... unconscious starts happening. We are connected in the unconscious; in the deepest realm of our being we are one. If one man becomes a Buddha, then everybody's unconscious is thrilled. You may not know consciously, but everybody's unconscious is thrilled. It is like a spider's web: you touch it from anywhere and the whole web starts trembling. We are one in our base. We are like a solid strong tree, standing...

... solitary in the field - big, huge, with great foliage. Leaves are millions, branches are many, but it all depends on a solid trunk, and they all are rooted in one soil. If one leaf turns enlightened, the whole tree will know it unconsciously... "Something has happened." Those who are consciously searching for truth will be the first to start moving. The unconscious will have the ripples. A...

..., something started moving, something in the unconscious. And after a few minutes the woman started saying, "Rauneesh, Rauneesh, Rauneesh" - and she had not known me at all, had not ever heard about me. When she came back, the man said, "You were repeating a certain name - Rauneesh - it seems to be very strange. I have never heard it." And the woman said, "I have never heard it. I...

... don't know." They both went to a bookstall to search for the name. Of course, it was not Rauneesh, it was Rajneesh. And he looked into my books, and that's what he had been searching for for many, many years. Next month he will be coming here. Now how does it happen? Something in the depth of the woman... It is easier for a woman to receive messages, because she is closer to the unconscious than...

... man. Man has gone far away from the unconscious. He has become too much hung up in the head, in the conscious. The woman still lives by hunches. Something started stirring in her unconscious with the man looking into her eyes. And the man is a conscious searcher; the woman is not. The woman had never been looking for a master. She is not coming. She must have explained it away as just a coincidence...

... or something. She has never been interested in any search, but her unconscious was more receptive. Being a woman, and then alcohol, and this man looking immensely magnetized by her eyes - all these things worked, something surfaced. And this man's conscious was looking. Hearing this word he was hooked. He got hooked with the word; he could not forget it. He had to go to the bookstalls to find out...

... last secret. BEFORE ENTERING SAMADHI - that is, death with consciousness.... Samadhi means death with consciousness, dying fully alert. You have died many times but it was not samadhi, it was simple death, because whenever you died you were unconscious. Before death happens you are unconscious, it is just a surgical procedure. Because death will be so painful for you, you cannot be allowed to be...

... conscious - just as a surgeon gives you anesthetic, chloroform, before he operates on you, and then his operation is just nothing. Death's operation is so big because the whole being has to be taken out of your body with which it has become so attached, identified. It is not simply removing a bone, it is removing the whole body from you. So nature has a process: before you die you fall unconscious, fast...

... asleep, you are no longer in your senses, and then your being can be removed. This is not samadhi. And remember, if a person dies in unconsciousness he is born in unconsciousness, because the birth, the coming birth, will be the same, the same quality. If in this life you die unconsciously, in the next life you will be born unconscious in a womb. If you can die consciously then you can be born...

... consciously. And if you can die with total awareness, the whole being alert, not a single part unconscious, then you will not be born at all. Then there is no need, then you can simply discard this body and become bodiless. BEFORE ENTERING SAMADHI - that is, conscious, alert, aware of death.... And only the person who has attained the seventh stage can enter it. He will be born no more, he will be out of...

... everything. Just say to death, "Take it. This is not me. Take this body, take this mind, take this self, this ego. I am not this." Don't cling, let your life be a gift to death. Don't create any fight and resistance. If you create fight you will become unconscious and you will miss an opportunity again. Give up. Give death whatsoever you have - from the gross to the subtle to the very self, go on...

... giving. Don't create any resistance. This is the foundational thing. Don't create resistance, don't fight with death. What will happen? If you can give up knowingly, consciously, blissfully, you will not fall unconscious, there is no need. Your clinging creates the problem. It happened just at the beginning of this century, the king of Benares was to undergo an appendix operation. He was a very...

... religious man, a very saintly man, and he said, "I have never taken anything to make me unconscious and I would not like to do that. So please, if you can operate, then operate on me when I am fully conscious. I will not take any anesthetic, chloroform, or any type of thing which can make me unconscious." The doctors were worried, and the case was serious. The appendix had to be removed soon...

..., otherwise the man would die. And he was adamant. He said, "I can die, that is not much of a problem - but I don't want to be unconscious." He must have been thinking of this sutra, he must have known about this secret, that one should never die unconsciously. Death is not the problem, unconsciousness is the problem. So he said, "It is okay. If you cannot operate then let me be as I am. I...

... the third state we call SUSHUPTI: sleep, deep sleep, dreamless deep sleep. The third state is "unconsciousness minus thinking"; you are unconscious -- you don't know where you are, who you are, all consciousness has disappeared, you are at rest -- and with the consciousness has disappeared thinking too, dreaming too. These three are ordinary states: waking, dreaming, sleeping. We all know...

.... These four disciples were not aware at all, so when the one said, "Fix those lamps" to a servant who was passing by, he must have done it in a very unconscious way; otherwise he was to keep silent. It was none of his business whether the lamps were getting dim or not. He had to remember that he was in silence, but he forgot. The story is not humorous; it is tragic. That's how things are with...

... thought -- how to get rid of you. And by the end even that disappeared. Then there was only an effort, not a thought -- no thought. My whole life was at stake. It was just an effort to get out of the river somehow. And I had lo put all my energies -- known, unknown, conscious, unconscious, whatsoever -- because this seemed to be the last moment." Farid said, "That is the method. When God...

... finger into my navel and calling for two beers." A mechanical mind is an unconscious mind. You go on doing things, but not knowing what you are doing and why you are doing them. And while doing them there is no awareness. Walking, you walk, but there is no awareness. Eating, you eat, but there is no awareness. Talking, you talk, but there is no awareness. The story is significant. It says the...

... "fall"? It is called "fall" because it helps you to be unconscious. It is a fall. You become unconscious. We say somebody has "fallen" asleep, somebody has "fallen" in love. "Fall" means now you are no more conscious; you are behaving very mechanically. Love in itself is mechanical. Then, when the hate starts coming, you will be a victim of that too...

... error becomes a remembrance of your own errors, your life will be transformed. Then everybody will become a teacher to you. Then the whole of life becomes your Master. Everywhere you will find arrows pointing to you. The whole of life will be arrowed towards you, saying, "This is unconscious ... this is irresponsible." We have found a very easy trick: we turn the arrows towards others...

... bothers? But more essential is why you choose a certain woman, why you choose a certain man. Why? What fits with your mind? Again you will choose the same type of woman -- for the same reasons. Those reasons are unconscious. So you can go on changing women and you will not find the woman you are searching for. You can go on changing your job and you will not find the job you are searching for. And you...

... with the quality of awareness. Then whatsoever you do is virtue. Then whatsoever you do is good. Then whatsoever you do is a blessing to you and to the world in which you live. Ponder over this small story. It is a story of four unconscious people who are trying to be silent. But they have not understood the laws of thought, they have not understood the law of being unconscious. They don't know that...

... psychoanalysis. This was far simpler - because a master cannot work that way, that for years one student goes on, every day, taking up one hour, telling his stupid dreams while the master listens. And then he figures out, after years of listening, what is hiding in the man's unconscious. Gurdjieff's method was so simple: just let a person drink and come to a point where he loses all consciousness, and the...

... unconscious starts speaking. In a single session he was able to derive conclusions which Freud was not able to in ten years - because the unconscious immediately takes over. And Gurdjieff would provoke people to talk in that state. That was his basic understanding about the person, and it would be followed up: what kind of technique had to be given, what kind of person the man was. If he was an independent...

... to the groups, or people who could be a great help to him. All the sorting was done out of their unconscious statements. If the statements were absolutely indicative that the person already had a developed consciousness, he could be a help to the master. He could go on growing himself, but he was far higher than others - he could be a help. And the master cannot work on so many people. Gurdjieff...

... showed tremendous compassion in their unconsciousness. These were the people who could help the group. If they did not help anybody, they would suffer; their compassion would remain repressed. Compassion needs a certain expression. And there were people who were utterly independent. Even in their unconscious their statements were absolutely of their own. Each statement had their own signature. Even in...

... night, it comes out itself. And everybody, in unconsciousness, behaves differently, so these three categories are found through the unconscious. But my work is a totally different. In the first place, it is not the work of a school. In the second place, it is not dictatorial. Work has to be dictatorial if you cannot explain it to people; and there is something in which Gurdjieff is handicapped - he is...

... weightier than billions and billions of people on the earth. Existence cannot destroy the world - not only because of those few people who are enlightened; but because of their enlightenment, the unconscious masses also become valuable, because it is from these unconscious masses that those Himalayan peaks have arisen. They were also unconscious yesterday, today they are conscious. And existence is very...

... patient: if it sees that unconscious people can become fully conscious, then this great mass of people, which is absolutely unconscious, also has a possibility. I depend on the individuals, not on the collectivity. The collectivity is so rotten that it will be an act of compassion to destroy it. But we have to prove that out of this unconscious, almost dead humanity, a few lotuses can blossom. Then...

... cannot find that which is something more, something transcendental to body and mind. The psychologists, particularly the behaviorists, have been studying man for half a century, but they study the ordinary man, and of course their thesis is proved by all their studies. The ordinary man, the unconscious man, has nothing more in him than the bodymind composite. The body is the outer side of the mind and...

... the mind the inner side of the body. Both are born and both will die one day. But there is something more. That something more makes a man awakened, enlightened, a Buddha, a Christ. But a Buddha or a Christ is not available to be studied by Pavlov, Skinner, Delgado and others. Their study is about the unconscious man, and of course when you study the unconscious man you will not find anything...

... transcendental in him. The transcendental exists in the unconscious man only as a potential, as a possibility; it is not yet realized, it is not yet a reality. Hence you cannot study it. You can study it only in a Buddha, but even then studying is obviously very difficult, just very close to the impossible, because what you will study in a Buddha will again be his behavior. And if you are determined that there...

... a science of the soul. Buddha certainly has denied the self, the ego, the "I", but he has not denied the soul and the self and the soul are not synonymous. He denies the self because the self exists only in the unconscious man. The unconscious man needs a certain idea of "I", otherwise he will be without a center. He does not know his real center. He has to invent a false...

... in your own unconscious way. Hamid, your friend says that: MAN IS A BIOCHEMICAL COMPUTER AND NOTHING MORE. Can a biochemical computer say that? Can a biochemical computer deny the self, the soul? No biocomputer or any other kind of computer has any idea of self or no-self. Your friend is doing it - certainly HE is not a biochemical computer. No biochemical computer can write a thesis on artificial...

... consciously there, if you are not a witness to it, if you remain unconscious, mechanical, robotlike, then it is indulgence. If you are aware, then it is experiencing. And experiencing is beautiful, indulgence is ugly. But remember the distinction that I am making. In the past all the religions have labeled things; I am not labeling things. They have labeled things: "This is indulgence and this is...

.... Years later he was found walking on all fours, eating raw meat and living in the open. He was put in school where in one year he breezed through grammar school, high school and college. The day after he got his Ph.D. he was killed - chasing a car. Even if you get your Ph.D. you are going to chase the car - unconscious habit! Knowledgeable you can become, but that is not going to transform you; you...

... becomes what he was meant to be. In the East we have called that man the buddha, in the West we have called that man the christ. The word 'christ' exactly means what the word 'buddha' means: one who has come home. We are all wanderers in search of the home, but the search is very unconscious - groping in the dark, not exactly aware what we are groping for, who we are, where we are going. We go on like...

..., that up to now you have remained utterly unconscious. Start becoming conscious; that is the only way to arrive. It is arduous, it is hard. To remain accidental is easy; it needs no intelligence, hence it is easy. Any idiot can do it - all the idiots are already doing it. It is easy to be accidental because you never feel responsible for anything that happens. You can always throw the responsibility...

..., utterly unconscious; doing things, not knowing why; simply doing because there is an unconscious urge to do. Now, this is not only a mystic hypothesis about man. Sigmund Freud, Gustav Jung, Alfred Adler and others, the modern researchers into the psyche of man, have also come across the same fact. Freud says man lives unconsciously, although the mind is so cunning that it can find reasons, motives. At...

... least it can create a facade as if you are living a conscious life - and that is very dangerous because you can start believing in your own facade. Then your life is gone, then you will not be able to use this tremendously valuable opportunity. People go on doing unconscious things - although they suffer, although they are immensely miserable, still they go on doing the same things which bring misery...

... to them. They don't know what else to do. They are not there, they are not present; hence they can't do anything. They are trapped in the unconscious instincts. Hennessy, loaded to the gills, was lurking on a dark and deserted street corner. Soon a man came walking by, and Hennessy sprang out of the shadows, a gun in his hand. "Stay where you are!" he slobbered. Then he pulled a bottle...

... up to you. You will have to find the way, you will have to find the master, you will have to find the right situation. It is a great challenge. Life is a great challenge to know oneself. If this challenge is accepted, you really become man for the first time; otherwise you go on existing on a subhuman level. And it is not only the worldly people who are living an unconscious life. The so-called...

... moment your potential becomes actual, the moment you are a realized soul, even gods admire you. Even gods are far behind, because even gods have not yet become buddhas. They are also living unconscious lives - maybe living in heaven. What you call angels in Christianity are called gods in Buddhism. The angels living in heaven, even they are not buddhas; they are as asleep as you are. The only...

..., you are no longer separate. The way to reach to this actualization is: HE IS THE CHARIOTEER. He becomes a conscious master. His body is a chariot, he drives it where he wants to, not vice versa. The unconscious man is driven by his body. Just watch yourself: your body goes on driving you. Just a moment before you were not hungry, and you pass by the side of a restaurant, and the smell of food... and...

... of existence. But if you just move from one class to another like a sleepwalker, a somnambulist, unconscious, dragged from one class to another, not moving deliberately and consciously, you will miss. That's how many people arrive at the point of being human beings and they cannot see any god. That simply shows they have missed the lessons, they avoided the lessons. They were in the classes but...

... ordinarily be seen when you are asleep, when you are unconscious. Shake all the dust from the eyes. Be skillful and live life consciously. Otherwise life becomes boring. You feel it. You know how it feels. Sooner or later everything feels boring; one is bored to death. One goes on living because one is not courageous enough to commit suicide. One goes on living just in the hope that sooner or later one...

... unconscious. You carry it. The body changes, the identity changes, but the bundle of memories goes on jumping from one life to another. And it goes on accumulating, gathering. It goes on becoming bigger and bigger. Nothing is lost as far as memory record is concerned. If you look into yourself, you have the whole record of the existence in you. Because you have been here from the very beginning - if there...

..., you accumulated wealth, you became very famous, you had prestige and power - this has happened many many times, millions of times. And you carry deep down in the unconscious, the reservoir of memories, and whatsoever you are doing looks futile, pointless, meaningless. I have heard: A newspaper reporter was interviewing Mulla Nasrudin on his hundredth birthday. If you had your life to live over,' he...

... doing in primal therapy - they are trying to recall all that has disappeared into the tunnels of the unconscious, to relive it. Once it is relived, you are freed from it. What primal therapists are doing now, Buddha has done twenty-five centuries ago. And on a greater, in a greater way, in a deeper way. Not only with this life - he has done it with the whole past. You have to pass through the womb...

... to look into the past, it is just as a help to prepare for the future. But the interest, the center of interest is the future. Buddha says... PURE IN HEART AND SINGLE IN PURPOSE. People who are not in the head but in their heart, only they can enter into the past lives. Heart is very close to the unconscious basement, head is farthest away. Heart is closer to your navel center. Just somewhere near...

... the navel is the corresponding point in the body with your unconscious. You have to come to the heart. Heart is midway between the head and the navel. If you become more and more full of feeling, full of heart, you will become capable of knowing, of entering into that great story of your past lives. It is not only YOUR biography; it is the biography of the whole universe. Because sometimes you were...

... a tree, and still in your mind, deep down in the unconscious, you are carrying all those memories of being a tree. Someday you were a tiger, and someday you were a cat, and someday you were an elephant, and someday you were a woman, and someday you were a man, and millions of memories are there. The whole drama of life is there, in a very condensed form. If you go into it, it starts playing. You...

... a single word of it, you don't know anything about it. A human being is vast. It is not so confined as you think. You think you are a Hindu, or a Mohammedan, or a Christian, or an Indian, or Japanese, or Chinese. These are just boundaries on your conscious mind. On the unconscious, you are infinite territory. You are all. Not only Hindu and Mohammedan and Christian, but even a tiger, a cat, a...

... unconscious. It is the language of visualization. It is the language of children. Children think in pictures, hence in children's books we have to make many, many pictures, colored pictures. The text is very small, pictures are very big - because that is the only way to persuade children to learn to read, because they can learn only through the pictures. The primitive mind thinks in pictures. That's why it...

... to visualize it. All primitives do that. That is the language of the unconscious. You still do it; howsoever articulate you are with language, and howsoever proficient you have become in rational argumentation, still in the night you dream in pictures. The more primitive you are, the more colorful your pictures will be; the more civilized you have become, your pictures become less and less colorful...

.... Black and white thinking makes humanity schizophrenic. You say: This is my friend and that is my enemy. But the enemy can become a friend tomorrow, and the friend can become an enemy tomorrow. So the difference can be, at the most, relative; it cannot be absolute. Think in color - don't think in black and white. Visualization is the language of children, of all primitive people, and of the unconscious...

.... Your unconscious also thinks in pictures. Kakuan first tried the unconscious language because that is the deepest: he painted these ten bulls. But he felt dissatisfied. Then he wrote ten poems as a supplement, as an appendix. Poetry is mid-way between the unconscious and the conscious: a bridge, a misty land where things are not absolutely in the dark and are not absolutely in the light - just...

... somewhere in the middle. That's why where prose fails, poetry can indicate. Prose is too superficial; poetry goes deeper. Poetry is more indirect but more meaningful, richer. But still Kakuan felt dissatisfied, so he wrote prose commentaries. First he wrote the language of the unconscious, the language of painters, sculptors, dreamers; then he wrote the language of the poets, the bridge between the...

... unconscious and the conscious - of all art. And then he wrote the language of logic, reason, Aristotle - the conscious. That's why I say such an experiment is unique; nobody else has done that. Buddha talked in prose. Meera sang in poetry. Unknown painters and sculptors have done many things - Ajanta, Ellora, the Taj Mahal. But a single person has not done all three things together. Kakuan is rare, and he...

... moon. But in the morning he opens his eyes - where will he find himself? On the moon? He will find himself here, now. The moon will disappear with the dream. The world is a dream. Not that it does not exist, not that it is not - the world is a dream because the world that you think is, is nothing but your dream, because you are asleep, unconscious, sleepy, moving, doing things. It is fortunate that...

... questions will come out of your unconscious. In fact, all questions will be absurd. That's not the way to encounter reality. One has to be silent, utterly silent. Hence Buddha says, don't be bothered about God. Be concerned with your own preparation, be prepared. The emphasis is totally different. All the religions emphasize God, the object of search; Buddha emphasizes YOU, the subject. All other...

....... What does Buddha mean by "something good"? Buddha always emphasizes that unconscious acts are bad and conscious acts are good. You can do something apparently good, but if you are unconscious it can't be good. Your intention is good, but the action and its consequences are going to be bad. For example, just the other day somebody had asked, "I want to stop smoking. What should I do...

...?" asked the officer. "To hell with them!" snorted Millarney. "Let them wait!" The ordinary humanity is really in a state of stupor. People are asleep. There is no need to be a drunkard, people are already drunk. Naturally we are not born conscious, we are born unconscious, and then we go on becoming more and more unconscious in life - - because we are unconscious, we want to...

... be more unconscious. It seems to be natural, it fits with us. To be conscious seems to be a very uphill task. Hence the immense attraction for alcohol or for other drugs. From the times of the Vedas up to now it has been the same. The Vedas praise SOMARAS very highly. Somaras seems to be something like marijuana, LSD, psilocybin, something like that. It has not yet been discovered exactly what it...

... unconscious and the problems of life, anxieties of life, dangers of life, make us sometimes conscious. They wake up our deep, deep slumber, they disturb it. So we need more drugs, more and more drugs, to remain undisturbed in our unconsciousness. And out of that unconsciousness we act, we live our lives. Ferguson and Malone decided to go hunting one morning. "Listen," said Ferguson, "I will...

... believe that he was a pessimist. He believes, of course, in a totally different kind of life. He does not believe in the ordinary, unconscious life - dishonest, unauthentic, unloving, unmeditative. He calls that life misery, but only a certain kind of life he calls misery. True life cannot be misery, true life is bliss. OH HOW SWEET IT IS TO ENJOY LIFE, LIVING IN HONESTY AND STRENGTH! We have forgotten...