Jin Khoja Tin Paiyan #14

But searching and begging are two different things. In fact, the one who does not want to search is the one who begs. Searching and begging are not the same; they are opposites. He who wants to avoid searching begs; a seeker never begs. And the processes of searching and begging are entirely different. In begging you have to keep your attention on the other—the one who will give. In searching you have to keep your attention on yourself—the one who is to receive.

It is true that there are obstacles on the path of the seeker. But if we understand rightly, saying there are obstacles on the path of the seeker means the obstacles are within the seeker; the path too is within. And to understand one’s obstacles is not very difficult. So we will have to speak a little more extensively on what the obstacles are and how the seeker can remove them.

As I spoke of the seven bodies yesterday, if we understand a bit more in that connection, this too will become clear.

The possibilities of the Muladhar chakra
Just as there are seven bodies, so there are seven chakras. And each chakra is particularly connected to one of the bodies. Of the seven bodies we spoke of—the physical body, the gross body—the chakra of this body is the Muladhar; it is the first chakra. This Muladhar chakra has a central relationship with the physical body; it is the center of the physical body. The Muladhar chakra has two kinds of potential: one is its natural potential, which we receive by birth; the other is the potential of sadhana, which becomes available through practice.

The primary natural potential of the Muladhar chakra is sexual desire, which nature gives us; it is the central urge of the physical body. Now the first question before the seeker is: what to do about this central element of the physical body? And this chakra has another potential, which becomes available through sadhana, and that is brahmacharya—celibacy. Sex is its natural potential and brahmacharya is its transformation. To the extent that the mind is centered on and possessed by sexual desire, to that extent the Muladhar will not be able to attain its ultimate potential. Its ultimate potential is brahmacharya. The chakra has two possibilities: one given by nature, and the other that will be attained through sadhana.

Neither indulgence nor suppression—rather awakening
This means that with what nature has given us we can do two things: either we live in it as it is, in which case the life of sadhana does not begin; or we transform it. On the path of transformation the great danger is that we may start fighting with the natural center. What is the danger on the seeker’s path? Either he indulges the natural arrangement, in which case he cannot rise to the highest possibility—the height to which he could have risen, the reach the physical body could have given him, remains unattained; he gets stuck right where he starts. That is indulgence. The second is suppression—fighting it. Suppression is the obstacle on the seeker’s path—the first obstacle at the first center. Because through suppression there is never transformation.

If suppression is an obstacle, then what should the seeker do? What will be his instrument?

Understanding will be the instrument. The more one understands sexual desire, the more transformation begins within. The reason is: all the elements of nature within us are blind and unconscious. If we become alert toward those elements, transformation begins in them. The very moment something in us starts to awaken, the elements of nature begin to change. Awakening is alchemy; awareness is the chemistry of their change, of transformation.

So if someone becomes fully aware of sexual desire, with total feeling and total attention, the birth of brahmacharya begins within him in place of lust. And until one reaches brahmacharya at the first body, it is very difficult to work with the possibilities of the second body.

The possibilities of the Swadhisthan chakra
The second body I said is the emotional body or etheric body. It is related to our second chakra, Swadhisthan. Swadhisthan also has two possibilities. The basic natural potentials received from nature are fear, hatred, anger, violence. These are the natural states given to Swadhisthan. If one gets stuck in these, then the other, wholly contrary, transformed state—love, compassion, fearlessness, friendliness—does not become possible.

On the seeker's path, the obstacle at the second chakra is the question of transforming hatred, anger, and violence. Here too the same mistake will occur as with all elements. One may choose to be angry, or one may try to suppress anger. We only do these two things: someone may be afraid, and another may suppress fear and parade a futile bravado. Neither brings transformation. Fear is there; it must be accepted. To suppress or hide it serves no purpose. Violence is there; putting a cloak of nonviolence over it will make no difference. Shouting that nonviolence is the supreme dharma will not change anything. Violence is a natural potential given to our second body. It too has its use, just as sex has its use. Sex is a natural potential so that through it another physical body can be given birth before this one perishes. Fear, violence, anger are all indispensable on the second plane; otherwise humans could not survive, could not be safe. Fear protects; anger brings one into struggle; violence gives the tools to protect oneself from another’s violence. These are potentials of the second body.

But ordinarily we stop there. If they can be understood—if one understands fear, one attains to fearlessness; if one understands violence, one attains to nonviolence; if one understands anger, one attains to forgiveness. In truth, anger is one face and forgiveness is the other face hidden behind it; the other side of the coin. But the coin must be flipped. And it flips. If we fully understand one side of the coin, spontaneously the curiosity arises to turn it over and see the other side.

But if we hide it and say, “I don’t have it at all! I have no fear!” then we will never see fearlessness. He who accepts fear and says, “There is fear,” and who probes and investigates it fully, he will soon reach the point where he wants to know: what is behind fear? The curiosity will tell him to flip the coin and look. And the day he flips it, he attains to fearlessness. Likewise, violence turns into compassion. These are the possibilities of the second body for the seeker.

Therefore the seeker has to transform what has been given by nature. And for this there is no need to go asking around a lot; the need is to continually search and inquire within. We all know that anger is an obstacle; we all know that fear is an obstacle—because how will the fearful go in search of truth? The fearful goes out to beg. He wants someone to give without his having to set foot on unknown, unfamiliar paths.

The possibilities of the Manipur chakra
The third body I called the astral body, the subtle body. It too has two parts. Primarily the subtle body hovers around doubt and thought. If these are transformed—doubt, when transformed, becomes trust; and thought, when transformed, becomes discrimination.

He who suppresses doubt will never attain to trust. Although everywhere people explain: suppress doubt and believe. He who suppresses doubt and believes will never attain to trust; doubt will remain inside—suppressed; it will keep slithering like a worm within and keep working. His belief will be imposed out of fear of doubt.

No, one must understand doubt, live through doubt, walk with doubt. And one day doubt leads to the point where doubt itself is doubted. And the day doubt is doubted, trust begins.

Nor can one attain discrimination by dropping thought. There are people who drop thoughts, and people who make others drop them; they say—don’t think, drop thinking. If someone drops thought, he attains belief and blind belief. That is not discrimination. Only by passing through the subtlest processes of thought does one attain discrimination.

What does discrimination mean?

In thinking there is always doubt. Thought is ever indecisive. Hence those who think a lot can never decide anything. And whenever someone does decide, he decides only when he is outside the circle of thought. Decision always comes from beyond thought. If one remains entangled in thought, he never decides. There is no relationship between decision and thought.

Therefore it often happens that the thoughtless are very decisive, and the thoughtful are highly indecisive. Both are dangerous. The thoughtless are very decisive. Whatever they do, they do with full force—because there is no thought in them to kindle even a spark of doubt. All the dogmatic, blind, fanatical people in the world are very industrious; because in them there is no question of doubt, they never think. If they feel that by killing a thousand people they will attain heaven, they won’t stop until they have killed one thousand and one. It never occurs to them even once to consider otherwise; there is no indecision in them. The thoughtful goes on thinking and goes on thinking.

So out of fear of thought, if one shuts the door of thought altogether, he attains only blind belief. Blind belief is dangerous and is a great obstacle on the seeker’s path. What is needed is discrimination with eyes—thought in which decision abides. That is all discrimination means. It means that thinking is complete, but we have gone through thinking so deeply that whatever elements of doubt and suspicion it contained have departed; slowly only pure decision remains along with the conclusion.

So the third body’s center is Manipur. The Manipur chakra has these two forms: doubt and trust. Doubt, when transformed, becomes trust.

But remember: trust is not the opposite or enemy of doubt; trust is doubt’s purest development, its ultimate flowering; the last shore where everything of doubt is lost, because doubt becomes doubt upon itself, becomes suicidal, commits self-destruction—and trust becomes available.

The possibilities of the Anahata chakra
The fourth body is our mental body, the manas body, the psyche. It is related to our fourth chakra, Anahata. The natural form of this fourth, the mind, is imagination and dreaming. Our mind by nature keeps doing this—imagining and dreaming. At night it dreams, in the day it dreams and keeps imagining.

Its ultimate developed form is this: if imagination is fully and supremely developed, it becomes resolve, will; and if dreaming is fully developed, it becomes vision—psychic vision.

If in a person the capacity to dream becomes fully developed and transformed, then even with eyes closed he begins to see things. Then he is no longer dreaming; he begins to actually see. He can see through a wall. For now he can only dream about what is beyond the wall, but then he can actually see beyond it. For now he can only guess what you might be thinking; then he can see what you are thinking. Vision means that without the senses, things begin to be seen and heard. The distances of time and space fall away for him.

In dreams also you travel. In a dream you are in Bombay and you can go to Calcutta. And in vision you can go too. But there will be a difference. In a dream there is only the idea that you went to Calcutta; in vision you actually go. That fourth psychic body can be present.

Therefore, in the ancient world the notion about dreams was—though it gradually got dropped and the new rational people rejected it—because we had lost track of the ultimate possibility of the fourth body—in relation to dreams the old experience was that in dreaming a person’s subtle body leaves and goes out traveling.

There was a man, Swedenborg. People thought of him merely as a dreamer. Because he spoke of heaven and hell; and talk of heaven and hell must be dreams! But one afternoon he was sleeping, and suddenly he sat up and shouted, “Help! There’s a fire! Help, there’s a fire!” His family gathered; there was no fire there. They woke him and asked, “Are you asleep, or dreaming? There’s no fire anywhere!” He said, “No, my house is on fire.” His house was three hundred miles away, and at that exact time his house had caught fire. By the second or third day the news arrived that his house had burned to ashes. And when he cried out in his dream was exactly when the fire broke out.

Now this is no longer a dream; this is vision. The gap of three hundred miles had collapsed and this man saw what was happening three hundred miles away.

Transcendent phenomena before science
By now even scientists have agreed that the fourth body has great psychic potentials. And because of space travel they have to work with great understanding, for sooner or later the difficulty is bound to arise that the travelers we send into space—no matter how reliable the machines, they are still not entirely reliable—if their instruments fail even a little, their radio equipment, our connection with them will be broken forever; they will not even be able to inform us where they went and what happened. So scientists are at this time very keen to see whether psychic vision of the fourth body and telepathy can become workable—they too are part of the ultimate possibilities of the fourth body—so that if those travelers, without radio equipment, can send us direct telepathic messages, some rescue may be possible.

Considerable work has been done on this. About thirty years ago a traveler went to explore the North Pole. There was a radio system by which he would send messages, but there was another arrangement that had just been discovered. And that was that a psychic person, a man in whom the second possibilities of the fourth body worked, was also designated, so that he would receive messages from him as well.

And the remarkable thing is that on the days when water, wind, weather were bad and no messages came by radio, that man still received them. And when all the diaries were later compared, at least between eighty and ninety-five percent of what the psychic medium had received was correct. And amusingly, what the radio had reported did not exceed seventy-two percent; because meanwhile sometimes glitches occurred and many things got missed.

And even now Russia and America are both extremely eager in this regard. Therefore telepathy, clairvoyance, thought-reading, and thought-projection are being worked on a great deal. These are possibilities of our fourth body. Dreaming is its natural potential; seeing the true, seeing reality, is its ultimate potential. This Anahata is our fourth chakra.

The possibilities of the Vishuddha chakra
The fifth chakra is Vishuddha; it is near the throat. And the fifth body is the spiritual body, the atma body. That is its chakra; it is related to that body. Up to the four bodies and four chakras that I have spoken of, they are divided in duality. From the fifth body, duality ends. As I said yesterday, up to the fourth body there is a male–female difference in the body; from the fifth body the distinction between male and female ceases. If you observe closely, all duality is the duality of male and female; duality as such is only male–female. And where the gap between male and female ends, there all dualities end. The fifth body is nondual. It does not have two possibilities; it has only one.

Therefore after the fourth, there is not much work left for the seeker; all the major work is up to the fourth. After the fourth there is not much work—“not much” in the sense that there is no opposite left there. One has only to enter. And by the time one reaches the fourth, so much strength has accumulated that entry into the fifth happens naturally.

But whether one enters or not, what difference will there be? In the fifth body there is no duality. But what is the difference between someone who has not yet entered and someone who has?

There will be a difference. The difference will be that one who enters the fifth body will have all kinds of unconsciousness shattered; he will not be able to sleep at night. The body will sleep; inside, someone in him will remain constantly awake. If he even turns over, he knows it; if he does not, he knows it. If he has pulled up a blanket, he knows; if he has not, he knows. His knowing will not slacken even in sleep; he will be aware twenty-four hours a day.

Those who have not entered the fifth body will be in exactly the opposite condition: in sleep they will of course be asleep, but even in what we call waking, one layer of them will remain asleep.

Human unconsciousness and mechanicalness
People appear to be doing things. You come home; the steering wheel turns left, and the brakes are applied in front of your house—don’t think you are doing all this consciously! It all happens habitually, in unconsciousness. Only sometimes, in certain moments of great danger, we come to our senses—when the danger is such that one cannot function in sleep—if a man places a dagger on your chest—then for one second you come into awareness. For one second the sharp edge of the dagger reaches you to the fifth body. But such moments occur only two or four times in life; ordinarily we live asleep.

A husband has never really seen his wife’s face; if he closes his eyes now and tries to recall, he won’t be able to. The lines will shift here and there in a moment, and he won’t be sure that this is the face of my wife whom I have been looking at for thirty years. He has never actually seen it. Because to see, someone awakened inside is needed.

The sleeping person seems to be seeing, but he is not seeing. Inside him sleep is going on, and dreams are going on too. In that sleep everything goes on. You get angry and later say, “I don’t know how it happened! I didn’t want to do it.” As if someone else did it. You say, “That abuse slipped from my mouth—pardon me—I didn’t want to say it, my tongue must have slipped.” You yourself used the abuse, and you say you didn’t want to. There are murderers who say, “I don’t know—in spite of us, despite us—it happened; we did not want to do it, but it just happened.”

So are we automatons, moving mechanically? We say what we don’t want to say; we do what we don’t want to do. In the evening we resolve: we will get up at four in the morning! We even swear an oath. At four in the morning we ourselves say: what’s the point! Sleep now, we’ll see tomorrow. At six we get up and regret, and we say: we made a big mistake; we will never do this; tomorrow we must get up; we should have kept the vow.

It is astonishing—how did the person who decided in the evening get changed at four in the morning? Then if he decided at four, how did he change at six? Then what he decides at six, by evening it changes again. Evening is far; in between it changes twenty-five times.

No, these decisions, these thoughts, arise in our sleep; they are like dreams. They form like bubbles and burst. There is no awakened person behind them; there is no person filled with awareness behind them.

So sleep is the natural state before entry into the spiritual body—sleep; being asleep. And after entering the spiritual body, the natural state is awakening. Therefore after the fourth body we can call the person a buddha. After the fourth body awakening has come. Now the person is awake. Buddha is not Gautam Siddhartha’s name; it is the adjective given after the attainment of the fifth body—Gautam the Buddha! It means Gautam who has awakened. His name is Gautam, but that was the name of Gautam as a sleeping person. Therefore gradually that was dropped, and only “Buddha” remained.

A world of sleeping people
This is the difference of our fifth body: before entry into it man is asleep, sleepy. Whatever he does are acts done in sleep. His words cannot be relied upon; what he says is not to be trusted; his promise has no value; his given word has no meaning. He says, “I will love for life!” And two moments later he may strangle the throat. He says, “This relationship will last for many lifetimes!” It may not last even two moments. It is not even his fault; what value has a vow taken in sleep? If at night in a dream I vow to someone that this relationship will last for life, what value is that? In the morning I say it was a dream.

A sleeping man cannot be trusted in anything. And our whole world is a world of sleeping people. That is why there is so much confusion, conflict, duality, quarrel, and uproar—sleeping people are creating it.

There will be another difference between sleeping and awakened people; we should keep that in mind too. Because a sleeping person never knows who he is, he is all the time trying to show someone that “I am this!” All the time he is at it. He himself does not know who he is, so in a thousand ways he tries: sometimes he rides some political post to show people, “I am this”; sometimes he builds a big house to show, “I am this”; sometimes he climbs a mountain to show, “I am this.” From all sides he is trying to tell people, “I am this.” And through all these efforts he is circling around trying to know himself—“Who am I? Who am I?” He does not know.

The answer to “Who am I?”
Before the fourth body there is no way to know it. We call the fifth body the atma body precisely because there you will know who you are. Therefore after the fifth body, the sounds of “I” cease completely. After the fifth body the claim of being somebody ends altogether. If you say to him then, “You are this,” he will laugh. And from his side all claims will disappear; because now he knows—there is no need to claim anything. There is no need to prove anything before anyone; it has been proven before himself who he is.

Therefore within the fifth body there is no conflict; but between the one outside the fifth and the one inside, there is a fundamental difference; if there is conflict, it is in that sense—between outside and inside. Within the person who has entered the fifth body, there is no conflict.

The fifth body is deeply fulfilling
But the fifth body has its own danger: if you wish, you can stop there; because you have known yourself. And it is such a satisfying and blissful state that you may not move further. Up to now the dangers were of suffering; now the danger that begins is of bliss. All the dangers before the fifth body were of pain; now what begins is bliss. It is so blissful that perhaps you will not search any further.

Therefore for the person who has entered the fifth body, the utmost alertness to maintain is that bliss should not seize him and become a stopper. And bliss is supreme. Here bliss will manifest at its full height and full depth. A great revolution has taken place: you have known yourself. But you have known only yourself. And you are not the only one; there is all the rest as well. Often pains do not prove as halting as pleasures; and bliss proves very halting. To leave even the marketplace’s crowd was difficult; now it will be far harder to leave the veena playing in this temple. Therefore many seekers stop at self-knowledge and do not attain to knowledge of the Absolute.

Do not get absorbed in bliss
So even toward this bliss one must remain alert. Here too the work is the same: do not get absorbed in bliss. Bliss absorbs, engulfs, drowns. Do not get absorbed. Know the experience of bliss too as an experience—just as there were experiences of pleasure and of pain, so too bliss is an experience. But you still remain outside it; become a witness to this as well. Because as long as there is experience, there is superimposition; and as long as there is experience, the final shore has not come. On the final shore all experience ceases. Pleasure and pain of course cease; bliss too ceases. But our language cannot go beyond this. Therefore we have called the form of the divine sat-chit-ananda—truth, consciousness, bliss. It is not the form of the divine; it is only as far as language goes. Bliss is our last word.

In truth, beyond the fifth body language does not go. So about the fifth body something can be said—there is bliss, there is complete awakening, there is self-knowing; all this can be said without difficulty.

After self-ism comes mysticism
Therefore those who stop at self-ism will have no mysticism in their words. Those who stop at the self will have no mystery; their talk will seem entirely like science; because the world of mystery lies beyond this. Up to here things can be clear. And to my understanding, those who stop at the self—their religion, sooner or later, science will assimilate; because even science will be able to reach up to the self.

A seeker of truth will not stop at the self
Ordinarily, when a seeker sets out, his search is not for truth but for bliss. He says he is searching for truth, but what he seeks is bliss. He is troubled by suffering and restlessness; he is looking for bliss. Therefore he who has gone out seeking bliss will definitely stop at the fifth body. So let me add one more thing: let the search be for truth, not for bliss. Then there will be no stopping.

Then a new question will arise: bliss is there, yes; I am knowing myself, yes; but these are the flowers and leaves of the tree—where are the roots? I am knowing myself, yes; I am blissful, yes; but where do I come from? From where? Where are my roots? Where have I come from? What is the depth of my existence? From where am I arising? This wave of mine—from what ocean has it arisen?

If there is a longing for truth, you will be able to go beyond the fifth body. Therefore, from the very beginning the inquiry should be into truth, not into bliss. Otherwise up to the fifth there will be an excellent journey, but at the fifth the matter will stop suddenly. If the search is for truth, there is no question of stopping here.

So the greatest obstacle in the fifth body is its extraordinary bliss. And we come from a world where apart from sorrow, pain, anxiety, and tension, we have known nothing. When we enter the temple of this bliss, the mind wants to drown completely, to get lost now, to dance and be lost in this bliss.

This is not the place to be lost. That place too will come, but then you will not have to lose yourself; you will be lost. There is a great difference between losing oneself and being lost. That is, a place will come where even if you want to save yourself you will not be able to. You will see yourself being lost and have no means. But here you can “lose” yourself; here too you can get lost. But even in that, our effort, our striving—and deep down—ego will be dissolved in the fifth body, but asmitā will not. Therefore it is necessary to understand a little difference between ego and asmitā (pure am-ness).

In the self body there is no ego; asmitā remains
Ego dissolves, the sense of “I” disappears. But the sense of “am” does not disappear. “I am” contains two things—“I” is ego, and “am” is asmitā—the sense of being. The “I” dissolves at the fifth body; only being remains, the “am” remains; asmitā remains.

Therefore standing at this place, if someone speaks about the world, he will say there are infinite souls, each soul is separate; the soul is not one, each person’s soul is distinct. From this place the selfist experiences many selves; because he is seeing himself in asmitā, still separate.

If the search for truth is in the heart and one can be saved from the obstacle of absorption in bliss—and one can be saved, because when bliss remains constant it becomes boring. Bliss too becomes boring; if the same note of bliss keeps sounding, it too becomes monotonous.

Bertrand Russell has, somewhere in jest, said that he would not like to go to moksha, because he hears that there is nothing but bliss there. That would be very monotonous, that only bliss and nothing else; not even a line of sorrow in between, no anxiety or tension. How long could one endure such bliss?

Absorption in bliss is the obstacle in the fifth body. Then, if you can be saved from absorption in bliss—which is difficult, and sometimes it takes many lifetimes. Crossing the first four steps is not so difficult; crossing the fifth is very difficult; many births may be needed—to get bored of bliss, to get bored of the self, to get bored of that “self.”

So up to the fifth body the search is for freedom from something—freedom from hatred, from violence, from lust. After the fifth, the search is freedom from oneself. So there are two things: freedom from something—that is completed up to the fifth. Then the second: not freedom from something, but freedom from oneself. And thus from the fifth body a wholly new world begins.

The possibility of the Ajna chakra
The sixth body is the brahman body, the cosmic body; and the sixth center is Ajna. From here there is no duality. The experience of bliss becomes profound at the fifth body; the experience of existence becomes profound at the sixth—existence, being. Asmitā is lost at the sixth body. “Am” also goes—“Is!” I am—“I” goes at the fifth body; “am” goes as soon as you cross the fifth. Is! There is the sense of is-ness, tathatā—suchness. Thus it is. There, “I” will not appear anywhere; asmitā will not arise anywhere. What is, that which is—only that remains.

Here there will be the knowing of sat—being; there will be the knowing of chit—consciousness. But here chit is freed from me; not “my” consciousness—consciousness! Not “my” existence—existence!

Transcending even Brahman: entry into the nirvana kaya
And some people will stop at the sixth. Because the cosmic body has arrived; I have become Brahman—the state of aham brahmasmi. Now I am not; only Brahman remains. What more is there to seek? What search now? What remains to search? Now there is nothing left to search; everything is attained—because “Brahman” means the total, the all.

From this point those who have spoken say that Brahman is the ultimate truth, the absolute; beyond it there is nothing. And therefore at this point one can stop for infinite lifetimes. Ordinarily one does stop; because beyond this it does not even occur that there could be anything further.

So the knower of Brahman will get stuck here; he will not go beyond. And it is extremely difficult to cross this point—because now there is no place left to which one could go beyond. Everything has been encompassed; but to go out, somewhere is needed too! If I leave this room, there must be an outside as well! Now this room has become so vast—endless, infinite; boundless, beginningless; now there is nowhere to go—nowhere to go. So where will you go to search now? There is nothing left to search; all has come. So here one can stop for endless births.

In the ultimate quest, the last barrier is Brahman
So Brahman is the last obstacle—the last barrier in the seeker’s ultimate quest. Being remains now, but still non-being is left. “Is” has been known; “is not” remains to be known. Therefore the seventh body is the nirvana kaya. Its chakra is Sahasrar. And nothing can be said about it. Up to Brahman, something can be said—with stretching and straining; it becomes very inaccurate.

The opening of the third eye at the sixth body
Up to the fifth body the talk proceeds very scientifically; everything can be made clear. At the sixth body the limits of talk begin to be lost, words begin to lose meaning; even so, indications can still be made. But now even the finger breaks, the gestures fall—because now even one’s own being falls.

So the absolute Being can be known up to the sixth body and from the sixth center.

Therefore those who are in search of Brahman will meditate on the Ajna chakra. That is its center. Hence they meditate on the Ajna chakra between the eyebrows; it is the chakra related to that body. And when one works fully on that chakra, from there what begins to be seen—the infinite expanse—they begin to call it the third eye. From there the third eye comes—through which they begin to see the infinite, the cosmic.

The possibility of the Sahasrar chakra
But still one more remains—non-being, naught. Existence is only half the story; non-existence is also there. Light is half the story; darkness too is there. Life is half the story; death too is there. Therefore the ultimate non-existence, the void, must also be known—because the ultimate truth will only be known when both are known—being and non-being; theism known in its totality and atheism known in its totality; being known in its totality and non-being known in its totality. Only then can we know the whole; otherwise even this is incomplete. In Brahman-knowledge there is an incompleteness, that it cannot know non-being. Therefore the knower of Brahman simply denies non-being; he says: it is maya, it is not; it does not exist. He says: being is truth, non-being is false, illusory; it does not exist; where is the question of knowing it!

Nirvana kaya means the body of void, where we take a leap from “being” to “non-being.” Because that remains to be known as well; it too must be known—what is non-being? What is it to be erased? Therefore the seventh body, in one sense, is the great death. And nirvana, as I said yesterday, means the extinguishing of the lamp. Our “being”—our “I”—has been erased; our asmitā has been erased. But now we had become one with the All, we had become Brahman—this too has to be left. And one who has made such a leap will of course know what is; he will also know what is not.

These are our seven bodies and seven chakras. And within these seven chakras lie all our obstacles and all our means. Nowhere on any outer path is there any obstacle. Therefore there is not that much question of going around asking someone.

Go out searching, not begging
And even if you go to ask someone, or to understand from someone, do not go to beg. Begging is one thing; understanding is another; asking is different. Keep your own search going. And whatever you have understood, make that too your search; do not make it your belief. Otherwise it becomes begging.

You asked me something and I said something to you. If you had come to beg, then what I said you would put into your bag and keep it carefully as your possession. Then you remain a beggar, not a seeker. No—what I said to you becomes your inquiry; it sets your search in motion; it provokes and awakens your curiosity more; it creates for you more difficulties and restlessness; it raises new questions and opens new directions, and you set out on a fresh search—then you did not beg from me; then you understood. And what you understood from me, if it helps you to understand yourself—then it is not begging.

So set out to understand, set out to search. You are not searching alone; many are searching. Many have searched; many have found. See what happened to all of them, what did not happen; understand all that. But having understood all that, do not stop understanding yourself; do not take it to be your knowledge. Do not make it your belief, do not rely on it; make from all that your questions; make from all that your problems; do not make it your solutions; then your journey will continue. And then there is no begging; then it is your search. And only your search can take you to the end. And as you search within, at each center you will see two elements—one that you have been given, and one that you have to discover. Anger has been given; forgiveness you have to discover. Sex has been given; brahmacharya you have to discover. Dreaming has been given; vision, darshan, you have to discover.

Up to the four bodies your search in duality will continue; from the fifth body your search in nonduality will begin.

In the fifth body, whatever you receive, keep searching for that which is other than it. If you receive bliss, search: what is there other than bliss? On the sixth body, if you receive Brahman, keep searching: what is there other than Brahman? Then one day you will reach the seventh body, where being and non-being, light and darkness, life and death, both happen together. And then the ultimate. And about that there is no way to speak.

After the fifth body there is mystery and only mystery
Therefore our scriptures all either come to completion at the fifth. Those with a very scientific intellect do not speak beyond the fifth; because beyond that begins the cosmic, whose expanse has no end.

But those who are of a mystic kind—mystics, Sufis and people of that sort—speak of that too. Though in speaking of it they face great difficulty, and they have to contradict themselves every time, to oppose themselves. And if you listen to all the words of a Sufi fakir or a mystic, you will say: this man is crazy! Because sometimes he says this, sometimes that! He says: God is; and he says: God is not. He says: I have seen him. And in the very next sentence he says: how can you see him! Is he an object for the eyes? He raises such questions that you will be surprised whether he is raising them to someone else or to himself! From the sixth body begins mysticism.

Therefore, any religion in which there is no mysticism—understand that it has stopped at the fifth. But mysticism is not the last thing either; mystery is not the last thing. The last thing is emptiness; nihilism is the last word.

So the religion that stops at mystery—understand that it has stopped at the sixth. The last is the last. And beyond that void there cannot be any last word.

Make even the stone on the road into a step
So from the fifth body the search for nonduality begins; up to the fourth, the search in duality is finished. And all obstacles are within you. And obstacles are a very good thing in that they are available to you. And by transforming each obstacle, that very thing becomes your means. A stone lies on the path; as long as you have not understood it, it stops you. The day you understand it, it becomes your step. The stone remains right there. Before you understood, you were shouting: this stone is stopping me—how can I go further! The day you understood it, you stepped on it and went ahead. And now you thank that stone: great is your grace, because on the plane on which I was walking, by stepping on you my plane changed—I am now walking on another plane. You were a means, but I mistook you for an obstacle; I thought the road was blocked, this stone has come in between—now what will happen!

Anger came in the way. If you step upon anger, you will attain forgiveness, which is a very different plane. Sex came in the way. If you step upon sex, brahmacharya becomes available, which is an entirely different plane. And then you will be able to thank sex, and you will even be able to thank anger.

You will become bound to that with which you fight
Every stone on the path can become an obstacle or a means. It depends on you what you do with that stone. But do not, by mistake, fight with the stone, otherwise your head may break and it will not become a means. And if someone starts fighting with a stone, the stone will hold him up; because wherever we fight is where we stop. One can never go far from what one is fighting.

Hence if someone starts fighting sex, he will go on circling around sex just as much as the one who indulges in it. In fact sometimes even more. Because the one who indulges becomes bored and steps out; this one cannot even become bored; he keeps circling around it.

If you fight anger, you will become anger; your entire personality will be filled with anger; and from every fiber and strand of you the sounds of anger will begin to emanate; and around you waves of anger will flow. Therefore the stories we read of rishis—of great wrath—there is a reason. The reason is they are people who fight anger. Some Durvasa, some this or that. They can think of nothing but cursing. Their entire personality is fire. They fought the stone and got into trouble; they have become that with which they fought.

You will read stories of rishis whom some apsara from heaven comes and immediately corrupts. Amazing! This is only possible if they have fought sex; otherwise it is not possible. They have fought so much, so much, so much, that in fighting they have themselves become weak. And sex is standing where it is; now it is waiting; it will burst out through any door. And it is unlikely that an apsara came; more likely it was just an ordinary woman, but he saw an apsara. As if apsaras have taken a contract to come and harass rishis! But if sex has been much suppressed, even an ordinary woman becomes an apsara; because our mind begins to project. At night it dreams the same, in the day it thinks the same; then our mind becomes entirely filled with it. Then anything—anything at all—becomes supremely alluring, which it was not.

Do not fight; understand
So for the seeker, one must beware of mere fighting and make the effort to understand. And the effort to understand means to understand what you have received from nature. Then by the very path of what you have received, you will also receive what you have not received; that is the first end. If you run away from it, you will never reach the other end.

If, frightened of sex, you run away from it, how will you reach brahmacharya? Sex was the gate given by nature. Brahmacharya is the discovery you will eventually dig out through that very gate.

Seen like this, there is no need to go out begging; there is great need to go out understanding. And your whole life is for understanding—learn from anyone, from everywhere, and finally understand within yourself.

Avoid weighing people

Better not get into this tangle. It has no substance. It has no meaning. And even if I were to say it, you would have no proof with which to verify it. And as far as possible, it is good to refrain from weighing individuals. There is no use in it. There is no use in it. It has no meaning at all. Let them be.
In the fifth or sixth body, after death, birth in the celestial realms.

Yes, that is correct: after attaining the fifth body, a person will not be born into this gross physical body. But there are other bodies. There are other bodies. In fact, there are bodies of the kind we have called “deities.” After the fifth, such bodies can become available.
After the sixth, even those kinds of bodies will not be available. Not the bodies of “gods,” but the kind of body we have called “God,” Ishwar, will become available.
But bodies will continue to be available; what kind they are is a very secondary matter. Only after the seventh will no bodies be available. Only after the seventh will there be a disembodied state. Before that, subtler and subtler bodies will keep becoming available.
Grace is superior to shaktipat.

Very possible—many things are possible. In truth, the difference between shaktipat and prasad, grace, is large. Essentially, it is prasad that is the real thing; what comes without any medium will be the purest, because there is no one in between to contaminate it. As when I look at you with naked eyes, what I see is the purest. If I put on glasses, it won’t remain so pure—the medium has come in between. Yet even among media there can be many forms of purity and impurity: the glasses may be tinted, or they may be clear and colorless. And the quality of the glass itself can differ greatly. You understand, don’t you?

So whenever we receive through a medium, some impurity is bound to enter—it will be the impurity of the medium. Therefore the purest prasad is direct; the purest grace descends directly—no medium at all.

Now understand: if we could see even without eyes, that would be purer still, because the eye itself is a medium. If vision were possible without eyes, it would be even more uncontaminated, because then even the eye could not interfere. Someone has jaundice, someone’s eyesight is weak—there are difficulties.

But now, for the one whose eye is weak, the medium of spectacles can be helpful. It may be that with the naked eye he cannot see as purely as with glasses. So the glasses become another medium—two media now—but this medium can compensate for the defect of the previous medium.

It is exactly like that. When prasad reaches someone through a person, the person as medium will introduce some impurity. Yet if that impurity counteracts the seeker’s own defect—if the two cancel out—then the transmission will come closest to prasad. But that must be decided case by case.

My understanding is: therefore seek direct prasad; drop worrying about the medium of a person. Yes, sometimes, for the flow of life, a glimpse will flash through a person as medium—that is fine; the seeker need not be concerned about it.

Do not go looking to receive! Because if you go to receive, as I told you yesterday, you will find a giver. And the denser the giver, the more impure the affair becomes. The giver should be such that you cannot even tell giving is happening—only then can shaktipat be pure. Even so, it will not become prasad. One day what is needed is that which comes immediately, without a medium, directly—no one between the divine and us, no one between the energy and us. Keep that in meditation, keep that in your sight, make that your search. Many happenings may occur along the way, but do not stop at any of them—that much is enough. And differences will be there—differences of quality and differences of quantity, for many reasons. To go into all those reasons would be a long story; there are many.

The purest medium of shaktipat
In fact, through anyone who has attained the fifth body, shaktipat can happen—through the fifth body. But the shaktipat of one in the fifth will not be as pure as that of one in the sixth, because his asmita is still intact. The ego has dissolved, but the sense of “am-ness” remains; the “I” is gone, the “am” remains. That “am” will still taste a little juice.

From one in the sixth body too, shaktipat will happen. There even the “am” is no more; there is only Brahman. It will be purer. Yet there is still Brahman; the state of “is-not” has not arrived—there is still “is.” That “is” is a very fine veil—very fine, delicate, transparent—but it is a veil. So shaktipat from the sixth will happen, and it will be superior to that from the fifth. It will come very close to prasad. But however close, even the slightest distance is still distance. And the more precious the thing, the greater even a tiny distance becomes. The realm of prasad is so precious that even such a thin veil—the mere knowing that “it is”—becomes a hindrance.

From one who has attained the seventh body, shaktipat becomes the purest—the purest. Yet it is still not grace. The purest state of shaktipat is reached at the seventh body—no further. On that side there is no veil now; for the one in the seventh there is no veil—he is one with the void. But on your side there is a veil. You will still take him to be a person. Your veil will now provide the final obstruction. From his side there is none, but for you he remains a person.

The sense of personhood toward the medium is also an obstacle
Understand: if I attain the seventh state, it is my affair that I know I am the void—but you? You will know me as a person. And your notion that I am a person becomes the last veil. That veil will fall only when the happening befalls you from non-personhood—when you cannot hunt down where it came from or how it happened, when you find no source. Only then can that notion drop; it must be source-less. If a ray of the sun comes, you will catch hold of the sun as a person. But when a ray comes that comes from nowhere, and a rain that falls with no cloud to cause it—only then will the last veil, born of the other being a person, fall from your mind.

So finer and finer distances remain. The final event of prasad will happen only when there is no one in between. Even your idea that “someone is” is a sufficient obstacle—the last one. As long as there are two—you and the other—it is too much. Yes, the other may be gone, but you remain; and because you are, you still conceive of the other. When source-less prasad happens—when grace descends with no origin anywhere—then it will be the purest. Because of that originlessness your person will be swept away in it; it will not be able to survive. If another person is present, he serves to save your person—even if he is present only for you, he still serves that function.

From “I” and “Thou” arises tension
In fact, when you go to the seashore you feel greater peace; when you go into the forest you feel more peace—because there is no other person before you, the Other is absent. Therefore your own “I” becomes attenuated. As long as the other is present, your “I” is strengthened. Put two people in a room and streams of tension flow in that room. They are doing nothing—neither fighting nor quarrelling, just sitting silently—yet currents of tension are flowing, because two I’s are present and activity is going on all the time: defense is going on, attack is going on. There may be silence; it isn’t necessary to quarrel or speak—the mere presence of two makes the room tense. And if someday I speak about it—if you become aware of all the waves that emanate from our personalities—you will be able to see that the room has split into two fields, each person has become a center, and their electrical currents and waves stand facing each other like enemies.

The presence of the other strengthens your “I.” When the other leaves, the room changes, you relax; your “I,” which was primed for whatever might happen, loosens. It leans back against the pillow and rests; it breathes, “For now there is no other present.”

Hence the use of solitude: there your “I” can loosen. You can stand more easily beside a tree than beside a man. That is why in countries where tensions between people become very deep, people begin to keep dogs and cats and live with them. It is easier with them; they carry no “I.” We happily walk along with a leash around a dog’s neck—but we cannot walk like that with a leash around a person’s neck.

Though we try! The husband has the wife on a leash, the wife has the husband on a leash, and they go along! Only the leashes are subtle, invisible. But the other keeps creating trouble—shaking his neck all the time as if to say, “Take it off; this leash won’t do.” A dog, leashed, simply goes along, wagging his tail behind us. So a dog can give us a kind of comfort that a person cannot, because a person instantly calls our “I” to attention and puts it in difficulty.

Gradually, breaking off from relationships with persons, man starts relating to things—because with things it is simple. So heaps of objects increase. Houses fill up with things while people become fewer. People bring anxiety; things do not make a fuss. The chair stays where it is; if I sit, it does not create any trouble.

A tree, a river, a mountain—they bring no hassle, so we feel great peace in their presence. The sole reason is: there, on the other side, no “Thou” stands firmly, so we too can relax. We say, “Fine—if there is no thou here, what need is there for me to be? All right, I too am not.” But let there be the slightest hint of another person’s presence, and our “I” is instantly on alert, worrying about security—who knows what might happen—so it must be prepared.

The ego’s unease before the zero-person
This preparedness remains to the last moment. Even if you meet a person of the seventh body, your vigilance will persist—in fact, with such a person it may increase. An ordinary man does not frighten you so much, because even if he can hurt you, he cannot wound you very deeply. But a person who has gone beyond the fifth body can wound you deeply—he can reach to the very body to which he himself has reached. Your fear of him increases: who knows what might happen! From within him you begin to sense a very unknown, unknowable power peering out. So you stand very cautiously. Around him you begin to see an abyss; you feel there is a pit within—if we go near, we might fall into it.

That is why whenever men like Jesus, Krishna, or Socrates are born in the world, we kill them. They create great disturbance within us. To go near them is to go near danger. Then, when they are dead, we worship them; now they no longer frighten us. We make golden statues and stand with folded hands: “You are God.” But while they are alive we do not behave like this—we are very afraid of them. And the fear is vague, because we do not know exactly what it is. The deeper a man becomes, the more he becomes an abyss for us, a chasm. And as when you peer into a chasm you feel fear and your head swims, so too if you look into such a person’s eyes, fear arises and the head begins to reel.

There is a very wonderful story about Moses: after the prophet Moses had a vision of the divine, he never again unveiled his face; he kept it veiled. He lived thereafter with a veil, because to gaze into his face had become dangerous. Whoever looked would take flight; they could not remain there. An abyss became visible through him. An infinite chasm had opened in his eyes. So when Moses went among people he kept a veil over his face; only veiled could he speak. People began to be nervous and afraid of him, as if something were pulling like a magnet into a pit—and who knows where it would take one, what would happen! No one knew.

So even the man who has reached the seventh state still “is”—for you. Therefore you will protect yourself against him, and a veil will remain; hence grace cannot be pure. With such a man it could be pure if the very notion that “he is” were to drop for you. But that notion can drop only when the notion “I am” drops for you. If you reach the state where the sense “I am” is absent, then purity can come even from there. But then there is no point of meeting or not meeting; it has become source-less—it has become prasad.

The larger the crowd we are in, the more hard, dense, condensed our “I” becomes. Hence the perennial counsel to move out of the crowd, away from the other, so the “I” can drop. But wherever you go, if you stay long by a tree, you will begin to talk to the tree and make it a “thou.” Stay long enough by the sea—five or ten years—and you will begin to speak to the sea and make it a “thou.” Our “I” will, as a last resort, produce a “thou” even if you have fled outside; it will form a bond of attachment even with them, and begin to see them as if with form.

The ego’s safety in the devotee–God duality
Even one who reaches the very last stage may then set God up as a “Thou” in order to save his “I.” The devotee keeps saying, “How can we be one with the Supreme? He is he, we are we! How could we be at his feet when he is God!” He is saying nothing else but this: if I become one with him, then here my “I” will have to be lost. So he keeps the divine far, as a Thou. And he rationalizes it: “How can we be one with him? He is great, he is the Absolute; we are petty, fallen. How could we be one!” But he is preserving the Thou so that here his “I” may be preserved.

Therefore the devotee does not go beyond the fourth body; he does not reach the fifth—he gets stuck at the fourth. Yes, in the fourth, imagination is replaced by vision; he finds the supreme possibilities of the fourth body. Thus many miraculous happenings begin to occur in a devotee’s life—but he remains at the fourth. I am not taking names, hence I speak in this way: the devotee remains at the fourth.

The journeys of the devotee, the hatha yogi, and the raja yogi
The self-practitioner, the hatha yogi, the man engaged in many yogic techniques reaches at most the fifth body; because deep down he is saying, “I want bliss; I want liberation; I want the cessation of suffering”—but behind every “want” the “I” is present. “I want liberation”—not liberation from the I, but the I’s liberation. “I want to be free, I want moksha.” That “I” stands dense. He reaches the fifth body.

The raja yogi reaches the sixth. He says, “What is there in the I? I am nothing; only That is. Not I, only That—Brahman is all.” He shows a readiness to lose the I, but not to lose asmita, the sense of being. He says, “I will remain, as one with Brahman, as a part of it. I will remain, one with That; I am Brahman.” He will drop the ego, but what is essential within will remain united with That. He reaches the sixth.

Only a seeker like Buddha reaches the seventh, because he is ready to lose—ready to lose even Brahman, ready to lose himself; ready to lose everything. He says, “Let what is be; I have no expectation that this should remain or that should remain—no expectation at all.” Ready to lose all—and the one who is ready to lose all becomes entitled to gain all. The nirvana body can be attained only in such a state, when we are prepared for zero and for non-being, prepared even to know death. Preparations for knowing life are many; therefore the knower of life stops at the sixth body. The one who is prepared to know death will know the seventh.

If you wish, you can yourself find the names—there is not much difficulty in that.

The scientific possibilities of the fourth body

Understood! It’s a perfectly valid question. There are three or four points to understand here.

First, many things were indeed told by people who attained the fourth body. Many things were indeed told by people who attained the fourth body. And we could even count them. For example, about when the earth came into being: the age of the earth given by those who had reached the fourth body differs only slightly from the age science gives today. And even now it cannot be said with certainty that science is right—science itself cannot claim finality. The gap is quite small, not large.

Second, regarding the earth’s roundness and its measurements: what the fourth-body seers reported differs even less from current science. And this gap need not mean that the seers were wrong, because the earth’s curvature and many metrics are not fixed. Today the earth is at a certain distance from the sun; it has not always been so. Today the moon is at a certain distance from the earth; it has not always been so. Where Africa is today, it was not always there—at one time Africa was joined to India. Thousands of things have changed and are changing. If you take these shifting conditions into account, it is astonishing how many of science’s “discoveries” were reported long ago by those who had the fourth-body vision.

The difficulty of expressing supersensory experience
There is also a basic difficulty: the language of science and the language of those who reached the fourth body are fundamentally different. The one who has fourth-body vision does not have a mathematical language; he has a language of visions, pictures, symbols—of parables.

Dreams have no language; visions too have no literal language. Consider: what you think by day, if it appears at night in a dream, must choose a symbolic language, because words are absent there. If I am an ambitious man who all day hopes to rise above everyone, at night I will dream that I have become a bird flying high in the sky above all. I won’t say in the dream, “I am ambitious.” The language shifts; the dream shows me flying.

So the language of vision is pictorial, not verbal. Just as dream interpretation developed after Freud, Jung, Adler—so too the sayings of those who had the fourth-body vision still await interpretation. We have not yet even finished interpreting dreams; interpreting visions is a far subtler task. What did those seers really mean?

Hindu avatars as symbols of biological evolution
Take an example. When Darwin said man evolved from animals, he stated it in scientific terms. But if you read the Hindu story of the avatars, you find a symbolic parallel long before Darwin. The first avatar is not a man; the first avatar is a fish—Matsya. Darwin too places fish at the beginning of the line. This is symbolic language: “The first manifestation of divinity appeared as a fish.” Not scientific language, but a parable.

Then comes Kurma, the tortoise—an amphibian, of both water and land. Surely, from fish one cannot leap straight to land animals; there had to be creatures half water, half land. Then gradually some descendants remained in water, some on land.

Read through the twenty-four avatars and you’ll be amazed: what Darwin grasped after thousands of years, we had already encoded in symbolic form. Before the human avatar comes Narasimha—half man, half lion. Animals could not have become human in a single leap; there must have been transitional links—half animal, half man.

Scientific possibilities hidden in the Puranas
If you understand this, you’ll see: what Darwin later said in scientific language, those with fourth-body vision had conveyed much earlier in Purāṇic language. But even today the Puranas cannot be properly interpreted because they have fallen into the hands of the uncomprehending, not into the hands of scientists.

The Puranic “codes” are lost
A further difficulty: the keys to decode the Puranas have been lost. For instance, much later science says that at most another four thousand years are left for humanity on earth. Many Puranas predicted something very similar. The time window is almost the same. Science says: the sun is cooling, its rays weakening, its thermal energy dissipating; in about four thousand years it will be cold enough that life on earth will end. The Puranas say it differently. And even this is not final—if the Puranas say five thousand, I myself lean to five thousand; science’s calculations can err, but vision doesn’t. Science keeps revising—Newton says one thing, Einstein another; every few years, models change. In the end, what we conclude is unlikely to be far from what the fourth-body seers saw.

Do not rush to judgment just because something doesn’t fit current knowledge. Life is vast; snap judgments are the habit of an unscientific mind. If you track “scientific truths” across a century, many of them become old tales; new findings arrive.

Now consider: the Puranic truths lost their code. Suppose a third world war breaks out. Its first outcome will be that the most educated, cultured strata will die; the uncultured remnants will survive—forest-dwellers, tribals. City-dwellers in Bombay or New York will not survive. After such wars, the finest minds go first. A tribal might tell his children, “Flying machines once crossed the sky.” He is not lying; he saw them. But he has no code to explain how. For a generation or two the children believe; later they ask, “Did you see it yourself?” “No, my father told me.” After a couple of millennia they say, “Pure fancy—no one ever flew.”

Mahabharata and the loss of a developed science
Something like this happened. The Mahabharata war destroyed the refined knowledge that India had through its psychic mind; stories remained, but the knowledge was lost. Today we doubt, for instance, that Rama flew to Lanka—doubt is understandable; not even a bicycle remains from that era, let alone an airplane, and no manual survives. The war wiped out the best; what survived was memory—smriti and shruti: heard and remembered, not seen and verified. A few speak, a few hear, a few repeat—that is all. When the topmost minds perish—remember, the world’s deepest insights may reside in ten or twenty-five people—if an Einstein dies, there may be no second person to truly explicate relativity. The Mahabharata destroyed the best; what remained became stories. Proofs are being sought now—and can be sought—but we are unfortunate; we are hardly searching.

Pyramids and the use of psychic force
Sites have been found at least three to five thousand years old that seem to have served as airstrips. Structures exist that could not have been built without massive mechanical systems—think of the stones raised on the pyramids. Even today many of those blocks lie beyond the capacity of our largest cranes. Yet they were hoisted and placed—clearly by human beings. Either there were machines, or, I say, there was a use of fourth-body psychic force. Try a simple experiment: have a man lie down, four people stand around him. Two place two fingers each under his knees, two place a finger each under his shoulders. All four resolve to lift him with those fingers alone, breathe strongly for five minutes, hold the breath—and lift. He will rise on the fingers. In just this way, four men could lift a massive stone with a finger each. In any case, the stones are there; they cannot be denied.

The scope of psychic inquiry
Psychic force has infinite dimensions. A person with the fourth body need not be concerned with the moon; he may not wish to know about it, nor have any need. Their curiosity lay elsewhere—in matters more precious. They asked: Do spirits exist? Where do people go after death? Today even science begins to hint at such things. As one enters the fourth body, interest in matter declines: the exact girth of the earth is no longer compelling.

Picture a child telling a sage, “We won’t consider you knowledgeable unless you explain how to make dolls; the boy next door can.” The difference is of curiosity. The fourth-body seeker asks: What is the soul’s path after death? By what laws does it travel? How is birth determined? Can we consciously design birth?

His interest was not in reaching the moon—that is trivial; his interest was in reaching liberation—which is meaningful. How does the soul enter the womb? Can we assist its choice of womb? How long does the transition take?

Tibet’s experiments with the dead
In Tibet there is the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Those who had reached the fourth body devoted great effort to how to help a person for seven weeks after death—how to guide him, how to inspire a special rebirth, how to direct him into a particular womb. Science will take time to establish such things, but it can be done. They also devised ways to test validity.

The selection of the chief Lama
In Tibet, when the chief Lama dies, he leaves word: in which house he will be born next, how he can be recognized, and certain secret signs. The country then searches for the child. The one who can reveal the secret is accepted as the reborn Lama—only the one who left the signs can decode them. The present Lama was found in this way. A special formula was to be proclaimed from village to village; the child who could give its meaning would be recognized as the reincarnated Lama, for no one else could know it.

Different sciences, different curiosities
The fourth-body person’s curiosity was different. The universe is infinite, its secrets endless. The sciences we have today are not the final sciences; thousands more will be born. And when they arise, they will ask why the ancients did not tell us these things. We will say: they were scientists too, but their curiosity was different—vastly different.

Luqman, the physician who spoke with plants
Today we might boast that we have cures; why didn’t the ancients give them? Yet Ayurveda and Unani catalog an astonishing array of herbs—without laboratories. How did they know which herb, in what dose, heals which ailment?

There is a story of Luqman: he would go to each plant and ask, “Tell me what you can be used for.” Today this sounds fanciful. Until fifty years ago we did not even accept that plants are alive; now science accepts it. Until thirty years ago we did not accept that plants breathe; now we do. Until fifteen years ago we did not accept that plants feel; now we do. Approach a plant in anger, its state changes; approach with love, it changes. It is no surprise if, within fifty years, we say we can talk to plants. That would simply be a continuum. Then Luqman will stand vindicated.

This is not something one can do outwardly; it is possible at the level of the fourth body—to merge with the plant and ask. No laboratory could be vast enough for Luqman to determine the uses of a hundred thousand herbs by experimentation alone; it would take countless lifetimes. Yet he said, “This herb works for this,” and now science often agrees.

Much of the ancient investigation was the work of those with fourth-body access. They discovered many things we do not even suspect.

On illness and the placebo
We treat thousands of “diseases” in ways that are unscientific. A fourth-body knower would say: many of these are not diseases at all—why are you treating them? Modern medicine is beginning to see this. In some American hospitals they take ten patients with the same illness; five receive a drug, five receive water injections. Astonishingly, both groups improve in the same proportions. This means those who improved with water did not have a real disease; they had only the belief of disease.

Treating such “phantom” illness with real drugs is harmful—the toxins cause real problems, and we end up creating diseases that are hard to cure. Old science used to say ninety percent of illnesses are phantom. Allopathy fifty years ago denied this; now it accepts perhaps fifty percent. I say: within forty or fifty years they will have to accept ninety percent—because that is closer to reality.

Different languages: science and Purana
What the fourth-body people knew has not been properly interpreted in today’s scientific language and perspective. That is the difficulty, and no other. Parable and science use different tongues.

The sun’s seven horses
Today science says every sunray splits into seven colors through a prism. The Vedic rishi says the sun has seven horses—seven-colored horses pulling his chariot. This is parable. There is no contradiction. Much that psychic seers predicted early is grasped by science only much later, when the right language arrives.

Consider also: mathematics and calendrics existed long before modern science. How did the ancients calculate that the earth completes one orbit around the sun in a year? The year and its 365 days are very old. Without instruments, how? Apart from psychic vision, what means were there?

Seeing the earth from above through the mind
An extraordinary find: in Arabia, a seven-hundred-year-old world map was discovered—drawn as if from above, the way earth looks from an airplane. It could not have been made from the ground. Seven hundred years ago there were no airplanes. So either there were airplanes—and there were not—or someone rose high in the fourth body and mapped what he saw.

Inner anatomy known through vision
Read Charaka and Sushruta and you will be amazed. They describe the body’s minutest parts as we see them today by dissection. Either surgery had become exceedingly refined—and yet we find no instruments, no surgical manuals—or someone entered the human body in vision and saw. Today we know X-rays penetrate the body; a century ago if someone had said, “We can photograph your bones,” we would not have believed him. The fourth-body eye can see deeper than X-rays and render a full picture without cutting. In India, where we cremate, dissection was not feasible; in the West, burial allowed anatomy to develop—indeed, it grew on the back of stolen corpses, with trials in courts, because cutting a body was a crime.

What Western anatomy reached by cutting, our texts reached three thousand years ago without cutting. This simply means that there are other routes to knowing besides experiment.

Someday I would like to speak on this fully. It would take ten to fifteen days—then a little of it might come into view.