Chapter 10: Tantra and the World of the Chakras

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‌Chapter 10: Tantra and the World of the Chakras

Tantra is freedom – freedom from all mind constructs, from all mind games; freedom from all structures, freedom from the other. Tantra is a space to be. Tantra is liberation.

Tantra is not a religion in the ordinary sense. Religion is again a mind game, religion gives you a certain pattern. A Christian has a certain pattern, so has a Hindu, so has a Muslim. Religion gives you a certain style, a discipline. Tantra takes all disciplines away.

When there is no discipline, when there is no enforced order, a totally different kind of order arises in you. What Lao Tzu calls Tao, what Buddha calls dhamma,arises in you. This is not anything done by you; it happens to you. Tantra simply creates a space for it to happen. It does not even invite, it does not wait; it simply creates a space. And when the space is ready, the whole flows in.

I have heard a very beautiful story, a very ancient one…

In a province, no rain had fallen for a long time – everything was dried up. At last the citizens decided to fetch the rainmaker. A deputation was sent to see him in the distant town where he lived, with an urgent request to come as soon as possible and make rain for their parched fields.

The rainmaker, a wise old man, promised to do so, on condition that he was provided with a solitary little cottage in the open country where he could withdraw by himself for three days – no food or drink would be required. Then he would see what could be done. His requests were met.

On the evening of the third day abundant rain fell, and full of praise, a grateful crowd made a pilgrimage to his house and exclaimed, “How did you do it? Tell us.”

“It was quite simple,” the rainmaker answered. “For three days all I did was to put myself in order. For, I know that once I am in order, then the world will be in order, and the drought must yield place to the rain.”

Tantra says that if you are in order, then the whole world is in order for you. When you are in harmony, then the whole existence is in harmony for you. When you are in disorder, then the whole world is disorder. And the order must not be a false one, it must not be a forced one. When you force some order upon yourself, you simply become split; deep down the disorder continues.

You can observe it: if you are an angry person you can force your anger, you

can repress it deep down in the unconscious, but it is not going to disappear. Maybe you become completely unaware of it, but it is there – and you know that it is there. It is running underneath you, it is in the dark basement of your being, but it is there. You can sit smiling on top of it, but you know it can erupt any moment. And your smile cannot be very deep, and your smile cannot be true, and your smile will be just an effort you are making against yourself. A man who forces order from the outside remains in disorder.

Tantra says there is another kind of order. You don’t impose any order, you don’t impose any discipline; you simply drop all structures, you simply become natural and spontaneous. It is the greatest step a man can be asked to take. It will need great courage because the society will not like it, the society will be dead against it. The society wants a certain order. If you follow the society, the society is happy with you. If you go a little bit astray here and there, the society is very angry – and the mob is mad.

Tantra is a rebellion. I don’t call it revolutionary because it has no politics in it. And I don’t call it revolutionary because it has no plans to change the world, it has no plans to change the state and the society. It is rebellious, it is individual rebellion. It is one individual slipping out of the structures and the slavery. But the moment you slip out of the slavery, you come to feel another kind of existence around you that you have never felt before – as if you were living with a blindfold and suddenly the blindfold has become loose, your eyes have opened and you can see a totally different world.

This blindfold is what you call your mind – your thinking, your prejudices, your knowledge, your scriptures; they all make up the thick layer of the blindfold. They are keeping you blind, they are keeping you dull, they are keeping you unalive.

Tantra wants you to be alive – as alive as the trees, as alive as the rivers, as alive as the sun and the moon. That is your birthright. You don’t lose anything by losing the blindfold; you gain all. And if everything is to be lost in gaining it, nothing is lost. Even a single moment of utter freedom is enough to satisfy. And a long life of a hundred years, yoked like a slave, is meaningless.

To be in the world of Tantra needs courage: it is adventurous. Up to now, only a few people have been able to move on that path. But the future is very hopeful. Tantra will become more and more important. Man understands more and more what slavery is, and man also understands that no political revolution has proved revolutionary. All political revolutions finally turn into anti- revolutions. Once revolutionaries are in power they become anti-revolutionary. Power is anti-revolutionary. So there is a built-in mechanism in power: give anybody power and he becomes anti-revolutionary. Power creates its own

world. So up to now there have been many revolutions in the world and all have failed, utterly failed; no revolution has helped. Now man is becoming aware of it.

Tantra gives a different perspective. It is not revolutionary; it is rebellious. Rebellion means individual. You can rebel alone, you need not organize a party for it. You can rebel alone, on your own. It is not a fight against society, remember; it is just going beyond society. It is not anti-social, it is asocial; it has nothing to do with society. It is not against slavery, it is for freedom – freedom to be.

Just look at your life. Are you a free man? You are not: there are a thousand and one bondages around you. You may not look at them, it is very embarrassing; you may not recognize them, it hurts. But it doesn’t change the situation: you are a slave. To move into the dimension of Tantra you will have to recognize your slavery. It is very deep-rooted; it has to be dropped, and being aware of it helps you to drop it.

Don’t go on pacifying yourself, don’t go on consoling yourself, don’t go on saying, “Everything is okay.” It is not. Nothing is okay, your whole life is just a nightmare. Have a look at it! There is no poetry and no song and no dance and no love and no prayer. There is no celebration. Joy? – it is just a word in the dictionary. Bliss? – yes, you have heard about it, but you have not known anything about it. God? – in the temples, in the churches. Yes, people talk about it. Those who talk, they don’t know; those who hear, they don’t know. All that is beautiful seems to be meaningless, and all that is meaningless seems to be very, very important.

A man goes on accumulating money and thinks that he is doing something very significant. Human stupidity is infinite. Beware of it, it will destroy your whole life; it has destroyed millions of people’s lives down the ages. Take hold of your awareness – that is the only possibility to get out of stupidity.

Before we enter today’s sutras from Saraha, the founder of Tantra, something has to be understood about Tantra’s map of inner consciousness.

First: Tantra says that no man is just man, and no woman is just woman. Each man is both man and woman, and so is each woman – woman and man. Adam has Eve in him, and Eve has Adam in her. In fact, nobody is just Adam and nobody is just Eve, we are Adam-Eves. This is one of the greatest insights ever attained.

It is one of the greatest discoveries of the world because with this understanding you can move in your inner direction; otherwise you cannot move in your inner direction. Why does a man fall in love with a woman? – because he carries a woman inside him, otherwise he would not fall in love.

And why do you fall in love with a certain woman? There are thousands of women, but why, suddenly, does a certain woman become most important to you, as if all other women have disappeared and that is the only woman in the world? Why? Why does a certain man attract you? Why at first sight does something suddenly click? Tantra says you are carrying an image of a woman inside you, an image of a man inside you. Each man is carrying a woman and each woman is carrying a man. When somebody on the outside fits with your inner image, you fall in love – that is the meaning of love.

You don’t understand it; you simply shrug your shoulders and say, “It has happened.” But there is a subtle mechanism in it. Why did it happen with a certain woman, why not with others? Your inner image fits somehow, the outer woman is similar in a way. Something just hits your inner image. You feel, “This is my woman,” or “This is my man”; this feeling is what love is. But the outer woman is not going to satisfy, because no outer woman is going to completely fit with your inner woman. The reality is not that way at all. Maybe she fits a little bit – there is an appeal, a magnetism, but it will be worn out sooner or later. Soon you will recognize that there are a thousand and one things that you don’t like in the woman. It will take a little time to come to know about those things.

First you will be infatuated. First the similarity will be too much, it will overwhelm you. But by and by you will see that there are a thousand and one things, details of life, that don’t fit – that you are aliens, strangers. Yes, you still love her, but the love has no more infatuation, that romantic vision is disappearing. And she will also recognize that something appeals in you, but your totality is not appealing. That’s why each husband tries to change the wife and each wife tries to change the husband. What are they trying to do? Why? Why does a wife continuously try to change the husband? For what? She has fallen in love with this man, then immediately she starts changing him? Now she has become aware of the dissimilarities. She wants to drop those dissimilarities; she wants to take a few chunks off this man so that he completely fits with her idea of a man. And the husband also tries – not so hard, not so stubbornly as women try because the husband becomes tired very soon – the woman hopes longer.

The woman thinks, “Today or tomorrow or the day after tomorrow – someday he will change.” It takes almost twenty, twenty-five years to recognize the fact that you cannot change the other. By the age of fifty, when the woman has passed her menopause and the man too, when they are getting really old, then they become alert by and by that nothing has changed. They have tried hard, they have tried every way; the woman remains the same and

the man remains the same. Nobody can change anybody. This is a great experience to come to, a great understanding.

That’s why old people become more tolerant: they know that nothing can be done. That’s why old people become more graceful: they know that things are as they are. That’s why old people become more accepting. Young people are very angry, nonaccepting; they want to change everything: they want to make the world the way they would like it. They struggle hard, but it has never happened. It cannot happen, it is not in the nature of things.

The outer man can never fit with your inner man, and the outer woman can never be absolutely the same as your inner woman. That’s why love gives pleasure and also pain, love gives happiness and also unhappiness. And the unhappiness is much more than the happiness. What does Tantra propose about it, what has to be done then?

Tantra says that there is no way to be satisfied with the outer; you will have to move inward. You will have to find your inner woman and inner man; you will have to attain to a sexual intercourse inside. That is a great contribution.

How can it happen? Try to understand this map. I have talked about seven chakras, the Yoga-Tantra physiology. In man the muladhar is male and svadhishthan, female. In woman the muladhar is female and the svadhishthan, male, and so on and so forth. In seven chakras, up to the sixth, the duality remains; the seventh is nondual.

There are three pairs inside you: the muladhar-svadhishthan have to marry; the manipura-anahata have to marry; the vishuddha-agya have to marry.

When the energy moves outside, you need a woman outside. You have a little glimpse for a moment – because the coition with a woman outside cannot be permanent, it can be only momentary. For a single moment you can lose yourself in each other. Again you are thrown back to yourself, and thrown back with a vengeance. That’s why after each lovemaking, there is a certain frustration: you have failed again, it didn’t happen the way you wanted it to happen. Yes, you reached to a peak, but before you had even become aware of it, the decline, the fall began. Before the peak was achieved, the valley. Before you had met the woman or the man, the separation. Divorce comes so fast with marriage that it is frustrating. All lovers are frustrated people: they hope much, they hope against their experience, they hope again and again – but nothing can be done. You cannot destroy the laws of reality. You have to understand those laws.

The outer meeting can only be momentary, but the inner meeting can become eternal. And the higher you move, the more eternal it can become. The first chakra, the muladhar, in man is male. Even while making love to a woman

outside, Tantra says, remember the inner. Make love to the woman outside, but remember the inner. Let your consciousness move inward. Forget the outer woman completely. In the moment of orgasm forget the woman or the man completely. Close your eyes and be in, and let it be a meditation. When energy is stirred, don’t miss this opportunity. That is the moment when you can have a contact – an inward journey.

Ordinarily it is difficult to look in; but in a love moment there is some gap, you are not ordinary. In a love moment you are at your maximum. When orgasm happens, your whole body energy is throbbing with dance; each cell, each fiber dancing in a rhythm, in a harmony, that you don’t know in ordinary life. This is the moment, this moment of harmony; use it as a passage inward. While making love, become meditative, look in.

A door opens at that moment – this is the Tantra experience. A door opens in that moment, and Tantra says that you feel happy only because that door opens and something of your inner bliss flows to you. It is not coming from the outer woman, it is not coming from the outer man; it is coming from your innermost core. The outer is just an excuse.

Tantra does not say that to make love to the outer is sin, it simply says that it is not very far-reaching. It does not condemn it, it accepts its naturalness, but it says that you can use that love wave to go far inside. In that moment of thrill, things are not on the earth: you can fly. Your arrow can lead the bow toward the target.

If while making love you become meditative, you become silent, you start looking in, you close your eyes, you forget the outer man or woman, then it happens. The muladhar, your male center inside, starts moving toward the female center – the female center is the svadhishthan – and there is a coition, there is an intercourse inside.

Sometimes it happens without your knowing it. One man writes to me again and again, and he must be wondering why I do not answer. The map was not available up to now, now I am giving you the map. Listening to me he always feels as if he is going into orgasm. His whole body starts throbbing, and he has the same experience as he has while making love to a woman. He becomes very puzzled – naturally so. He loses track of what he was listening to – he forgets, and the thrill is so much and the joy is so much that he is worried. What is happening? What is this inside him?

This is happening: the muladhar is meeting with the svadhishthan, your male center is meeting with your female center. This is the joy when you move into meditation, when you move into prayer; this is the mechanism of your inner celebration. And the moment the muladhar and svadhishthan meet, the

energy is released. Just as when you love your woman, energy is released, when the svadhishthan and muladhar meet, energy is released and that energy hits the higher center, the manipura.

The manipura is male, the anahata is female. Once you have become attuned to the first meeting of your man and woman inside, one day the second meeting suddenly happens. You do not have to do anything about it; just the energy released from the first meeting creates the possibility for the second meeting. And when energy is created by the second meeting, it creates the possibility for the third meeting.

The third meeting is between the vishuddha and agya. And when the third meeting happens, the energy is created for the fourth, which is not a meeting, which is not a union, but unity. The sahasrar is alone; there is no male-female. Adam and Eve have disappeared into each other totally, utterly. Man has become the woman, the woman has become the man; all division disappears. This is the absolute, the eternal meeting. This is what Hindus call sat-chit- anand. This is what Jesus calls “the Kingdom of God.”

In fact the number seven has been used by all the religions. Seven days are symbolic and the seventh day is the holiday, the holy day. Six days God worked and on the seventh day he rested. You will have to work on six chakras, the seventh is the state of great rest, utter rest, absolute relaxation – you have come home.

With the seventh you disappear as part of duality; all polarities disappear, all distinctions disappear. Night is no longer night, and day is no longer day. Summer is no longer summer, and winter is no longer winter. Matter is no longer matter, and mind is no longer mind – you have gone beyond. This is the transcendental space Buddha calls nirvana.

These three meetings inside you, and the achievement of the fourth, have another dimension too. I have talked to you many times about four states: sleep, dream, waking, turiya. Turiya means “the fourth,” “the beyond.” These seven chakras, and the work through them, have a correspondence with these four states also.

The first meeting between the muladhar and svadhishthan is like sleep. The meeting happens, but you cannot be very aware of it. You will enjoy it, you will feel a great freshness arising in you. You will feel great rest, as if you have slept deeply; but you will not be able to see it exactly – it is very dark. The man and woman have met inside you, but they have met in the unconscious; the meeting was not in the daylight, it was in the dark night. Yes, the result will be felt, the consequence will be felt. You will suddenly feel a new energy in you, a new radiance, a new glow. You will have an aura. Even others may start feeling

that you have a certain quality of presence, a vibe. But you will not be exactly alert to what is happening, so the first meeting is like sleep.

The second meeting is like dreaming: when the manipura and anahata meet, your meeting with the inner woman is as if you have met in a dream. Yes, you can remember a little bit of it, just as in the morning you can remember the dream that you had last night – a little bit here and there, a few glimpses. Maybe something has been forgotten, maybe the whole is not remembered, but still you can remember. The second meeting is like dreaming. You will become more aware of it, you will start feeling that something is happening. You will start feeling that you are changing, that a transformation is on the way, that you are no longer the old person. And with the second, you will start becoming aware that your interest in the outer woman is lessening or your interest in the outer man is not as infatuating as it used to be.

With the first there will also be a change, but you will not be aware of it. With the first you may start thinking that you are no longer interested in your woman, but you will not be able to understand that you are not interested in any woman at all. You may think you are bored with your woman and you will be happier with some other woman; a change will be good, a different climate will be good, a different quality of woman will be good. This will be just a guess. With the second you will start feeling that you are no longer interested in the woman or the man, that your interest is turning inward.

With the third you will become perfectly aware; it is like waking. The vishuddha meeting the agya: you will become perfectly aware, the meeting is happening in the daylight. Or you can say it in this way: the first meeting happens in the dark middle of the night, the second meeting happens in a twilight time between the night and the day, the third meeting happens in full noon – you are fully alert, everything is clear. Now you know you are finished with the outer. It does not mean you will leave your wife or your husband, it simply means that the infatuation is no more. You will feel compassion. Certainly the woman who has helped you so far is a great friend, the man who has brought you so far is a great friend; you are grateful. You will start being grateful and compassionate to each other.

It is always so: when understanding arises it brings compassion. If you leave your wife and escape to the forest, that simply shows you are cruel and compassion has not arisen. It can be only out of nonunderstanding, it cannot be out of understanding. If you understand you will have compassion.

When Buddha became enlightened, the first thing he said to his disciples was, “I would like to go to Yashodhara and talk to her” – his wife.

Ananda was very disturbed. He said, “What is the point of your going back to the palace and talking to your wife? You have left her – twelve years have passed.” And Ananda was also a little bit disturbed because how can a buddha think about his wife? Buddhas are not expected to think that way.

When the others had left, Ananda said to Buddha, “This is not good. What will people think?”

Buddha said, “What will people think? I have to express my gratitude to her, and I have to thank her for all the help she gave me. And I have to give something of that which has happened to me – I owe that much to her. I will have to go.”

He went back, he went to the palace, he saw his wife. Certainly Yashodhara was mad; this man had escaped one night without even saying anything to her. She said to Buddha, “Couldn’t you have trusted me? You could have said that you wanted to go, and I would have been the last woman in the world to prevent you. Couldn’t you have trusted me even that much?” And she was crying – twelve years of anger! This man had escaped like a thief in the middle of the night – suddenly, without giving a single hint to her.

Buddha apologized. And he said, “It was out of nonunderstanding. I was ignorant, I was not aware. But now I am aware and I know; that’s why I have come back. You have helped me tremendously. Forget those old things; now there is no point in thinking about spilt milk. Look at me – something great has happened. I have come home. And I felt my first duty was toward you, to come and to convey and to share my experience with you.”

The anger gone, the rage subsided, Yashodhara looked out through her tears. Yes, this man had changed tremendously; this was not the same man she used to know. This was not the same man, not at all. He looked like a great luminosity: she could almost see the aura, a light around him. And he was so peaceful and so silent; he had almost disappeared, his presence was almost absence. And then, in spite of herself, she forgot what she was doing. She fell at his feet and she asked to be initiated.

When you understand, there is bound to be compassion. That’s why I don’t say to my sannyasins to leave their families. Be there.

Rabindranath has written a poem about this incident – when Buddha goes. Yashodhara asked him one thing: “Just tell me one thing,” she said. “Whatever you have attained – I can see you have attained, whatsoever it is, I don’t know what it is – just tell me one thing: Was it not possible to attain it here in this house?”

And Buddha could not say no. It was possible to attain it there in the house.

Now he knew, because it has nothing to do with forest or with town, with the family or with an ashram. It has nothing to do with any place; it has something to do with your innermost core. It is available everywhere.

First, you will start feeling that your interest in the other is loosening. It will be a dim phenomenon, dark – looking through a dark glass, looking through a very foggy morning. Second, things become a little clearer, like a dream, the fog is not so much. Third, you are fully awake – it has happened, the inner woman has met the inner man. The bipolarity is no longer there: suddenly you are one. Schizophrenia has disappeared, you are not split.

With this integration you become an individual. Before that you were not an individual, you were a crowd, you were a mob, you were many people, you were multi-psychic. Suddenly you fall into order. That’s what this ancient story says.

The man had asked for three days… If sometimes you look into these small stories you will be wonderstruck; their symbols are great. The man had asked for three days to sit silently. Why three days? Those are the three points: in sleep, in dream, in waking; he wanted to put himself in order. First it happens in sleep, then it happens in dreams, then it happens in waking. And when you are in order, the whole of existence is in order. When you are an individual, when your split has disappeared and you are bridged together, then everything is bridged together.

It will look very paradoxical, but it has to be said: the individual is the universal. When you have become an individual, suddenly you see that you are the universal. Up to now you have been thinking that you were separate from existence; now you cannot think that. Adam and Eve have disappeared into each other. This is the goal that everybody is trying to find in some way or other. Tantra is the surest science for achieving it; this is the target.

A few more things: I told you that the muladhar has to be relaxed, only then can the energy move upward, inward. And inward and upward mean the same; outward and downward mean the same. Energy can move inward or upward only when the muladhar is relaxed. So the first thing is to relax the muladhar.

You are holding your sex center very tight. The society has made you very aware of the sex center; it has made you obsessed with it, so you are holding it tight. You can simply watch. You are always holding your genital organism very tight, as if you are afraid that something will go amiss if you relax. Your whole conditioning has been to keep it uptight. Relax it; leave it to itself. Don’t be afraid – fear creates tension. Drop the fear. Sex is beautiful; it is not a sin, it is a virtue. Once you think in terms of its being a virtue you will be able to relax.

I have talked about how to relax the muladhar before. And I have talked about how to relax the svadhishthan; it is the death center. Don’t be afraid of death. These are the two fears which have been dominating humanity: the fear of sex and the fear of death. Both fears are dangerous; they have not allowed you to grow. Drop both the fears.

The third chakra is the manipura; it is loaded with negative emotions. That’s why your stomach becomes disturbed when you are emotionally disturbed; the manipura is affected immediately. In all the languages of the world we have expressions like, “I cannot stomach it.” It is literally true. Sometimes when you cannot stomach a certain thing you start feeling nauseous, you would like to vomit. In fact sometimes it happens – a psychological vomit. Somebody has said something and you cannot stomach it, and suddenly you feel nausea: you vomit, and after vomiting you feel very relaxed.

In yoga they have methods for it. The yogi has to drink a large amount of water in the morning – a bucketful of water with salt; the water has to be lukewarm – and then he has to vomit it. It helps to relax the manipura. It is a great process, a great cleansing process.

You will be surprised: now many modern therapies have become aware of that vomiting helps. It releases the manipura. Tantra and yoga have always been aware of it.

The negative emotions – anger, hatred, jealousy and so forth – have all been repressed. Your manipura is overloaded. Those repressed emotions don’t allow the energy to go up; those repressed emotions function like a rock: your passage is blocked. Encounter, Gestalt, and therapies like that, all function unknowingly on the manipura. They try to provoke your anger, they try to provoke your jealousy, your greed; they provoke your aggression, your violence, so that it bubbles up, surfaces. The society has done one thing: it has trained you to repress all that is negative and pretend all that is positive. Now, both are dangerous. To pretend the positive is false, hypocrisy, and to repress the negative is dangerous; it is poisonous, it is poisoning your system.

Tantra says to express the negative and allow the positive. If anger comes, don’t repress it; if aggression comes, don’t repress it. Tantra does not say go and kill a person – but Tantra says that there a thousand and one ways to express the repressed emotions. You can go into the garden and chop wood. Have you watched woodcutters? They look more silent than anybody else. Have you watched hunters? Hunters are very good people. They do a very dirty thing, but they are good people. Something happens to them while they are hunting. Killing animals, their anger, their aggression is dissolved. The so- called nonviolent people are the ugliest in the world. They are not good people

because they are holding down a volcano. You cannot feel at ease with them; something is dangerously present there – you can feel it, you can touch it, it is oozing out of them.

You can just go into the forest and shout, scream. Primal Therapy is just scream therapy, tantrum therapy. And Encounter and Primal, Gestalt, are of tremendous help in relaxing the manipura.

Once the manipura is relaxed there arises a balance between the negative and the positive. And when the negative and positive are balanced, the passage is open; then the energy can move higher. The manipura is male. If the manipura is blocked, then energy cannot go upward. It has to be relaxed.

Anything that can be of help has to be used, because man has been so damaged that all sources of help should be made available. You may not even be able to understand why I am making available all the methods to you: Yoga, Tantra, Tao, Sufi, Jaina, Buddhist, Hindu, Gestalt, Psychodrama, Encounter, Primal Therapy, Polarity Balancing, Rolfing, Structural Integration – why I am making all these things available to you. You have never heard of these things being done in any ashram anywhere in the East at all. There is a reason for it: man has been damaged so much that all sources should be tapped. Help should be taken from every source possible; only then there is hope. Otherwise man is doomed.

The fourth chakra is the anahata. Doubt is the problem with the fourth chakra; if you are a doubting person, your fourth chakra will remain unopened. Trust opens it. So anything that creates doubt destroys your heart. The anahata is the heart chakra. Logic, logic chopping, argumentativeness, too much rationality, too much of Aristotle in you, destroy the anahata. Philosophy, skepticism, destroy the anahata.

If you want to open the anahata, you will have to be more trusting. Poetry is more helpful than philosophy, and intuition is more helpful than reasoning, and feeling is more helpful than thinking. So you will have to shift from doubt to trust, only then does your anahata open, does your anahata become capable of receiving the male energy from the manipura. The anahata is female; it closes with doubt, it becomes frigid with doubt, it becomes dry with doubt – it cannot receive the male energy. It opens with trust: with trust, moisture is released in that chakra and it can allow the penetration of the male energy.

Then the fifth: the vishuddha. Noncreativity, imitativeness, parroting, monkeying – these are damaging.

The vishuddha is destroyed by copying. Don’t be an imitator, don’t be just a carbon copy. Don’t try to become a Buddha and don’t try to become a Christ. Beware of books like Thomas à Kempis’ book Imitation of Christ – beware. No

imitation is going to help. The vishuddha is destroyed by noncreativity, imitation; and it is helped by creativity, expression, finding your own style of life, being courageous enough to “do your own thing.” Art, song, music, dance, inventiveness are all helpful. But be inventive – whatsoever you do, try to do it in a new way. Try to bring some individuality into it, bring some authentic signature. Even cleaning a floor, you can do it in your own way; even cooking food, you can do it in your own way. You can bring creativity to everything that you do; it should be brought. In as much as you are creative the vishuddha will open. And when the vishuddha opens, only then can the energy move into the agya, the third-eye center, the sixth center.

This is the process: first cleanse every center, purify it, beware of what damages it, and help it so that it becomes naturally functioning. Blocks are removed, energy rushes.

Beyond the sixth is the sahasrar, the turiya, the one-thousand-petaled lotus. You bloom. Yes, that’s exactly what it is. Man is a tree: the muladhar is the root and sahasrar is the blooming of it. The flower has bloomed, your fragrance is released to the winds. That is the only prayer; that is the only offering to the feet of the divine. Borrowed flowers won’t do, stolen flowers from the trees won’t do; you have to flower and offer your flowers.

Now the sutras of Saraha. The first:

For the delights of kissing the deluded crave, declaring it to be the ultimately real –

like a man who leaves his house and standing at the door asks a woman for reports of sensual delights.

Kissing is symbolic – symbolic of any meeting between yin and yang, between male and female, between Shiva and Shakti. Whether you are holding hands with a woman – this is a kissing, hands kissing each other – or you are touching her lips with your lips, that is kissing; or your genital organs together – that too is a kiss. So the kiss is symbolic in Tantra of all meetings of opposite polarities. Sometimes you can kiss just by seeing a woman. If your eyes meet and touch each other there is a kiss, the meeting has happened.

For the delights of kissing the deluded crave, declaring it to be the ultimately real… Saraha says that the deluded – the people who are not alert at all to what they are doing – go on hankering for, missing, the other: man, the woman; woman, the man. They are continuously hankering to meet the other – and the meeting never happens. The absurdity of it is this: you hanker and hanker and desire and desire, and nothing but frustration comes into your hands. Saraha says this is not the ultimately real meeting. The ultimately real

meeting is that which happens in the sahasrar. Once it has happened, it has happened forever. That is real. The meeting that happens outside is unreal, momentary, temporal – just a delusion.

It is …like a man who leaves his house and standing at the door asks a woman for reports of sensual delights. A beautiful simile. Saraha says that holding the hand of a woman outside, while the woman inside is waiting to be yours and forever yours, is just …like a man who leaves his house and standing at the door asks a woman for reports of sensual delights.

First …leaves his house… You are leaving your house, your innermost core, in search of a woman outside – and the woman is within. You will miss her wherever you go; you can go on running all over the earth and chasing all sorts of women and men. It is a mirage, it is a rainbow search, nothing comes into your hands. The woman is inside, and you are leaving the house.

And then …standing at the door… That too is symbolic. You are always standing at the door, by the senses – those are doors. Eyes are doors, hands are doors, genital organs are doors, ears are doors – these are doors. We are always standing at the door. Looking through the eyes, hearing through the ears, trying to touch with the hands, a man continuously remains at the door and forgets how to go inside the house. And then the absurdity of it – you don’t know what love is and you ask a woman about the delights, about her experience. You think that by listening to her experience you will become blissful. It is taking the menu for the food.

Saraha is saying that first you go out of yourself – stand at the door – and then you ask others what delight is, what life is, what joy is, what God is. And God is waiting all the time within you. He resides in you, and you are asking others. And do you think that by listening to them you will come to any understanding?

The stirring of biotic forces in the house of nothingness has given artificial rise to pleasures in so many ways. Such yogis from affliction faint for they have fallen from celestial space, inveigled into vice.

First: sex is not the ultimate in pleasure, it is just the beginning, the alpha, the ABC of it; it is not the omega. Sex is not the ultimately real, it is not the bliss supreme, but just an echo of it; the sahasrar is far away. When your sex center feels a little happiness, it is just a faraway echo of the sahasrar. The closer you come to the sahasrar, the more happiness you feel.

When you move from the muladhar to the svadhishthan, you feel happier – the first meeting of the muladhar and the svadhishthan is of great joy. Then the

second meeting is of even greater joy. Then the third meeting and you cannot believe that more joy can be possible; but still more is possible because you are still far away – not very far but still at a distance – from the sahasrar. The sahasrar is just incredible. The bliss is so much that you are no more, only bliss is. The bliss is so much that you cannot say, “I am blissful,” you simply know that you are bliss.

At the seventh you are just a tremor of joy – naturally so. Joy happens in the sahasrar and then it has to pass six layers. Much is lost, it is just an echo. Beware: don’t mistake the echo for the real. Yes, even in the echo something of the real is there. Find the thread of reality in it. Catch hold of the thread and start moving inward.

The stirring of biotic forces in the house of nothingness has given artificial rise to pleasures in so many ways. And because of this delusion that sex is the ultimate in pleasure, so many artificial things have become very important. Money has become very important because you can purchase anything for money: you can purchase sex. Power has become important because through power you can have as much sex as you want; a poor man cannot afford it. Kings used to have thousands of wives – even in the twentieth century, the Nizam of Hyderabad had five hundred wives. Naturally, one who has power can have as much sex as he wants. Thousands of other problems have arisen because of this delusion that sex is the ultimately real: money, power, prestige.

The stirring of biotic forces in the house of nothingness… It is just imagination; it is just imagination that you are thinking it is pleasure. It is autohypnosis, autosuggestion. And once you autosuggest to yourself it looks like pleasure. Just think: holding the hand of a woman, and you feel such pleasure: it is just autohypnosis. It is just an idea in the mind.

The stirring of biotic forces… Because of this idea in the mind, your bioenergy is stirred. It is stirred sometimes even while looking at aPlayboy picture; there is nobody, just lines and colors – and your energy can be stirred. Sometimes just an idea in the mind and your energy can be stirred. Energy follows imagination.

The stirring of biotic forces in the house of nothingness – you can create dreams, you can project dreams onto the screen of nothingness – has given artificial rise to pleasures in so many ways.

If you watch the pathology of man, you will be amazed: people have such ideas that you cannot believe what is happening. Some man cannot make love to his woman unless he looks at pornography first. The real seems to be less real than the unreal; he becomes excited only through the unreal. Have you not seen it again and again in your own life that the real seems to be less exciting

than the unreal?

Remember to change your consciousness from the imaginary to the real. Always listen to the real. Unless you are very, very alert you will remain in the trap of the imaginary.

The imaginary seems to be very satisfying for many reasons. It is under your control. You can have my nose as long as you want – in your imagination. You can think whatsoever you want to think; nobody can hinder it, nobody can enter your imagination, you are utterly free. You can paint me as you want, you can imagine me, you can expect, you can make whatsoever you want of me. You are free; the ego feels very good.

That’s why when a master is dead he finds more disciples than while he is alive. With a dead master, disciples are completely at ease; with a living master, they are in difficulty. Buddha never had as many disciples as he has now, after twenty-five centuries. Jesus had only twelve disciples; now, half of the earth. Just see the impact of the absent master: now Jesus is in your hands, you can do whatsoever you want to do with him. He is no longer alive, he cannot destroy your dreams and imaginations. If the so-called Christians had seen the real Jesus, their hearts would stop fluttering immediately. Why? – because they would not believe. They have imagined things, and Jesus is a real man. You could have found him in a pub, drinking with friends and gossiping. Now, this doesn’t look like the “only begotten son of God.” It looks very ordinary: maybe he is just the carpenter Joseph’s son. But once Jesus is gone, he cannot interfere with your imagination. Then you can picture and paint and create images of him as you like.

Far away it is easier: the imagination has full power. The closer you come to me, the less and less power your imagination will have. And you will never be able to see me unless you drop your imagination. So is the case with all other pleasures.

The stirring of biotic forces in the house of nothingness has given artificial rise to pleasures in so many ways. Such yogis from affliction faint for they have fallen from celestial space, inveigled into vice. If you imagine too much, you will lose your celestial space. Imagination is samsara, imagination is your dream. If you dream too much, you will lose the celestial space, you will lose your divinity, you will not be a conscious being. Imagination will outweigh you, it will overburden you, you will be lost in a fantasy. You can faint in your fantasy and you can think that it is samadhi. There are people who faint and then they think they are in samadhi. Buddha has called such samadhis “wrong samadhis.” So too Saraha says that it is a wrong samadhi. Imagining about God, going on into your imagination, feeding your imagination, nurturing it

more and more, fantasizing more and more – you will faint, you will lose all consciousness; you will have beautiful dreams of your own creation.

But this is falling from the celestial space. And Saraha says that to fall from your purity of awareness is the only vice. What does he mean by the “celestial space”? Space without any dreams. Dreaming is the world; without dreaming you are in nirvana.

As a brahmin, who with rice and butter makes a burned offering in blazing fire

creating a vessel for nectar from celestial space, takes this, through wishful thinking, as the ultimate.

In India, the brahmins have been doing yagnas. They have been offering rice and butter to the fire, the blazing fire, and imagining that the offering is going to God. Sitting around a fire, fasting for many days, doing certain rituals, certain mantras, repeating certain scriptures, you can create a state of autohypnosis. You can be fooled by yourself and you can think that you are reaching God.

Saraha says that those who really want to enter godliness will have to burn their inner fire; the outer fire won’t do. And those who really want to attain will have to burn their own seeds of desire; rice won’t do. And those who really want to attain will have to burn their ego; butter won’t do. Butter is just the most essential part of milk, the most purified part of milk. So is ego the most purified dream; it is ghee, purified butter. Offering ghee to the fire is not going to help. You have to burn your inner fire.

And sexual energy moving upward becomes a fire, it becomes a flame. It is fire! Even when it moves outward, it gives birth to life; sex energy is the most miraculous thing. It is through sex energy that life is born. Life is fire, it is a function of fire; without fire, life cannot exist. Without the sun there will be no trees, no men, no birds, no animals. It is transformed fire that becomes life.

While making love to a woman, the fire is going outward. While moving inward, the fire is going in. And when you throw your seeds of desire, seeds of thought, seeds of ambition, seeds of greed into this fire, they are burned. And then, finally, you throw your ego – the most purified dream; that too is burned. This is real yagna, real ritual, real sacrifice.

As a brahmin who with rice and butter makes a burned offering in blazing fire creating a vessel for nectar from celestial space, takes this, through wishful thinking, as the ultimate. And he thinks, through wishful thinking, that this is the ultimate. The man who is making love to a woman and thinks that it is the ultimate is throwing into the outer fire in exactly the same way; he is pouring

into something outside. And so is the woman who thinks she is making love or moving into a great space of bliss and benediction by just making love to a man, just throwing out her fire.

The fire has to move inward; then it gives a rebirth to you, it rejuvenates you.

Some people, who have kindled the inner heat and raised it to the fontanel,

stroke the uvula with the tongue in a sort of coition

and confuse that which fetters with what gives release, in pride will call themselves yogis.

And a very important thing: just as I explained to you the map, you have to remember that the vishuddha, the fifth chakra, is in the throat. Vishuddha, the throat chakra, is the last point from which you can fall. Up to that point there is a possibility of falling back. With the sixth chakra, the third eye, attained, there is no possibility of falling back. You have gone beyond the point from which one can return. The point of no return is the third eye. If you die at the third-eye center, you will be born at the third-eye center. If you die at the sahasrar, you will not be born again. But if you die at the vishuddha, you will slip back to the first, the muladhar. In the next life you will have to start from the muladhar again.

So up to the fifth there is no certainty; there is promise, but no certainty. Up to the fifth there is every possibility of falling back. And one of the greatest possibilities that has caused many people in India to fall back is, this sutra says: Some people, who have kindled the inner heat and raised it to the fontanel…

You can create the inner heat – the flame starts moving upward and it comes to the throat; then there arises a great desire to tickle the throat with the tongue. Beware of it. In India they have devised great techniques for tickling it with the tongue. They have even cut the roots of the tongue so that the tongue becomes long and can easily move backward – you will find many yogis doing that. The tongue can move backward and it can tickle the fifth center. That tickling is masturbatory because the sex energy has come there.

Just as I told you, the fifth chakra, vishuddha, is male. When the male energy comes to the throat, your throat becomes almost a genital organ – of more superiority, of more finesse than the genital organ. Just a little tickle with the tongue and you enjoy greatly. But that is masturbatory, and once you start doing that… And it is very, very great pleasure, sex is nothing compared to it. Remember it: sex is just nothing compared to it. Tickling with your own tongue, you can enjoy it so much. So in yoga there are methods…

Saraha is making it clear that no Tantrika should do that. It is a deception

and a great failure because the energy has come up to the fifth, and now the desire arises to tickle it; that is the last desire. If you can keep yourself alert and can move beyond that desire, then you will reach the sixth center, the agya; otherwise you will start falling back. That is the last temptation. In fact, in Tantra that is the temptation which you can say that Jesus had when Satan came and tempted him, or Buddha had when Mara came and tempted him. This is the last temptation, the last effort of your desire-mind, the last effort of your dream world, the last effort of the ego before it is lost utterly. It makes a last effort to tempt you. And the temptation is really great: it is very difficult to avoid it. It is so pleasurable, infinitely more pleasurable than sex pleasure.

When people think that sex pleasure is the ultimate, what to say about this pleasure? And it loses no energy. In sex you have to lose energy; you feel frustrated, tired, weak. But if you tickle your sex energy when it has come to the throat, there is no loss of energy. And you can go on tickling the whole day – that’s what Jose Delgado has attained through mechanical devices.

Some people, who have kindled the inner heat and raised it to the fontanel, stroke the uvula with the tongue in a sort of coition and confuse that which fetters with that which gives release… This is again samsara – falling back into samsara. …and confuse that which fetters with that which gives release, in pride will call themselves yogis. But they are not, they have missed. In fact the right word for them is yogabrashta, “one who has fallen from yoga.”

The fifth center is the most dangerous center. You cannot tickle any other center – that is the danger of it. You cannot tickle the swadhishthan, you cannot tickle the manipura, you cannot tickle the anahata; they are beyond you, there is no way to reach them and tickle them. You cannot tickle the third eye. The only point which can be tickled is the vishuddha, your throat center, because it is available. The mouth is open, it is available, and the easiest way is to turn your tongue backward and tickle it.

In yoga treatises you will find it described as something great; it is not, beware of it.

This is the inner map of Tantra alchemy. The energy can start moving any time; you just have to bring to your lovemaking a little meditation, a little inwardness. Tantra is not against lovemaking, remember; let it be repeated again and again. It is all for it, but not just for it; it is the first rung of the ladder, a seven-runged ladder.

Man is a ladder. The first rung is sex and the seventh rung is the sahasrar – samadhi. The first rung joins you with samsara, the world, and the seventh rung joins you with nirvana, the beyond. With the first rung, you move in a vicious circle of birth and death again and again; it is repetitive. With the

seventh rung, you go beyond birth and death. Life eternal is yours – the kingdom of God.

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