Psychologists have been experimenting and they have come to the same facts as the Eastern esoteric psychology: man is a victim, not a master. Psychologists have put people in total isolation, with every comfort possible. Whatsoever was needed was given to them but they didn’t come in contact with any other human beings. They lived in isolation in an air conditioned cell – no work, no trouble, no problem, but the same habits continued. One morning, with no reason now – because every comfort was fulfilled, there was no worry, there was no excuse to be angry – and the man would find suddenly that anger was arising.
It is within you. Sometimes, suddenly sadness comes for no apparent reason at all, and sometimes one feels happy, sometimes one feels euphoric, ecstatic. A man deprived of all social relationships, isolated in total comfort, supplied with every need, moves through all the moods that you move through in a relationship.
That means that something comes from within and you hang it on somebody else. That is just a rationalization. You feel good, you feel bad, and these feelings are bubbling from your own unconsciousness, from your own past. Nobody is responsible except you. Nobody can make you angry, and nobody can make you happy. You become happy on your own, you become angry on your own, and you become sad on your own. Unless you realize this, you will always remain a slave.
The mastery of one’s self comes when one realizes, ‘I am absolutely responsible for whatsoever happens to me, whatsoever happens, unconditionally. I am responsible, absolutely.’ In the beginning it will make you very, very sad and depressed because if you can throw the responsibility on the other, you feel good that you are not in the wrong. What can you do when the wife is behaving in such a nasty way? You have to be angry. But remember well, the wife is behaving nastily because of her own inner mechanisms. She’s not nasty to you. If you were not there she would be nasty to the child. If the child were not there she would be nasty to the plates – she would have thrown them on the floor. She would have broken the radio. She had to do something; nastiness was coming up. It was just coincidence that you were found reading your newspaper and she became nasty to you. It was just a coincidence that you were available at the wrong moment.
You are angry not because the wife is nasty. She may have supplied the situation, that’s all. She may have given you a possibility to be angry, an excuse to be angry, but the anger was bubbling up. If the wife were not there you would have been angry all the same – with something else, with some idea, but anger had to be there. It was something that was coming from your own unconscious.
Everybody is responsible, totally responsible for his own being and behavior. In the beginning it will give you a very depressed mood that you are responsible for, because you have always thought that you want to be happy – so how can you be responsible for your unhappiness? You always desire blissfulness, so how can you be angry on your own? And because of this you throw the responsibility on the other. If you go on throwing responsibility on the other, remember that you will always remain a slave because nobody can change the other. How can you change the other? Has anybody ever changed the other? One of the most unfulfilled wishes in the world is to change the other. Nobody has ever done that. It is impossible because the other exists in his own right – you cannot change him. You go on throwing responsibility on the other but you cannot change the other. And because you throw the responsibility on the other, you will never see that the basic responsibility is yours. The basic change is needed there inside you.
This is how you are trapped: if you start thinking that you are responsible for all your actions, for all your moods, in the beginning a depression will take over.
But if you can pass through that depression, soon you will feel light because now you are freed from the other, now you can work on your own. You can be free, you can be happy. Even if the whole world is unhappy and unfree it makes no difference. Otherwise, how is a Buddha possible? And how is a Patanjali possible? How am I possible? The whole world is the same. It is just the same as it is for you, but a Krishna goes on dancing and singing; he’s freed. And the first freedom is to stop throwing responsibility on the other, the first freedom is to know that you are responsible. Then Many things become immediately possible.
The whole philosophy of karma is that you are responsible. Whatsoever you have sown in the past you are reaping. You may not be able to follow the link between the cause and the effect, but if the effect is there, the cause must be there somewhere in you.
That is the whole method of prati-prasav: how to move from the effect to the cause, how to go backwards and find the cause, from where it is coming up.
Whatsoever happens to you – you feel sad, just close your eyes and watch your sadness. Follow where it leads, go deeper into it. Soon you will come to the cause. Maybe you will have to travel long, because this whole life is involved; and not only this life, but many other lives are involved. You will find many wounds in you which hurt, and because of those wounds you feel sad; they are sad. Those wounds have not gone dry yet; they are alive. The method of prati- prasav, the method of going back to the source, from the effect to the cause, will heal them. How does it heal? Why does it heal? What is the phenomenon implied in it?
Whenever you go backwards, the first thing you drop is throwing the responsibility on others, because if you throw the responsibility on the other you go outwards. Then the whole process is wrong: you try to find the cause in the other: ‘Why is the wife nasty?’ Then the ‘why’ goes on penetrating into the wife’s behavior. You have missed the first step and then the whole process will be wrong. Why am I unhappy? Why am I angry? – Close the eyes and let it be a deep meditation. Lie down on the floor, close the eyes, relax the body and feel why you are angry. Just forget the wife; that is an excuse – A, B, C, D, whatsoever, forget the excuse. Just go deeper into yourself, penetrate the anger.
Use anger itself as a river; into the anger you flow and the anger will take you inwards. You will find subtle wounds in you.
The wife looked nasty because she touched a subtle wound in you, something which hurts. You have always thought that you are not beautiful, your face is ugly, and there is a wound inside. When the wife is nasty she will make you aware of your face. She will say, ‘Go and look in the mirror!’ Something hurts.
You have been unfaithful to the wife and when she wants to be nasty, she will bring it up again, ‘Why were you laughing with that woman? Why were you sitting with that woman so happily?’ A wound is touched. You have been unfaithful, you feel guilty; the wound is alive. You close the eyes, feel the anger, let it arise in its totality so that you can see it completely, what it is. Then let that energy help you to move towards the past, because the anger is coming from the past. It cannot come from the future of course. The future has not yet come into being. It is not coming from the present.
This is the whole standpoint of karma: it cannot come from the future because the future is not yet; it cannot come from the present because you don’t know at all what it is. The present is known only by the awakened ones. You live only in the past so it must be coming from somewhere else in your past. The wound must be somewhere in your memories. Go back. There may not be one wound, there may be many: small, big. Go deeper and find the first wound, the original source of all anger. You will be able to find it if you try, because it is already there. It is there; all your past is still there. It is like a film, rolled and waiting inside. You unroll it, you start looking at the film. This is the process of prati-prasav. It means going backwards to the very root cause. And this is the beauty of the process: if you can consciously go backwards, if you can consciously feel a wound, the wound is immediately heated.
Why is it healed? – Because a wound is created by unconsciousness, unawareness. A wound is part of ignorance, sleep. When you consciously go backwards and look at the wound, consciousness is a healing force. In the past, when the wound happened, it happened from unconsciousness. You were angry, you were possessed by anger, you did something: you killed a man and you have been hiding the fact from the world. You can hide it from the police, you can hide it from the court and the law, but how can you hide it from yourself? – You know, it hurts. And whenever somebody gives you an opportunity to be angry you become afraid because it could happen again, you could kill the wife.
Go back, because at that moment when you murdered a man or you behaved in a very angry and mad way, you were unconscious. In the unconscious those wounds have been preserved. Now go consciously.
Prati-prasav, going back, means going consciously to things which you have done from unconsciousness. Go back – just the light of consciousness heals. It is a healing force. Whatsoever you can make conscious will be healed, and then it will hurt no more.
A man who goes backwards releases the past. Then the past is no more functioning, then the past has no more grip on him and the past is finished. The past has no place in his being. And when the past has no place in your being you are available to the present, never before it. You need space; the past is so much inside – a junkyard of dead things. There is no space for the present to enter.
That junkyard goes on dreaming about the future, so half the place is filled with that which is no more and half the place is filled with that which is not yet. And the present? – It simply waits outside the door. That’s why the present is nothing but a passage, a passage from the past to the future, just a momentary passage.
Be finished with the past! Unless you are finished with the past you are living a ghost life. Your life is not true, it is not existential. The past lives through you, the dead goes on haunting you. Go backwards – whenever you have an opportunity, whenever something happens in you: happiness, unhappiness, sadness, anger, jealousy, close the eyes and go backwards. Soon you will become efficient in travelling backwards. Soon you will be able to go back in time and then many wounds will open. When those wounds open inside you, don’t start doing anything. There is no need to do it. You simply watch, look, observe; the wound is there. You simply watch, give your watching energy to the wound, look at it. Look at it without any judgment because if you judge, if you say, ‘This is bad, this should not be so,’ the wound will close again. Then it will have to hide. Whenever you condemn then the mind tries to hide things. That’s how the conscious and unconscious are created. Otherwise, mind is one; there is no need for any division. But you condemn. Then the mind has to divide and put things in the dark, in the basement so you cannot see them – and then there is no need to condemn.
Don’t condemn, don’t appreciate. You simply be a witness, an unattached observer. Don’t deny. Don’t say, ‘This is not good,’ because that is a denial and you have started suppressing. Be detached. Just watch and look. Look with compassion and the healing will happen.
Don’t ask me why it happens because it is a natural phenomenon. It is just as at a hundred degrees, water evaporates. You never ask, ‘Why not at ninety nine degrees?’ Nobody can answer that. It simply happens that at a hundred degrees water evaporates. There is no question, and the question is irrelevant. If it evaporated at ninety nine degrees, you would ask why. If it evaporated at ninety eight, you would ask why. It is simply natural that at a hundred degrees water evaporates.
The same is true of the inner nature. When a detached, compassionate consciousness comes to a wound, the wound disappears, evaporates. There is no reason for it. It is simply natural, it is how it is, it is how it happens. When I say this I say it from experience. Try it and the experience is possible for you also; this is the way.
Tags: Patanjali Your Own Past
