14

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‌CHAPTER 14

14 May 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine and giresh means god of the mountains. The full name will mean: god of the divine mountains. And I am giving this name to you for a certain reason – that your path will be almost as if one is climbing a mountain. A few people move towards height and few people move towards depth. Ultimately they both culminate in the same experience, but the paths are different.

A person who moves into depth has to learn more let-go, more relaxation, and a person who has to go up-hill, has to learn more effort, more technique, more will... and will is going to be your path. If you try relaxing, it will be very difficult and you will not succeed in it. You can succeed very easily in creating great will.

So the path towards the mountains is the path of will. It is arduous but you will enjoy it; it will not be arduous for you. And that has also to be understood – that something may be arduous to one person and it may be very very beautiful to another. And something may be very easy to one and may be very difficult to another. It depends on the person.

I can see in you a very very great possibility of a willpower that can explode. And if you don’t allow it, you will be going against yourself.

The path towards the mountains is the path glasser calls ‘the path of positive addiction.’ There are two types of addiction in life – one is negative addiction: a man becomes an alcoholic or a man becomes a heroin addict or a smoker or anything. Then there are positive addictions: a man becomes a meditator or a man becomes a runner or a great swimmer – these are positive addictions. The addiction is the same – if you are an alcoholic, you will miss it if you don’t drink; then you will miss it tremendously. The same will happen to you if you become positively addicted

If you run every morning for one hour and one day you don’t run, you will feel very very sad and depressed and that something is missing – and a guilt feeling too. Of course there is no question

of any guilt about whether you run or not, but you will feel a guilt feeling too. If people who are will- oriented become negatively addicted, their life is wasted. If they become positively addicted then they are great creators. The addiction is the same, the mind is the same.…

So if you can start working on positive addictions you will be tremendously benefited. For example, meditation: choose one meditation and then put all your effort in it. That effort has to be very regular because will is created only out of regularity. It has to be very persistent and a continuity has to be maintained. Even to miss for one day is to destroy much – and at least one hour every day has to be given to it.

Many people have been doing research work on addictions and it has been found that it takes at least sixty minutes per day to become addicted to something... less than that won’t do. And it takes at least three to four months to really become addicted: one hour every day for four months; that is the period. Once you have become addicted, then there is no need for any effort. It becomes natural, it becomes your second nature.

After doing a meditation for one hour every day for three, four months, without break, any meditation will do and you will start finding trance-like states. It can happen through running.

Runners know about it – that after running a certain distance they lose the mind and suddenly there is a transcendental state, a trance-like state. They don’t know who they are any more; they are just pure energy. Joggers know that, dancers know that that after a certain moment the dancer disappears... there is only dance. When that moment comes, it is the meditative moment, and it can be done through anything.

In Japan they have used all kinds of things – archery, swordsmanship, wrestling – for meditation. And anything active will be good for you – something like Vipassana won’t help much. If you just have to sit silently it will be unnecessary trouble for you. So choose some active meditation – the Dynamic is good, Kundalini is good, dancing is good – and then persist.

After three, four months, you will become a perfect meditator. The only thing is to be regular and not to relax the effort. It is only a question of three, four months – that is the most important period. Once the foundation is there and you have become positively addicted, then the addiction works.

[The new sannyasin says: The only question I have I find that I can’t really... ]

Ask it – that’s right! No real question can be asked – only unreal questions can be asked. Real questions have to be lived, so one has to struggle with them, encounter them. And for real questions there are no answers; only life gives the answers and you have to fight for them. Only for unreal questions the answers exist.

An unreal question is such a simple question, any answer will do. But a real question, an authentic question – which is not really a question but a quest – there is no way to answer it.

Buddha used to say to his disciples to never ask ten types of questions – he had made ten categories of questions never to be asked – and those are the real questions, very basic questions.

He would say, ‘Don’t ask these questions. Anything else you can ask and I will answer, but these questions have not to be asked and cannot be answered. You will have to move into the mysteries of life, you will have to live, you will have to go through the darkness and find a way.’

That’s why they are not so easily available to the mind, and that’s why it is very difficult to be articulate about them, to put them into words. They don’t belong to the world of the words. They belong to the world of facts, not to the world of fictions.

The word is the world of fiction. It is very good to spin theories, stories, poetries, philosophies around the word, but the fact is a naked thing, bare, raw. It has no philosophy about it; it is simply there just like a rock on the path. You have to do something about it. You can step over it, you can jump, you can by-pass it, but you have to do something. It is not a question that has to be solved – it is a rock standing there in front of you. You ,have to do something about it and only doing solves real questions.

Good! At least this awareness is very good – that you know that something is there but it cannot be put into words. But I know what it is... because that real question is not different; it cannot be.

Each human being basically has only one question. The thousand and one other questions are just ways to avoid that real one. so one creates a great cloud around oneself of many questions and thinks this is important and that is important. And this is just a trick of the mind so that you can forget about the real. This is a solace: this is like giving a child a pacifier so he does not ask for the real breast and he can fall into sleep, he can hypnotise himself by the pacifier. But the real question is bound to be the same, it cannot be different – different for me and different for you – because it concerns our being and at that point we are not different. Mm? – that being is exactly the same.… So I know what it is.

But it is good that you are alert about it. Start working on meditations and by and by you will become able to see exactly what it is. Not only that: you will be able to see in it the way too, because the real question is the door for the real answer. Once you understand it, half the answer is already in your hands.

[A couple are leaving for the West. The woman says that what has happened for her here is beyond anything she could ever had imagined.]

Much has happened and much more has to happen. Just continue to meditate there also, so that it will continue happening. It is a chain: if you just go on remaining in the same mood, it will continue that way.

And it is beyond imagination; you cannot dream about it. When it happens, then only do you know that it is possible, it was possible. Much more is there still which you cannot imagine, which you cannot think of even in your wildest dreams.

Life is such a wonderful mystery; it is not exhausted by our desires. Our desires are very puny and tiny. We are desiring meaningless things while great, meaningful experiences are just waiting there. Just for the asking they will be yours. But the problem is that because we cannot imagine them, how can we desire them?

That’s the whole purpose of being with a master who can see things which you cannot imagine and who can start helping you move towards directions which you would have never moved on your own. And a master has to almost force you because many times you don’t want to move, many times you want to move exactly in the opposite direction. And that too is natural – because you cannot see why you should go in this direction; you don’t see anything there. All is hidden and you want to move into a certain direction where you can see something.

The master is needed, a great trust is needed, so you can move into a direction where you don’t know what is going to happen. Just out of trust you move, but once you start moving, things start happening and then you come to know. Then more trust becomes possible and with more trust, more new experiences. And it is a non-ending journey: it only starts, it never ends.

[A visitor, who stayed at Muktananda’s ashram says: ... it was very strange to me – everything that went on there – and I found it very difficult to speak the truth of what I was really feeling. So I feel very confused now and I just wanted to ask you maybe if you could help me.]

Never betray your truth! If you betray your truth you will feel disconnected with everything, because it is through truth that we are connected – truth is our connection. Truth is the connection, the only connection there is. You are not connected to me directly; you can only be connected to me with your truth. You cannot meet me, I cannot meet you – only my truth and your truth can meet; there is no other way. If you are untrue then there is no possibility of meeting.

That’s why people are so alienated, why people are moving so much like islands – unconnected, unrelated. Even with those to whom you feel related you are not really related. Communication has disappeared from the world. It disappears the day truth disappears.

So the most basic religious attitude is that one should never betray the truth, whatsoever the cost!

[She asks: But what if you feel so isolated all the time whenever you speak the truth and you feel like?... ]

Be isolated... but be true! And soon you will find that you are not isolated. Truth never makes you isolated. And even if in truth you are isolated, the company of truth is enough; one doesn’t need anybody else’s company. Truth is god!

[She says: But sometimes it feels that you’re fighting all the time and it’s difficult.]

You have not understood exactly, that’s why it feels like fighting. You have not really lived the truth that you are, that’s why it feels like fighting. You still have many investments with untruth, that’s why it feels like fighting.

A place like muktananda’s is an untrue place – one will feel suffocated. The so-called old traditional people and the so-called old traditional saints are the real poisoners. They have poisoned the whole of humanity; in beautiful words, in beautiful philosophies they have poisoned whole humanity. They have made the whole of humanity false, pseudo, bogus.

In the name of spirituality they kill your body, they kill your mind; and the spirit never arises unless your body is really alive. The spirit only arises only out of an alive body, the spirit arises only out of an alive mind.

The body/mind functions as the opportunity for it to flower. Once the body is crippled, once the mind is crippled, once you have been told to do stupid things – which you know are stupid and which you still do – then by and by you will lose track first with other people, then by and by with yourself. Then you are a ghost in a machine, you are not really alive: your body is just like a robot, a machine, and you are caged in it, imprisoned.

And that is the old religious attitude – that the body is the imprisonment of the soul. It is not; the body is the only liberating force in the world.

You are fortunate that you escaped from there! Help other prisoners also to escape! These people are really the criminals because they don’t know what they are doing! Nothing has happened to them. They cannot help anybody towards growth – they can cripple.

[She answers: It does have a very strong power, though, on me.]

Nothing – just your imagination, just your imagination.And when a few things are repressed you

become imaginative.

For example, if sex is repressed your imagination will become very powerful because the energy that moves through sex will start moving through your mind. Then you will start imagining kundalini and chakra and this and that, and a thousand and one things. It is the same sexual energy which now needs new fantasies because you don’t allow the old fantasies.

Now meditate over it: if a person is really sexually fulfilled, only then can real kundalini arise, never before it. I am not saying that there exists nothing like kundalini; it exists, but it cannot arise in muktananda’s ashram, no, not at all!

The first basic requirement is that sex should not be repressed. Repress sex and you will start fantasizing about kundalini. Sex is the most fantasizing energy. Mm? that’s why there is so much appeal in pornography. And people’s minds are pornographic. When sex is repressed in your guts, it moves into your mind – then it starts moving thereAnd you can move it in any direction.

A man who has repressed his sex can become a good soldier because the energy is there and he wants to penetrate people. The bayonet is nothing but a phallic symbol. Now this is obscene – to kill a man. To me, violence is the only obscenity.

It is beautiful to penetrate a woman’s body, to be penetrated by a man’s body – it is beautiful. But by a bayonet? – it is ugly. But if you repress sex then you can make a good soldier. That’s why in all armies sex is repressed; the most repressive army will be the most powerful army.

If Americans have been defeated again and again – in Korea, in Vietnam – the reason is: the American soldier is not as repressed as he should be. He cannot win... he cannot win; it is impossible. Violence is not possible if sex is not repressed.

It has always happened that whenever a society has become very affluent, it becomes weak. When a society is poor and people are repressed and starved about everything, they are very powerful because all their energy is boiling like a volcano. If they have nowhere to explode, they will take any direction.

If sexual energy is repressed in man he may become money-obsessed; that money will become the sexual object. If sex is not repressed you cannot be obsessed by money; it is so stupid. And hippies are right when they say ‘Make love, not war’ – there is a relationship between these two. If you make love, wars will disappear from the world. And the trick of the religious priest is the same.…

They have known down the centuries to first repress people’s sexuality, to make them condemnatory towards it, to make them feel guilty about it. Once they start feeling guilty about it, once you have told them that something is wrong in it, it is a sin, then they will start fantasizing about anything. Give them any object and their sex energy will start flowing in it and it will become a beautiful experience.

[She asks about sex being sacred compared with just sleeping around, which is not meaningful.]

I will talk about that... I will talk about that. In that too is condemnation – ‘sleeping with somebody and sleeping with somebody else.’ In that very expression there is condemnation. What is wrong with sleeping with somebody?

... I’m not saying that you should go and sleep with people. I’m not saying that. I’m simply saying that these are condemnatory attitudes.…

And why should there be meaning? That again is an old trick! If it is fun; what more meaning is needed? Is not fun enough meaning?

[She answers: Well, it’s like eating too much food.]

No, no, I’m not saying... eating too much comes only if you have been fasting. No animal eats too much, you cannot force any animal to eat too much. Why?

The animal eats as much as he wants. Too much is not the question. The ‘too much’ is coming because of these repressive people.…

First they teach you that eating is sin, enjoying food is sin – fasting is good, fasting is great purity. First they teach you fasting then naturally your balance is lost. Then you break your fast; you eat too much. First they teach that sex is sin then you start restricting it; then too much energy and one day you indulge in it too much. Your saints and your prostitutes are in the same conspiracy. They are not different people but are just different faces of the same person, of the same society.

And this idea of sleeping with somebody and somebody else.… Who is this somebody and who is this somebody else? They are as beautiful human beings as you are! Why this condemnatory attitude at all ? And nobody is saying to go and sleep with them – I am not saying that – but they are beautiful people; why say ‘this and that’? If it happens, it’s good. And sex has no meaning... just as god has no meaning. What do you think about god? Has he some meaning in the world? Is he trying to achieve something? What can that be?

[She argues: But it’s when sex is disconnected from love, from god.]

It is not disconnected, but these people have made sex disconnected from love.

Once the repressive mind disappears, sex is love; it is not disconnected then. This dichotomy of always dividing body and soul, sex and love, god and the world, this continuous dichotomy is a repressive dichotomy. It is a great technique to condemn things. They are all joined together: they are one!

You are your body, your body is you! So is sex and love: love is the soul and sex is the body. They are together as you are together with your body and god is together with the world. Just as you are with your body, god is with the world, in the world, the world!

My approach is of a non-dualist – I don’t divide. The lowest is joined with the highest: the highest comes to the lowest and the lowest reaches to the highest. The lower and the higher are just rungs of the same ladder. The whole existence is one unity, and when you look with that vision, then there is no meaning; each moment is meaningful in itself. While you make love, love is the meaning, and while you eat, eating is the meaning. While you are listening to me, listening is the meaning; I am talking to you, talking is the meaning. When you are with people, to be with people is the meaning; when you are alone, to be alone is the meaning. Then each moment becomes luminous with meaning. Meaning is not extrinsic, it is intrinsic. But down through the centuries it has been hammered into the mind so deeply that even if sometimes intellectually you understand it, again you will fall in the trap.

What I was saying is that if sex is not a fulfilled phenomenon, if sex has not flowered into love and love has not flowered into prayer, if you have some kundalini experiences, those will be just imaginary experiences.

George Gurdjieff used to call these kundalini experiences ‘kundabuffer’... and he was right! A very condemnatory word he has chosen – ‘kundabuffer’. He was right!

The real kundalini is totally different. It comes out of tremendous fulfillment, not out of starvation, not out of living a forced life, but out of spontaneity... out of living your life as totally as possible, with no denial, with tremendous affirmation. Then the real experience arises. . . and that is not your imagination. And when the real arises then you will know that whatsoever you have been imagining was just a mind game – and what happens in places like muktananda’s is just a mind game.

People are hankering, desiring. They want some experience. Their life is meaningless because their life has lost all experiencing quality.

They don’t experience food so they eat too much; they don’t experience love so they indulge too much in sex. They don’t experience anything! They don’t experience the beauty of the trees so they rush from one mountain to another mountain. They don’t enjoy any moment so they are hurrying to reach somewhere and they don’t know where they are going; and wherever they go, they will be the same people. Then one day they start thinking that in the world there is no meaning so there must be somewhere else. Find some guru and then find some meaning in spirituality... but their whole mind is wrong.

Spirituality arises out of a lived life.

My whole approach is totally different.…

[A sannyasin describes experiences where she feels as if she is dying: I don’t know who I am or anything... Sometimes I feel very sad about it and other times it’s very beautiful.]

It is beautiful... you should not feel sad, you should feel happy about it. The primal has really gone deep and you have touched your birth pangs. It is not death that you are feeling: it is the moment of birth that you are experiencing again, when you were passing through the birth canal, from the womb of the mother. It is nothing like death, but it looks like death to you. For the child it looks like death when he comes out of the womb. For nine months this has been his life and a very comfortable life – never again will it be so comfortable! And suddenly when the child has to be thrust out of the mother’s womb, he feels it is death. Not that he can think – he has no thought – but the feeling is that he is dying. And while passing through the narrow canal he feels very suffocated.

And then in the world, it is a shock. Everything is a shock – the light, the colour, the people; everything is a shock. It is a death experience. Birth is a death experience, and so is death again a birth experience. So you touched the primal. Primal therapy succeeded on you, it succeeded perfectly. It rarely succeeds – it succeeded! You touched your moment of birth and it is coming up. Allow it to come and you will be so much enriched by it!

Mm, so don’t take it sadly. It is a great blessing.

And if you feel too afraid, just take the locket in your hand and leave it to me.

It will be perfectly okay. It will come for a few days more and then it will disappear. And when it disappears you will be unburdened of many things: your whole past will be finished, you will be able to start a new life... a new birth.

[The sannyasin asks about going to the West, if this is the right time... ]

It is perfectly all right, but this moment will be coming anywhere, so you just remember... enjoy it! And I will arrange it in such a way that it comes only in the night when you are in your bed.

... Once you know that it is good, no problem. Fear arises because one is confused whether it is good or something wrong is happening. No problem.…

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