Chapter-4

THE YOGA SUTRAS OF PATANJALI

Beyond Mind To Awareness

First Question

Energy Enhancement Enlightened Texts Yoga Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

The first question:

Question 1

YOU SAID THAT THERE ARE ONLY TWO ALTERNATIVES FOR MEN, EITHER MADNESS OR MEDITATION, BUT MILLIONS OF PEOPLE ON THE EARTH HAVE NOT REACHED TO EITHER OF THE TWO. DO YOU THINK THEY WILL?

They have reached! They have not reached to meditation, but they have reached to madness! And the difference between the mad who are in the madhouses and the mad who are outside is only of degrees. There is no qualitative difference, the difference is only of quantity. You may be less mad, they may be more mad, but man as he is, is mad.

Why I call man as he is, mad? Madness means many things. One, you are not centered. If you are not centered you will be insane. Not centered, many voices in you -- you are many, you are a multitude. And no one is a master in the house, and every servant of the house claims to be the master. There is confusion, conflict, and a continuous struggle. You are in a continuous civil war. If this civil war is not going on, then you will be in meditation. It continues day and night, twenty-four hours. Write down whatsoever goes on in your mind for a few minutes, and be honest. Write down exactly whatsoever goes on, and you yourself will feel that this is mad.

I have a particular technique I use with many persons. I say to them that, sit in a closed room and then start talking loudly, whatsoever comes in the mind. Talk it loudly so that you can listen. Just fifteen minutes of talking, and you will feel you are listening to a madman. Absurd, inconsistent, unrelated fragments floating in the mind. And that is your mind! So you may be ninety-nine percent mad and someone has crossed the boundary, he has gone beyond one hundred percent. Those who have gone beyond the hundred percent we put into madhouses. We cannot put you into madhouses because there are not so many madhouses. And there cannot be -- then the whole earth has to be a madhouse.

Kahlil Gibran writes a small anecdote. He says one of his friends became mad, so he was put in a madhouse. Then just out of love, compassion, he went to see him, to visit him. He was sitting under a tree in the garden of the madhouse, surrounded by a very big wall. Kahlil Gibran went there, sat by the side on the bench with his friend and asked him, "Do you ever think about why you are here?" The madman laughed, and he said, "I am here because I wanted to leave that big madhouse outside. And I am at peace here. In this madhouse -- you call it madhouse -- no one is mad."

Mad people cannot think that they are mad; that is one of the basic characteristics of madness. If you are mad, you cannot think that you are mad. If you can think you are mad, there is possibility. If you can think and conceive that you are mad, you are still a little sane. The madness has not occurred in its totality. So this is the paradox: those who are really sane, they know that they are mad, and those who are completely mad, they cannot think that they are mad.

You never think that you are mad. That is part of madness. You are not centered, you cannot be sane. Your sanity is just superficial, arranged. Just on the surface you appear to be sane. That's why, continuously, you have to deceive the world around you. You have to hide much; you have to prevent much. You don't allow everything to come out. You are suppressive. You may be thinking something else, but you will say something else. You are pretending, and because of this pretension you can have the minimum superficial sanity around you; inside you are boiling.

Sometimes there are eruptions. In anger you erupt, and the madness that you have been hiding comes out. It breaks all your adjustments. So psychologists say anger is a temporary madness. You will again regain balance; you will again hide your reality; you will again polish your surface; you will again become sane. And you will say that "It was wrong. I did it in spite of me. I never meant it, so forgive me." But you meant it! That was more real. This asking for forgiveness is just a pretension. Again you are maintaining your surface, your mask.

A sane man has no mask. His face is original; whatsoever he is, he is. A madman has to change continuously his faces. Every moment he has to use a different mask for a different situation, for different relationships. Just watch yourself changing your faces. When you come to your wife you have a different face; when you go to your beloved, your mistress, you have totally a different face.

When you talk to your servant you have a different mask, and when you talk to your master, a totally different face. It may be that your servant is standing on your right and your boss is standing on your left then you have two faces simultaneously. On the left you have a different face; on the right you have a different face, because to the servant you cannot show the same face. You need not. You are the boss there, so one side of the face will be the boss. You cannot show that face to your boss you are a servant there; your other side will show a servile attitude.

This is continuously going on. You are not watching, that's why you are not aware. If you watch, you will become aware you are mad. You don't have any face. The original face has been lost. To regain the original face is what meditation means.

So Zen Masters say, "Go and find out your original face -- the face you had before you were born, the face you will have when you have died." Between birth and death you have false faces. You continuously go on deceiving-and not only others: when you stand before a mirror you deceive yourself. You never see in the mirror your real face. You don't have that much courage to face yourself. That face in the mirror is also false. You create it, you enjoy it; it is a painted mask.

We are not deceiving others only, we are deceiving ourselves also. Really, we cannot deceive others if we have not deceived ourselves already. So we have to believe in our own lies, only then can we make others to believe. If you don't believe in your lies, nobody else is going to be deceived.

And this whole nuisance that you call your life leads nowhere. It is a mad affair. You work too much. You overwork; you walk and run. And the whole life you struggle and you reach nowhere. You don't know from where you are coming, you don't know to where you are moving, to where you are going. If you meet a man on the road and you ask him, "From where are you coming, sir?" and he says, "I don't know," and you ask him, "Where are you going" and he says, "I don't know," and still he says, "Don't prevent me, I am in a hurry," so what you will think about him? You will think he is mad.

If you don't know from where you are coming and where you are going, then what is the hurry? But this is the situation of everybody, and everybody is on the road. Life is a road; you are always in the middle. And you don't know from where you have come; you don't know where you are going. You have no knowledge of the source, no knowledge of the goal, but in much hurry, making every effort to reach nowhere.

What type of sanity is this? And out of this whole struggle, not even glimpses of happiness come to you -- not even glimpses. You simply hope someday, somewhere tomorrow, day after tomorrow, or after death, in some afterlife -- happiness is waiting for you. This is just a trick, just to postpone, just not to feel too much miserable right now.

You don't have even glimpses of bliss. What type of sanity is this? Continuous misery -- and, over and above, that misery is not created by anybody else. You create your suffering. What type of sanity is this? You create your suffering continuously! I call it madness.

Sanity will be this: you will become aware that you are not centered. So the first thing to be done is to be centered, to get centered, to have a center within yourself from where you can lead your life, you can discipline your life, to have a master within you from where you can direct, you can move. The first thing is to be crystallized, and then the second thing will be not to create suffering for yourself. Drop all that creates suffering -- all those motives, desires, hopes which create suffering.

But you are not aware. You simply go on doing it; you don't see that you create it. Whatsoever you do, you are sowing some seeds. Then trees will follow, and whatsoever you have sown you will crop it. And whenever you crop anything, there is suffering, but you never look that these seeds were sown by you. Whenever suffering happens to you, you think it is coming from somewhere else, you think it is some accident or some evil forces are working against you.

So you have invented the devil. The devil is just a scapegoat -- you are the devil. You create your suffering. But whenever you suffer, you simply throw it on the devil, the devil is doing something. Then you are at ease. Then you never become aware of your own foolish pattern of life, stupid pattern of life.

Or you call it a fate, or you say "God is testing me." But you go on avoiding the basic fact that you are the sole cause of whatsoever happens to you. And nothing is accidental. Everything has a causal link, and you are the cause.

For example, you fall in love. Love gives you a feeling, a feeling that bliss is somewhere nearby. You feel for the first time that you are welcomed by someone, at least one person welcomes you. You start flowering. Even one person welcoming you, waiting for you, loving you, caring for you, you start flowering. Just in the beginning, and then immediately your wrong patterns start working-you immediately want to possess the beloved, the loved one.

And possession is killing. The moment you possess the lover you have killed. Then you suffer. Then you weep and cry and then you think that the lover is wrong, the fate is wrong, "The destiny is not in my favor." But you don't know you have poisoned love through possession, through possessiveness.

But every lover is doing that and every lover suffers. Love which can give you the deepest blessings becomes the deepest misery. So old cultures, particularly in India in the old days, they completely destroyed the phenomenon of love. They had arranged marriages for children -- no possibility of falling in love, because love leads to misery. This was such a known phenomenon -- that if you allow love, then love leads to misery -- so it is better not to have the possibility. Let the children, small children, be married. Before they can fall in love, let them be married. They will never know what love is, and then they will not be in misery.

But love never creates misery. It is you who poison it. Love is always joy, love is always celebration. Love is the deepest ecstasy that nature allows you. But you destroy it. So just not to fall into misery, in India and in other old, ancient countries, the possibility of love was completely closed. So you will not fall in misery, but then you have also missed the only ecstasy that nature allows. So a mediocre life will be there. No misery, no happiness, just a pulling on anyhow. This is what marriage has been in the past.

Now America is trying, West is trying, to revive love. But much misery is coming through that, and sooner or later western countries will have to decide for child marriage again. Few psychologists have already proposed that child marriage has to be brought back because love is creating so much misery. But I again say it is not love. Love cannot create misery. It is you, your pattern of madness, which creates misery. And not only in love, everywhere. Everywhere you are bound to bring your mind.

Many people come to me. For example, they start meditating. In the beginning there are sudden flashes, but only in the beginning. Once they have known certain experiences, once they have known certain glimpses, everything stops. And they come weeping and crying to me, and they say, "What is happening? Something was going to happen, something was happening, now everything has stopped. We are trying our best, but nothing, nothing comes out of it."

I tell them, "For the first time it happened because you were not expecting. Now you are expecting, so the whole situation has changed When for the first time you had that feeling of weightlessness, feeling of being filled by something unknown, feeling of being carried from your dead life, feeling of ecstatic moments, but you were not expecting it, you had never known such moments. For the first time they were falling on you. Unaware you were, unexpecting. That was the situation.

"Now you are changing the situation. Now every day you sit for meditation, you are expecting. Now you are cunning, clever, calculating. When for the first time you had the glimpse, you were innocent, just like a child. You were playing with meditation, but there was no expectation. Then it happened. It will happen again, but then you will have again to be innocent.

"Now your mind is bringing you misery, and if you go on insisting that 'I must have the experience again and again', you will lose it forever. Unless you forget it completely, it may take years. Unless you become completely inattentive that somewhere in the past such a happening was there, then the possibility will again be open to you."

This I call madness. You destroy everything. Whatsoever comes in your hand, you immediately destroy it. And remember, life gives you many gifts, unasked. You have never asked life, life gives you many gifts. But you destroy every gift, and every gift can become greater and greater. It can grow because life never gives you anything dead. If love has been given to you, it can grow. It can grow to unknown dimensions, but the very first moment you destroy it.

If meditation has happened to you, just feel thankful to the divine and forget it. Just feel grateful, and remember well that you don't have any capacity to have it, you are not in any way authorized to have it; it has been a gift. It has been an overflowing of the divine. Forget it. Don't expect it; don't demand it. It will come next day again-deeper, higher, greater. It will go on expanding, but every day drop it from the mind.

There is no end to its possibilities. It will become infinite; the whole cosmos will become ecstatic for you. But your mind has to be dropped. Your mind is the madness. So when I say there are only two alternatives madness and meditation, I mean mind and meditation. If you remain confined in the mind, you will remain mad. Unless you transcend the mind, you cannot transcend madness. At the most you can be a functioning member of the society, that's all. And you can be a functioning member of the society because the whole society is just like you. Everybody is mad, so madness is the rule.

Become aware, and don't think that others are mad. Feel it deeply that you are mad and something has to be done. Immediately! It is an emergency! Don't postpone it because there may come a moment when you cannot do anything. You may go so much mad that you cannot do anything.

Right now you can do something. You are still within limits. Something can be done; some efforts can be made; the pattern can be changed. But a moment can come when you cannot do anything, when you have become completely shattered and you have lost even the consciousness.

If you can feel that you are mad, this is a very hopeful sign. It shows you can become alert towards your own reality. The door is there; you can become really sane. At least this much sanity is there -- that you can understand.