FEEL YOURSELF AS PERVADING ALL DIRECTIONS, FAR, NEAR

Tantra and yoga both think that your narrowness is the problem. Because you have made yourself so narrow, so tightly narrow, you feel always in bondage. The bondage is not coming from anywhere else: the bondage is coming from your narrow mind. And it goes on being narrower and narrower and you are very confined. That confinement gives you the feeling of bondage. You have an infinite soul and an infinite being but that infinite being feels imprisoned.

So whatsoever you do, you feel limitations everywhere. Wherever you move, a point of cul de sac comes. You cannot move beyond it. Everywhere there is a boundary. There is no open sky to fly. But that boundary is created by you -- that boundary is your own creation. You have created it for certain reasons: for security, safety. You have created a boundary. And the narrower the boundary, the more you feel secure. If you have a very large boundary you cannot watch over all of it, you cannot be alert and watchful everywhere. It becomes vulnerable. Narrow the boundary and you can watch it, you can remain closed, you are not vulnerable, you feel safe. The safety, the security has created the boundary. But then you feel a bondage.

This is how the mind is paradoxical. You go on asking for more safety and you go on asking for more freedom. Both cannot be together. If you want freedom you will have to lose safety, security -- in any case the safety is just illusory, it is not really there. Because death is going to happen -- whatsoever you do, you are going to die. All your safety, security, is just a facade, nothing will help. But afraid of insecurity you create boundaries, you create big walls around you and then the open sky is closed. And then you suffer! And then you say, "Where is the open sky?" and "I want freedom and I want to move!" But you have created these boundaries.

So this is the first thing to remember before you do this technique otherwise it will not be possible to do it. With your boundaries intact you cannot do it. Unless you stop creating boundaries you will not be able to feel or do it.

.... PERVADING ALL DIRECTIONS, FAR, NEAR. No boundaries, becoming infinite, becoming one with infinite space.... This will be impossible with your mind. How can you feel it? How can you do it? First you will have to stop doing certain things.

The first thing is that if you are too concerned about security and safety then remain in bondage. Really, prison is the most secure place. No one can harm you there. No one out of prison is as secure, as guarded, as the prisoners. You cannot kill, you cannot murder a prisoner. It is difficult. He is more guarded than a king. You can murder a president or a king, it is not so difficult. Every day they go on killing them. But you cannot kill a prisoner. He is so safe that those who want to be safe, really, must be in prisons, they must not live outside. To live out of a prison is dangerous, it is full of hazards. Anything can happen. So we have created mental prisons around us, psychological prisons around us, and we carry those prisons with us, they are portable. You need not remain with them, they move with you. Wherever you go, your prison goes with you.

You are always behind a wall. Only sometimes, rarely, do you stretch your hand out of it to touch someone. But only a hand -- you never come out of your prison. So whenever we meet, it is simply meeting hands out of prisons. Out of windows we stretch a hand, afraid, scared, and ready any moment to withdraw the hand. Both the parties are doing the same -- only hands touch. And now psychologists say that even that is just an appearance, because hands have their own armor around them. No hand is ungloved. Not only Queen Elizabeth uses gloves, you also have gloves so that no one can touch you. Or even if someone touches, there is only a hand, dead. You are already withdrawn, afraid. Because the other creates fear.

As Sartre says, "The other is the enemy." The other will look like an enemy if you are so armored. With an armored person there can be no friendship. Friendship is impossible, love is impossible, communion is impossible. You are afraid. Someone may make you a possession, someone may overpower you, someone may make you a slave... afraid of this, you have created a prison, a safety wall around you. Cautiously you move, cautiously you take every step. Life becomes a drudgery, life becomes a boredom. If you are too cautious, life cannot be an adventure. If you are protecting yourself too much, hankering after security too much, you are already dead.

So remember one basic law: life is insecurity. And if you are ready to live in insecurity, only then will you be alive. Insecurity is freedom. If you are ready to be insecure, constantly insecure, you will be free. And freedom is the door to the Divine.

Afraid, you create a prison -- you become dead, more and more dead. And then you call, "Where is God?" And then you question, "Where is life? What does life mean? Where is bliss?" Life is there waiting for you, but you have to meet it on its own terms. You cannot have your own terms, life has its own terms. And the basic term is: remain insecure. Nothing can be done about it. You can only create an illusion and in that illusion you can waste your life. Nothing can be done about it. Whatsoever you do is just a deception.

If you fall in love you become afraid that this woman can leave you or this man can leave you. Fear enters immediately. You were never afraid when you were not in love. Now you are in love: life has entered and insecurity has entered with it. One who never loves anybody is never afraid that anyone will leave him. The whole world can leave him, he is not afraid. You cannot harm him. He is secure. The moment you love someone, insecurity has entered because life has entered. And with life, death has entered. The moment you love you have become afraid: this person can die, this person can leave, this person can love somebody else! Now to make things secure, you must do something -- you must get married.

So a legal bondage is made so that it is now difficult for this person to leave you. \Now society will protect you, the law will protect you, the policeman, the judge, will all protect you. Now if this person wants to leave, you can drag him to the court, and if he wants a divorce he will have to prove something against you. Even then it will take three or five years. Now you have created safety around you. But the moment you are married you are dead. The relationship is not alive. Now it has become a law, not a relationship. Now it is a legal phenomenon, not an alive thing. The court cannot protect life; the law can only protect laws. Now marriage is something which is dead. It can be defined. Love cannot be defined. Marriage is definable, love is indefinable. Now you have come under the world of definitions.

But the phenomenon is already dead. The moment you wanted it to be secure, the moment you wanted to enclose it so that no new thing happens to it, you are imprisoned in it. Then you will suffer. Then you will say that this wife has become a bondage to you. The husband will say this wife has become a bondage to him. And then you fight because you have each become an imprisonment for the other. Now you fight. Now love has disappeared, there is only conflict. That is what happens because of the hankering for security.

And this has happened in everything. Remember it as something basic: life is insecure. This is the very nature of it. So when there is love, suffer the fear that the beloved can leave you, but don;t create security. Then love will grow. The beloved can die and you cannot do anything, but that will not kill love. Security can kill. Love will grow more.

Really, if man were immortal, I say love would be impossible. If man were immortal it would be difficult to love anybody. It would be so dangerous to fall in love. Death is there and life is just like a dew drop on a trembling leaf. Any moment the breeze will come and the dew drop will fall and disappear. Life is just a wavering. Because of that wavering, because of that movement, death is always there. It gives intensity to love. Love is possible only because there is death. Love becomes intense because there is death. Think... if you know your beloved is going to die the next moment, all meanness will go, all conflict will go. And this one moment will become eternity. And there will be so much love that your whole being will be poured into it. But if you know the beloved is going to live, there is no hurry. You can fight and you can postpone the loving for later on. If life is eternal, if the body is immortal, you cannot love.

Hindus have a beautiful myth. They say in heaven where Indra rules -- Indra is the king of heaven -- there is no love. There are beautiful girls, more beautiful than on the earth, and deities. They have sex but there is no love because they are immortal.


So it is recorded in one of the Indian stories that Urvashi, the chief of the heavenly girls, asked permission of Indra to move to earth for a few days to love a man. "What nonsense!: Indra said. "You can love here! And you will not find such beautiful persons on the earth." Urvashi said, "They are beautiful but they are immortal, so there is no charm. They are really dead."

They are really dead because there is no death to make them alive. They will always be there. They cannot die, so how can they be alive? That aliveness exists against death. A man is alive because death is there constantly, fighting. Against the background of death life exists.

So Urvashi said, "Give me permission to move to the earth. I want to love someone." Permission was given so she came down to earth and fell in love with Pururuwa, a young man.

But there was a condition from Indra. Indra made the condition that she could go to the earth, she could love someone, but she must tell the man who loved her not to ask anything about who she was. This is difficult for love because love is curious. Love wants to know everything about the beloved, everything. The whole unknown has to be made known. The whole mystery has to be entered and penetrated. So Indra cunningly made a condition which Urvashi didn't understand the craftiness of. So she said, "Okay. I will tell my lover not to be curious about me, not to ask who I am. And if he asks, immediately I will leave him, I will come back." And she said to Pururuwa, "Don't ever ask anything about me, who I am. The moment you ask I will have to leave earth."

But love is curious. Because of this Pururuwa must have become more curious about who she was. He could not sleep. He would go on looking at Urvashi. Who is she? Such a beautiful woman, made of dreamy stuff, doesn't look earthly, doesn't look substantial. Perhaps she comes from somewhere else, some unknown dimension. He became more and more curious. But he also became more and more afraid, because she might leave. He became so afraid that in the night when he went to sleep he would take a fragment of her saree in his hand because he was not confident about himself. Any moment he could ask, the question was always there. Even in his sleep he could ask. And Urvashi said that even in sleep he could not ask about her. So he slept with a part of her saree in his hand.

But one night he couldn't contain himself -- and he thought that now she loved him so much that she would not leave. So he asked. And Urvashi had to disappear -- only a fragment of her saree remained in Pururuwa's hand. And it is said that he is still searching for her.

In heaven there cannot be love because there is no life really. Life exists here on earth, where death exists. Whenever you make anything secure, life disappears. Remain insecure, that is the very quality of life itself. Nothing can be done about it. And it is beautiful!

Just think if your body was immortal -- it would be ugly. You will start finding ways and means of committing suicide. And if it is impossible, against the law, you will suffer so much you cannot even imagine. Immortality is a very long thing. Now in the West they go on thinking about euthanasia because people are now living longer. So a person who reaches the age of a hundred wants the right to kill himself. And really, the right will have to be given. We made it a law not to commit suicide when life was very short. Really in Buddha's age to be forty or fifty was much. The average life was just about twenty. In India, just two decades ago the average life was twenty-three. Now in Sweden the average life is eighty-three.

So people can very easily live to be a hundred and fifty. In Soviet Russia there are fifteen hundred people who have reached the mark of a hundred and fifty. Now if they say they have the right to kill themselves, because now it is too much, we will have to give them the right. It cannot be denied them. Sooner or later suicide will be one of the birth rights. You cannot deny it if a person wants to die -- not for any reason, just because now life has no meaning. It has been too long already. A person living at a hundred doesn't feel like living. Not that he is frustrated, not that there is no food. Everything is there, but life has no meaning.

So think of immortality. Life will be totally meaningless. The meaning comes with death. Love has meaning because love can be lost. Then it throbs, vibrates, pulsates. It can be lost! You cannot be certain about it! You cannot think anything about it for tomorrow because it may not be there. You have to love the lover and the beloved with the view that tomorrow may never be there at all. Then love becomes intense.

So first, withdraw your efforts to create a secure life. Just by withdrawing, your walls around you will fall. For the first time you will feel rains coming to you directly, the wind blowing at you directly, the sun rising to you directly. You will be under the open sky. It is beautiful. And if it looks horrible to you it is only because you have become accustomed to living in a prison. You will have to get accustomed to this new freedom. This freedom will make you more alive, more flowing, more open, more rich, more radiant. But the more radiant you are, the higher the peak of your aliveness, the deeper will be the death near you. Just near. You can rise only against death, the valley of death. The peak of life and the valley of death are always near and in proportion.

That's why I always say that Nietzsche's dictum is to be followed. It is a very religious dictum. Nietzsche says, "Live dangerously." Not that you have to seek danger positively, there is no need to seek danger positively. Don't create protections. Don't create walls around you. Live naturally, and that will be dangerous, dangerous enough. There is no need to seek any danger.

Then you can do this technique. FEEL YOURSELF AS PERVADING ALL DIRECTIONS, FAR, NEAR. Then it is very easy. If walls are not there, you will already be feeling yourself pervading everywhere. Then there is no point at where you end. You simply begin in the heart and end nowhere. You have a center and no periphery. The periphery goes on expanding -- on and on. The whole space is surrounded by it. Stars move in it. Earths are born and dissolve. Planets arise and set. The whole cosmos becomes your periphery. In this vastness where will your ego be? In this vastness where will your suffering be? In this vastness where will your mean mind be? The mediocre mind, where will it be? It cannot be there in such vastness, it simply disappears. It can exist only in a narrow field. It can exist only when it is walled, enclosed, encapsulated. The encapsulation is the problem. Live dangerously and be ready to live in insecurity.

And the beauty is that even if you decide not to live in insecurity, you will! You cannot do anything!

I have heard about a king. He was very afraid of death....

Kings are more afraid. They are more afraid because they have exploited so many people; they have pushed, crushed; they have played many political games on so many people. They have made many enemies. A real king has no friend. He cannot have. Because the closest friend is also an enemy, just waiting for an opportunity to kill him, to be in his place. A man in power cannot have any friends. A Hitler, a Stalin, a Nixon, they cannot have friends. They just have enemies who are parading around them as friends and just waiting for the right chance to push them aside from the throne. Whenever they get the chance they do everything. Just a moment ago they were friendly, but their friendliness is a strategy. Their friendliness is a tactic. A man who is in power cannot have friends. So Lao Tzu says, "If you want friends, don't be in power." Then the whole world will be friendly to you. If you are in power, then you are your only friend, everyone is your enemy.

.... So the king was very afraid. He was very scared of death, it was all around. He was haunted by the idea that everyone around him was going to kill him. He couldn't sleep. So he asked his wise men, his counsellors, what to do. They told him to make a palace with only one door. At the door he should put seven rings of military men: the first watching the palace, the second watching the first, the third ring watching the second. With only one door no one could enter and the king would be safe.

The king built the palace with only one door and with seven rings of soldiers watching each other. The news spread all over and another king from a nearby state came to see it. He was also afraid. News had reached him that his neighbor had built such a secure palace that it was impossible to kill him. He came to visit his neighbor and together they appreciated very much the idea of only one door and every safety; no danger.

While they were looking at the door a beggar just sitting at the corner of the street started laughing. So the king, the owner of the palace, asked the beggar, "Why are you laughing?" The beggar replied, "I am laughing because you have made one error. You should go inside and close, seal this door also. This door is dangerous, someone can enter it. A door means that somebody can enter. So you do one thing: go inside and let this door be also closed. Then you will be really safe because death cannot enter." But the king said, "That means I would be already dead if I closed this door also." The beggar said, "You are already ninety-nine per cent dead -- you are only as much alive as this door. That is the danger, this much alive. Leave this aliveness also."

Everyone in his own way is creating a palace around him where nothing can enter and he can remain in peace. But then you are already dead. And peace happens only to those who are alive; peace is not a dead thing. Remain alive, live dangerously, live a vulnerable life, open, so that everything can happen to you. And let everything happen to you. The more that happens to you the richer you will be.

Then you can practise this technique. This technique is then very easy, you will not even need to practise it. Just think, and you will be pervading the whole space.