Talks on the Shiva Sutra
Talks given from 11/9/1974 to 20/9/1974
Original in Hindi
Book Chapters: 10
Year published: 1994
Source: www.osho.com and www.oshoworld.com

[Note: This is a translation from the Hindi series Shiva Sutra, which is in the process of being edited. It is for research only.]

Chapter No. 1 - The Darkness Inside
11 September 1974 am in Chuang Tzu Auditorium, Pune, India

OM! I BOW DOWN TO LORD SHIVA -- THE ONE WHO IS SELF-LUMINOUS, DELIGHTING IN HIS OWN BEING.

AND NOW, THE BEGINNING OF THE SHIVA SUTRA.

CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE ATMAN, THE SOUL; KNOWLEDGE IS BONDAGE. THE BODY IS THE UNION OF RAMAN, NATURE AND RAMAN, THE EGO, THE DOER. THE SPIRITUAL ENDEAVOR IS RAMAN. ONE WHO APPLIES HIS TOTAL ENERGY, FOR HIM THE WORLD EXISTS NO MORE.

Two ways exist of searching for the truth. One way is that of the male -- aggression, violence, the scramble for power. Another is that of the female -- surrender, withdrawal. Science is the male path, aggressive; religion is a female path, bowing down, submissive. Make this distinction very clearly.

All scriptures of the East begin with a salutation to God. This salutation is not just a formality; it is not merely following a tradition or a convention. The salutation is indicative of the fact that the path ahead is of surrender. Only the humble will attain. Those who are aggressive and full of ego, those who wish to attain even truth by grabbing at it, those with the attitude of conquering nature will be defeated. They can possess the trivial, but that which is so immense, so vast, can never be theirs. They may succeed in grabbing the worthless, but nothing meaningful can ever become part of them.

Hence, a scientist discovers all that is unessential, but misses the essential. He succeeds in gathering details about the soil, the stones, matter, but an understanding of the soul and God escapes him. It is like one attacks a woman passing by. One may become successful in raping her, one may even have her body in one's control, but one can never have her soul; one will never be able to win her love.

So those who approach God aggressively are the rapists. They may bring the physical body of God under their control; they may dissect and analyze nature manifesting all around, they may discover some of its secrets, but the discovery will be as trivial as someone attacking and raping a woman. The man may succeed in securing the woman's body, but such an achievement is not worth a straw because he won't be able to even touch her soul. And if the soul has remained untouched, the possibility of love that is hidden within her, the hidden seed of her love can never sprout. Her love can never shower upon him.

Science is an act of rape. It is an assault on nature -- as if nature were some kind of an enemy, as if it has to be conquered, defeated. That's why science believes in cutting things into pieces. Analysis, destruction; it believes in dissection.

If you were to tell a scientist, "The flower is beautiful," he will immediately sit down and start pulling apart the flower, dissecting it, analyzing it. He has no idea that in the very tearing of it into pieces, the beauty of the flower disappears. The flower looked beautiful in its wholeness, but when divided into parts, it lost its beauty. Of course, in doing the analysis the scientist can find out the chemical elements contained in the flower; he may show the substance, the minerals the flower is made of. He may place them in different bottles and label them accordingly. But he won't be able to say, "Here is a bottle which contains the beauty once present in the flower," because the beauty will have disappeared already. By making an assault on the flower, you will only come upon its body, not the soul.

This is the reason why science doesn't believe in the soul -- how can it? Even after making so much effort, not even a glimpse of the soul becomes available to science -- it never can... not because there is no soul, but because the scientist has chosen a wrong method. The method he uses is not the way to discover the soul. The very means applied to its discovery is the means good for finding the trivial. That which is of great value cannot be attained through aggression.

You will be able to find the mystery of life only if you enter through the door of surrender. If you bow down, if you pray, you will be able to reach the center of love. Courting God is almost as good as courting a woman. One needs to approach Him with a heart full of love, gratitude and humility. And there is no hurry! Any haste on your part, and you miss. A great deal of patience is required. Your haste... and His heart will be closed. Even rushing things is an act of aggression.

Hence those who set out in search of God, their life-style is contained in two words: prayer and patience. So the scriptures begin with prayer and they end with awaiting. The search therefore, begins with the prayer.

The first line of this scripture says:

OM! I BOW DOWN TO LORD SHIVA -- THE ONE WHO IS SELF-LUMINOUS, DELIGHTING IN HIS OWN BEING.

And now, the beginning of the Shiva Sutra.

Let this salutation penetrate deep in you because if you miss the door, you will not be able to understand me when I start describing the palace. Push aside the male within you, a little. Drop your aggressive attitude a little. This understanding is not going to come out of intellect, it is going to rise from your heart. This understanding will not depend on your logic, it will depend on how much love there is within you.

You will be able to understand this scripture; but this understanding will not be the same as following a mathematical problem. The understanding will be similar to the one you have from appreciating poetry. You don't pounce on poetry. You enjoy poetry leisurely, sip by sip, just as you enjoy drinking tea. You don't swallow it just in one shot as if it were some kind of bitter medicine. Rather, you relish its taste bit by bit; you let its taste dissolve slowly.

In order to appreciate even a single poem you need to read it over and over again... which is not the case with a mathematical problem. You don't need to go over it again once you have understood and solved it -- then the problem is done with. Poetry never ends, because the heart is limitless. The more you love, the more it unfolds.

That's why in the East we don't study scriptures -- we read them over and over. Scriptures can't be studied anyway. To study means: once you have understood, you throw the book away in the garbage. Now that you have understood it, what is the need to go through it again. So you feel you are done with it.

Patha, reading over and over means you will need to go over this scripture savouring in unhurriedly -- reading and re-reading. Who knows how many times, but knowingly or unknowingly, you'll have to repeat it in your different moods, in different states of mind. Sometimes, when the sun is on the horizon, or when night covers everything under its darkness, when the mind is cheerful, or sometimes when the mind is sad. You'll have to enter this scripture in different moments in different conditions, only then by and by will its facets become apparent to you. And yet it will remain inexhaustible.

No scripture can ever be used up. The more it will appear you have found what you were looking for, the more you'll realize there is much more left undiscovered. The more you dive deep into it, the more it grows deeper. No reader can ever exhaust a scripture. Patha, means reading over and over again -- many times.

People in the West fail to understand this. It is beyond them to figure out why people have been reading the Geeta for thousands of years. They wonder, "the same man reads the same Geeta every morning -- has he gone crazy or something?" They have no idea that the whole technique of patha, reading and re-reading is to let the scripture penetrate the heart. It has more to do with enjoying the taste of it rather than understanding it.

It is not even remotely connected with logic and calculation. It's main purpose is to dissolve the distance between the reader and the text. The idea is that eventually the text of the Geeta and the reader of it should merge into each other. That no distinction be left between the Geeta and its reader. This is the feminine state. This is the way of surrender. Keep this in mind.

So these sutras of Shiva can be understood if we follow the path of humility. Let them sink in you. Make no haste in arriving at a conclusion whether they are right or wrong. As far as these sutras are concerned, make one thing clear to you: it is not up to you to decide of their rightness or wrongness. How can you? One who is living in darkness, what judgement can he pass about light? And the one who has never known what it is like being healthy, one who has always been confined to a sickbed, how can he understand what it means to be healthy.

One who has never been stirred by the feeling of love -- who has lived all along a life of hate, jealously, enmity -- he can, of course, read love-poems, because he will follow the words easily: nevertheless, that which is hidden in the words, which is interwoven in the words, access to that will always remain closed to him. So don't be in a hurry to judge what is right and what is wrong.

You simply imbibe these sutras -- I am not saying understand them -- simply drink them, soak yourself, absorb the whole taste of it. And if this taste could help unfold the secrets hidden within you, and if in the savouring of these sutras a new flower may blossom within you releasing its fragrance and making you realize even for a moment your stinking life has disappeared forever, and if with the kindling of a lamp inside, you could come to recognize you are not the darkness and if the sutras could create an impact of a lightning inside you offering just a glimpse -- then this alone will cause the understanding to emerge, it will not come through your intellect or reasoning. Even a flash of experience will be enough to cause the understanding to arise in you. Hence, I say, treat these sutras with humbleness.

Secondly, a sutra means: the most concise, quintessential, telegraphic. Each and every word of a sutra is highly condensed. A sutra is never long and elaborate, it is crystallized, encapsulated, very small like a seed. Even if you wished to see, you can't find the tree inside the seed. You need penetrating eyes -- the kind of eyes which can see the tree within the seed, which can see in the present what future will be like, which can see today what tomorrow will be, which can discover the invisible in the visible -- you require very sharp eyes indeed.

You don't have such sharp eyes yet. Right now you will see nothing but the seed. The only way you can see the tree is by sowing the seed. Only when the tree will break open and sprout will you be able to see the growing tree. These sutras are the seeds. You will have to sow them in your heart. So hold your judgement, because, if you reached a premature conclusion about these seeds, you may throw them away as trash.

Actually, there is not much difference between a seed and a rock. In fact, sometimes, rocks are more colorful, shining, beautiful, precious than seeds. And yet there is a difference between the costliest diamond kohinoor and a seed. Nothing will sprout if you sowed the kohinoor. Regardless of how costly the kohinoor is, the diamond is dead. No matter what price the fools may assign to it, the stone is lifeless -- just a corpse.

Irrespective of how ugly a seed may look, it may not cost even a penny, but it contains life. If you sow it, it can produce a huge tree and then one seed can create millions of seeds. One small seed can give birth to this whole universe, because a single seed causes millions of seeds to appear, and again one of these millions of seeds can create yet other millions of seeds. A small seed can contain the entire universe within.

So the sutra is the seed -- you can't be impatient with it. Only when you have sown the seed in your heart and it has sprouted and flowered, will you be able to know. Only then can you come to a conclusion.

The third thing -- before we went the sutras -- is that, religion is a great revolution. Whatsoever you have learned in the name of religion has almost nothing to do with religion really. Therefore, Shiva's Sutras will surely startle you. You will be scared, frightened too because your religions will be shaken up. Your temples, your mosques, your churches will simply collapse if you understood these sutras. Don't make any effort to save them because even if they are saved, you won't get anything out of them.

You breathe in these places and yet you are as good as dead. The temples are very festively decorated but there is not a ray of festivity in your life. There is plenty of light in your temples, but it doesn't eradicate the darkness from your life. So don't be afraid of these sutras, although they are sure to put you in difficulty. Because Shiva is not some kind of a priest. A priest's language always seems satisfactory to you. The priest is basically interested in exploiting you, not in transforming you. His interest lies in keeping you as you are. His business is to see that you remain as you are -- sick, diseased.

I have heard. A doctor's son returned home after completing his education. The father had never been on a vacation so he told his son, "I want to go on a vacation for three months. In the meantime, you carry on my practice. I have spent my whole life earning money without a break. So now you look after the business for a while."

Having completed a world tour, he came back at the end of three months. He asked his son how things were going, the son replied., "Everything is going just fine. You will be surprised, but the patients you couldn't cure your whole life, I cured them in three months." The father couldn't believe his ears. He said, "You fool! They gave us the business. I could have cured them too but then how could I have paid for your education? Those patients made it possible. I could have helped the schooling of other children as well. You ruined the whole thing!"

The priest likes you to be the way you are -- sickly, unhealthy. That's what helps them run their business. Shiva is not a priest. He is a teerthankara. Shiva is an avatara. He is the seer, the paigambara. His words are like fire. Come near him only if you are ready to be burned; accept his invitation only if you are ready to disappear as you are. Because, the new will be born only when you would cease to be as you are. Not until you have turned yourself into ashes, will the new life emerge. So keeping these things in view, now try to understand each sutra.

The first sutra is:

THE CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE ATMAN, THE SOUL.

Although conscious we all are, yet we never come to know the soul. If consciousness is indeed the soul, then we should all have the knowledge of it. We all possess consciousness, but what is really the meaning of, "consciousness is the soul?"

The first meaning is: in this world, only consciousness is yours. The word atman means: that which is your own. Regardless of how much the rest may appear to you as your own, it is alien. All of that which you otherwise claim as yours -- friends, loved ones, family, wealth, fame, high position, a great empire -- it is all a deception. Because one day death will snatch it all away from you. So death is the criterion for determining who is your own and who is the stranger. That which death can separate you from, know that it didn't belong to you, and that which it can't, was indeed your own.

So atman means: one's own. But the moment we think in therms of "mine", the other comes in. "Mine" in itself means, "Someone else who belongs to me." It never occurs to you that except your own self, there is no one who can be yours. And the longer you will remain swayed by the idea that the other belongs to you, the greater will be the loss of time on your part, you will have wasted that much life. That much time you gave in for dreaming. You could have awakened in the meantime -- you could have attained moksha. But all that time you only collected garbage.

So this is the first sutra: you are all by yourself; that means, there is nothing by way of either relationship or possession that you can claim as yours. No one and nothing except yourself belongs to you really. This is indeed a very revolutionary sutra. It goes against the very nature of society. Because the society exists on the very premise that others are mind -- the caste people are mine, the countrymen are mine. A whole array of possessive attitudes in on display: my country, my caste, my religion, my family. The society survives on the concept of "mine". Religion is essentially antithetical to society -- it is a freedom from society, it is a freedom from the "other".

According to religion, there is no one you can claim as "mine" except your own self. If seen superficially this statement looks selfish. Because, if I alone am for myself then one immediately surmises this as a selfish attitude. But there is nothing selfish in it. The truth is, this feeling alone will cause the attitude of altruism and universal goodness to arise in your life. Because one who has not yet become aware of the fact that essentially only his being is his own, cannot follow altruism,

When you call others as "mine", what do you do really? You exploit them. Your "mine" is nothing but a part and parcel of your exploitation of them. Whosoever you identify as "mine", you turn that person into a slave. You convert the person into one of your possessions. You say, "my wife, my husband, my son, my father...", what goes on behind the backdrop of this "my-ness"? What is the basis of your relationship made evident by calling someone as yours? You exploit the other, you take advantage of the other, you take the other for a ride. And if this is what you call as altruism then you are indeed carrying a false notion.

An emperor had three sons. As he grew old he became concerned as to which of the three sons would be worthy of inheriting his kingdom. Because all three of them were equally capable and qualified, and that made the choice very difficult. One day he called his sons and said, "Tell me about the greatest act you may have done the whole of last year."

The eldest son reported, "Before leaving for a pilgrimage, the richest man of this city left with me his precious diamonds and jewelry worth millions of rupees without counting them or making a list of them with his signature on. He asked me to save them until his return. If I had wished I could have seized all his treasure, for the man had neither made any documents nor were there any witnesses to prove the treasure belonged to him. Since the man had not kept any count, I could have easily saved at least a few diamonds for myself. But instead, I handed him over the pouch left in tact."

The father said, "You did right, but let me ask you this, wouldn't you have been besieged with the feelings of guilt, shame, embarrassment if you had kept some of the diamonds for yourself?" The son replied, "Indeed I would have."

Then the father said, "You can't call this an altruistic act. What you did was nothing but simply saving yourself from your own feeling of shame and guilt. What good did it do? Since saving diamonds would have pricked your conscience, you preferred to give them back to the owner. It was a kind act alright, but there was no altruism involved in it. You were only being kind to your own self."

Hearing all this, the second son got a little worried. He said, "Once I was passing by a lake. It was evening, no one was around. I heard someone was drowning. I could have easily ignored his screams and walked away but instead I immediately jumped into the lake and saved the man at the risk of my own life."

The emperor said, "You did the right thing but if you had walked away without rescuing the man, wouldn't that man's death have followed you the rest of your life? Outwardly you could have ignored, but inside you his screams would have continued to echo, don't you think his ghost would have haunted you forever? It was out of this fear that you jumped in the lake and risked your life. But this should not give you the excuse to carry the misunderstanding that you did some altruistic act."

The third son narrated, "As I was once passing through a forest, I saw a man asleep on the cliff of a mountain. Just one turn on his side and he would have been finished, because there was a great abyss on the other side. I went close to him to see who he was and found that he was none other but my sworn enemy. Having recognized him, I could have quietly gone my way. Even if I had passed him slowly, mounted on my horse, perhaps my passing itself -- without my doing anything -- might have caused him to turn his side and fall into the valley. But instead, I went near him very quietly, crawled on the ground lest he might fall with my approaching sound. I knew very well he as a wicked man; that in spite of my saving his life he would go on cursing me. Nevertheless, I shook him gently and woke him up. And the very man is now blaming me all over the place. He says 'I had gone to commit suicide; this man followed me even there. He does not allow me to live peacefully, of course, but he didn't let me die either.'"

The emperor said, "You are better than the other two; but what you did was no altruism either. Why? Because you are filled with ego, as if you have accomplished something great. The glimmer in your eyes. Your whole demeanor is boastful and self-serving. And any act that creates the ego can no longer be an altruistic act. You have used very subtle means to feed that ego. You think you acted like a religious person, that you did something good. I can only say that you are simply better than the other two but I'll have to look for someone else, the fourth person who can become the ruler of my kingdom."

When you think you are being of service to others, in fact you are not. How can one serve others when he doesn't even know who he is? Serving the poor, attending the sick in the hospital, gives you the idea you are rendering some kind of service. But if you'll look at the whole thing very closely you'll find somewhere along these acts fulfilling your ego. And if it is your ego that ultimately feeds upon such acts of service, then this service too is exploitation. Until one has attained self-awareness he can't be altruistic; because, only after one has known oneself, can such a great transformation take place.

I have heard, Mulla Nasruddin's wife was having a fight with him. She said to Mulla, "This matter has to be settled once and for all. Why do you hate all my relatives?" Mulla said, "This is totally wrong, the facts don't support your accusation. I have the proof for it, and the proof is that I love your mother-in-law more than I do mind."

This is how the ego finds its ways through. Superficially it looks as though you are doing service to others, but deep down it is your ego that is being serviced by you. And the more subtle the way of the ego becomes, the more it gets out of reach. The others are unable to gauge it, of course, but even you yourself fail to have a handle on it. Others are deceived by you, of course, but even you become the victim of your own deception. Even you get lost in the enigma, the puzzle, you create for others. We have created our respective mazes with the intent and purpose of befooling others not realizing that someday we may ourselves be duped by it -- and in fact we already are.

So remember one thing: no one belongs to you except your own self. The moment this remembrance becomes crystallized within you that consciousness is the being, that except consciousness nothing else is mine -- all the rest is extraneous, disparate -- the first ray of transformation enters your life. With that, a crevice appears between you and the society, between you and your relationships. But the man doesn't want to take a look at himself. It is difficult to talk such a look because it requires one to go through a process that is extremely arduous.

One marwari businessman fell in love with a film actress. It was undoubtedly an unusual happening -- a marwari businessman falling in love! Ordinarily, this kind of a person would always stay away from love. But sometimes even the impossible happens. He fell in love of course, but his was a very suspicious mind., So he hired a detective in order to keep an eye on the actress and find out if she was of a lose character. He wanted to have this in black and white before his proposing to her for marriage.

The detective went ahead and did a lot of investigating. After a week he sent his report. The report stated, "The woman is absolutely clean, innocent and without blemish. There is not a trace of evidence which can place her character in doubt, except that she has been seen in the last few days moving with a suspicious looking marwari." The businessman himself was that suspicious looking marwari.

The eye sees the other. Hands touch the other. The mind thinks of the other. But you always remain in the dark. Your situation is similar to that of a lamp -- the light of which reaches all around except underneath, except itself. That's how you function. In the light of your own lamp, in the light of your consciousness, you wander around and look in all directions; only one remains unknown, unseen, and that is none other than yourself.

So the first sutra is:

CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE SOUL. Let this sutra penetrate deep in your heart. Your voyage to the whole world is meaningless if you remained unaware of your own self. If you earned knowledge of all the rest but remained ignorant of yourself, even the entire sum of that knowledge will equal to nothing.

You may have seen the whole universe, scanned the moons and the stars, but if you have failed to see yourself you remain a stranger among all. Because he alone can claim to have eyes who has seen himself; he alone can claim to have attained knowledge who has known himself. He alone is purified who has cleansed himself in the self-luminous consciousness. Consciousness alone is holy, purifying. Except consciousness, there is no other holy place for pilgrimage.

Consciousness is your innate nature. You have not been away from it even for a moment. But the fact is, it is dark underneath the lamp. You can't go too far away from the lamp, the illuminating consciousness -- even if you wished to. You can, of course, have an illusion of having been moved too far apart from it; you can be in a dream world. But a dream cannot be the reality. Consciousness is your inherent nature and that is the only reality there is.

Consciousness is the being. And so the first thing is: no one, nothing is mine except the consciousness. Should this feeling become crystallized in you, it will give birth to sannyas. Because, essentially, samsara means to carry the feeling that someone other than myself can be mine.

Hence, the first sutra is tremendously radical; it can spark off a revolution in your life. It's a provocation for making you realize for the first time the truth that you alone belong to yourself -- there is no one else for you. This realization will naturally depress your mind; because you have built great relationships, you have saved lofty dreams around other people. You are carrying a lot of hopes from them.

A mother is carrying high expectations from her son. A father is hopeful of his son. They are completely lost in their hopes. Your father, for example, died carrying similar hopes. What did he gain from you? The same will apply to you; you too will meet death and gain nothing from your son. And your son will continue to follow the same stupidity -- he will keep expectations from his son.

No, this won't help. Look at your own self -- neither at someone who will follow you, nor at anyone who preceded you. No one is yours. No son can ever fulfill you. No relationship can ever be a substitute for your soul. You alone are your own friend. A realization of all this creates fear, because it makes one feel as though he is left all by himself.

Man is so scared of being lonely that even as he passes through a deserted lane, he begins to sing in a loud voice. Just by listening to his own voice he feels he is not alone. The fact is, he is listening to his own voice, there is no one else around. Similarly, when the father builds his dreams around his son, the son is not a party to it. This is the father whistling alone in a deserted alley. He is bound to face unhappiness, because throughout his life he did nothing but weave dreams assuming his son was having the same dreams too. He is wrong. The son is engaged in his own dreams, the father in his own, his father cherished some other dreams -- but they don't meet anywhere.

Every father dies unhappy. What can be the reason? Because, the fact remains that whatever dreams he creates, they all fall apart. Moreover, everyone here is to see his own dreams -- not your dreams. And if you wish to attain an ideal situation, a satisfaction, then never create your dreams around someone else; otherwise, you are sure to get lost.

Samsara simply means: the boat of your dreams is tethered to others. Sannyas means you have awakened; and that you have accepted one fact -- regardless of how painful, how hurting, how terribly tormenting it may feel in the beginning -- that you are alone. That all relationships, all companionships are pseudo. This does not mean however that you should escape to the Himalayas. Because, one who is heading to the Himalayas shows that he still looks upon his relationships, his ties as real -- that they haven't become false and meaningless to him yet.

Once it becomes evident that something is false, then there is no point in running away from it. After waking up in the morning and having realized the dream was false, one doesn't start running away from home. Once the falsity of the dream is recognized, the matter is over -- what is there to run away from? And yet we come across a man escaping from his wife, children. His very fleeing shows he must have just heard the dream is false -- he himself has no realization of it. Until yesterday he rushed toward his wife, now he is running away from her -- in either case, the wife remains crucial.

A Jaina monk -- Ganeshvarni -- had for years renounced his wife. After twenty years of his becoming a monk, he received the news of his wife's death. The words he uttered hearing the news are worth noting. He said, "Good riddance!" His disciples interpreted these words to mean non-attachment. But if you will give a little thought, it would be clear this is not non-attachment. Because the very idea of getting rid of wife shows she was still being seen as a botheration even after twenty years.

The arithmetic is quite clear. The wife left behind twenty years ago must have been following like a shadow. She must have been haunting him all the time -- weighing upon him. Even after twenty years he had not been able to free himself from her thought. His mind must have been debating all along whether what he did was right or wrong. The words, "Good riddance" at the instance of wife's death say nothing about the wife, they speak for the husband. Although this man did run away from his wife, but could not leave her.

And Ganeshvarni was a holy man. So beware, holy men can also live in great delusion. He was indeed a man of impeccable character -- unerring, virtuous, upright. And yet something went wrong, he took the very problem with him when he left for the Himalayas.

There is yet another thing in this regard that needs to be understood as well. The fact that at the death of his wife the first thing which occurred to him was "good riddance" shows that knowingly or unknowingly, the desire for her death must have been lurking somewhere in the unconscious. This requires to take a deeper look at it.

At some level he must have wished that she be dead, finished forever; but this shows violence. Every word that we utter doesn't just come from out of the blue, without a reason. Every word comes from our innermost parts. And in such moments when the news of wife's death has just arrived, you don't react through the everyday normal attentive state. After an hour or so you become aware of it and then you begin to rationalize what you said, you patch it up. But that would all be a falsehood.

In that very moment Ganeshvarni was given the news, he missed. In an instant he forgot about the whole facade of holiness he had created all around him for the past twenty years. If this could happen to Ganeshvarni, it can easily happen to you too.

Running away won't do any good. No one has ever been able to escape just by running away from something. But the disciples can never recognize this. Thinking that the words uttered by Ganeshvarni showed what a man of non-attachment he was, they consider them of great significance in the whole story.

You can hardly ever know what "non-attachment" means. Since you live in the world of attachments, you only understand what renunciation is. You understand when someone does something contrary to what you do. You know very well you can't leave your wife, whole this man did -- you obviously find him greater than you. The man is certainly opposite to you, but not different from you. You are standing on your feet while he is standing on his head -- but there is not an iota's difference between his mind and your mind. Take a look for yourself. You all think the wife is a trouble. Can you find a single husband who can say the wife is not a pain? But please don't ask him in front of his wife, ask him when he is alone, confidentially.

Mulla Nasruddin said to me, "Once I was a happy man too. But this I came to know only later -- after I got married. It was too late by then, the happiness had already slipped through my hands."

If you probe deeply, you may hardly come across a single husband who may not have thought of killing his wife, who may not have dreamed killing his wife. He may even wonder in the morning what a ridiculous dream he had, but deep in the unconscious his desire was indeed that. It's a simple logic, the mind wants to destroy the cause of trouble. But the truth is, the other is never the cause of trouble.

Who can stop you if the wife was indeed the cause of your trouble? If that were the case, all of you would have escaped to the Himalayas by no. The wife is not the source of your troubles. Because even in the Himalayas you'll find a wife for you. The trouble is within you. You can't live alone. You need the other. You are scared when left to yourself, but when someone else is around, you feel safe and confident. Why? The presence of the other makes one feel assured that in the time of need there will be someone, in life or death there will be someone he can rely upon. But the fact is that aloneness is one's nature. And one who has realized that only the soul belongs to him, he has indeed experienced his aloneness.

So there is no need to escape. Once you stop running away, the trouble disappears on its own. Remain wherever you are, there is no need to make even the slightest change. But be alone inside you. Experience the aloneness within you; feel you are alone without any friend or companion. But please don't repeat this, there is no need to repeat every morning, "I am alone, I have no friends, no companions." This won't help at all. Such repetition will only show that you haven't got it yet. Please understand this.

You are alone is a fact. The problem is in having an understanding of it -- that is the real tapascharya, the real spiritual practice. It does not mean standing under the hot sun. Except man, all other animals and birds live under the sun -- none of them is on the way to moksha. Also, spiritual practice does not mean abstaining from food, going on fast; as it is, half of the world is starving to death. Fasting does not lead anyone to moksha. Nothing will come out of tormenting, torturing the body -- it is self-destruction and the greatest sin ever. Only stupid people enter into such sins. Those who possess even a little bit of awareness would not do such foolish things.

If forcing the other to starve is wrong, how can starving oneself to death be right? If torturing the other is violent, how can self-torturing be a non-violent act? Violence is in the very act of torture -- it makes no difference who the victim is. Those who are courageous, they inflict pain on the other; while those who are weak, hurt themselves. Causing pain to the other is risky, he can take revenge. No such risk is involved in inflicting pain on oneself -- who will avenge it? Hence, the weak torture themselves.

Has it ever occurred to you, when the man gets upset he beats his wife, but when the wife gets upset she beats herself. The wife symbolizes the monks. So the helpless hurts himself -- what else can he do? The powerful hurts the other. One who is powerless always faces the danger as to how the other might react, what the other might do to him. The one who is weak is self-destructive while the powerful is other-destructive. A religious person is non-destructive -- he neither hurts the other, nor himself. The whole idea of hurting and torturing is meaningless.

Tapascharya, spiritual practice means: accepting the truth that you are alone; that there is no way one can have a friend, a companion. No matter how much you long for it, regardless of how much you close your eyes and dream of them -- you will still remain alone. For lives you built a home, you built a family, and then you lost it -- and all through that you have always remained alone. Not even slightly has your aloneness been ever affected. So one who has known, one who has accepted that he is alone, for him there is an indication in this sutra: CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE BEING. Only being is yours, nothing else.

Secondly, the sutra says: THIS BEING IS THE CONSCIOUSNESS.

Your being, your soul is not some kind of a doctrine which you can read in a scripture and believe in it. It is not something like a theory of gravitation. The soul is not a matter of theory, it is an experience. And the experience is that of the intensity of consciousness. Hence, the more you will become conscious, the more you will come to realize the soul. The more you will become unconscious, the more you will fail to know yourself -- and you are almost unconscious.

One who wants to realize his own being doesn't need to go through any philosophical treatise, rather he needs to know the technique of awakening his consciousness. He needs a method which can help him become more aware. For example, when you dig through the ashes, when you dust off the ashes, the hot coal begins to shine. Similarly, you need to have some kind of a technique which can dust off the ash and allow your amber to shine. Because only in the glimmer of that amber will you be able to recognize you are a consciousness.

And the more conscious you are, the more centered you become. The day you will find you are the supreme consciousness, you will have attained the divinity. The very degree to which your consciousness grows will be the extent to which you will have realized your being. However, right now, you are almost unconscious. You are almost in the state of intoxication. You are walking, moving, working, but all as if in sleep -- you are not aware.

Has it ever occurred to you while reading a book that after having read the whole page you come to realize, "Heavens, I read the whole page and don't remember a word of it -- how did that happen?" You can indeed read a book in a state of sleep. As you read, your mind wanders around. After going through the page you become aware. You come to realize you read the whole page in vain. Similarly, you walk down the whole street without being aware that you are walking. You go on doing your job without the awareness that you are working.

Although your consciousness is the being, nevertheless, you go on living in unawareness. And then you ask, "What is being? What is soul?" You want someone to give you a concluding proof or at least someone to explain its existence rationally. Otherwise, you may turn into an atheist. Atheism is a natural consequence of unawareness; theism is the result of awareness. As your awareness will go on increasing, there won't be any need for you to believe in soul.

Many fools believe in soul, but that's of no use. In this country everyone believes in soul, what difference does it make? It doesn't bring any transformation in your life. Perhaps you believe so because such belief is being repeated for thousands of years. Your ears have become sore hearing it. You have completely forgotten you need to think about it. Hearing the same thing over and over again you become hypnotized. Hearing the same thing you forget that it is subject to doubt, that it needs to be thought over.

Hearing that there is a soul brings you great satisfaction. You know pretty well that the body will die; it gives you much courage when you are told the soul won't die. You find great solace hearing, "The soul will never die; that fire can't burn in, the weapons can't pierce it, death can't cause any harm to it." But such consolation is not the truth. Neither one can accept the soul as theory, nor can one let himself be hypnotized by the repeated assertion of its existence. Only they can know what soul is who are able to raise their consciousness.

So live in such a way that the ash doesn't gather on you. Live in a way that the amber within you remains burning, shining. Live a life where you are not unconscious, where you are aware every moment.

A child was born to Mulla Nasruddin. That was his first son. He was immensely happy. He invited his friend to celebrate the happy occasion and both went to a tavern. You only know one way to celebrate the happiness -- becoming unconscious.

This is very strange. Shiva, Mahavira, Buddha go on proclaiming, "There is only one joy in the world. The joy of awareness. And you only know one kind of pleasure -- the pleasure of being unconscious." Either you are right or they are right -- both can't be.

So instead of going to the hospital first to see his newborn son, Mulla Nasruddin went straight to the bar. He thought of having some fun first, after all a long time dream had come true. Both drank heavily. When they reached the hospital and Mulla looked at his son through the glass window, he began to cry. When asked by his friend why he as crying, Mulla said, "The first thing is, he doesn't look like me." He didn't know who he was really, he couldn't have recognized even his own face, but he was quick in saying the son didn't look like him. "Secondly," he said, "the boy looks very small to me. What will I do having such a small child? Do you think he will survive?"

Mulla's friend said, "Don't you worry, when I was born I also weighed three pounds." Nasruddin said, "Did you survive?" The friend thought for a while, he too was unconscious, and said, "I can't tell you for sure."

Man is unconscious. His entire perspective of life is filled with unawareness, his entire vision is blurred. You can't see anything right. And you know only one pleasure and that is of forgetting yourself -- whether by watching the movie, listening to music, or through sex. Whichever place helps you forget yourself, you feel that's where you found the pleasure. You call forgetting yourself a pleasure. There is a reason for it. Because whenever you become aware, you find nothing except misery in your life. Even a little bit of alertness on your part shows how much you are surrounded by pain, misery, and ugliness.

I have a friend who remained a bachelor. I asked him, "What happened? How did you miss?" He said, "There was a big problem. Whichever woman I fell in love with looked to me beautiful when I would be drunk. At that time I would be willing to marry her, but she would refuse. When I would become sober and conscious, she would be willing to marry me but I would refuse. This is how I missed. What to do -- there was no way out."

Whenever you'll open your eyes, you will find nothing but ugliness and misery all around you. Everything looks fine when you are in an unconscious state. This is the reason why you find it difficult to conceive: CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE BEING. You say, "Impossible!" That's why one needs to go through pain. That is called tapascharya, spiritual practice. Whenever one begins to become aware, first he will have to go through suffering. For lives you have created misery around you, who else would pass through it if not you? That is what we have called the karma.

Karma simply means: the misery created all around by you for life after life. Knowingly or unknowingly you have sown the seeds of misery, now who will reap the crop? So whenever you come to your awareness, you see the crop -- long and wide. You will have to pass through this farm. But you sit there out of fear. Looking at the field and realizing what a great bother it is, you close your eyes and get drunk. But the more you become drunk, the more the crop grows. Each birth of yours adds something into the chain of your karmas, not reduce anything. It takes you deeper and deeper into a pit, the hell comes closer and closer.

As soon as you are filled with awareness, the first thing that will happen is you will begin to see misery, the hell around you. Because you are the one who has created it. However, if you remain courageous and pass through the misery consciously, you will have cut the crop. You won't have to go through the same miseries again. Once you have gone through this chain of miseries -- the chain of karmas, the chain tied around your soul.... If you could pass through it without losing your consciousness, courageously, unworried; if you could determine, "whatever misery I have created, I'll go through it, I'll go to the end of it. I want to arrive at that initial moment when I was innocent and the journey of suffering had not started yet, when my soul was absolutely pure and I had not gathered any misery -- I am determined to penetrate up to that point regardless of any consequences, pain, or sorrow."

If you could show this much courage then sooner or later you are bound to cross your misery and reach the very point where this sutra of Shiva, CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE BEING, will become clear to you. And once you have become centered in your consciousness, no misery will ever be caused by you. Only an unconscious man creates misery all around him.

Have you seen a drunkard walk on the street staggering along? That's how your life is. You take a step in one direction and the foot lands in another direction. You set out to go at one place, but reach somewhere else. You leave home to talk about one thing but end up speaking something else. You see this happening every day, and yet you fail to understand why it is so. You go out to ask someone an apology, but return home after having squabbled more. Are you in your senses? You begin with a loving talk but end up with hostility.

One man, drunk, was walking down the street looking at the sky. A car passed by him. The driver barely managed in saving the accident. He stopped the car and said to the man, "Sir, if you won't look in the direction where you want to go, you might end up going where you are looking now." And we are all....

You have no idea where you are going, why you are going, where you are looking, why you are looking. You are constantly on the move, because there is a restlessness within which does not allow you to sit down. The energy inside keeps you going. Then whatsoever you do it produces contrary results.

People come to see me and they say, "We never did any wrong deeds, we were always good to others but received wickedness from them in return." But it is not possible that you may do good but receive evil back from them. It is impossible that you may sow the seed of mango and the tree would give in return the bitter fruit of a neem tree. This is impossible. The only thing possible is that in your unconscious state instead of sowing the seed of the mango you must have sown the seed of the neem tree. Because why would the tree lie? You must have mistakenly sown the wrong seeds. So even when you do good, your intention is never the same.

Even when you speak the truth, you do so to hurt the other person. You speak the truth to insult the other person. You speak truth as if to use it as some kind of a deadly weapon. Your truths are bitter. Truth doesn't have to be bitter too. But you find pleasure in making the truth sound bitter. You have no interest in the truth itself really. Your lie is always sweet; your truth is always bitter. What's the matter? Is bitterness the nature of truth? Is sweetness part of a lie?

No, the fact is, you want to make your lie passable, therefore you make it sound sweet. You know very well it won't work otherwise. You know that in the first place a lie is difficult to promote unless accompanied by sweetness. It works the same way as giving a bitter pill but sugar coated, to a child. He swallows it taking the pill to be a candy. Before he can feel the bitterness, the pill goes already in.

You make the lie sound sweet because you want to promote the lie. You make the truth sound bitter because you are interested not in promoting the truth but in using it for the purpose of hurting others. You speak the truth only when you want to use it in a way so as to make it even worse than a lie.

You are unconscious. You are totally unaware of your actions. You need to look at yourself with a little more alertness. Did you speak what you intended to say, or was it something else? Was what you said on your mind really?

Mark Twain returned home one evening. His wife asked, "How did your speech go?" He said, "Which one? The one I had prepared, or the one that I delivered? or the one that I had wished to deliver?"

The speech one prepares and the speech he delivers are always very different. Moreover, while coming home the speech he thinks he should have given is altogether different.

Are you in your right senses? You go on missing all the targets; have you ever hit a single target in your life? Even a man with a blindfold may sometimes manage to hit his arrow on the mark, but not you.

I have heard it said that even a stopped clock shows correct time twice in twenty four hours, but you can spend a lifetime without being correct even twice. Are you worse than a stopped clock? A man may someday succeed in hitting the target even if he were to go on throwing his arrows in the dark. You throw your arrows with open eyes, in the light, and yet never do you ever hit the mark. What could be the reason?

Mulla Nasruddin was fond of hunting deer. When he reached the lodge on his third hunting trip and opened his suitcase, he found a large photograph under which his wife had written, "Mulla, this is how a deer looks." Mulla loved to hunt, but had no idea how a deer looked like. His wife wanted to make sure he didn't kill any odd thing and bring it home as a deer, hence the photograph.

You have missed at every instance, and that's the cause of your misery. And the only reason why you have missed is that, you are not aware. I say, therefore, whatsoever you do, do it with awareness. Walk with awareness, talk with awareness.

Mahavira has said, "Remain alert when you walk, when you sit, when you take your food, when you speak, even in sleep." When Mahavira was asked who is a sadhu, who is a holy man, he said, "One who is aware." When asked who is a non-sadhu, he replied, "One who is unaware." A man who lives as if asleep is the non-sadhu; one who lives in full consciousness is the sadhu.

This is exactly what Shiva is saying: CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE SOUL. Raise your consciousness and by and by you are bound to see the glimpse of soul in your life.

The second sutra is: KNOWLEDGE IS BONDAGE. This is a very strange sutra. 'Knowledge' has many meanings. One, as long as you are filled with the knowledge that "I am", you will remain in ignorance, because, the very sense of the "I", the ego, is ignorance. The day you are filled with the soul, the 'am-ness' will remain but the 'I-ness' will disappear. From "I am", the 'I' will drop and simply 'am' will remain.

You can experiment with this. Sometimes sit quietly under a tree and look within yourself, see where is the 'I'? You won't find it anywhere. The 'am' you will of course find everywhere in the existence, but never the ego. The ego is your creation, it is of your making, it is false, untrue. There is nothing more unauthentic than the ego itself. It comes out handy.

Although it is required in the world, as such it nowhere has any place in truth.

So, there is this knowledge that 'I am', which is the cause of bondage. The awareness that I have of the 'am-ness' is pure and limitless. When you say 'am', can there be any distinction between your 'am-ness' and the am-ness of a tree? Would there be any difference between your am-ness and my am-ness? When you only are, then you, the rivers, the mountains, the trees all become one. However, as soon as you say "I", you become separate from the whole. The moment you say "I", you break away, you alienate yourself, you disconnect yourself from the existence.

Am-ness is Brahman and "I" is man's state of ignorance. When you know simply that you are, then there is no separate center within you. Then you become one with the existence. Then you become like a wave which is lost in the ocean. Right now you are like the wave which frozen into ice, which has broken itself away from the ocean.

Gyanam bandaha So the first thing is: KNOWLEDGE IS BONDAGE -- the knowledge that "I am." The other kind of bondage is all the knowledge that you have gathered from outside, which you have stolen from the scriptures, the knowledge which you have borrowed from the great Masters, the knowledge which is stored in your memory -- all of this is bondage. You won't be able to free yourself from it. That's why you cannot find a man more enslaved than the pundit.

All kinds of people come to me -- all kinds of patients. But no one among them is more afflicted with cancer than the pundit, the scholar. There is no cure for him -- he is beyond treatment. The trouble with him is that he knows. Hence, he can neither listen nor understand. Before you say anything to him he has already understood the meaning of it; before he has heard you, he would have formed his own theory. A mind filled with words is incapable of knowing. He knows so much without knowing, because all his knowledge is borrowed.

If knowledge could be attained through scriptures, everyone would have attained it. Knowledge is attained when a person has become silent, when he has dropped all the scriptures, when he returns to the world all the knowledge which he has borrowed from others, when he goes on a search of that which is his original existence -- the one which he has not attained from other people.

Try to understand this a little. You have received your body from your parents. You have nothing in your body that is actually yours. One half of it is a contribution from your father, and the other half from your mother. Then the body is made of the food you eat every day. And further, the body contains the five elements -- the air, the fire, and so on. You can't claim any of these as yours. But your consciousness consists of neither of these elements, nor have you obtained it from your parents.

Whatsoever you know, you have learned it from your schools and universities, you have heard it from your scriptures, you have obtained it from your gurus. But all of that is a part of your body, nor of your soul. Your soul is that which you have obtained from no one. So your true nature consists of that which you have received from no body -- neither from your mother, nor father, society, guru, or scripture. Until you have discovered that pure element which is innately yours, you won't be able to realize your true being.

So knowledge is the bondage because it doesn't allow you to reach up to your true nature, your true being. It is the knowledge that has divided mankind. You call yourself a Hindu, or a Mohammedan. Have you ever thought why you are a Hindu or a Mohammedan? What is the difference between a Hindu and a Mohammedan really? Can a physician ever find out on the basis of a blood test whether the blood belongs to a Hindu or a Mohammedan? Can anyone determine whether a particular bone has been taken from the body of a Hindu or a Mohammedan? There is no way.

You won't know anything by investigating bodies because the bodies of both -- the Hindu and the Mohammedan -- are made of the same five elements. But if you examine their minds you will surely know who is a Hindu and who is a Mohammedan. For the simple reason that their scriptures are different, their principles are different, their words are different. The difference between the two consists of words. You are a Hindu because you received one kind of knowledge which is labelled as "Hindu". Somebody is a Jaina because he received a different kind of knowledge which is named as Jaina. All the differences between you, all the walls, are the walls of knowledge -- and all your knowledge is borrowed.

Raise a Moslem child in a Hindu household, he will grow to be a Hindu. He will wear the sacred thread like a Brahmin does. He will quote from the Vedas and the Upanishads. Similarly, let a Hindu child be brought up in a Muslim household, he will begin reciting the verses of Koran.

Knowledge binds you. It makes a wall around you. It makes you fight your fellow beings and it brings malice, enmity in your life. Just think for a while, if you were not brought up as a Hindu, a Mohammedan, Jaina, or a Parsi, what would you do? You would grow up as a human being -- without any walls around you.

There are about three hundred religions in the world -- three hundred prisons. Each man is made to be locked up in one or the other prison as soon as he is born. And the priests try their best to have their control lover the child as early as possible. They call it "religious education," but there is nothing more irreligious than this. The child is caught young, before his is seven, because after that it would be difficult each day to exercise control over the child. If the child were to gain even a little bit of understanding, he will begin to raise questions. And the pundits have absolutely no answers to the childs questions.

The pundit can satisfy only the idiots. The less intelligent a person is, the more quickly he is satisfied by the pundit. He asks a question, and the answer is given to him. You ask a pundit, "Who created the world?" He answers, "God created the world." You come home happy and satisfied without asking him, "Who created God?" The pundit would have been annoyed had you asked this second question because even he doesn't know the answer to it. The answer is not given in the book. And it is a bothersome question -- who created God? You can go on and on asking questions on the same line endlessly no matter what the answer may be.

If you look at it closely, you'll find that your first question was not answered at all -- the pundit merely satisfied your curiosity. Seeing you are not so intelligent. Children are innocent. Their faculties of reasoning and thinking are not developed as yet. They are not in a position to ask questions. Whatever garbage you may dump into their brains, they will accept it. Children are open to everything, because they feel whatever is given to them must be right. A child can't raise many questions. In order to raise a question one requires some degree of maturity. That's why all religions grab the children and virtually strangle their spirits.

This strangling looks very beautiful, very ornamental. One has the Bible hanging in his neck, another his samayasar, while someone has the Koran in his neck, and someone else has the Geeta around his neck. These ties are so endearing that it requires a tremendous courage for one to get rid of them. And whenever you will try to drop them, one danger will come facing you: doing away with these books would mean you know nothing, only the books contain all the knowledge. Hence you become anxious to guard these scriptures with your life. This is the only way you can hide your ignorance.

It would be a very simple matter if one could do away with his ignorance just by hiding it. The fact is, ignorance grows more when you hide it. It is like hiding a wound. But hiding a wound won't cure it; instead, it will grow inside deeper and deeper. And the pus will spread throughout within the body.

Shiva says: KNOWLEDGE IS BONDAGE.

Any knowledge -- whether learned from somebody or borrowed from somewhere -- the knowledge is the cause of bondage. Hence, drop all that which you have acquired from others. Go in search of that which you have received from no one. Set out in search of the face that is authentically yours. There is a spring of consciousness hidden within you, which no one has given to you. It is your very own nature, your own treasure, your very soul.

The third sutra is: YONIVARGAHA KALASHARIRAM

Yoni means the nature. That's why we call the woman, or the female element, prakriti or nature. The woman gives birth to the body, she represents prakriti. And kala means the will to do. There is only one art, and that is: the art of entering this world. And this comes through the will to do, to be a doer.

Your body is made of two things: your will to do, your ego, and the physical form you have received from the prakriti, the nature. If the will to do is present within you, then the nature will go on providing you with an appropriate body. This is how you have been born again and again. Sometimes you were an animal, sometimes a bird, a tree some other time, and sometimes a man. Whatsoever you wished to achieve, it has happened. Your desire to achieve becomes the actuality; thoughts become real things. So beware when you desire, because all desires are fulfilled -- sooner or later.

If you are of the habit of watching the birds fly in the sky and wonder, "How free the birds are, I wish I were a bird." it will not be long before you become a bird. You see dogs mating, and if that moment a thought arises in you, "What freedom! What happiness!" -- soon you will become a dog. Whatever desire you keep within you, it becomes a seed.

The nature only gives birth to the body. You are the artist, you are your own creator. So the meaning of kala is: you have fashioned your own body. No one else gives you the body -- it is your very desire that gives it a form.

Has it ever occurred to you that the last thought before your falling asleep at night becomes the first thought on waking up in the morning? All night long, while you remain asleep, the thought stays within you in a seed form. And so, that which is the last thing at night becomes first in the morning. At the moment of your death all your desires will come together and become a seed. That very seed will consequently be the new life in the womb. You start fresh from where you left off.

Whatsoever you are is of your own making. Don't blame others. As a matter of fact, there is no one whom you can blame. Basically it is the cumulative effect of your own actions. Whatsoever you are -- beautiful or ugly, happy or unhappy, man or a woman -- it is all a result of your actions. You are the architect of your life. Don't blame on your stars -- you'll be simply fooling yourself. This way you are dumping the responsibility on to someone else.

No need to say God has sent you -- don't dump the responsibility on God. That's just a strategy to avoid your own responsibility. You alone are the cause for being imprisoned in this body. One who understands perfectly that he himself is responsible for being in this world, a transformation takes place in his life.

Shiva is saying: the body is a product of nature and your will to do. The nature is merely the source, the womb. Your ego functions like a seed in it. Your will to do this or that, to achieve this or that, to become this or that -- acts like a seed. And the moment the art of your doing meets the womb of nature, a body is formed.

Therefore, buddhas say: "Give up all desires, only then will you be liberated.: If you desired for heaven, you will become an angel, but that won't be liberation either. Because as long as desires persist, there can never be any liberation. All desires lead to the formation of bodies.

So as long as you have not attained to desirelessness, as long as you have not renounced desires completely, you will go on taking births and wandering in different bodies. And howsoever different the forms of the body may be, their basic condition is always the same. The ills of the body are the same, regardless whether it's a bird's body or man's. There is no difference in their miseries, because the fundamental misery is only one: the soul becoming confined in the body, the entering of the soul into the prison of body. A prison after all is a prison; it makes no difference whether its walls are circular or angular no matter what you think.

A friend of mine is a drawing teacher. He was sentenced to prison for three years. When he came out I asked him how his stay was. He said, "Everything was alright except the corners of my prison cell were not set at right angles to each other." This was the brain of a drawing teacher -- he was upset the corners were not made at ninety degrees. This is what troubled him all three years -- staying in the same prison cell day in and day out staring at the corners which were not at right angles.

Now what difference does it make if the corners were set at ninety degrees or not? A prison is a prison. Whether the body is that of a bird or a man does not make much difference. The fact is, you are imprisoned -- and that's the misery. You got tied down -- and that's the pain. Desire binds. The desire is the rope that binds us. And remember, except you, no one else is responsible for it.

The fourth sutra is: UDYAMA IS BHAIRAVA. Udyama means the spiritual endeavor by which you attempt to come out of this prison. And this endeavor is bhairava. Bhairava is a technical term: 'bha' means that which sustains, that which maintains, 'ra' means that which destroys, 'va' means that which expands. So bhairava means: the Brahman -- that which is upholding and sustaining us, that in which we are born and in which we will eventually disappear; that which constitutes all the expanse and will ultimately come to shrink; that which is the origin of all and in which all will come to an end. The total existence is bhairava.

Shiva says: UDYAMA IS BHAIRAVA. The day you begin your spiritual endeavor, you start becoming bhairava -- you start becoming one with God. Your first rays of endeavor, and the journey toward the sun has begun; the first thought of liberation, and the destination is not far off. Because the first step is almost half of the journey.

Spiritual endeavor is bhairava. It will take time for you to attain it; it will be a while before you reach the destination. But as soon have begun the effort and the seed is sown: "Let me get out of this prison and be free of this body, let me be relieved of all desires, let me not sow more seeds and increase my involvement in this world, let me not desire more births." As soon as the feeling intensifies within you to overcome your unconsciousness, you start becoming bhairava, you start becoming one with Brahman. In fact, you are already one with Brahman, just that you need to remember it. Basically you are that -- a stream of the same ocean, a ray of the same sun, a tiny part of the same vast sky. Once you begin to remember this and the prison walls begin to crumble, you become one with the infinite space.

UDYAMA IS BHAIRAVA -- a very intense effort is needed. The sleep is very deep. Only a consistent hammering will be able to break it. So being lazy won't help. You may destroy the sleep today but create a new one tomorrow. This way you will continue to wander from one birth to another. It would not do any good if you broke the sleep on the one hand and went on creating anew on the other -- all your effort will be in vain. So udyama means you must make an all out effort.

People come to me and say, "We make the effort but nothing happens." I look at their faces and I find that either they make no effort at all, or even when they do it is always so lukewarm. Their efforts are spiritless, that's why nothing happens. But they come to me complaining as if they are doing a favor to God and yet nothing is happening. They feel something is wrong, otherwise why is it that things happen to others, but never to them? They think it to be unjust.

No injustice ever takes place in this universe. Whatsoever happens is always just and right, for there is no human being sitting up there doing either justice or injustice. The universe is ruled by certain laws, and these laws constitute religion. If you walked around scatterbrained, you are bound to fall and break your leg. In that case you won't be able to blame the law of gravitation for it in the courts. Gravity is neither interested in causing you to fall, nor in guarding you from falling. When you walk straight it guards you from falling; when you don't, it brings you down. As such, the gravity has no vested interest of its own either to see you fall down, or saving you from falling.

The universal law is always neutral. Religion is the name of this neutral law. The Hindus call it 'rita' -- its the supreme law. It shows no favoritism -- making someone fall, lifting someone else -- nothing of the sort. When you walk correctly, the law protects you; when you wish to fall down, it helps you to fall. The law works under all conditions. The law is always available. You can use it whichever you like, its doors are always open to you. If you want to hit your head against the closed door, it will not stop you. If you want to walk through the door, it will let you. The law is absolutely neutral.

So UDYAMA IS BHAIRAVA. A great effort is needed. udyama means: an intense effort. An effort that would require you to involve your total being is udyama. Then your becoming a bhairava will not take too long.

The fifth sutra is: ONE WHO APPLIES HIS TOTAL ENERGY, FOR HIM THE WORLD EXISTS NO MORE.

And if you have made the right effort, if you have harnessed your total energy into searching the truth, God, or soul, then the circuit of your energy becomes complete. Right now it is not a whole -- it is torn and split.

Scientists say that even the most intelligent person in the world does not use more than fifteen percent of his intellect -- the remaining eighty-five percent goes to rot. If this is true about the genius, imagine what it must be in case of a fool. Perhaps he never uses his intellect at all. Even our physical energy we don't use more than five percent. So if you live an apathetic, spiritless life, whose fault is it? You never live totally. You are afraid lest the flame of life might engulf you. Hence you live apprehensively, scared, so the energy circuit within you never completes.

Your life is like a car which moves sometimes with jerks caused by the dirt in its gas as if it has hiccups. That's ordinarily how you live -- piecemeal. Your energy moves in fits and starts, bit by bit, it never comes to an integrated whole. It's a matter of utilizing your full energy -- in anything. For example, if you are a painter and if you were to devote your entire energy into painting a picture -- without holding back even a bit -- you will attain liberation there and then. Such application of total energy is udyama. As soon as the circuit is complete, you become bhairava. If you are a sculptor and have poured into your sculpture all that you have -- so much so that only the sculpture remains, you disappear -- the energy circuit completes. So when you use your total energy in any work -- it becomes meditation. Then the bhairava is close, the temple is nearby.

The fifth sutra says: ONE WHO APPLIES HIS TOTAL ENERGY, FOR HIM THE WORLD EXISTS NO MORE.

Whenever the circuit of your energy becomes complete, total -- not broken in pieces, but whole -- that very moment the world ceases to exist for you. You become God. You become bhairava. You become free. Then there is no bondage for you -- no body, no samsara.

So remember, you have to apply your total energy. If you will bring into effect your whole energy in this meditation camp, if you did not meditate superficially -- but instead gave all your energy -- you will experience that very moment suddenly that the world has disappeared and you are facing God.

Transformation takes place the moment you apply your energy totally. Then you stand with your back to the world and face toward God. One flash of this experience and you are never the same again. Just a glimpse of it is enough to set your life on that journey.

So remember, drown yourself here completely -- only then will something happen. If you will hold back even a little, all your effort will prove useless. Until the effort has become udyama -- a total effort -- you will not be able to attain to bhairava.

Enough for today.

Chapter No. 2 - The Stars Mirrored
Chapter No. 3 - Maxims of Yoga: A sense of wonder
Chapter No. 4 - To Be Dead Do Nothing
Chapter No. 5 - The Knowledge That Is Self Knowledge
Chapter No. 6 - The Mad Projectionist
Chapter No. 7 - Meditation is the Seed
Chapter No. 8 - The Fourth State
Chapter No. 9 - Right Search, Wrong Direction
Chapter No. 10 - The Eternal Spring