Prabhaker

This question arises for so many reasons. One, you are not really working. You are just deceiving yourself. You are playing tricks with yourself. You are less concerned with what you are doing and more concerned with what is happening. If you are really doing it, you can leave the result to existence. Meditation is not just a certain thing which you do for one hour and forget. Really, the whole of life has to be meditative. Only then will you begin to feel things. And when I say that the whole life is to be meditative, I do not mean to go and close your eyes for twenty-four hours and sit and meditate – no! Wherever you are you can be sensitive and that sensitivity will pay. Then there will be no need to ask, 'Am I progressing or not?' Only with this capacity of being aware of all things happening around you will you develop the capacity to feel what is happening within.

@Jhonny Exactly the same number of women attain to enlightenment as men, but they don't fuss about it as much as men - that's all. They don't advertise it as much as men. They enjoy it. That is how woman, the feminine being, is. Man enjoys talking about his enlightenment more than enlightenment itself. He is interested in how many people have come to know that he has become enlightened. Women are not worried. They are not worried at all. If it has happened they enjoy it, they nourish it deep inside.

@mikeyy The basic structure of the family is of possessiveness: the husband possesses the wife and they both possess the children; and the moment you possess a human being you have taken away his dignity, his freedom, his very humanity. You have taken away all that is beautiful and you have given him only handcuffs; perhaps made of gold – beautiful cages in place of his wings – but those golden cages cannot give him the sky and the freedom of the sky.

Yoga says we have seven bodies: the physical, the etheric,the astral, the mental, the spiritual, the cosmic, and the nirvanic. As there are seven bodies, so there are also seven chakras, energy centres, and each chakra is connected in a special way with its corresponding body. Psychic powers become possible as you go deeper into purities and perfection. For example, if you can move your astral body out of the gross body you can do many things which will be miraculous. You can visit people. They can see you but they cannot touch you. You can even talk to them by your astral projection. Astral body is beyond gravitation. Gravitation has no power over it. In the astral realm, you can travel not only in space but also in time. The astral body can trespass the barrier of time -- but only toward the past, not toward the future. During a spiritual journey it is not necessary to pass through psychic realms. But that does not mean that you will not pass through them. You can pass through them with such speed that you do not notice them. Patanjali in has a complete section of these sutras devoted to vibhuti pada -- to this dimension of power. And he has written the whole part just to make you beware that don't become a victim of it, because ego is very subtle.

I don't know about flying monk, but I personally know some meditators having psychic powers. It happens that when for the first time a meditator attains to some psychic energy, some psychic power, the tendency, a natural tendency, is to exhibit it. And if he exhibits, sooner or later he will lose the power. These psychic powers are the greatest obstacle on the way to realization. The mind is always hankering. The mind is nothing but hankering, desiring something to happen. Sometimes it is thinking about money, to have more money, to have bigger houses, to have more respectability, to have more political power. Then you turn towards spirituality; the mind remains the same. Now you want to have more psychic powers -- telepathy, clairvoyance, and all sorts of nonsense. But the mind remains the same -- you want more. And if you want more you will remain ill. Somebody went to Ramakrishna and said: "My Master is a great man. He can walk on the water." Ramakrishna said: "Foolish! Because I can simply go to the ferryman, and with just two paisa he takes me to the other side. How many years did your Master have to practice to do this miracle?" He said: "Eighteen years." He said: "This is too much; just two paisa is the value of it! Your Master is a fool. Go and make him aware that he should not waste his life. It can be done so easily." Yes, this is what Ramakrishna is saying: all miracles are ego-trips.

Zen the only living religion because it is not a religion, but only a religiousness. It has no dogma, it does not depend on any founder. It has no past; in fact it has nothing to teach you. It is the strangest thing that has happened in the whole history of mankind—strangest because it enjoys in emptiness, it blossoms in nothingness. Zen is pure meditation. The very word `Zen' means meditation. It has nothing else, it requires no rituals. Just as you are, the only requirement is to go in and discover your eternal self. Zen does not require any faith. It requires of you only an intense inquiry into yourself, a deepening of consciousness, not concentration—a settling, a relaxing of consciousness.

@Josh2 @Saarah Intuition functions in a quantum leap. It has no methodological procedure, it simply sees things. It has eyes to see. It sees things which you have never even thought of as things -- for example, love. You have never thought of it as a thing. But a man of intuition can see whether there is love in you or not, whether there is trust in you or not, whether there is doubt in you or not. He can see them as if these are things. An unclean unconscious is hindering you. Clean it; and the way to clean it is to satisfy it, to satisfy it so much that it starts telling you: "Please stop! It is more than I needed." Only leave it then. And with that, your intellect is filled with such a fresh flow of energy that it turns into intelligence. Then the energy goes on rising and opens the doors of intuition. Then you can see things which are not visible to your physical eyes, things which are not even things. Love is not a thing, truth is not a thing, trust is not a thing, but they are realities -- much more real than your things. But they are realities only for intuition, they are existential. We have corrupted intuition. Man’s intuition is almost absolutely corrupted. Woman’s intuition is not corrupted as much – that’s why women have something called a “hunch”. A hunch is just a fragment of intuition. It cannot be proved. You are going to take a flight and your woman simply says that she is not going and she will not allow you to go either. She feels as if something is going to happen. Now this is nonsense. You have much work to do, everything is planned, and you have to go – but your woman won’t allow it. And the next day you read in the newspaper that the aeroplane was hijacked, or it crashed and all the passengers died. Now the woman cannot say how she knows. There is no way. It is just a hunch, just a feeling in the guts. But that too is very corrupted, that’s why it is just a flash.

@InsidesOut Yoga means union. Meditation is the most supreme phenomenon as far as union with reality is concerned. But yoga has fallen into wrong hands, and not only recently – for centuries it has been in the wrong hands. Patanjali has divided yoga into eight parts. His division is clear-cut, very scientific, but he was not really aware of human stupidity. He started with the body – and that's the right way to start. The first part of yoga must be physiological because man lives on the circumference, in the body, so the work has to start there, only then can it reach the mind. And when one has gone beyond the body and beyond the mind, then the third, meditation, happens. So according to Patanjali the first part belongs to the body. But he was not clearly aware that millions of people would remain entangled with the first part. Hence yoga has become synonymous with yoga postures: people standing on their heads and doing all sorts of contortions. That has become synonymous with yoga. A few people, only very few – if a hundred people become interested in yoga then only one person will get out of the physiological entanglement. And that one person will become entangled in the psychological. If a hundred persons are entangled in the psychological then only one person gets out of it...and only when you get out of the mind does the real yoga begin. The physiological part of yoga will give you great physiological powers; it can make you live a really long, healthy life. But what are you going to do with a long life? If you are idiotic, instead of being idiotic for seventy years you will be idiotic for two hundred years. It is not going to help anybody; it will be a calamity. The second part is even vaster than the physiological. If you get into it you can have many psychic powers, you can read people's thoughts. But what is the point? Your own rubbish is so much, what is the point of reading somebody else's rubbish? He is tortured by his rubbish and you are reading his thoughts – and you think you are doing something great! Hence I say the only essential thing, the real core of all religion, of all yoga, of all methods of search, is meditation. One should put aside everything non-essential. You can use things as stepping stones, but not more than that – just like jumping boards. You need not bother too much about them.

No, there are laws we know, there are laws some mystics know. (I am not talking about magicians and fake gurus) For example, The higher your consciousness, the greater your vision; the lower your consciousness, the smaller your vision. Go and stand on the street under a tree and look: you have a vision – you can see to the nearest corner of this road, then there is a turning and the vision stops. Climb the tree and have a look from the tree – then you have a greater vision. Go in an airplane – then you have a birdseye view of the whole city. Go higher, and greater becomes the vision; go lower, and smaller is the vision. There are rungs in the ladder of consciousness. If you are at the peak of your consciousness, look from there: eternity is revealed. For Buddha everything is present because there is no future – his vision is complete. For Jesus everything is present: there is no past because he can see, there is no future because he can see. From the highest peak of consciousness the whole is visible, so nothing is past, nothing is future; everything is here and now. The future exists because of your confined vision, not because the future is a necessity in the world, in existence. It simply shows that you have a narrow vision: something that goes out of your field of vision becomes the past; that which has not yet come into it becomes the future. But things in themselves are in eternity.

@comp13 Our lives are both predestined and they are not. Both yes and no. Whatever is physical in you, material, whatever is mental, is predetermined. But something in you constantly remains undetermined, unpredictable. That something is your consciousness. If you are identified with your body and your material existence, in the same proportion you are determined by cause and effect. Then you are a machine. But if you are not identified with your material existence, with either body or mind – if you can feel yourself as something separate, different, above and transcendent to body-mind – then that transcending consciousness is not predetermined. It is spontaneous, free.

THE STATE OF ENLIGHTENMENT is not the state of individuality. There is no person in it. One who is enlightened is enlightened only because he is not; there is nobody to function. Activity continues, but there is nobody to do it. Functioning continues, but there is nobody to function it. Then it continues on its own... just as stars go on moving and the seasons move, and the sun rises, and the moon comes, and the tide, and the seas, and the rivers. An enlightened person is one with the whole; the whole functions through him. His activity is perfect because he is not there to distort it. He is just like a hollow bamboo - whatsoever song the whole chooses to sing through him, it is sung. There is nobody to hinder, there is nobody to obstruct.

There are dozens of enlightened masters already doing this work. Few persons listen to them and out of those listeners few gather courage to drop their mind.

This is something basic to be understood – the ego must come to a peak, it must be strong, it must have attained an integrity – only then can you dissolve it. A weak ego cannot be dissolved. And this becomes a problem. In the East all the religions preach egolessness. So in the East everybody is against the ego from the very beginning. Because of this anti attitude, ego never becomes strong, never comes to a point of integration from where it can be thrown. It is never ripe. So in the East it is very difficult to dissolve the ego, almost impossible. But in the West it is very easy to dissolve the ego. So whenever a Western seeker reaches an understanding that ego is the problem he can easily dissolve it, more easily than any Eastern seeker. This is the paradox – in the West ego is taught, in the East egolessness is taught. But in the West it is easy to dissolve the ego, in the East it is very difficult. This is going to be a hard task for you, first to attain and then to lose – because you can lose only something which you possess. If you don't possess it, how can you lose it?

Running, Jogging and Swimming IT is natural and easy to keep alert while you are in movement. When you are just sitting silently the natural thing is to just fall asleep. When you are lying on your bed it is very difficult to keep alert because the whole situation helps you to fall asleep. But in movement naturally you cannot fall asleep, you function in a more alert way. The only problem is that the movement can become mechanical. Learn to melt your body, mind and soul. Find out ways where you can function as a unity. It happens many times to runners. You might not think of running as a meditation, but runners sometimes have felt a tremendous experience of meditation. And they were surprised, because they were not looking for it – who thinks that a runner is going to experience God? But it has happened. And now, more and more, running is becoming a new kind of meditation. It can happen when running. If you have ever been a runner, if you have enjoyed running in the early morning when the air is fresh and young and the whole world is coming back from sleep, awakening – you were running and your body was functioning beautifully, the fresh air, the new world born again out of the darkness of the night, everything singing all around, you were feeling so alive ... a moment comes when the runner disappears, and there is only running. The body, mind and soul start functioning together: suddenly an inner orgasm is released. Runners have sometimes come accidentally on the experience of the fourth, turiya, although they will miss it – they will think it was just because of running that they enjoyed the moment: that it was a beautiful day, the body was healthy and the world was beautiful, and it was just a certain mood. They will not take note of it – but if they do take note of it, my own observation is that a runner can come close to meditation more easily than anybody else. Jogging can be of immense help, swimming can be of immense help. All these things have to be transformed into meditations. Drop the old ideas of meditations, that just sitting underneath a tree in a yoga posture is meditation. That is only one of the ways, and it may be suitable for a few people but it is not suitable for all. For a small child it is not meditation, it is torture. For a young man who is alive and vibrant it is repression, it is not meditation. Start running in the morning on the road. Start with half a mile and then one mile and come eventually to at least three miles. While running use the whole body. Don’t run as if you are in a strait jacket. Run like a small child, using the whole body – hands and feet – and run. Breathe deeply and from the belly. Then sit under a tree, rest, perspire and let the cool breeze come; feel peaceful. This will help very deeply. Sometimes just stand on the earth without shoes and feel the coolness, the softness, the warmth. Whatsoever the earth is ready to give in that moment, just feel it and let it flow through you. And allow your energy to flow into the earth. Be connected with the earth. If you are connected with the earth, you are connected with life. If you are connected with the earth, you are connected with your body. If you are connected with the earth, you will become very sensitive and centered – and that’s what is needed. Never become an expert in running; remain an amateur so that alertness may be kept. If you feel sometime that running has become automatic, drop it; try swimming. If that becomes automatic, then dancing. The point to remember is that the movement is just a situation to create awareness. While it creates awareness it is good. If it stops creating awareness, then it is no more of any use, change to another movement where you will have to be alert again, never allow any activity to become automatic.

Intelligence is the growth of inner consciousness. It has nothing to do with knowledge, it has something to do with meditativeness. The person who is meditating has the greatest possibility of reaching the highest peaks of intelligence,because in meditation he is doing the greatest possible work that a man is capable of,and that is realizing oneself,knowing. As your meditation goes on becoming more and more luminous, your intelligence will be growing to the last breath of your life. To be intellectual is to be phony; it is a pretending intelligence. It is not real because it is not yours; it is borrowed.

Man is coming to a very unique point from where a quantum leap will be possible. The moment is coming closer, because for the first time, particularly in the west, the society has come to such a state where it is feasible, it is practical. Otherwise in the east people have lived in such starvation – how to think about consciousness? For that quantum leap a certain affluence was needed, and it has happened in West. That affluence has happened and society has created a stage where poverty is no more the rule and people can afford to think of higher things. They will seek all sorts of methods and possibilities and all sorts of gurus and pseudo-gurus will be there. But that is natural – it cannot be prevented. And even those pseudo gurus help, because sooner or later you get fed-up with them and you start looking for the real.

Concentration of the mind is a need in order to live–to survive and exist. The more narrowed the mind is, the more successful it will be. Useful in scientific inquiry, useful in business, useful in the market, useful in politics. You will become a specialist, you will become an expert, but the whole thing will consist of knowing more and more about less and less. In concentration you bring your mind to one point. In meditation you drop that point also. When I say “Meditate”, I mean “Watch”. If I say “Meditate on the songs of the birds”, I am simply saying “Watch”. I am not saying “Concentrate”. You cannot concentrate for twenty-four hours, you will have to take holidays to rest. Concentration can never become your nature. Meditation does not tire, meditation does not exhaust you. Meditation can become a twenty-four hour thing - day in, day out, year in, year out. It can become eternity. It is relaxation itself. Meditation is immediacy. You cannot meditate, you can be in meditation. You cannot be in concentration, but you can concentrate. Concentration is human, meditation is divine.

Concentration is a choice. It excludes all except its object of concentration; it is a narrowing. The moment you narrow the mind you become particularly conscious of one thing and simultaneously unconscious of so many other things. Concentration is an act, a willed act. Meditation is a state of no will, a state of inaction. It is relaxation. Concentration is not meditation.

@Frogfucius A total man is neither extrovert nor introvert. Then you have the tranquillity of the introvert and the excitement of the extrovert. That's what a rich life has to be - the silence of the introvert and the joy of the extrovert, the centre of the introvert and the periphery of the extrovert. The introvert becomes more and more sad - silent of course, but not happy. The extrovert is very excited; the introvert is never excited. He remains calm and quiet, but calmness and quietude are not the goals of life. Ecstasy is the goal of life. Just to be calm and quiet can mean death, can mean suicide. You can dry up all the sources of life in you. You will become calm and quiet, all the fever gone, all the passion gone, all the lust gone - but then you are also gone. You are just an empty room, a negativity, a sort of absence, not a presence. You are not fulfilled. You cannot dance - you have nothing to dance about. You cannot sing. No song arises in your life because all songs dry up when love dries up. You can be with an extrovert, happily; you can relate with him. He is an excited being. He sings, he plays around... many games. He enjoys. Of course he is tense. He is never silent; that is his problem. Happiness is at a cost - that he loses tranquillity, equilibrium, balance. His excitement becomes more and more feverish, and there is every possibility of it turning into a delirium. The extrovert can be mad at any time; the breakdown can come very easily to him. He is so excited and so tense. He has no centre - just the revolving periphery.

celibacy is not a discipline, it is a consequence. You put your total energy so you don’t have any energy... and it happens in ordinary life also. You can see a great painter: he forgets women completely. When he is painting there is no sex in his mind,because the whole energy is moving. You don’t have any extra energy. A great poet, a great singer, a dancer who is moving totally in his commitment, automatically becomes celibate. He has no discipline for it. Sex is superfluous energy; sex is a safety valve. When you have too much in you and you cannot do anything with it, the nature has made a safety valve; you can throw it out. You can release it, otherwise you will go mad or burst – explode. And if you try to suppress it, then too you will go mad, because suppressing it won’t help. It needs a transformation, and that transformation comes from total commitment. A warrior, if he is really a warrior – an impeccable warrior, will be beyond sex. His whole energy is moving.

U. G. Krishnamurti said he went to see Ramana Maharshi. He was not attracted - because he was chopping vegetables. Yes, Ramana Maharshi was that kind of man, very ordinary. Chopping vegetables! U. G. Krishnamurti must have gone to see somebody extraordinary sitting on a golden throne or something. Ramana Maharshi just sitting on the floor and chopping vegetables? preparing vegetables for the kitchen! He was very much frustrated. Then another day he went and saw him reading jokes. Finished for ever! This man knows nothing. This man is very ordinary. He left the ashram; it was not worth it. Ramana Maharshi, is one of the greatest Buddhas ever born to the world. That was his Buddhahood in action! U. G. Krishnamurti must have been in search of a pretender. U. G. Krishnamurti, lived with Swami Sivanand of Rishikesh for seven years - and that chap was just stupid - and practised yoga with him. And after seven years he recognized that he has nothing; but after seven years, he took seven years. That simply shows that he also has a mighty dull mind. Seven years to see that Sivanand has nothing. U.G. Krishnamurti lived with J. Krishnamurti for twelve years, and he never mentioned his name. If somebody brought up J. Krishnamurti's name, he immediately condemned J. Krishnamurti -- and whatever he was saying is just an imitation of J. Krishnamurti, paraphrasing. These people like U.G. Krishnamurti were telling people to drop anger, to drop greed, to drop the ego. But if you provoke them... Their whole religion is just skindeep. Inside is hiding a very pious ego. U.G. Krishnamurti was not an authentic or sincere man -- but you can fall into the trap because he was repeating beautiful phrases. His memory was good, and his intellect was good, but this was the shadow.

@Seyed Only people who know how to be without the mind, are capable of using the mind, otherwise the mind uses them. You are being used; the mind has become the master of you, you are a slave, but the mind is very clever, it goes on buttressing you. It says, “I am just an instrument, you are the master.” But watch, look into the mechanism of the mind, how it goes on using you. You think you are using it. You can use it only when you know that you are separate from it; otherwise how will you use it? You are identified with it.

First give the emotions a chance to come totally up into the conscious. Right now you are repressing them in the unconscious. Then you get involved in your day-to-day work and you force them back again. That is not the way to get rid of them. Let them come out; live them, suffer them. It will be difficult and tedious but immensely rewarding. Once you have lived them, suffered them and accepted them – that this is you, that you have not made yourself in this way so you need not condemn yourself, that this is the way you have found yourself…. Once they are lived consciously, without any repression, you will be surprised that they are disappearing on their own. Their force on you is becoming less; their grip on your neck is no longer that tight. And when they are going away there may be a time when you can start watching. Once everything comes into the conscious mind it disperses, and when only the shadow is there, that is the time to become aware. Right now it will create insanity ; then it will create enlightenment.

Psychology cannot transform you. It can certainly give you a few insights into the mind, but those insights are not going to be transforming, because transformation always happens from a higher plane. Transformation never means solving problems — remaining on the same plane — that means adjustment. Psychology is still trying to help you adjust — to adjust to the society which is itself insane, to adjust to the family, to adjust to the ideas that are dominant around you. But all those ideas — your family, your society — they themselves are ill, sick, and to adjust to them will give you a certain normality, at least a superficial appearance of health, but it is not going to transform you. Psychology can give you a few insights into the mind, but because it cannot take you beyond the mind it can’t be of any help. Be a light unto yourself. Do not follow others, do not imitate, because imitation, following, creates stupidity. You are born with a tremendous possibility of intelligence. You are born with a light within you. Listen to the still, small voice within, and that will guide you. Nobody else can guide you, nobody else can become a model for your life, because you are unique. Nobody has there been ever who was exactly like you, and nobody is ever going to be there again who will be exactly like you.

See what man has done to man himself. In three thousand years man has fought five thousand wars. All the countries are preparing for war. And the Third World War will be a total war. Nobody is going to be a winner, because nobody is going to survive it. Not only is man going to be destroyed but all life on earth. You cannot call this humanity healthy. And only once in a while has a Buddha bloomed. Something very basic has gone wrong. Each person is born to be a Buddha: less than that is not going to fulfill you. Beware of the old conditioning which divides you as Indians, as Germans, as Japanese, as Americans. The enlightened man has to be universal. He will transcend all barriers of race, religion, sex, colour. The enlightened man will not be of the East or of the West; the new man will claim the whole earth as his home. For thousands of years we have lived with an either/or concept of man as a kind of battleground between the lower and the higher, the material and the spiritual, the worldly and the other–worldly, between good and evil, between God and the Devil. The consequences of such have severely limited human potential. The old man was repressive, aggressive. The old man was bound to be aggressive because repression always brings aggression. The enlightened man will be spontaneous, creative. The enlightened man is open and honest. He is transparently real, authentic and self-disclosing. He will not be a hypocrite. Right now the enlightened man is bound to be a mutant minority – but he is the carrier of a new culture.