TANTRA
Tantra Supreme Understanding 05
Fifth Discourse from the series of 10 discourses - Tantra Supreme Understanding by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
The song continues:
The practice of mantra and paramita, instruction in the sutras and precepts, and teaching from the schools and scriptures, will not bring
realization of the innate truth. For if the mind when filled with some desire should seek a goal, it only hides the light.
He who keeps tantric precepts yet discriminates, betrays the spirit of samaya. Cease all activity, abandon all desire, let thoughts rise and fall as they will like ocean waves. He who never harms the non-abiding nor the principle of non-distinction, upholds the tantric precepts.
He who abandons craving and clings not to this and that, perceives the real meaning given in the scriptures.
The Tantra attitude is the very being of Tilopa. You must understand first what the Tantra attitude is; only then it will be possible for you to comprehend what Tilopa is trying to say. So, something about the Tantra attitude: the first thing, it is not an attitude because Tantra looks at life with a total vision. It has no attitude with which to look at life. It has no concepts; it is not a philosophy. It is not even a religion – it has no theology. It doesn’t believe in words, theories or doctrines. It wants to look at life without any philosophy, without any theory, without any theology. It wants to look at life as it is, without bringing any mind in between because that will be a distortion. The mind then will project, the mind then will mix, and you will not be able to know that which is.
Tantra avoids mind and encounters life face to face, neither thinking “This is good” nor thinking “This is bad,” but simply facing that which is. So it is difficult to say that this is an attitude; in fact it is a no attitude.
The second thing to remember: Tantra is a great yea sayer; it says yes to everything. It has nothing like no in its vocabulary, there is no negation. It never says no to anything because with no the fight starts, with no you become the ego. The moment you say no to anything, you have become the ego already; a conflict has come in, now you are at war.
Tantra loves, and loves unconditionally. It never says no to anything whatsoever – because everything is part of the whole, and everything has its own place in the whole, and the whole cannot exist with anything missing from it.
It is said that if just a drop of water is missing, the whole of existence will thirst. You pluck a flower in the garden, and you have plucked something out of the whole of existence. You harm a flower, and you have harmed millions of stars because everything is interrelated. The whole exists as a whole, as an organic whole. The whole exists not as a mechanical thing – everything is related to everything else.
So Tantra says yes unconditionally. There has never been any other vision of life which says yes without any conditions: simply yes. No disappears; from your very being, no disappears. When there is no no, how can you fight? How can you be at war? You simply float. You simply merge and melt. You become one. The boundaries are no longer there. No creates the boundary. No is the boundary around you. Whenever you say no, watch – immediately something closes in, but your being opens whenever you say yes.
The real atheist is one who goes on saying no to life; his saying no to God is just symbolic. You may believe in God, but if you say no to anything, your belief is not of any worth, your God is hocus-pocus – because only a total yes creates a real God, reveals the real God. When you say a total yes to existence, all of existence is suddenly transformed; then there are no longer rocks, no longer trees, no longer people, rivers, mountains, suddenly everything has become one, and that oneness is God.
A real theist is one who says yes to everything, not only to God – because mind is very cunning. You can say yes to God and no to the world. This has happened. Millions have lost their whole life because of this. They say yes to God and they say no to life. In fact, they think that unless you say no to life, how can you say yes to God? They create a division: they deny the world in order to accept God. But an acceptance that stands on a denial is no acceptance at all. It is false. It is a pretension.
How can you accept the creator without accepting the creation? If you say no to the creation, how can you say yes to the creator? They are one. The creator and the creation are not two things: the creator is the creation. In fact, there is no division between the creator and the creation, it is a continuous process of creativity. At one pole creativity looks like the creator; at the other pole creativity looks like the creation, but they are both poles of the same phenomenon.
Tantra says that if you say yes, you simply say yes; you don’t pose it against some no. But all the religions have done that: they say no to the world and yes to God; and they say no to the world forcibly, so that their yes can become stronger. Many so-called saints have said, “God, we accept you, but we don’t accept your world.” But what type of acceptance is this? Is this acceptance? You are choosing. You are dissecting existence into two. You are putting yourself above God. You say, “This we accept and that we deny.” All renunciation comes out of this.
One who renounces is not a religious person. In the view of Tantra, one who renounces is an egoist. First he was accumulating things of the world, but his attention was on the world. Now he renounces, but his attention is again on the world and he remains the egoist. The ego has subtle ways of fulfilling itself, and coming again and again in spirals. Again and again it comes back, with a new face, with new colors.
It happened…
I was staying in my village and Mulla Nasruddin came to visit me. He, in those days, used to live in New Delhi, the capital, and he was so full of the capital that he was almost blind. I took him to the small fort of my village; he said, “What! You call this a fort? You should come to New Delhi and see the Red Fort. This is nothing!” I took him to the river, and he said, “What! You call this a river? I have never seen such a sick and thin river in my life.” And this happened everywhere.
Then came the full-moon night, and I thought that at least with the full moon he will be happy and not bring in this small village. But no, I was wrong. I took him to the river. It was a beautiful silent evening, and then the moon came up, very big, simply wonderful. And I looked at Nasruddin and said, “Look! What a big moon.”
He looked at the moon, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Not bad for a small village like this.”
This is the mind; it persists, it comes in spirals – again and again to the same thing. You can renounce the world, but you will not become otherworldly; you will remain very worldly. And if you want to check, go to the Indian monks, sadhus. They remain very, very worldly, rooted in the world. They have renounced everything, but their focus is on the world, their focus is on renouncing, their focus is ego-centered, ego-oriented. They may be thinking that by renouncing they are nearing God, no! Nobody has ever reached to the divine by saying no to anything.
This is the vision of Tantra. Tantra says say yes, say yes to everything. You need not fight, you need not even swim – you simply float with the current. The river is going by itself, on its own accord, everything reaches to the ultimate ocean. You simply don’t create any disturbance, you don’t push the river; you simply go with it. That going with it, floating with it, relaxing with it, is Tantra.
If you can say yes, a deep acceptance happens to you. If you say yes, how can you be complaining? How can you be miserable? Then everything is as it should be. You are not fighting, not denying – you accept. And remember, this acceptance is different from ordinary acceptance.
Ordinarily a person accepts a situation when he feels helpless; that is impotent acceptance. That will not lead you anywhere; impotence cannot lead you anywhere. A person accepts a situation when he feels hopeless: “Nothing can be done, so what to do? At least accept, to save face.” Tantra acceptance is not that type of acceptance. It comes out of an over fulfillment, it comes out of a deep contentment – not out of hopelessness, frustration, helplessness. It comes when you don’t say no; it suddenly surfaces in you. Your whole being becomes a deep contentment.
That acceptance has a beauty of its own. It is not forced; you have not practiced for it. If you practice, it will be false; it will be hypocrisy. If you practice, you will be split in two: on the outside it will be acceptance; deep down, the turmoil, the negation, the denial. Deep down you will be boiling up to explode any moment. Just on the surface you will pretend that everything is okay.
Tantra acceptance is total; it doesn’t split you. All the religions of the world, except Tantra, have created split personalities. All the religions of the world, except Tantra, have created schizophrenia. They split you. They make something bad in you and something good. And they say the good has to be achieved and the bad denied, the Devil has to be denied and God accepted. They create a split within you and a fight. Then you are continuously feeling guilty because how can you destroy the part that is organically one with you? You may call it bad, you may call it names; it doesn’t make any difference. How can you destroy it? You never created it. You have simply found it; it was given. Anger is there, sex is there, greed is there; you have not created them; they are given facts of life, just like your eyes and your hands. You can call them names, you can call them ugly or beautiful or whatsoever you like, but you cannot kill them. Nothing can be killed out of existence; nothing can be destroyed.
Tantra says a transformation is possible, but destruction, no! And a transformation comes when you accept your total being. Then suddenly everything falls in line, then everything takes its own place; then anger is also absorbed, then greed is also absorbed. Then without trying to cut anything out of your being, your whole being rearranges itself. If you accept and say yes, a rearrangement happens, and whereas before there was a noisy clamor inside, now a melody – music is born, a harmony comes in.
What is the difference between noise and harmony? The same sound waves arranged in a different way. In a noise there is no center; the notes are the same. A madman playing on the piano; the notes are the same, the sound is the same, but a madman playing – it has no center to it. If you can give a center to noise it becomes music, then it converges on a center and everything becomes organic. If a madman is playing on the piano, then every note is separate, individual; it is a crowd of notes, not a melody. And when a musician plays on the same piano with the same fingers, there comes an alchemical change: now the same notes have fallen into a pattern, the same notes have joined into an organic unity, now they have a center to them. Now they are not a crowd, now they are a family; a subtle love joins them together, now they are one. And that is the whole art: to bring notes into a loving phenomenon – they become harmonious.
Tantra says you are a noise right now as you are. Nothing is wrong in it – simply you don’t have a center. Once you have a center, everything falls in line, and everything becomes beautiful.
When Gurdjieff gets angry it is beautiful. When you get angry it is ugly. Anger is neither ugly nor beautiful. When Jesus gets angry it is sheer music – even anger. When Jesus takes a whip into the temple and chases the traders out of the temple, there is a subtle beauty to it. Even Buddha lacks that beauty; Buddha seems to be one-sided. It seems that nothing of anger is left in him to play with; the tension of anger, the salt of it is not there. Buddha doesn’t taste as good as Jesus. Jesus has a little salt in him, he can get angry – even his anger has become part of his whole being; nothing has been denied, everything has been accepted.
But Tilopa is incomparable. Jesus is nothing… The Tantra masters are simply wild flowers; they have everything in them. You must have seen Bodhidharma pictures; if you have not seen, look again – so ferocious that if you meditate on Bodhidharma’s picture in the night, alone, you will not be able to sleep: he will haunt you. It is said of him that once he looked at anybody, that man would have nightmares, continuously. Bodhidharma would haunt him, the very look, so ferocious. When Bodhidharma or Tilopa spoke, it is said their speaking was like a lion’s roar, a thundercloud, a tremendous waterfall, wild, fiery.
But if you wait a little and don’t judge them too soon, you will find within them the most loving of all hearts. Then you will feel the music, the melody in them. And then suddenly you will realize that they have not denied anything; they have absorbed everything, even ferociousness. A lion is beautiful, even its ferociousness has a beauty of its own. You take the ferociousness out of a lion and he is just a stuffed lion, dead.
Tantra says everything has to be absorbed, everything, remember – without any condition. Sex has to be absorbed; then it becomes a tremendous force in you. A Buddha, a Tilopa, a Jesus, they have such a magnetic force around them. What is it? – sex absorbed. Sex is human magnetism. Suddenly you fall into their love. Once you come across their path, you are being pulled to a different world altogether. You are torn from your old world, and you are being pulled to something new, something that you never even dreamed about. What is this force? It is the same sex which has become transformed; now it has become a magnetism, a charisma. Buddha has anger absorbed; that very anger becomes compassion. And when Jesus takes the whip in his hand, it is because of compassion. When Jesus talks in fire, this is the same compassion.
Remember this, that Tantra accepts you in your totality. When you come to me, I accept you in your totality. I am not here to help you deny anything. I am here only to help you to rearrange, to get a center of all your energies, to converge them to a center. And I tell you that you will be richer if you have anger absorbed in it; you will be richer if you have sex absorbed in it; you will be richer if you have hatred, jealousy, absorbed in it – they are the spices of life, and you will taste… You will not become tasteless; you will have an enrichment of your taste. You need a little salt. And anger is exactly in the same amount as is needed. When it overpowers you, then it becomes ugly. If you eat only salt then you will die. Salt is needed in proportion, absolutely needed. Remember this.
On the path you will meet many people who would like to cripple you, to cut you up, to dissect you. They will say, “This hand is bad, cut it off! This eye is bad; throw it out! Anger is bad, hate is bad, sex is bad.” They will go on cutting you, and by the time they have left you, you are simply paralyzed, a crippled one. You have no life left. That’s how the whole civilization has become paralyzed and crippled.
Unless Tantra becomes the foundation of the whole human mind, man will not be complete – because no other vision accepts man in his totality. But the acceptance, remember again, is of overflowing, it is not of impotence.
One lives one’s life, one goes through it: each shade of it has to be lived, and each taste of it has to be tasted. Even the wandering, even going astray is meaningful because if you never go astray you will not achieve an enriched enlightenment, you will never be simple. You may be a simpleton, but you will never be simple. A simpleton is not simple.
Simplicity needs a very deep and complex experience behind it. A simpleton is simply without experience. He may be a fool, but he cannot be a sage. A sage is one who has lived all the sins of life, who has not denied anything, who has not called anything a sin, who has simply accepted whatsoever has happened, who has allowed it to happen; who has moved with every wave, who has drifted, who went astray, who fell down to the very hell.
Somewhere Nietzsche says, “If a tree wants to reach to the sky, its roots need to go to the very hell.” He’s right. If you want a real flowering into the sky, your roots will need to go to the deepest hell in the earth.
When a sinner becomes a sage, the sage has a beauty. When a sage is simply a sage, without becoming ever a sinner, he is just a simpleton; he has missed life. And no virtue can come out unless there has been a wandering away, going astray.
There is a beautiful parable that Jesus tells:
A father had two sons. The younger son asked for his heritage, took it away, wasted it in the city with wine and women and became a beggar. The other son remained with the father, worked hard in the farms and accumulated much wealth. And then one day, the beggar son, the son who had gone astray, informed his father, “I am coming back, I was a fool, I wasted your wealth. Forgive me. Now I have nowhere to go, accept me, I am coming back.”
And the father said to his older son, “Celebrate this occasion. Kill the fattest sheep, make many delicious foods, distribute sweets to the whole town, and find the oldest wine for him. This is going to be a feast – my son who had gone astray is coming back.”
Some people from the village went to the farm, and they told the other son, “Look – what injustice! You have been with your father, you served him like a servant, you never went astray, you never did anything against him, but a feast was never given in your honor, it was never celebrated. And now that vagabond, that beggar who has wasted all your father’s money and who has lived in sin, is coming back. And look at the injustice, your father is celebrating it: come to the town! Sweets are being distributed, a great feast is being arranged.”
Of course, the elder son felt very, very angry. He came back, was very sad, and he told his father, “What type of injustice is this? You never killed any sheep for me; you never gave me any gift. And now that son of yours who has wasted all the wealth that you had given him, and wasted it in wrong ways, is coming back – and you are celebrating it.”
The father said, “Yes, because you have always been with me, there is no need. But his coming back has to be celebrated: he had gone astray, he is the sheep lost and found again.”
Christians have not understood the full significance of this story. In fact, it says what I am saying, what Tantra means; it is a Tantra story. It means that if you remain always on the right path, you will not be celebrated by existence. You will be a simpleton; you will not be enriched by life. You will not have any salt in you; you may be nutritious, but no spices. You will be very simple, good, but your goodness will not have a complex harmony in it. You will be a single note, not millions of notes falling into a melody. You will be a straight line, with no curves and no corners. Those curves and corners give a beauty, they make life more mysterious, they give depth. You will be shallow in your saintlihood, you will not have any depth in you.
That’s why Tantra says everything is beautiful. Even sin is beautiful because sin gives depth to your saintliness. Even going astray is beautiful because coming back becomes more enriched. This world is needed for you to move into it deeply so that you forget yourself completely, and then…a coming back.
People ask, “Why does this world exist if God is against it? Why does he throw us into the world, into the world of karmas, sins and wrongs? Why does he throw us in? He can simply redeem us.” That is not possible. Then you would be shallow, superficial. You have to be thrown to the farthest corner of the world, and you have to come back. That coming back has something in it; that something is the crystallization of your being.
Tantra accepts everything, lives everything. That’s why Tantra never could become a very accepted ideology. It always remained a fringe ideology, just somewhere on the boundary, outside the society, civilization, because civilization has chosen to be shallow, good but shallow. Civilization has chosen to deny: to say no to many things. Civilization is not courageous enough to accept all, to accept everything that life gives.
The greatest courage in the world is to accept all that life gives to you. And this is what I am trying to help you toward, to accept all that life gives you, and accept it in deep humbleness, as a gift. And when I say this, I mean even those things which society has conditioned you to call wrong and bad. Accept sex, and then there will come a flowering out of it; brahmacharya will come, a purity, an innocence will come; a virginity will come out of it – but that will be a transcendence. Through experience one transcends.
Moving in the dark valleys of life, one’s eyes become trained, and one starts seeing the light even in darkness. What beauty is there if you can see light while there is day? The beauty is there when there is the darkest night, and your eyes are so trained in darkness that you can see the day hidden there. When in the darkest night you can see the morning, then there is beauty, then you have achieved. When in the lowest you can see the highest, when even in hell you can create a heaven, then, then you have become the artist of life. And Tantra wants to make you the artists of life – not deniers, but great yea sayers.
Accept, and by and by you will feel the more you accept, the less there is desire. If you accept, how can desire stand there? Whatsoever the case is in this moment, you accept it. Then there is no movement for anything else. You live it moment to moment in deep acceptance. You grow, without there being any goal, without there being any desire to go somewhere and be something else or somebody else.
Tantra says, “Be yourself,” and that is the only being you can ever achieve. With acceptance desires fall, with acceptance desirelessness comes into being by itself. You don’t practice it; you don’t force it upon yourself. You don’t cut off your desires – just by accepting, they disappear.
And when suddenly a moment happens that you accept totally and all desires have gone, there is a sudden enlightenment. Suddenly, without doing anything on your part, it happens. That’s the greatest gift this existence can give to you.
This is the Tantra attitude toward life. There is no other life than this, and there is no other world than this. This very samsara is the nirvana. You just have to be a little more understanding, more accepting, more childlike, less egoistic.
Now the sutras of Tilopa:
The practice of mantra and paramita, instruction in the sutras and precepts, and teaching from the schools and scriptures, will not bring realization of the innate truth.
No Vedas will help, no Bibles. The practice of mantra will not be of any help; rather, it can become a hindrance. What is a mantra in fact? What are you doing when you are chanting a mantra? What is Maharishi Mahesh Yogi teaching to people when he is teaching transcendental meditation? He is saying to repeat a certain word or a certain mantra continuously inside: Ram, Ram, Ram; om, om, om; anything, even your own name will do; even if you repeat H2O, H2O, H2O, that will do because the point is not the sound or the word. The point is that if you continuously repeat something, by the very repetition something happens.
What is that? When you repeat a certain word continuously, a rhythm is created inside: Ram, Ram, Ram, a rhythm is created, and the rhythm is monotonous. Whenever you repeat a certain word continuously, monotony happens. Repeating a certain word continuously, you start feeling sleepy. This is what hypnosis is, this is autohypnosis; repeating a mantra is auto hypnotizing. You become drunk from your own monotonous sound rhythm.
It is good! Nothing is bad in it; it gives you a good sleep, very refreshing. If you are tired, it is a good mental trick; you will feel fresh, even fresher than you can feel in ordinary sleep because the ordinary sleep cannot go as deep as mantra sleep can go. Because in ordinary sleep many thoughts continue, dreams continue, they continuously disturb. But if you continuously repeat a certain mantra, nothing else can be there, only the mantra. It takes you to very, very deep sleep.
In Yoga we have a special word for it: in Sanskrit sleep is called nidra, and a sleep created by mantra chanting is called tandra. That is a deeper sleep but still sleep, it is called yoga tandra: sleep created by mantra yoga, chanting.
If you are disturbed in your sleep, TM can be helpful. That’s why in America it seems that Maharishi’s influence has been great because America is the most disturbed country as far as sleep is concerned. So many tranquilizers are being used; so many sleeping pills are being used. People have lost the natural capacity to sleep – hence the influence. In India, nobody bothers about TM because people are already sleeping so deeply that it is difficult to wake them.
A mantra gives you a subtle sleep; as far as it goes it is good, but don’t think that it is meditation; then you become a victim. Don’t think that it is a meditation; it is just a mental tranquilizer. And it is as chemical as any sleeping pill because sound changes the chemistry of your body. Sound is part of the chemistry of your body. That’s why with a certain type of music you feel very, very refreshed; the music falls on you, cleanses you, as if you have taken a bath. Sound changes the chemistry of your body. There are certain types of music which will make you very passionate and sexual; just their hitting sounds change the chemistry of your body.
A mantra is creating inner music with a single note; monotony is basic to it. And there is no need to ask Maharishi Mahesh Yogi about it – every mother in the world knows about it. Whenever the child is restless, she hums a lullaby. A lullaby is a mantra: just two or three words, even meaningless, no need for any meaning to be there. She sits by the side of the child, or takes the child near her heart – that too, the beating of the heart, is monotonous music. So whenever a child is restless, the mother puts his head on her heart, the beat of the heart becomes a mantra and the child is befooled, he falls asleep. Or, if the child has grown a little and cannot be befooled so easily, then she chants a lullaby; she goes on repeating just two or three words, monotonous, simple words. Monotony helps, the child falls asleep, nothing bad in it – better tranquilizer than any chemical pill. But still a tranquilizer, a pill, subtle, a sound pill; it affects the chemistry of the body.
So if you are disturbed in your sleep, if you have a certain degree of insomnia, a mantra is good, but don’t think that it is meditation. It will make you more and more adjusted, but it will not transform you. And the whole society is always trying to make you more adjusted to it. It has tried religion to make you adjusted to it. It has tried morality; it has tried mantra and yogas. It has tried psychoanalysis, and many types of psychiatry, to bring you back to the adjusted society. The whole goal of the society is how to create an adjusted individual. But if the whole society is wrong, being adjusted to it cannot be good. If the whole society is mad, then being adjusted to it means only becoming mad.
Somebody asked Sigmund Freud once, “In fact, what exactly are you doing in psychoanalysis, and what is the goal of it?”
He said – and he was a really authentic person – he said, “At the most what we can do is this: we make hysterical, unhappy people normally unhappy. That’s all: hysterically unhappy people, normally unhappy; we bring them back to the normal unhappiness, like everybody else. They were going a little too much; they were creating too much unhappiness and they were becoming neurotic. We bring them back to the normal neurosis of humanity.”
Freud says, “Man can never be happy. Man can only be either neurotically unhappy or normally unhappy, but man can never be happy.”
As far as ordinary humanity is concerned, his diagnosis seems to be exactly right, but he is not aware of a Buddha or a Tilopa; he is not aware of those who have achieved a total, blissful state of being. And it is as it should be because a Buddha will not go to be treated by Freud – for what? Only hysterical persons come to Freud, and then he treats them. His whole knowledge, his whole experience, is of hysterically neurotic people. In all his forty years’ experience with patients, he has not known a single individual who is happy. So he is right, empirical. His experience shows that there are only two types of people: normally unhappy and hysterically unhappy. And at the most we can help this much: we can make you more adjusted.
Mantras, psychoanalysis, religion, morality, churches, and prayers have all been used to make you adjusted. And the real religion starts only when you start on a journey of transformation, not to be adjusted to the society, but to be in harmony with the cosmos. To be adjusted to the society you have to fall down.
It happens many times that a madman has nothing wrong in him. The madman is simply too much of an energy and he cannot adjust himself to the society – he goes astray. A madman is too much of an individual; a madman is so talented in certain things that he cannot get adjusted to the society. And you must remember all geniuses always remain maladjusted in the society, and out of one hundred geniuses, almost eighty percent always have a trip to the madhouse. They have to because they go beyond society. They have much more than ordinary society allows.
The ordinary society is like a paperweight on you: it won’t allow you to fly. A genius throws away the paperweight and would like to be on the wing and go to the farthest corner of the sky. The moment you go beyond the line of society, the boundary, you are mad. And the whole society tries to readjust you.
Tantra says readjustment, adjustment, is not the goal; it is not worth much. Transformation is the goal. What to do? Don’t try tricks to be readjusted. A mantra is a trick. If you are feeling that you cannot sleep, then don’t try to find sleep through a mantra. Rather, on the contrary, try to find what the restlessness is that is causing you sleeplessness. You may desire too much, you may be too ambitious. Your ambition won’t allow you to sleep, your restlessness continues, your desiring mind goes on and on and on, and the thinking process continues. That’s why you cannot sleep. Now there are two ways: one is of mantra and the other is of Tantra.
Mantra says: don’t bother about the causes; simply repeat a mantra and fall asleep. This is so superficial. Don’t bother about the causes, just repeat a mantra – fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen in the evening – and you will be able to sleep; and you will feel good and you will feel healthy. But even if you feel good and healthy, what will happen out of it? There are many healthy people who sleep beautifully, but nothing has happened to them; the ultimate blooming has not come. Health is good in itself, but it cannot be the goal. To sleep is good, but cannot be the goal. Tantra says find the cause of your restlessness.
A minister in the Indian government used to come to me. He was always worried about his sleep, and he would say, “Just give me some technique so that I can sleep.”
But I told him, “A politician cannot sleep – that is not possible. A politician is not meant to sleep; he is not expected to sleep. That is good, and I am not going to give you any technique. Go to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, he will give you a technique without asking why.” And in fact he went.
Then he came after three months. He said, “You suggested and it worked! Now it is beautiful, now I can sleep.”
Then I told him, “Whenever you need, and you feel that sleep is not enough, that awakening is needed, then come to me because you can sleep, but what will happen out of it? You will remain the same; in the morning you will again be on the same ambitious trip. You may think something good has happened, but only one thing has happened: now you will not be aware of the causes; they have been forced by the mantra into the deeper unconscious, and the possibility of transformation has been postponed.”
I cannot give you better sleep. I would like to give you better awakening, better awareness.
A politician continuously desires, is fighting, competing, jealous, trying to reach higher and higher in the hierarchy. In the end nothing is achieved.
Mulla Nasruddin worked his whole life in politics and went to the highest post possible. Then I asked him, “What have you attained?”
He said, “To be frank, I’m the greatest ladder climber in the world. That is my achievement: the greatest ladder climber.”
But even if you reach the highest rung of the ladder, what to do then? Your presidents and prime ministers have reached, they are the greatest ladder climbers, but ladder climbing is not life. And what is the point of just going on and on climbing bigger and bigger ladders?
Ambition creates restlessness. I would like you to understand your ambition. Desiring creates restlessness. I would like you to be aware of your desiring. This is the way of Tantra. When the cause disappears, the disease disappears. And if the cause disappears, then you are transformed. The disease is just a symptom – don’t try to hide the symptom; let it be there, it is good because it goes on poking, goes on hitting you and saying that something is wrong. If you cannot sleep, it is good because it shows that something is wrong in your very style of life.
I am not going to help you to attain better sleep. I will say, “Try to understand, this is a symptom.” This symptom is a friend; it is not an enemy. It is simply showing that deep down in your unconscious there are undercurrents which won’t allow you to sleep. Understand them, absorb them, go through them, transcend them; and then there will be a deep sleep, not because you have forced the symptom underground, but because the disease has disappeared. And in that sleep a totally different quality of consciousness comes into existence. Then you can be deeply asleep and still alert. It is not hypnosis then, it is not like a drunken state, it is not through a drug. And all mantras are drugs; very subtle, but still drugs. Don’t become a drug addict.
Says Tilopa: The practice of mantra and paramita, instruction in the sutras and precepts, and teaching from the schools and scriptures, will not bring realization of the innate truth.
Paramita is a Buddhist word; it means compassion, serving the people. Whatsoever the Christian missionaries are doing all over the world is paramita. Serve! Help! Sympathize! Be compassionate! But Tilopa says that will also not help.
I have also observed that. I know many people who are social reformers, great servants of society; they have devoted and sacrificed their whole life for the uplift of people, but no transformation has happened to them. It cannot happen because serving the people, serving the society, becomes an occupation; they become occupied.
In fact, if the society is suddenly transformed by a divine miracle, and there is no beggar to be served, no poor man to be served, no ill person, no hospitals, no mad people – if this suddenly happens, can you conceive what will happen to your great servants of the society? They will commit suicide! Not finding anybody to serve, what will they do? They will simply be at a loss. What will happen to Christian missionaries? If there is nobody to be converted and forced and led and seduced to their path; if everybody becomes Christian, what will they do? Where will they go on their great missions? They will have to commit suicide. If the revolution really happens, what will be the fate of your revolutionaries? What will they do? Suddenly out of a job, unemployed, they will start praying to God, “Bring back the old society; we need lepers to serve, we need beggars to help.”
You can be occupied either in your own business, or you can be occupied with other people, but the mind needs occupation. The mind needs that you should forget yourself and be occupied with something. This is an escape from the innate truth. And Tilopa says these are not the ways.
The practice of mantra and paramita, instruction in the sutras and precepts, and teaching from the schools and scriptures, will not bring
realization of the innate truth. For if the mind when filled with some desire should seek a goal, it only hides the light.
He who keeps tantric precepts yet discriminates, betrays the spirit of samaya. Cease all activity, abandon all desire, let thoughts rise and fall as they will like ocean waves. He who never harms the non-abiding nor the principle of non-distinction, upholds the tantric precepts.
He who abandons craving and clings not to this and that, perceives the real meaning given in the scriptures.
The Tantra attitude is the very being of Tilopa. You must understand first what the Tantra attitude is; only then it will be possible for you to comprehend what Tilopa is trying to say. So, something about the Tantra attitude: the first thing, it is not an attitude because Tantra looks at life with a total vision. It has no attitude with which to look at life. It has no concepts; it is not a philosophy. It is not even a religion – it has no theology. It doesn’t believe in words, theories or doctrines. It wants to look at life without any philosophy, without any theory, without any theology. It wants to look at life as it is, without bringing any mind in between because that will be a distortion. The mind then will project, the mind then will mix, and you will not be able to know that which is.
Tantra avoids mind and encounters life face to face, neither thinking “This is good” nor thinking “This is bad,” but simply facing that which is. So it is difficult to say that this is an attitude; in fact it is a no attitude.
The second thing to remember: Tantra is a great yea sayer; it says yes to everything. It has nothing like no in its vocabulary, there is no negation. It never says no to anything because with no the fight starts, with no you become the ego. The moment you say no to anything, you have become the ego already; a conflict has come in, now you are at war.
Tantra loves, and loves unconditionally. It never says no to anything whatsoever – because everything is part of the whole, and everything has its own place in the whole, and the whole cannot exist with anything missing from it.
It is said that if just a drop of water is missing, the whole of existence will thirst. You pluck a flower in the garden, and you have plucked something out of the whole of existence. You harm a flower, and you have harmed millions of stars because everything is interrelated. The whole exists as a whole, as an organic whole. The whole exists not as a mechanical thing – everything is related to everything else.
So Tantra says yes unconditionally. There has never been any other vision of life which says yes without any conditions: simply yes. No disappears; from your very being, no disappears. When there is no no, how can you fight? How can you be at war? You simply float. You simply merge and melt. You become one. The boundaries are no longer there. No creates the boundary. No is the boundary around you. Whenever you say no, watch – immediately something closes in, but your being opens whenever you say yes.
The real atheist is one who goes on saying no to life; his saying no to God is just symbolic. You may believe in God, but if you say no to anything, your belief is not of any worth, your God is hocus-pocus – because only a total yes creates a real God, reveals the real God. When you say a total yes to existence, all of existence is suddenly transformed; then there are no longer rocks, no longer trees, no longer people, rivers, mountains, suddenly everything has become one, and that oneness is God.
A real theist is one who says yes to everything, not only to God – because mind is very cunning. You can say yes to God and no to the world. This has happened. Millions have lost their whole life because of this. They say yes to God and they say no to life. In fact, they think that unless you say no to life, how can you say yes to God? They create a division: they deny the world in order to accept God. But an acceptance that stands on a denial is no acceptance at all. It is false. It is a pretension.
How can you accept the creator without accepting the creation? If you say no to the creation, how can you say yes to the creator? They are one. The creator and the creation are not two things: the creator is the creation. In fact, there is no division between the creator and the creation, it is a continuous process of creativity. At one pole creativity looks like the creator; at the other pole creativity looks like the creation, but they are both poles of the same phenomenon.
Tantra says that if you say yes, you simply say yes; you don’t pose it against some no. But all the religions have done that: they say no to the world and yes to God; and they say no to the world forcibly, so that their yes can become stronger. Many so-called saints have said, “God, we accept you, but we don’t accept your world.” But what type of acceptance is this? Is this acceptance? You are choosing. You are dissecting existence into two. You are putting yourself above God. You say, “This we accept and that we deny.” All renunciation comes out of this.
One who renounces is not a religious person. In the view of Tantra, one who renounces is an egoist. First he was accumulating things of the world, but his attention was on the world. Now he renounces, but his attention is again on the world and he remains the egoist. The ego has subtle ways of fulfilling itself, and coming again and again in spirals. Again and again it comes back, with a new face, with new colors.
It happened…
I was staying in my village and Mulla Nasruddin came to visit me. He, in those days, used to live in New Delhi, the capital, and he was so full of the capital that he was almost blind. I took him to the small fort of my village; he said, “What! You call this a fort? You should come to New Delhi and see the Red Fort. This is nothing!” I took him to the river, and he said, “What! You call this a river? I have never seen such a sick and thin river in my life.” And this happened everywhere.
Then came the full-moon night, and I thought that at least with the full moon he will be happy and not bring in this small village. But no, I was wrong. I took him to the river. It was a beautiful silent evening, and then the moon came up, very big, simply wonderful. And I looked at Nasruddin and said, “Look! What a big moon.”
He looked at the moon, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Not bad for a small village like this.”
This is the mind; it persists, it comes in spirals – again and again to the same thing. You can renounce the world, but you will not become otherworldly; you will remain very worldly. And if you want to check, go to the Indian monks, sadhus. They remain very, very worldly, rooted in the world. They have renounced everything, but their focus is on the world, their focus is on renouncing, their focus is ego-centered, ego-oriented. They may be thinking that by renouncing they are nearing God, no! Nobody has ever reached to the divine by saying no to anything.
This is the vision of Tantra. Tantra says say yes, say yes to everything. You need not fight, you need not even swim – you simply float with the current. The river is going by itself, on its own accord, everything reaches to the ultimate ocean. You simply don’t create any disturbance, you don’t push the river; you simply go with it. That going with it, floating with it, relaxing with it, is Tantra.
If you can say yes, a deep acceptance happens to you. If you say yes, how can you be complaining? How can you be miserable? Then everything is as it should be. You are not fighting, not denying – you accept. And remember, this acceptance is different from ordinary acceptance.
Ordinarily a person accepts a situation when he feels helpless; that is impotent acceptance. That will not lead you anywhere; impotence cannot lead you anywhere. A person accepts a situation when he feels hopeless: “Nothing can be done, so what to do? At least accept, to save face.” Tantra acceptance is not that type of acceptance. It comes out of an over fulfillment, it comes out of a deep contentment – not out of hopelessness, frustration, helplessness. It comes when you don’t say no; it suddenly surfaces in you. Your whole being becomes a deep contentment.
That acceptance has a beauty of its own. It is not forced; you have not practiced for it. If you practice, it will be false; it will be hypocrisy. If you practice, you will be split in two: on the outside it will be acceptance; deep down, the turmoil, the negation, the denial. Deep down you will be boiling up to explode any moment. Just on the surface you will pretend that everything is okay.
Tantra acceptance is total; it doesn’t split you. All the religions of the world, except Tantra, have created split personalities. All the religions of the world, except Tantra, have created schizophrenia. They split you. They make something bad in you and something good. And they say the good has to be achieved and the bad denied, the Devil has to be denied and God accepted. They create a split within you and a fight. Then you are continuously feeling guilty because how can you destroy the part that is organically one with you? You may call it bad, you may call it names; it doesn’t make any difference. How can you destroy it? You never created it. You have simply found it; it was given. Anger is there, sex is there, greed is there; you have not created them; they are given facts of life, just like your eyes and your hands. You can call them names, you can call them ugly or beautiful or whatsoever you like, but you cannot kill them. Nothing can be killed out of existence; nothing can be destroyed.
Tantra says a transformation is possible, but destruction, no! And a transformation comes when you accept your total being. Then suddenly everything falls in line, then everything takes its own place; then anger is also absorbed, then greed is also absorbed. Then without trying to cut anything out of your being, your whole being rearranges itself. If you accept and say yes, a rearrangement happens, and whereas before there was a noisy clamor inside, now a melody – music is born, a harmony comes in.
What is the difference between noise and harmony? The same sound waves arranged in a different way. In a noise there is no center; the notes are the same. A madman playing on the piano; the notes are the same, the sound is the same, but a madman playing – it has no center to it. If you can give a center to noise it becomes music, then it converges on a center and everything becomes organic. If a madman is playing on the piano, then every note is separate, individual; it is a crowd of notes, not a melody. And when a musician plays on the same piano with the same fingers, there comes an alchemical change: now the same notes have fallen into a pattern, the same notes have joined into an organic unity, now they have a center to them. Now they are not a crowd, now they are a family; a subtle love joins them together, now they are one. And that is the whole art: to bring notes into a loving phenomenon – they become harmonious.
Tantra says you are a noise right now as you are. Nothing is wrong in it – simply you don’t have a center. Once you have a center, everything falls in line, and everything becomes beautiful.
When Gurdjieff gets angry it is beautiful. When you get angry it is ugly. Anger is neither ugly nor beautiful. When Jesus gets angry it is sheer music – even anger. When Jesus takes a whip into the temple and chases the traders out of the temple, there is a subtle beauty to it. Even Buddha lacks that beauty; Buddha seems to be one-sided. It seems that nothing of anger is left in him to play with; the tension of anger, the salt of it is not there. Buddha doesn’t taste as good as Jesus. Jesus has a little salt in him, he can get angry – even his anger has become part of his whole being; nothing has been denied, everything has been accepted.
But Tilopa is incomparable. Jesus is nothing… The Tantra masters are simply wild flowers; they have everything in them. You must have seen Bodhidharma pictures; if you have not seen, look again – so ferocious that if you meditate on Bodhidharma’s picture in the night, alone, you will not be able to sleep: he will haunt you. It is said of him that once he looked at anybody, that man would have nightmares, continuously. Bodhidharma would haunt him, the very look, so ferocious. When Bodhidharma or Tilopa spoke, it is said their speaking was like a lion’s roar, a thundercloud, a tremendous waterfall, wild, fiery.
But if you wait a little and don’t judge them too soon, you will find within them the most loving of all hearts. Then you will feel the music, the melody in them. And then suddenly you will realize that they have not denied anything; they have absorbed everything, even ferociousness. A lion is beautiful, even its ferociousness has a beauty of its own. You take the ferociousness out of a lion and he is just a stuffed lion, dead.
Tantra says everything has to be absorbed, everything, remember – without any condition. Sex has to be absorbed; then it becomes a tremendous force in you. A Buddha, a Tilopa, a Jesus, they have such a magnetic force around them. What is it? – sex absorbed. Sex is human magnetism. Suddenly you fall into their love. Once you come across their path, you are being pulled to a different world altogether. You are torn from your old world, and you are being pulled to something new, something that you never even dreamed about. What is this force? It is the same sex which has become transformed; now it has become a magnetism, a charisma. Buddha has anger absorbed; that very anger becomes compassion. And when Jesus takes the whip in his hand, it is because of compassion. When Jesus talks in fire, this is the same compassion.
Remember this, that Tantra accepts you in your totality. When you come to me, I accept you in your totality. I am not here to help you deny anything. I am here only to help you to rearrange, to get a center of all your energies, to converge them to a center. And I tell you that you will be richer if you have anger absorbed in it; you will be richer if you have sex absorbed in it; you will be richer if you have hatred, jealousy, absorbed in it – they are the spices of life, and you will taste… You will not become tasteless; you will have an enrichment of your taste. You need a little salt. And anger is exactly in the same amount as is needed. When it overpowers you, then it becomes ugly. If you eat only salt then you will die. Salt is needed in proportion, absolutely needed. Remember this.
On the path you will meet many people who would like to cripple you, to cut you up, to dissect you. They will say, “This hand is bad, cut it off! This eye is bad; throw it out! Anger is bad, hate is bad, sex is bad.” They will go on cutting you, and by the time they have left you, you are simply paralyzed, a crippled one. You have no life left. That’s how the whole civilization has become paralyzed and crippled.
Unless Tantra becomes the foundation of the whole human mind, man will not be complete – because no other vision accepts man in his totality. But the acceptance, remember again, is of overflowing, it is not of impotence.
One lives one’s life, one goes through it: each shade of it has to be lived, and each taste of it has to be tasted. Even the wandering, even going astray is meaningful because if you never go astray you will not achieve an enriched enlightenment, you will never be simple. You may be a simpleton, but you will never be simple. A simpleton is not simple.
Simplicity needs a very deep and complex experience behind it. A simpleton is simply without experience. He may be a fool, but he cannot be a sage. A sage is one who has lived all the sins of life, who has not denied anything, who has not called anything a sin, who has simply accepted whatsoever has happened, who has allowed it to happen; who has moved with every wave, who has drifted, who went astray, who fell down to the very hell.
Somewhere Nietzsche says, “If a tree wants to reach to the sky, its roots need to go to the very hell.” He’s right. If you want a real flowering into the sky, your roots will need to go to the deepest hell in the earth.
When a sinner becomes a sage, the sage has a beauty. When a sage is simply a sage, without becoming ever a sinner, he is just a simpleton; he has missed life. And no virtue can come out unless there has been a wandering away, going astray.
There is a beautiful parable that Jesus tells:
A father had two sons. The younger son asked for his heritage, took it away, wasted it in the city with wine and women and became a beggar. The other son remained with the father, worked hard in the farms and accumulated much wealth. And then one day, the beggar son, the son who had gone astray, informed his father, “I am coming back, I was a fool, I wasted your wealth. Forgive me. Now I have nowhere to go, accept me, I am coming back.”
And the father said to his older son, “Celebrate this occasion. Kill the fattest sheep, make many delicious foods, distribute sweets to the whole town, and find the oldest wine for him. This is going to be a feast – my son who had gone astray is coming back.”
Some people from the village went to the farm, and they told the other son, “Look – what injustice! You have been with your father, you served him like a servant, you never went astray, you never did anything against him, but a feast was never given in your honor, it was never celebrated. And now that vagabond, that beggar who has wasted all your father’s money and who has lived in sin, is coming back. And look at the injustice, your father is celebrating it: come to the town! Sweets are being distributed, a great feast is being arranged.”
Of course, the elder son felt very, very angry. He came back, was very sad, and he told his father, “What type of injustice is this? You never killed any sheep for me; you never gave me any gift. And now that son of yours who has wasted all the wealth that you had given him, and wasted it in wrong ways, is coming back – and you are celebrating it.”
The father said, “Yes, because you have always been with me, there is no need. But his coming back has to be celebrated: he had gone astray, he is the sheep lost and found again.”
Christians have not understood the full significance of this story. In fact, it says what I am saying, what Tantra means; it is a Tantra story. It means that if you remain always on the right path, you will not be celebrated by existence. You will be a simpleton; you will not be enriched by life. You will not have any salt in you; you may be nutritious, but no spices. You will be very simple, good, but your goodness will not have a complex harmony in it. You will be a single note, not millions of notes falling into a melody. You will be a straight line, with no curves and no corners. Those curves and corners give a beauty, they make life more mysterious, they give depth. You will be shallow in your saintlihood, you will not have any depth in you.
That’s why Tantra says everything is beautiful. Even sin is beautiful because sin gives depth to your saintliness. Even going astray is beautiful because coming back becomes more enriched. This world is needed for you to move into it deeply so that you forget yourself completely, and then…a coming back.
People ask, “Why does this world exist if God is against it? Why does he throw us into the world, into the world of karmas, sins and wrongs? Why does he throw us in? He can simply redeem us.” That is not possible. Then you would be shallow, superficial. You have to be thrown to the farthest corner of the world, and you have to come back. That coming back has something in it; that something is the crystallization of your being.
Tantra accepts everything, lives everything. That’s why Tantra never could become a very accepted ideology. It always remained a fringe ideology, just somewhere on the boundary, outside the society, civilization, because civilization has chosen to be shallow, good but shallow. Civilization has chosen to deny: to say no to many things. Civilization is not courageous enough to accept all, to accept everything that life gives.
The greatest courage in the world is to accept all that life gives to you. And this is what I am trying to help you toward, to accept all that life gives you, and accept it in deep humbleness, as a gift. And when I say this, I mean even those things which society has conditioned you to call wrong and bad. Accept sex, and then there will come a flowering out of it; brahmacharya will come, a purity, an innocence will come; a virginity will come out of it – but that will be a transcendence. Through experience one transcends.
Moving in the dark valleys of life, one’s eyes become trained, and one starts seeing the light even in darkness. What beauty is there if you can see light while there is day? The beauty is there when there is the darkest night, and your eyes are so trained in darkness that you can see the day hidden there. When in the darkest night you can see the morning, then there is beauty, then you have achieved. When in the lowest you can see the highest, when even in hell you can create a heaven, then, then you have become the artist of life. And Tantra wants to make you the artists of life – not deniers, but great yea sayers.
Accept, and by and by you will feel the more you accept, the less there is desire. If you accept, how can desire stand there? Whatsoever the case is in this moment, you accept it. Then there is no movement for anything else. You live it moment to moment in deep acceptance. You grow, without there being any goal, without there being any desire to go somewhere and be something else or somebody else.
Tantra says, “Be yourself,” and that is the only being you can ever achieve. With acceptance desires fall, with acceptance desirelessness comes into being by itself. You don’t practice it; you don’t force it upon yourself. You don’t cut off your desires – just by accepting, they disappear.
And when suddenly a moment happens that you accept totally and all desires have gone, there is a sudden enlightenment. Suddenly, without doing anything on your part, it happens. That’s the greatest gift this existence can give to you.
This is the Tantra attitude toward life. There is no other life than this, and there is no other world than this. This very samsara is the nirvana. You just have to be a little more understanding, more accepting, more childlike, less egoistic.
Now the sutras of Tilopa:
The practice of mantra and paramita, instruction in the sutras and precepts, and teaching from the schools and scriptures, will not bring realization of the innate truth.
No Vedas will help, no Bibles. The practice of mantra will not be of any help; rather, it can become a hindrance. What is a mantra in fact? What are you doing when you are chanting a mantra? What is Maharishi Mahesh Yogi teaching to people when he is teaching transcendental meditation? He is saying to repeat a certain word or a certain mantra continuously inside: Ram, Ram, Ram; om, om, om; anything, even your own name will do; even if you repeat H2O, H2O, H2O, that will do because the point is not the sound or the word. The point is that if you continuously repeat something, by the very repetition something happens.
What is that? When you repeat a certain word continuously, a rhythm is created inside: Ram, Ram, Ram, a rhythm is created, and the rhythm is monotonous. Whenever you repeat a certain word continuously, monotony happens. Repeating a certain word continuously, you start feeling sleepy. This is what hypnosis is, this is autohypnosis; repeating a mantra is auto hypnotizing. You become drunk from your own monotonous sound rhythm.
It is good! Nothing is bad in it; it gives you a good sleep, very refreshing. If you are tired, it is a good mental trick; you will feel fresh, even fresher than you can feel in ordinary sleep because the ordinary sleep cannot go as deep as mantra sleep can go. Because in ordinary sleep many thoughts continue, dreams continue, they continuously disturb. But if you continuously repeat a certain mantra, nothing else can be there, only the mantra. It takes you to very, very deep sleep.
In Yoga we have a special word for it: in Sanskrit sleep is called nidra, and a sleep created by mantra chanting is called tandra. That is a deeper sleep but still sleep, it is called yoga tandra: sleep created by mantra yoga, chanting.
If you are disturbed in your sleep, TM can be helpful. That’s why in America it seems that Maharishi’s influence has been great because America is the most disturbed country as far as sleep is concerned. So many tranquilizers are being used; so many sleeping pills are being used. People have lost the natural capacity to sleep – hence the influence. In India, nobody bothers about TM because people are already sleeping so deeply that it is difficult to wake them.
A mantra gives you a subtle sleep; as far as it goes it is good, but don’t think that it is meditation; then you become a victim. Don’t think that it is a meditation; it is just a mental tranquilizer. And it is as chemical as any sleeping pill because sound changes the chemistry of your body. Sound is part of the chemistry of your body. That’s why with a certain type of music you feel very, very refreshed; the music falls on you, cleanses you, as if you have taken a bath. Sound changes the chemistry of your body. There are certain types of music which will make you very passionate and sexual; just their hitting sounds change the chemistry of your body.
A mantra is creating inner music with a single note; monotony is basic to it. And there is no need to ask Maharishi Mahesh Yogi about it – every mother in the world knows about it. Whenever the child is restless, she hums a lullaby. A lullaby is a mantra: just two or three words, even meaningless, no need for any meaning to be there. She sits by the side of the child, or takes the child near her heart – that too, the beating of the heart, is monotonous music. So whenever a child is restless, the mother puts his head on her heart, the beat of the heart becomes a mantra and the child is befooled, he falls asleep. Or, if the child has grown a little and cannot be befooled so easily, then she chants a lullaby; she goes on repeating just two or three words, monotonous, simple words. Monotony helps, the child falls asleep, nothing bad in it – better tranquilizer than any chemical pill. But still a tranquilizer, a pill, subtle, a sound pill; it affects the chemistry of the body.
So if you are disturbed in your sleep, if you have a certain degree of insomnia, a mantra is good, but don’t think that it is meditation. It will make you more and more adjusted, but it will not transform you. And the whole society is always trying to make you more adjusted to it. It has tried religion to make you adjusted to it. It has tried morality; it has tried mantra and yogas. It has tried psychoanalysis, and many types of psychiatry, to bring you back to the adjusted society. The whole goal of the society is how to create an adjusted individual. But if the whole society is wrong, being adjusted to it cannot be good. If the whole society is mad, then being adjusted to it means only becoming mad.
Somebody asked Sigmund Freud once, “In fact, what exactly are you doing in psychoanalysis, and what is the goal of it?”
He said – and he was a really authentic person – he said, “At the most what we can do is this: we make hysterical, unhappy people normally unhappy. That’s all: hysterically unhappy people, normally unhappy; we bring them back to the normal unhappiness, like everybody else. They were going a little too much; they were creating too much unhappiness and they were becoming neurotic. We bring them back to the normal neurosis of humanity.”
Freud says, “Man can never be happy. Man can only be either neurotically unhappy or normally unhappy, but man can never be happy.”
As far as ordinary humanity is concerned, his diagnosis seems to be exactly right, but he is not aware of a Buddha or a Tilopa; he is not aware of those who have achieved a total, blissful state of being. And it is as it should be because a Buddha will not go to be treated by Freud – for what? Only hysterical persons come to Freud, and then he treats them. His whole knowledge, his whole experience, is of hysterically neurotic people. In all his forty years’ experience with patients, he has not known a single individual who is happy. So he is right, empirical. His experience shows that there are only two types of people: normally unhappy and hysterically unhappy. And at the most we can help this much: we can make you more adjusted.
Mantras, psychoanalysis, religion, morality, churches, and prayers have all been used to make you adjusted. And the real religion starts only when you start on a journey of transformation, not to be adjusted to the society, but to be in harmony with the cosmos. To be adjusted to the society you have to fall down.
It happens many times that a madman has nothing wrong in him. The madman is simply too much of an energy and he cannot adjust himself to the society – he goes astray. A madman is too much of an individual; a madman is so talented in certain things that he cannot get adjusted to the society. And you must remember all geniuses always remain maladjusted in the society, and out of one hundred geniuses, almost eighty percent always have a trip to the madhouse. They have to because they go beyond society. They have much more than ordinary society allows.
The ordinary society is like a paperweight on you: it won’t allow you to fly. A genius throws away the paperweight and would like to be on the wing and go to the farthest corner of the sky. The moment you go beyond the line of society, the boundary, you are mad. And the whole society tries to readjust you.
Tantra says readjustment, adjustment, is not the goal; it is not worth much. Transformation is the goal. What to do? Don’t try tricks to be readjusted. A mantra is a trick. If you are feeling that you cannot sleep, then don’t try to find sleep through a mantra. Rather, on the contrary, try to find what the restlessness is that is causing you sleeplessness. You may desire too much, you may be too ambitious. Your ambition won’t allow you to sleep, your restlessness continues, your desiring mind goes on and on and on, and the thinking process continues. That’s why you cannot sleep. Now there are two ways: one is of mantra and the other is of Tantra.
Mantra says: don’t bother about the causes; simply repeat a mantra and fall asleep. This is so superficial. Don’t bother about the causes, just repeat a mantra – fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen in the evening – and you will be able to sleep; and you will feel good and you will feel healthy. But even if you feel good and healthy, what will happen out of it? There are many healthy people who sleep beautifully, but nothing has happened to them; the ultimate blooming has not come. Health is good in itself, but it cannot be the goal. To sleep is good, but cannot be the goal. Tantra says find the cause of your restlessness.
A minister in the Indian government used to come to me. He was always worried about his sleep, and he would say, “Just give me some technique so that I can sleep.”
But I told him, “A politician cannot sleep – that is not possible. A politician is not meant to sleep; he is not expected to sleep. That is good, and I am not going to give you any technique. Go to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, he will give you a technique without asking why.” And in fact he went.
Then he came after three months. He said, “You suggested and it worked! Now it is beautiful, now I can sleep.”
Then I told him, “Whenever you need, and you feel that sleep is not enough, that awakening is needed, then come to me because you can sleep, but what will happen out of it? You will remain the same; in the morning you will again be on the same ambitious trip. You may think something good has happened, but only one thing has happened: now you will not be aware of the causes; they have been forced by the mantra into the deeper unconscious, and the possibility of transformation has been postponed.”
I cannot give you better sleep. I would like to give you better awakening, better awareness.
A politician continuously desires, is fighting, competing, jealous, trying to reach higher and higher in the hierarchy. In the end nothing is achieved.
Mulla Nasruddin worked his whole life in politics and went to the highest post possible. Then I asked him, “What have you attained?”
He said, “To be frank, I’m the greatest ladder climber in the world. That is my achievement: the greatest ladder climber.”
But even if you reach the highest rung of the ladder, what to do then? Your presidents and prime ministers have reached, they are the greatest ladder climbers, but ladder climbing is not life. And what is the point of just going on and on climbing bigger and bigger ladders?
Ambition creates restlessness. I would like you to understand your ambition. Desiring creates restlessness. I would like you to be aware of your desiring. This is the way of Tantra. When the cause disappears, the disease disappears. And if the cause disappears, then you are transformed. The disease is just a symptom – don’t try to hide the symptom; let it be there, it is good because it goes on poking, goes on hitting you and saying that something is wrong. If you cannot sleep, it is good because it shows that something is wrong in your very style of life.
I am not going to help you to attain better sleep. I will say, “Try to understand, this is a symptom.” This symptom is a friend; it is not an enemy. It is simply showing that deep down in your unconscious there are undercurrents which won’t allow you to sleep. Understand them, absorb them, go through them, transcend them; and then there will be a deep sleep, not because you have forced the symptom underground, but because the disease has disappeared. And in that sleep a totally different quality of consciousness comes into existence. Then you can be deeply asleep and still alert. It is not hypnosis then, it is not like a drunken state, it is not through a drug. And all mantras are drugs; very subtle, but still drugs. Don’t become a drug addict.
Says Tilopa: The practice of mantra and paramita, instruction in the sutras and precepts, and teaching from the schools and scriptures, will not bring realization of the innate truth.
Paramita is a Buddhist word; it means compassion, serving the people. Whatsoever the Christian missionaries are doing all over the world is paramita. Serve! Help! Sympathize! Be compassionate! But Tilopa says that will also not help.
I have also observed that. I know many people who are social reformers, great servants of society; they have devoted and sacrificed their whole life for the uplift of people, but no transformation has happened to them. It cannot happen because serving the people, serving the society, becomes an occupation; they become occupied.
In fact, if the society is suddenly transformed by a divine miracle, and there is no beggar to be served, no poor man to be served, no ill person, no hospitals, no mad people – if this suddenly happens, can you conceive what will happen to your great servants of the society? They will commit suicide! Not finding anybody to serve, what will they do? They will simply be at a loss. What will happen to Christian missionaries? If there is nobody to be converted and forced and led and seduced to their path; if everybody becomes Christian, what will they do? Where will they go on their great missions? They will have to commit suicide. If the revolution really happens, what will be the fate of your revolutionaries? What will they do? Suddenly out of a job, unemployed, they will start praying to God, “Bring back the old society; we need lepers to serve, we need beggars to help.”
You can be occupied either in your own business, or you can be occupied with other people, but the mind needs occupation. The mind needs that you should forget yourself and be occupied with something. This is an escape from the innate truth. And Tilopa says these are not the ways.