Yoga Sutra 46 Drop Hope

Now, a few things about samadhi will have to be understood.

One: it is not a goal to be achieved, it is not a desire to be achieved. It is not an expectation, it is not a hope, it is not in the future; it is here-now. That’s why the only condition for samadhi is desirelessness – not even the desire for samadhi.

If you desire samadhi, you are continuously eroding samadhi yourself. The nature of desire has to be understood, and in that understanding it drops by itself, on its own accord. That’s why I say that when your hopes are frustrated, you are in a beautiful space; use it. That is the moment when you can enter into samadhi more easily.

Blessed are those who are hopeless: let it be added to Jesus’ other beatitudes.

He says, “Blessed are the meek, because they shall inherit the earth.” I say to you: blessed are the hopeless, because they will inherit the whole.

Try to see how hope is destroying you. With hope arises fear. Fear is the other side of the same coin.

Whenever you hope you also become afraid. You become afraid of whether you are going to fulfil your hope or not. Hope never comes alone; it keeps company with fear. Then, between fear and hope you are spread out. Hope is in the future and fear is also in the future, and you start swinging between hope and fear. Sometimes you feel, “Yes, it is going to be fulfilled”; and sometimes you feel, “No, it seems impossible,” and fear arises. Between fear and hope, you lose your being.

Let me tell you one very famous old Indian story.

A fool was sent to buy flour and salt. He took a dish in which to carry his purchases. He was told not to mix the two ingredients, but to keep them separate. After the shop-keeper had filled the dish with flour, the fool, thinking of the instructions, inverted the dish asking that salt be poured on the upturned bottom. Therewith the flour was lost, but he had the salt. He brought it to his boss who enquired, “But where is the flour?” The fool turned the dish over to find it, so the salt was gone too.

Between hope and fear, your whole being is lost.

That’s how you have become so disintegrated, split, schizophrenic. Just see the point of it: if you don’t have any hope, you will not be creating any fear – because fear cannot come without hope.

Hope is a step of fear in you. Hope creates the door for the fear to enter. If you don’t have any hope then there is no point in fear. And when there is no hope and no fear, you cannot move away from yourself. You are simply that which you are. You are here-now. This moment becomes intensely alive.

 The second sutra:

JATY-ANTARA-PARINAMAH PRAKRTY-APURAT.

THE TRANSFORMATION FROM ONE CLASS, SPECIES, OR KIND INTO ANOTHER IS BY THE OVERFLOW OF NATURAL TENDENCIES OR POTENTIALITIES.

Very significant….

If you are a man of austerities you will not be overflowing. You will have repressed your energies.

Afraid of sex, afraid of anger, afraid of love, afraid of this and that, you will have repressed all your energies; you will not be in an overflow. And Patanjali says that only through overflow is there transformation. It is one of the most basic laws of life.

Have you watched; that when you are feeling low in energy, suddenly love disappears? When you are feeling low in energy, creativity disappears. You cannot paint, you cannot write a poem. If you write, your poetry will not walk; dancing is far away. It will not even walk; it may, at the most, limp.

It will not be much of a poem. If you paint when you are low-energy, your painting will be ill. It will not be healthy. It cannot be because it is your painting and you are feeling low in energy. In fact, the painting is you, spread on the canvas. It will be gloomy, sad, dying.

I have heard about one great painter who had asked one of his friends, a doctor, to come and see his painting. The doctor watched, looked from this side and that. The friend, the painter, was very happy at how much he was appreciating. Then he finally asked, because he saw that the doctor was looking puzzled – not even puzzled, but worried. The friend said, “What is the matter? What do you think of this painting?” He said, “Appendicitis.” He had made a portrait of somebody and the doctor was looking everywhere, because the face was so pale and the body looked in such agony that he felt it must be appendicitis. Later on, it was found that the painter had appendicitis, he was suffering from it.

You spread yourself in your poetry, in your painting, in your sculpture. Whatsoever you do, it is you; it has to be so.

Flowers come into the trees only when they are overflowing; the energy’s too much. They can afford it. When a tree has not much energy, it will not flower because it does not even have enough energy for the leaves. It does not even have enough energy for the roots – how can it afford flowers? Flowers will be almost a luxury. When you are hungry, you don’t bother to buy paintings for your house. When you don’t have clothes, you think of clothes; you don’t think of having a beautiful garden. These are luxuries. When energy is overflowing, then only is the celebration, the transformation. When you are overflowing with energy you want to sing, you want to dance, you want to share.

THE TRANSFORMATION FROM ONE CLASS, SPECIES OR KIND INTO ANOTHER IS BY THE OVERFLOW…

Ordinarily, as man is, he is so blocked and there are so many problems repressed that the energy never comes to a point where it can overflow and just be shared with others. And your sahasrara, which is your flowering, the lotus in the crown of your head, will not flower unless energy is overflowing, unless it is overflowing, so much so that it goes on rising higher and higher. The level goes on rising higher and higher; it reaches to the second center, the third center, the fourth center, and whatsoever center is touched by the overflowing energy opens, flowers. The seventh chakra is the flower of humanity: sahasrara. Sahasrara dul kamal: the one-thousand-petalled lotus that will flower only when you are in an overflow.

Never repress and never create blocks in your being. Never become too solid. Don’t get frozen.

Flow. Let your energy remain always streaming. That’s the whole purpose of yoga methods: that your blocks are broken. The yoga postures are nothing but just a methodology to break the blocks that you create inside your body.

Now, something exactly like it has happened in the West. It is called Rolfing, founded by Ida Rolf. Because in the West the mind is more technological, people don’t want to do their own thing. They want it to be done by somebody else; hence Rolfing. The Rolfer will do the work. He will give you a deep massage, and he will try to melt your blocks. The musculature that has become hardened will be relaxed.

The same can be done with yoga, and more easily, because you are your own master. You can feel your inner being more rightly, accurately. You can feel where your blocks are. If you close your eyes and sit silently every day, you can feel where your body is feeling uncomfortable, where your body is feeling tense. Then there are yoga asanas for that particular body part to relax. Those asanas will help to dissolve the musculature which has become hardened and will allow the energy to move.

But one thing is certain: that a repressed person never flowers.

A repressed person remains with – dammed energy, pent-up energy. And if you don’t channelize your energy in the right directions, your energy can become destructive and suicidal to you. For example: if your energy is not moving towards love, it will become anger. It will go sour, bitter. Whenever you see an angry person remember, somehow his energy has missed love. Somehow, he has gone astray; hence, he is angry. He is not angry at you, he is simply angry; you may be just an excuse.

He is – anger. The energy is blocked and life is feeling almost meaningless, without any significance; he is in a rage.

There is a very famous poem by Dylan Thomas. His father died, and on that night he wrote this poem. In this poem come the lines, Rage, rage against the dying of the light: Do not go gently into that good night!

He is saying to his father “Fight with death; rage against it. Don’t surrender, don’t just let go. Give a good fight even if you are defeated, but don’t go without a fight.”

If love is not fulfilled, one becomes angry. If life is not fulfilled, one becomes angry at death. A man whose life is a fulfillment will not rage against death, he will welcome it. And he will not say that it is dark night; he will say, “So beautiful, so restful.” The dark is restful. It is almost warm, like a mother’s womb. One is moving again into the greater womb of God. Why rage? Those who have flowered, surrender. Those who are frustrated cannot surrender. Out of their frustrations they create more hopes, and each hope brings more frustrations – and the vicious circle goes on and on, ad nauseam.

If you want not to be frustrated, drop hope – then there will be no frustration. And if you really want to grow, never repress. Enjoy energy. Life is an energy phenomenon. Enjoy energy – dance, sing, swim, run – let energy stream all over you, let energy spread all over you. Let it; be a flow. Once you are in a flow, flowering becomes very easy.