Undisturbed in sorrow, his mind; in pleasures, free of longing।
Bereft of attachment, fear, and anger—he is called a sage of steady wisdom।। 56।।
Geeta Darshan #16
Available in:
Read in Original Hindi (मूल हिन्दी)
Sutra (Original)
दुःखेष्वनुद्विग्नमनाः सुखेषु विगतस्पृहः।
वीतरागभयक्रोधः स्थितधीर्मुनिरुच्यते।। 56।।
वीतरागभयक्रोधः स्थितधीर्मुनिरुच्यते।। 56।।
Transliteration:
duḥkheṣvanudvignamanāḥ sukheṣu vigataspṛhaḥ|
vītarāgabhayakrodhaḥ sthitadhīrmunirucyate|| 56||
duḥkheṣvanudvignamanāḥ sukheṣu vigataspṛhaḥ|
vītarāgabhayakrodhaḥ sthitadhīrmunirucyate|| 56||
Translation (Meaning)
Questions in this Discourse
Osho, while describing the qualities of the sthitaprajna you have clarified that his sensitivity is not blunted. You say he remains without craving in pleasure and unagitated in pain. There seems to be a hurdle here. If he does not take pleasure as pleasure and pain as pain, how can we call his sensitivity human? Is being sthitaprajna a superhuman phenomenon?
If one’s wisdom has awakened—become steady and unshakable—will he not know pain?
A new word has appeared here which we had not discussed yet: we spoke of pleasure and of pain, but not of suffering. It is necessary to understand the distance between these.
Suffering is a fact; grief is an interpretation. If a thorn pierces the foot, the pricking is a fact; a sthitaprajna feels it as well. He has not died that the prick would go unnoticed. He will know it—perhaps more than you do—because his awareness is more quiet, more sensitive. His capacity to feel is deeper, denser. Sensitivity depends on attention. It may be that you have never come to know a thorn’s prick in the way he will, because knowing depends on the capacity for attention.
A young man is playing hockey. He’s hit on the toe; the nail splits, blood flows, and he does not know. Spectators see the trail of drops. When the match ends, he clutches his foot and asks, “When did this happen? I didn’t notice!” At the moment of injury his attention was elsewhere—occupied, engaged in the game. Without attention, sensation does not register. Only when the game ends and attention returns, can the toe be noticed, the bleeding, the pain.
The sthitaprajna’s awareness remains unoccupied. In a mind utterly still, consciousness is not entangled anywhere; it abides in itself. So if a thorn pierces his foot, he will feel it many times more clearly than we do. Pain is a fact; he will know there is pain in the foot. But he won’t spin the interpretation, “My pain,” the identification that becomes grief. The pain in the foot is an event—outside, at a distance, separate.
Mark this well: between us and pain there is always a distance; between us and grief there is none. When we identify with pain—when pain becomes “I”—pain turns into grief. He will say, “There is a thorn in the foot, an injury in the foot.” He will act to remove the thorn, tend the foot—but without agitation.
And here’s the paradox: agitation never reduces pain. The more agitated you are, the less capable you are of doing what helps. The more unagitated you are, the quicker and more appropriate your response.
I once stayed in a village. A house next door caught fire on the second floor; the whole roof was sheets of tin. Beedi leaves had ignited. The owner became so frantic that he climbed to the third floor where the water tank was and began flinging buckets from above. The red-hot sheets turned the water to scalding rain, burning the people below who were rescuing children and bringing out belongings. Whoever it hit screamed and fled. No one dared go in. People shouted up, “Stop! Or your children will die inside!” But the man, possessed by panic, kept shouting “Save me! Fire!” and kept throwing water. That man—not the fire—burned the house down. A child died, not from the fire but from his water.
An agitated mind becomes self-destructive. An unagitated mind does what is appropriate. When there is only the fact of pain, not the interpretation of grief, you are not upset—you are simply filled with the pure awareness of pain. Grief is a mental interpretation; pain is a fact. Likewise, the absence of pain is a fact; what we call pleasure is a mental interpretation.
The sthitaprajna knows both pain and non-pain well. Lay him on thorns and he will know the thorns; seat him on a cushion and he will know the cushion. But he does not cling to the cushion, does not go mad upon it, does not become one with it. The cushion does not become “pleasure,” an interpretation; it remains a physical fact. Thorns too remain physical facts.
In experience—in sheer sensing—the man of steady wisdom is fully sensitive to facts. But he does not weave the interpretations we do. Death will come to him as well; we grieve, he does not. He sees death as a fact that comes. Old age comes to him; he sees it as a fact of life. The body grows frail, but he does not feel, “I am becoming old”—only that the body is. We, however, insert our “I” into every fact. We turn every fact into an interpretation. The sthitaprajna does not interpret: he calls A “A,” B “B.” He never sticks himself to any of it—and because he does not stick, he can always stand outside and laugh.
I have heard of Epictetus in Greece—a man one could call “Krishna-samadhi-sth.” He used to say, “Even if you kill me, I shall keep laughing; even if you cut me to pieces, I shall keep laughing.” The emperor had him brought in and said, “Enough of words. We believe deeds.” He had wrestlers chain Epictetus and ordered them to break his leg. As they began to twist it, Epictetus said, “Good, a little more. As you are doing it, it only hurts; it won’t break. A bit more—and it will snap!” The emperor said, “Are you mad—you’re teaching them how to break your own leg!” Epictetus replied, “I know more precisely than they do—I’m inside. I can feel the pain rising, rising; now we are at the point where the bone will break. But it’s my leg you’re breaking, isn’t it? If you don’t, tomorrow death will break it anyway. And you are only breaking one; death breaks wholesale, everything. One leg today—one remains. Inside I tell myself, ‘Look, son, only one is breaking; the other is still fine—let this one break properly.’ And the longer it takes to break, the longer the pain; neither your experiment nor mine will be fulfilled. Today you’ve given me the opportunity—we shall both see whether pain becomes grief or not.”
Pain/non-pain are one thing; pleasure/grief quite another. Pleasure and grief are human interpretations. So when you ask, “Does such a man become superhuman?”—certainly. Not superhuman in the sense that thorns won’t prick him, or that illness won’t hurt, or that he won’t grow old, or that death won’t come. Superhuman in this sense: he will not indulge in the habit of interpretation that humans cling to. In that sense he is supra-human, a superman.
“Yaḥ sarvatrānabhisnehas tattat prāpya śubhāśubham,
nābhinandati na dveṣṭi tasya prajñā pratiṣṭhitā.” 57
“Yadā saṁharate cāyaṁ kūrmo’ṅgānīva sarvaśaḥ,
indriyāṇīndriyārthebhyas tasya prajñā pratiṣṭhitā.” 58
He whose attachment is gone everywhere, who upon meeting auspicious or inauspicious circumstances neither rejoices nor despairs—his wisdom is established. And, like a tortoise drawing in its limbs, when the yogi, steadfast in knowledge, withdraws his senses from their objects, then his wisdom becomes established.
No elation in pleasure, no dejection in pain; no difference between favorable and unfavorable. But when does this fruit ripen? Krishna says: just as a tortoise knows how to draw in its limbs at will, so the samadhi-immersed one knows how to draw back his senses from the objects.
A delicate point. In yoga there are two aspects of the senses. One is what we see outwardly—the body of the sense. The other is not visible—the life or soul of the sense, its inner urge.
Take the eye. The physician can dissect it, describe every fiber. That is only the body of the eye, not the sense itself. The real sense is behind it: the urge to see, the relish for seeing. No surgeon can find that by cutting.
Every sense has a body and a life. Behind seeing, there is desire to see; behind tasting, a craving for taste. That craving is the sense’s inner life.
To understand Krishna, we must grasp these two halves. Otherwise one might start plucking out eyes and cutting off ears! And don’t assume no one has ever done such things. Many have. In the Middle Ages in Europe there was a Christian sect that had the genitals of thousands removed; women had their breasts cut off, men their genitals.
But does blinding the eyes destroy the desire to see? Does cutting off the genitals end lust? If that were so, all old people would be beyond lust!
No: cutting a sense only removes the channel of expression. The craving remains—and, denied expression, becomes more insane, more ghostlike. The body is gone; the obsession roams bodiless.
When Krishna gives the tortoise example, don’t stretch it too far. No example is complete; examples only point—just an indication. Like the tortoise retracting limbs, the sthitaprajna draws in the inner taste-senses—the craving. But shrinking the outer instrument is meaningless; that is death. And cutting the instrument does not cut the craving. If the inner craving is dissolved, the sense remains a pure instrument—for functioning, not for passion.
Then the eye sees without the lust to see. It simply registers what is before it; it does not ache for something to see. The tongue helps digest what is there; it does not drool for what is not there. The ear hears what comes; it does not pant to hear. The senses become mere instruments of transaction.
When the senses are instruments of behavior, they simply collect data from outside—facts, nothing else. When they are instruments of craving, they carry inner urges outward to attach them to objects.
These are two entirely different functions. The eye’s job is to report: a tree ahead, a stone ahead. But when the eye is obsessed by desire, it sees what it wants to see.
Tulsidas ran to find his wife. Then his eyes were not functional; he took a snake for a rope. The eye failed its function because desire overrode it: it wanted a rope, so it saw a rope—even in a snake. He crossed a river using a corpse as a log. Desire had blinded the senses.
So when Krishna says the sthitaprajna withdraws his senses like a tortoise, it does not mean he blinds his eyes or closes them forever. It means: he uses the eyes only to see, and only what is—ears only to hear what is—hands only to touch what is. He does not project craving onto objects; he does not build dream-palaces upon them.
I have heard the king of Majnun’s town called him in and said, “You are mad. Laila is an ordinary girl. I’ll summon twelve of the city’s most beautiful women; choose any one.” Majnun laughed: “Where is Laila, and where are these? None can sit at her feet!” The king said, “Whose mind is sound—yours or mine?” Majnun replied, “To see Laila’s beauty, one needs Majnun’s eyes.” We all have the same physical eye; what differs is the eye obsessed by craving—it sees only what craving wants to show.
It is the inner sense that is to be withdrawn—the inner instrument.
Understand this gap well. When the hand touches the earth, it only touches; a physical event, no craving. But when I love someone and touch their hand, is it only a physical event? No; then the hand also dreams, spins poetry. That inner hand—the inner sense behind the touch—is what Krishna speaks of drawing back, as the tortoise does with the outer limbs.
We are not to shrink the outer senses. They are great gifts—they are the doors through which the vast world enters us: light, sky, flowers, human beauty. The senses are doors. They remain wholesome so long as only the outer comes in through them. When the mind rushes out through these doors, assails things, imposes demands and fantasies, we get caught in a web—not of outer senses, but of inner senses.
How to withdraw these inner senses? Withdrawing the outer is easy; plucking out eyes is easy. But giving up the relish for seeing—hard! Close the eyes at night and dreams do not stop. Pluck out the eyes and dreams will occupy twenty-four hours.
Much research has been done on dreams. When you dream, even closed eyes move rapidly—REM. Machines can graph when and how often you dream; even the kinds of dreams are being inferred. Sexual dreams? The genitals respond as well; those too can be graphed. There is no external object; all senses are closed. Who moves inside? The inner senses. Their inner movement even affects the outer. Cut the body to pieces, it won’t change; the inner smoke will keep swirling. Often “good” people have everything swirling inside; what “bad” people do outside, “good” people do within. In religion, there is no difference.
So how to withdraw the inner senses? A small sutra—then we’ll take the next verse. Buddha was once speaking. A man in front kept twitching his big toe. Buddha stopped and asked, “Brother, why is your toe moving?” The man started, as did the audience: what connection! Buddha said, “Why is it moving?” Instantly the toe stopped. The man said, “You notice such odd things! Forget it.” Buddha said, “No. You ask me questions; today I ask one—answer.” The man said, “The truth is, I didn’t know it was moving; and as soon as I knew, it stopped.” Buddha said: inner vibrations stop the moment they are seen. They rely on unawareness.
So you don’t have to forcibly shrink the inner senses; simple awareness shrinks them. As soon as you see, “A wave of lust has arisen,” do nothing—just watch. Close the eyes, watch it move toward the genital centers—just watch. Two seconds—and suddenly it contracts. Anger arises—watch; it returns. A craving to see someone stirs—watch the inner sense reaching out for the outer—watch, and it withdraws.
The inner senses are so shy they cannot bear even a little light. They need the medium of unconsciousness—stupor. One who becomes aware of them finds they shrink of themselves. The outer senses remain available; the inner senses recede. This is the samadhi-like state.
“Viṣayā vinivartante nirāhārasya dehinaḥ,
rasavarjaṁ raso’py asya paraṁ dṛṣṭvā nivartate.” 59
For the body-identified ascetic who restrains the senses, only the objects fall away; the relish remains. But for the sthitaprajna, upon seeing the supreme, even the relish dissolves.
A body-identified ascetic! There are two kinds of body-identification: the hedonist’s and the ascetic’s. Both are body-centric. The hedonist believes: through the body I will reach pleasure. The renouncer believes: through the body I will be free of objects. Both are body-oriented. One seeks to gratify the senses; the other to fight them. Both worship the body.
Someone asked me, “Why is there no lasting sect of Charvaka? No scriptures, temples?” I said, sects form in minorities; the majority needs none. The world is Charvaka at heart. “Charvaka” means charu-vak—pleasing speech; “Lokayata”—what the people accept. And what does he say? All pleasures are sensory. If pleasure is sought, it comes only through the senses. True, pain also comes via the senses. But no one discards wheat for chaff or flowers for thorns. The intelligent one reduces pain and increases pleasure. Have you ever doubted that all pleasures you know are sensory? Taste, music, beauty, fragrance—all through the senses. Thus we don’t know the soul; the one whose entire wealth is sense-experience cannot know what is beyond the body. This is the hedonist’s position.
Sometimes, sated and bored by indulgence—as one tires of everything, as one would even in heaven—he turns against the senses, and becomes a body-identified renouncer. He begins torturing the very senses through which he sought pleasure, believing the opposite will bring bliss. But he still takes the body as basis.
Krishna says: such a person may drop objects, but not the relish (rasa). Blind the eyes, and visible objects disappear; deafen the ears, and the veena is gone. But does the relish vanish? Objects are outside; relish is inside; senses are the bridges between. Break the bridge and you sever their connection, but the relish remains, impotent and maddened—creating imaginary objects when real ones are denied. Fast all day and you feast in dreams at night. The inner rasa manufactures its own objects. It becomes auto-erotic—its own relish its own object—neurotic.
Therefore Krishna says: the renouncer loses objects, not relish. And the real issue is not objects but relish. The issue is not that there is a mansion outside, but that within me is the longing to own one; not the flower, but the violence in my hand that would pluck it. If there is no inner violence, I pass by; flowers do not call.
Which is valuable—the object or the relish? If the object, then austerity is material, physical. If relish, then austerity is psychological, inner. Krishna is a deep psychologist; he mocks the merely physical ascetic. He calls him “body-identified”—a cutting critique. Labor he does; direction he lacks. With objects dropped and rasas intact, one breeds psychosis, not liberation.
The samadhi-immersed drops the rasas. Then objects cease to be “objects of desire” and remain just things—because there is no connection from within. He is eager for the dissolution of relish, not for the abandonment of objects. Renunciation happens on its own.
This must be remembered, for it is the chief allegation against Krishna. Seeing him dance in groves, the body-identified ascetic cannot bear it. He would run to file a police complaint: “What is this?” He cannot conceive that if inner rasas have withdrawn, no bridges to objects remain. Then there is neither running toward nor away. Hence Krishna’s life has astonishing episodes. He danced in Vrindavan, then left—and never looked back. If his mind were passion-ridden, leaving would be difficult; memories would torment; Vrindavan would haunt. But for Krishna, it is as if it fell off the map. Those who loved him suffered, because rasa remained in them; their minds tried to build bridges between Vrindavan and Dwaraka. But for Krishna—where he is, he is wholly. He gives total attention to the near; it creates illusions in the other, who thinks, “He gave me so much attention, then forgot me—faithless!” She does not know that when Krishna is gone, he is gone. No bridge forms within; there is no rasa.
Moreover, the more passion-ridden a person is, the less he suffers near the object, the more he suffers when far. What we love we forget when it is present; we remember when it is absent. Krishna is the opposite: what is present, he holds fully in awareness. That is why one feels so deeply seen—and later abandoned. He has no inner bridges, no relish clinging.
“Yatato hy api kaunteya puruṣasya vipaścitaḥ,
indriyāṇi pramāthīni haranti prasabhaṁ manaḥ.” 60
“Tāni sarvāṇi saṁyamya yukta āsīta mat-paraḥ,
vaśe hi yasya indriyāṇi tasya prajñā pratiṣṭhitā.” 61
O Kaunteya, even the striving, insightful seeker’s mind is seized and dragged by the turbulent senses. Therefore, restraining all the senses, abide steadfast with your mind in me; for he whose senses are under control—his wisdom is established.
A warning: the senses drag one toward objects. We must understand this more deeply. Do the senses have power independent of the self? No. But they can still pull—because they are mechanical habits. Across lifetimes you have conditioned them. When you change, they don’t know; they repeat their programming.
A gramophone spins a record; you no longer want to hear it, but it keeps singing—till you turn it off. You can switch it off because you never mistook the machine for yourself. But you do take your senses to be yourself; so when they run, you run behind them. You don’t turn them off as mechanics.
A man has a mechanical habit of smoking. He pledges to stop. But his senses don’t know; for thirty, forty years the built-in process has been: every half hour, a cigarette. The bell rings from many parts of the body: lips ache to hold, lungs to draw, blood thirsts for nicotine, the nose to exhale, the mind to occupy itself—complex, involving the whole body. The conscious decision is a minute old; the habit is decades deep in the unconscious.
The mind cannot readily change; if it did, life would be chaos. What you held for forty years cannot be dropped in a second; the mind is orthodox to preserve continuity. At peaks of resolve, you think nothing can stop you; an hour later, in a trough, you feel helpless. As you argue within, the hands light the cigarette. Then you wake and say, “What happened?” You conclude, “It’s impossible.” Thus, Krishna says, the senses drag down the seeker—really, the seeker’s own conditioning.
Samskara is powerful. We live by conditioning, not by consciousness. So if a seeker brashly confronts the senses, he will be thrown down again and again. What to do? As long as you only rely on quick decisions against forty years of habit, you will fail. The senses need to be un-conditioned—de-programmed. Fortunately, the senses don’t care whether you smoke or chant; they can be re-habituated either way.
People who pray daily feel uneasy if they miss a day. Don’t mistake this for bliss in prayer; often it is merely habit’s protest—the same as with cigarettes.
Unconditioning requires that you unwind what you wound. For this Krishna gives a remarkable suggestion: the wise do not take all the burden upon themselves. In truth, they take none; they leave it to the divine. They receive the assaults of old habits as the fruit of past actions and bear them in witnessing.
Buddha would be abused in a village. He would laugh and pass on. A monk asked, “They abused you; you did not reply?” Buddha said, “No doubt I abused them in some past; this is the reply. If I reply again, the chain continues. The account is settled; I am happy.”
Krishna says: the seeker regards assaults as part of a karmic chain, bears them in witnessing, and in the struggle for samadhi enlists the support of the supreme. He does not say, “I alone will do it.” Try this. If I have smoked for fifty years, the “I” that vows to quit is a minute old—it will lose to the ancient “I” that has smoked. Let the quitting “I” lay itself at the feet of the divine: “I leave it to you. When the urge returns, instead of arguing for or against the cigarette, turn to surrender—remember the vast. In that remembrance, energy swells—then even fifty births of habit weaken.”
A small incident: around 1910 an expedition to the North Pole was trapped in ice for three months; supplies dwindled. The gravest crisis came when cigarettes ran out. Men would take less food or water—but not fewer cigarettes. Then they began cutting the boats’ ropes to smoke them; the captain pleaded, “If the ropes are gone, even when the ice frees us we cannot row.” They would burn clothes, books—anything—to smoke. On his return, the captain reported: that was the worst ordeal.
A man named Stewart Perry, a chain smoker, read this in the paper while smoking. He thought, “Would I have smoked ropes? Perhaps I would.” He set his half-smoked cigarette on the ashtray and said, “God, now you take care. I will pick this up only on the day I lose trust in you. Before I lift it, I will look up once.” Thirty years later, in 1940, he stated: “It still lies there. Whenever I am about to pick it up, I look up; the cigarette stays there, and I remain here. Now I can say the trust I placed in the divine has been fulfilled.”
So Krishna tells Arjuna: the sthitaprajna leaves it. In that deep discipline of restraint, he does not rely only on himself; he surrenders to the supreme. In moments of weakness this surrender becomes support. Acknowledging “I am weak” becomes great strength; clinging to “I am strong” becomes great weakness.
The senses topple the ascetic who is egoistic. They cannot topple the one who is humble—who acknowledges his weaknesses, does not suppress or deny them, but places even them in the hands of the divine. Such a seeker is gradually freed from rasas, from the pressure of the senses, from past conditioning, from habits, from mechanicalness. Only then does the state of sthitaprajna begin; only then can one abide steady in oneself.
That’s all for today. The rest tomorrow morning.
A new word has appeared here which we had not discussed yet: we spoke of pleasure and of pain, but not of suffering. It is necessary to understand the distance between these.
Suffering is a fact; grief is an interpretation. If a thorn pierces the foot, the pricking is a fact; a sthitaprajna feels it as well. He has not died that the prick would go unnoticed. He will know it—perhaps more than you do—because his awareness is more quiet, more sensitive. His capacity to feel is deeper, denser. Sensitivity depends on attention. It may be that you have never come to know a thorn’s prick in the way he will, because knowing depends on the capacity for attention.
A young man is playing hockey. He’s hit on the toe; the nail splits, blood flows, and he does not know. Spectators see the trail of drops. When the match ends, he clutches his foot and asks, “When did this happen? I didn’t notice!” At the moment of injury his attention was elsewhere—occupied, engaged in the game. Without attention, sensation does not register. Only when the game ends and attention returns, can the toe be noticed, the bleeding, the pain.
The sthitaprajna’s awareness remains unoccupied. In a mind utterly still, consciousness is not entangled anywhere; it abides in itself. So if a thorn pierces his foot, he will feel it many times more clearly than we do. Pain is a fact; he will know there is pain in the foot. But he won’t spin the interpretation, “My pain,” the identification that becomes grief. The pain in the foot is an event—outside, at a distance, separate.
Mark this well: between us and pain there is always a distance; between us and grief there is none. When we identify with pain—when pain becomes “I”—pain turns into grief. He will say, “There is a thorn in the foot, an injury in the foot.” He will act to remove the thorn, tend the foot—but without agitation.
And here’s the paradox: agitation never reduces pain. The more agitated you are, the less capable you are of doing what helps. The more unagitated you are, the quicker and more appropriate your response.
I once stayed in a village. A house next door caught fire on the second floor; the whole roof was sheets of tin. Beedi leaves had ignited. The owner became so frantic that he climbed to the third floor where the water tank was and began flinging buckets from above. The red-hot sheets turned the water to scalding rain, burning the people below who were rescuing children and bringing out belongings. Whoever it hit screamed and fled. No one dared go in. People shouted up, “Stop! Or your children will die inside!” But the man, possessed by panic, kept shouting “Save me! Fire!” and kept throwing water. That man—not the fire—burned the house down. A child died, not from the fire but from his water.
An agitated mind becomes self-destructive. An unagitated mind does what is appropriate. When there is only the fact of pain, not the interpretation of grief, you are not upset—you are simply filled with the pure awareness of pain. Grief is a mental interpretation; pain is a fact. Likewise, the absence of pain is a fact; what we call pleasure is a mental interpretation.
The sthitaprajna knows both pain and non-pain well. Lay him on thorns and he will know the thorns; seat him on a cushion and he will know the cushion. But he does not cling to the cushion, does not go mad upon it, does not become one with it. The cushion does not become “pleasure,” an interpretation; it remains a physical fact. Thorns too remain physical facts.
In experience—in sheer sensing—the man of steady wisdom is fully sensitive to facts. But he does not weave the interpretations we do. Death will come to him as well; we grieve, he does not. He sees death as a fact that comes. Old age comes to him; he sees it as a fact of life. The body grows frail, but he does not feel, “I am becoming old”—only that the body is. We, however, insert our “I” into every fact. We turn every fact into an interpretation. The sthitaprajna does not interpret: he calls A “A,” B “B.” He never sticks himself to any of it—and because he does not stick, he can always stand outside and laugh.
I have heard of Epictetus in Greece—a man one could call “Krishna-samadhi-sth.” He used to say, “Even if you kill me, I shall keep laughing; even if you cut me to pieces, I shall keep laughing.” The emperor had him brought in and said, “Enough of words. We believe deeds.” He had wrestlers chain Epictetus and ordered them to break his leg. As they began to twist it, Epictetus said, “Good, a little more. As you are doing it, it only hurts; it won’t break. A bit more—and it will snap!” The emperor said, “Are you mad—you’re teaching them how to break your own leg!” Epictetus replied, “I know more precisely than they do—I’m inside. I can feel the pain rising, rising; now we are at the point where the bone will break. But it’s my leg you’re breaking, isn’t it? If you don’t, tomorrow death will break it anyway. And you are only breaking one; death breaks wholesale, everything. One leg today—one remains. Inside I tell myself, ‘Look, son, only one is breaking; the other is still fine—let this one break properly.’ And the longer it takes to break, the longer the pain; neither your experiment nor mine will be fulfilled. Today you’ve given me the opportunity—we shall both see whether pain becomes grief or not.”
Pain/non-pain are one thing; pleasure/grief quite another. Pleasure and grief are human interpretations. So when you ask, “Does such a man become superhuman?”—certainly. Not superhuman in the sense that thorns won’t prick him, or that illness won’t hurt, or that he won’t grow old, or that death won’t come. Superhuman in this sense: he will not indulge in the habit of interpretation that humans cling to. In that sense he is supra-human, a superman.
“Yaḥ sarvatrānabhisnehas tattat prāpya śubhāśubham,
nābhinandati na dveṣṭi tasya prajñā pratiṣṭhitā.” 57
“Yadā saṁharate cāyaṁ kūrmo’ṅgānīva sarvaśaḥ,
indriyāṇīndriyārthebhyas tasya prajñā pratiṣṭhitā.” 58
He whose attachment is gone everywhere, who upon meeting auspicious or inauspicious circumstances neither rejoices nor despairs—his wisdom is established. And, like a tortoise drawing in its limbs, when the yogi, steadfast in knowledge, withdraws his senses from their objects, then his wisdom becomes established.
No elation in pleasure, no dejection in pain; no difference between favorable and unfavorable. But when does this fruit ripen? Krishna says: just as a tortoise knows how to draw in its limbs at will, so the samadhi-immersed one knows how to draw back his senses from the objects.
A delicate point. In yoga there are two aspects of the senses. One is what we see outwardly—the body of the sense. The other is not visible—the life or soul of the sense, its inner urge.
Take the eye. The physician can dissect it, describe every fiber. That is only the body of the eye, not the sense itself. The real sense is behind it: the urge to see, the relish for seeing. No surgeon can find that by cutting.
Every sense has a body and a life. Behind seeing, there is desire to see; behind tasting, a craving for taste. That craving is the sense’s inner life.
To understand Krishna, we must grasp these two halves. Otherwise one might start plucking out eyes and cutting off ears! And don’t assume no one has ever done such things. Many have. In the Middle Ages in Europe there was a Christian sect that had the genitals of thousands removed; women had their breasts cut off, men their genitals.
But does blinding the eyes destroy the desire to see? Does cutting off the genitals end lust? If that were so, all old people would be beyond lust!
No: cutting a sense only removes the channel of expression. The craving remains—and, denied expression, becomes more insane, more ghostlike. The body is gone; the obsession roams bodiless.
When Krishna gives the tortoise example, don’t stretch it too far. No example is complete; examples only point—just an indication. Like the tortoise retracting limbs, the sthitaprajna draws in the inner taste-senses—the craving. But shrinking the outer instrument is meaningless; that is death. And cutting the instrument does not cut the craving. If the inner craving is dissolved, the sense remains a pure instrument—for functioning, not for passion.
Then the eye sees without the lust to see. It simply registers what is before it; it does not ache for something to see. The tongue helps digest what is there; it does not drool for what is not there. The ear hears what comes; it does not pant to hear. The senses become mere instruments of transaction.
When the senses are instruments of behavior, they simply collect data from outside—facts, nothing else. When they are instruments of craving, they carry inner urges outward to attach them to objects.
These are two entirely different functions. The eye’s job is to report: a tree ahead, a stone ahead. But when the eye is obsessed by desire, it sees what it wants to see.
Tulsidas ran to find his wife. Then his eyes were not functional; he took a snake for a rope. The eye failed its function because desire overrode it: it wanted a rope, so it saw a rope—even in a snake. He crossed a river using a corpse as a log. Desire had blinded the senses.
So when Krishna says the sthitaprajna withdraws his senses like a tortoise, it does not mean he blinds his eyes or closes them forever. It means: he uses the eyes only to see, and only what is—ears only to hear what is—hands only to touch what is. He does not project craving onto objects; he does not build dream-palaces upon them.
I have heard the king of Majnun’s town called him in and said, “You are mad. Laila is an ordinary girl. I’ll summon twelve of the city’s most beautiful women; choose any one.” Majnun laughed: “Where is Laila, and where are these? None can sit at her feet!” The king said, “Whose mind is sound—yours or mine?” Majnun replied, “To see Laila’s beauty, one needs Majnun’s eyes.” We all have the same physical eye; what differs is the eye obsessed by craving—it sees only what craving wants to show.
It is the inner sense that is to be withdrawn—the inner instrument.
Understand this gap well. When the hand touches the earth, it only touches; a physical event, no craving. But when I love someone and touch their hand, is it only a physical event? No; then the hand also dreams, spins poetry. That inner hand—the inner sense behind the touch—is what Krishna speaks of drawing back, as the tortoise does with the outer limbs.
We are not to shrink the outer senses. They are great gifts—they are the doors through which the vast world enters us: light, sky, flowers, human beauty. The senses are doors. They remain wholesome so long as only the outer comes in through them. When the mind rushes out through these doors, assails things, imposes demands and fantasies, we get caught in a web—not of outer senses, but of inner senses.
How to withdraw these inner senses? Withdrawing the outer is easy; plucking out eyes is easy. But giving up the relish for seeing—hard! Close the eyes at night and dreams do not stop. Pluck out the eyes and dreams will occupy twenty-four hours.
Much research has been done on dreams. When you dream, even closed eyes move rapidly—REM. Machines can graph when and how often you dream; even the kinds of dreams are being inferred. Sexual dreams? The genitals respond as well; those too can be graphed. There is no external object; all senses are closed. Who moves inside? The inner senses. Their inner movement even affects the outer. Cut the body to pieces, it won’t change; the inner smoke will keep swirling. Often “good” people have everything swirling inside; what “bad” people do outside, “good” people do within. In religion, there is no difference.
So how to withdraw the inner senses? A small sutra—then we’ll take the next verse. Buddha was once speaking. A man in front kept twitching his big toe. Buddha stopped and asked, “Brother, why is your toe moving?” The man started, as did the audience: what connection! Buddha said, “Why is it moving?” Instantly the toe stopped. The man said, “You notice such odd things! Forget it.” Buddha said, “No. You ask me questions; today I ask one—answer.” The man said, “The truth is, I didn’t know it was moving; and as soon as I knew, it stopped.” Buddha said: inner vibrations stop the moment they are seen. They rely on unawareness.
So you don’t have to forcibly shrink the inner senses; simple awareness shrinks them. As soon as you see, “A wave of lust has arisen,” do nothing—just watch. Close the eyes, watch it move toward the genital centers—just watch. Two seconds—and suddenly it contracts. Anger arises—watch; it returns. A craving to see someone stirs—watch the inner sense reaching out for the outer—watch, and it withdraws.
The inner senses are so shy they cannot bear even a little light. They need the medium of unconsciousness—stupor. One who becomes aware of them finds they shrink of themselves. The outer senses remain available; the inner senses recede. This is the samadhi-like state.
“Viṣayā vinivartante nirāhārasya dehinaḥ,
rasavarjaṁ raso’py asya paraṁ dṛṣṭvā nivartate.” 59
For the body-identified ascetic who restrains the senses, only the objects fall away; the relish remains. But for the sthitaprajna, upon seeing the supreme, even the relish dissolves.
A body-identified ascetic! There are two kinds of body-identification: the hedonist’s and the ascetic’s. Both are body-centric. The hedonist believes: through the body I will reach pleasure. The renouncer believes: through the body I will be free of objects. Both are body-oriented. One seeks to gratify the senses; the other to fight them. Both worship the body.
Someone asked me, “Why is there no lasting sect of Charvaka? No scriptures, temples?” I said, sects form in minorities; the majority needs none. The world is Charvaka at heart. “Charvaka” means charu-vak—pleasing speech; “Lokayata”—what the people accept. And what does he say? All pleasures are sensory. If pleasure is sought, it comes only through the senses. True, pain also comes via the senses. But no one discards wheat for chaff or flowers for thorns. The intelligent one reduces pain and increases pleasure. Have you ever doubted that all pleasures you know are sensory? Taste, music, beauty, fragrance—all through the senses. Thus we don’t know the soul; the one whose entire wealth is sense-experience cannot know what is beyond the body. This is the hedonist’s position.
Sometimes, sated and bored by indulgence—as one tires of everything, as one would even in heaven—he turns against the senses, and becomes a body-identified renouncer. He begins torturing the very senses through which he sought pleasure, believing the opposite will bring bliss. But he still takes the body as basis.
Krishna says: such a person may drop objects, but not the relish (rasa). Blind the eyes, and visible objects disappear; deafen the ears, and the veena is gone. But does the relish vanish? Objects are outside; relish is inside; senses are the bridges between. Break the bridge and you sever their connection, but the relish remains, impotent and maddened—creating imaginary objects when real ones are denied. Fast all day and you feast in dreams at night. The inner rasa manufactures its own objects. It becomes auto-erotic—its own relish its own object—neurotic.
Therefore Krishna says: the renouncer loses objects, not relish. And the real issue is not objects but relish. The issue is not that there is a mansion outside, but that within me is the longing to own one; not the flower, but the violence in my hand that would pluck it. If there is no inner violence, I pass by; flowers do not call.
Which is valuable—the object or the relish? If the object, then austerity is material, physical. If relish, then austerity is psychological, inner. Krishna is a deep psychologist; he mocks the merely physical ascetic. He calls him “body-identified”—a cutting critique. Labor he does; direction he lacks. With objects dropped and rasas intact, one breeds psychosis, not liberation.
The samadhi-immersed drops the rasas. Then objects cease to be “objects of desire” and remain just things—because there is no connection from within. He is eager for the dissolution of relish, not for the abandonment of objects. Renunciation happens on its own.
This must be remembered, for it is the chief allegation against Krishna. Seeing him dance in groves, the body-identified ascetic cannot bear it. He would run to file a police complaint: “What is this?” He cannot conceive that if inner rasas have withdrawn, no bridges to objects remain. Then there is neither running toward nor away. Hence Krishna’s life has astonishing episodes. He danced in Vrindavan, then left—and never looked back. If his mind were passion-ridden, leaving would be difficult; memories would torment; Vrindavan would haunt. But for Krishna, it is as if it fell off the map. Those who loved him suffered, because rasa remained in them; their minds tried to build bridges between Vrindavan and Dwaraka. But for Krishna—where he is, he is wholly. He gives total attention to the near; it creates illusions in the other, who thinks, “He gave me so much attention, then forgot me—faithless!” She does not know that when Krishna is gone, he is gone. No bridge forms within; there is no rasa.
Moreover, the more passion-ridden a person is, the less he suffers near the object, the more he suffers when far. What we love we forget when it is present; we remember when it is absent. Krishna is the opposite: what is present, he holds fully in awareness. That is why one feels so deeply seen—and later abandoned. He has no inner bridges, no relish clinging.
“Yatato hy api kaunteya puruṣasya vipaścitaḥ,
indriyāṇi pramāthīni haranti prasabhaṁ manaḥ.” 60
“Tāni sarvāṇi saṁyamya yukta āsīta mat-paraḥ,
vaśe hi yasya indriyāṇi tasya prajñā pratiṣṭhitā.” 61
O Kaunteya, even the striving, insightful seeker’s mind is seized and dragged by the turbulent senses. Therefore, restraining all the senses, abide steadfast with your mind in me; for he whose senses are under control—his wisdom is established.
A warning: the senses drag one toward objects. We must understand this more deeply. Do the senses have power independent of the self? No. But they can still pull—because they are mechanical habits. Across lifetimes you have conditioned them. When you change, they don’t know; they repeat their programming.
A gramophone spins a record; you no longer want to hear it, but it keeps singing—till you turn it off. You can switch it off because you never mistook the machine for yourself. But you do take your senses to be yourself; so when they run, you run behind them. You don’t turn them off as mechanics.
A man has a mechanical habit of smoking. He pledges to stop. But his senses don’t know; for thirty, forty years the built-in process has been: every half hour, a cigarette. The bell rings from many parts of the body: lips ache to hold, lungs to draw, blood thirsts for nicotine, the nose to exhale, the mind to occupy itself—complex, involving the whole body. The conscious decision is a minute old; the habit is decades deep in the unconscious.
The mind cannot readily change; if it did, life would be chaos. What you held for forty years cannot be dropped in a second; the mind is orthodox to preserve continuity. At peaks of resolve, you think nothing can stop you; an hour later, in a trough, you feel helpless. As you argue within, the hands light the cigarette. Then you wake and say, “What happened?” You conclude, “It’s impossible.” Thus, Krishna says, the senses drag down the seeker—really, the seeker’s own conditioning.
Samskara is powerful. We live by conditioning, not by consciousness. So if a seeker brashly confronts the senses, he will be thrown down again and again. What to do? As long as you only rely on quick decisions against forty years of habit, you will fail. The senses need to be un-conditioned—de-programmed. Fortunately, the senses don’t care whether you smoke or chant; they can be re-habituated either way.
People who pray daily feel uneasy if they miss a day. Don’t mistake this for bliss in prayer; often it is merely habit’s protest—the same as with cigarettes.
Unconditioning requires that you unwind what you wound. For this Krishna gives a remarkable suggestion: the wise do not take all the burden upon themselves. In truth, they take none; they leave it to the divine. They receive the assaults of old habits as the fruit of past actions and bear them in witnessing.
Buddha would be abused in a village. He would laugh and pass on. A monk asked, “They abused you; you did not reply?” Buddha said, “No doubt I abused them in some past; this is the reply. If I reply again, the chain continues. The account is settled; I am happy.”
Krishna says: the seeker regards assaults as part of a karmic chain, bears them in witnessing, and in the struggle for samadhi enlists the support of the supreme. He does not say, “I alone will do it.” Try this. If I have smoked for fifty years, the “I” that vows to quit is a minute old—it will lose to the ancient “I” that has smoked. Let the quitting “I” lay itself at the feet of the divine: “I leave it to you. When the urge returns, instead of arguing for or against the cigarette, turn to surrender—remember the vast. In that remembrance, energy swells—then even fifty births of habit weaken.”
A small incident: around 1910 an expedition to the North Pole was trapped in ice for three months; supplies dwindled. The gravest crisis came when cigarettes ran out. Men would take less food or water—but not fewer cigarettes. Then they began cutting the boats’ ropes to smoke them; the captain pleaded, “If the ropes are gone, even when the ice frees us we cannot row.” They would burn clothes, books—anything—to smoke. On his return, the captain reported: that was the worst ordeal.
A man named Stewart Perry, a chain smoker, read this in the paper while smoking. He thought, “Would I have smoked ropes? Perhaps I would.” He set his half-smoked cigarette on the ashtray and said, “God, now you take care. I will pick this up only on the day I lose trust in you. Before I lift it, I will look up once.” Thirty years later, in 1940, he stated: “It still lies there. Whenever I am about to pick it up, I look up; the cigarette stays there, and I remain here. Now I can say the trust I placed in the divine has been fulfilled.”
So Krishna tells Arjuna: the sthitaprajna leaves it. In that deep discipline of restraint, he does not rely only on himself; he surrenders to the supreme. In moments of weakness this surrender becomes support. Acknowledging “I am weak” becomes great strength; clinging to “I am strong” becomes great weakness.
The senses topple the ascetic who is egoistic. They cannot topple the one who is humble—who acknowledges his weaknesses, does not suppress or deny them, but places even them in the hands of the divine. Such a seeker is gradually freed from rasas, from the pressure of the senses, from past conditioning, from habits, from mechanicalness. Only then does the state of sthitaprajna begin; only then can one abide steady in oneself.
That’s all for today. The rest tomorrow morning.
Osho's Commentary
Who is not agitated when sorrow arrives? Only the one who has made no claim upon pleasure, who has not craved happiness. One who has desired pleasure will inevitably be disturbed when pain comes. What you wanted and did not get will certainly create agitation. Where there is the longing for pleasure, there will also be the sting of pain. Whoever wants the flower of pleasure must be ready for the thorn of pain.
So first: the one who is not disturbed by sorrow. And second: the one who has no craving, no aspiration for pleasure.
These are two sides of the same coin. If there is a craving for pleasure, there will be agitation in pain. If there is no craving for pleasure, sorrow is powerless to disturb.
No one wants sorrow; sorrow comes anyway. Everyone wants pleasure. So sorrow has only one doorway: it comes hiding behind pleasure. There is no other route. No one invites sorrow. No one says to sorrow, “Come.” If sorrow knocks, anyone would shut the door. No one welcomes it. And still, it comes. How?
Sorrow comes in the guise of pleasure; that is the path. If you see clearly, sorrow is the shadow of pleasure. See more deeply and what appears as pleasure on the surface proves to be sorrow within. You could say pleasure is only a display; sorrow is the substance.
A man sits fishing by the riverbank. He laces the hook with dough, and lets it dangle in the water. No fish will go for a bare hook—why would it? But every fish wants the dough. The fish always goes for the dough, and in catching the dough, is caught by the hook. The dough proves to be a deception, a covering; the hook inside is the truth.
Pleasure is no more than that dough. In every lump of pleasure there is a hidden hook of pain. And even that pleasure is only felt so long as the dough is still at a distance and not yet in the fish’s mouth—only until then! The moment it enters the mouth, the hook begins to be felt.
So pleasure is only what appears; what is received is always pain. And one who has desired pleasure—if pain arrives, how could he not be agitated? Then who would be agitated, if not he? He asked for pleasure and pain came; he asked for life and death arrived; he asked for thrones and a cross was given—will he not be disturbed? He will. Agitation is born where expectation is thwarted.
Understand one more thing: in truth, the one asking for pleasure is asking for agitation as well. Perhaps you never considered this. We rarely consider anything; we live with our eyes closed. Otherwise Krishna would not need to say it; we would see it ourselves.
Pleasure too is a kind of agitation, an excitement. Yes, it is a pleasing excitement, but it is still a movement; even in pleasure the mind does not become still, it trembles. That is why, if ever a very great pleasure comes, it can prove worse than sorrow. Sometimes if too much dough gets into the fish’s mouth, it never reaches the hook; the dough itself kills—there is no need for the hook to do its work.
A man wins a lottery and his heart stops. A hundred thousand rupees! How is the heart to continue? It cannot beat as hard as such a great pleasure demands. Unable to beat that hard, it simply stops. Such an excitement would have required an iron lung; then perhaps it could have gone on beating in the shock of those rupees. If a lakh falls into your lap all at once, even pleasure can be too heavy.
Take note: pleasure too is excitement; it has its degrees. Some degrees we can tolerate. Usually pleasure does not kill because such degrees rarely occur.
It is a curious fact that excess sorrow seldom kills, but excess pleasure can. To endure sorrow is easier; to endure pleasure is difficult. We don’t know this because real pleasure rarely arrives. Bearing sorrow is easy; bearing pleasure is difficult. Why? Because within sorrow there is always hope for pleasure—an opening out of the excitement. That hope helps us bear it.
With pleasure, there is no further hope; the moment it arrives you are stunned, stopped. It seldom arrives, that’s another matter. If what you want were to be given you instantly, your heart would stop right there. Because pleasure has no opening; sorrow has a door. In sorrow there is a portal, the hope of pleasure ahead, by which we keep living. If pleasure became complete, there would be no hope beyond it, no way to go on. Pleasure too is a deep excitation.
I have heard of a man who won a lottery. His wife was worried and frightened. The man had never seen a hundred rupees in his hand; suddenly five lakhs! There was a church nearby. She went to the priest and prayed, “We have won five lakhs. My husband will be returning from the office. He is a clerk—he has never held more than a hundred rupees at once. Five lakhs! Save him somehow from this pleasure—what if something bad happens?”
The priest said, “Don’t worry. If pleasure falls all at once, it can be dangerous; if it falls in installments, the danger lessens. I’ll come; we will arrange to give him happiness in parts.”
The priest was wise; he came and sat. The husband returned. The priest thought, better not say five lakhs at once—start with fifty thousand. He said, “Have you heard? You’ve won fifty thousand in the lottery!” Then he watched the man’s eyes—if he digests that, I’ll add another fifty. But the man said, “Really? If fifty thousand are truly mine, then I donate twenty-five thousand to the church.” The priest had a heart attack. Twenty-five thousand! No one ever gave the church even five paisa.
If the blow of pleasure is sudden and sharp, the very current of life can snap; the wires can break.
Pleasure is excitement—pleasing, in our feeling, because we desired it. In itself it is only excitation. Therefore note this too: all pleasures are convertible; they can turn into pain. And all pains can turn into pleasure. The whole question is of craving. Change the craving and the polarity changes.
When a man drinks alcohol for the first time, the taste is not pleasing; it is bitter, disagreeable. One has to develop a taste. A drinker has to cultivate it. He drinks again and again—in the bravado of friends, in people’s praise, as if to prove he is not weak. Practice sets in. Then that bitter taste begins to feel pleasing.
When someone smokes a first cigarette, all he gets is coughing, discomfort. But cigarettes come with swagger, with ego symbols of style. For that style a person endures the discomfort and becomes habituated. Then the dirty taste of smoke—how could smoke ever taste good?—begins to seem pleasing; it becomes a “pleasure.” Practice can turn pain into pleasure; practice of pleasure can, in turn, yield pain.
Suppose you come to me and I embrace you; for a moment it feels deeply pleasing. But after a minute you start to feel uneasy. Two minutes and you want to be released. Three minutes and you say, “Please let go.” Four minutes and you worry I may be mad. Five minutes and you call for the police!
What happened? In the first instant you were saying, “Meeting heart to heart was such bliss.” In five minutes the bliss vanished! If it had truly been there, in five minutes it should have grown a thousandfold. If so much was received in one second, then more in the next, and more in the third. No—what you felt in the first second wasn’t received; it was imagined. By the second second understanding grew; by the third, more; and you found there was nothing there. The hands we long to hold—in a little while, nothing comes from them but sweat.
All excitements of pleasure, once familiar, turn into pain; all excitements of pain, once familiar, can become pleasure. Pleasure and pain are convertible; they can become each other. Therefore, in the depths, they are one, not two. Only our mood shifts; the thing itself does not.
Thus Krishna gives two sutras: first, one who is not agitated in sorrow—whose mind remains unagitated in pain; second, one who has no craving, no demand for pleasure. The third: one in whom anger and fear do not arise.
Here take careful note, because not seeing this has created great confusion everywhere. Krishna is saying: in whom anger and fear are absent, that one is established in samadhi. He is not saying: one who drops anger and fear becomes established in samadhi. He is saying: one who is established in samadhi—his anger and fear are found to be absent. There is a deep difference. To think that by abandoning anger and fear one will gain samadhi is to remain entangled with anger and fear and never find samadhi. Such a person will fight anger and fear. And by fighting anger one never goes beyond anger; by fighting fear one never goes beyond fear. Fight fear and you enter subtler fears; fight anger and you become angry on subtler planes.
I’ve heard a story. A man had become famous for having conquered anger. A friend went to test him. Morning, winter chill, but the sun was up. The monk must have risen at four; he had lit a fire and warmed himself. The fire had gone out; only ashes remained. The monk still sat there. The friend came, bowed, and asked, “Is there any ember left?” The monk said, “No—can’t you see? Are you blind? Only ashes.” The man laughed. “No, master, there must be a little left, buried under the ashes.” The monk said, “What kind of man are you? I tell you there is no fire.” The man said, “Just poke it and see—perhaps some spark is there!” The monk’s hand went to his tongs. “Are you a man or a beast? I tell you, there is no fire!” The man said, “Master, now there is not only a spark—there are flames.”
The fire he was speaking of was anger. The ashes he claimed were repression on the surface. A small prod—who knows whether there were embers in the hearth—but there was plenty of fire in the monk; it leapt out. A tiny touch and out it came. The visitor said, “I had heard only ashes remained and no fire. I came to see. But the fire remains; the ashes are a deception on top.”
He who fights anger can at most press it down. He who fights fear can at most become “fearless” in the sense of bravado, not truly free of fear. “Fearless” means the fear is pressed inside; even if fear arises, no worry—we stand our ground. But “abhaya,” fearlessness, means something else. It means the absence of fear. “Fearless” is bravery: courage despite fear. “Abhaya” is fearlessness: no fear at all. The bravest person is still afraid; he is not fear-free. To be fear-free means fear is not there; there is not even a question of being brave. Fear is gone.
Krishna is listing symptoms, not causes; consequences, not the method. He is not giving the cause; he is giving the signs: if anger and fear are not there, such a person is steady in wisdom.
But we usually invert it. We might say: if a man’s body is not hot, he has no fever. Right, there’s no difficulty with that. But if a man’s body is hot, cooling the body will not remove the fever; pouring water on him won’t cure it. If you try to remove fever by dousing with water, the disease won’t leave—the patient might.
When a physician notes fever, he checks the temperature to learn how deep the inner disease has gone, which is causing such heat outside. Heat is a symptom, not the disease. Somewhere inside, the body is in deep conflict; because of that conflict the body is heated. The cells, the tissues are fighting like enemies within. Some inner battle goes on. Germs have entered and are fighting the body’s defenders. Between the guardians and the invaders there is deep struggle. Because of that, the whole system burns. The burning is a symptom, not the disease. If you mistake heat for the disease, you will try to cool it—and pour water. Then there will be no fever because there will be no patient.
Understand this much: if there is fever, there is inner disease. Now separate out the disease. And you will know it is gone when the fever subsides. The physician says: when there is no heat, the man is healthy. But lowering the heat is not the method of healing.
When Krishna says fear and anger no longer remain, understand that anger and fear are like temperature. In a diseased mind—when one is fighting within oneself, full of inner quarrel—there is the fever of anger. In a mind at war with itself, weakness comes; battling oneself, one is broken, loses strength, and thus becomes afraid. Anger and fear are signs that the mind is in conflict—news that the inner being is sick. And when anger and fear are gone, there is news that the inner being is healthy. The health of consciousness is samadhi; inner health is samadhi.
I say this so you don’t start fighting anger and fear. See them, know them, recognize them. Their recognition will show you that samadhi is absent within. Then the methods to bring samadhi are of a different order. Do those. When samadhi comes, anger and fear will go. The thermometer will say so. When anger and fear are no longer felt, then know samadhi has borne fruit.
But we do the reverse; we press anger and fear down. There is a danger in repressing. Samadhi does not flower within, and because anger and fear are suppressed, we don’t even know samadhi is absent. We deceive ourselves with the lack of symptoms.
I mentioned Gurdjieff. When someone came to him to learn, he would serve wine. Not only that, he would create strange temptations and situations. He would bring a man to a state where he wouldn’t even realize he was being provoked—and Gurdjieff would draw out his full anger, to the point of madness. And when the man was in a rage, Gurdjieff would say, “Now wake up and look—how much anger there is in you! When you came it was already there. Don’t think it just arrived. It was hidden; now it is manifest. Recognize it, because this is a symptom.”
We have no idea how much is buried within. We usually think someone “makes” us angry. This is a false idea. No one can make anyone angry unless anger already exists within. Others can only be the hook, the peg; the coat is yours. You hang it there. You cannot say the peg hung the coat. The coat was yours—whether you hung it on a hook, a latch, a nail, or your shoulder—it would be hung somewhere. The peg only provided a place; you are responsible, not the peg. The peg is only an occasion.
Someone abuses me. Fire flares up, anger arises. I say, “He provoked my anger.” Can he produce my anger? Am I a machine that someone presses a button and anger is manufactured?
No—anger is already boiling within me; the other is only an occasion. And don’t say that person is seeking me out. In truth, I am seeking him. If I don’t find him, I get into trouble; if I do, I feel relieved, unburdened—my load is dropped.
Like lowering a bucket into a well—it comes up filled with water. But there must be water in the well. A bucket cannot draw water from a dry well; it will clatter back empty. Another’s insult is at most a bucket; there must be anger in my well, then it fills and overflows.
Everything is filled inside. We sit on it by force of paper-thin restraints—not a strong pressure. Scratch a little and it will surface at once. But it must be seen.
So do not take Krishna’s words to mean: if you suppress anger and fear, you are now secure, established in samadhi, steady in wisdom. It is not so cheap. Instead of suppressing, bring anger into the light and look at it. When someone insults you, look within and see how much rises up. And when someone abuses you, thank him: “Your kindness! Had you not brought the bucket, I would not have known the state of my well. Come with a bucket now and then.”
Kabir said: Keep your critic close; give him a hut in your courtyard. He told seekers: house your detractor next door, so that the moment you step out he drops the bucket and you can see what is inside you. If you see it, if you recognize it, you will know your actual condition. And one who does not know his real, present condition will never attain his ultimate state. One who knows his factual state in this very moment can set out toward his supreme nature.
Anger and fear are pointers, indicators, symbolic, symptomatic. Use them for diagnosis. If they are there, samadhi is not within. But do not think that by pressing them down samadhi will happen. No—when samadhi comes, they will not be. By suppressing them, samadhi will not bear fruit.
Therefore Krishna’s sutras are exactly right: if sorrow does not unsettle, if there is no craving for pleasure, if anger does not heat the mind, if fear does not make it shake—then know, Arjuna, such a person is established in samadhi.