Not Through Suppression

IT IS UNDERSTOOD THAT IN THE PAST, MANY SCHOOLS OF YOGA TAUGHT MAINLY THROUGH SUPPRESSION. AND QUITE A FEW DID ATTAIN THROUGH IT. IS IT NOT POSSIBLE THAT EVEN TODAY, THE TECHNIQUE OF SUPPRESSION MAY SUIT A CERTAIN TYPE OF PERSON?

First thing: never! – nobody who knows has ever taught suppression.

Second: never anybody has attained through it.

But everywhere false coins exist. The way of being natural is very simple, but looks very difficult for you because the ego wants something difficult to struggle with, to be challenged by, to conquer it. The ego exists through constant challenge. If something is absolutely simple, the ego flops down. If you have nothing to do but sit quietly and silently and let things be, and let things move where they are moving, no activity on your part, then when and how the ego will exist? There is no possibility.

In being loose and natural, the ego flops down completely, immediately. It disappears because ego needs constant activity. Ego is just like going on a bicycle: you have to pedal it continuously. If you stop pedaling, it may go for a few feet or few yards because of the past momentum, but it has to fall down. The cycle and the rider both will fall down. The cycle needs constant pedaling. Even if you pedal very slowly, you will fall down. It needs a certain continuous feeding of energy.

Ego is just like cycling – you have to feed it continuously: this challenge, that challenge, this activity, that activity – something has to be attained. Everest has to be conquered, you have to reach to the moon – something always in the future. You have to pedal, and then the ego exists. The ego exists in activity… Inactivity, simply the cycle falls down, and the rider also. Immediately the whole activity disappears and with it the ego.

That’s why simple things look difficult for the ego, and difficult things look simple. If I tell you that the path is very, very arduous, you will be immediately ready to follow. If I say it is very simple, it is so simple that you need not even take a single step, it is so simple that you need not go anywhere, just sit in your house and it will have it. You will simply forget about me and what I am saying. You will simply move away from me as if you have not listened at all. You will go to somebody who is talking some nonsense and creating some difficulty for you. That’s why suppression came into existence, because that is the most difficult thing in the world, to suppress – almost impossible because it never succeeds, it is always a failure.

How can you suppress a part of your being by another part? It is just like trying to win by your right hand trying to defeat your left hand. You can pretend. After a little activity you can pretend that the right is on top and the left is suppressed. But do you think it is suppressed or it is conquered? How can you conquer a part of your own being by another part? – Just pretensions. If you suppress sex, the brahmacharya will be a pretension, a hypocrisy. It is just the right hand Lying and waiting there, helping you to pretend. Any moment it can upset everything again – and it will upset. That which you have conquered has to be conquered again and again, because it is never a real victory. And in the end, you find that you have been fighting the whole life and nothing has been achieved. In fact, only you will be defeated, nothing else. Your whole life will be defeated.

No Master who knows, no Master who is enlightened has ever preached suppression. But they have preached something which can look like suppression to people who don’t know, so let me make the distinction clear. For example – the distinction is very subtle – Buddha and Mahavira both have taught about fasting, both have taught about brahmacharya, celibacy. Are they teaching suppression? They cannot, and they are not teaching.

When Buddha says, “Go on a fast,” what does he mean? Suppress your hunger? – No. He says, “Watch your hunger.” The body will say, “I am hungry.” You simply sit inside your being and watch. Don’t do anything either to feed the body or to suppress the hunger. You simply watch the hunger. No activity is needed on your part, and suppression is an activity. When you suppress hunger, what will you do? You will not be able to watch it. In fact, that is the only thing that you will avoid.

A person who wants to suppress hunger and who has gone on a fast, as Jains go every year, what they will do? They will try to distract the mind somewhere else so that the hunger is not felt. They will chant mantras, or they will go to the temple and recite sutras, or they will go to their religious leader to listen to him, so that the mind is engaged, and they need not pay attention to the hunger which is there. This is suppression. Suppression means: something is there and you don’t look at it and you pretend as if it is not there. So if you are occupied deeply in the mind, then the hunger cannot penetrate and cannot bring your attention to itself. The hunger will go on knocking on the door but you are reciting a mantra so loudly that you don’t hear the knock. Suppression means distracting your mind from the reality of your being.

You have taken a vow of celibacy or you have taken the life of a brahmachari; now what you will do when the sex desire arises and a beautiful woman passes by? You will start chanting the mantra: Ram, Ram, Ram. You are avoiding it. You are pulling a curtain over your eyes. You are pretending as if the woman is not there. But the woman is there and that’s why you are chanting the name of Rama, and so loudly.

In India, people have to take a morning bath. In my village there is a very beautiful lake, a river, and people go there to take their morning bath. There, in Osho’s childhood, for the first time he became aware of the trick of suppression. The river is cold – particularly in winter – people go to take their bath… In summer also he watches them taking their bath, and they will not chant: Rama, Hari Krishna, Hari Krishna. But in winter, because the river is so cold, and they chant so loudly they forget the river. They take a dip and they are out. Their mind is engaged in chanting. Colder the morning, greater will be the chanting on the God.

In his childhood, watching people there, for the first time he became aware of the trick – what they are doing. He sees the same persons taking their baths in summer and they don’t bother about Rama, Hari Krishna, or anybody. But in winter suddenly they become religious? They have learned a trick – how to avoid a fact, and the fact is there knocking and kicking and alive.

Turn your mind somewhere else: have you seen people going through a lonely street in the night when it is dark? They start singing a song, or whistling, or humming. What they are doing? – The same trick. Humming, they forget the darkness. Loudly singing a song they listen to their own voice and feel that they are not alone. The voice gives a feeling that they are not alone. Surrounded by their own voice, the darkness has disappeared for them. Otherwise, if they move silently into a lonely street in the night, their own footsteps create fear, as if somebody is following. This is a simple trick

Mahavira and Buddha cannot talk and cannot teach such deceptions. They teach about fasting, but their fasting is totally, qualitatively different. On the surface both the fasters will be the same, but deep down the difference exists. Deep down, a person who is following Mahavira or Buddha will fast and will not do any activity in the mind. He will watch and he will pay all attention to hunger. And then arises a very, very beautiful phenomenon: if you pay attention to hunger, it disappears. Without any food, it disappears. Why? What happens in paying attention to hunger?

When sex desire arises, one simply pays total attention to it, not judging, not saying this is good or bad not saying this is evil, not saying that this is a provocation from the devil. No – no evaluation at all because all valuation belongs to the mind and witnessing is not of the mind. Good, bad – distinctions all belong to the mind, and the witnessing is undivided, one. It is neither good nor bad, it simply is. One pays attention to hunger or to the sex desire, total attention – and total attention is such an energy, it is fire-the hunger simply is burned, the sex desire is simply burned. What happens? What is the mechanism inside?

You feel hunger. In fact, you have never been hungry. The body has been hungry, you have never been hungry. But you are identified with the body that, “I am the body.” That’s why you feel you are hungry. When you pay attention to hunger a distance is created, the identity breaks down. The identification is no more there. You are no more the body; the body is hungry and you are the watcher. And suddenly a blissful freedom arises in you that “I am not the body, I have never been the body. The body is hungry; I am not hungry.”

The bridge is broken – you are separate.

The body has a desire for sex because the body has come out of sex. The body has a desire for sex because every cell of the body is sexual. Your mother and your father, in a deep sexual activity, have created your body. The first cells of your body came out of deep sexual passion; they carry the quality of it. And those cells have been multiplying themselves; that’s how your whole body is created. Your whole body is sex passion. The desire arises. It is natural for the body, nothing is wrong in it. The body is sexual energy and nothing else.

Brahmacharya is not possible for the body. Sexuality is natural for the body. Sexuality is natural for the body, and for you, only brahmacharya is natural; sex is unnatural, absolutely unnatural. That’s why we call celibacy brahmacharya. The English word celibacy is not very good. It is very ordinary, cheap. It doesn’t carry the sense of brahmacharya. Brahmacharya is derived from the root brahma. The word brahmacharya means that you have come to attain, you have come to know that you are the brahma, the ultimate, the divine – God himself you are.

When one starts feeling this, that one is God himself then there is real celibacy. Because then there is no problem. And what happens, what is miraculous… when you are separate, when the bridge is broken, you are not identified with the body, you don’t say, “I am the body,” you say, “I am in the body, but not the body. I live in this house but I am not the house. I am in these clothes but the clothes are not me.” When you have come to attain this – and I say attain because intellectually you know it already, that is not the point; you have not realized it. When you realize in deep attention to hunger, or to sex, or anything – you realize, suddenly the bridge disappears between the body and the embodied soul. When the gap is there and you have become a witness, then the body lives through your cooperation.

The body cannot live without your cooperation. That is what happens when the body dies: the body is absolutely the same, only your cooperation is no more there. You have gone out of the house, that’s why the body is dead. Otherwise, nobody is ever dead. The body is the same, but the body depends on your energy. Continuously, you have to feed energy to the body. It exists with your cooperation; it has no existence of its own. It is through you it is together. Otherwise it will fall apart. You are the center and the crystallizing factor in it.

When in hunger, one watches the hunger, the cooperation is not there. It is a temporary death. You are not supporting the body. When you are not supporting the body, how can the body feel hunger? – Because the body cannot feel anything; the feeling is of your being. Hunger may be there in the body but the body cannot feel, it has no feelers.

Now, just within this decade, brain surgeons have become aware of a certain very mysterious phenomenon: that the brain, which feels everything, has no feeling in its own nervous system.

You can be lying completely awake on the brain surgeon’s table, and your head can be opened and he can cut your brain tissues – you will not feel. No need for any anesthesia. He can make a window in the head, he can drill a hole in the head; you will feel the drilling just on the skull, but once he reaches the inside there is no feeling at all. If he cuts your whole brain completely you would not know, and you are perfectly aware.

Many people in the West are moving with many parts cut – they don’t know. Many people are moving with certain electrodes fixed in their brain – they don’t know and they cannot feel… A stone can be put in your head, inside, and you will never feel that it is there, because in the brain there is no feeling. From where the feeling comes then?

The brain is the subtlest part of the body, the most delicate; even that has no feeling. The feeling comes from your being. It is borrowed by the body. The body has no feeling of its own. Once you watch hunger – and if the watching is real, authentic, and you don’t avoid – hunger disappears.

The fasting of a Mahavira or a Buddha is a totally different fasting from the fasting of Jains and Buddhists. The brahmacharya of Mahavira is totally different from the brahmacharya of Jain monks. Mahavira is not avoiding it, he is simply watching it. Watching, it disappears. Witnessing, it is not found there. Avoiding, it follows you. In fact, not only follows you, it haunts you. No yoga teaches suppression – cannot teach – but there are yogis who teach. They are teachers; they have not realized their innermost being. So there exists not even a single person who can attain; to buddhahood through suppression. It is not possible, it is simply not possible. Through awareness one achieves, not through suppression.