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Vigyan Bhairav Tantra - Meditation
Technique 55
"AT THE POINT OF SLEEP, WHEN THE SLEEP HAS NOT YET
COME AND EXTERNAL WAKEFULNESS VANISHES, AT THIS POINT BEING IS
REVEALED."
There are some turning points in your consciousness. At these turning
points you are nearer to your center than at other times. You change
gears, and whenever you change a gear you pass through the neutral gear.
That neutral gear is nearer. In the morning, when sleep is going,
vanishing, and you are feeling awake but not yet awake, just at the
midpoint, you are in a neutral gear. There is a point when you are not
asleep and not awake, just in the middle.
There you are in a neutral gear. From sleep to waking,
your consciousness changes the whole mechanism. It jumps from one
mechanism to another. Between the two mechanisms, there is no mechanism;
there is a gap. Through that gap you can have a glimpse of your being.
The same happens in the night when you are again jumping from your
waking mechanism to your sleeping mechanism, from your consciousness to
the unconscious. For a single moment there is no mechanism, no grip of
the mechanism on you, because you have to take a jump from one to
another. Between the two if you can be awake, between the two if you can
become aware, between the two if you can remember yourself, you will
have a glimpse of your real being.
How to do it? While going to sleep, relax. Close your eyes, make the
room dark. Just close your eyes and start waiting. The sleep is coming;
just wait, don't do anything, just wait! Your body is relaxing, the body
is becoming heavy: feel it. Have the feeling of it. Sleep has its own
mechanism, it starts working. Your waking consciousness is vanishing.
Remember, because the moment will be very subtle and the moment will be
atomic. If you miss, you miss. It is not a very long period -- a single
moment, a very small gap, and you will change from waking to sleep. Just
wait, fully aware. Go on waiting. This will take time. It takes at least
three months. Only then can you have the glimpse one day of the moment
which is just in the middle. So don't be in a hurry. You cannot do it
just now; you cannot do it tonight. But you have to start and you may
have to wait for months.
Ordinarily, within three months, one day it happens. It is happening
every day, but your awareness and the meeting of the gap cannot be
planned. It is a happening. You just go on waiting, and someday it
happens. Someday, suddenly you become aware that you are neither awake
nor asleep -- a very weird phenomenon. You may even become afraid
because you have known only the two: you know when you are asleep, you
know when you are awake. But you don't know a third point in your being
when you are neither. At the first impact of it you may become afraid
and scared. Don't get scared and don't be afraid. Anything which is so
new, unknown previously, is bound to give a certain fear because this
moment, when you will have experienced it again and again, will give you
another feeling also: that you are neither alive nor dead, neither this
nor that. This is an abyss.
These two mechanisms are like two hills; you jump from one peak to
another. If you remain in the middle you fall into an abyss, and the
abyss is bottomless: you go on falling, you go on falling. Sufis have
used this technique, and before they give this technique to a seeker,
they give another practice also just to safeguard. Whenever this
technique is given in Sufi systems, before it another practice is given,
and that is to imagine with closed eyes that you are falling into a deep
well -- dark, deep and bottomless. Just imagine falling into a deep well
-- falling and falling and falling, eternally falling. There is no
bottom, you cannot reach to the bottom. Now this fall cannot stop
anywhere. You can stop; you can open your eyes and say no more, but this
fall in itself cannot stop. If you continue, the well is bottomless, and
it gets more and more dark.
In Sufi systems, this well exercise -- this bottomless, dark well
exercise -- is to be practiced first. It is good, helpful. If you have
practiced it and you have realized the beauty of it, the silence, then
the deeper you go into the well, the more silent you become. The world
is left far away, and you feel that you have gone far away, far away,
far away. Silence grows with darkness, and deep down there is no bottom.
Fear comes to your mind, but you know that this is just imagination so
you can continue.
Through this exercise, you become capable of this technique, and then,
when you fall into the well between waking and sleeping, it is not
imagination; it is a real fact. And it is bottomless, the abyss is
bottomless. That is why Buddha has called this nothingness emptiness --
SHUNYA. There is no end to it. Once you know it, you also have become
endless. It is difficult to have this glimpse while awake. Then it is
impossible, of course, while you are asleep because then the mechanism
is functioning, and it is difficult to detach yourself from the
mechanism. But there is a moment in the night and in the morning another
moment -- in twenty-four hours there are these two moments -- when it is
very easy, but one has to wait.
"AT THE POINT OF SLEEP, WHEN SLEEP HAS NOT YET COME AND EXTERNAL
WAKEFULNESS VANISHES, AT THIS POINT BEING IS REVEALED:"
Then you know who you are, what is your real being, what is your
authentic existence. We are false while we are awake, and you know it
well. You are false while you are awake. You smile when tears would have
been more real. Your tears are also not believable. They may be just a
facade, ceremonial, a duty. Your smile is false, and those who study
faces can say that your smile is just a painted smile. There are no
roots within; the smile is just on your face, just on your lips. It is
nowhere else in your being. There are no roots, there are no limbs. It
is imposed. The smile is not coming from within to without; the smile
has been forced from without.
Whatsoever you say and whatsoever you act is false, and it is not
necessarily the case that you are doing this false business of life
knowingly -- not necessarily! You may be totally unaware -- and you are!
Otherwise it will be very difficult to carry such false nonsense
continuously. It is automatic. This falseness continues while you are
awake, and it continues even while you are asleep -- in a different way,
of course. Your dreams are symbolic, not real. It is surprising that
even in your dreams you are not real, even in your dreams you are
afraid, and you create symbols.
Now psychoanalysis goes on doing this business of analyzing your dreams.
They have a big business because you cannot analyze your own dreams.
They are symbolic, they are not real. They say something only in
metaphors. If you want to kill your mother and get rid of her, you are
not going to kill her even in your dream. You will kill someone else who
looks like your mother. You will kill your aunt or someone else, but not
your mother. Even in dreams you cannot be real. Then psychoanalysis is
needed; a professional is needed to interpret -- but you may describe
the whole thing in such a way that even psychoanalysis is deceived.
Your dreams are also totally false. If you are real while you are awake,
your dreams will be real. They will not be symbolic. If you want to kill
your mother you will see a dream in which you kill your mother, and no
interpreter will be needed to show you what your dream means. But we are
so false. In dream you are alone, still afraid of the world and the
society.
To kill a mother is the greatest sin, and I wonder whether you have ever
thought about why to kill a mother is the greatest sin. It is the
greatest sin because everyone feels a deep enmity toward his mother. It
is the greatest sin, and it is taught, your mind is conditioned, that
even to think of harming your mother is a sin. She has given birth to
you. All over the world, in all societies, the same is taught. There is
not a single society on the earth which will not agree to this, that to
kill a mother is the greatest sin. She has given you birth and you are
killing her?
But why this teaching? Deep down there is the possibility that everyone
goes against his mother of necessity -- because the mother has not only
given birth to you, she has been the instrument of falsifying you; she
has been the instrument of forcing you to be unreal. She has made you
whatsoever you are. If you are a hell, she has a part in it, the
greatest part. If you are miserable, your mother is there somewhere,
hidden in you because the mother has given you birth, she has brought
you up -- or, really, she has brought you "down" from your reality. She
has falsified you. The first untruth happened between you and your
mother; the first lie happened between you and your mother -- the first
lie!
Even when there is no language and the child cannot speak, he can lie.
The child sooner or later becomes aware that many of his feelings are
not approved by his mother. Her face, her eyes, her behavior, her mood,
everything shows that something in him is not accepted, appreciated.
Then he starts suppressing. Something is wrong. There is no language
yet; his mind is not functioning. But his whole body starts suppressing.
Then be begins to feel that sometimes something is appreciated by the
mother. He depends on the mother, his life depends on the mother. If the
mother leaves him, he will be no more. His whole existence is centered
on the mother.
Everything the mother shows, does, speaks, behaves, is significant. If
the child smiles, and the mother loves him and gives him warmth and milk
and hugs him, he is learning politics. He will smile while there is no
smile in him because now he knows he can persuade the mother. He will
smile a false smile. Then the liar is born; the politician has come into
existence. Now he knows how to falsify, and this he learns in his
relationship with his mother. This is the first relationship with the
world. When he will become aware of his misery, of his hell, of his
confusions, he will find that his mother is hidden somewhere.
There is every possibility that you may feel inimical towards your
mother. That is why every culture insists that it is the greatest sin to
kill your mother. Even in thought, even in dream, you cannot kill your
mother. I am not saying that you SHOULD kill her, I am simply saying
that your dreams are also false -- symbolic, not real. You are so false
that you cannot even dream a real dream.
These are our two false faces: one is there while you are awake, one is
there while you are asleep. Between these two false faces there is a
very small door, an interval. In that interval you can have a glimpse of
your original face when you were not related to your mother, and through
the mother to the society; when you were alone with yourself; when YOU
WERE -- not this and that, there was no division. Only the real was;
there was no unreal. You can have a glimpse of that face, that innocent
face between these two mechanisms.
Ordinarily we are not concerned with dreams, we are concerned with our
waking hours. But psychoanalysis is more concerned with your dreams, not
with your waking hours, because it feels that in waking hours you are a
greater liar. In dreams something can be caught. You are less aware when
you are asleep, and you are not forcing things, you are not
manipulating. Then something real can be caught. You may be a celibate,
a monk in your waking hours, but you have suppressed the sex urge. Then
it will force itself into your dreams; your dreams are going to be
sexual. It is very difficult to find a monk who is without sexual dreams
-- rather, impossible. You can find a criminal without sexual dreams,
but you cannot find a religious man without sexual dreams. A debauchee
may be without sexual dreams, but not so-called saints, because
whatsoever you force down while you are awake will erupt in your dreams
and will color your dreams.
Psychoanalysts are not concerned with your waking life because they know
it is totally false. If something of the real can be glimpsed, it can be
glimpsed only through your dreams. But tantra says that even dreams are
not so real. They are more real -- and this will look paradoxical
because we think that dreams are unreal -- they are more real than your
waking hours because then you are less on guard. The censor is asleep,
and things can come up, and the suppressed can express itself -- of
course symbolically, but symbols can be analyzed.
And all over the world human symbols are the same. You may speak a
different language while awake, but while dreaming you speak the same
language. All over the world the dream language is one. If sex is
repressed, then the same symbols will come up. If the urge for food, the
urge to eat, hunger, is repressed, then the same symbols will come -- or
similar ones. The dream language is one, but in dreams there are still
problems because they are symbolic. And a Freud may interpret them in a
different way, a Jung in a different way and an Adler still in a
different way. And if you are analyzed by a hundred psychoanalysts,
there will be a hundred interpretations. You will be still more confused
than you were before, more confused with a hundred interpretations of
one thing.
Tantra says in neither waking nor sleeping are you real. You are real
only in between. So don't be concerned with the waking, and don't be
concerned with dreaming and sleep. Be concerned with the gap; be aware
of the gap. While passing from one state to another have a glimpse. And
once you know when the gap comes, you become the master of it. You have
the key; you can open that gap anytime and enter into it. A different
dimension of being, the real dimension, opens. |