Each Integration

Before we enter Yoga Sutra 42, let us understand what each integration is.

Patanjali’s skill in expressing the inexpressible is superb. Nobody has ever been able to surpass him. He has mapped the inner world of consciousness as accurately as it is possible; he has almost done the impossible job.

I have heard one story about Ramkrishna: One day he said to his disciples, “I will tell you everything today and will not keep anything secret.” He described clearly the centers and the corresponding experiences up to the heart and throat, and then pointing to the spot between the eyebrows he said, “The supreme self is directly known and the individual experiences samadhi when the mind comes here. There remains then but a thin transparent screen separating the supreme self and the individual self. The sadhaka then experiences….” Saying this, the moment he started to describe in detail the realization of supreme self, he was plunged in samadhi and became unconscious. When the samadhi came to an end and he came back, he tried again to describe it and was again in samadhi; again he became unconscious. After repeated attempts Ramkrishna broke into tears, started crying, and told his disciples that it is impossible to speak about it.

But Ramkrishna has tried, has tried in many ways, from different directions, and this always happened, his whole life. Whenever he will come beyond the third-eye center and will be coming nearer sahasrara, he will be caught hold of by something inner, so deeply that the very remembrance of it, the very effort to describe it, and he is gone. For hours he will remain unconscious. It’s natural because the bliss of sahasrara is such, one is almost overpowered by it. The bliss is so oceanic that one is possessed by it and taken over. One is no longer oneself, once you transcend the third eye.

Ramkrishna tried and failed, but could not describe it. Many others have not even tried. Lao Tzu resisted, for his whole life, saying anything about the world of tao because of this.

Nothing can be said about it, and the moment you try to say it, you are plunged into an inner whirlwind, whirlpool. You are lost, drowned. You are bathed in such beauty and beatitude that you cannot utter a single word.

But Patanjali has done the impossible. He has described as exactly as possible each step, each integration, each chakra, its functioning, and how to transcend it, up to sahasrara – and he has even indicated beyond. On each chakra, on each wheel of energy, a certain integration happens. Let me tell you.

At the sex center, the first center, the most primitive but the most natural, the one that is available to all, the integration happens between the outer and the inner. Of course it is momentary. A woman meeting a man or a man meeting a woman come for a single moment, split moment, where the outer and inner meet and mingle and merge into each other. That’s the beauty of sex, the orgasm, that two energies, the complementary energies, meet and become one whole. But it is going to be momentary because the meeting is through the most gross element, the body. The body can touch the surfaces but it cannot really enter into the other. It is like ice cubes. If you put two ice cubes together, they can touch each other, but if they melt and become water, then they meet and mingle with each other. Then they go to the very center. And if the water evaporates, then the meeting becomes very, very deep. Then there is no I, no thou, no inner, no outer.

The first center, the sex center, gives you a certain integration. That’s why there is so much hankering for sex. It is natural, it is in itself beneficial and good, but if you stop there, then you have stopped on the porch of a palace. The porch is good, it leads you into the palace, but it is not a place to make your abode, it is not a place to stop forever… and the bliss that is waiting for you on the higher integrations of other centers will be missed.

And in comparison to that bliss and happiness and joy, the beauty of sex is nothing, the pleasure of sex is nothing. It simply gives you a momentary glimpse.

The second chakra is hara. At the hara, life and death meet. If you reach the second center, you reach a higher orgasm of integration. Life meeting death, sun meeting moon. And the meeting is inner now, so the meeting can be more permanent, more stable, because you are not dependent on anybody else. Now you are meeting your own inner woman or your own inner man.

The third center is the navel. There the positive and the negative meet – the positive electricity and the negative electricity. Their meeting is even higher than life and death because the electric energy, the prana, the bioplasma or bioenergy, is deeper than life and death. It exists before life, it exists after death. Life and death exist because of bioenergy.

This meeting of bioenergy at the navel, nabhi, gives you even a higher experience of being one, integrated, and unity.

Then is the heart. At the heart center the lower and the higher meet. At the heart center the prakriti and purusha, the sexual and the spiritual, the worldly and the other-worldly – or you can call it the meeting of heaven and earth. It is still higher because for the first time something of the beyond dawns – you can see the sun rising at the horizon. You are still rooted in the earth, but your branches are spreading into the sky. You have become a meeting. That’s why the heart center gives the highest and the most refined experience ordinarily available – the experience of love. The experience of love is the meeting of earth and heaven; so love is in a way earthly and in another way heavenly.

If Jesus defined God as love, this is the reason, because in human consciousness love seems to be the higher glimpse.

Ordinarily people never go beyond the heart center. Even to reach the heart center seems to be difficult, almost impossible. People remain at the sex center. If they are trained deeply in yoga, karate, aikido, t’ai chi, then they reach the second center, the hara. If they are trained in the deep mechanism of breathing, prana, then they reach the navel center. And if they are trained how to look beyond earth and how to see beyond the body and how to look so deeply and so sensitively that you are no longer confined to the gross, and the subtle can penetrate its first rays into you, only then, the heart center.

All paths of devotion, bhakti yoga, work on the heart center. Tantra starts from the sex center. Tao starts from the hara center. Yoga starts from the navel center. Bhakti yoga, paths of devotion and love, Sufis and others, they start from the heart center.

Higher than the heart is the throat center. Again there happens another integration, even more superior, more subtle. This center is the center of receiving and giving. When the child is born he receives, from the throat center. First, life enters into him from the throat center – he sucks air, breathes; and then he sucks milk from his mother. The child functions from the throat center, but it is half functioning and soon the child forgets about it. He just receives. He cannot give yet. His love is passive. And if you are asking for love, then you remain juvenile, you remain childish. Unless you mature, then you can give love, you have not become a grown-up. Everybody asks for love, demands love, and almost nobody gives. That’s the misery all over the world. And everybody who demands thinks that he is giving, believes that he is giving.

I have looked into thousands of people – all hungry for love, thirsty for love, but nobody in any way trying to give. And they all believe that they are giving but they are not receiving. Once you give, you receive, naturally. It has never happened otherwise. The moment you give, love rushes in you. It has nothing to do with persons and people. It has something to do with the cosmic energy of God.

The throat center is the meeting of receiving and giving. You receive from it and you give from it. That is the meaning of Christ’s saying that you must become a child again. If you translate it into the yoga terminology it will mean: you must come to the throat center again. The child forgets by and by.

If you look into Freudian psychology, you will have a parallel. Freud says the first stage of the child is oral, the second stage is anal, and the third stage is genital. The whole Freudian psychology ends with the third. Of course it is a very poor psychology, very rudimentary, fragmentary, and concerned with the very lower functioning of human beings. Oral – yes, the child uses the throat center, just to receive. And once he has started receiving, his being moves to the anal.

Have you watched that a few people cling to the oral, even up to their death? These are the people you will find smoking; these are oral people. They still go on…. The smoke, the cigarette, the cigar, gives them a feeling as if something hot like mother’s milk is passing through the throat center; and they remain confined to the oral, and they cannot give. If a person is a chain-smoker, heavy smoker, almost always he is not a giver of love. He demands, but he will not give.

People who are smoking too much are always interested in women’s breasts too much.

Bound to be, because a cigarette is a substitute for the nipple. I am not saying that people who are not smokers are not interested in women’s breasts. Those who smoke, they are interested. Those who don’t smoke, they are also interested; they may be chewing pan or gum or something else, or they may be simply interested in pornography – or they may be just obsessed by the breast continuously. In their mind, in their dream, in their imagination, fantasy, the breast – breasts and breasts go on floating all around them.

These are oral people, stuck.

When Jesus says you have to be a child again, he means you have to come back to the throat center, but with a new energy to give. All creative people are givers. They may sing a song for you or dance a dance or write a poem or paint a picture or tell you a story.

For all these the throat center is again used as a center to give. The meeting of receiving and giving happens at the throat. The capacity to receive and to give is one of the greatest integrations.

There are people who are only capable of receiving. They will remain miserable because you never become rich by receiving. You become rich by giving. In fact you possess only that which you can give. If you cannot give it, you simply believe that you possess. You don’t possess it; you are not a master. If you cannot give your money, then you are not the master of it. Then the money is the master. If you can give it, then certainly you are the master. This will look like a paradox, but let me repeat it: you are the possessor only of that which you give. The moment you give, in that very moment you have become a possessor, enriched. Giving enriches you.

Miserly, people are the most miserable and Poor people in the world – poorer than the poor. They cannot give; they are stuck. They go on hoarding. Their hoarding becomes a burden on their being; it does not free them. In fact if you have something you will become freer. But look at the misers. They have much, but they are burdened; they are not free. Even beggars are more free than they are. What has happened to them? They have used their throat center just to receive. Not only that they have not used their throat center to give, they have not even moved to the second Freudian center, anal. These people are always constipatory; hoarders, misers, always suffer from constipation. Remember, I am not saying that all people who have constipation are misers; there may be other reasons.

But misers are certainly constipated.

Freud says that there is something in gold and excreta. Both look yellow, and people who are constipatory are too attracted to gold. Otherwise gold has no existential value – some psychological value, but no existential value. You cannot eat it, you cannot drink it. What can you do with it? Even a glass of water is more valuable existentially. But why has gold become so valuable? Why are people so obsessed with gold? They have not moved from the oral to the anal. They are constipated in their inner being. Now their whole life will reflect their constipation; they will become hoarders of gold. Gold is symbolic. The yellowness gives them some idea.

Have you watched small children? It is almost difficult to persuade them to go to the toilet; they have almost to be forced to go to the toilet. And even then they insist, “Nothing is happening. Can I come back?” They are learning the first lessons of miserliness – how to hold. How to hold, how not to give even that which is useless, even that which is harmful if you keep it within you. Even the poison, it is difficult for them to leave it, to renounce it.