The third question:

Question 3

BELOVED OSHO,

WILL YOU PLEASE INDICATE SOMETHING ABOUT THE FIFTH STAGE IN ACTIVE MEDITATION.

Nothing can be said about it; that is why I never talk about it. The fourth is the last -- the fifth will happen but nothing can be said about it. There is no need either. The fifth is not a state, it is your being. The first four are states, steps, but the fifth is not a state, it is not a step. It is your own being, it is your nature. But nothing can be said about it. If you come to the fourth the fifth will happen to you, that much is certain. If you can come to a total silence in the fourth, then the fifth will happen. It is a growth of your silence.

But nothing can be said about it -- or whatsoever can be said will be misunderstood. For example, if I say it is absolute bliss -- and it has been said that it is absolute bliss -- you will misunderstand it because you do not know what bliss is. You know certain pleasures and you think that bliss must be something like pleasure. It is not! You can think only in terms of pleasure because that is what you are acquainted with. You can think it is infinite pleasure; it is not. It is not pleasure at all.

Or you can think negatively that there will be no pain, no suffering -- as Buddha has said. Buddha said: In that ultimate state of being there will be no suffering. And when people used to ask to him, "This is not enough. Tell us something more. You are saying what will not be there. Please tell us something about what will be there. You are saying that there will be no suffering but what will be there?" Buddha refused to answer. He said, "I will not say anything. This much I can say: there will be no suffering."

But even that will be misunderstood -- because you are left nowhere, hanging. If it is said that it will be pleasure-like, then it is wrong. If it is said that there will be no pain, it is better than the first, but still not exactly right because you may carry the impression that it is going to be of negativity when it is not. Buddha was misunderstood in this country. He was thought to be a nihilist, a negativist, who was saying that in nirvana there will be no suffering, that is all. But no bliss, SATCHITANANDA -- no existence, no consciousness -- simply no-suffering?

But whatsoever is said will be misunderstood because we understand only that which we know. You know pleasure, you know pain, but in the fifth there will be neither. The duality will cease: there will be no pleasure, there will be no pain. Now it becomes inconceivable. What will it be like? If there is no pain and no pleasure, what will it be like? It becomes inconceivable; you cannot imagine it.

Bertrand Russell has said somewhere that if it is really so, that nirvana or the ultimate is beyond pain and pleasure, then it must be like a deep slumber, a deep sleep. That seems logical. If there is no pain and no pleasure, how can you be conscious? -- because consciousness needs something to be conscious about. If there is nothing -- no pain, no pleasure -- then there is no challenge for consciousness to be there, so you will fall into a deep coma.

Everything will be misunderstood; that is why I never talk about it. I simply lead you to the door of the temple and leave you to enter and know. I leave you at the door of the temple. These four steps help you to reach the door. Then you can enter. You are standing right in front of the door and the door is open. If the temple magnetizes you, calls you, challenges you, you will enter. No one has returned back from the fifth step. No one can return because it is the ultimate ecstasy. Your whole being simply gravitates toward it.

The fifth is left out of discussion. It is your own being; it is not a state. The first four are states. In the first you are working with your vital energy, with your PRANA -- with breathing. Breathing is life. In the first step, you are working with your life. You are destroying the pattern of your breathing. Through chaotic breathing, you are destroying the settled pattern. And if you can destroy the pattern of breathing, then all the patterns in all your bodies will be loosened -- because breathing is the most subtle thing to work with.

You may not have observed but whenever your mind changes, your breathing changes. Even a subtle change in mood and your breathing immediately changes. Or, to be more correct, even before the mood changes, the breathing has already changed. When you are happy you breathe differently; when you are angry you breathe differently; when you are tense you breathe differently; when you are sad you breathe differently; when you are relaxed you breathe differently. The rhythm always goes on changing.

Observe it. Observe the moods of your breathing. You are not breathing the same way the whole day. In the morning you breathe differently, in the evening differently. Just by knowing about your breath, everything can be said about your mind, what is happening to your mind.

Sooner or later, when medical science and psychology can penetrate into this phenomenon of breathing more deeply, they will make a graph of it. Your breathing graph will show through what types of moods you have been passing throughout the day. When you are asleep you breathe differently; when you are alert you breathe differently, when you are sleepy you breathe differently. Breathing can be changed easily, and if you change the breathing you change the mind.

You can work from both ways. There are many schools of yoga. Some schools, particularly the schools of raja yoga, start with the mind. They say first change the mind, then the breathing will change by itself. And there are other schools, particularly of hatha yoga, which say change the breathing and the mind will follow. Both are right because both are related.

Do one thing: while you are feeling relaxed, someday just lying in your armchair, and the whole world seems to be happy and at ease and you feel at home, note your breathing. Just observe the rhythm: how are you inhaling and how are you exhaling, what is the proportion of time, how much gap is there between inhalation and exhalation? Note everything; then do one thing more. Sometime, when you feel angry, breathe the way you were breathing when you were relaxed. It will be impossible to be angry. Then you cannot be angry. You CANNOT be angry! It will be impossible to be angry because anger needs a different type of breathing.

When you are in love, sitting with your friend or with your wife or with your beloved, note down how you are breathing. Then try to breathe that way anywhere and suddenly you will feel love bubbling up. Note it down. While just lying on the bed with your beloved, note down how you are breathing. Then sit beside a tree and breathe the same way. Suddenly you will feel that the tree has become the beloved because now the love is flowing.

When unaware of this fact you unnecessarily create much misery for yourself. You go on breathing wrongly in wrong places and you create much riddle, much puzzle and confusion.

In the first step, we work with breathing to create a chaos, because unless a chaos is there YOU cannot be born. The first step is to break all the old patterns of breathing.

In the second step, we are working with emotions to bring out all the suppressed emotions. If you have really taken deep, chaotic breaths, the suppressed emotions will come out easily. They will start coming out by themselves, and you will not need to do anything. The second step will follow automatically if the first has been done rightly. If you have not been resistant in the first, the second will follow easily. In the second we are working with the emotions to bring them out, to act them out, to throw them out.

When you are angry with someone and you throw your anger on him, you are creating a chain reaction. Now he too will be angry and this may continue for lives and you will go on being enemies. You can continue this for centuries. It is not going to end. Where will it end? There is only one possibility. You can end it only in meditation, nowhere else, because in meditation you are not angry with someone: you are simply angry.

Remember, this difference is basic. You are not angry with someone; you are simply angry, and the anger is released into the cosmos. You are not hateful toward anyone. If hate comes, you are simply hateful and the hate is thrown out. In meditation, emotions are not addressed; they are unaddressed. They move into the cosmos, and the cosmos purifies everything.

Remember, it is just like a dirty river falling into the ocean: the ocean will purify it. Whenever your anger, your hate, your sexuality, moves into the cosmos, into the ocean, it purifies it. Whenever a dirty river falls into another river, then the other river also becomes dirty. When you are angry with someone, you are throwing your dirt at him. Then he will also throw his at you and this will become a mutual dirtying process.

In meditation you are throwing yourself into the cosmos to be purified. All the energy that you throw is purified in the cosmos. The cosmos is so vast and so great an ocean, you cannot make it dirty. In meditation we are not related with persons. In meditation we are related directly to the cosmos.

In the second step, we are throwing emotions out. It is a catharsis. In the third we are using a mantra: Hoo. It is a Sufi sound just like the Hindu sound Aum but more useful for the modern man than Aum can be. Aum is a very delicate sound. When you say Aum, it never goes below the heart. It is not very violent; it is very nonviolent. One of the most nonviolent sounds is Aum.

It was invented for a different type of people from you -- for those who were very loving and nonviolent, for those who were simply natural, simple; for those who lived in nature, in villages; for those who were not educated, uneducated; for those who were simply human, not very much cultivated and conditioned. They were animal-like -- pure, simple, innocent. The Aum was invented for them. Even this much was enough to change them. It is a very delicate hammer, Aum. It hits the heart very delicately. But it was enough for them because they had hearts. For you it will not do. You need a very violent hammer.

Sufis invented this second sound, Hoo. This is part of Allah-Hoo. Sufis repeat, "Allah! Allah!" and when you repeat it continuously, it becomes "Allah-Hoo! Allah-Hoo! Allah-Hoo! Allah-Hoo!" Then the beginning part is dropped, the Allah is dropped, and only Hoo is retained. Then it becomes, "Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!" When you say Hoo it goes directly to the sex center. It penetrates directly to the sex center; it hits the sex center.

This age is so sexual that you need a hammering on the sex energy. The heart is no more there. If you are going to try Aum, you are knocking at a door which is vacant. No one lives there now. The center of gravity has shifted down to the sex center. Your center is not the heart. The heart can be the center when you are centered in love but now you are centered in sex, not in love.

Psychologists say that love is nothing but a foreplay to sex. They are right -- because they have no other specimen to study. They study you and then they come to conclude that love is nothing but a foreplay -- just creating a situation in which sex can happen, nothing else. So when sex has happened, love disappears. It is just like when you feel hungry you gravitate toward food and look at food with enchanted eyes. But when your hunger is satiated, you look away from the food. All the enchantment is lost.

So when you love your wife or your husband, the love is just an etiquette to enter into sex -- because it will be too rude to start.... So it just plays like a lubricating agent. And when sex is satisfied, the husband moves to his own side of the bed and goes to sleep. He is finished; all the enchantment is gone. It will come again only when he feels a type of hunger. Psychologists say that love is nothing but a foreplay -- just a mannerism. And they are right because they do not know any other type of man.

Aum was invented, discovered, for a different type: for those who were in love. Not that they never had sex: they had it; otherwise you would not have been here. They were having sex but the basic difference of quality is this: they were centered in love and their sex was but an expression of it, nothing else. Love was basic and sex was just one of the many expressions of it -- the deepest expression, but expression of love. They loved first and then sex happened. It was not cerebral, it was not planned.

If you want to use the contemporary jargon, then I can say that sex was nothing but an afterplay. The psychologists say that love is nothing but a foreplay, but I say that then sex was nothing but an afterplay -- just to finish the game. It was the peak but it was not the center. Love was the center. Then the heart functioned in a different way, vibrated in a different way. Then Aum was enough to work with. Aum will help a person who is very loving and who has a heart; otherwise, it will not help him.

Hoo is the sound for this age. It will hit you directly at the sex center. If you really hit loudly with "Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!" you will feel a subtle hammering inside. And sex energy can move in two ways: it can move outward and it can move inward.

When you feel attracted to a woman or to a man, the energy has started moving outward. Really, a woman or a man -- a person of the opposite sex -- is hitting you from without. And this is literally true. When you feel that some woman is attracting you, if you can become alert and observing you will feel a subtle hit at your sex center. The feminine energy, or the masculine energy hits you on that center. The same hit will be felt when you shout Hoo, but from within. And if you go on hammering the sex center from within, an opening is created and the energy begins to flow inward -- upward.

Once you know how to make this energy flow upward and withinward, you will reach to higher orgasms, to higher peaks of ecstasy, than you can ever reach with any woman or any man. An inner meeting will have started.

The first step is to change your prana, your breathing pattern. The second stage is to throw your emotions, the suppressed part of your mind -- a catharsis. And the third is to hit your life energy to move upward. And when the energy starts moving upward, then you are not to do anything, you are simply to lie down as if dead.

There is to be no diversion there. The energy simply moves upward and you are not to do anything. That is why I go on emphasizing not to move. After the third step when I say "Stop!" stop completely. Do not do anything at all because anything can become a diversion and you miss the point. Anything, just a cough or a sneeze, and you may miss the whole thing because the mind has become diverted. Then the flow will stop immediately because your attention has moved.

Do not do anything. You are not going to die! Even if the sneeze is coming and you do not sneeze for ten minutes, you will not die. If you feel like coughing, if you feel an irritation in the throat and you do not do anything, you are not going to die. Do not be afraid: no one has ever died. Remain DEAD as far as the body is concerned so that the energy can move in one flow.

When the energy moves upward you become more and more silent. Silence is the by-product of energy moving upward and tension is the by-product of energy moving downward. You will be more and more in anxiety when energy moves down; you will be more and more silent, quiet, calm and cool as energy moves upward and inward. And these words downward and outward are synonymous, and inward and upward are synonymous. And when you have become silent, that energy is moving like a flood, it is passing through all the chakras, all the centers. And when it passes through all the chakras, it cleanses them, it purifies them, it makes them dynamic, alive, and the flood goes upward, upward to the last chakra.

Sex is the first chakra, the first center, the lowest -- and we exist at the lowest. That is why we know life only at its minimum. When the energy flows upward and reaches to the last chakra, to the SAHASRAR, energy is at its maximum, life is at its maximum. Then you feel as if the whole cosmos has become silent: not even a single sound is there. Everything becomes absolutely silent when the energy comes to the last chakra.

You know the first chakra; it will be easy to understand through that. When the energy comes to the sex center, you become absolutely tense. The whole body is feverish, your every cell is in a fever. Your temperature goes high, your blood pressure goes high, your breathing becomes mad. Your whole body is in a temporary delirium -- at the lowest.

Quite the opposite is the case at the last chakra. Your whole body becomes so cool, so silent, as if it has disappeared. You cannot feel it. You have become bodiless. And when you are silent the whole existence is silent because the existence is nothing but a mirror: it reflects you. In thousands and thousands of mirrors, it reflects you. When you are silent the whole existence has become silent.