... own tail or you chasing your own shadow; you cannot catch hold of it. It was so ridiculous, the whole effort was so absurd! That's why I am laughing: I have always been a buddha! Now it looks very strange that for millions of lives I remained unconscious. It seems unbelievable how I went on missing myself. Now that I have known, a great laughter is arising in me." And it is said he continued to...

... is your own creation, so is heaven. If you go on living unconsciously, through your unconscious desires, instincts, motives - of which you are not the master but only the victim - then you create hell around yourself. But if you start living a conscious life, a life of bringing more and more light to the deep, dark corners of your being, if you start living full of light, your life is moment-to...

... transformation process. But my emphasis is never on renouncing anything; my emphasis is on rejoicing more and more. And your rejoicing is bound to change your life patterns. You can't remain the same when you meditate, when you become aware. How can you remain the same? How can you go on doing the same foolish things? It was possible when you were unconscious; it is impossible when you become conscious. A...

... found my wife in the bathtub, and it took me four hours to dry out my uniform!" When you live an unconscious life you live in a different way. When Tom, the rising young insurance executive, appeared at his friend Ed's home in the early morning hours, asking to be put up for the night, Ed was concerned by his friend's hollow-eyed appearance. "What happened, Tom? You and your wife had a fight...

...?" "Yeah, when I got home last night I was really beat, tired as hell, so when she asked me for fifty dollars for a new dress...." "Yeah?" "Well, I guess I must have been half asleep or something, because I said, 'Alright, but let us finish this dictation first.'" Are you all British, or what? Can't you get such a simple joke? Living an unconscious life you are even...

... may simply be using her as a sex object, or he may be using her as a mother substitute. He may be using her because he is unable to be alone, but he may never have loved her. He may be dependent on her; she may have great utility. But to use another human being is immoral, ugly - and to pretend that you love.... And I am not saying that you are consciously doing it; it may be just an unconscious...

... has a natural instinct behind it; friendship has no natural instinct behind it. Friendship is something conscious; love is unconscious. You fall in love with a woman.... Why do we say "falling in love"? That phrase is significant: "falling in love." Nobody ever rises in love, everybody FALLS in love! Why do you fall in love? - because it is falling from the conscious to the...

... unconscious, from intelligence to instinct. What we call love is more animalistic than human. Friendship is absolutely human. It has something for which there is no inbuilt mechanism in your biology; it is nonbiological. Hence one rises in friendship, one does not fall in friendship. It has a spiritual dimension. But don't ask, "Who is a real friend?" Ask, "Am I a real friend?" Always be...

... about individuation, he was going into the idea of individuation deeper and deeper, but it was not his own meditation, it was not his own existential experience. THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER IS an alchemical process. These are the words of those who have known. Jung was not an individual in the sense of individuation, he was still divided: he had the conscious mind and the unconscious mind and the...

... collective unconscious mind. He was not one, he himself was a multiplicity. He was a crowd as everybody else is. He had all the fears, all the greeds, all the ambitions that any normal human being is expected to have. He was not a Buddha, he was not enlightened. He had not known his own inner being which is timeless. In the moment of inner illumination, all differences and distinctions disappear. There is...

... only pure consciousness - neither conscious nor unconscious nor collective unconscious. The same was happening with Sri Aurobindo in India. He was also talking about conscious mind and the superconscious mind, and so on and so forth. In the moment of illumination, mind disappears. Mind means division; whether you divide it into conscious and unconscious or you divide it into conscious and...

.... Union is not unity, union is only an order imposed on chaos. This can be done, and then you will have a false kind of individuation. You will feel better than before, because now you will not be a crowd, a mob. Many noises will not be there, they will have fallen into a certain kind of harmony; a certain adjustment will have arisen in you. Your conscious mind will be friendly with the unconscious, not...

... antagonistic. Your unconscious will be friendly with the collective unconscious, not antagonistic. There will be a thread running through the flowers, you will be more like a garland than a pile. But still, individuation in the sense I am talking about here has not happened. Individuation is not the unity of mind but the disappearance of the mind. When you are utterly empty of the mind, you are one. To be a...

... very close, around the comer. Just a turning of the head, and you will be able to see that which is: truth, God, enlightenment. You will be able to see that into which you had gone when dreams had stopped and sleep was profound, but then you were unconscious. Deep sleep rejuvenates because, although unconsciously, you enter into the core of your being - but you still enter. All the tiredness of the...

... outside world is taken away, and all the wounds are healed, and all the dust disappears. You have taken a bath, you have dived deep into your own being. That's why Patanjali says: Deep, dreamless sleep is almost like SAMADHI - but almost, not exactly SAMADHI. What is the difference? It is very small - or very great - but this much difference is there: in sleep you are unconscious, in SAMADHI you are...

... each thought is quite clear. Whatsoever is being said outside is quite clear, in fact, more clear than it was before. This is the magic of meditation. You are not becoming unconscious, because in unconsciousness also you will see that noises are disappearing. For example, if you have been given chloroform you will feel this same phenomenon happening: noises start going away, away, away... and they...

... are gone - but you have fallen unconscious. You cannot hear anything clearly. Just the same happens in meditation, but with a difference - the noises start going away from you, but every noise becomes distinctly clear, more clear than it was before, because now a witnessing is arising. First you were also a noise in all the noises; you were lost in it. Now you are a witness, an observer, and because...

... no snake, nothing" - and we looked around - "and we know that there are so many rats in your house. It must have been a rat." So he was satisfied; we went to sleep. Everything was perfectly good. We went to the river, we swam in the river, we came back. After lunch a snake was found in the house, and immediately my friend became unconscious - the very idea! And I tried hard, but now...

... he was already unconscious, so what to do? For one and a half hours he remained unconscious, in a kind of coma. Doctors were called, they checked. They said, "There is no poison, nothing. Even the rat has not done any harm, and there is no question of any snake." But still injections were given to bring him back. Just the idea... but the idea can create a reality. When you see a rope and...

... center so you can remember it your whole day. Two times are the best. The first best time is the early morning: orient yourself to the center so you can live on the circumference but yet with full remembrance of the center. And the second time is before you go to bed: orient yourself again to the center, so in your deep sleep also - even while you are dreaming, while you are unconscious - you can...

... lives, and unless you take hold of your life and start changing it from the accidental to the existential, there is going to be no transformation. That's what sannyas is all about: an effort to change the accidental into the existential, an effort to change the unconscious life into a conscious life, the effort to wake up. And then life is learning, and so is death. Then one goes on learning. Then...

...; said the Texan. "Grandpa does not want to get married. He HAS to." This way life goes on and on to the very end. This is not real life. You are just a victim - a victim of your unconscious instincts, a victim of biology, a victim of physiology, a victim of nature. This is the bondage. To be free of all this unconsciousness is liberation. To be free of the bondage of your body chemistry, to...

... be free of the bondage of the program that nature has put in your body cells, to be free of all that is unconscious in you, to be on your own, to be a conscious light - that is the beginning of real life. Count your age only from the moment when you start living consciously, fully alert, meditatively. When each act has the flavor of consciousness, then you are coming closer to home. Otherwise you...

... power-politics; the drug can be anything. Anything that keeps you unconscious is a drug. Anything that keeps you engaged in the non-essential is a drug. Drugs are not only sold at the chemist, drugs are available everywhere. Your schools, your colleges, your universities sell drugs because they create ambition, and ambition keeps people unconscious. Ambition keeps them running, chasing shadows...

... and trapped by your own mind again and again, in the same stupidities that you have come across many times and you have repented for many times and you have decided many times, taken a vow, "Never again!" But the mind will come with subtle allurements. The mind is the greatest salesman. The mind is very persuasive. And because the mind is always helping your unconscious desires, the body...

.... Unless you become conscious you will go on moving in this wheel, and this wheel goes on mercilessly repeating itself. It is very boring, and it is utterly stupid to continue it. But to become aware needs great effort. To become aware, you will have to go into a long struggle with your own sleep, with your own unconscious states. You will have to fight your way. The struggle is hard and arduous and the...

... delusion. Now it has no substance in it, it is the same stuff dreams are made of. The first unconscious perception of the world looked very substantial - it was very objective, it was THERE. After meditating on emptiness, it is still there but it is no longer substantial, it is only a mind game. It is like a dream. That's what Hindus mean when they say, "The world is maya." It does not mean...

... become so fully conscious that the mind is not needed. The rock is so unconscious that the mind cannot exist. In the rock the unconscious is absolute, hence the mind is not possible. In the Buddha the consciousness is absolute and the mind is not needed. Let me explain it to you; it is one of the most important things to learn, to understand. Mind is needed only because you are not really conscious. If...

... living in a kind of nowness; they don't know the past, they don't know the future. The Buddha knows no past, no future, and no present. He knows no division. That's the state of eternity. Then the now is absolutely there. There is only now, and only here, and nothing else. But the rock is also in that state - unconscious, of course. The second sphere is the biosphere. It means life, pre-consciousness...

... animal has more freedom. He can move, he can choose a little more freedom - where to go, what to do. The bird has even a little more freedom - it can fly. This is the sphere called the biosphere, the life sphere. It is pre-consciousness; just rudimentary consciousness is coming into being. The rock was absolutely unconscious. You cannot say the tree is so absolutely unconscious. Yes, it is unconscious...

... entered into the unconscious, has been put in the unconscious. His conscious mind is unaware. He will not even have any idea of why he is going to the market. But he will find some rationalization: he will say, "Let us go shopping today." Why today? He will say, "This is my freedom. Whenever I want to go I will go. Who are you to prevent me? This is my freedom." And he's unaware...

... back, and when you are back the world is going to be more ugly than it ever was before, and life is going to be more of a problem than it ever was before. Because while you were intoxicated, unconscious, asleep in the drug, the problems were growing. The problems were becoming more and more complicated. While you were thinking that you had gone beyond the problems, the problems were taking root more...

... in your being, in your unconscious. Tomorrow again you will be back in the same world -- it will look more ugly compared to the peace that you had attained by reduction, by intoxication, by forgetfulness. Compared to that peace, the world will look even more dangerous, more complex, more scary. And then the only way is: go on increasing the doses of your drug. But that too does not help for long...

... suggestion that comes to the mind is: repress the animal, forget the animal; keep the animal at the back, don't look at it. Throw it deep down in the basement of your unconscious so you don't come across it in your daily life, so you don't see it. Man thinks almost in the same way as the ostrich. The ostrich thinks if he cannot see the enemy, the enemy does not exist. Hence, when the ostrich encounters the...

... night I am incapable, I am unconscious, so the hole discipline and control disappears." Sigmund Freud's insight is very valuable, that to know about a man you have to know his dreams, not his waking life. His waking life is pseudo. His real life asserts itself in his dreams, because his dreams are more natural -- no repression, no discipline, no control. Hence, psychoanalysis does not bother...

... dreams. Your dreams are far more real, because you are not there to distort, you are fast asleep; the conscious mind is asleep and the unconscious is free to have its say. And the unconscious is your true mind, because the conscious is only one tenth of your total mind. Nine tenths is the unconscious -- nine times more powerful, nine times bigger than your conscious mind. And what will you do when you...

... are fighting with your sexuality, anger, greed? You will go on throwing them into the unconscious, into the darkness of the basement, thinking that by not seeing them you are getting rid of them. You are not getting rid of them. Not even a man like Mahatma Gandhi... what to say about small mahatmas like Morarji Desai etc. A man like Mahatma Gandhi continued to have sexual dreams. That simply shows...

... its noises - they must have some message for you. You go into its dreams - even if they look absurd they must be conveying something from the unconscious to you. Just by cutting those messages you are not going to grow - because you are cutting your own unconscious. When you still your mind you are doing one thing: you are stilling your unconscious. You are saying, 'I don't want to hear.' But the...

... unconscious has something valuable to say to you. The whole of psychoanalysis is a proof for it, that the unconscious has something to convey. And the unconscious is more in tune with God than your so-called conscious. And the conscious tries to force the unconscious not to say anything. No, no song will be born out of it. You can force a child to sit silently, out of fear. You can give him an electric...

... death?' I said, 'I don't talk about it. I talk about life BEFORE death.' After death? You have not even lived the life that is before death, and you are talking about life after death? Live this! and the other will take care of itself. Desire, ambition, creates a drunkenness. One's eyes become dull, one starts feeling very very shaky, one becomes unconscious. The desire becomes a curtain on the...

... you were complacent, you were moving in peace. On the surface everything was okay, but all the monsters were there in the unconscious. Tantra brought all those monsters to the surface. It is good; now they can be released and they can be said good-bye to. Many things become possible once the unconscious unloads itself into the conscious. That's what a nightmare is: the unconscious unloading itself...

... has to be done the last thing at night. After it, simply go to sleep so the feeling continues in your unconscious. That is the whole thing. The whole mechanism is that you start by consciously imagining, then you start falling asleep. By and by when you are on the threshold of sleep, a little imagination continues, lingers on. You fall asleep but that little imagination enters the unconscious. That...

... tension all around - not particularly addressed to you; he is simply throwing. And he is unconscious; he is not doing it to anybody knowingly. He has to throw it because he is too burdened. He will go mad if he doesn't throw it. It is not that he has decided to throw it. It is overflowing. It is too much and he cannot contain it, so it goes on overflowing. Somebody passes by you and he goes on throwing...

... reconciliation is possible. In hypnotherapy the whole process is to relax into your unconscious, because the problem exists in the unconscious. Encounter functions in the conscious mind. Hypnotherapy says that the prob-lem is in the unconscious. If you drop a little lower to a different layer of your being, then the problem simply disappears because it is attached to a particular level. With a change of...

... is boiling with it and it does. not allow spontaneity. So encounter says throw it out, vomit it out, be relieved of it. Hypnotherapy says that anger is in the unconscious. You move towards deeper levels of your being and from there look again Suddenly, because you are on a different plane, things appear in a different light. Something looks very big when you are looking through a microscope. When...

... hypnotherapy if you had no problems. Then it is simply a beautiful experience, a great relaxing, but you are not coming as a patient. You come simply to enjoy as a guest. It is a beautiful dimension. You enter into the unconscious. It is good in itself, not as therapy. Good as a game. [He answers: I was looking forward to it. I was expecting... ] That's the trouble. If you are looking for something, some...