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‌Chapter 9: This Very Life, the Ultimate Joy

The first state of vairagya, desirelessness: cessation from self-indulgence in the thirst for sensuous pleasures, with conscious effort.

The last state of vairagya, desirelessness: cessation of all desiring by knowing the innermost nature of purush, the supreme self.

Abhyasa andvairagya – constant inner practice and desirelessness: these are the two foundation stones of Patanjali’s Yoga. Constant inner effort is needed not because something has to be achieved but because of wrong habits. The fight is not against nature, the fight is against habits. Nature is there, every moment available to flow in, to become one with it, but you have a wrong pattern of habits. Those habits create barriers. The fight is against these habits, and unless they are destroyed, the nature, your inherent nature, cannot flow, cannot move, cannot reach to the destiny for which it is meant.

So remember the first thing: the struggle is not against nature. The struggle is against wrong nurture, wrong habits. You are not fighting yourself, you are fighting something else which has become fixed with you. If this is not understood rightly, then your whole effort can go in a wrong direction. You may start fighting with yourself, and once you start fighting with yourself you are fighting a losing battle. You can never be victorious. Who will be victorious and who will be defeated? You are both, the one who is fighting and the one with whom you are fighting. If both my hands start fighting, who is going to win?

Once you start fighting with yourself you are lost, and so many people, in their endeavors, in their seeking for spiritual truth, fall into that error. They become victims of this error, and start fighting with themselves. If you fight with yourself you will go more and more insane. You will be more and more divided, split, you will become schizophrenic. This is what is happening in the West.

Christianity – not Christ, Christianity – has taught to fight with oneself, to condemn oneself, to deny oneself. Christianity has created a great division between the lower and the higher; there is nothing lower and nothing higher in you. Christianity talks about the lower self and the higher self, or the body and the soul. But somehow Christianity divides you and then creates a fight. This fight is going to be endless, it will not lead you anywhere. The ultimate result

can only be self-destruction, a schizophrenic chaos. That’s what is happening in the West.

Yoga never divides you, but still there is a fight. The fight is not against your nature. On the contrary, the fight is foryour nature. You have accumulated many habits; those habits are your achievement of many lives’ wrong patterns. And because of those wrong patterns your nature cannot move spontaneously, cannot flow spontaneously, cannot reach to its destiny. These habits have to be destroyed. And these are only habits – they may look like nature to you because you are so addicted to them. You may have become identified with them, but they are not you.

This distinction has to be clearly maintained in the mind, otherwise you can misinterpret Patanjali. Whatsoever has come into you from without and is wrong has to be destroyed so that which is within you can flow, can flower. Abhyasa, constant inner practice, is against habits.

The second thing, the second foundation stone, is vairagya, desirelessness. That too can lead you in a wrong direction. And, remember, these are not rules, these are simple directions. When I say these are not rules I mean they are not to be followed like an obsession, their meaning and significance has to be understood, and that significance has to be carried in one’s life.

It is going to be different for everyone so it is not a fixed rule. You are not to follow it dogmatically. You have to understand its significance and then allow it to grow within you. The flowering is going to be different with each individual. So these are not dead, dogmatic rules, these are simple directions. They indicate the direction, they don’t give you the detail.

I remember, once Mulla Nasruddin was working as a doorkeeper in a museum. The first day he was appointed he asked for the rules: “What rules have to be followed?” So he was given the book of rules that were to be followed by the doorkeeper. He memorized them, he took every care not to forget a single detail.

And the first day when he was on duty, the first visitor came. He told the visitor to leave his umbrella there outside with him at the door. The visitor was amazed. He said, “But I don’t have any umbrella.”

So Nasruddin said, “In that case, you will have to go back. Bring an umbrella because this is the rule. Unless a visitor leaves his umbrella here outside, he cannot be allowed in.”

And there are many people who are rule-obsessed. They follow blindly. Patanjali is not interested in giving you rules. Whatsoever he is going to say are

simply directions, not to be followed but to be understood. And out of that understanding, following will come. The reverse cannot happen: if you follow the rules, understanding will not come. If you understand the rules, the following will come; will come automatically, as a shadow.

Desirelessness is a direction. If you follow it as a rule then you will start killing your desires. Many have done that, millions have done that – they start killing their desires. Of course this is mathematical, this is logical. If desirelessness is to be achieved then the best way is to kill all desires. Then you will be without desires but you will also be dead. You have followed the rule exactly, but if you kill all desires you are killing yourself, you are committing suicide because desires are not only desires, they are the flow of life energy. Desirelessness is to be achieved without killing anything. Desirelessness is to be achieved with more life, with more energy, not less.

For example, you can kill sex easily if you starve the body, because sex and food are deeply related. Food is needed for your survival, for the survival of the individual, and sex is needed for the survival of the race, of the species. They are both food, in a way. Without food the individual cannot survive and without sex the race cannot survive, but the primary is the individual. If the individual cannot survive then there is no question of the race.

So if you starve your body, if you give so little food to your body that the energy created by it is exhausted in day-to-day routine work, walking, sitting, sleeping; if no extra energy accumulates, then sex will disappear. Sex can be there only when the individual is gathering extra energy, more than he needs for his survival. Then the body can think of the survival of the race.

If you are in danger then the body simply forgets about sex; hence so much attraction for fasting, because if you fast sex disappears. But this is not desirelessness, this is just becoming more and more dead, less and less alive. In India, Jaina monks have been fasting continuously just for this end, because if you fast continuously and you are constantly on a starvation diet, sex disappears. Nothing else is needed, no transformation of the mind, no transformation of the inner energy, simply starving helps. Then you become habituated to starvation. And if you continuously do it for years, you will simply forget that sex exists. No energy is created, no energy moves to the sex center. There is no energy to move! The person exists just as a dead being. There is no sex.

But this is not what Patanjali means. This is not a desireless state. It is simply an impotent state, energy is not there. If you give food to the body, even though you may have starved the body for thirty or forty years, once you give the right food to the body, sex reappears immediately. You are not changed, the

sex is just hidden there waiting for energy to flow. Whenever energy flows it will become alive again.

So what is the criterion? The criterion has to be remembered: be more alive, be more filled with energy, vital, and become desireless. Only then, if your desirelessness makes you more alive have you followed the right direction. If it simply makes you a dead person you have followed the rule. It is easy to follow the rule because no intelligence is required. It is easy to follow the rule because simple tricks can do it. Fasting is a simple trick. Nothing much is implied in it, no wisdom is going to come out of it.

There was an experiment in Oxford. For thirty days a group of twenty students, young healthy boys, were totally starved. After the seventh or eighth day they started losing interest in girls. Nude pictures were given to them and they were indifferent. And this indifference was not just bodily, even their minds were not interested.

There are now methods to judge the mind. Whenever a young boy, a healthy boy, looks at a nude picture of a girl, the pupils of his eyes become big. They are more open to receive the nude figure. And you cannot control your pupils, they are not voluntary. So you may say that you are not interested in sex, but a nude picture will show whether you are interested or not. And you cannot do anything voluntarily; you cannot control the pupils of your eyes. They expand, because something so interesting has come before them that they open more, the shutters open more to take more in. Now, women are not interested in nude men, they are interested in small babies, so if a beautiful baby’s picture is given to them their eyes expand.

In the Oxford experiment, every precaution was taken to see whether the boys were interested, and there was no interest. By and by the interest declined more. Even in their dreams they stopped seeing girls, sexual dreams. By the second week, the fourteenth or fifteenth day, they were simply dead corpses. Even if a beautiful girl came nearby they would not look. If someone said a dirty joke they would not laugh. For thirty days they were starved, and on the thirtieth day the whole group was sexless. There was no sex in their minds, in their bodies.

Then food was given to them again: on the very first day they again became as they were. The next day they were interested, and the third day all that starving for thirty days had disappeared. Now not only were they interested, they were obsessively interested, as if this gap had helped. For a few weeks they were obsessively sexual, only thinking of girls and nothing else. When the food was in the body, girls became important again.

But this has been done in many countries all over the world. Many religions

have followed this fasting. And then people start thinking that they have gone beyond sex. You can go beyond sex, but fasting is not the way. That’s a trick. And this can be done in every way. If you are on a fast you will be less angry, and if fasting becomes habitual then many things from your life will simply drop because the base has dropped: food is the base.

When you have more energy you move in more dimensions. When you are filled with overflowing energy, your overflowing energy leads you into many, many desires. Desires are nothing but outlets for energy. Two ways are possible: one is that your desire changes and the energy remains, or energy is removed and the desire remains. Energy can be removed very easily. You can simply be operated on, castrated, and then sex disappears. Some hormones can be removed from your body. And that’s what fasting is doing – some hormones disappear, then you can become sexless.

But this is not the goal of Patanjali. Patanjali says that energy should remain and desire disappears. Only when desire disappears and you are filled with energy can you achieve that blissful state that Yoga aims at. A dead person cannot reach to the divine. The divine can be attained only through overflowing energy, abundant energy, an ocean of energy.

So this is the second thing to remember continuously: don’t destroy energy, destroy desire. It will be difficult. It is going to be hard, arduous, because it needs a total transformation of your being. But Patanjali is for it. So he divides his vairagya, his desirelessness, into two steps. We will enter the sutra.

The first sutra:

The first state of vairagya – desirelessness: cessation from self-indulgence in the thirst for sensuous pleasures, with conscious effort.

Many things are implied and have to be understood. One: the indulgence in sensuous pleasures. Why do you ask for sensuous pleasures? Why does the mind constantly think about indulgence? Why do you move again and again in the same pattern of indulgences?

For Patanjali, and for all those who have known, the reason is that you are not blissful inwardly, hence the desire for pleasure. The pleasure-oriented mind means that as you are, in yourself, you are unhappy. That’s why you seek happiness somewhere else. A person who is unhappy is bound to move into desires. Desires are the way for the unhappy mind to seek happiness. Of course, nowhere can this mind find happiness. At the most he can find a few glimpses; those glimpses appear as pleasure. Pleasure means glimpses of happiness. And the fallacy is that this pleasure-seeking mind thinks that these

glimpses and the pleasure are coming from somewhere else. It always comes from within.

Let us try to understand. You are in love with a person, you move into sex. Sex gives you a glimpse of pleasure, it gives you a glimpse of happiness. For a single moment you feel at ease. All the miseries have disappeared, all the mental agony is gone. For a single moment you are here and now, you have forgotten all. For a single moment there is no past and no future – because of this there is no past and no future. And for a single moment you are here and now; from within you the energy flows. Your inner self flows in this moment and you have a glimpse of happiness.

But you think that the glimpse is coming from the partner, from the woman or from the man. It is not coming from the man or from the woman, it is coming from you! The other has simply helped you to fall into the present, to fall out of future and past. The other has simply helped to bring you to the nowness of this moment.

If you can come to this nowness without sex, sex by and by will become useless, it will disappear. Then it will not be a desire. If you want to move in it you can move into it as fun, but not as a desire. Then there is no obsession in it because you are not dependent on it.

Sit under a tree some day, just in the morning when the sun has not risen and watch what happens in your body – because with the sun’s rising your body is disturbed and it is difficult to be at peace within. That is why in the East they have always been meditating before sunrise. They have called it brahmamuhurt, the moments of the divine. And they are right, because with the sun, energies rise and they start flowing in the old pattern that you have created.

Just in the morning, the sun has not yet come on the horizon, everything is silent and nature is fast asleep: the trees are asleep, the birds are asleep, the whole world is asleep; your body also inside is asleep. You have come to sit under a tree. Everything is silent. Just try to be here in this moment. Don’t do anything, don’t even meditate, don’t make any effort. Just close your eyes, remain silent in this silence of nature. Suddenly you will have the same glimpse which has been coming to you through sex or even greater, deeper. Suddenly you will feel a rush of energy flowing from within. And now you cannot be deceived because there is no “other”; it is certainly coming from you, it is certainly flowing from within. Nobody else is giving it to you, you are giving it to yourself.

But the right situation is needed, a silence, energy not in excitement, not doing anything, just being there under a tree. Then you will have the glimpse

and this will not really be pleasure, it will be happiness, because now you are looking at the right source, the right direction. Once you know it then through sex you will immediately recognize that the other was just a mirror; you were reflected in him or in her. And you were the mirror for the other. You were helping each other to fall into the present, to move away from the thinking mind to a non-thinking state of being.

The more mind is filled with chattering, the more sex has appeal. In the East sex was never such an obsession as it has become in the West. Films, stories, novels, poetry, magazines, everything has become sexual. You cannot sell anything unless you can create a sex appeal. If you have to sell a car you can sell it only as a sex object. If you want to sell toothpaste you can sell only through some sex appeal. Nothing can be sold without sex. It seems that only sex has the market, nothing else has this significance.

Every significance comes through sex, the whole mind is obsessed with sex. Why? Why has this never happened before? This is something new in human history. And the reason is now the West is totally absorbed in thoughts with no possibility of being here and now, except in sex. Sex has remained the only possibility, and even that is going.

For the modern man it has even become possible that while making love he can think of other things. And once you become so capable that while making love you can go on thinking of something – your bank accounts, talking with a friend, or being somewhere else while making love here – sex will also be finished. Then it will just be boring, frustrating, because sex was not the thing. The thing was only this: that because sexual energy is moving so fast your mind comes to a stop, the sex takes over. The energy flows so fast, so vitally, that your ordinary patterns of thinking stop.

I have heard…

Once it happened that Mulla Nasruddin was passing through a forest. He came upon a skull. Just curious, as he always was, he asked the skull, “What brought you here, sir?”

And he was amazed because the skull said, “Talking brought me here, sir.” He couldn’t believe it, but he had heard it so he ran to the court of the king.

He told them there, “I have seen a miracle! A skull, a talking skull, lying just near our village in the forest!”

The king also couldn’t believe, but he was curious. The whole court followed. They went into the forest. Nasruddin went near the skull and asked again the same question, “What brought you here, sir?” But the skull remained silent. He asked again and again and again, but the skull was dead silent.

The king said, “I knew before, Nasruddin, that you are a liar. But now this is too much. You have played such a joke that you will have to suffer for it.” He ordered his guard to cut off his head and throw the head near the skull for the ants to eat. When everybody went – the king, his court – the skull started talking again. And he asked, “What brought you here, sir?”

Nasruddin answered, “What brought me here? Talking brought me here, sir.”

Talking has brought man to this situation that is today. A constant chattering mind does not allow any happiness, any possibility of happiness, because only a silent mind can look within, only a silent mind can hear the silence, the happiness that is always bubbling there. But it is so subtle that with the noise of the mind you cannot hear it.

Only in sex the noise sometimes stops. I say sometimes, because if you have become habitual in sex also, as husbands and wives become, then it never stops. The whole act becomes automatic and the mind goes on on its own. Then sex is also a boredom.

Anything has appeal if it can give you a glimpse. The glimpse may appear to be coming from the outside; it always comes from within. The outside can only be just a mirror. When happiness flowing from within is reflected from the outside, it is called pleasure. This is Patanjali’s definition: happiness flowing from within reflected from somewhere in the outside, the outside functioning as a mirror. And if you think that this happiness is coming from the outside, it is called pleasure. We are in search of happiness, not in search of pleasure, so unless you can have glimpses of happiness you cannot stop your pleasure- seeking efforts. Indulgence means the search for pleasure.

A conscious effort is needed for two things. One, whenever you feel there is a moment of pleasure, transform it into a meditative situation. Whenever you feel you are feeling pleasure, happy, joyful, close your eyes and look within at where it is coming from. Don’t lose this moment, this is precious. If you are not conscious you may continue thinking that it comes from without, and that’s the fallacy of the world.

If you are conscious, meditative, if you search for the real source, sooner or later you will come to know it is flowing from within. Once you know that it always flows from within, it is something that you have already got, indulgence will drop, and this will be the first step of desirelessness. Then you are not seeking, not hankering. You are not killing desires, you are not fighting with desires, you have simply found something greater. The desires don’t look so important now, they wither away.

Remember this: they are not to be killed and destroyed, they wither away. You simply neglect them because you have a greater source, you are magnetically attracted towards it. Now your whole energy is moving inwards.

The desires are simply neglected. You are not fighting them. If you fight with them you will never win. It is just like you had some stones, colored stones, in your hand and now suddenly you have come to know about diamonds – and they are lying about. You throw away the colored stones just to create space for the diamonds in your hand. You are not fighting the stones. When there are diamonds you simply drop the stones, they have lost their meaning.

Desires must lose their meaning. If you fight, the meaning is not lost. Or even, on the contrary, just through fight you may give them more meaning. Then they become more important. This is happening. Those who fight with any desire, that desire becomes the center of their mind. If you fight sex, sex becomes the center. Then you are continuously engaged, occupied with it. It becomes like a wound. And wherever you look that wound immediately projects, and whatsoever you see becomes sexual.

Mind has a mechanism, an old survival mechanism, of fight or flight. The ways of the mind are two: either you can fight with something or you can escape. If you are strong then you fight, if you are weak then you take flight, then you simply escape, but in both ways the other is important, the other is the center. You can fight or you can escape from the world, from the world where desires are possible. You can go to the Himalayas: that too is a fight, the fight of the weak.

I have heard…

Once Mulla Nasruddin was shopping in a village. He left his donkey on the street and went into a shop to purchase something. When he came out he was furious. Someone had painted his donkey completely red, bright red. So he was furious, and he inquired, “Who has done this? I will kill that man!”

A small boy was standing there. He said, “A man has done this, and that man has just gone inside the pub.”

So Nasruddin went there, rushed there, angry, mad. He said, “Who has done this? Who the hell has painted my donkey?”

A very big man, very strong, stood and he said, “I did. What about it?”

So Nasruddin said, “Thank you, sir. You have done such a beautiful job. I just came to tell you that the first coat is dry.”

If you are strong then you are ready to fight. If you are weak then you are

ready to flee, to take flight. But in both cases you are not becoming stronger. In both cases the other has become the center of your mind. These are the two attitudes, fight or flight – and both are wrong because through both the mind is strengthened.

Patanjali says there is a third possibility: don’t fight and don’t escape, just be alert. Just be conscious. Whatsoever is the case, just be a witness. Conscious effort means first, searching for the inner source of happiness, and second, witnessing the old pattern of habits, not fighting it, just witnessing it.

The first state of vairagya, desirelessness: cessation from self-indulgence in the thirst for sensuous pleasures, with conscious effort.

Conscious effort is the key. Consciousness is needed, and effort is also needed. And the effort should be conscious, because there can be unconscious efforts. You can be trained in such a way that you can drop certain desires without knowing that you have dropped them.

For example, if you are born in a vegetarian home you will be eating vegetarian food. Non-vegetarian food is simply not the question. You never dropped it consciously; you have been brought up in such a way that unconsciously it has dropped by itself. But this is not going to give you some integrity, this is not going to give you some spiritual strength. Unless you do something consciously, it is not gained.

Many societies have tried this for their children, to bring them up in such a way that certain wrong things simply don’t enter into their lives. They don’t enter, but nothing is gained through it because the real thing to gain is consciousness. And consciousness can be gained through effort. If something is conditioned on you without your effort, it is not a gain at all.

So in India there are many vegetarians. Jainas, brahmins, many people are vegetarians. Nothing is gained because being a vegetarian just by being born in a Jaina family means nothing. It is not a conscious effort, you have not done anything about it. If you were born in a non-vegetarian family you would have taken to non-vegetarian food in the same way.

Unless some conscious effort is done your crystallization never happens. You have to do something on your own. When you do something on your own you gain something. Nothing is gained without consciousness, remember it. It is one of the ultimates – nothing is gained without consciousness! You may become a perfect saint, but if you have not become through consciousness it is futile, useless. You must struggle, inch by inch, because through struggle more consciousness will be needed. And the more consciousness you practice the

more conscious you become. And a moment comes when you become pure consciousness.

The first step is:

…cessation from self-indulgence in the thirst for sensuous pleasures, with conscious effort.

What to do? Whenever you are in any state of pleasure – sex, food, money, power, anything that gives you pleasure – meditate on it. Just try to find where it is coming from. Are you the source, or is the source somewhere else? If the source is somewhere else then there is no possibility of any transformation because you will remain dependent on the source.

But fortunately, the source is not anywhere else, it is within you. If you meditate you will find it. It is knocking from within every moment, “I am here!” Once you have the feeling that it is there knocking every moment, and you were only creating situations outside in which it was happening, it can happen without situations. Then you need not depend on anybody, not on food, on sex, on power, on anything. You are enough unto yourself. Once you have come to this feeling, the feeling of enoughness, indulgence – the mind that indulges, the indulgent mind – disappears.

That doesn’t mean you will not enjoy food. You will enjoy more, but now food is not the source of your happiness, you are the source. You are not dependent on food, you are not addicted to it.

That doesn’t mean you will not enjoy sex. You can enjoy more, but now it is fun, play, it is just a celebration. But you are not dependent on it, it is not the source. And once two persons, two lovers, realize that the other is not the source of their pleasure, they stop fighting with the other. They start loving the other for the first time.

You cannot love a person upon whom you are dependent in any way. You will hate, because he is your dependence. Without him you cannot be happy. So he has the key, and a person who has the key to your happiness is your jailer. Lovers fight because they see that the other has the key and, “He can make me happy or unhappy.” Once you come to know that you are the source, and the other is the source of his own happiness… You can share your happiness, that’s another thing, but you are not dependent. You can share, you can celebrate together. That’s what love means: celebrating together, sharing together, not deriving from each other, not exploiting each other, because exploitation cannot be love. Then you are using the other as a means, and whomsoever you use as a means will hate you.

Lovers hate each other because they are using, exploiting each other. And love, which should be the deepest ecstasy, becomes the ugliest hell. But once

you know that you are the source of your happiness, no one else is the source, you can share it freely. Then the other is not your enemy, not even an intimate enemy. For the first time friendship arises, you can enjoy anything.

You will be able to enjoy only when you are free. Only an independent person can enjoy. A person who is mad and obsessed with food cannot enjoy. He may fill his belly, but he cannot enjoy. His eating is violent, it is a sort of killing. He is killing the food, he is destroying the food. And lovers who feel that their happiness depends on the other are fighting, trying to dominate the other, trying to kill the other, to destroy the other. You will be able to enjoy everything more when you know that the source is within. Then the whole life becomes a play and moment to moment you can go on celebrating, infinitely.

This is the first step: with effort, consciousness and effort, you achieve desirelessness. Patanjali says this is the first, because even effort, even consciousness is not good because it means some struggle, some hidden struggle, is still on.

The second and last step of vairagya, the last state of desirelessness:

…cessation of all desiring by knowing the innermost nature of purush, the supreme self.

First, you have to know that you are the source of all happiness that happens to you. Second, you have to know the total nature of your inner self. First, you are the source. Second, “What is this source?” First, just this much is enough – that you are the source of your happiness. And second, what this source is in its totality, what this purush, this inner self is – “Who am I?” – in its totality.

Once you know this source in its totality you have known all. Then the whole universe is within. Not only happiness, all that exists, exists within, not only happiness. Then God is not somewhere sitting in the clouds, he exists within. Then you are the source, the root source of all. Then you are the center.

And once you become the center of existence, once you know that you are the center of existence, all misery has disappeared. Now desirelessness becomes spontaneous, sahaj. No effort, no striving, no maintaining is needed. It is so; it has become natural. You are not pulling it or pushing it. Now there is no “I” who can pull and push.

Remember this: struggle creates ego. If you struggle in the world it creates a gross ego: “I am someone with money, with prestige, with power.” If you struggle within it creates a subtle ego: “I am pure, I am a saint, I am a sage” – but “I” remains with struggle. So there are pious egoists who have a very subtle ego. They may not be worldly people – they are not, they are other-worldly – but there is struggle. They have achieved something: that achievement still carries the last shadow of “I.”

The second step, and the final state of desirelessness for Patanjali, is total disappearance of the ego: just nature flowing, no “I,” no conscious effort. That doesn’t mean you will not be conscious; you will be perfect consciousness, but no effort implied of being conscious. There will be no self-consciousness. Pure consciousness means you have accepted yourself and existence as it is.

A total acceptance: this is what Lao Tzu calls Tao, the river flowing towards the sea. It is not making any effort, it is not in any hurry to reach the sea. Even if it doesn’t reach it will not get frustrated. Even if it reaches in millions of years, everything is okay. The river is simply flowing because flowing is its nature. There is no effort, it will go on flowing.

When for the first time desires are noted and observed, effort arises, a subtle effort. Even the first step is a subtle effort. You start trying to be aware: “Where is my happiness coming from?” You have to do something, and that doing will create the ego. That’s why Patanjali says that is only the beginning, and you must remember that is not the end. In the end not only have desires disappeared, you also have disappeared. Only the inner being has remained in its flow.

This spontaneous flow is the supreme ecstasy, because no misery is possible for it. Misery comes through expectation, demand. There is no one to expect, to demand, so whatsoever happens is good. Whatsoever happens is a blessing. You cannot compare with anything else – it is the case. And because there is no comparing with the past and with the future – there is no one to compare – you cannot look at anything as misery, as pain. Even if pain happens in that situation it will not be painful. Try to understand this. This is difficult.

Jesus is being crucified. Christians have painted Jesus very sad. They have even said that he never laughed, and in their churches they have the sad figure of Jesus everywhere. This is human, we can understand it because a person who is being crucified must be sad, he must be in inner agony, he must be in suffering.

So Christians say that Jesus suffered for our sins – but he suffered. This is absolutely wrong! If you ask Patanjali or me, this is absolutely wrong. Jesus cannot suffer. It is impossible for Jesus to suffer. And if he suffers then there is no difference between you and him.

Pain is there, but he cannot suffer. This may look mysterious, but this is not; this is simple. Pain is there. As far as we can see from the outside he is being crucified, insulted, his body is destroyed. Pain is there but Jesus cannot suffer because in this moment when Jesus is crucified, he cannot ask. He has no demand. He cannot say, “This is wrong. This should not be so. I must be crowned and I am crucified.”

If he has in his mind that “I must be crowned and I am crucified,” then there will be pain. If he has no “futuring” in his mind that, “I should be crowned,” no expectation for the future, no fixed goal to reach, wherever he has found himself is then the goal. And he cannot compare. This cannot be otherwise. This is the present moment that has been brought to him. This crucifixion is the crown.

And he cannot suffer because suffering means resistance. You must resist something, only then can you suffer. Try it. It will be difficult for you to be crucified, but there are daily crucifixions, small ones, but they will do.

You have a pain in the leg, or in the head you have a headache. You may not have observed the mechanism of it: you have a headache and you constantly struggle and resist. You don’t want it. You are against it, you divide. You are somewhere standing within the head and the headache is there. You are separate and the headache is separate. You insist that it should not be so, and this is the real problem.

Try once not to fight, flow with the headache, become the headache. And say, “This is the case. This is how my head is at this moment, and at this moment nothing is possible. It may go away in the future, but in this moment the headache is there.” Don’t resist. Allow it to happen, become one with it. Don’t pull yourself separate, flow into it. And then there will be a sudden upsurge of a new type of happiness that you have not known. When there is no one to resist, even a headache is not painful. The fight creates the pain. The pain means always fighting against the pain – that’s the real pain.

Jesus accepts: this is how his life has led to the cross. This is the destiny. This is what in the East they have always called fate, bhagya, the kismet. Sothere is no point in arguing with your fate, there is no point in fighting it. You cannot do anything, it is happening. Only one possibility is there for you – you can flow with it or you can fight with it. If you fight it becomes more agony. If you flow with it the agony is less. And if you can flow totally, agony disappears. You become the flow.

Try it when you have a headache, try it when you have an ill body, try it when you have some pain – just flow with it. And if you can allow, you will come to one of the deepest secrets of life: that pain disappears if you flow with it. And if you can flow totally, pain becomes happiness.

But this is not something logical to be understood. You can comprehend it intellectually, but that won’t do. Try it existentially. There are everyday situations, every moment something is wrong. Flow with it, and see how you transform the whole situation. And through that transformation you transcend it.

A Buddha can never be in pain, that is impossible. Only an ego can be in pain. To be in pain, ego is a must. And if the ego is there you can also transform your pleasures into pain; if the ego is not there you can transform your pains into pleasures. The secret lies with the ego.

The last state of vairagya, desirelessness: cessation of all desiring by knowing the innermost nature of purush, the supreme self.

How does it happen? – just by knowing the innermost core of yourself, the purush,the dweller within. Just by knowing it! Patanjali says, Buddha says, Lao Tzu says, just by knowing it all desires disappear.

This is mysterious, and the logical mind is bound to ask how it can happen that just by knowing themselves all desires disappear. It happens, because not knowing themselves all desires have arisen. Desires are simply the ignorance of the self. Why? All that you are seeking through desires is there, hidden in the self. If you know the self, desires will disappear.

For example, you are asking for power. Everybody is asking for power. Power creates madness in everybody. It seems to be just human: society has existed in such a way that everybody is power-addicted.

The child is born helpless, and this is the first feeling all of you carry with you always. The child is born, he is helpless, and a helpless child wants power. That’s natural because everybody is more powerful than he is. The mother is powerful, the father is powerful, the brothers are powerful, everybody is powerful, and the child is absolutely helpless. Of course the first desire that arises is to have power, to grow powerful, to be dominating. And the child starts being political from that very moment. He starts learning the tricks of how to dominate.

If he cries too much he comes to know that he can dominate through crying. He can dominate the whole house just by crying. He learns crying. And women continue it even when they are no longer children. The child has learned the secret and he continues it. And he has to continue it because he remains helpless – that’s power politics.

He knows a trick, he can create a disturbance, and he can create such a disturbance that you have to accept and compromise with him. And every moment he feels deeply that the only thing that is needed is power, more power. He will learn, he will go to school, he will grow, he will love, but behind everything – his education, love, play – he will be finding out how to get more power. Through education he will want to dominate, to come first in his class so he can be dominating; to get more money so he can be dominating, to go on growing in influence and the territory of domination. His whole life he

will be after power.

Many lives are simply wasted. And even if you get power, what are you going to do? Simply a childish wish is fulfilled. So when you become a Napoleon or a Hitler, suddenly you become aware that the whole effort has been useless, futile. Just a childish wish has been fulfilled, that’s all. Now what to do? What to do with this power? If the wish is fulfilled you are frustrated, if the wish is not fulfilled you are frustrated. And it cannot be fulfilled absolutely, because no one can be so powerful that he can feel, “Now it is enough” – no one! The world is so complex that even a Hitler feels powerless in moments, even a Napoleon will feel powerless in moments. Nobody can feel absolute power, and nothing can satisfy you.

But when one comes to know one’s self, one comes to know the source of absolute power. Then the desire for power disappears because you were already a king and you were only thinking that you were a beggar. And you were struggling to be a bigger beggar, a greater beggar, and you were already a king. Suddenly you come to realize that you don’t lack anything. You are not helpless. You are the source of all energies; you are the very source of life. That childhood feeling of powerlessness was created by others. And it is a vicious circle they created in you because it was created in them by their parents, and so on and so forth.

Your parents are creating the feeling in you that you are powerless. Why? Because only through this can they feel powerful. You may be thinking that you love children very much. That doesn’t seem to be the case. You love power, and when you get children, when you become mothers and fathers, you are powerful. Nobody may be listening to you, you may be nothing in the world, but at least in the boundaries of your home you are powerful. You can at least torture small children.

Look how fathers and mothers torture! And they torture in such a loving way that you cannot even say to them, “You are torturing!” They are torturing, “For their own good” – for the children’s own good! They are helping them to grow. They feel powerful. Psychologists say that many people go into the teaching profession just to feel powerful, because with thirty children at your disposal you are just a king.

It is reported that Aurangzeb was imprisoned by his son. When he was imprisoned he wrote a letter and he said, “If you can fulfill only one wish it will be good, and I will be very happy. Just send thirty children to me so that I can teach them in my imprisonment.”

The son is reported to have said, “My father has always remained a king,

and he cannot lose his kingdom. So even in the prison he needs thirty children so he can teach them.”

Look! Go into any school! The teacher sitting on his chair has absolute power, just the master of everything that is happening there. People want children not because they love, because if they really loved the world would be totally different. If you loved your child the world would be totally different. You would not help him to be helpless, to feel helpless. You would give him so much love that he would feel he is powerful. If you give love then he will never be asking for power. He will not become a political leader, he will not try to get elected to anything. He will not try to accumulate money and go mad after it, because he knows it is useless – he is already powerful; love is enough. But nobody is giving love, so he will create substitutes.

All your desires, whether for power, money, prestige, all show that something had been taught to you in your childhood, something has been conditioned in your biocomputer, and you are following that conditioning without looking inside to find that whatsoever you are asking for is already there.

Patanjali’s whole effort is to put your biocomputer into silence so that it doesn’t interfere. This is what meditation is. It is putting your biocomputer, for certain moments, into silence, into a non-chattering state, so you can look within and hear your deepest nature. Just a glimpse will change you because then this biocomputer cannot deceive you. This biocomputer goes on saying, “Do this, do that!” It goes on continuously manipulating you: “You must have more power, otherwise you are nobody.”

If you look within, there is no need to be anybody. There is no need to be somebody. You are already accepted as you are. The whole existence accepts you, is happy about you. You are a flowering, an individual flowering, different from any other, unique. And God welcomes you, otherwise you could not be here. You are here only because you are accepted. You are here only because God loves you or the universe loves you or existence needs you. You are needed.

Once you know your innermost nature, what Patanjali calls the purush – purush means the inner dweller, the body is just a house, the inner dweller, the inner-dwelling consciousness, is purush – once you know this inner-dwelling consciousness, nothing is needed. You are enough, more than enough, you are perfect as you are. You are absolutely accepted, welcomed. The existence becomes a blessing. Desires disappear; they were part of self-ignorance. With self-knowledge they disappear, they evaporate.

Abhyasa,constant inner practice, conscious effort to be more and more alert, to be more and more master of oneself, to be less and less dominated by habits, by mechanical, robot-like mechanisms, andvairagya, desirelessness: these two attained, one becomes a yogi. These two attained, one has attained the goal.

I will repeat: don’t create a fight. Allow all this happening to be more and more spontaneous. Don’t fight with the negative. Rather, create the positive. Don’t fight with sex, with food, with anything. Rather, find out what it is that gives you happiness, from where it comes; move in that direction. Desires, by and by, go on disappearing.

And be more and more conscious. Whatsoever is happening, be more and more conscious. And remain in that moment and accept that moment. Don’t ask for something else. Then you will not be creating misery. If pain is there, let it be there. Remain in it and flow in it. The only condition is, remain alert. Knowingly, watchfully, move into it, flow into it, don’t resist.

When pain disappears the desire for pleasure also disappears. When you are not in anguish you don’t ask for indulgence. When anguish is not there indulgence becomes meaningless, and you go on falling into the inner abyss more and more. And it is so blissful, it is such a deep ecstasy, that even a glimpse of it and the whole world becomes meaningless. Then all that this world can give to you is of no use.

This should not become a fighting attitude. You should not become a warrior, you should become a meditator. If you are meditating, spontaneously things will happen to you which will go on transforming and changing you. Start fighting and you have started suppression. And suppression will lead you into more and more misery.

And you cannot deceive. There are many people who are not only deceiving others, they are deceiving themselves. They think they are not in misery. They go on saying they are not in misery but their whole existence is miserable. When they are saying that they are not in misery their faces, their eyes, their heart, everything, is in misery. I will tell you one anecdote, and then finish.

I have heard…

Once it happened that twelve ladies reached purgatory. The officiating angel asked them, “Were any of you unfaithful to your husbands while on earth? If someone was unfaithful to her husband, she should raise her hand.” Blushingly, hesitating, by and by, eleven ladies raised their hands.

The officiating angel took his phone, called into the phone, “Hello! Is that hell? Have you got room for twelve unfaithful wives there? – One of them, stone deaf!”

It isn’t needed for you to say it or not – your face, your very being, shows everything. You may say you are not miserable but the way you say it, the way you are, shows you are miserable. You cannot deceive. And there is no point because no one can deceive anybody else, you can only deceive yourself.

Remember, if you are miserable, you have created all this. Let it penetrate deep into your heart that you have created your sufferings, because this is going to be the formula, the key. If you have created your sufferings, only then can you destroy them. If someone else has created them, you are helpless. You have created your miseries; you can destroy them. You have created them through wrong habits, wrong attitudes, addictions, desires.

Drop this pattern. Look afresh, and this very life is the ultimate joy that is possible to human consciousness.

Enough for today.

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