; only the parts are known. We cannot prove the whole, but we can feel it; the hand cannot prove me, but the hand can feel me. It can go deep inside itself, and when it reaches the depths, it is me. The so-called mystics who are annoyed with reason are not real mystics. 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. So-called mystics and religious people who are afraid of reason, of logic, of argument, are really afraid of themselves. Any argument against them may create inner doubts; it may help their inner doubts to emerge. They are afraid of themselves. The Christian mystic Tertullian says, "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: "It is impossible; that is why I believe." If it is possible, then there is no need to believe. It becomes just a concept, an ordinary concept. This is what mystics have always meant by faith, by belief. It is not something intellectual, it is not a concept; it is a jump into the impossible. But you can only jump into the mysterious from the edge of reason, never before. How can you do it before? You can jump only when you have stretched reason to its logical extremes. You have come to a point that reason cannot go beyond, and the beyond remains. Now you know that reason cannot take a single step further and yet the "further" remains. Even if you decide to remain with reason, a boundary is created. You know that existence is beyond the boundary of reason, so even if you do not go beyond this boundary, you become a mystic. Even if you do not take the jump you become a mystic because you have known something, you have encountered something that was not rational at all. All that reason can know you have known. Now something is encountered that reason cannot know. If you take the jump, you have to leave reason behind; you cannot take the jump with reason itself. This is what faith is. Faith is not against reason; it is beyond it. It is not antirational; it is irrational. Yoga is the method of bringing you to the extreme limit of reason -- and not only a method to bring you to the extreme, but also a method to take the jump. How to take the jump? Einstein, for example, would have flowered like a Buddha if he had known something about meditative methods. He was just on the verge, many times in his life he came to the point from which a jump was possible.

But again and again he missed: he was entangled, again, in reason. And in the end, he was frustrated by his whole life of reason. The same thing could have happened with Buddha. He also had a very rational mind, but there was something possible for him, a method that could be used. Not only does reason have its methods, irrationality also has methods. Reason has its own methods; irrationality has its own methods. Yoga is ultimately concerned with irrational methods; only in the beginning can rational methods be used. They are just to persuade you, to push you, to persuade your reason to move toward the limit. And if you have come to the limit, you will take the ultimate jump. Gurdjieff worked with a certain group on some deep, irrational methods. He was working with a group of seekers and using a particular irrational method. He used to call it a Stop Exercise. For example, you would be with him and suddenly he would say, "Stop!" Then everyone had to stop as he is -- totally stop. If the hand was in a certain place, the hand must stop there. If the eyes were open, they would have to remain open; if the mouth was open -- you were just about to say something -- the mouth would have to remain as it was. No movement! This method begins with the body. If there is no movement in the body, suddenly there is no movement in the mind. The two are associated: you cannot move your body without some inner movement of the mind, and you cannot stop your body totally without stopping the inner movement of the mind. 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. Seekers were practicing this Stop Exercise continually for one month. One day Gurdjieff was in his tent and three seekers were walking through a dry canal that was on the grounds. It was a dry canal; no water was flowing in it. Suddenly, from his tent, Gurdjieff cried, "Stop!" Everyone on the bank of the canal stopped. The three who were in the canal also stopped. It was dry, so there was no problem. Then suddenly there was an onrush of water. Someone had opened the water supply and water rushed into the canal. When it had come up to the necks of the three, one of them jumped out of the canal thinking, "Gurdjieff does not know what is happening. He is in his tent and he is unaware of the fact that water has come into the canal." The man thought, "I must jump out. Now it is irrational to be here," and he jumped out. The other two remained in the canal as the water became higher and higher. Finally it reached their noses and the second man thought, "This is the limit! I have not come here to die. I have come here to know eternal life, not to lose this one," and he jumped out of the canal. The third man remained. The same problem faced him, too, but he decided to remain because Gurdjieff had said that this was an irrational exercise and if it was done with reason, the whole thing would be destroyed. He thought, "Okay, I accept death, but I cannot stop this exercise," and he remained there. Now water was flowing above his head. Gurdjieff jumped out of his tent and into the canal and brought him out. He was just on the verge of death. But when he revived, he was a transformed man. He was not the same one who was standing and doing the exercise; he was transformed totally. He had known something; he had taken the jump. Where is the limit? If you continue with reason, you may miss. You go on falling back. Sometimes one has to suddenly take a step that leads you beyond. That step becomes a transformation; the division is transcended. Whether you say that this division is between the conscious and the unconscious, between reason and nonreason, science and religion, or East and West -- division must be transcended. That is what yoga is: a transcendence. Then you can come back to reason, but you will be transformed. You can even reason things out, but you will be beyond reason.

 Meditation: The Art of Ecstasy 

Chapter #2 

Chapter title: Non-Doing Through Doing

 Meditation is always passive; the very essence of it is passive. It cannot be active because the very nature of it is non-doing. If you are doing something, your very doing disturbs the whole thing; your very doing, your very "activeness," creates the disturbance. Non-doing is meditation, but when I say non-doing is meditation I do not mean that you need not do anything. Even to achieve this non-doing, one has to do much. But this doing is not meditation. It is only a stepping stone, only a jumping board. All "doing" is just a jumping board, not meditation. You are just on the door, on the steps.... The door is non-doing, but to reach the nondoing state of mind one has to do much. But one should not confuse this doing with meditation. Life energy works in contradictions. Life exists as a dialectic: it is not a simple movement. It is not flowing like a river, it is dialectical. With each move life creates its own opposite and through the struggle with the opposite, it moves forward. With each new movement the thesis creates the antithesis. And this goes on continuously: thesis creating antithesis, being merged with antithesis, and becoming a synthesis that then becomes the new thesis; then again, there is the antithesis. By a dialectical movement, I mean it is not a simple straight movement; it is a movement divided unto itself, dividing itself, creating the opposite, then meeting with the opposite again. Then, again, dividing into the opposite. And the same thing applies to meditation, because it is the deepest thing in life. If I say to you, "Just relax," it is impossible because you do not know what to do. So many pseudo teachers of relaxation continue saying, "Just relax. Don't do anything; just relax." Then what are you going to do? You can just lie down, but that is not relaxation. The whole inner turmoil remains, and now a new conflict is there - to relax. Something over and above is added. The whole nonsense is there, the whole turmoil is there, with something added - to relax. A new tension is now added to all the old tensions. So a person who is trying to live a relaxed life is the most tense person possible. He is bound to be because he has not understood the dialectical flow of life. He is thinking that life is a straight flow; you can just tell yourself to relax and you will relax. It is not possible. So if you come to me, I will never tell you to just relax. First be tense, as utterly tense as possible. Be tense totally! First let your complete organism be tense, and go on being tense to the optimum, to your fullest possibility. And then, suddenly, you will feel a relaxation setting in. You have done whatsoever you could do, now the life energy will create the opposite. You have brought tension to a peak. Now there is nothing further; you cannot go on. The whole energy has been devoted to tension, but you cannot continue with this tension indefinitely; it has to dissolve. Soon it will begin to dissolve; now be a witness to it. Through being tense you have come to the verge, to the jumping point; that is why you cannot continue. If you continue further, you may just burst and die. The optimum point has been reached, now the life energy will relax by itself. It relaxes. Now be aware and see this relaxation setting in. Each limb of the body, each muscle of the body, each nerve of the body is just going to innocently relax without anything being done on your part. You are not doing anything to relax it; it is relaxing. You will begin to feel many points in the organism relaxing. The whole organism will just be a crowd of relaxing points. Just be aware. This awareness is meditation. But it is a nondoing; you are not doing anything because being aware is not an act. It is not an act at all; it is your nature, a very intrinsic quality of your being. You are awareness. It is your unawareness that is your achievement, and you have achieved it with much effort. So to me, meditation has two steps: first, the active, which is not really meditation at all, and second, the completely nonactive, the passive awareness that is really meditation. Awareness is always passive, and the moment you become active you lose your awareness. It is possible to be active and aware only when awareness has come to such a point that now there is no need of meditation to achieve it, or to know it, or to feel it. When meditation has become useless, you simply throw meditation. Now you are aware. Only then can you be both aware and active, otherwise not. As long as meditation is still needed, you will not be able to be aware during activity. But when even meditation is not needed.... 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. Now you are never the actor: you are always a witnessing consciousness. Consciousness is passive... and meditation is bound to be passive, because it is just a door to consciousness, perfect consciousness. So when people talk about "active" meditation, they are wrong. Meditation is passivity. You may need some activity, some doing, to get to it - that can be understood - but this is not because meditation itself is active. Rather, it is because you have been active through so many lives, activity has become so much a part and parcel of your mind, that you will even need activity to reach nonactivity. You have been so involved in activity that you cannot just drop it. So persons like Krishnamurti may continue to say, "Just drop it," but then you will continue to ask how to drop it. He will say, "Do not ask how. I am saying: just drop it! There is no 'how' to it. There is no need for any 'how'." And he is right in a way. Passive awareness or passive meditation has no "how" about it. It cannot have, because if there is any "how" then it cannot be passive. But he is wrong, too, because he has not taken the listener into account. He is talking about himself. Meditation is without any "how," without any technology, without any technique.

So Krishnamurti is absolutely correct, but the listener has not been taken into account. The listener has nothing but activity in him; to him everything is activity. So when you say, "Meditation is passive, nonactive, choiceless; you can just be in it. There is no need of any effort; it is effortless," you are just speaking a language that the listener is unable to understand. He understands the linguistic part of it - that is what makes it so difficult. He says, "Intellectually, I understand completely. Whatever you are saying is completely understood." But he is unable to understand the meaning. There is nothing mysterious about Krishnamurti's teachings. He is one of the least mystical teachers. Nothing is mysterious; everything is obviously clear, exact, analyzed, logical, rational, so anyone can understand it. And this has become one of the greatest barriers because the listener thinks he understands. He understands the linguistic part but he does not understand the language of passivity. He understands what is being said to him - the words. He listens to them, he understands them, he knows the meaning of those words. He correlates; a whole correlated picture comes to his mind. What is being said is understood; there is an intellectual communication. But he does not understand the language of passivity. He cannot understand. From where he is, he cannot understand. He can understand only the language of action, activity. So I have to talk about activity. And I have to lead you through activity to the point where you can just jump into nonactivity. The activity must come to an extreme point, to a verge point, where it becomes impossible for you to be active - because if activity is still possible, you will continue. Your activity must be exhausted. Whatever you can do, you must be allowed to do. Whatsoever you can do you must be pushed to do it to the very point where you, yourself, cry, "Now I cannot do anything; everything has been done. Now nothing is possible; no effort is possible. I am exhausted." Then I say, "Now, just drop!" This dropping can be communicated. You are on the verge, you are ready to drop; now you can understand the language of passivity. Before this, you could not understand. You were too full of activity. You have never been to the extreme point of activity. Things can be dropped only from the extreme, never from the middle. You cannot drop it. You can drop sex - if you have been totally in it, you can just drop it; otherwise not. You can drop everything that you have gone to the very limit of, where there is no further to go and no reason to go backward. You can drop it because you have known it totally. When you have known something totally, it becomes boring to you. You may want to go into it further, but if there is no further to go, then you will just "stop dead." There is no going back, and there is no possibility of going on further; you are at the point where everything ends. Then you can just drop, you can be passive. And the moment you are passive, meditation happens; it flowers, it comes to you. It is a "dropping dead" into passivity. So to me, it is effort that leads to no effort; it is action that leads to no action; it is mind that leads to meditation; it is this very material world that leads to enlightenment. Life is a dialectical process; its opposite is death. It is to be used, you cannot just drop it. Use it, and you will be thrown into the opposite. And be aware: when you are thrown on the waves, be aware. It is easy. When you come from a tense climax to the point of relaxation, it is very easy to be aware, very easy. It is not difficult then because to be aware you have to just be passive, just be witnessing. Even the effort of witnessing should not be there; it is not needed. You are so exhausted through activity that you will feel, "Damn it all - enough!" Then meditation is, and you are not. And once tasted, the taste is never lost again. It remains with you wherever you move, wherever you go. It remains with you. Then it will penetrate your activities also. There will be activity, and there, in the very center of your being, there will be a passive silence. On the circumference, the whole world; in the center, the Brahman. On the circumference, every activity; in the center, only silence. But a very pregnant silence, not a dead silence, because out of this silence everything is born, even the activity. Out of this silence, every creativity comes; it is very pregnant. So whenever I say "silence," I do not mean the silence of a cemetery, the silence of a house when no one is there. No, I mean the silence of a seed, the silence of a mother's womb, the silence of the roots underground. There is much hidden potentiality that will be coming soon. Activity will be there but now the actor is no more, the doer is no more. This is the search; this is the seeking. There are two antagonistic traditions: yoga and SAMKHYA. Yoga says that nothing can be achieved without effort. The whole of yoga, the whole of Patanjali's yoga, raja yoga, is nothing but effort. And this has been the main current, because effort can be understood by many. Activity can be understood, so yoga has been the main current. But sometimes there have been freaks who say, "Nothing is to be done." A Nagarjuna, a Krishnamurti, a Huang Po - some freaks! They say, "Nothing is to be done. Do not do anything. Do not ask about the method." This is the tradition of samkhya. There are really only two religions in the world: yoga and samkhya. But samkhya has always appealed only to a very few individuals here and there, so it is not talked about much. That is why Krishnamurti appears to be very novel and original. He is not, but he seems to be because samkhya is so unknown. Only yoga is known. There are ashrams and training centers and yogis all over the world. Yoga is known: the tradition of effort. And samkhya is not known at all. Krishnamurti has not said a single word that is new, but because we are not familiar with the tradition of samkhya, it appears to be new. Only because of our blissful ignorance are there revolutionaries. Samkhya means knowledge, knowing. Samkhya says, "Only knowing is enough; only awareness is enough." But these two traditions are just dialectical. To me, they are not opposed. To me, they are dialectical and a synthesis is possible. That synthesis I call effortlessness through effort: yoga through samkhya and samkhya through yoga - non-doing through doing. In this age, neither of these two opposite, dialectical traditions, by itself, will help. You can use yoga to achieve samkhya - and you will have to use yoga to achieve samkhya. If you can understand Hegelian dialectics, this whole thing will be clear to you. The concept of dialectical movement has not been used by anyone since Marx, and he used it in a very non-Hegelian way. He used it for material evolution, for society, for classes, to show how society progresses through classes, through class struggle. Marx said, "Hegel was standing on his head, and I have put him on his legs again." But, actually, the contrary is the case. Hegel was standing on his legs; Marx put him on his head. And because of Marx, the very pregnant concept of dialectics became contaminated with communism. But the concept is very beautiful, very meaningful; it has much depth in it. Hegel says, "The progress of an idea, the progress of consciousness, is dialectical. Consciousness progresses through dialectics." I say any life force progresses through dialectics and meditation is the deepest phenomenon happening, the explosion of the life force. It is deeper than an atomic explosion because in an atomic explosion only a particle of matter explodes, but in meditation a living cell, a living existence, a living being, explodes. This explosion comes through dialectics. So use action, and remember non-action. You will have to do much, but remember that all this doing is just to achieve the state in which nothing is done. Samkhya and yoga both appear simple. Krishnamurti is not difficult; neither is Vivekananda. They are simple, because they have chosen one part of the dialectics; then they appear very consistent. Krishnamurti is very consistent, absolutely consistent. In forty years of talking he has not uttered a single inconsistent word because he has chosen a part of the whole process, the opposite of which is denied. Vivekananda is also consistent: he has chosen the other part. I may look very inconsistent. Or, you can say, I am only consistent in my inconsistencies. Use dialectics: relax through tension - meditate through action. That is why I talk about fasting. It is an action, a very deep action. Taking food is not so great an activity as not taking it. You take it, and then you forget about it; it is not much of an activity. But if you are not taking food, it is a big act; you cannot forget it. The whole body remembers it; each single cell demands it. The whole body gets in a turmoil. It is very active - active to the very core. It is not passive. Dancing is not passive, it is very active. In the end you become movement; the body is forgotten, only movement remains. Really, dancing is a most unearthly thing, a most unearthly art, because it is just rhythm in movement. It is absolutely immaterial so you cannot hold on to it. You can hold on to the dancer, but never to the dancing. It just withers in the cosmos. It is there, and then it is not there; it is not here, and then suddenly it is here - it comes out of nothing and it is here - it comes out of nothing and then, again, goes into nothing. A dancer is sitting here; there is no dancing in him. But if a poet is sitting here, poetry may be in him; poetry can exist in the poet. A painter is here: in a very subtle way, painting is present. Before he paints, painting is there. But with a dancer nothing is present, and if it is present, then he is simply a technician and not a dancer. The movement is a new phenomenon coming in. The dancer becomes just a vehicle: the movement takes over. One of the greatest dancers of this century was Nijinsky, and in the end he just went mad. He may have been the greatest dancer in all of history, but the movement became so much for him that the dancer was lost in it. In his last years he was unable to control it. He could begin dancing at any moment, anywhere, and when he was dancing, no one could say when it would end. It might even continue the whole night. When friends asked him, "What has become of you? You begin, and then there is no end," Nijinsky said, "'I' am only in the beginning. Then something takes over and 'I' am no more - and who dances, I do not know." He went mad. He was in a madhouse; he died in a madhouse. Take any activity and go to the limit where there is either madness or meditation. Lukewarm search will not do.

AHOBHAV WORLD 🙏