Yoga Sutra 16.1 Enjoy It

KRIYA-YOGA IS A PRACTICAL, PRELIMINARY YOGA, AND IT IS COMPOSED OF AUSTERITY, SELF STUDY AND SURRENDER TO GOD.

The first word is ‘austerity’. Masochists have converted austerity into self-torture.

They think that the more you torture the body, the more spiritual you become.

Torturing the body is the way to become spiritual: this is the understanding of the masochist.

Torturing the body is not a way; torturing is violent. Whether you torture others or yourself, it is violent; and violence can never be religious. What is the difference between torturing someone else’s body and torturing your own body?

What is the difference? The body is ‘the other’. Even your own body is the other.

Your body is a little closer and the other’s body is a little further away, that’s all.

Because yours is closer it is more likely to become a victim of your violence; you can torture it. And for thousands of years people have been torturing their bodies with the false notion that it is the way towards God.

In the first place, why would God give you a body? He has not provided you with any implements to torture your body. Rather, on the contrary, he has provided you with sensibilities, sensitiveness, with senses: to enjoy it, not to torture it. He has made you so sensitive because through sensitivity awareness grows. If you torture your body you will become more and more insensitive. If you lie down on a bed of thorns, by and by, you will become insensitive. The body will have to become insensitive, otherwise how can you continuously tolerate thorns? The body will become dead in a way, it will lose its sensitivity. If you stand in the hot sun continuously, the body will protect itself by becoming insensitive. If you sit naked in the Himalayas when snow is falling and the whole mountain range is covered in snow, by and by, the body will lose its sensitivity to coldness. It will become a dead body.

And with a dead body, how can you feel the blessings of existence? How can you feel the constant shower of blessings that is happening every moment? Existence goes on pouring millions of blessings upon you; you cannot even count them. In fact, you need more sensitivity to become a religious man, not less, because the more sensitive you are, the more you will be able to see the Divine everywhere.

Sensitivity should become the eye, the penetration. When you become absolutely sensitive, every small breeze touches you and gives you the message, and even an ordinary leaf shaking in the wind becomes such a tremendous phenomenon because of your sensitivity. You look at an ordinary pebble and it becomes a kohinoor. It depends on your sensitivity.

Life is more if you are more sensitive; life is less if you are less sensitive. If you have a completely wooden body with no sensitivity, life is nil, life is no longer there; you are already in your grave. Masochists have done that. Sadhana has become an effort to deaden the body and the sensitivity.

To me, just the opposite is the way. Austerity does not mean torture; austerity means a simple life, an austere life. Why a simple life? Why not a very complicated life? Because the more complicated life is, again, the less sensitive you will be. A rich man is less sensitive than a poor man because his whole effort of accumulating riches has made him insensitive. You have to be insensitive if you are going to accumulate riches. You have to be completely like a murderer and not bother about what is happening to others. You go on accumulating treasures, and others are dying. You go on becoming more and more rich, and others are losing their very lives in it. A rich man has to be insensitive, otherwise he cannot be rich. How will he exploit? – It will be impossible.

I have heard about a very great rich man; Mulla Nasrudin went to see him. He wanted some donation for an orphan house that he was running. The rich man said, ‘Okay Nasrudin, I will give you something, but I have a condition and nobody has ever fulfilled it. Look into my eyes; one eye is false and another eye is real. If you can tell me exactly which eye is false and which is real, I will donate.’ Nasrudin looked into his eyes and said, ‘The left eye is real and the right eye is false.’ Amazed, the rich man said, ‘But how could you tell?’ He said, ‘Because in the left eye I can see a little compassion; it must be false.’

He saw a little compassion, just a glimmer, and it had to be false. A rich man cannot be rich if he is sensitive. In accumulating wealth, he goes on dying.

There are two ways to kill your body: one is the way of the masochist who tortures, another is the way of the rich man who accumulates wealth and rubbish. By and by, all the garbage that he accumulates becomes a barrier and he cannot move, he cannot see, he cannot hear, he cannot taste, he cannot smell. An austere life means an uncomplicated life, simple. It is not a cultivation of poverty, remember, because if you cultivate poverty through effort, then again the very cultivation will deaden you.

A simple life is a life of deep understanding, not of cultivation. It is not a practice to become poor. You can practice being poor, but through the practice your senses will harden. Practice of anything makes you hard; the softness is lost, the flexibility is lost. Then you are no longer flexible like a child. Then you become rigid like an old man. Lao Tzu says, ‘Rigidity is death, flexibility is life.’ A simple life is not a cultivated, poor life. Don’t make poverty your goal and don’t try to cultivate it. Just understand that the more simple, unloaded your body and mind are, the more you penetrate into existence. Unburdened, you can come into direct contact with reality; burdened you cannot come. A rich man always has his bank balance in the way.

You see the Queen of England, Elizabeth? She cannot even shake hands without gloves on. She cannot even touch humanity without gloves on. Even the human touch seems to be something impure, something ugly. A queen, a king, lives encapsulated; it is not only a question of the hand. That is just a symbol to say that the Queen is entombed; she is no longer alive.

In the Middle Ages in Europe it was thought that kings and queens didn’t have two legs, because nobody had ever seen them naked. It was thought that they had only one leg. They were not human; they were living at a distance. Ego always tries to live at a distance, and the distance makes you insensitive. You cannot come and touch a child playing on the road. You cannot come near a tree and embrace the tree. You cannot come nearer to life; you are pretending that you are higher than life, greater than life, bigger than life. The distance has to be created and only then can you pose as being bigger than life. But life is not losing anything by your foolishness; you are only becoming more and more insensitive.

You are already dead. Life needs you to be more alive.

When Patanjali says ‘austerity’, he means, ‘Be simple, don’t cultivate it.’ Because cultivated simplicity is not simplicity. How can a cultivated simplicity be simple?

It is very complex; you have been trying, calculating, cultivating.

Osho was sharing regarding a Jain monk to whom he knew – I know a man; I happened to pass by the village where he was living. My driver said, ‘Your friend lives here, just outside the village.’ So I said, ‘It is good. Just for a few minutes I will go see him, and see what he is doing now.’ He was a Jain monk. When I reached near his house, through the window I could see him walking naked inside. Jain monks have five stages; by and by, they cultivate simplicity. At the fifth stage, the last, they become naked. First they will wear three articles of clothing, then two, then one, and then that too is to be dropped.

That is the highest ideal of simplicity, when one becomes absolutely nude; nothing to carry – no burden, no clothes, no things. But I knew that this man was only in the second stage, so why was he nude?

I knocked on the door. He opened the door, but now he was wrapped in a lunghi. So I asked, ‘What is the matter? Just now I saw you through the window and you were nude.’ He said, ‘Yes, I am practicing. I am practicing for the fifth, the last stage. First, I will practice inside the house, then with friends; then, by and by, I will move to the village, and then to the larger world. I have to practice. It will take at least a few years for me to drop the shyness, to be courageous enough to move naked in the world.’ I told him, ‘You had better join a circus. You will be nude, but a practiced nudity is not simple; it is very calculated. You are very cunning, and you are moving step by step with cleverness. In fact, you will never become nude. A practiced nudity will be like clothes again, very subtle clothing. You are creating them by practice. If you feel like an innocent child, you will simply drop the clothes and move in the world. What is the fear – that people will laugh? What is wrong in their laughter? – Let them laugh. You also can participate, you also can laugh with them. They will make fun of you – so far, so good, because nothing kills ego like people making fun of you. It is good, they are helping you. But by this practice for five years, you will miss the whole thing. Nudity should be innocent like a child’s. Nudity should be an understanding, not a practice. Through practice, you are finding a substitute for understanding. Innocence is not of the mind, it is not a part of your calculating, your reasoning. Innocence is an understanding of the heart.’

Austerity cannot be practiced. You simply have to look at life and see that the more complicated you become, the less sensitive you become. And the less sensitive you are, the farther away from the Divine you are. The more sensitive you become, the closer and closer and closer you come. A day comes when you are sensitive to the very roots of your being; suddenly you are no longer there, you are just a sensibility, a sensitivity. You are no longer there, you are just an awareness. And everything is beautiful then, everything is alive; nothing is dead.

Everything is conscious; nothing is alive, nothing is dead. Everything is conscious, nothing is unconscious. With your sensitivity, the world changes. At the last moment, when the sensitivity reaches its total, its ultimate climax, the world disappears; there is God. God is not to be found, really; sensitivity has to be found. Be sensitive so totally that nothing is left behind, no holding back; and suddenly, God is there. God has always been there, only you were not sensitive.

To me, austerity is a simple life, a life of understanding. You need not move into a hut, you need not go naked. You can live simply in life, with understanding.

Poverty will not help but understanding will. You can force poverty on yourself, you can become dirty, but that won’t help.

This is happening now in the West with hippies and other sorts of people. They are again making the same mistake that India has been making for a long time.

India has known all sorts of hippies in the past. They have lived the dirtiest lives possible. Just in the name of austerity, they would not take baths because they felt, ‘Why bother, and why decorate the body?’ Did you know that Jain monks don’t take baths? You cannot sit near them; they stink. They don’t brush their teeth. You cannot talk to them; there is a bad smell, a bad odor comes out of their mouths. And this is thought to be austerity, because they say, ‘Even bathing or cleaning the body is to be a materialist. Then you are much too involved with the body, so why bother?’ But this type of attitude is just moving to the other extreme, from one foolishness to another.

There are people who are engaged with the body for twenty-four hours. You can find women wasting hours before the mirror. This is one type of foolishness: just cleaning the part continuously, never noticing that it is only a part. Good, clean it, but don’t clean it continuously the whole day, otherwise it is an obsession. A clean body is good, but a continuous obsession with cleaning it – that is madness. There are people who are continuously decorating their bodies. Almost half of the industries of the world are devoted to body decorations: powders, soaps, perfumes.

Cleanliness is good, but it should not be an obsession. It had become an obsession in the West, and now, the other pole. People who are too concerned with the body, with clothes and cleanliness and this and that, are ‘square’ people.

But the hippies have moved to the other extreme – they don’t bother at all. They are dirty, and the dirtiness has become a religion. As if just by being dirty, they will attain something. They are simply becoming more and more insensitive to the beauties of life.

Because you have become so insensitive, drugs have become so important. Now it seems that you cannot be sensitive without chemical drugs. Otherwise, an austere man is so sensitive that he does not need the drugs. Whatsoever you experience through drugs, he experiences just through his sensitivity. You take the drug and an ordinary tree becomes a marvelous phenomenon – every leaf a unique world in itself, thousands of greens in one tree. And every flower emanates light, becomes a prism. An ordinary tree that you have passed so many times and never looked at, suddenly becomes like a dream, an ecstasy, a rainbow of colors. This is what happens to a sensitive man without taking any drugs. To take the drugs means that you have become so hardened and dull and dead that now a chemical aggression is needed on your body. Only then for a few moments the window will open and you will see the poetry of life, and again the window will be closed; and more and more quantity of the drug will be needed.

The moment will come when even drugs won’t help. Then you will really be stoned!

Become more sensitive, become more austere. And when I say ‘become’, I don’t mean practice, I mean understand. Try to see that whenever you are simple, things go beautifully. Whenever you are complex, things become problematic; you create more puzzles to be solved and everything becomes entwined, a mess.