We are the pilgrims of the unknowable

Question 1:

Vimal Paro, it is one of the perennial questions that you have asked. Every seeker on the path, one day or another stumbles on the same question. It is the mind which wants to know everything, because the knowing mind becomes powerful over what it knows. Then that becomes its own territory. But existence consists of three layers: one is that of knowledge - that which has already been known. Mind is perfectly at ease with it. The other is the territory of the unknown, which will become known sooner or later: what is known today was unknown yesterday; what is unknown today is bound to be known tomorrow. Mind is a little uncomfortable with it, but not much. It knows that, although it is still beyond its territory, it cannot remain beyond its territory much longer.

The first territory belongs to all the religions of the world. That's why they are all past-oriented. They don't have any tomorrows, only yesterdays.

The second category belongs to the scientific world. They are perfectly at ease with the yesterdays, because the tomorrow is going to be based on the yesterday. But their focus is on the unknown.

That is the adventure of science, to go on conquering the unknown and making it known; in other words to demystify the universe. That is the basic purpose of all scientific research: there should be no mystery in the world; everything should be known.

Science is mind's final growth: therefore it cannot go beyond mind. The very word 'science' means knowledge. Hence science does not divide existence into three categories, but only into two: the known and the unknown.

And there is a third category, which I call the unknowable. We are the pilgrims of the unknowable. To move into the unknowable feels very scary to the mind, because the unknowable can in no way be made part of knowledge. It can never become the dominion and the empire of mind. It will always remain a mystery.

You can live it, but you cannot know it. You can experience it, but you cannot reduce your experience into knowledge. You can dance it, you can rejoice in it, but you cannot transform its basic quality of being mysterious into knowledgeability. Knowledge is absolutely unmysterious.

This is the world of the mystic. This is the world of sat-chit-anand - truth, consciousness and bliss.

These words are absolutely unknown to science, and these words are absolutely scary for the mind.

Neither does it know truth, nor does it want to know the truth; lies are so beautiful and comfortable.

Truth is dangerous for the mind, because mind's whole basis is false and phony. The moment truth arrives mind has to leave, its time is over. The arrival of truth is instant death to the mind: all its empire simply disappears.

Nor is the mind interested in consciousness. In fact, the mind tries in every way to remain unconscious as much as possible. Down the ages, every society and every culture has condemned alcohol and other intoxicating drugs, but to no effect - they have survived and they go on growing more and more influential. The reason is: mind wants to drown itself in unconsciousness, which is its only relaxation. Otherwise there is always tension, because the unknowable is very close. The mind wants to forget all about the unknown, all about truth.

You will be surprised to know that science is not interested at all in discovering the truth. It is interested in discovering relative truths. Relative truths are simply relative lies! You can use the words as synonyms.

Just try ... If you say to someone, "I love you relatively," what will it mean? It will simply mean that you love many more people too. "Relatively," you can say, "I love you too." You hate many people relatively - you don't hate just that person. With love, you are really saying, "I love you, relatively."

But no lover has ever made such a statement. Every lover says, "I love you totally, absolutely."

Science is interested only in the objective world, where you can never come to the ultimate truth, because from the very beginning it is boycotting the subjective world. So its truth is going to remain always relative. The scientist is interested in objects, but he is not interested in himself.

To be interested in oneself means to be interested in truth, to be interested in consciousness, to be interested in bliss. But those are fearful, dangerous paths for the mind - any one of them ....

And in fact they all three come together as three aspects of one experience. The moment you experience truth you also experience a tremendous explosion of consciousness and, at the same time, an immense overflowing of bliss from your own heart.

In this flood of light, mind finds itself incapable even of opening its eyes. It is a bird of darkness, just like the owl - in the day it closes its eyes, in the night its day begins - and the overflowing bliss becomes almost like a flood. It will take away all dead wood, which mind has collected as knowledge. And consciousness will dispel all the dark corners in which mind is hiding itself, repressing its desires, repressing its anger, greed, lust and a thousand and one other things which have been condemned by the society.

Mind's greatest fear is not death. Its greatest fear is enlightenment. Death is nothing to be worried about, it cannot take away anything from the mind, but illumination is going to destroy the mind completely.

Your question, Paro, is really mind trying to figure out what is happening to you. And what is happening to you is beyond the capacity of mind, which is why you are afraid, shaky, worried. I will read your question: "Sitting in front of you, I feel something tremendous is happening to me, which I don't understand at all."

Neither do I! Nor has anyone ever known what it is - no Gautam Buddha, no Jesus Christ, no Socrates; nobody has ever known what it is. But they have all drunk of it, felt its sweetness, its fragrance, its music. But everything is so vast, so tremendous, they cannot reduce it into words so that mind can figure out what it is.

Unless something is reduced to language, mind is incapable of understanding it. Mind is a linguist, full of words and language. That is its only treasure and if something cannot be brought into language, it remains outside the world of mind. But mind is only a small part of you: you are far bigger; hence you can experience many things, which mind cannot understand.

You are saying, "I feel so thankful ..." You are experiencing the inexpressible. All that you can do is feel grateful. You cannot even say for what you are grateful, because that 'what' is part of the mystery of existence.

This is a good indication that what is happening to you is bringing a thankfulness. And thankfulness or gratefulness is far more important than any knowledge, because it transforms you. Knowledge only informs you.

You can find great scholars, full of knowledge, but their lives are empty and poor. Nothing happens in their lives. Underneath the load of their knowledge they have not lived. They are simply carrying the load, because that load makes them respectable in a world of ignorant people. These same people - if they were surrounded by mistakes - would be laughed at.

Mohammed used to say, "A man of knowledgeability is just a donkey carrying holy scriptures." He may feel very proud amongst other donkeys, who are carrying mundane things: one carrying salt, another carrying mud, another carrying sand, another carrying wood - naturally the donkey who is carrying holy scriptures is a priest among the donkeys. He is a great scholar among the donkeys and all the donkeys are going to be respectful to him; he is no ordinary donkey.

So it is with your scholars, great professors, great priests, great rabbis - they have wasted their lives on books. I am not against books, but you should remember that is only one dimension; it is not your whole life. If your whole life becomes full of books, you are just a bookcase, otherwise utterly empty.

Books can enhance your life. If you have some life, if you have some love, you may be able to find in poetry something which even the poet may not have been aware of. If he was just a man of mind then what he has written is only a composition of words, according to the rules of grammar and language. But a mystic can read in those words something which in fact, he pours into them, which is not there.

And one of the significant qualities of the mystic is thankfulness, not even knowing for what: "But I don't know why and for what" - that's exactly the right thing. Full of gratitude for the unknowable, full of gratitude for that which is beyond the capacity of the mind. You are touching new horizons, you are flying close to the stars. Mind cannot reach there. That's why there is thankfulness.

"Tears are coming, and I cannot see any reason." They are not tears of rationality. In fact nobody has heard of rational tears, nobody has ever experienced that tears are flowing from his eyes because two plus two is four - my God, two plus two is four brings tears!

Knowledge cannot bring tears. Tears are indicating something very deeply significant, that you have touched something which can only be expressed by tears or laughter or dancing - which are all irrational. You cannot explain them rationally!

I gave Shunyo a small antique Rolex watch for Veeresh. I told her, "Find him and give it to him."

She came running back to me saying, "Veeresh is really crazy. When I gave him the watch, he simply started crying and dancing. I could not believe it! He did not say anything, he is simply dancing outside!"

And because she was searching for him, she told Anando also to look for him. After Shunyo had given the watch to Veeresh, Anando found him and she could not believe either - "What has happened?" Just tears and laughter together, and he was dancing, jumping. She brought him close to my room, to inform Shunyo.

And Anando said, "It is strange ... What has happened to him?"

Shunyo said, "It is nothing, just that Oshohas given a watch to him."

It is irrational, but a man who knows only reason knows only a desert of a life. He does not know the roses. He does not know the beautiful sounds of the birds, which don't mean anything - they are irrational. In fact, even to call them songs is not quite right. The birds are just making sounds for no reason at all, just out of tremendous gratefulness to this beautiful morning, to the sun, to the trees; just for another day to breathe in, to fly in the sky, to love, to sing and dance. They are making sounds because they don't know how to thank the universe in any other way.

When you also come to experience something of the heart, you will find a tremendous desire to cry. That crying is not out of sadness. Those tears are more valuable than any pulse. Those tears are still warm, those tears are still alive, and those tears are saying that you have touched something beyond words, beyond mind. They are of immense joy and gratefulness, sensitivity and helplessness - helplessness because you cannot express what you are experiencing in words.

In fact anything that is great in life has no reason.

Once Picasso was painting by the side of a rosebush and a man was standing there watching for almost an hour. Finally he could not resist the temptation and said to Picasso, "Excuse me, sir, but I cannot see any reason for what you are painting. I have looked at it from every side ... I can't even figure out what it is!"

Picasso looked at him and said, "Just look at the roses. Go to them and try to find out why they are there. I am so much harassed and nobody asks the birds, nobody asks the peacock, 'Why this beautiful tail, with so many beautiful colors?' Nobody asks the cuckoo - the sound is so sweet, almost incomparably sweet - nobody asks the trees, 'Why are you green?' And every idiot comes to me to ask, 'What are you doing, what is the meaning of it?' Go to God and ask him, 'What is the meaning of this whole universe?' I am a small creator, he is a big creator ... Just go - perhaps he knows the reason."

But I know, if you meet God, he will not know the reason either. What reason can he supply for why he painted the peacock's feathers so beautifully? What was the reason? Why has he given a long white tail to the bird of paradise?

You will find it here in my garden. It comes and goes seasonally. Just two days ago, it came again.

For a few months it had disappeared. It has such a white tail, so snow-white, and the bird is very small and black. And such a small bird, carrying such a long white tail - it does not make any sense.

Because of the tail, the bird can hardly fly. He simply jumps from one tree to another tree. Now what reason could there be? But he is so beautiful, just the combination of colors is so beautiful.

Beauty need not be rational; nor does bliss need to be rational, nor silence. Meditation is not a rational endeavor: it is basically irrational. To be more accurate, it is suprarational: it goes beyond reason and all its concepts.

Picasso was right, because he was simply saying that nobody asks God ... Everybody goes to pray in the church, in the synagogue, in the temple, and nobody asks him, "What is the purpose of it all?"

The sun goes on rising every morning, creating such a beautiful sunrise over the oceans, over the mountains, creating so many beautiful colors on the horizon - for a strange reason which I don't know.

I was a student in a university which has, perhaps, the best location in the whole world - certainly in India. I have visited many universities, but the University of Sagar, a very small place, has some special quality to it - not the university, but the mountain and the lake. The university is on the mountain, a small mountain, but the lake is very vast, miles long.

I have seen the horizon being painted every morning by God, every evening by God in many places around the world, but I have never seen so many psychedelic colors as he manages at Sagar University. I have never seen such colors as when the sun rises over the lake and when it sets over the mountains. It spreads so many colors, absolutely without any reason, just out of sheer abundance!

After seeing the mornings and evenings in Sagar I have been searching for the same colors, but I have not found them anywhere. Every place seems to be poor as far as mornings and evenings are concerned. Sagar is a small place. The only beautiful thing is that it has a university in one of the most beautiful places. But why should God be so generous? There is no reason.

Even if you meet God, he cannot explain anything to you. That's why I have removed the very hypothesis of God. There is no need of God, because to accept God is to put so much burden and tension and worry and concern on the poor fellow. It is better that he is not. It is not that I'm against God - it is just out of my love and compassion. I feel he should not be! My own way of denying God is totally different from an atheist's - they are against him. I am absolutely for him, but he is not there.

Picasso was right when he became angry. Another time it happened ... One very rich woman, super-rich, asked him to make a portrait of her. He said, "I don't paint portraits."

She said, "The price is not a question at all - whatever you demand - but I want a portrait from you, just because you don't do portraits! I want something unique; nobody will have a Picasso portrait in the whole world except me. I'm ready to pay whatever price you say, but you will have to do a portrait."

Picasso thought for a moment to himself, "Ask such an enormous amount that the woman will escape." So he said, "Five million dollars."

The woman said, "I will give you six. Start painting; I am already prepared."

Now he was caught, so he had to paint the portrait. When the portrait was complete, the woman said, "Everything is beautiful, but just tell me one thing: where is my nose? I cannot find it ...."

A nose is the very center of your face. If you can find a nose, then you can figure out where the eyes are, where the mouth is, where your ears are and everything. But without finding the center ....

The woman said, "Just tell me about the nose, everything else I will figure out!"

Picasso said, "I told you already that I don't do portraits, because this kind of problem always arises later on. I don't know where your nose is. I knew when I was painting, but now all that I know ... It is a beautiful painting, so many beautiful colors - who cares about the nose? Just don't tell anybody that this is your portrait!"

Picasso, in a certain way, has come closer to mysticism than any other painter, because whatever he has painted is not to be understood, but only to be experienced. His colors, his combination of colors are just unbelievable. He has defeated God many times. But don't ask the meaning, don't ask the reason, don't bring it within the mind, just enjoy!

And you know it already, when you are enjoying a really good ice cream ... What do you call it?

Tutti-frutti? You don't ask the reason! You don't ask the meaning. And when you go to Sarjano's place for pizza, do you ask, "What is the meaning of it?" Taste is enough. I don't even know what it is, because I never tasted it but I'm feeling saliva coming into my mouth, what about you? And I will never taste pizza I can promise you, because I love to keep a few things mysterious!

You are saying, Paro, "I leave discourse with unsteady knees ..." I also leave in the same way. I somehow manage to reach my room. You are saying, " ... as if I had done twenty-four hours' hard work." The reason for unsteady legs is that you are drunk with something that is not chemical drugs or alcohol, but something of consciousness, something of truth, something of bliss, which can make you as drunk or even much more drunk than any alcoholic beverage.

And now you are asking me, "But what happened?" Don't ask such questions! Something really happened. If you ask questions there is a danger that it may stop happening; it is a very shy phenomenon. Allow it to happen, enjoy as much as you can, and don't be worried about unsteady knees. The more you stop asking questions or figuring out what is happening, the less you will feel that you have worked hard for twenty-four hours.

To ask about the unanswerable creates great tension. It really creates the feeling of hard work and failure, because you can never succeed! Even if you work your whole life you cannot succeed.

"Is it a matter of my undeveloped awareness that I don't grasp what is happening ...?" No! With developed awareness you will be finding your knees even more unsteady. It is simply what you recognize yourself: "Does my mind want an answer where there is no answer?"

Yes, stop doing that!

Dolores marries old Mr. Pincus because she figures she will get his money without having to put out much. On their wedding night she giggles when he takes out a condom and lays it on the night table.

"Darling," she murmurs, "don't you think you are being a little cautious? After all, you are eighty- eight."

But Mr. Pincus only snickers and moments later takes cotton wool from the drawer and stuffs it up his nostrils. He then takes out a pair of earplugs.

"Darling," she says, "I understand the condom, but what are you doing now?"

"Honey," he replies, putting in his ear plugs, "you might as well know now that there are two things I can't stand in life. One is a woman screaming, and the other," he says as he snaps off the light, "is the smell of burning rubber."

Hymie Goldberg worked hard all his life and became very rich. But now he's on his deathbed with his wife Becky by his side, and he is dispersing his worldly possessions.

"My Cadillac," he begins, "with the push button motorcycle-cop detector, I leave to my son, Sam."

"Better you should leave it to Joe," says Becky. "He is a better driver."

"All right," whispers Hymie. "My Rolls Royce I leave to my daughter, Linda."

"You had better give it to your nephew, Willie," interrupts Becky. "He is a very careful driver."

"All right. Give it to Willie," continues Hymie. "And my twelve-cylinder Jaguar, I give to my niece, Sally."

"Personally," says Becky, "I think Judy should get it."

Hymie raises his head and shouts, "Becky, please! Who is dying? You or me?"

Question 2:

Dhyan Yogesh, first a small story: Once there was a Japanese meditator called Wu, whose master lived in a little house on the other side of the river. One morning, after a particularly "good"

meditation, Wu felt so overjoyed that he dedicated a small poem to his master.

He wrote: "At the peak of the mountain, the sun is rising in the East. Sitting here in my lotus posture, the three worldly evils cannot affect me."

He folded the paper and gave it to his servant to take to the master. The master looked at the paper and wrote a few words on it, telling the servant to take it back to Wu. Wu was most upset to have his poem returned, especially when he opened the paper and found three words written underneath it:

"Fat, fat, fat."

Wu immediately ran down to the river and swam across as fast as he could to his master's house.

Prostrating himself in front of the master, he said, "Oh, Master, I wrote you this poem as an expression of my love for you and look what you have done!"

"So," said the Master, "you sit on top of the mountain and feel that the three worldly evils cannot affect you any longer, but three little words are enough to blow you right across the river."

Don't be worried about your getting fatter.

You are saying, Yogesh, "The deeper and deeper I go into meditation, the fatter and fatter I am getting. Am I in danger of exploding?"

I hope so! That's the whole purpose of your being here - exploding!

But becoming fat is not because of meditation. Perhaps you are meditating too much and not doing enough exercise. You will have to do two things ... I hate exercise myself - but then you have to reduce your calories. I have to live on only six hundred calories per day. That is now. A few days ago I was living on twelve hundred calories per day.

If you don't want to exercise, then you will have to cut down on the stuff that you go on putting in your mouth. Meditators are known to become fat because they forget completely that meditation is sitting silently, doing nothing, and the fat grows ... So either start doing some exercises or cut down on your food.

Gautam Buddha had to cut one meal completely from his disciples' diet. They could eat only once, not twice a day; and of course not five times a day with different names: breakfast, lunch, coffee- break, supper, and the last - just a little bit before you go to sleep. He had to cut from two meals, which are common in India, to one meal. That means fifty percent.

Mahavira was even more ... because he was teaching longer periods of meditation than Gautam Buddha. Gautam Buddha had an alternating system: one hour meditation, one hour walking. That repeated walking one hour and meditating one hour kept the balance. And then only one meal a day.

But Mahavira had no such alternating system. People were in meditation for eight hours, ten hours, twelve hours. He also insisted on one meal but he had made another condition: that you had to eat it standing. Nor could you use plates; you had to use only your hands. So whatever comes within your two hands, cupped - that's all. And eat it standing, because when you are sitting, you are at ease, comfortable.

We make our meals as comfortable as possible: comfortable chairs, table, beautiful plates, candlelight, some fragrance, flowers, and then you go on, course upon course. So if you are meditating as well, then naturally you will become more and more fat.

There is also a reason for this fatness other than the food: a meditator slowly becomes less and less interested in sex. That has two by-products: one is, the little gymnastics that you used to do in sex are dropped and that may have been your only exercise; secondly, the moment you drop sex, you become more interested in food.

People who drop sex automatically start eating a little more: the way life begins creates this connection. The child becomes aware of his mother's breast and the food that comes from it at the same time. Later on the breast becomes a sexual symbol, but the association with food is very deep in your unconscious. The people who drop sex - in this place it is otherwise; sex drops people - start eating more to substitute, because eating is connected with man's sexuality.

So you have to be aware, Yogesh: exploding is perfectly good, but that is an exploding of consciousness, an explosion of your inner being, not an explosion of your body.

People are already afraid of coming close to me, and if you do this kind of exploding then I am going to lose all my crazy people. So please, be kind towards yourself and be kind towards me. Cut down on your food, make an alternating system: meditation, walking, jogging, running, anything that gives your body enough exercise to absorb your food.

And it is tremendously significant ... If you can make an alternating way your meditation will go even deeper, because when the body is tired, it relaxes quickly. When it is not tired, it does not relax quickly.

That is one of the reasons why rich people cannot sleep. Their bodies are not tired. Sleep is part of relaxation. Laborers, beggars, sleep so deeply that even emperors feel jealous. The whole body is so tired, because they are working the whole day, that it is impossible for them not to fall asleep immediately.

You will be surprised to know that there are aboriginals in India, in Burma, in Thailand and in other Far Eastern countries who don't dream. And the reason is that they are so tired, their work is so hard, that by the time they go to sleep they fall so deeply asleep that they miss a layer of dreams. The first layer is of your waking consciousness; the second layer is of your dreaming consciousness; the third layer is of your dreamless sleep; the fourth layer is your awakening, enlightenment. Because their lifestyle is so hard - just to have a little food, just to survive - they don't dream.

When they first came in contact with the Christian missionaries - and Christian missionaries are now being trained in psychoanalysis ... Christianity is the most cunning religion in the world. Seeing that the old style of priesthood was getting out of date, they started sending their missionaries to learn psychoanalysis - because they could see that, in the future, psychoanalysis is going to replace the priesthood.

The psychoanalyst is the future priest. He is already taking his place. He has become the most highly paid professional in the world, and all that he does is analyze your dreams.

So when these missionaries, trained in psychology, reached the thick forest in Burma, in Thailand, they could not believe what they found. When they asked the aboriginals, "What did you dream last night?" the aboriginals looked at each other and said, "What does he mean by 'dream'?" They have never dreamed.

For two reasons they have not dreamed: one, their life is not of repression. A repressed person dreams more because, whatever is repressed, mind has to get rid of in dreaming. It is a kind of catharsis - mind unbinding itself. Secondly, it is only those who cannot go to the deeper layers of sleep who are stuck in the dreaming layer. Once in a while you slip into the deeper layer, where there is no dream. But again you surface.

Your sleep graph is not just the same the whole night. Sometimes you are very superficial, sometimes you are going very deep. Sometimes you are again superficial, just on the verge of waking. Sometimes you go very deep, almost close to death. On one superficial layer is your life and on the deepest layer is your death. And just below your superficial layer is the dreaming layer.

Many aboriginals completely miss dreaming.

You will be able to go deeper into your meditation, into your relaxation, because relaxation is essential for your meditation. Make it a point to jog, jump, run, and then when you feel tired, utterly tired, sit down or lie down and meditate. And you will find that you are not getting fatter and your body is not going to explode. But your consciousness is going to explode into the tremendous phenomenon we call enlightenment.

The East has never bothered about dreams and the East has been concerned for thousands of years about consciousness. It is a strange phenomenon. The West became concerned with consciousness only one hundred years ago, and it immediately jumped on dreams. The whole psychological endeavor became dream analysis. One wonders what happened ....

The East has been concerned for at least ten thousand years about consciousness. Its whole genius has been focused on searching deeply into consciousness - more than has happened anywhere else. This has been the only contribution to human evolution as far as consciousness is concerned.

The East is poor. It has not developed science, it has not developed technology, because it has put all its intelligence into one direction and that is consciousness. But the strange fact is, even after ten thousand years Eastern psychology has nothing to do with psychoanalysis-type psychologies, which are concerned with dream analysis.

What is the reason? The reason is Christianity. Christianity is the most repressive religion in the world. It represses everything. And because of that repression the layer of dreams becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. Now Western psychoanalysts say that a man dreams six hours per night if he sleeps eight hours. For only two hours, once in a while, he goes a little deeper and does not dream. Otherwise, for six hours he is dreaming.

What happened to the Eastern explorers of consciousness? They did not come to such a thick layer - six hours! And strangely, the conclusion of Western psychology is that if you are not allowed to dream that amount of time, you will not feel refreshed in the morning. They have tried experiments:

One man is disturbed whenever he is dreaming ... and it is very easy to know when a person is dreaming, because whenever a person is asleep without dreams there is no movement of the eyes under the eyelids. You can see that there is no movement. The moment he starts dreaming, he is looking at a film and his eyes start moving. You can immediately check whether the person is dreaming or not - very simple.

So one person in this experiment is disturbed. Whenever he moves his eyes he is immediately awakened, then allowed again to sleep. When he goes to sleep, again he will dream. The whole night the disturbance continues. He can only sleep those two hours when he does not dream.

And another person in another room is being disturbed differently. Whenever he is not dreaming, he is disturbed, he is awakened - and allowed to dream six hours without disturbance.

The conclusion is - and it has been repeated many times in many psychological labs around the Western world; the result is very strange; nobody had ever thought such a result would come out of it; not even the psychoanalysts had ever thought about it - the result is that the man whose dreams are disturbed is disturbed the whole day. He feels tired, tense, sad, depressed. He feels that he has not been able to sleep, he is utterly tired ... and because of this continuous disturbance the whole night, he wants to sleep again.

The other person, whose sleep time was disturbed but not the dream time, has no problem. He gets up rejuvenated, fresh, with no tiredness.

The conclusion is that you need dreams more than sleep. Your body, your physical well-being, depends on dreaming, not on sleep, which has been the traditional concept. Traditionally it has been understood that dreams are a kind of disturbance. Now the situation is totally different: dreams are not a disturbance, they are a tremendous help.

But this is the Western mind and the experiment is confined to Western people. They should not apply their conclusion to the whole of humanity. Their conclusion belongs only to the Christians. A meditator starts dreaming less and less, and once you are at the very peak of meditation dreams disappear.

Primitive people, aboriginals don't dream at all. The East has not paid any attention to dreams, because it would have been futile. There was not such a repressive attitude in the East before Christianity came. All the repression that you see today in India or in other Eastern countries is not part of its heritage. It has been brought by Christian missionaries. Although Hindus are not Christians, Christian ideology has penetrated every religion in the world. They may not have been able to convert everybody into Christianity, but they have fed their ideology into every mind!

Just see: Hindus were perfectly at ease with the temples of Khajuraho; they never thought that they were pornographic. And today? Even if you are just a little bit less clad than you are clad now, that's enough to disturb the Indians. It is not Indian culture; it is Indian culture polluted by Christianity.

Indians were never worried! All Indian gods have their wives: the Christian god has no wife.

Before Mohammedanism - which is a by-product, just as Christianity is, of Judaism - India was a totally different world, absolutely unrepressed. There was no question of repression at all. With Mohammedans repression started entering into the Indian mind, and with Christianity it became absolute.

Mohammedans came to India nearabout thirteen centuries ago. Before that there were no repressive ideologies preached; people were more innocent. Hence, a method like Vipassana - which is a Buddhist method - was possible for meditation: just watching the mind silently and meditation happens.

Meditation was not something arduous or difficult, but to the Western mind or even to the Eastern mind today - which is absolutely overtaken by the Western ideology - watching the mind is not an easy job. So much garbage and so much crap has been forced into the mind that you go almost crazy just watching it. It is a film which begins, but never ends. You can go on watching day in, day out, year in, year out and the mind is always ready to supply new images, new dreams.

It is because of this I had to create a few other devices - Dynamic, Kundalini, and others - before you could enter into a silent witnessing meditation like Vipassana. I have made devices to help you cathart, throw out your garbage rather than waste time in watching it.

It can be thrown out by Latihan - tremendously beautiful - but it is not a meditation; it is only a clearance. It can be done by Dynamic Meditation even better than by Latihan - because Latihan has some dangers, which I have cut out of the meditation. Sometimes Latihan people go mad, because they cannot stop.

It is an Indonesian method which became immensely successful in the fifties in Europe and America.

It never became successful in the East, because in the East - particularly in Indonesia, which is a backward country - there is nothing to cathart! The man who invented Latihan was Bapak Subuh - he called his philosophy subud. He has taken the word 'Subud' from 'Buddha', which means 'the great awakening'. But Latihan cannot bring the great awakening. It became fashionable in the West and then disappeared completely, because it created many people who had to be put into mental asylums - for the simple reason that it has no stop built into the process.

Once you start Latihan you are overtaken by the process of catharsis, and it goes on and on and you don't know what to do. You are almost without any control. But Dynamic Meditation I have divided into different sections. Latihan has to be done alone; Dynamic Meditation has to be done under instruction. Then once you have learned it you can do it alone. Under instruction, after each ten minutes, the process can be changed. So you are always in control. It never becomes so big as to take all control into its own hands.

These devices are needed just to clear the rubbish that Christianity has created, and to bring you to a state of naturalness, simplicity ... And from there the only way is witnessing, which is called, by Buddha, Vipassana. Vipassana means 'looking at'.

If you want to do Vipassana, or any silent meditation, Dynamic Meditation becomes absolutely essential, because Christianity having poisoned your mind, that poison has to be thrown out. You have to go completely crazy to throw it out; otherwise that craziness remains inside you, and won't allow you to get into a silent, watching, witnessing meditation.

So do some Dynamic Meditation, do some jogging, do some running, swimming and when you feel utterly tired, when you feel an intrinsic need to relax, you are free from Christianity. Then you can sit silently, then you can watch your mind - and it is not much. You have thrown out almost ninety-nine percent of it. Maybe here and there a few pieces are clinging because they are very old and have become glued to you ... Just watch them.

Watching is a process of ungluing those small pieces hanging here and there in the mind. Once they also disappear, you don't have a mind, you have a vast sky opening. That is the explosion, and that explosion will bring you to sachchidanand, to truth, to consciousness, to bliss.

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Osho.