Geeta Darshan #1

Before we enter this sutra, a few things must be understood.

First: many modern thinkers—at most—hold that the world’s evolution moves from the lower to the higher. Darwin or Marx, Bergson, and others. The further back we go, the less development; the further ahead, the more development. The past was backward. The present is evolving. The future will go further still.

The root of this entire line of thought is to consider the source small and the final peak of development superior. But the Indian vision is exactly the opposite; to understand this sutra, that is essential.

We have always held that the origin is the highest. The source is supreme. It is a completely inverted logic. The old man is not superior; rather, the seed hidden in the womb is supreme. What the West calls evolution, we have called decline.

If growth is true in the Western sense, then God must be at the end, not at the beginning. Only when the whole world evolves to the ultimate peak would the Divine be revealed. But the Indian insight declares that God is first. Therefore what we call the world is not development but fall. And if the last is to be attained, the first must be regained. We can never rise higher than where we have come from. There is no way to go beyond the primal source.

This is why when a person attains the supreme meditative state, he becomes like a small child. The ultimate attainment—of peace, nirvana, liberation—is exactly that, like the child resting in the mother’s womb: silent, arrived in nirvana, free.

There is no way to go beyond the first. Or better still, we can say that the further we go forward, the further back we are really going. And the final destination turns out to be our very first halt. Or say it another way: what we call the development of the world is circular. We draw a circle; the point where it starts is where it completes.

The world’s process is not linear. It does not go like a line; it moves like a circle. Then the first becomes the last; and those who want to reach the last must come into the state of the first.

The world is the fall of God. And the only way to “develop” in the world is that this fall is dissolved, and we return to the original source; that is the first point. Only if we grasp this will the metaphor of the inverted tree be understood.

There is no inverted tree in the visible world. Here a seed must be sown; the tree rises upward and develops. The tree is the growth of the seed, its expression, its peak rejoicing. But the Gita and the Upanishads call the world an inverted tree. It is God’s fall, not growth. It is the loss of height, the descending, not an ascent.

As a tree rises upward, so we are not rising upward in the world. The more we move in the world, the more we are moving downward. The reality is exactly the opposite of what we think we see. What we call development is decline.

For this reason the entire Eastern mind became renunciate. This is the root cause behind it. Renunciation means: what the world calls development, we will drop. What the world calls attainment, we will consider trivial. What the world calls enjoyment, that is what we will renounce.

One man keeps gathering wealth. He is developing. In the West he will be called progressive. In the East we have called those progressive who dropped wealth—Buddha dropped wealth, Mahavira left his kingdom; and we called that development.

In the West, accumulation is development. In the East, letting go is development. In the West, how much you possess measures your height. In the East, how much you could let go—how little remains with you. The day you are left alone, with nothing at all, that day the East calls you developed.

All these insights are contained in the image of the inverted tree.

A few more points, then we will enter the sutra.

However inverted this tree, it is still connected to God. However far its branches may spread, the life-juice flowing in them is His alone. However distant a branch, it remains joined to the root. There is no way to be severed from the root.

The world may be contrary, but it is an inseparable part of God. However far we wander, we remain connected. There is no way to be separate even for a moment. His life-sap flows even through the world.

Hence a unique viewpoint arose in the East: the East is renunciate, yet it does not see the world as the enemy of God. The world too is His integral part. The current may be flowing downward, but it is His current. The current’s direction has to be reversed. It has to be led back to its source. But there is no enmity or hatred toward the current.

If God were to stand on His head, there is the world. If the world stands upright, there is God. But as we see the world, we assume it is straight. Therefore all religious disciplines appear inverted to the worldly eye. The worldly mind calls what it does “straight.” Therefore it judges the sannyasin to be “upside down.” But for those who understand the truly inverted flow of this current, to live “upside down” in the world becomes the only way to be straight.

Be cautious about what the world calls straight. Be a little suspicious of those the world calls wise. Don’t embrace with closed eyes what the world calls success. Because everyone says it, that does not make it true.

Einstein had to leave Germany because of Hitler, the Nazi propaganda, and anti-Jewish hatred. When Einstein reached America, he heard that Hitler had appointed a hundred scientists to prove that Einstein’s discoveries were all wrong. They worked very hard.

When Einstein heard this, he laughed and said, “If I am wrong, one scientist is enough to prove it; there is no need for a hundred. And if I am not wrong, even if Hitler gathers all the scientists in the world, I will not be proved wrong. The very fact he needs a hundred…”

Truth stands alone. Falsehood needs a crowd. Falsehood’s strength comes from numbers; it has no strength of its own.

What the world calls “right,” you too accept as right because the crowd has power. But that does not make it right. No proof comes from that.

Consider: a politician is called successful because he holds a high post. The world calls it success. And within that success there isn’t a single ray of joy. Not a single flower of bliss ever blooms there. Ask the politician himself: his success is dry like a desert! He has gained nothing.

In the Second World War, General MacArthur became very famous. Once, when he came to review a unit in Japan, a comic actor was invited to entertain the soldiers. When the actor was about to leave, MacArthur said, “Come stand with me for a photograph.”

The actor was delighted. He said, “What good fortune, that I get to be photographed with a great general like you—renowned, whose name will remain in history.” MacArthur said, “Let it be. My little boy wrote and said that when you come here, I must get a photo with you. Because my little boy considers you a very famous actor, a world-famous actor. For him, I am nothing.”

Those we call successful in the world are almost in this very state. Their success depends on recognition. If you consider them successful, they are successful; if you consider them failures, they are failures. Ask them themselves, and you will find them even more undecided than you.

A man amasses great wealth: he is successful. Ask the one who gathered it by selling himself, and he will tell you his life feels wasted.

This world-tree is utterly inverted. Those who appear successful are hiding their failure. Those who appear wealthy are utterly poor. Those who outwardly smile and seem delighted are inwardly full of sorrow.

Here, everything is upside down. But if the eye goes a little deeper, this begins to be seen. And the day you begin to see that the world-tree is inverted, the moment of revolution has arrived in your life. Now you can change.

Let us now enter the sutra.

After explaining the Yoga of the Division of the Three Gunas, Sri Krishna said, O Arjuna, the world-ashvattha, the pipal tree, whose roots are above and branches below, is called imperishable; and whose leaves are said to be the Vedas—whoever knows this world-tree with its root in essence knows the purport of the Vedas.

This is a very revolutionary statement. But it is said so subtly that it is difficult to penetrate its full meaning.

First, “whose root is above…”

In this world, roots are always below. Surely we are making a mistake somewhere.

The East has always revered the mother and father. In the West such reverence is less, because we consider the roots above. However great a son becomes—even if he becomes a Buddha—he touches his mother’s feet. Because there is no way to rise above the root. In the West there is less such reverence, because the tendency to see the roots as above is missing. And outwardly, it appears that roots are below. The tree’s roots are hidden in the earth; its branches are above.

Therefore Krishna says, this world is an inverted tree. Its root is above.

And remember, if the mother and father are not above, then God cannot be above either—He is the root of the world.

Gurdjieff had a line written in his ashram: “Only the person who is capable of honoring his mother and father do I consider human.”

There seems no direct connection. Many asked Gurdjieff why such a small thing was written there. He said, it is not a small matter.

And if we understand modern psychology—Freud and his followers—they all say that every son harbors hatred for his parents.

People despise the root. People want to escape it, hide it. Perhaps our condemnation of sexuality has this cause: it is the root. We want to hide it. You never even think how you were born! From where you were born! Where your root lies! You never think that your birth, your life, begins in the deep desire of two people.

We hide the root. It seems low, mean; we are “higher.” But remember, there is no way to be bigger than where you came from. And if you are big, only one thing is proved: the root is big.

If a Buddha can arise from the source of sex, then sexuality has the capacity to give birth to a Buddha—this alone is proved. Nothing else follows. And if you are not becoming a Buddha, the fault is not sexual desire. The energy in that desire is the same that can birth a Buddha. You too can become a Buddha. Perhaps the root is not being used rightly. The energy given by the root is not being given right direction and flow.

But everyone hides his root, because the notion is that the root is something inferior.

This sutra says: the root is above. O Arjuna, whose root is above…

If the end were superior, then death would be superior. If the first is superior, then birth is superior. The West is a believer in death, the East in birth.

The root is above. And all streams flow downward. This also seems reasonable, because flow can only be toward the lower. How can it flow upward!

We see that we sow a seed and the tree rises upward. But our vision is very limited. Does the tree truly rise upward? Hard to say. From the standpoint of the vast cosmos, there is no above or below. And then there are many things to understand.

Scientists have discovered a law: gravitation. We throw a stone; it falls downward. If the earth pulls everything down, how does the tree rise up? There must be a law contrary to gravitation that pulls upward—one possibility. Or else the tree’s rising is our illusion; the tree too is going downward, but within our limited view it appears to be rising.

I have heard: on the ceiling of the top floor of a hundred-story New York building, some ants were wandering. One philosopher-ant said to the others, “Man is a strange creature. He builds such tall buildings and still always walks ‘below.’ When he isn’t going to walk on the ceiling at all, when he will always walk on the floor, what is the need to build so high? We are the ones who walk on ‘top’!”

Ants surely think so. They have their relative world.

Are trees truly rising upward? It only appears so to us. If we stood on the moon and looked, all trees would look as if they hang downward.

The Gita says that the whole development—what we call evolution—is all downward. In this sense, the mythic stories of all religions are very valuable: they all say the world is a fall. Whether in Christianity, Hinduism, or Islam—the primal stories all say the world is a fall. Fall does not mean sin; fall simply means the flow is downward. Therefore, if height is to be regained, we must return to the source.

Zen masters in Japan say: if you want to know what God is, know yourself in that moment when you were not yet born. Go back.

In America, a new psychotherapy—Primal Therapy—has had great impact. Among the most precious therapies discovered in this century, its influence will grow, because it contains a fundamental truth.

Primal Therapy’s view is that, to be completely healthy, consciousness must begin to move backward. The day a person starts to re-access the states of his childhood, that day he begins to heal. And the day he truly attains the state of consciousness of the womb, he becomes supremely peaceful and whole. Many psychological illnesses suddenly dissolve.

There is truth here, and it has been effective on hundreds. Arthur Janov, who discovered Primal Therapy, would have his patients do one thing: lie down, close their eyes, darken the room, and he would say, “Try to go back—not just in memory, but go back and live it. Grasp the last clear memory. If you were five, try to live that hour again.”

An unusual thing happened. Janov was working with an old woman of eighty. Her eyes had failed for twenty years; she could not see. As Janov took her back and she remembered, “When I was six, an incident happened…”—as she began to relive it, her eyesight returned. She herself was astonished: she began to see. Her mind didn’t just become six years old; for those moments, the body forgot it was eighty. After the session, her eyes returned to being eighty. It was a matter of inner state.

Janov says that as people move back, their faces change. They become quiet, innocent, as if all the dust of the in-between has fallen away, the rubbish cut off. When someone reaches what he calls the “primal scream”—the first cry at the moment of birth, that first scream—when a person not only remembers but relives it, and the same kind of cry breaks out again…

It can take months to bring this cry—three to six months of continuous work. But the day it comes, with that cry all the person’s neuroses dissolve. After that cry, the person becomes someone else—simple, guileless, innocent, as he was born. As if with that cry the entire life dissolved, the whole fall vanished, the source was found again.

Recently, I keep encountering in meditation that those who touch that deep cry in meditation, the first ray of samadhi descends into their lives.

People ask me, why so much crying and shouting in meditation? They imagine meditation only as people sitting silently. You can sit silently and nothing will happen—because your madman within is running; your sitting quietly won’t change that. Sit for a lifetime, become a stone statue, yet Buddhahood will not flower. The supreme is attained by regaining the first.

My whole effort is that in meditation the primal scream is born and every fiber of your being cries out, and in that cry all disturbance dissolves—like after a storm, all becomes calm—and behind it, all is silent. Then you will have a first glimpse of the root. And that root is God.

Attainment is not in running ahead, but in regaining what you first were. It sounds paradoxical: what you have always been is the goal to be attained. Every other pursuit is futile. Every other chase will bring nothing but anxiety. Let a person regain what he was born as. What has always been within his being requires no attainment—only re-seeing.

O Arjuna, the world-ashvattha, whose root is above and branches below, is called indestructible.

And this world is never completely destroyed; yet a strange thing—it is being destroyed every moment. It perishes and it arises, it dissolves and it becomes.

God is eternal, indestructible—but His indestructibility means something else. He never becomes; He simply is. He never perishes. The world too is indestructible, but in a completely different sense: it is forever arising and dissolving. The process of becoming and perishing never ends. The world moves in circles.

From Gangotri the Ganga flows, falls into the ocean. A long journey, thousands of miles. Falling into the sea, the sun lifts her as vapor. Clouds gather and move toward the Himalayas. Rain falls. Gangotri fills. Again the Ganga flows. Again the ocean; again clouds; again Gangotri; again the Ganga; again the sea.

The circular world keeps revolving. We have called it a wheel. The very word samsara means “the wheel,” that which keeps turning. It too is indestructible. It will never cease. It will end and arise, arise and end, but the process continues.

The world’s process is indestructible, and God’s being is indestructible. God’s isness is indestructible; the world’s motion is indestructible. God’s stillness is indestructible; the world’s movement is indestructible.

The world keeps spinning. To try to change this spinning world is futile. To try to make it stand still is futile. That is not its nature. Understand this a little.

Modern thinking lays all stress on stopping the world, changing it. Marx, Engels, Lenin—according to them, today or tomorrow equality will come. People asked Marx, “After equality, then what?” Marx said, “Then nothing; equality will remain. There will be no further change.”

Here Marx is mistaken. Krishna’s statement is deeper. Nothing stands still here. Even equality will not remain. No state can be permanent; it never has been, it never will be. Everything will be made and unmade. Movement is its nature.

Even a penetrating thinker like Marx becomes weak at his own theory’s end. He says everything will change; capitalism cannot endure; it will go; revolution will come. Feudalism did not endure; revolution came; it went. The world has kept changing.

Marx himself says the world is dynamic and dialectical. Everything is changing. Capitalism too will change. But then, attached to his own ideal, he says: when communism comes, then there will be no more movement!

Movement is the nature of samsara. Nothing will stand still here. What rises today will sink tomorrow. It must, or how else will others rise? He came to power because someone else went down. Whoever ascends will descend. Whoever is rich will be poor. Whoever is successful today will fail tomorrow. Whoever is alive today will die tomorrow. The process continues.

If someone tries to stop the process, we call him ignorant. One who stops worrying about the process, who understands that it will continue, that my stopping it won’t stop it—who becomes still within and drops concern about the process—we call him wise.

All of us try to make the process stop. You are happy, and you want happiness to stay. You hold it tightly to your chest lest it slip away, lest what you have be lost.

But nothing abides here. This is not your weakness; it is the nature of things. Nothing stays. Fire is hot; it is not fire’s fault. If you grasp it you will burn. The fault lies in the grasping. The world’s nature is change. Therefore, whatever you get, you try to make it last.

People come to me constantly. They do a little meditation; the mind grows a little quiet; and they say, “May this peace remain.”

Nothing here will remain—not even this peace. It too is part of the world; it has come from doing; it will be lost. There is another peace that abides, but it is not part of the world. That peace arises from this understanding: where everything changes, I will not do the madness of trying to make it stay. Let it change. Let happiness come, sorrow come; peace or restlessness—let me stand at a distance and watch. I will neither clutch nor push away. I will remain a witness.

One who looks at pleasure and pain thus takes a leap outside the wheel. The world goes on; he stands beyond it.

So there are two ways. Either you get busy changing the world—this we call foolishness. Or you change yourself—this we call wisdom.

Modern thought emphasizes changing the world and fixing things in place. Hence so much misery, increasing daily. The modern mind cannot be happy, because its whole vision is outward.

It is as if someone stands by a river and wishes it would stop. It won’t, so he is miserable. And until it stops he will remain unhappy, because he believes only if the river stops can he be happy.

Krishna says: the river’s nature is to flow; let it flow. Don’t waste your strength trying to stop it. You are not the river—that much is enough to know. Whether the river flows or not has nothing to do with you. You can forget the river; you can be remembered to yourself.

In man, the two meet: the indestructible God and the indestructible world. Their boundaries meet in you. Both are indestructible within you: that whose state never dies, and that whose process never dies. You are the boundary where they meet.

From that boundary, the world starts downward; upward, God begins. Forward, the world begins; backward, God begins. Toward the root is God; toward the branches is the world.

The world-ashvattha, whose root is above and branches below, is called indestructible; and whose leaves are called the Vedas—whoever knows this world-tree, root and all, in essence, is the knower of the Vedas’ purport.

This is an extraordinary statement. The leaves of this world, Krishna calls the Vedas. God is the root, the world are the branches, and on these branches the leaves are knowledge. Knowledge is very far from God. This may sound strange.

Desire is closer to God than knowledge; knowledge is even farther. Desire is still branch; knowledge is only a leaf—the last thing. After the leaf, there is nothing. The leaf is the end. What we call the Vedas, what we call knowledge, what we consider great attainment—Krishna says these are like leaves.

If someone keeps counting leaves and thinks he has attained the root…it is like memorizing the Vedas: you have gathered leaves; you have no relation to the root. If one becomes an enemy of desires and cuts off leaves, he has gathered dead leaves—those leaves aren’t even alive.

Ancient scriptures were written on leaves—how apt. Dead, dry leaves carried the scriptures. All scriptures are dead, dry leaves. Even desire is far more alive. Hence often the ordinary person immersed in desires is closer to God than those who drown only in the leaves of the Vedas. Their connection to the root is broken.

We must go beyond desire—but there are two ways to go beyond. If you sit on a branch and must get beyond it, there are two directions: go back toward the root, or forward toward the leaves. In both cases, you get off the branch.

Thus those who cling to knowledge also move, in one sense, away from the world. But they do not come near God. To come near God, one must leave the branch—but not toward the leaves; toward the root.

And whoever knows this world-tree, root and all, in essence, he alone knows the Vedas’ purport.

So the purport of the Vedas is not hidden in the books; it is hidden in the total expression of this world. Whoever knows this tree—its root, branches, leaves, flowers, seeds—in essence, that person knows the meaning of the Vedas.

You can memorize the Rigveda. In memorizing, you may have neither time nor means to know the world.

I’ve heard of a Jewish mystic, Baal Shem. He had a large ashram, seekers stayed for years. One young man had come years ago and now had become old. He had memorized all the Jewish scriptures. The Talmud sat on his tongue. His fame spread. People would come to the ashram and, instead of meeting Baal Shem, they would go meet that man—once a youth, now old from memorizing scriptures.

One day a man said to Baal Shem, “This person knows so much; he is unique. You never say anything about him!” Baal Shem said, “Don’t tell anyone; he knows so much about the scriptures that I always worry—when will he know the world? And one who cannot know the world, how will he ever relate to God?”

Who knows this world, root and all, knows the purport of the Vedas.

It may be that he doesn’t know the Vedas at all, but he knows the purport. He may be unfamiliar with the Vedas, not learned in Sanskrit or grammar, but the essence will be with him.

Purport is something else. It is like fragrance in a flower. Even if you don’t meet the flower, you can meet the fragrance floating in the air. That is the essence. The Vedas are like flowers; their fragrance spreads everywhere. From every particle of the world, the Veda is being born every moment.

Veda is a unique Hindu word: it means knowing. At every moment there is the possibility of knowing—but eyes must be open. Often scriptures blind the eyes.

Who knows this world, root and all, in essence, knows the purport of the Vedas.

The branches of that world-tree—the yogic branches of gods, humans, and animals—are spread everywhere, below and above, nourished by the waters of the three gunas and budding into sense-enjoyment. And in the human birth the roots of ego, possessiveness, and desire—binding according to one’s actions—extend below and above throughout all the worlds.

A few more points, then the second part of the sutra will become clear.

In this tree, in this world, desires carry you downward. But don’t fall into the illusion that if you start going “up,” desires will disappear. It can happen—and often does—that a branch first travels downward and then, if the gardener is skillful, is turned upward. The branch remains the same, its life the same, its direction altered—but its essence unchanged.

A man may bind his ego to wealth; then he drops wealth and binds his ego to renunciation. Yesterday his ego swelled with wealth; today it swells with renunciation. The direction changed, the style changed, but the gardener is clever and the branch’s vital current has not changed; the branch is still the same.

It is easy to change direction; it is hard to change oneself. And it may be that if you change yourself, there is no need to worry about direction at all. Let the root be remembered, and it won’t matter if the branch grows downward; you will be moving toward the root.

Therefore renunciation is not indispensable. One can remain amid enjoyments—and yet let the remembrance of the root arise.

Krishna himself is such a one: he has not changed the direction of the branches. The branches grow where they grow. But the life-current within the branches has changed its course. Now it flows toward the root. The remembrance is of the source, the origin, the first. The journey is not toward the last. Let branches spread, let the world go on—but consciousness moves toward the first.

The reverse often happens. People cut off branches out of fear of falling. They mutilate the senses—pluck out eyes, deafen ears—afraid that a sense may lead them astray. But consciousness does not change its current by plucking out eyes; otherwise all the blind would attain supreme knowledge.

Throughout the world there have been sects that tried to cut off branches in the hope that without branches there would be no movement. This hope is illusory; the logic is flawed. Even without a branch, movement can be within. And even with branches, there need be no movement.

You can live at home and be a renunciate; you can be a sannyasin and yet be thoroughly worldly. You will find many examples of the latter. Look carefully at sannyasins and you will see they are new kinds of householders. The former is rarer: the householder who is truly renunciate. But he, too, can be found—if your eyes are open and sharp, without preconception or premature judgment. You will find householders who are utterly sannyasins. It is a matter of the flow of consciousness.

The branches of that world-tree—the womb-like branches of gods, humans, and animals—are spread below. They spread above as well; they spread in both directions. In the human birth the roots of ego, possessiveness, and desire—binding according to one’s actions—extend below and above throughout all the worlds.

Desire flows below and above; it runs in all directions. Therefore it matters less where desire flows than whether desire is related to the source.

Reflect on yourself: perhaps it never occurs to you to think of the origin. Perhaps you never sit and consider: what was I like in the womb? If you do think, others will call you mad. You yourself will think, what a pointless thought! At times the thought of death may arise—death lies ahead, the end of the branches—but birth never comes to mind.

Birth lies behind; it is hidden in your depths. Experiment a little in this direction. In ancient times, a special meditation was discovered precisely for this. Let me give it to you. Try it, and you will be amazed.

Sit where there is little light—twilight or darkness. Let the place be quiet, no noise—because the womb is utterly quiet; no sound enters there. Sit comfortably. Sit so that your head gradually bows and comes to touch the ground. Fold both legs as Sufis sit, or as Muslims sit in prayer; their posture is the womb-posture. Bend both knees and sit as in prayer. Then close your eyes and slowly, very slowly, bow your head.

Bow so slowly that you can feel the bending. Bowing is precious. If you bend suddenly, you won’t feel it. As slowly as possible, lower the head, feeling the bend. Let the forehead touch the ground.

You have come into the very posture of the child in the womb. The child is curled this way in the womb: knees against chest, head bowed, feet tucked behind.

That is why the Muslim way of prayer is very scientific. It is more valuable than padmasana or siddhasana, because no child sits in the womb in padmasana or siddhasana. Those postures lack the naturalness that prayer’s prostration has.

The one who prays bends again and again—he practices bowing. He bows down, rises, bows again. It is the art of bending. Hence the humility you see in one leaving the mosque is rarely seen in a Hindu leaving a temple. The whole namaz is the art of bowing.

It was difficult for Muhammad to make the fierce people of the desert religious. The process of prayer helped. To make Hindus tolerant and broad-minded is not so difficult—nature is generous here. Everything is available. Life is not a harsh struggle.

But where Muhammad taught bowing, life was a terrible struggle—survival meant killing the other. And the burning expanse of desert, with no green in sight—there it is natural to become stiff, arrogant, cruel, hard. The process of namaz and bowing made even those fierce people humble.

Try the experiment. Let the room be dark. Come into the state as if you have again become a small child and entered the womb. Breath will gradually slow. In that posture, breath cannot be fast—belly and chest are compressed, head bowed. The breath will slow. Support it. Let it slow. There will come a moment when it will seem to stop—“Is it moving or not?”—because the child in the womb does not breathe.

When it feels as if breath is moving or not moving—you cannot tell—then know you have entered the womb-state. Sometimes, for a moment, breath will stop. In that instant, you will have a glimpse of the primal root. As these glimpses begin, you will become a different person.

Seek the origin; seek the point you come from. Because where you come from is your final destination—there is no other way. You cannot seek the destination, it is far; but you can seek the first, it is hidden within. It is present even now. You carry it. What you knew in the womb lies within you still.

You’ll be surprised to know that in deep hypnosis people recall even events from the womb. If your mother fell and was injured, and the jolt reached you in the womb—under hypnosis you can remember it. People recall: “When I was five months in the womb, my mother fell; I was jolted.” That memory still lives in you. What you knew in those nine months lies inside you.

Even before those nine months, you were. The source lies deeper still. For a few moments you were purely soul—your previous body had dropped, a new one was not yet obtained. In between, you were bodiless. That too can be remembered.

Then memories of many lives. And with memories of all lives, the remembrance of transcendence—that I have neither birth nor death. So many births and deaths were halts on my journey; I am the traveler. As soon as this remembrance comes, you have attained your source. This is what Buddha calls nirvana, what Patanjali calls samadhi.

Freud made a cutting remark: he said Buddha’s nirvana and Patanjali’s samadhi are cravings for the womb, the desire to re-enter it. He said it as criticism, called it morbid. But his arrow hit the right spot; the fact is so.

What are we all seeking? Think. We can only seek what we have once known. Otherwise, why would we seek it? How would we even imagine it?

You say you seek bliss. But bliss must have been known, otherwise how could you seek its taste? You may not consciously remember, but you have known bliss. Otherwise why this taste, this urge, this running? No one seeks the utterly unknown.

Sufi mystics say: we seek God because we already know Him.

They are right. Knowing must be somewhere within, otherwise the search cannot begin. Have you ever heard of a person who sets out to seek something he cannot even conceive? How would he begin?

We seek bliss because we have known it. It was our first experience. It was so deep that after it we have known nothing higher. After it, the tree only goes downward. That bliss must be regained. It is the search for the root.

Keep well in mind: your samadhi will be the experience of being in the womb again. If you can re-experience being in the womb, Japanese masters call this satori—the first taste of samadhi, the first glimpse.

And if you go on going back, back, back, to the point where this entire cosmos is your womb and you are part of this womb, Patanjali calls that the supreme samadhi—brahma-samadhi, the final samadhi. The first glimpse and the ultimate attainment: the day the whole world becomes womb and you dissolve within it.

This sutra is priceless. Even in the Gita, few sutras are so precious. And it is for the seeker. Forget the forward; remember the backward. Drop worrying about what is to be attained; remember what was already attained and was somehow lost—what was forgotten.

The more you go back, the more you go forward, because the movement is circular. The day you reach the starting point, you also reach the destination.

Where the roots are, there the final flowers are. When a tree flowers, what is the end? In the end the flowers fall. The circle completes. We sowed a seed. The seed became a tree; then flowers and fruit; the seed returns. The circle completes. As soon as the seed returns, fruits and flowers fall and the seed drops into the earth.

Where the journey began, there it ends. From seed to seed. From God to God. The first is the last.

Our mind runs forward. The path backward seems unknown. Perhaps we are afraid—because on returning, the pains we have hidden will rise. That is the fear. They will rise and we will have to pass through them again. There is pain in that.

I have heard: one evening Mulla Nasruddin was sitting sadly before his house. His wife asked, “Nasruddin, why so sad?” Nasruddin said, “In the morning when I went to the market, there was a hundred-rupee note in my pocket. I have checked every pocket except one, and I can’t find it.” His wife said, “Why leave that one?” Nasruddin said, “I’m afraid—if I look there and it’s not there either! It’s my only hope. I don’t have the courage to put my hand in that pocket.”

You are afraid to go within. You have tied your hopes to the future. There, hopes are easy—imagination has no end; dreams can be made beautiful at will. The past—you can do nothing. It is solid, real; it has happened. You went through it; you know there was pain. All that pain lies there. You fear to pass those points again.

And remember, you will pass all the pain—you must. All your wounds will be revived; every hurt will become green again. No wound vanishes; it remains.

If at ten your father beat you, the hurt remains. When you begin to return, when you do the womb-experiment, you will be ten again; the hurt will be fresh; the father will beat you again. The same pain, the same blow to ego, the same helplessness—everything will reappear. The same tears, the same sobbing.

Let it arise; it is precious—because now you pass through it consciously. Once you pass any experience with awareness, it frees you from memory. Samskaras are thinned this way; karma dissolves this way. Whatever pain you have hidden, relive it—and you will become light.

So don’t be afraid. Drop the fear of going back. Suffer the old pains a little. You will find yourself light. Once this is understood, you can move through all suffering and reach the womb.

The root is above—behind—in the first. You have traveled long. There is one easy way to avoid the journey back: keep dreaming of the future. Your past grows by the day; returning becomes harder. The longer you wait, the harder it gets.

People say to me, “It’s not yet time. We are still young. Why meditation, samadhi, God now? When we retire, when we are free, then!”

They don’t know: the longer it takes, the harder it becomes. The past keeps growing—more weight, more hurts, more jealousy, more burns. Returning becomes tougher; more doors close; fear grows.

As soon as possible is best. And someday—though it has not happened yet on earth, and perhaps it never will—if parents become truly religious—not as most are now—then they will take the child forward and simultaneously back, keeping alive the process of returning into childhood again and again, never allowing the past to pile up.

If you can teach your small children each night to relive the day before sleep—when they go to bed, go backward. Don’t start from the morning—start from lying down on the bed and then step by step move back through each act to the moment of waking. Reach back to when they opened their eyes in the morning.

If every child is taught from childhood to return daily, dust will not gather. He will shake off his karma each day. Then as a youth he will truly be fresh. Even as an old man he will be fresh. There will be a dignity in his old age, filled with freshness. No past behind him, no dust—he has been cleaning daily.

We clean the house daily; we never clean ourselves. Religion is nothing more than cleaning oneself. It has nothing to do with God or moksha as separate objects. It is the cleaning of oneself. Because if you are clean, you are God, you are liberation.

Learn to return. Don’t waste your energy in running forward. But dreams are sweet.

I’ve heard: Mulla Nasruddin once went to his psychiatrist and said, “I’m very distressed; only when I was exhausted did I come. One dream comes again and again, every night, for years. I’m worn out. I can’t sleep now. All day I fear the dream; all night I am trapped in it.”

The psychiatrist was curious: “What dream?” Nasruddin said, “Every night I dream: I’m sitting before my house; a very beautiful young woman passes and I run after her. She goes into her house and closes the door. I stand knocking, knocking. For years, the same dream!”

The doctor said, “You want to be free of this dream?” Nasruddin said, “You misunderstand. I want that she shouldn’t be able to close the door!”

The mind runs in dreams. Even in dreams, ambition; the wish that they be fulfilled—that the door not be shut. No one is ready to be free of dreams; we try only to make them more beautiful. Keep this in mind.

People come to me and say, “Free us from the world.” No one wants to be free. They mean, “Make this world a little more beautiful; make sure the door never closes.” Their salvation, their heaven are only prettier forms of this world, where the door is always open. Not just the ordinary—those we call intelligent too. How to make dreams succeed! How to make them more beautiful!

The more beautiful and successful your dreams, the more you will be lost; your remembrance will diminish. Dream means to lose oneself, to forget.

All true methods are processes of remembering oneself. Dreams had not begun in the womb. Return to where not even the first touch of dream had come.

Therefore Patanjali says in the Yoga Sutras that samadhi is the state of deep sleep—sushupti. Where there is not a single dream, not a single thought. But the difference is: in sleep you are unconscious; in samadhi you are full of awareness. Consciously go back and touch the point where the beginning is.

Do not worry how the world began—who made it, why, for what. Be concerned with when you began—how you began. Catch the moment when you began.

To catch the world’s beginning is futile; it cannot be caught, because creation is eternal. The wheel is always turning. Catch the point when you mounted it, when you tied yourself tightly to it.

Before that point you were God; after that, you were lost among branches—and the tree grows downward. The moment you realize there was a moment when you were not holding this wheel, you were outside it—at that very moment, the wheel drops. Because then there is no sense in holding it.

The instant you glimpse the bliss that was before entering this world, in that instant the worldly chase ceases. Because we are trying to find that very bliss in the world.

If you do the small meditation I have described, Krishna’s intent will become clear.

Many commentaries have been written on Krishna’s words—thousands. Not one, however, suggests that you return to your source. Therefore I say, those commentaries are textual; they cannot catch the truth. What you grasp from them will be textual too.

Mulla Nasruddin’s house was infested with rats. He was harassed. Miserly, he wouldn’t buy a mousetrap. Finally he did. But the trouble was, he had to put a piece of bread in it—and that was hard for his miserliness. So he devised a trick. He cut out a picture of bread from a newspaper and placed it inside. He slept peacefully.

In the morning he beat his head. When he opened the trap, beside the picture of bread lay a gnawed scrap of newspaper—with a picture of a mouse.

Bread printed in the newspaper can, at most, catch a mouse printed in the newspaper—nothing more. Words can be explained by words, but then you won’t catch the real mouse. That is why I first spoke of a meditative process—only then will you see that you are an inverted tree.

Whether the world is or is not, you are. When you are, the whole mystery opens. Then you will feel your root is above, branches below. What you call development is decline. And what you call “backward” is the true end—there you must arrive.

Enough for today.