Main Mrityu Sikhata Hun #6

To the friend who has asked why God does not become available in sleep, I would say: it is possible—if you can remain awake even in sleep. And that is exactly what meditation means. The process of meditation I give is, in fact, the process of going to sleep—sleeping while staying awake, entering sleep while awake. That is why I tell you to relax the body, to let the breath go, to quiet the mind. This is the preparation for sleep. And so it often happens that instead of entering meditation, some friends drift into sleep. It happens often, because the preparation is that of sleep. While doing this preparation they don’t notice when they have fallen asleep. Therefore I keep adding a third point: remain awake within, remain filled with inner awareness. Let the body be completely relaxed, let the breath become utterly relaxed—even more than in sleep—but inside remain awake; let the lamp of awareness keep burning within, so that sleep does not come.
The initial conditions for meditation and for sleep are the same. They differ in the final condition. The first condition is that the body be relaxed. If you go to a doctor and say you cannot sleep, he will teach you relaxation. He will say, relax the body. What I am telling you, he too will tell you: leave the body loose, relax, do not hold tension in the body—let the whole body be as loose as a tuft of cotton. He will tell you: watch a cat sleeping.
Have you ever seen a cat sleep? A dog sleep? How do they sleep? As if they are not there at all. Utterly… Have you seen a small child sleeping? How does he sleep? As if everything has dissolved; there is no tension anywhere. All the limbs have gone so limp that there is no measure for it. But look at a man sleeping—a young man, an old man—the body is taut, stretched.
So the doctor, the physician, will say: let everything go completely loose. Sleep has the same condition. Another condition for sleep is that the breath become relaxed and deep, quiet. You must have noticed: if you have to run, the breath becomes fast. When the body has to labor, the breath speeds up and the blood circulation increases. If you are to sleep, the flow of blood must slow down—the exact opposite of running—so the breath relaxes. Therefore the second condition is: relax the breath.
If thoughts are running fast, the blood has to race through the brain. And when blood rushes to the head, sleep is impossible. A condition for sleep is that the rush of blood to the head be reduced. That is why you use a pillow. Perhaps you have never considered why you use a pillow: it is to reduce the flow of blood. Without a pillow the head remains at the same level as the body; at the same level the flow is full and equal from head to toe. When you raise the head, it becomes harder for the blood to climb, so less goes to the head and it circulates more through the whole body. The movement in the head is reduced.
Therefore, the more difficulty one has in sleeping, the more pillows one keeps adding—one, two, three…—because the head needs to be higher. What I am pointing to is simply this: raising the head means less blood goes there. When less blood goes there, sleep comes quickly; with less movement there, the brain relaxes.
If thoughts keep running fast, the flow of blood will continue, because even for thoughts to run they have to ride on the vehicle of blood. The brain’s nerves will keep working swiftly. You may have noticed: when anger arises, the veins swell. They swell because the blood has to run so fast that the veins do not have the capacity to carry it at that speed, so they expand. Thus an angry person’s veins appear swollen. When he calms down, the veins subside, because the speed of the blood decreases. You have seen: in anger the face turns red, the eyes become red. There is no other reason—the circulation has become rapid. When thoughts race so fast, the blood has to rush very fast. The breath speeds up. When lust seizes the mind you will find the breath becomes rapid—very rapid. Sex makes the breath very fast, quickens the blood, and sweat breaks out of the body. Because the thoughts run so fast, the mind runs so fast, all the neural pathways of the brain fling blood rapidly.
So the conditions are the same as for sleep: let the body relax, let the breath relax, let go of thoughts. These are the conditions for sleep, and they are also the conditions for meditation. The initial conditions are the same; the final condition differs. For sleep it is: now go to sleep. For meditation it is: now remain awake. If these three conditions are fulfilled, you remain awake within—that’s all.
So the friend who has asked has asked rightly. There are very deep connections between sleep and meditation. There are very deep connections between samadhi and sushupti (deep sleep). But there is one difference that is very precious. That difference is between being awake and being unconscious. Sleep is unconsciousness; meditation is awakening.
Another friend has asked: Osho, what is the difference between what you call meditation and auto-hypnosis, self-hypnosis?
The difference is the same as between sleep and meditation. It is good to understand this clearly. Sleep comes naturally, and self-hypnosis is also a kind of sleep, but brought on through effort. That is the only difference. In hypnosis—hypnos itself means sleep—hypnosis means trance, it means being mesmerized. There is sleep that comes on its own, and there is sleep that has to be cultivated, induced.

If someone cannot fall asleep, then something will have to be done to bring sleep. If a person lies down and repeats within, “Sleep is coming, sleep is coming, sleep is coming… I am sleeping, I am sleeping, I am sleeping…” and this suggestion begins to circulate through his whole being, goes round and round until the mind takes hold of it—“I am sleeping, sleep is coming”—then the body will start behaving accordingly. The body will say, “If sleep is coming, then relax now.” The breath will say, “Relax now.” The mind will say, “Be quiet now.” If the inner atmosphere that “sleep is coming” is created, the body will begin to act in that way. The body doesn’t mind; the body is very obedient.

If every day you feel hungry at eleven and you eat at eleven, and one night you forget to wind your clock and it stopped at eleven, and in the morning it is actually only eight o’clock, but you look at the clock and see eleven—suddenly your stomach will say, “I’m hungry.” It isn’t eleven yet; there are three hours to go. But because the clock says eleven, the stomach immediately sends the message of hunger. The stomach’s mechanism is mechanical: hunger comes at eleven every day. If it is “eleven,” hunger has arrived; the stomach will duly inform you. If you sleep at midnight every night, and today it is only ten but the clock strikes twelve, as soon as you hear the chimes you will find drowsiness descending—because the body says, “It is twelve; now we should sleep.”

The body is very obedient. And the healthier the body, the more obedient it is. A healthy body simply means an obedient body. An unhealthy body is one that has stopped obeying. Unhealthy doesn’t mean anything else: you give a command and it doesn’t follow. You say, “Sleep is coming,” and it says, “Where?” You say, “I’m hungry,” and it says, “Not at all.” When the body stops obeying, it becomes ill. When it obeys, it is healthy—because it moves in accord with us, follows behind us like a shadow. When it ceases to obey, great difficulty arises.

So hypnosis, mesmerism, simply means giving suggestions to the body and bringing it under suggestion.

Many of our illnesses are false; they are not real. Out of a hundred, roughly fifty are absolutely false. The reason diseases seem to be increasing in the world is not that illnesses themselves are growing. The reason is that man’s falseness is increasing, so false illnesses are increasing. Understand this well. That diseases appear to be increasing does not mean diseases are multiplying. Why should diseases increase because you became educated, or because poverty decreased? Diseases should decrease. No—man’s capacity to lie goes on increasing. He doesn’t only lie to others; he lies to himself. He even manufactures illnesses.

Consider a man who finds it hard to go to the market; he is on the verge of bankruptcy. His mind cannot accept that he might go bankrupt. He doesn’t have the courage to go to his shop—whoever he sees asks for money. Suddenly he will find that he has been seized by such an illness that he is confined to bed. This is a created illness, produced by his psyche. It brings him a double benefit. First, now he can say, “I am ill, that is why I don’t come.” He has convinced himself and convinced others. This illness cannot be cured by any treatment—because if it were an illness, treatment would work. It is not an illness, so the more medicines are given, the more “ill” he will become.

If your illness does not improve with medicines, know that the illness is not of the kind that medicines address. The illness is somewhere else, and medicine has nothing to do with it. You will curse the medicine and say all doctors are fools—so much treatment and still I am not cured. And you will make the rounds from Ayurveda to naturopathy, from allopathy to homeopathy—nothing will happen anywhere. No doctor can help you, because a doctor can only cure authentic illness. He has no hold over a false illness. And the irony is, you take delight in maintaining the false illness; you want it to remain.

More than fifty percent of women’s illnesses are false. From childhood, women learn a formula: only when they are ill do they receive love; otherwise, they never do. When a woman is ill, the husband leaves his office and sits beside her. He may be cursing her inwardly, but he sits. And whenever she wants to keep him sitting by her bed, it becomes necessary for her to fall ill. So women go on being ill. There is hardly an occasion when they are not ill, because only in illness do they take control, they dominate everyone. The sick person becomes the dictator of the whole house, a tyrant. He says, “Turn off all the radios now,” and all radios must be turned off. He says, “Everyone go to sleep,” and all must sleep. He says, “Today no one goes out, everyone sit here,” and all must sit. The more tyrannical the tendency, the more a person seeks illness—because who would distress a sick person? Whatever he says, comply. When he gets well, then fine.

But there is a great danger here. In this way we encourage the illness. It is better that when the wife is healthy, the husband sits with her—that makes sense. If she is ill, then please go to the office; do not encourage her illness. It is costly. When a child falls ill, the mother should not be overly solicitous; otherwise the child, for the rest of his life, will fall ill whenever he wants attention. When the child is ill, reduce solicitude, so that no association forms between illness and love. The child should not feel that when I am ill my mother must massage my legs, must rub my head. When the child is happy and cheerful, then massage his legs, rub his head—so that love gets associated with joy.

We have linked love with suffering. This is very dangerous. It means that whenever there is a lack of love, we will invite suffering. If suffering comes, love will follow behind it. Therefore whoever feels a lack of love will become ill, because through illness they receive “love.”

But remember: illness never brings love; it brings pity. And pity is very humiliating. Love is another matter—but we do not understand this.

So I am saying to you: the body picks up our suggestions. If we want to be ill, the poor body becomes ill. For such illnesses, hypnosis is useful; mesmerism is useful. That is, a false illness can be cured by a false remedy. A true medicine will not work. If we have believed we are ill, then if, in opposition, we begin to believe “I am not ill,” the illness will drop—because it arose out of belief. Hence hypnosis is a very valuable thing. Today, in developed countries, there is hardly a major hospital without a hypnotist on staff. In big hospitals in America or Britain a hypnotist is kept alongside the doctors—because there are scores of illnesses for which doctors are quite useless; for those, the hypnotist is useful. He teaches them how to go into a kind of sleep and to suggest, “You are getting well, you are getting well.”

Do you know that out of a hundred snakes only about three percent have venom? Ninety-seven percent have none at all. But if any snake bites, a man will die. People die even from non-venomous snakes.

That is why mantra and tantra “work”—they are false treatments. Suppose someone has been bitten by a snake that has no venom. Now it is only necessary to convince him that the poison has been drawn out. That’s enough! “The snake is gone.” In truth, it was never there. If this conviction does not arise, the person can die. If he remains fixed in the belief, “A snake has bitten me,” he will die—not from the snakebite, but from “A snake has bitten me.”

I have heard of an incident. A man once stayed at an inn. That night he ate there, left early in the morning, and went on his way. A year later he returned by the same road and stayed again at the same inn. The innkeeper said, “Are you safe and well? We were very frightened.” The man asked, “What happened?” The innkeeper said, “The night you stayed here, a snake fell into the pot of food. Four people ate from it; all four died. You were the fifth—you left early in the morning. We were very anxious about you. But you are alive!” The man said, “A snake?” and he collapsed and died right there—a year later. “I ate snake!” His hands and feet trembled; he fell and died. The innkeeper said, “Don’t be afraid, now there’s no question!” But by then the man was gone.

For illnesses of this kind, hypnosis is very useful. But hypnosis only means this much: what we have unnecessarily, falsely accumulated around ourselves can be cut by another falsehood. Remember, if a false thorn is stuck in someone’s foot, never try to remove it with a real thorn. If you try to pull out a false thorn with a real one, there will be great danger: the false thorn won’t come out, and the real thorn will pierce the foot. A false thorn must be removed with a false thorn.

What is the relationship between meditation and hypnosis? Only this: wherever false thorns are embedded, hypnosis is used up to that point. For example, when I say to you, “Feel that the body is relaxing”—that is hypnosis, mesmerism, self-hypnosis.

In fact, you have been holding the idea that the body cannot relax. To cut that, this is needed—nothing else. If you did not have that craziness, then with a single thought—“The body is relaxed”—the body would relax. We are not doing this to relax the body; we are doing it to cut your conviction that the body cannot relax. So you must plant another conviction: “The body is relaxing, the body is relaxing, the body is relaxing.” Your false belief is cut by this other false belief. And when the body relaxes you will know, “Yes, the body has relaxed.” Relaxation is the body’s natural state. But we are so full of tension, we have created so much tension, that now even to dissolve it we have to do something.

So hypnosis is useful to this extent. When you suggest, “The body is relaxing, the breath is becoming calm, the mind is becoming quiet,” that is hypnosis. But only up to here. After this, meditation begins. Up to here it is not meditation. Meditation begins when you awaken, when you become a witness. When you begin to see: “Yes, the body is lying relaxed; the breath is moving quietly; thoughts have stopped—or thoughts are moving.” When you begin to see—only to see—the witnessing itself is meditation. Before that there is only hypnosis. And hypnosis means induced sleep, nothing else. It was not coming; we brought it. We made an effort, invited it. Sleep can be invited; if we are willing and let go, it comes.

But meditation and hypnosis are not the same. Understand me carefully. I said: up to this point it is hypnosis, mesmerism—so long as we are manufacturing suggestions. When the manufacturing of suggestions stops and you awaken—where awareness begins—there meditation begins. Where witnessing begins, meditation begins. And the reason for this hypnosis is that you have fallen into a reverse hypnosis. In scientific language, this is not hypnosis but de-hypnosis. Not mesmerism, but the breaking of mesmerism. We are the ones mesmerized—but we don’t know it. In life we have become hypnotized, and we have no idea how many kinds of hypnotic trances we have taken on, by how many devices we have produced them.

A large part of our life is hypnosis. And when we want to be hypnotized, we don’t notice what we are doing. For example… we live like this all our lives. If we became aware of it, hypnosis would break. When hypnosis breaks, we can enter within, because hypnosis is the world of the false. Suppose someone is learning to ride a bicycle. The road is wide—sixty feet across. On one side there is a stone, a milestone. On such a broad road, even with eyes closed, there is very little chance of colliding with that stone. But the person is a beginner. He does not see the road first; he sees the stone first. His first fear is, “I must not collide!”

The moment the fear arises—“I must not collide”—he is hypnotized. Hypnotized means the road disappears from view and only the stone is seen. Now the stone becomes vivid. He is afraid; his handlebar begins to turn toward the stone. The handle goes where the attention goes. His attention is on the stone. And because it is, the road vanishes and only the stone remains. He is drawn toward it, mesmerized by it. The more he goes, the more he panics; the more he panics, the more he goes. He collides with the stone. The novice is astonished: “The road was so wide—how did I hit this little stone? Why couldn’t I avoid it?”

He was hypnotized. He focused on the stone, “I must not collide.” Then only the stone remained visible. When only the stone is seen, the hand turns the handle that way—because the body goes where attention goes. The body follows attention. He moves toward it. The more he fears, the more he keeps his attention on the stone—“Don’t collide, so keep watching it!”—and what he keeps watching hypnotizes him. He goes and hits the stone.

In life, the mistakes we try to avoid most carefully are often the very ones we collide with—we get hypnotized by them. A man fears anger—“May anger not arise”—and he finds, twenty-four times a day, that anger has arisen. The more he fears anger, the more he is hypnotized by it; then, all day long, he looks for anger. A man is afraid of women—“May no beautiful woman appear, otherwise desire will be aroused”—and he will see beautiful women all day long. Gradually even plain women will look beautiful; gradually men will begin to look like women. If he sees a monk from behind, he will circle around to check who it is. If the hair is long, he will suspect, “Perhaps it is a woman.” Then women will appear even in pictures. A poster will mesmerize him. What is a poster—just some colors thrown together. But a poster too will hypnotize him. He will hide a nude photograph inside the Gita or the Koran to look at it—and never pause to think, “These are only lines; why am I so hypnotized?” He tried to avoid woman and became obsessed. Now he sees nothing but woman—whether in temple or mosque, everywhere. This too is hypnosis.

So a sex-denying society becomes sexual. A society that condemns sex becomes obsessed with sex. Whatever it condemns, it becomes hypnotized by; the mind centers on it. The more talk there is of celibacy, the more depraved and debauched people such a society will produce—because the excessive talk of celibacy focuses the mind on sexuality. These are our hypnotisms, and we live in them. The whole world is entangled in them. And breaking them is difficult—because what we do to break them only increases the hypnosis.

In this way we have created many, many hypnotic trances in life. We keep producing them and then go on living in them. They must be broken so we can awaken. But for breaking them—since the whole web is false—fitting false thorns must be found.

Therefore, all sadhana, in a sense, is false—and is for removing the false. All sadhana, all methods, all the experiments by which we try to move toward the divine are false—because we have never actually gone away from the divine. We have only gone away in imagination.

It is like this: a man sleeps in Dwarka at night and in a dream reaches Calcutta. Now in the night he gets frightened: “My wife is ill at home; I must get back to Dwarka—and I have come to Calcutta! Which train should I take, which timetable should I consult, which plane should I catch, which bus should I board—how do I go?” He begins asking people, “How do I get to Dwarka?” If someone instructs him, “Go to such-and-such station and catch such-and-such train,” he will be in trouble. Because first of all, he is not in Calcutta. If he were in Calcutta, he could catch a train to Dwarka. He has never actually gone to Calcutta; he has only reached there in dream, in imagination, in hypnosis. Whatever route anyone tells him will only entangle him further.

No route will be of any use; all routes will be false. And when he returns to Dwarka, he cannot come by a true route—because a true route cannot exist. He never reached Calcutta to begin with, so what route could he take from there? If he sits in a train and comes to Dwarka, that train will be as false as Calcutta was. If he boards the train at Howrah station, that station will be as false as Calcutta was. If he buys a ticket, it will be just as false. If a ticket checker appears on the way, he too will be false. The stations along the way will be false. Then he will arrive in Dwarka, and wake up delighted. And he will be amazed: “How astonishing—I was sleeping on my own cot! I had gone nowhere, yet I returned! How did I return?” The going was false, the returning is false.

No one has ever gone outside of God; no one can. He alone is; there is nowhere outside to go. Hence going away is false, and returning is false. But since you have “gone,” you have to return; there is no other way. Having “gone,” you must now come back. Therefore, devices have to be adopted for returning. But when you have returned, you will find that all methods were false, all sadhana was false. We had to practice because we had “gone,” and so we had to “return.” If this is understood deeply, perhaps nothing at all will be required—you will suddenly find you have “returned.” But this is hard to understand—because you insist, “What you say may be true, but I am in Calcutta. Tell me how to return.”

Now they ask such things. I ask them: Have you lost God? If I say, “Yes, I have found,” I have already assumed He was lost. He is ever-found. Even when it seems He is lost, He is still here. It is only that we have wandered into a kind of hypnosis and it appears He is lost. So the person who says, “Yes, I have found God,” is still in mistake. He has not yet understood that He was never lost. Those who know will not say, “I have found God”; they will say, “He was never lost.”

The day Buddha became enlightened, the villagers gathered and asked, “What have you attained?” Buddha said, “Nothing at all. That which had never been lost has simply become evident. That which was never lost, which was always present, that is what ‘has been attained.’” The villagers said, “Then there’s no benefit—your effort was in vain!” Buddha said, “Yes, in that sense no benefit. But one benefit has happened: now there is no longer any need to strive. In that sense no gain—but now there is no need to make effort. I will never again go out searching, never set out to acquire anything, never go on any journey. That much gain has happened. Because now I know that where I am, there I have always been.”

Only in dreams do we go outside, somewhere else, where we are not. In this sense all religions are untrue. They are untrue in that they are procedures of returning. All practices are untrue, all yogas are untrue—because they are ways of returning. Yet they are greatly useful. If someone has been “bitten” by a snake—even a false snake—the village shaman is very useful, who, with spells and sweeping rituals, separates the snake. He is much needed; he should remain in the village. If he is not there, people will die—bitten by a snake that does not exist.

Where I live, there was a man next door—he has passed away now. People came to him from far and wide across India to have snake-bites “exorcised.” He was a very clever man. He had kept ten or so snakes. At his house he kept them all. When someone came, he would perform his rituals and ask, “What kind of snake was it? Where did it bite? Are you still alive?” After making all these enquiries, he would then summon that snake. And where was that snake going to come from! The snakes tied up in his house would be released. He had tricks—what to do, how to do it—so that snake number so-and-so would appear. He would have its lock opened. In half an hour, an hour, that snake would come, hood flaring, hissing, entering from the door. The moment it entered—behold, a miracle!

One who is bitten by a snake cannot properly see what bit him, what it was. He gets caught in the panic—“I’m dying!”—and the snake disappears somewhere. And if the snake has been killed, then they will call its spirit; its spirit will enter one of his snakes. And when the snake appears, they will scold it severely. The snake will beg forgiveness, knock its head on the ground. And the poison in the man will start to subside. They will say, “All right, now drink back your poison.” And the snake will put its mouth on the wound. The man gets well, and he goes away.

By fate, his own son was bitten by a snake. Then there was great trouble, because his treatment did not work at all. He came running to me and said, “I am in great difficulty. Please show me some way—my boy has been bitten by a snake. And he knows all the snakes are kept at home and that this is all trickery. Now what can I do? The boy will die; I can do nothing.” I said, “But you are such a great ‘caster’—people come to you from far away.” He said, “That is all fine. But if I myself were bitten, I would be in great difficulty. If I am bitten, it will be hard to save me, because every ‘caster’ will seem to me a trickster, up to something. And a snake has bitten—and survival is very difficult.”

His boy could not be saved. He could not save his own son.

To erase a lie, there are remedies made of lies. Yet they have efficacy—because we have gone into the lie. So do not ask in that language at all—at the beginning it is hypnosis. The initial stages are of hypnosis, of sleep; only the final stage is meditation. That alone is precious. But for that, this groundwork is absolutely necessary. From the lie into which you have gone, a return is necessary.

And do not ask in this language, “Has God been found or not?” The very question is wrong. Who will find Him? Who will meet whom? That which is, is. The day you awaken, you will find: nothing has been lost, nowhere have you gone, nothing has been erased, nothing has died; what is, is. On that day all journeys, all going, come to an end.

What does liberation from coming-and-going mean? It does not mean you will not be born here. Liberation from coming-and-going means that then there is no coming or going left—anywhere, on any plane. That coming and going is gone. Then we remain where we are. And the day we remain where we are, that very day the springs of bliss burst forth. Because where we are not, we can never be blissful; where we are, only there can we be blissful. Only by being what we are can we be blissful; by being what we are not, we can never be blissful. So “coming and going” means that we are wandering elsewhere, where we are not; we are lost somewhere we have never gone; we are roaming in a place where our being is never meant to be. And where we are, we have missed. Liberation from coming-and-going means returning to where we are.

Coming into the Divine means becoming exactly what we are. There is no such thing as someday meeting God somewhere, standing there, and you bowing and saying, “Thank you, at last I found You.” There is no such God anywhere. And if such a God appears somewhere, know that hypnosis is operating. That too is created. This God is also of your own making. That meeting is just as false. As false as His loss was, just that false is His finding. There is no God to be found somewhere.

Until then… this language keeps deceiving us. Because language gives us the feeling: “God-realization, God-vision.” These words are very wrong. From these words it seems as if somewhere someone will be found, whose vision will occur, a direct encounter will happen, you will embrace, there will be a meeting. All this is false talk. If ever such a God appears, immediately be alert. That God will be entirely a construction of your own mind. It will be hypnosis.

From all hypnosis one has to return. One has to stand in that place where there is no sleep, no hypnosis, where we are fully awake, standing as what we are. The experience that happens there is the experience of the unity of all life, the oneness of the Whole. The name of that experience is God.

Now let us sit for the morning meditation. There are a few more questions—I will speak about them at night.

Spread out a little from one another. Do not talk—quietly make some space. Yes, make room. Those who need to lie down may lie down—make room for lying down. And if in the middle someone feels like falling, they should fall; they should not try to stop themselves. And go up to the veranda as well, but make room. Because if you fall on someone behind you, you will feel discomfort and the other’s meditation will be disturbed. So move aside… Come down here… Yes, close your eyes… No children should talk now, and sit silently for ten minutes. Close your eyes… Let the body go loose… let the body relax. Let the body be completely limp, as if there is no life-force in it. Let all energy move inward… the energy of the body is going inside… flowing inside… we are shrinking inward. And the body will hang outside like a shell… whether it falls or remains propped up… it will remain outside like a hollow garment. Slip within… and leave the body relaxed. Then I will suggest—experience along with me.

Experience: the body is relaxing… the body is relaxing… the body is relaxing. Feel it, and let the body go completely limp. The body is utterly obedient; when the feeling is complete, the body becomes like a corpse. Feel: the body is relaxing… the body is relaxing… the body is relaxing… the body is relaxing… the body is becoming completely relaxed. Let go… release all holding… do not hold the body from within—just let go… withdraw all your grip. As if this body is not ours at all… Whatever happens, happens; if it falls, it falls; if it is lost, it is lost. Step completely back… withdraw the sense of “I.”

The body is relaxing… the body is relaxing… the body is relaxing… the body is relaxing… the body is relaxing… the body is relaxing. The body has relaxed… let go… release all hold on the body… if it falls, let it fall! The body has relaxed… as if it has become absolutely dead… as if it has died. Die—on the plane of the body, die completely… as if the body is gone. The body is no more… we have separated… we have moved away.

The breath is becoming quiet… feel it: the breath is becoming quieter and quieter… the breath is becoming quiet… the breath is becoming quiet… the breath is becoming quiet… the breath is becoming quiet… the breath is becoming quiet… the breath is becoming quieter and quieter… quieter and quieter. Let go… let go of the breath as well… and move inward. The breath has become quiet… the breath has become quiet… the breath has become quiet… the breath has become quiet. We have stepped back even from the breath… the breath has become quiet.

Thoughts too are becoming quiet… thoughts too are becoming quiet… thoughts too are becoming quiet. Step back from thoughts… let go of thoughts as well. Thoughts are quieting… thoughts are becoming quiet… thoughts are becoming quiet… thoughts are becoming quiet… thoughts are becoming quiet… thoughts are becoming quiet. Let thoughts go… thoughts are becoming quiet… thoughts are becoming quiet… thoughts are becoming quiet… thoughts are becoming quiet.

The body has relaxed… thoughts have quieted… for ten minutes remain awake within… for ten minutes remain awake within. For ten minutes everything has died; within, we remain awake like a flame. The body lies far away… the breath is heard far away… thoughts have fallen silent… within, our consciousness is awake and seeing. Do not fall asleep—remain awake within.

While awake within, keep looking within… keep looking… become the witness. And immediately a depth will begin… silence will begin… the void will begin. Now for ten minutes, silence… just keep watching within.

The mind has become quiet... the mind has become utterly quiet. Go deeper... as if one were falling into a deep well... keep falling... keep falling... Remain awake within and go on becoming a void. Keep awareness inside... stay awake... keep watching. And everything has died... the body has gone far away... the breath has slipped far away... thoughts are lost... only we remain. Just stay awake and watch... keep watching... the mind will go on becoming more and more empty.
The mind has become quiet, has become void... watch, remain awake within... Like a flame, remain a witness inside. And slowly, slowly even the sense of being will dissolve. Then nothing will remain, only a void will remain. Only awareness will remain. Look, look within, and go deeper.
(Silence, deserted, stillness...)
The mind has become utterly empty... watch, remain a witness within. The mind has become empty... utterly empty... all has been erased, all has died; only that which is deathless has remained... only that which is deathless has remained... only pure consciousness remains. All has been erased, all has died, all has come to an end.
Now slowly, slowly take two or four deep breaths... and keep watching the breath. The breath is far, very far... we are very far. Breathe deeply, slowly... with each breath the mind will become even more quiet. Breathe deeply, slowly... breathe deeply, slowly, and see: the breath is very far, the body is very far; we are standing far away, watching... the breath too, the body too. Breathe deeply, slowly.
And then very gently, slowly, open your eyes and return. Those who have fallen, let them breathe deeply, slowly; then very gently open the eyes. Then rise very slowly. If you cannot get up at once, take a few more deep breaths and then get up. Even then, if you cannot get up, remain lying down; do not hurry... get up slowly, slowly.
Rise slowly, slowly. Those who have fallen, breathe deeply, slowly; open your eyes very gently and then get up. Get up very slowly; do not hurry. If you still cannot rise, remain lying down for a while.
Our morning session is complete.