Reliving

Through prati-prasav one becomes free of the karmas. Karmas try to insist on the future; they don’t allow you to go to the past. They say, ‘Move into the future. What will you do in the past? Where are you going? Why waste time? Do something for the future!’ Karmas always insist, ‘Go into the future so the past remains hidden in the unconscious.’ Start the reverse process, the prati-prasav.

Don’t listen to the mind which says to go into the future. Watch – mind is always saying something about the future. It never allows you to be here. It is always forcing you to move into the future.

Go back into the past. And when I say to go back into the past I am not saying that you should remember the past. Remembering won’t help; remembering is an impotent process. This distinction has to be remembered: remembering is not of any help – it may even be harmful – but reliving. They are totally different. The distinction is very subtle and has to be understood.

You remember something: you remember your childhood. When you remember your childhood you remain here and now. You don’t become a child. You can remember, you can close your eyes and you can remember when you were seven years of age running in a garden – you see it. You are here and the past is seen like a film: you are running, the child is running trying to catch butterflies. You are the seer and the child is the object. No, this is not right; this is remembering.

It is impotent, it will not help.

Wounds are deeper. They cannot be revealed by remembering, and remembering remains a part of the conscious mind. And that is very, very significant. It has been hidden in the unconscious, so you remember only useless things, or you remember only those things which your mind accepts.

That’s why every man says that his childhood was a paradise. Nobody’s ever been. Why does everybody say that childhood was a paradise? You would like to be a child again, but ask the children. No child wants to be a child, every child is trying to become a grown-up and thinking how soon he can do it. No child is happy with childhood because he says, ‘Grown-ups are powerful.’ Every child feels helpless, and helplessness cannot be a very good feeling. Every child feels pushed and pulled from here and there, as if he had no independence.

Childhood looks like a slavery to the child; he has to depend on others for everything. If he wants ice cream he has to ask and beg, and everybody is there to teach that ice cream is bad. The child thinks, ‘Then why does God make ice cream?’ All the things that the parents force him to eat are bad, he does not like them, and all the things that he likes to eat are bad for the parents. They say, ‘This will be disturbing, your stomach will go wrong and this will happen and that will happen.’ It seems to the child that all the good vitamins are put in wrong things, and wrong things have been put in good things. The child is not happy at all; he wants to be finished with this whole nonsense. He wants to grow up and be a free man. But later on these same children will say that childhood was a paradise. What has happened?

Whatsoever is bad, ugly, is thrown into the unconscious because the ego does not want to look at it. All miseries are forgotten and all happinesses remembered.

You go on cherishing happinesses and you go on forgetting miseries. This is a choice. That’s why later on everybody says that childhood was paradise, because you have tried to forget all that was wrong. Your childhood as you remember it is not true, it is fictitious. It is a fiction created by the ego. So if you remember you will remember the happy things, not the unhappy things. If you relive, you will relive the total: happy, unhappy, all.

And what is reliving? – Reliving is to become the child again; not to look at the child as running in the garden, but to be the child running. Don’t be a watcher – become. This is possible because the child still exists in you, it is part of you.

Layer upon layer, all that you have lived exists in you. You were a child, it is there; then you became young, it is there; then you became old, it is there.

Everything is there, layer upon layer. You cut the trunk of a tree and each layer is there. In the depth, in the center-most place you will find the first layer. The tree was a very small plant; the first layer is there, the second layer is there. You can count the years because each year is one layer and the tree accumulates. You can count the age of the tree, how old it is. Not only trees, but even stones, rocks, have layers.

Everything is an accumulated phenomenon. You are the first seed that happened in your mother’s womb. Still it is there. And then after it millions of layers were added every day, thousands of things were happening. They are all there, accumulated. You can be again, because you have been. You have just to step back. So try reliving.

Prati-prasav is reliving the past. You close your eyes, lie down and move backwards. You can try it in a simple way. It will give you the knack of it. Every night you can lie down on the bed and move backwards towards the morning.

Lying down on the bed is the last thing – make it first; and now move backwards. What did you do before lying down? – You took a glass of milk; take it again, relive. You had a fight with the wife; relive. Don’t judge because there is no need now to judge. It has happened. Don’t say good or bad, don’t bring in valuations. You simply relive, it has happened. You go backwards: early in the morning when the alarm clock woke you up, listen to it again. Just go and try to live every moment of the day, unwinding the clock. You will feel very, very refreshed and you will fall into a beautiful sleep because you are finished with the day. Now the day is no more hanging on you. You relive consciously.

In the day it was difficult to be conscious; you were involved in so many things.

And you don’t have such consciousness that you can take it to the market yet.

Maybe in the temple, for a few seconds it happens. Maybe meditating, for a few seconds you will become aware. You don’t have enough of it to carry it to the market, to the shop, to the world of affairs where you become unconscious.

Again you fall into the old somnambulistic habit. But lying down on your bed, you can be conscious. Just watch, relive, let everything happen again. In fact, that’s how it happens to a Buddha.

You relive consciously in the night: the wife said something, then you said something, then she reacted. Then how did the whole thing arise? How did you become angry and hit her, and how did she start crying?

And then you had to make love to her. Go into the minutest details, everything.

Be watchful. It is easier because nothing is involved. The world is there no more.

You can watch and relive it. The moment you are reaching the morning you will feel so silent and the oblivion of sleep will be descending on you, not as an unconsciousness, but as a beautiful darkness, velvet like – you can touch it, you can feel it. The warmth surrounds you like a mother. And then you move into the night.

You will have less dreams because dreams are created by the unlived day.

Millions of things are happening. You cannot live all of them and you cannot live with them, with alertness. They remain hanging. Dreams are a hangover of the whole unlived day, or a day lived unconsciously; that is the same thing. A day half-heartedly lived, somehow lived, dragged, as if you are drunk, is how the dreams are created. Dreams are just to complete the whole process that has been left incomplete in the day.

Mind is a perfectionist; it doesn’t want anything to be complete. It wants to complete it and that’s why the whole night you dream. But if you can relive the day, dreams will fall, and a day comes when suddenly there are no dreams.

When there are no dreams, then for the first time you taste what sleep is.

Patanjali says that samadhi is just like sleep, the ultimate ecstasy is just like sleep, with only one difference: sleep is unconscious and samadhi is conscious. Sleep is one of the most beautiful phenomena, but you have never slept because you are so consistently dreaming.

In the whole night there are almost eight cycles of dreaming and each cycle persists for almost forty minutes. If you sleep for eight hours then there are eight cycles of dream, and each dream cycle persists for forty minutes. Between two dreams you have only twenty minutes, and that too is not very deep because another dream is getting ready. One dream finishes, the actors have gone behind the curtain, but there is much activity because they are getting ready, painting their faces and changing their dresses. They are getting ready and soon the curtain will be up; they will have to come.

So when between two dreams a twenty minute gap is given to you, that too is not very peaceful. Hidden behind is the basement; preparation is going on. It is just like the peace between two wars: the First World War, the Second World War, and the peace between the two. People count those as peaceful days – they were not. They could not be. Otherwise how could you prepare for the Second World War? Those were not peaceful days. Now they have found the right word; they call it ‘cold war’. There is a hot war, and between two hot wars, a cold war; that is the preparation behind the screen.

Between two dream cycles there is a twenty minute gap; it is like an interval.

Everything is getting ready and you are also getting ready. It is not non-tense, it is tense.

When you relive the whole day, dreaming stops. Then you fall in such a bottomless depth. You go on falling and falling and falling as if a feather is falling into an abyss – it is. It has a tremendous beauty. And this is only if you go backwards into the day. This is just to learn the knack of it; then you can do it for your whole life.

Go backwards to the very moment when you screamed and you were born.

Remember, it has to be relive, not remembered – because how can you remember? And you can scream again, the first scream, what Janov calls the primal scream. You can scream again as if you are reborn, as if you are again a child coming out of the passage of the mother’s womb. It is a difficult passage, hard. You struggle to come out and it is painful, because for nine months you have been living in such a paradise as the womb.

Our whole science has not yet been able to create a more comfortable thing than the womb. It is perfect. The child lives absolutely without any responsibility, with no worries, no thinking about bread and butter, or the world, or the relationship – no worries. Because there is nobody else, there is no question of any relationship. He feeds on the mother with not even the worry of having to digest anything. The mother digests and the child simply gets the digested food. There is not even the worry to breathe. The mother breathes, the child simply gets the oxygen and he floats in the water.

Hindus have a picture of Vishnu. They say that Vishnu floats on the ocean. You must have seen the picture: on the bed of a snake he rests; the snake protects and Vishnu sleeps. That picture is really a symbolization of the womb. Every child is a Vishnu, a God incarnate – at least in the womb. Everything is perfect, nothing is lacking. The water that he floats in is just exactly like the ocean water, with the same chemicals, the same salt. That’s why a pregnant woman starts eating more salt and salty things, hankers after salty things: the womb needs more salt. It is the exact chemical situation as in the ocean and the child floats in the ocean, perfectly comfortable. The temperature remains exactly the same. Whether it is cold outside or hot makes no difference, the mother’s womb carries exactly the same temperature for the child. He lives in perfect luxury. Coming out of that luxury in a dark passage, narrow, painful, the child screams.

If you can go back to your birth trauma you will scream, and you will scream if you relive. A moment will come when you will feel that you are the child, not the one who is remembering.

You are coming out of the birth passage; a scream comes. This scream vibrates your whole being, it comes from the very grounds of your being, the very roots of your being. That scream will relieve you of many things. You will again become a child, innocent – that is a rebirth. This too is not enough because this is only for one life. If you can do it for one life, you can enter into other lives. You go to the very, very first day, the day of creation. Or, if you are a Christian then the terminology of Adam will be good: you go back, and again you are in the Garden of Eden. You have become Adam and Eve. Then all your past karmas, habits, conditionings are dissolved, washed away. You have entered heaven again. This is the process of prati-prasav.