Yoga Sutra 17 Painful As Pleasurable

Says Patanjali, ‘Lack of awareness is taking the impure for the pure, the painful as pleasurable.’

You will say, ‘Either of the things that Patanjali says may be true but we are not so foolish to take the painful as pleasurable.’ You are. Everybody is – unless one becomes perfectly aware. You have taken many things as pleasurable which are painful. You suffer the pain and you cry and weep, but still you don’t understand that you have taken something which is basically painful and cannot be changed into a pleasure.

People go to Osho about their sexual relationship saying that it is painful. Osho have not come across a single couple who has said to him that their sex life is as it should be – perfect, beautiful. What is the matter? In the beginning they say that everything was beautiful. In the beginning it always is! With everybody, the sex relationship is beautiful in the beginning, but why does it turn sour and bitter? Why after a little while, even before the honeymoon is over, does it start becoming sour and bitter?

Those who have words on human consciousness, deeply they say, ‘The beginning, the beauty in the beginning is just a natural trick to befool you.’ Once you are befooled, the reality comes up. It is just like when you go fishing and you use a little bait; in the beginning, when two people meet, they think, ‘Now this is going to be the greatest peak experience in the world.’ They think, ‘This woman is the most beautiful woman,’ and the woman thinks, ‘This man is the greatest man there has ever been.’ They start in an illusion, they project. They try to see whatsoever they want to see. They don’t see the real person. They don’t see who is there, they just see their own dream projected; the other becomes just a screen and you project. Sooner or later the reality asserts. And when sex is fulfilled, when the basic hypnosis of nature is fulfilled, then everything turns sour.

Then you come to see the other as he is: very ordinary, nothing special. The body is no more a fragrance – it perspires. The face is no more divine – it has come nearer to an animal’s. From the eyes, now God is no longer looking at you, but a ferocious animal, a sexual animal. The illusion is broken, the dream is shattered.

Now the misery starts.

And you had promised that you would love the woman forever; the woman had promised that even for future lives she would be your shadow. Now you are tricked by your own promises, trapped. Now how can you fall back? Now you have to carry it.

Hypocrisy enters, pretensions, anger. Because whenever you are pretending, sooner or later you will get angry; pretension is such a heavy weight. Now you take the hand of the woman and hold it, but it simply perspires and nothing happens; no poetry, only perspiration. You want to leave it but the woman will feel hurt. She also wants to leave it but she also thinks that you will feel hurt, and lovers have to hold hands. You kiss the woman but there is nothing but a bad mouth odor. Everything goes ugly, and then you react, then you take revenge, then you throw responsibility on the other, then you try to prove that the other is guilty. He or she has done something wrong, or she has deceived you; she pretended to be something which she was not. And then, the whole ugly affair of a marriage.

Remember, lack of awareness is taking the painful as pleasurable. If something is a pleasure in the beginning and in the end it turns painful, remember that it was painful from the very beginning; only lack of awareness has deceived you.

Nobody else has deceived you, only lack of awareness. You were not alert enough to see things as they were. Otherwise, how could pleasure turn into pain!

If there were really pleasure, as time passed, it would have become greater and greater pleasure. That is how it should be.

You sow the seed of a mango tree; as it grows, will it become the fruit of a neem tree, bitter? If in the first place the seed was of the mango, it will be a mango tree, a big mango tree. Thousands of mangoes will come out of it, sweet. But if you plant a mango tree and in the end it turns out to be a neem tree, bitter, absolutely bitter, what does it mean? It means the tree has not deceived you but you mistook the seed of a neem tree for the seed of a mango tree.

Otherwise, pleasure grows more pleasurable, happiness grows more and more happy. Finally it turns into the highest peak of bliss; but then one has to be aware when one is sowing the seeds. Once you sow the seeds, you are caught because then you cannot change. Then you will have to reap the crop also. And you are reaping the crop. You always reap the crop of misery and you never become aware that something must be wrong with the seed. Whenever you have to reap misery, you start thinking that somebody else has been deceiving you: the wife, the husband, the friend, the family, the world, but some. body else. The devil or somebody is playing tricks on you. This is avoiding facing the reality that you have sown wrong seeds.

Lack of awareness is taking the painful as pleasurable. And this is the criterion.

Ask Patanjali, Shankaracharya, Buddha; this is the criterion: if something turns finally into pain, it must have been painful from the beginning. The end is the criterion, the final fruit is the criterion. You should judge a tree by the fruit; there is no other way to judge it. If your life has become a tree of misery, you should judge that the seed was wrong, something that you have done wrong; move back.

But you never do that. You will commit the same mistake again. If your wife dies and you had thought many times that if she died it would be good – it is difficult to find a husband who has not thought many times that if his wife died it would be good – ‘I am finished and I am not going to look at another woman again’ – but the moment the wife dies, immediately the idea of another woman comes into the mind. The mind starts thinking again, ‘Who knows? This woman was not good but the other woman can be. This relationship didn’t come to a beautiful end but that doesn’t close all the doors; other doors are open.’ The mind starts working. You will fall into the same trap again and you will suffer again.

And you will always think, ‘Maybe this woman and that woman….’ It is not a question of a woman and a man, it is a question of being aware.

If you are aware, then with everything that you do you will do looking at the end. You will be fully alert to what is going to be in the end. Then if you want it to be painful, if you want to live in pain and misery, it is up to you to choose. But then you cannot make anybody else responsible. You know perfectly well that you sowed the seed and now you have to reap it. But who is so foolish that alert, aware, he will sow bitter seeds? For what?

AND LACK OF AWARENESS IS TO TAKE THE NON SELF FOR THE SELF: These are the criteria.

You have taken the non self for the self. Sometimes you think you are the body, sometimes you think you are the mind, sometimes you think you are the heart; these are the three traps. Body is the outermost layer. When you feel hungry have you not always said, ‘I am hungry?’ – Lack of awareness. You are just the knower that the body is hungry; you are not hungry. How can consciousness be hungry? Food never enters consciousness; consciousness is never hungry. In fact, once you come to know consciousness, you will find that it is always satiated, never hungry. It is always perfect, absolute; it lacks nothing. It is already the very pinnacle, the very peak, the ultimate growth; it is not hungry. And how can consciousness be hungry for food? – Body needs it.

A man of awareness will say, ‘My body is hungry.’ Or, if awareness goes even deeper, he will not say ‘my body’; he will say, ‘This body is hungry, the body is hungry.’

One great Indian mystic went to America. His name was Ramteerth. He always used to speak in the third person. He would never use ‘I’. It looked awkward because people who didn’t know him couldn’t follow what he was saying. One day he went back to the house where he was staying in America. He went on laughing and enjoying, his whole body laughing belly laugh. The whole body was shaking with laughter. The family asked, ‘What is the matter, what has happened? Why are you so happy? Why are you laughing?’ He said, ‘It happened on the street. A few urchins started throwing stones at Ram’ – Ram was his name – ‘and I said to Ram, “Now see!” And Ram was very, very angry. He wanted to do something but I didn’t cooperate, I stood aside.’ The family said, ‘We cannot follow what you mean. You are Ram. About whom are you talking?’ Said Ramteerth, ‘I am not Ram, I am the knower. This body is Ram and those urchins cannot throw stones at me. How can a stone be thrown at consciousness? Can you hit the sky with a stone? Can you touch the sky with a stone?’ Consciousness is a vast sky, a space; you cannot hit it. Only the body can be hit with a stone because the body belongs to matter; matter can hit it. Body belongs to matter.

It feels hungry for food. Food can satisfy it, hunger will kill it. Consciousness is not the body.

Lack of awareness is when you take your body as yourself. Ninety percent of your lives’ miseries are because of this: lack of awareness. You take the body as yourself and then you suffer. You are suffering in a dream. The body is not yours. Soon it will not be yours. Where were you when your body was not there?

Where were you before your birth, what face had you then? And after the death, where will you be and what will your face be? Will you be a man or a woman?

Consciousness is neither. If you think that I am a man, this is a lack of awareness.

Consciousness? How can consciousness be divided into sex? – It has no sex organs. If you think you are a child or a young man or an old man, you are again lacking in awareness. How can you be old, how can you be young?

Consciousness is neither. It is eternal, it is the same: it is not born, it doesn’t die and it remains – it is life itself.

Or, take the mind – that is the second, deeper layer. And it is more subtle and nearer to consciousness. You take your mind to be yourself. You go on saying: ‘I, I, I.’ If somebody contradicts your idea you say, ‘This is my idea,’ and you fight for it. Nobody debates for truth; people discuss and debate and fight for their ‘I’.

‘My idea means me. How dare you contradict? I will prove that I am right!’

Nobody is bothered about the truth. Who bothers? – It is a question of who is right, not a question of what is right. But then people are identified, and not only ordinary people, even people who are religious.

A man renounces the family, the children, the market-place, the world, and goes to the Himalayas. You ask him, ‘Are you a Hindu?’ and he says, ‘Yes.’ What is this Hinduism? Is consciousness Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian? It is the mind.

Lack of awareness is if you get identified with the non self and think it is the self.

And then there is the heart, the nearest to consciousness but still far away. There is body, thought and feeling. When you feel, you have to be very, very aware to feel that it is not you who feels. It is again a part of the mechanism. Of course, it is the nearest to consciousness. That’s why the heart is the nearest to consciousness, head just in between, and body the farthest away. But still, heart is not you. Even feeling is a phenomenon: it comes and goes; it is a ripple, it arises and dies; it is a mood, it exists and then doesn’t exist. You are that which will always exist, always and always, forever and forever.

LACK OF AWARENESS IS TAKING THE NON SELF FOR THE SELF.