Tantra

THE TANTRA VISION, VOL. 1

Chapter 6: I am a destroyer, Question 2

 

 

Energy Enhancement                 Enlightened Texts                 Tantra                 The Tantra Vision, Vol. 1

 

 

The second question:
Question 2
YOU SPOKE IN SEVERAL RECENT DISCOURSES ON THE NO-PROBLEM, THE NON-EXISTENCE OF OUR PROBLEMS.
HAVING BEEN BROUGHT UP IN A REPRESSIVE CATHOLIC FAMILY, AND HAVING SPENT TWENTY-ONE YEARS IN AN EQUALLY CRAZY EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM -- ARE YOU SAYING THAT ALL THE COATS OF ARMOUR, ALL THE CONDITIONINGS AND ALL THE REPRESSIONS DO NOT EXIST, CAN BE DROPPED IMMEDIATELY -- NOW?
WHAT ABOUT ALL THE IMPRINTS LEFT ON THE BRAIN, ON THE MUSCULATURE OF THE BODY?

THIS IS A VERY SIGNIFICANT QUESTION -- it is from Jayananda. The question is significant because it shows two different approaches concerning the inner reality of man.
The Western approach is to think about the problem, to find the causes of the problem, to go into the history of the problem, into the past of the problem, to uproot the problem from the very beginning, to uncondition the mind, or to recondition the mind, to recondition the body, to take out all those imprints that have been left on the brain -- this is the Western approach. Psychoanalysis goes into the memory; it works there. It goes into your childhood, into your past; it moves backwards. It finds out from where the problem has arisen -- maybe fifty years before when you were a child the problem arose in your relationship with your mother, then psychoanalysis will go back.
Fifty years of history! It is a very long, dragging affair. And even then it doesn't help much -- because there are MILLIONS of problems. It is not only a question of one problem. You can go into one problem's history; you can look into your autobiography and find out the causes. Maybe you can eliminate one problem, but there are millions of problems. If you start going into each problem..to solve one life's problems you will need millions of lives. Let me repeat it: to solve ONE life's problems you will have to be born again and again, millions of times. This is almost impractical. This cannot be done. And all those millions of lives when you will be solving the problems of this life, those lives will create their own problems... and so on and so forth. You will be dragged more and more into the problems. This is absurd!
Now, the same psychoanalytical approach has gone into the body: rolfing, bio-energetics, and other methods are there which try to eliminate imprints on the body, in the musculature. Again, you have to go into the history of the body. But one thing is certain about both the approaches, which are on the same logical pattern, that the problem comes from the past, so somehow it has to be tackled in the past.
Man's mind has always been trying to do two impossible things. One is: to reform the past -- which cannot be done. The past has happened. You cannot REALLY go into the past. When you think of going into the past, at the most you go into the memory of it; it is not the real past, it is just the memory. The past is no more there, so you cannot reform it. This is one of the impossible goals of humanity; man has suffered very much because of it. You want to undo the past -- how can you undo it? The past is absolute. The past means: all potentiality of it is finished; it has become actual. Now there is no longer any potentiality to reform it, to undo it, to redo it. You cannot do ANYthing with the past.
And the second impossible idea that has always dominated the human mind is: to establish the future -- which cannot be done again. Future means that which is not yet; you cannot establish it. Future remains unestablished. Future remains open. Future is pure potentiality! Unless it happens, you cannot be certain about it.
Past is pure actuality -- it has happened. Now nothing can be done about it.
Between these two, man stands in the present always thinking of the impossibles. He wants to make everything certain about the future, about tomorrow -- which canNOT be done. Let it sink as deeply in your heart as possible: it cannot be done. Don't waste your present moment for making the future certain. The future is uncertainty; that is the very quality of the future. And don't waste your time looking back. The past has happened, it is a dead phenomenon. Nothing can be done about it. What, at the most, you can do is you can reinterpret it. That's all. That's what psychoanalysis is doing: reinterpreting it. Reinterpretation can be done -- but the past remains the same.
Psychoanalysis and astrology: astrology tries somehow to make the future certain, and psychoanalysis tries to redo the past. Neither is a science. Both things are impossible, but both have millions of followers -- because man LIKES it that way. He wants to be certain about the future, so he goes to the astrologer, he consults the I CHING, he goes to a Tarot reader, and there are a thousand and one ways to fool oneself, to deceive oneself.
And then there are people who say they can change the past -- he consults them also.
Once these two things are dropped, you become free of all sorts of foolishnesses. Then you don't go to the psychoanalyst and you don't go to the astrologer. Then you know the past is finished... you also be finished with it. And the future has not happened; whenever it happens, we will see -- nothing can be done about it right now. You can only destroy the present moment, which is the only moment available, real.
The West has been continuously looking into the problems, how to solve them. The West takes the problems very seriously. And when you are going in a certain logic, given the premises, that logic looks perfect.
I was just reading one anecdote:

A great philosopher and world renowned mathematician is aboard an aeroplane. He is sitting in his seat and thinking great mathematical problems, when suddenly an announcement comes from the captain: "I am sorry, there will be a a slight delay. Engine number one has cut out and we are now flying on three engines."
About ten minutes later another announcement: "I am afraid there will be further delay -- engines two and three have cut out and there is only number four left."
So the philosopher turns to the fellow sitting next to him and says, "Good golly! If the other one cuts out we will be up here all night!"

When you are thinking in a certain line, the very direction of it makes certain things possible, absurd things also possible. Once you have taken human problems very seriously, once you start thinking about man as a problem, you have accepted some premise you have taken the first step wrongly. Now you can go into the direction, and you can go on and on. Now such great literature has come up in this century about mind phenomena, psychoanalysis; millions of papers are written and treatises and books. Once Freud opened the doors of a certain logic, it dominated the whole century.
The East has a totally different outlook. First, it says no problem is serious. The moment you say no problem is serious, the problem is almost ninety-nine percent dead. Your whole vision changes about it. The second thing the East says is: the problem is there because you are identified with it. It has nothing to do with the past, nothing to do with its history. You are identified with it -- that is the REAL thing. And that is the key to solve all problems.
For example: you are an angry person. If you go to the psychoanalyst, he will say, "Go into the past... how did this anger arise? In what situations did it become more and more conditioned and imprinted on your mind? We will have to wash out all those imprints; we will have to wipe them off. We will have to clean your past completely."
If you go to an Eastern mystic, he will say, "You think that you are anger, you feel identified with the anger -- that is where things are going wrong. Next time anger happens, you just be a watcher, you just be a witness. You don't get identified with the anger. Don't say,'I am anger.' Don't say,'I am angry.' Just see it happening as if it is happening on a TV screen. Look at yourself as if you are looking at somebody else."
You are pure consciousness. When the cloud of anger comes around you, just watch it, AND remain alert so that you don't get identified. The whole thing is how not to become identified with the problem. Once you have learnt it... and then there is no question of'so many problems' -- because the key, the same key will open all the locks. It is so with anger, it is so with greed, it is so with sex: it is so with everything else that the mind is capable of.
The East says: Just remain unidentified. Remember -- that's what Gurdjieff means when he says'self-remembering'. Remember that you are a witness! Be mindful! -- that's what Buddha says. Be alert that a cloud is passing by! Maybe the cloud comes from the past, but that is meaningless. It must have a certain past, it cannot come just out of the blue; it must be coming from a certain sequence of events -- but that is irrelevant. Why be bothered about it? RIGHT NOW, this very moment, you can become detached from it, you can cut yourself away from it. The bridge can be broken right now -- and it can be broken ONLY in the now.
Going into the past won't help. Thirty years before, the anger arose and you got identified with it that day. Now you cannot get unidentified from that past; it is no more there. But you can get unidentified this moment, this very moment. And then the WHOLE series of angers of your past is no more part of you.

THE QUESTION IS RELEVANT. Jayananda has asked:" You spoke in several recent discourses on the no-problem, the non-existence of our problems. Having been brought up in a repressive Catholic family..."
You can, right now, become a non-Catholic. NOW! I say. You will not have to go back and undo whatsoever your parents and your society and the priest and the church have done. That will be a sheer wastage of precious present time. In the first place it has destroyed many years; now, again, it will be destroying your present moments. You can simply drop out of it, just as a snake slips out of the old skin.
"Having been brought up in a repressive Catholic family, and having spent twenty-one years in an equally crazy educational system -- are you saying that all the coats of armour, all the conditionings and all the repressions do not exist...?"
No, they exist. But they exist either in the body or in the brain; they don't exist in your consciousness, because the consciousness cannot be conditioned. Consciousness REMAINS free! Freedom is its innermost quality, freedom is its nature. In fact, even asking it, you are showing that freedom.
When you say "twenty-one years in a crazy educational system"; when you say "having been brought up in a repressive Catholic family" -- in THIS moment you are not identified. You can look: so many years of Catholic repression, so many years of a certain education. In this moment when you are looking at it, this consciousness is no longer Catholic; otherwise, who will be aware? If you had really BECOME Catholic, then who would be aware? Then there would be no possibility of becoming aware.
If you can say "twenty-one years in an equally crazy educational system," one thing is certain: you are not yet crazy. The system has failed; it didn't work. Jayananda, you are not crazy, hence you can see the whole system as crazy. A madman cannot see that he is mad. Only a sane person can see that this is madness. To see madness as madness, sanity is needed. Those twenty-one years of crazy system have failed; all that repressive conditioning has failed. It CANNOT really succeed. It succeeds only in the proportion that you get identified with it. Any moment you can stand aloof... it is there, I am not saying it is not there: but it is no more part of your consciousness.
This is the beauty of consciousness: consciousness can slip out of anything. There is no barrier to it, no boundary to it. Just a moment before you were an Englishman -- understanding the nonsense of nationalism, a second later you are no longer an Englishman. I am not saying that your white skin will change; it will remain white -- but you are no more identified with the whiteness; you are no more against the black. You see the stupidity of it. I am not saying that just by seeing that you are no more an Englishman you will forget the English language, no. It will still be there in your memory, but your consciousness has slipped out, your consciousness is standing on a hillock looking at the valley. Now, the Englishman is dead in the valley and you are standing on the hills, far away, unattached, untouched.
The whole Eastern methodology can be reduced to one word: witnessing. And the whole Western methodology can be be Reduced to one thing: analyzing. Analyzing, you go round and round. Witnessing, you simply get out of the circle.
Analysis is a vicious circle. If you REALLY go into analysis, you will be simply puzzled -- how is it possible? If, for example, you try to go into the past, where will you end? Where exactly? If you go into the past, where did your sexuality start? When you were fourteen years of age? But then it came out of the blue? It must have been getting ready in the body. So when? When you were born? But then when you were in the mother's womb, wasn't it getting ready? Then when? The moment you were conceived? But before that? Half of your sexuality was mature in your mother's egg and half of the sexuality was maturing in your father's sperm. Now go on..where will you end? You will have to go to Adam and Eve. And even then it does not end: you will have to go to Father God Himself. Why in the first place did He create Adam?...
Analysis will always remain half, so analysis never helps anybody really. It cannot help. It makes you a little more adjusted to your reality, that's all. It is a sort of adjustment. It helps you to attain a little bit of understanding about your problems, their genesis, how they have arisen. And that little intellectual understanding helps you to adjust to the society better, but you remain the same person. There is no transformation through it, there is no radical change through it.
Witnessing is a revolution. It is a radical change -- from the VERY roots! It brings a totally new man into existence, because it takes your consciousness out of all the conditionings. Conditionings are there in the body and in the mind, but consciousness remains unconditioned. It is pure, always pure. It is virgin. Its virginity cannot be violated.
The Eastern approach is to make you mindful of this virgin consciousness, of this purity, of this innocence. That's what Saraha is saying to the king again and again. Our emphasis is on the sky and the Western emphasis is on the clouds. Clouds have a genesis; if you find out from where they come, you will have to go to the ocean, then to the sunrays and the evaporation of the water and the clouds forming... and you can go on, but it will be moving in a circle. The clouds form, then again they come, fall in love with the trees, start pouring again into the earth, become rivers, go to the ocean, start evaporating, rising again on sunrays, become clouds, again fall on the earth.... It goes on and on, round and round and round. It is a wheel. From where will you be out? One thing will lead to another and you will be in the wheel.
The sky has no genesis. The sky is uncreated; it is not produced by anything. In fact, for anything to be, a sky is needed as a must, a priori; it has to exist before anything else can exist. You can ask the Christian theologian -- he says "God created the world." Ask him whether before He created the world there was any sky or not. If there was no sky, where did God used to exist? He must have needed space. If there was no space, where did He create the world? where did He put the world? Space is a must... even for God to exist. You cannot say "God created space." That would be absurd, because then He would not have any space to exist. Space must precede God.
Sky has always been there. The Eastern approach is to become mindful of the sky. The Western approach makes you more and more alert to the clouds, and helps you a little, but it doesn't make you aware of your innermost core. Circumference -- yes, you become a little more aware of the circumference, but not aware of the center. And the circumference is a cyclone. You have to find the center of the cyclone. And that happens only through witnessing.
Witnessing will not change your conditioning. Witnessing will not change your body musculature. But witnessing will simply give you an experience that you are beyond all musculature, all conditioning. In that moment of beyondness, in that moment of transcendence, no problem exists -- not for you.
And now it is up to you. The body will still carry the musculature and the mind will still carry the conditioning -- now it is up to you: if sometimes you are hankering for the problem, you can get into the mindbody and have the problem and enjoy it. If you don't want to have it, you can remain out. The problem will remain as an imprint in the bodymind phenomenon, but you will be aloof and away from it.
That's how a Buddha functions. You also use memory; a Buddha also uses memory -- but he is not identified with it. He uses memory as a mechanism. For example, I am using language. When I have to use language, I use the mind and all the imprints, but continuously I am not the mind -- that awareness is there. So I remain the boss, the mind remains a servant. When the mind is called, it comes; its utility is there -- but it cannot dominate.
So your question is right: problems WILL exist, but they will exist only in the seed form in the body and the mind. How can you change your past? You have been a Catholic in the past; if for forty years you have been a Catholic, how can you change those forty years and NOT be a Catholic? No. Those forty years will remain as a period of being Catholic. No -- but you can slip out of it. Now you know that that was just identification. Those forty years cannot be destroyed, and there is no need to destroy them. If you are the master of the house, there is no need. You can use even those forty years in a certain way, in a creative way. Even that crazy education can be used in a creative way.
"What about all the imprints left on the brain, on the musculature of the body?"
They will be there, but as a seed: potentially there. If you feel too lonely and you want problems, you can have them. If you feel too miserable without misery, you can have them. They will remain always available, but there is no need to have them, there is no necessity to have them. It will be your choice.
The future humanity will have to decide whether it has to go on the path of analysis or it has to change to the path of witnessing. I use both methods. I use analysis, particularly for seekers who come from the West -- I put them in the groups. Those groups are analytical, those groups are by-products of psychoanalysis. They have grown: Freud will not be able to recognize encounter if he comes; or primal therapy will be difficult for him to recognize -- what is happening? Have all these people gone mad? But they are offshoots of HIS work; he was the pioneer; without him there would be no primal therapy. He started the whole game.
When Western people come to me, I put them into the groups. That is good for them. They should start with what is easier for them. Then by and by, slowly I change. First they go into cathartic groups like encounter, primal therapy, and then I start putting them into intensive enlightenment, then vipassana. Vipassana is a witnessing. From encounter to vipassana there is a great synthesis. When you move from encounter to vipassana, you are moving from West to East.

 

Next: Chapter 6: I am a destroyer, Question 3

 

Energy Enhancement                 Enlightened Texts                 Tantra                 The Tantra Vision, Vol. 1

 

Chapter 6

 

 

 

 
ENERGY ENHANCEMENT
TESTIMONIALS
EE LEVEL1   EE LEVEL2
EE LEVEL3   EE LEVEL4   EE FAQS
NEWSLETTER SIGN UP
NAME:
EMAIL:

Google
Search energyenhancement.org Search web