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Vigyan Bhairav Tantra - Meditation
Technique 7 WITH INTANGIBLE
BREATH IN CENTER OF FOREHEAD, AS THIS REACHES HEART AT THE MOMENT OF
SLEEP, HAVE DIRECTION OVER DREAMS AND OVER DEATH ITSELF.
Osho - More and more you are entering deeper layers. WITH
INTANGIBLE BREATH IN CENTER OF FOREHEAD... If you have known the third
eye then you know the intangible breath, the invisible prana in the
center of the forehead, and then you know the showering -- the energy,
the light showers. AS THIS REACHES HEART... When the shower will reach
your heart... AT THE MOMENT OF SLEEP, HAVE DIRECTION OVER DREAMS AND
OVER DEATH ITSELF
Take this technique in three parts. One, you must be able to feel the
prana in breath -- the intangible part of it, the invisible part of it,
the immaterial part of it. It comes if you are attentive between the two
eyebrows; then it comes easily. If you are attentive in the gap, then
too it comes, but a little less easily. If you are aware of the center
at your navel where breath comes and touches and goes out, it also
comes, but with less ease. The easiest way to know the invisible part of
breath is to be centered at the third eye. But wherever you are
centered, it comes, you begin to feel the prana flowing in.
If you can feel the prana flowing in you, you can know when you are
going to die. Six months before the day of your death you begin to know,
if you can feel the invisible part of breath. Why do so many saints
declare the day of their death? It is easy, because if you can see the
content of the breath, the prana flowing into you, the moment the
process reverses you can feel it. Before you die, six months before you
die, the process reverses: prana begins to flow out of you. Then the
breath is not taking it in. Rather, on the contrary, the breath is
taking it out -- the same breath.
You cannot feel it because you do not know the invisible part -- you
know only the visible, you know only the vehicle. The vehicle will be
the same. Now the breath is carrying prana in, leaving it there; then
the vehicle goes back empty. Then again it is filled with the prana and
it comes in. So the ingoing breath and the outgoing breath are not the
same, remember. The ingoing breath and the outgoing breath are the same
as vehicles, but the incoming breath is filled with prana and the
outgoing breath is empty. You have taken in the prana and the breath has
become empty.
The reverse happens when you are nearing death. The incoming breath
comes prana-less, empty, because your body cannot suck prana from the
cosmos. You are going to die; there is no need for it. The whole process
has reversed. And when the breath goes out, it takes your prana out. One
who has been able to see the invisible can know his day of death
immediately. Six months before, the process reverses.
This sutra is very, very significant: WITH INTANGIBLE BREATH IN CENTER
OF FOREHEAD, AS THIS REACHES HEART AT THE MOMENT OF SLEEP, HAVE
DIRECTION OVER DREAMS AND OVER DEATH ITSELF. While you are falling into
sleep this technique has to be practiced -- then only, not at any other
time. While you are falling asleep, only then; that is the right moment
to practice this technique. You are falling asleep. By and by, by and
by, sleep is overtaking you. Within moments, your consciousness will
dissolve; you will not be aware. Before that moment comes, become aware
-- aware of the breath and the invisible part prana, and feel it coming
to the heart.
Go on feeling that it is coming to the heart. The prana enters from your
heart into the body. Go on feeling that the prana is coming into the
heart, and let sleep come while you are continuously feeling it. You go
on feeling, and let sleep come and drown you.
If this happens -- that you are feeling invisible breath coming into the
heart and sleep overtakes you -- you will be aware in dreams. You will
know that you are dreaming. Ordinarily we do not know that we are
dreaming. While you dream you think that this is reality. That too
happens because of the third eye. Have you seen anyone asleep? His eyes
move upwards and become focused in the third eye. If you have not seen,
then see.
Your child is sleeping... just open his eyes and see where his eyes are.
His pupils have gone up and they are focused in the third eye. I say
look at children, do not look at grown-ups -- they are not believable
because their sleep is not deep. They will just be thinking that they
are asleep. Look at children, their eyes move up. They become focused in
the third eye. Because of this focusing in the third eye you take your
dreams as real, you cannot feel they are dreams -- they are real. You
will know when you get up in the morning. Then you will know that "I was
dreaming." But this is the later, retrospective realization. You cannot
realize in the dream that you are dreaming. If you realize it, then
there are two layers: dream is there but you are awake, you are aware.
For one who becomes aware in dreams, this sutra is wonderful. It says,
HAVE DIRECTION OVER DREAMS AND OVER DEATH ITSELF.
If you can become aware of dreams, you can do two things. You can create
dreams -- one. Ordinarily you cannot create dreams. How impotent man is!
You cannot even create dreams. If you want to dream a particular thing
you cannot dream it; it is not in your hands. How powerless man is! Even
dreams cannot be created. You are just a victim of dreams, not the
creator. A dream happens to you; you cannot do anything. Neither can you
stop it nor can you create it.
But if you move into sleep remembering the heart being filled with prana,
continuously being touched by prana with every breath, you will become a
master of your dreams -- and this is a rare mastery. Then you can dream
whatsoever dreams you like. Just note while you are falling asleep that
"I want to dream this dream," and that dream will come to you. Just say,
while falling asleep, "I do not want to dream that dream," and that
dream cannot enter your mind.
But what is the use of becoming the master of your dreaming? Isn't it
useless? No, it is not useless. Once you become master of your dreams
you will never dream -- it is absurd. When you are master of your
dreams, dreaming stops; there is no need for it. And when dreaming
stops, your sleep has a different quality altogether, and the quality is
the same as of death.
Death is deep sleep. If your sleep can become as deep as death, that
means there will be no dreaming. Dreaming creates superficiality in
sleep. You move on the surface because of the dreams; because of hanging
on to the dreams, you move on the surface. When there is no dreaming you
just drop into the sea, its depth is reached.
Death is the same. That is why people in India have always been saying
that sleep is a short duration of death, and death is a long sleep --
qualitatively they are the same. Sleep is a day-to-day death. Death is a
life-to-life phenomenon, a life-to-life sleep. Every day you are tired.
You fall into sleep and you regain your vitality, your aliveness in the
morning; you are reborn. After a life of seventy or eighty years you are
tired completely. Now such short durations of death won't do; you need a
great death. After that great death or great sleep, you are reborn with
a totally new body.
Once you can know dreamless sleep and can be aware in it, then there
will be no fear of death. No one has ever died, no one can die -- that
is the only impossibility.
Just a day before I was telling you that death is the only certainty,
and now I say to you that death is impossible. No one has ever died and
no one can die -- that is the only impossibility -- because the universe
is life. You are again and again reborn, but the sleep is so deep that
you forget your old identity. Your mind is washed clean of the memories.
Think of it in this way. Today you are going to sleep: it is just as if
there were some mechanism -- and soon we will have this -- like that
which can erase on a tape recorder, which can wipe a tape clean so that
whatsoever was recorded is no more there. The same is possible with
memory, because memory is really just a deep recording. Sooner or later
we will have a mechanism which can be put on the head and it will clean
your mind completely. In the morning you will no longer be the same
person because you won't be able to remember who it was who went to
sleep. Then your sleep will look like death. There will be a
discontinuity; you won't be able to remember who went to sleep. This is
happening naturally. When you die and you are reborn, you cannot
remember who died. You start again.
With this technique, first you will become the master of your dreams --
that is, dreaming will cease. Or if you want to dream you will be able
to dream, but dreaming will become voluntary. It will not be
non-voluntary, it will not be forced upon you; you will not be a victim.
Then the quality of your sleep will become just like that of death. Then
you will know that death is sleep.
That is why this sutra says: HAVE DIRECTION OVER DREAMS AND OVER DEATH
ITSELF. you will know that death is just a long sleep -- and helpful and
beautiful because it gives you new life; it gives you everything anew.
Death ceases to be... with cessation of dreaming, death ceases to be.
There is another meaning to gaining power over death, direction over
death. If you can come to feel that death is just a sleep, you will be
able to direct it. If you can direct your dreams, you can direct your
death also. You can choose where you are to be born again, to whom,
when, in what form; you will become master of your birth also.
Buddha died... I am not referring to his last life, but to his
last-but-one life, before he became Buddha. Before dying he said, "I
will be born to such and such parents; such will be my mother, such will
be my father. But my mother will die immediately... when I am born my
mother will die immediately. Before I am born my mother will have
certain dreams." Not only do you gain power from your dreams, you gain
power from others' dreams also. So Buddha, as an example, said, "Certain
dreams will be there. When I will be in the womb, my mother will have
certain dreams. So whenever any woman has these dreams in this sequence,
know well I am going to be born to her."
And it happened. Buddha's mother dreamed the same sequence. The sequence
was known all over India, because it was no ordinary statement. It was
known to everyone, particularly those who were interested in religion
and the deeper things of life and the esoteric ways of life. It was
known, so the dreams were interpreted. Freud was not the first
interpreter -- and, of course, not the deepest. Only in the West was he
the first.
So Buddha's father immediately called dream interpreters, the Freuds and
Jungs of those days, and he asked, "What does this sequence mean? I am
afraid. These dreams are rare, and they go on repeating in the same
sequence. There are one, two, three, four, five, six dreams continuously
being repeated. There are the same dreams, as if one is seeing the same
film again and again. What is happening?"
So they told him, "You are going to be the father of a great soul -- one
who is going to be a buddha. But then your wife is going to be in
danger, because whenever this buddha is born it is difficult for the
mother to survive."
The father asked, "Why?" The interpreters said, "We cannot say why, but
this soul who is going to be born has made a statement that when he will
be born again, the mother will die immediately."
Later on Buddha was asked, "Why did your mother die immediately?" He
said, "Giving birth to a buddha is such a big event that everything else
becomes futile afterwards. So the mother cannot exist. She will have to
be born again to start anew. It is such a climax giving birth to a
buddha, it is such a peak, that the mother cannot exist beyond it."
So the mother died. And Buddha had said in his previous life that he
would be born while his mother was standing under a palm tree -- and it
happened. The mother was standing under a palm tree -- standing while
Buddha was born. And he had said, "I will be born while my mother is
standing under a palm tree, and I will take seven steps. Immediately, I
will walk. These are the signs I give to you," he said, "so that you
will know that a buddha is born." And he carried out everything.
And this is not only so about Buddha. It is so about Jesus, it is so
about Mahavir, it is so about many others. Every Jain TIRTHANKARA has
predicted in his previous life how he is going to be born. And they have
given particular dream sequences -- that such and such will be the
symbols -- and they have told how it will happen.
You can direct. Once you can direct your dreams you can direct
everything, because dream is the very stuff of this world. This life is
made out of the stuff of dreams. Once you can direct your dreams you can
direct everything. This sutra says, OVER DEATH ITSELF. Then one can give
a certain birth, a certain life to oneself.
We are just victims. We do not know why we are born, why we die. Who
directs us -- and why? There seems to be no reason. It all seems just a
chaos, just accidental. It is because we are not masters. Once we are
masters it is not like this.
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