Yoga Sutra 20 Because Of Hope

These sutras are very beautiful; try to understand them.

THE DISCRIMINATING PERSON REALIZES THAT EVERYTHING LEADS TO MISERY BECAUSE OF CHANGE, ANXIETY, PAST EXPERIENCES, AND THE CONFLICTS THAT ARISE BETWEEN THE THREE ATTRIBUTES AND THE FIVE MODIFICATIONS OF THE MIND.

Life is misery as you know it, life is bliss as I know it. Then we must be talking about different things, because how can life be misery for you and bliss for me?

We are not talking about one and the same thing. When you talk about life, you are talking about a life in the seed, a life just in hope, a life of dreams, fantasies; not a real authentic life. You are talking about a life which only desires but doesn’t know, which only hankers but never reaches; a life which is constantly feeling suffocated but thinks that suffocation is comfort; a life which is a miserable hell but always thinks that something is going to happen out of this hell – heaven is to be born out of this hell.

How can heaven be born out of hell? How can ecstasy be born out of your miseries? No, miseries will be born out of your miserable life more and more. A child is not as miserable as an old man becomes. It should be just the opposite, because the old man has lived life so much. He must be reaching near the peak, the peak of experiences, the flowers. But he is nowhere near that. Just on the contrary, life has not been a rising wave, he has not reached to any heaven.

Rather, he has descended into a deeper and deeper hell. A child seems to be more heavenly than an old man. This is simply absurd; it goes against nature. A child is just a seed. An old man must become a very ancient oak, a great tree; but he is not. He has reached into darker realms of hell. It is as if life is falling, not a rising phenomenon, as if you are falling towards more and more dark realms, not rising towards the sun.

What happens to an old man? A child is miserable, an old man is also miserable.

They are both on the same path. A child has just started the journey and the old man has accumulated all the miseries of the whole journey.

Out of hell, heaven is not born. If you are miserable today, how do you think tomorrow can be happy and blissful? Tomorrow will come out of you. From where else can it come? Tomorrow doesn’t come out of the clock; tomorrow, your tomorrow, comes out of you. All your yesterdays together, plus today, is going to be your tomorrow. It is simple arithmetic: today you are unhappy and miserable; then how, how is it possible that tomorrow is going to be happy and blissful? – Impossible! Until you die, it is impossible. Because with your death, all yesterdays die. Then it will not come out of your miseries; then it will be a fresh phenomenon, something which happens for the first time. Then it will not come out of your mind, it will come out of your being. You become dwij, twice born.

Try to understand the phenomenon of misery. Why are you so miserable? What creates so much misery? I watch you, I look inside you; miseries upon miseries, layers upon layers. It is really a miracle how you continue living. It must be that hope is stronger than experience, dream is stronger than reality. Otherwise, how could you continue living? You have nothing to live for except the hope that tomorrow something, somehow, is going to happen which will change everything. Tomorrow is the miracle – and this you have been thinking for many, many lives. Millions of tomorrows came, became todays, but the hope survives. Again hope goes on living. You live not because you have life, but because you have hope.

Omar Khayam says somewhere that he asked great doctors, theologians, priests, philosophers, ‘Why does man go on living?’ Nobody could answer. They all shrugged their shoulders. Says Omar Khayam, “I reached many who were known for their knowing, but through the same door I had to come back. Then desperate, not knowing whom to ask, I cried to the sky one night. I asked the sky, I told the sky, ‘You must have been here! You must have seen all the miseries that have existed in the past; millions and millions miserable. You must know why people go on living!’ A sound came from the sky, ‘Because of hope.’”

Hope is your only life. With the thread of hope you can tolerate all miseries. With just a dream of heaven, you forget the hell all around you. You live in dreams; dreams sustain you. Reality is ugly. Why does so much misery happen and why can’t you see why it is happening? Why can’t you find the cause of it?

To find the cause of misery, one has to stop evading it. How can you know a thing if you evade it? How can you know a thing if you escape? If you want to know something, you have to encounter it face to face. Whenever you are miserable, you start hoping; tomorrow immediately becomes more important than today. This is evasion. You have escaped and now hope is functioning as a drug: you are miserable, you take the drug and you forget. Now you are drunk, drunk with hope. There is no drug like hope. No marijuana, no LSD is comparable. Hope is the ultimate LSD. Because of hope you can tolerate everything, everything! Thousands of hells are nothing.

How does this mechanism of hope function? Whenever you are in misery, sad, depressed, you immediately escape from it, you try to forget it. That’s how it continues. The next time you are miserable – and you will not have to wait long; the moment my talk is finished you will be – don’t try to escape. My talk may also be functioning as an escape – you listen to me, you forget yourself. You listen to me, you have to be attentive towards me, but towards yourself you turn your back. You forget, you forget what your real situation is. I talk about bliss, I talk about ecstasy. That is real to me, but to you it becomes a dream. Again it becomes the hope that if you meditate, if you work for it, then it is going to happen to you also. Don’t use it as a drug. You can use a Master as a drug, and you can be drugged.

My whole effort is to make you more aware, so whenever you are in misery don’t try to escape. Hope is the enemy. Don’t hope, and don’t dream against reality.

If you are sad, then sadness is the reality. Remain with it; remain with it, don’t move, concentrate on it. Face it, let it be. Don’t move to the opposite of it. It is going to be a very bitter experience in the beginning, because when you face sadness, it surrounds you from everywhere. You become like a small island and sadness is an ocean all around – and such great waves of sadness! One feels afraid, one feels a trembling to the very being. Tremble, be afraid. Only don’t do one thing – don’t escape. Let it be, penetrate deeply into it. See, watch – don’t judge. You have been doing that for millions of lives. Just watch, penetrate into it. Soon, the bitter experience will not be so bitter. Soon, out of the bitter end, counter arises reality. Soon you will be moving, penetrating deeper and deeper – and you will find the cause, what the cause of misery is, why you are so miserable.

The cause is not outside, it is within you, hidden in your misery. Misery is just like smoke. Somewhere there is fire inside you; penetrate deep into the smoke so you can find the fire. Nobody can put the smoke out because it is a by-product.

But if you put the fire out, the smoke disappears of its own accord. Find the cause, the effect disappears because then something can be done. Remember, only with the cause can some. thing be done, never with the effect. If you go on fighting with the effect, all fight is in vain. That is the meaning of Patanjali’s method of prati-prasav: go back to the cause, penetrate the effect and reach to the cause. The cause must be there somewhere. The effect is just like smoke surrounding you; but once the smoke surrounds you, you escape into hope. You dream about days when there will be no smoke. This is all foolish. Not only is it foolish, but suicidal, because this is how you are missing the cause.

Patanjali says ‘the discriminating person’. The Sanskrit word is vivek – it means awareness, it means consciousness, it means discriminating force. Because through awareness, you can discriminate between what is what: what is real, what is false, what is the effect and what is the cause.

The discriminating person, the man of vivek, the man of awareness, realizes that everything leads to misery.

As you are, everything leads to misery. And if you remain as you are, everything will go on leading to misery. It is not a question of changing the situations, it is a question of a very deep-rooted thing within you. Something within you frustrates the very possibility of bliss. Something in you goes against your flowering into a blissful state. The man of awareness comes to know that everything leads to misery, everything.

You have done everything, but have you watched that everything leads to misery? If you hate, it leads to misery; if you love, it leads to misery. There seems to be no logical system in life. A man hates, it leads to misery. Simple logic will say that if hate leads to misery then love must lead to happiness. Then you love, and love also leads to misery. What is this? Is life absolutely absurd, irrational? Is there no logic? Is it a chaos? You do whatsoever you want, and finally comes misery. It seems that misery is the road and every road leads to it. From wherever you want to start, you can start: right, left, in the middle; Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Jain; man, woman, knowledge, ignorance, love, hate everything leads to misery. If you are angry it leads to misery; if you are not angry, that too leads to misery. It seems that misery is there and whatsoever you do is irrelevant. Finally, you come to it.