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There is no knowledge of self without the knowledge of otherness, there is no knowledge of the voluntary without the knowledge of the involuntary, of can without can’t. So they go together, and that going together of self and other is non-duality, that’s Advaita, that is the Self. So through Self one finds deliverance from self.
And so finally we come to the last consideration, which is the question: in what way and by what means can an individual—who is under the impression that he is a separate individual, limited by and enclosed in his bag of skin—how can such a person effectively realize that he is, deep down, the universal Self; the Brahman? This, of course, is a curious question. It proposes a journey to the place where you already are.
Now, it’s true that you may not know that you are there, but you are. And if you take a journey to the place where you are, you will visit many other places than the place where you are, and perhaps when you find, through some long experience, that all the places you go to are not the place you wanted to find, it may occur to you that you were already there in the beginning. And that is the dharma—or method, as I translated that word—which all gurus—teachers of spiritual development—use fundamentally.
They are—all of them—tricksters, but in the most beneficent sense of the word trickster. Why trickster? Because… do you know it’s terribly difficult—in fact, it’s impossible—to surprise yourself on purpose?
And yet, to be surprised is a great thing. But you can’t plan a surprise for yourself. Somebody else can do it for you.
And that is why so often a guru or teacher is necessary in this process. But let me say right from the start that a guru—there are many kinds of gurus. First of all, among human gurus, there are square gurus and there are beat gurus.
There are gurus like—well, let’s say a great Zen master today—let’s take Oda Rōshi at Daitoku-ji, who is a square guru, and a very good one. But you go through regular channels. Then there is a guru like Mr. Gurdjieff, who is a rascal guru.
Who leads you in by means that are very, very strange indeed. Then there are gurus that are not people. The gurus may be situations, a certain kind of problem or encounter, even a book can, to some extent, be a guru.
A friend can be a guru. I have often thought of writing a story about a man who is some sort of a guru-seeker and potential yogi, who goes, one day, into an automat and sits down at a table where there is another fellow, and he sort of thinks that this man looks wise. And he projects onto him the idea that he is a guru.
And he says, “I feel that there’s something special about you.” And the man says, “Oh really? Actually, there’s nothing special about me. I happen to be an insurance salesman.” And this other fellow says, “Isn’t that fascinating!
How modest he is.” And then I want to develop this story step by step. They keep meeting each other because they both eat at the same automat regularly for lunch. And although the fellow really is an insurance salesman and doesn’t know a thing about these things, it—in the end—results in the enlightenment of the person who projected this image upon him.
So there are, as I say, many kinds of guru. But the problem of the guru is to show the inquirer in some effective way that he already has what he’s looking for. Now, in Hindu traditions, the realization of who you really are is called, basically, sādhana.
And sādhana means ‘the discipline,’ the way of life that is necessary to follow in order to escape from the illusion that you are merely a skin-encapsulated ego. And sādhana comprises yoga, from the root yuk, which means ‘to join.’ And so—from that, in Latin—we get iungere; ‘to join.’ And in English, ‘junction,’ and also ‘yoke.’ And junction is also the word ‘union,’ you see? All this derives from this Sanskrit root yuk.
A yoke is also a discipline. When you yoke oxen, that is a kind of discipline. Now, strictly speaking, in the very strictest sense, yoga means ‘the state of union,’ the state in which the individual self—what is called the Jivatman; Jivatman is approximately translatable as ‘ego’—Jivatman finds that it is ultimately Ātman, which equals Brahman, the supreme Self.
So yoga is the state—the strictest meaning of yoga is the state—of union, and a yogi means one who has realized that union. But we find that the word is not normally used in that way, in that strict sense. Yoga, in the normal way of use, means the practice of meditation whereby one comes into the state of union, and the yogi means one who is a traveler, a seeker who is on the way to that point.
But, again, strictly speaking, there is no method to arrive at the place where you are, and no amount of searching will uncover the Self because all searching implies the absence of the Self—the big Self—so that to seek it is to thrust it away, and to practice a discipline to attain it is to postpone realizing. There is a famous Zen story told of a monk who was sitting in meditation, and the master came along and said, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m meditating to become a Buddha.” Whereupon the master picked up a brick that was lying nearby and started polishing it, rubbing it. And the monk said, “What are you doing?” He said, “I am rubbing this brick to make it a mirror.” He said, “By no amount of rubbing could you ever make a brick into a mirror.” The master replied, “By no amount of zazen could you become a Buddha.” Zazen means sitting meditation.
They react very badly to this story in modern-day Japan. Anyway, what is important, you see—quite radically here—supposing that I say to you, “Each one of you is really the great Self”—you know, the Brahman?—and you say, “Well, all you’ve said up until now makes me fairly sympathetic to this intellectually. But I don’t really feel it.
What must I do to feel it really?” My answer to you is this: “You ask me that question because you don’t want to feel it, really. You’re frightened of it.” And therefore, what you’re going to do is: you’re going to get a method of practice so that you can put it off. So that I can say, “Well, I can be a long time on the way getting this thing, and then, maybe, I’ll be worthy of it.
After I have suffered enough.” See? Because we are brought up in a social scheme whereby we have to deserve what we get. And the price that one pays for all good things is suffering.
But all of that is precisely postponement, because one is afraid, here and now, to see it. If you have the nerve—you know, real nerve—you would see it right away. Only that would be—when one feels—you shouldn’t have nerve like that.
Why, that would be awful, that would be—that wouldn’t do at all! Because, after all, I’m supposed to be poor little me. And I’m not really much of a muchness, and I’m playing the role of being poor little me.
And therefore—in order to be something great like a Buddha, or a Jivanmukta; one liberated in this life—I ought to suffer for it. So you can suffer for it. There are all kinds of ways invented for you to do this.
And you can discipline yourself, and you can gain control of your mind, and you can do all sorts of extraordinary things. I mean, you can drink water in through your rectum and do the most fantastic things. But that’s just like being able to run the hundred yards in nine seconds, or push a peanut up Mount Tamalpais with your nose, or any other kind of accomplishment you want to engage in.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the realization of the Self. The realization of the Self fundamentally depends on coming off it. You know this sort of—when we say to people who put on some kind of an act, we say, “Oh, come off it!” And some people can come off it.
They laugh and say they suddenly realize, you know, they were making fools of themselves, and they laugh at themselves, and they come off it. So in exactly the same way, the guru—the teacher—is trying to make you come off it. Now, if he finds he can’t make you come off it, he’s going to put you through all these exercises so that you—at the last time, when you got enough discipline, and enough suffering, and enough frustration—you’ll give it all up and realize you were there for the beginning, and there was nothing to realize.
But the guru is very clever. He says, “Alright, if this is the way you have to go, this is the way you have to go. You asked for it!
You came to me; I didn’t invite you.” You see? The guru says, “You came to me and said, ‘I want to learn yoga.’” Well, he said, “Yoga is union. You’re tat tvam asi, you know?
You’re that.” “Well, no,” you say, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand that because I only get it intellectually; I don’t feel it.” “Oh,” he says, “you’re one of those. So… I see. I’ve got to satisfy you.
The customer is always right.” You know? “I’ve got to give you all this work to do, because you can’t see directly that this is so.” But he’s looking at you in a funny way, you see? The guru is always saying to you, you know, “What are you doing?
What’s your game?” You know; gets kind of a Kafka-esque situation where you’re accused of a crime that’s not specified, and yet the accuser says you jolly well know what you’ve done. Of course, we can’t mention it because, you know, it’s like those laws that are on the books in the state of California and several other states, where people are accused of the abominable crime against nature and nobody knows what it—I mean… it can’t be mentioned, it’s too dreadful to be talked about. This guy does the same thing, but it’s in a different dimension.
You’ve done it. Now what did you do? See, the real crime is that you won’t admit you’re God.
That’s false modesty. So the guru challenges you, you see? He challenges you.
If you raise the question. He doesn’t go out and preach in the streets and say, “Come on, everybody. You ought to be converted.” He sits down under a tree and waits.
And people start coming around and they offer him propositions. He answers back. And he challenges you in any way that he thinks is appropriate to your situation.
Now, if you’ve got a thin shell and your mask is easily dispatched with, he simply uses what we might call an easy method. He says, “Listen, Shiva, come off it! Don’t pretend you’re this guy here!
I know who you are.” And the guy sort of twinkles a bit and says, “Well, I guess you’re right.” But people aren’t like that. They have very thick shells, and so he has to invent ways of cracking them. So here is how it goes.
To understand yoga you need to get hold of a good translation of Patañjali, the yoga sutra. I don’t know which is the best translation; there are so many of them. It says it starts out “now yoga is explained”; first verse.
And the commentators say now has a special meaning because it follows from something else that you’re supposed to know beforehand. That you’re supposed to be, in other words, a civilized human being before you start out on yoga. We don’t teach yoga to baboons, and so you’re supposed to have been disciplined in artha, kama, and dharma—in politics, sensuality, and dharma; justice.
And then you can start yoga. Then the next verse is, “Yogas chitta vritti nirodha,” which means yoga is the cessation of revolutions of the mind. In other words, you can interpret that at many levels.
Chitta meaning ‘consciousness,’ like a pool, like water, like a reflecting pool. If there are waves on that it doesn’t reflect, it breaks up all the reflections. So stop the waves on the mind and it will reflect reality clearly.
‘Get a perfectly calm mind;’ that’s one meaning of it. Or, another meaning of it is ‘stop thinking.’ Eliminate all contents from the mind; all thoughts, all feelings, all sensations—everything. How will you do that?
Well, it goes on to say you do it by certain steps. First of all, pranayama, which means the control of the breath; pratyahara, which means preliminary concentration; dhāraṇā, a more intense form of concentration; jhāna, which is the same—dhyāna is Sanskrit for ‘Zen’—and that means profound union between subject and object; and finally samadhi, which is way out. Now, what’s happening here?
Control your mind. First of all, by breathing. Breathing is a very strange thing, because breathing can be viewed both as an involuntary and as a voluntary action.
You can feel ‘I breathe,’ and yet you can feel ‘it breathes me.’ And they have all sorts of fancy breathing ways in yoga. They are very amusing to practice, because you can get very high on them. So they set you on these tricks.
And, of course, if you are bright, you may begin to realize some things at that point. If you’re not very bright, then you’ll have to go on. And so, next, they really get to work on concentration.
Concentrate the mind on one point. Now this can be an absolutely fascinating undertaking. I suggest that you try it this way, if you want to make experiments: select a highlight on some bright—some polished surface; copper, or glass, or something—where there’s a little, tiny reflection, say, of a candle or an electric light bulb.
Look at it and put your eyes out of focus so that the bright spot appears to be fuzzy; a fuzzy circle. Now look very carefully at the design in the fuzzy circle, and see if you can make it out. There is a definite pattern of blur, and you can have a wonderful time looking at that.
Then go back, get your eyes into focus, and look at intense light. And you can go into it, and into it, and into it, like, you know, you are falling down a funnel, and at the end of that funnel is this intense light. And go down, go in, in, in, in, in, in—it’s a most thrilling experience.
And, you know, that guru—you know, he’s watching you, and he’s a very, very sensitive man, and he knows when you’re doing—always knows what your motive is. So he puts you onto the kick of getting a pure motive. And that means very deep control of the emotions: I mustn’t have impure thoughts.
Alright, so you go along and you manage to repress as many impure thoughts as possible, and then, one day, he asks you, “Why are you repressing these thoughts? What’s your motive to try and to have a pure mind?” And you find out that you had an impure motive for trying to have a pure mind. That you did it for the same old reason you started out the thing in the beginning: because you were afraid.
Because you wanted to play get-one-up-on-the-universe. And so, eventually, you find out, you see, that your mind is what is called in Sanskrit mudh, mudha, which means ‘crazy.’ Because it can only go in vicious circles. Everything it does to get out of a trap puts it more securely in the trap.
Every step in the direction of liberation is a new tie-up. So that you started, you know, with molasses in one hand and feathers in the other. That was the original situation of man.
The guru made you put them together, see, like that. And so, now, pick the feathers off. And the more it is, the more of a mess the whole thing gets.
So get involved, and involved, and involved by this process. And he, in the meantime, you see, has been telling you, “Yes, you made a little attainment today, but it was only the eighth stage and there are 64 altogether.” And you’ve got to get that 64th stage. And he knows how to spin it out and drag it all out, because you are ever-hopeful that you’ll get that thing, just as you might win a prize, or win a special job, or a great distinction, and be somebody.
That’s the motivation all along, only it’s very spiritual here. It’s not for worldly recognition, you want to be recognized by the gods and the angels. But it’s the same story on a higher level.
So he keeps holding out these baits. And as long as the pupil falls for them, he holds out more baits. Until, after a while, the pupil gets the realization that what he’s doing is running faster and faster in a squirrel cage.
That he’s making an enormous amount of progress in getting nowhere, like in Alice Through The Looking-Glass, when the queen says, “Here you have to run faster and faster to stay where you are.” And so he impresses this upon you by these methods very thoroughly. And at last you find out that you—as an ego, as what you ordinarily call your mind—are a myth, that you just can’t do this thing. You can’t do it by any of the means that have been held out to you.
You can concentrate, yes—you’ve acquired a considerable power of concentration by doing all this—but you find you’re been doing it for the wrong reason. And there’s no way of doing it for the right reason. See, Krishnamurti does this.
He’s a very, very clever guru. Krishnamurti says to people, “Now, look: there is nothing you can do to be liberated, because all your efforts in the direction of liberation are phony. They are based on your desire to boost and continue your ego, and that will never lead to liberation.
All you can do,” he says, “is to be aware of yourself as you are without judgement. See what is. But then, if you can do that, you have no further problem.
But if you try to do it, you’re in the same mess all over again.” Gurdjieff played the same game, in a different way. He said, “The most important thing is self-remembering. Always, at every moment, be aware of what you’re doing.
Watch yourself, constantly, and never, never be absent-minded.” So, all day, you know, when you pick up the piece of paper, you realize, “I am picking up this piece of paper, and I’m opening it inside,” and so on. And I know I’m doing it this way, so I’m not asleep. Ordinary people, you know, pick up a piece of paper and… [laughter].
In this way, we’re really picking up the piece of paper. So all these people are doing this, you know, watching all the time. Now, where do they land up?
I’ve told this story millions of times, really. Excuse me, but it’s very important. When they teach you—in Japanese Zen—how to use a sword, the first thing that the teacher says to the student is, “Now, if you’re going to be a good soldier, you’ve got to be alert, constantly, because you never know where the attack’s going to come from.” Now, you know what happens when you try to be on the alert.
You think about being alert, and then you’re a hopeless prey to the enemy because you’re not alert. You’re thinking about being alert. You must be simply awake and relaxed, and then all your nerve ends are working.
And wherever the attack comes from, you’re ready. They likened this to a barrel of water. The water is just sittin’ there in the barrel.
But the minute you make a hole in the barrel, the water immediately is ready to come out of that hole. So, in the same way, the mind, when it is in a proper state, is ready to respond in any direction from which the attack may come. So this man is no longer alert in the sense of taut and anxious: “Which way is it going to come?” See?
He’s just sitting there, like a cat sits there. And the minute anything happens—geeow—it’s right there, because it didn’t have to overcome any set in a direction opposite to that from which the attack comes. If you’re set for the attack to come from there, and it comes from here, you have to pull back from there and go there, but that’s too late.
So you sit in the middle, and you don’t expect the attack from any particular direction. So, in the same way, all this applies to yoga. You can be watchful.
You can be concentrated. You can be alert. But all that will ever teach you is what not to do.
How not to use the mind. Because it will get you into deeper and deeper and deeper binds. You have to let it happen just like you have to let yourself go to sleep.
You can’t try to go to sleep. You have to let yourself digest your food. You can’t try to digest it.
And, so, in the same way, you have to let yourself wake up; become liberated. And when you find out, you see, that there isn’t any way of forcing it—that, for most people, is the only way of getting them to stop forcing it. Because they won’t believe, when you tell them in the first instance, “You’ve got to do this without forcing it,” they’ll say, “Well, it won’t work.
It won’t happen because I’m very unevolved. I’m just an ordinary human being. I’m just poor little me.
And, if I don’t force it, nothing will happen.” Like people who think that if they don’t struggle and strain they won’t have a bowel movement, or whatever it is. They think they’ve got to do that work in order to make it happen. In other words, all that is based on lack of faith, not trusting life.
And to get people to trust life who don’t trust it, you have to trick them. They won’t jump into the water, so you have to throw them in. And if they are very unwilling to be thrown in, they’re going to take diving lessons, you see, in which they’re going to read books about diving, they’re going to do all the preliminary exercises for diving, and they’re going to stand on the edge of the diving board and inquire whether this is the right posture until somebody comes up the side and kicks them in the butt, and they’re in the water.
And it’s also with this; it really is. So now, the most amazing gamesmanship goes on in the whole domain of yoga and spiritual practice; you would be astounded. One of the games in all this is to find a little flaw in you, see?
Everybody has a place where they can be jiggled a bit; something they’re a bit ashamed of, and so they think, “Does this person really know my secret? He’s not saying anything because he’s polite, but does he really see through me and know that somewhere are the awful awfuls, and that I’m a little bit upsettable.” This is all part of religious competition. If you go to the Roman Catholics, and you’ve been psychoanalyzed—you see?— they’ll say, “Well that’s fine, but,” of course, “it’s not nearly enough.
I mean, that’s all very well so far as it goes, but…” Or, if you’re a Roman Catholic and you go to a Buddhist outfit on a missionary basis, they’ll say, “Yes, of course, through your Catholicism you’ve learned some of the basic virtues, but, of course, Catholicism doesn’t go anywhere near the heart of things because Catholicism doesn’t have an elaborate system of meditation like we have.” Then you go over to a Hindu school and they say, “Yes, the Buddhists go to a certain point; they do obtain a very, very high stage of realization, but there is nevertheless something higher than that, which they don’t quite get.” And you’ll find this all ’round the world. Everybody claiming to have that little special extra essence which the others don’t have. Now, why are they doing that?
Are they all frauds? Are they all out to get you into their society? Sometimes, yes.
But sometimes they are trying to see whether you fall for this; testing you out. This is upāya, the ‘skillful method.’ And if you become falling for that little extra special thing that’s just supposed to be around the corner, then they’ve got you. Or rather, you’ve got yourself in a mix.
And you have to work at that, and work at that, and work at that, until you find out that you were being made a monkey of. But you were being made a monkey of because you could be made a monkey of. You hadn’t really arrived where you are.
You didn’t have the nerve to be you. That is to say, to be the Self. And so you had, always, to feel that there was something beyond that; there’s a stage higher, see?
So that’s why, for example, masonry is such a success; it has 33 degrees. And, you know, you can go up that ladder and get higher and higher status. The more degrees the merrier.
There have been things that invented hundreds of degrees, and they are an immense success. Because you can postpone it longer and longer, like Achilles overtaking the tortoise. He doesn’t overtake it in the problem because we keep dividing and dividing the space between Achilles and the tortoise as he approaches the tortoise.
What delays Achilles overtaking the tortoise is not Achilles, but our calculations about how he approaches it. We make the calculations more and more complicated as he gets nearer and nearer to the tortoise. It’s only the calculations that put it off.
Achilles, in fact, runs right by. So in the same way, you can calculate yourself out of liberation. You can put it off idefinitely by inventing new degrees and new stages.
But actually, when you get it, you don’t get it. You suddenly see it; it happens instantly. It happens instantly whether you put in thirty years’ practice, or whether you put in three minutes.
It’s the same. Suddenly it dawns on you that that’s the way things are. Tat tvam asi.
Medieval society in the West, comparable to Hindu society, allowed people to check out of the game. It revered and encouraged hermits, monks, nuns of various types of discipline. There’s this difference, you see, for the West and India: you couldn’t join the Brahmana caste, the priest caste, from some other caste.
But in the European caste system, by becoming a priest, or a cleric of any kind—you see, a cleric means, simply, a literate person—you could familiarize with any other caste once you’re in that one. And so it was a wonderful way of rising in society. You could, from being a serf, go to being a priest, to being an archbishop and consort with the nobility.
It was the only way open to cross castes, you see? And because they were the literate people, it was through literacy, and through universities founded by clerics, that our caste system began to break and we got the idea of choosing your own vocation, and not simply following what your parents did. Now, I want to make an observation, here, about checking out of the game.
This is not encouraged in contemporary society, because the Catholic church and the, say, the Episcopalian church, are very powerful minorities; they can still support monasteries and even hermits. But you can’t be one on your own without great difficulty. Firstly, because you’re a poor consumer.
See, around here, we have a number of hermits. There’s a guy out there building that boat, and he’s essentially a nonjoiner, a poor consumer, and the community—they live a lot a along here, and they’re mostly—they’re not working-class people, they are people who dropped out of college because they saw it was stupid. And they’re that sort of people.
We would call them, perhaps, beatniks. But, you see, the city doesn’t like it because they aren’t owning the right sort of cars, and therefore the local car salesman isn’t doing business through them. They don’t have lawns, and so nobody can sell them lawn mowers.
They hardly use dishwashers, appliances of that kind; they don’t need them. And, also, they wear blue jeans and things like that, and so the local dress shops feel a bit put out having these people around. And they live very simply.
Well, you mustn’t do that. You’ve got to live in a complicated way. You’ve got to have the kind of car, you know, that identifies you as a person of substance, and status, and all that.
So there’s a great problem here in our society. Now, why is there this problem? There’s always a very inconsiderable minority of these nonjoiners, or people who check out of the game.
But you will find that insecure societies are the most intolerant of those who are nonjoiners. They are so unsure of the validity of their game rules that they say, “Everyone must play.” Now, that’s a double-bind. You can’t say to a person, “You must play,” because what you’re saying is, “You are required to do something which will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily,” you see?
So ‘everyone must play’ is the rule in the United States. And it’s the rule in almost all republican governments. I mean republican in the sense of democratic.