Whatever you do in the pursuit of truth or reality takes you away from your own very Natural state in which you always are. It's not something you can acquire, attain or accomplish as a result of your effort. All that you do makes it impossible for what already is there to express itself. That is why I call this your natural state. You're always in that state. What prevents what is there from expressing itself in its own way is the search. The search is always in the wrong direction, so all that you consider very profound, all that you consider sacred, is a contamination in that consciousness. You may not [Laughs] like the word contamination but all that you consider sacred, holy and profound is a contamination. There's nothing that you can do, it's not in your hands. This is something which I can't give because you have it. It is ridiculous to ask for a thing which you already have. There isn't anything to get from anybody. You have what I have. I say you are there.
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I was brought up in a very religious atmosphere. My grandfather was a very cultured man. He knew Blavatsky [the founder of the Theosophical Society] and Olcott, and then, later on, the second and third generations of Theosophists. They all visited our house. He was a great lawyer, a very rich man, a very cultured man and, very strangely, a very orthodox man. He was a sort of mixed-up kid: orthodoxy, tradition on one side and then the opposite, Theosophy and the whole thing on the other side. He failed to establish a balance. That was the beginning of my problem.

[U.G. was often told that his mother had said, just before she died, that he "was born to a destiny immeasurably high." His grandfather took this very seriously and gave up his law practice to devote himself to U.G.'s upbringing and education. His grandparents and their friends were convinced that he was a yoga bhrashta, one who had come within inches of enlightenment in his past life.]

He had learned men on his payroll and he dedicated himself for some reason—I don't want to go into the whole business—to create a profound atmosphere for me and to educate me in the right way, inspired by the Theosophists and the whole lot. And so, every morning those fellows would come and read the Upanishads, Panchadasi, Nyshkarmya Siddhi, the commentaries, the commentaries on commentaries, the whole lot, from four o'clock to six o'clock, and this little boy of five, six or seven years—I don't know—had to listen to all that crap. So much so that by the time I reached my seventh year I could repeat most of those things, the passages from the Panchadasi, Nyshkarmya Siddhi and this, that and the other.

So many holy men visited my house—the Ramakrishna Order and the others; you name it, and those fellows had somehow visited that house—that was an open house for every holy man. So, one thing I discovered when I was quite young was that they were all hypocrites: they said something, they believed something, and their lives were shallow, nothing. I lived in the midst of people who talked of these things everlastingly—everybody was false, I can tell you. So somehow, what you call existentialist nausea—revulsion against everything sacred and everything holy—crept into my system and threw everything out.

That was the beginning of my search. I did everything, all the austerities. I was so young but I was determined to find out if there was any such thing as enlightenment. I wanted that very much. Otherwise, I wouldn't have given my life. Then my real search began. All my religious background was there in me. Then I started exploring. For some years I studied psychology and also philosophy, Eastern and Western, mysticism, all the modern sciences, everything. The whole area of human knowledge I started exploring on my own.

Before my forty-ninth year I had so many powers, so many experiences, but I didn't pay any attention to them. The moment I saw someone I could see their entire past, present and future without their telling me anything. I didn't use them. I was wondering, puzzled, you see, "Why do I have this power?" Sometimes I said things and they always happened. I couldn't figure out the mechanism of that. I tried to. They always happened. I didn't play with it. Then it had certain unpleasant consequences and created suffering for some people.
_______

[U.G. was travelling all over the world, still lecturing. In 1955, leaving his daughters in India, he and his wife moved to the United States in search of treatment for his son Vasant's polio. By 1961 his money was finished, and he felt beginning within him a tremendous upheaval which he could not and did not wish to control, and which was to last six years and end with the 'calamity'. His marriage broke up. He put his wife and sons—a second, Kumar, had been born in Chicago—on a plane to India, and he went to London. He arrived penniless and began roaming the city. For three years he lived idly in the streets. His friends saw him as heading on a headlong course downhill, but he says that at the time his life seemed perfectly natural to him. Later, religious-minded people were to use the mystics' phrase 'the dark night of the soul' to describe those years, but in his view there was "no heroic struggle with temptation and worldliness, no soul-wrestling with urges, no poetic climaxes, but just a simple withering away of the will."]

All kinds of funny things happened to me. I remember when I rubbed my body like this, there was a sparkle, like a phosphorous glow, on the body. She [Valentine] used to run out of her bedroom to see—she thought there were cars going that way in the middle of the night. Every time I rolled in my bed there was a sparkling of light [Laughs] and it was so funny for me—"What is this?" It was electricity—that is why I say it is an electromagnetic field. At first I thought it was because of my nylon clothes and static electricity; but then I stopped using nylon. I was a very skeptical heretic, to the tips of my toes, I never believed in anything; even if I saw some miracle happen before me, I didn't accept that at all—such was the make-up of this man. It never occurred to me that anything of that sort was in the making for me.

Very strange things happened to me, but I never related those things to liberation or freedom or moksha, because by that time the whole thing had gone out of my system. I had arrived at a point where I said to myself "Buddha deluded himself and deluded others. All those teachers and saviors of mankind were damned fools—they fooled themselves—so I'm not interested in this kind of thing anymore," so it went out of my system completely. It went on and on in its own way—peculiar things—but never did I say to myself, "Well, [Laughs] I am getting there, I am nearer to that." There is no nearness to that, there is no farawayness from that, there is no closeness to that. Nobody is nearer to that because he is different, he is prepared. There's no readiness for that; it just hits you like a ton of bricks.

The whole thing is finished for me and that's all. The linking gets broken and once it is broken it is finished. Then it is not once that thought explodes—every time a thought arises it explodes. The division cannot stay there, it's a physical impossibility. You don't have to do a thing about it. That is why I say that when this explosion takes place (I use the word explosion because it's like a nuclear explosion) it leaves behind chain-reactions. Every cell in your body has to undergo this change.

It's an irreversible change. There's no question of your going back. It is like a nuclear explosion. It shatters the whole body. It is not an easy thing. It is the end of the man, such a shattering thing that it blasts every cell, every nerve in your body. I went through terrible physical torture at that moment; not that you experience the explosion—you can't experience the explosion—but its after-effects. The fallout is the thing that changes the whole chemistry of your body. The senses are operating now without any coordinator or center, that's all I can say. Unless that alchemy or change in the whole chemistry takes place, there is no way of freeing this organism from thought, from the continuity of thought.

The blinking of the eyes stopped and then there were changes in taste, smell and hearing. I noticed that my skin was soft like silk and had a peculiar kind of glow, a golden color.

I no longer spend time in reverie, worry, conceptualization and the other kinds of thinking that most people do when they're alone. My mind is only engaged when it's needed, for instance when you ask questions, or when I have to fix the tape-recorder or something like that. My memory is in the background and only comes into play when it's needed, automatically. When it's not needed there is no mind here, there is no thought; there is only life.

My body had gone away and it has never come back. The points of contact are all that is there for the body. Nothing else is there for me because the seeing is altogether independent of the sense of touch here. I had discovered that all my senses were without any coordination. I felt the life energy drawing to a focal point from different parts of my body. Even now it happens to me. The hands and feet become cold, the body becomes stiff, the heartbeat slows down, the breathing slows down and then there is a gasping for breath. Up to a point you are there. You breathe your last breath, as it were, and then you are finished.

What happens after that, nobody knows. How long it lasted I don't know. I can't say anything about that because the experiencer was finished. There was nobody to experience that death at all. So that was the end of it. I got up. The things that had astonished me that week had become permanent fixtures. I call all these events a calamity because from the point of view of one who thinks this is something fantastic, blissful, full of love, ecstasy and all that kind of a thing, this is physical torture. Not a calamity to me but to those who have an image that something marvelous is going to happen.

It's something like you imagine New York. You dream about it. You want to be there. When you are actually there, nothing of it is there. It is a godforsaken place and even the devils have probably forsaken that place. It's not the thing that you had sought after and wanted so much but totally different.

What is there you really don't know. You have no way of knowing anything about that. There is no image here. Then suddenly, there was an outburst of tremendous energy shaking the whole body, vibrating. It lasted for hours. I couldn't bear it but there was nothing I could do to stop it. There was a total helplessness. This went on and on, day after day. Whenever I sat, it started—this vibration like an epileptic fit or something. Not even an epileptic fit; it went on for days. It was a very painful process because the body has limitations. It has a form, a shape of its own.

So when there is an outburst of energy which is not your energy or my energy but God's (call it by any name you like) it is like a river in spate. The energy that is operating there does not feel the limitations of the body. It is not interested. It has its own momentum. It is a very painful thing. It is not ecstatic, blissful and all that rubbish, stuff and nonsense. It is really a painful thing.

Oh I suffered for months before and after that, everybody has—a great cascade; not one but thousands. It went on and on for months. It's a very painful experience, painful in the sense that the energy has a peculiar operation of its own. It is clockwise, counterclockwise, and then it is this way, and then this way, and then this way. Like an atom, it moves inside—not in one part of your body—the whole body. It is as if a wet towel were being wrung to get rid of the water. It is like that—the whole of our body. It's such a painful thing. It goes on even now. You can't invite it. You can't ask it to come. You can't do anything. It gives you the feeling that it is enveloping you, that it is descending on you.

Every time it is new. Very strange, every time it comes in a different way. So you don't know what is happening. You lie down on your bed and suddenly it begins. It begins to move slowly like ants. I'd think there were bugs in my bed, jump out, look, see no bugs, then I'd go back, then again. The hairs are electrified. So it slowly moves. There were pains all over the body. Thought has controlled this body to such an extent that when that loosens, the whole metabolism is agog. The whole thing was changing in its own way without my doing anything. Every cell started changing and it went on and on for six months. In all, it took three years for this body to fall into a new rhythm of its own. I behaved normally, I didn't know what was happening. It was a strange situation.

The state is something natural. Do you see the swellings here? Yesterday was the new moon. The body is affected by everything that is happening around you. It is not separate. Whatever is happening there is also happening here. There is only the physical response. This is affection. Your body is affected by everything that is happening around you, and you can't prevent this for the simple reason that the armor that you have built around yourself is destroyed. So it is very vulnerable to everything that is happening there.

There are certain glands. These ductless glands are located in exactly the same spots where the Hindus speculated the chakras are. They have feelings, extraordinary feelings. There is one gland here which is called the thymus gland. Doctors tell us that is active through childhood until puberty then becomes dormant. In your natural state that gland is reactivated.

[Up and down his torso, neck and head, his friends observed swellings of various shapes and colors which came and went at intervals. On his lower abdomen, the swellings were horizontal, cigar-shaped bands. Above the navel was a hard, almond-shaped swelling. A hard, blue swelling like a large medallion in the middle of his chest was surmounted by another smaller, brownish-red, medallion-shaped swelling at the base of his throat. These were as though suspended from a varicolored, swollen ring—blue, brownish and light yellow—around his neck. His throat was swollen to a shape that made his chin seem to rest on the head of a cobra, as in the traditional images of Shiva. Just above the bridge of the nose was a white, lotus-shaped swelling. All over the head the small blood vessels expanded, forming patterns like the stylized lumps on the heads of Buddha statues. The arteries in his neck expanded and rose, blue and snake-like, into his head.]
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If somebody hurts himself there, that hurt is felt here—not as a pain, but there is a feeling, you see—you automatically say "Ah!" This actually happened to me when I was staying in a coffee plantation: a mother started beating a child, a little child, you know. She was mad, hopping mad, and she hit the child so hard, the child almost turned blue. And somebody asked me "Why did you not interfere and stop her?" I was standing there—I was so puzzled, you see. "Who should I take pity on, the mother or the child?"—that was my answer—"Who is responsible?" Both were in a ridiculous situation: the mother could not control her anger, and the child was so helpless and innocent. This went on—it was moving from one to the other—and then I found all those things [marks] on my back. So I was also part of that. (I am not saying this just to claim something.) That is possible because consciousness cannot be divided. Anything that is happening there is affecting you—this is affection, you understand? There is no question of your sitting in judgement on anybody; the situation happens to be that, so you are affected by that. You are affected by everything that is happening there.

Consciousness is, of course, not limited. If he is hurt there, you also are hurt here. If you are hurt, there is an immediate response there. I can't say about the universe, the whole universe, but in your field of consciousness, in the limited field in which you are operating at that particular moment, you are responding—not that you are responding.

And all the other glands also here... There are so many glands here; for example, the pituitary—'third eye', 'ajna [command] chakra', they call it. When once the interference of thought is finished, it is taken over by this gland: it is this gland that gives the instructions or orders to the body; not thought any more; thought cannot interfere. (That is why they call it that, probably. I'm not interpreting or any such thing; perhaps this gives you an idea.) But you have built an armor created an armor with this thought, and you don't allow yourself to be affected by things. But you have built an armor, created an armor, with this thought and you don't allow yourself to be affected by things.

Since there is nobody who uses this thought as a self-protective mechanism it burns itself up. Thought undergoes combustion—ionization, if I may use your scientific term. Thought is, after all, vibration. When this kind of ionization of thought takes place it sometimes covers the whole body with an ash-like substance. Your body is covered with that when there is no need for thought at all. When you don't use it what happens to that thought? It burns itself out—that is the energy—it's a combustion. The body gets heated, you know. There is tremendous heat in the body as a result of this, and so the skin is covered—your face, your feet, everything—with this ash-like substance. That's one of the reasons why I express it in pure and simple physical and physiological terms. It has no psychological content at all. It has no mystical content. It has no religious overtones at all, as I see it. I am bound to say that and I don't care whether you accept it or not. It is of no importance to me.

This kind of a thing must have happened to so many people. It is not something that one is specially prepared for. There are no purificatory methods necessary. There is no spiritual practice necessary for this kind of a thing to happen, no preparation of any kind. The consciousness is so pure that whatever you are doing in the direction of purifying that consciousness is adding impurity to it. Consciousness has to flush itself out, it has to purge itself of every trace of holiness, every trace of unholiness, everything. Even what you consider sacred and holy is a contamination in that consciousness.

It is not through any volition of yours. When once the frontiers are broken—not through any effort of yours, not through any volition of yours—then the floodgates are open and everything goes out. In that process of flushing out you have all these visions. It's not a vision outside there or inside of you. Suddenly, your whole consciousness takes the shape of those people who have come into this state. Not great men, not the leaders of mankind, it is very strange, but only those people to whom this kind of a thing happened.

Hundreds of people, probably something happened to so many hundreds of people. This is part of history—so many rishis, some Westerners, monks, so many women, and sometimes very strange things. You see, all that people have experienced before you is part of your consciousness. They run out of your consciousness because they cannot stay there any more, because all that is impurity, a contamination there.

You can say probably it is because of the impact on the human consciousness of the explosions of all those saints, sages and saviors of mankind that there is this dissatisfaction in you, that whatever is there is all the time trying to burst out, as it were. Maybe that is so. I can't say anything about it. You can say that they are there because they are pushing you to this point and once the purpose is achieved they have finished their job and they go away. But this flushing out of everything good and bad, holy and unholy, sacred and profane, has got to happen. Otherwise, your consciousness is still contaminated, still impure. During that time, it goes on and on, there are hundreds and thousands of them. Then, you see, you are put back into that primeval, primordial state of consciousness.

Once it has become pure, of and by itself, then nothing can touch it, nothing can contaminate that any more. All the past up to that point is there but it cannot influence your actions any more. All these visions and everything were happening for three years after the calamity. Now the whole thing is finished. The divided state of consciousness cannot function at all any more. It is always in the undivided state of consciousness.

Nothing can touch that. Anything can happen. The thought can be a good thought, a bad thought. It doesn't matter what comes there—good, bad, holy, unholy. The whole thing is finished. That is why I have to use the phrase religious experience, not in the sense in which you use the word religion. It puts you back to the Source. You are back in that primeval, primordial, pure state of consciousness. Call it awareness or whatever you like. In that state, things are happening and there is nobody who is interested, nobody who is looking at them. They come and go in their own way.

The most puzzling and bewildering part of the whole thing was when the sensory activities began their independent careers. There was no coordinator linking the senses. Like a baby I had to learn everything all over. All the knowledge was in the background and never came to the forefront, you see. But I knew that something really fantastic had happened inside. What it was I didn't know but that didn't bother me. That bewildering situation continued for a long time. All the knowledge was in the background. It's the same situation even now. When I am looking at something I really don't know what I'm looking at. That is why I say it is a state of not knowing. I really don't know. Once you are there through some luck, some strange chance, from then on everything happens in its own way.

You are always in a natural state. There is no question of going in and out of it, you are always there. It is a state of not knowing, you really don't know what you are looking at. I can't do anything about it, there is no question of my going back or anything, it is all finished. It is operating and functioning in a different way.

Somehow, you see, by some luck, by some strange chance, this kind of thing happens, and the whole thing is finished for you. The background is the only thing that can express itself. What else is there? My expression of it is the background—how I struggled, my path, how I rejected the paths of others. Up to that point I can say what I did or what I did not do and that it did not help me in any way.

If people come and ask me questions I answer. If they don't it makes no difference to me. I have not set myself up in the holy business of liberating people. I have no particular message for mankind except to say that all holy systems for obtaining enlightenment are bunk and that all talk of arriving at a psychological mutation through awareness is poppycock. Psychological mutation is impossible. The natural state can happen only through biological mutation.
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There is no teaching of mine and never shall be one. A teaching implies a method or a system, a technique or a new way of thinking to be applied in order to bring about a transformation in your way of life. What I am saying is outside the field of teachability. It is simply a description of the way I am functioning. It is just a description of the natural state of man. This is the way you, stripped of the machinations of thought, are also functioning. The natural state is not the state of a self-realized, God-realized man. It is not a thing to be achieved or attained. It is not a thing to be willed into existence. It is there. It is the living state.

This state is just the functional activity of life. By life I do not mean something abstract but the life of the senses functioning naturally without the interference of thought. Thought is an interloper which thrusts itself into the affairs of the senses. It has a profit motive. Thought directs the activity of the senses to get something out of them and uses them to give continuity to itself.

Your natural state has no relationship whatsoever with the religious states of bliss and ecstasy. They lie within the field of experience. Those who have led man on his search for religiousness throughout the centuries have perhaps experienced those religious states, so can you. They are thought-induced states of being and as they come so do they go. All are trips in the wrong direction. They are all within the field of time. Timeless can never be experienced, grasped, contained, much less given expression to, by any man. That beaten track will lead you nowhere. There is no oasis situated yonder. You are stuck with the mirage.
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This state is a physical condition of your being. It is not some kind of psychological mutation. It is not a state of mind into which you can fall one day and out of the next. You can't imagine the extent to which, as you are now, thought pervades and interferes with the functioning of every cell in your body. Coming into your natural state will blast every cell, every gland, every nerve. It is a chemical change. An alchemy of some sort takes place. But this state has nothing to do with the experiences of chemical drugs. Those are experiences, this is not.
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Does such a thing as enlightenment exist? To me what does exist is a purely physical process. There is nothing mystical or spiritual about it. If I close the eyes some light penetrates through the eyelids. If I cover the eyelids there is still light inside. There seems to be some kind of a hole in the forehead which doesn't show but through which something penetrates. In India that light is golden, in Europe it is blue.

There is also some kind of light penetration through the back of the head. It's as if there is a hole running through between those spots in front and back of the skull. There is nothing inside but this light. If you cover those points there is complete, total darkness. This light doesn't do anything or help the body to function in any way, it's just there.

This state is a state of not knowing. You really don't know what you are looking at. All there is inside is wonderment. It is a state of wonder because I just do not know what I am looking at. The knowledge about it, all that I have learned, is held in the background unless there is a demand. When required it comes quickly like an arrow, then I am back in the state of not knowing, of wonder.

You can never understand the tremendous peace that is always there within you that is your natural state. Your trying to create a peaceful state of mind is in fact creating disturbance within you. You can only talk of peace, create a state of mind and say to yourself that you are very peaceful, but that is not peace, that is violence. There is no use in practicing peace or reason to cultivate silence. Real silence is explosive. It is not the dead state of mind that spiritual seekers think. That doesn't mean anything at all. This is volcanic in its nature. It's bubbling all the time—the energy, the life—that is its quality.

Life is aware of itself, if we can put it that way. It is conscious of itself. When I talk of feeling I do not mean the same thing that you do. Actually, feeling is a physical response, a thud in the thymus. The thymus, one of the endocrine glands, is located under the breast bone. When you come into your natural state, sensations are felt there. You don't translate them as good or bad. They are just a thud. If there is a movement outside of you in your field of vision, that movement is also felt in the thymus. The whole of your being is that movement, or vibrates with that sound. There is no separation. This does not mean that you identify yourself with it. There is no you there, nor is there any object. What causes that sensation you don't know. You do not even know that it is a sensation.

Affection (this is not my interpretation of the word) means that you are affected by everything, not that some emotion flows from you towards something. The natural state is a state of great sensitivity, but this is a physical sensitivity of the senses, not some kind of emotional compassion or tenderness for others. There is compassion only in the sense that there are no others for me and so there is no separation. Actually, there is always a gap between any two sensations. The coordinator bridges that gap, establishes itself as an illusion of continuity. In the natural state, there is no entity coordinating the messages from the different senses, each sense is functioning independently in its own way.

When there is a demand from outside which makes it necessary to coordinate the senses and come up with a response, still there is no coordinator but there is a temporary state of coordination. There is no continuity. When the demand has been met, again there is only the uncoordinated, disconnected, disjointed functioning of the senses. This is always the case. Once the continuity is blown apart, not that it was ever there but the illusory continuity, it's finished once and for all.

All that you know lies within the framework of your experience, which is of thought. This state is not an experience. I am only trying to give you a feel of it, which is, unfortunately, misleading. When there is no coordinator, there is no linking of sensations, there is no translating of sensations. They stay pure and simple sensations. I do not even know that they are sensations. I may look at you as you are talking. The eyes will focus on your mouth because that is what is moving and the ears will receive the sound vibrations. There is nothing inside which links up the two and says that it is you talking.

What functions is a primordial consciousness untouched by thought. The eyes are like a very sensitive camera. The physiologists say that light reflected off objects strikes the retina of the eye and the sensation goes through the optic nerve to the brain. The faculty of sight, of seeing, is simply a physical phenomenon. It makes no difference to the eyes what they are focused on, they produce sensations in exactly the same way. The eyes look on everyone and everything without discrimination. Left to themselves they do not linger but are moving all the time. They are drawn by the things outside. Movement attracts them, or brightness, or a color which stands out from whatever is around it.

There is no self looking. The consciousness is like a mirror reflecting whatever is there outside. The depth, the distance, the color—everything is there, but there is nobody who is translating these things. Unless there is a demand for knowledge about what I am looking at, there is no separation, no distance from what is there. There is a kind of clarity.

The eyes do not blink except when there is sudden danger. This is something very natural because things outside are demanding attention all the time. Then when the eyes are tired they may be open but the vision is blurred. If they stay open all the time, if the reflex action of blinking is not operating, they become dry and there are some glands beyond the outer corners of the eyes, not activated in your case, which act as a watering mechanism. But by practicing not blinking one will not arrive in this state, one will only strain the eyes. Once you are in your natural state, by some luck or some strange chance, all this happens in its own way.

When I am walking and suddenly see something different because the light has changed, this consciousness suddenly expands to the size of the object in front of the body and the lungs take a deep breath. This is pranayama, not hyperventilation or inhaling through one nostril and exhaling through the other. This pranayama is going on all the time. So there is consciousness of a sudden change in the breathing and then it moves on to something else. It is always moving. It does not linger on something which thought has decided is beautiful. There is no one directing.

As for listening, when you leave the sense of hearing alone all that is there is the vibration of the sound. The words repeat themselves inside of you as in an echo chamber. This sense is functioning in just the same way with you except that you think the words you are hearing come from outside of you.
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Get this straight—you can never hear one word from anyone no matter how intimately you think you are in relationship with that person. You hear only your own translations always. They are all your words you are hearing. All that the other person's words can possibly be to you is a noise, a vibration picked up by the eardrum and transferred to the nerves which run to the brain. You are translating those vibrations all the time trying to understand because you want to get something out of what you are hearing. When there is no translation, all languages sound the same whether or not your particular knowledge structure speaks a particular language. The only differences are in the spacing of the syllables and in the tune. Languages are melodic in different ways but the appreciation of music, poetry and language is all culturally determined and is the product of thought.

Your movement of thought interferes with the process of touch just as it does with the other senses. Anything you touch is always translated as hard, soft, warm, cold, wet, dry and so on. Without this thought process there is no body consciousness, there are only isolated points of contact, impulses of touch which are not tied together by thought. So the body is not different from the objects around it. It is a set of sensations like any others. Your body does not belong to you.

Perhaps I can give you the feel of this. I sleep for four hours at night no matter what time I go to bed then I lie in bed until morning fully awake. I don't know what is lying there in the bed. I don't know whether I'm lying on my left side or my right side. For hours and hours I lie like this. If there is any noise outside, it just echoes in me. I listen to my heartbeat and don't know what it is.

There are only the sensations of touch from points of contact and the gravitational pull, nothing inside links up these things. Even if the eyes are open and looking at the whole body there are still only the points of contact and they have no connection with what I am looking at. If I want to try to link up these points of contact into the shape of my own body probably I will succeed but by the time it is completed the body is back in the same situation of different points of contact. The linkage cannot stay.

My talking comes out in response to the questions which are asked. I cannot sit and give a talk on the natural state. That is an artificial situation for me. There is nobody who is thinking thoughts and then coming out with answers. This state is expressing itself. I really don't know what I'm saying and what I'm saying is of no importance. You may transcribe my own talking but it will make no sense to me. It is a dead thing.

What is here, this natural state, is a living thing. It cannot be captured by me, let alone by you. It's like a flower. This simile is all I can give. It just blooms. It's there. As long as it is there it has a fragrance which is different and distinct from that of every other flower. You may not recognize it. It's of no importance. You can't preserve its perfume. Whatever you preserve of this is not the living thing. Preserving the expressions, teachings or words of such a man has no meaning. This state has only contemporary value, contemporary expression.
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The natural needs of a human being are basic: food, clothing and shelter. You must either work for them or be given them by somebody. If these are your only needs they are not very difficult to fulfill. To deny yourself the basic needs is not a sign of spirituality. But to require more than food, clothing and shelter is a neurotic state of mind.

Is not sex a basic human requirement? Sex is dependent upon thought. In the natural state, there is no build-up of thought. Without that build-up sex is impossible. The body normally is a very peaceful organism and then you subject it to this tremendous tension and release which feels pleasurable to you. Actually, it is painful to the body. But through suppression or attempts at sublimation of sex you will never come into this state.

As long as you think of God you will have thoughts of sex. Ask any religious seeker you may know who practices celibacy whether he doesn't dream of women at night. Why do you weave so many taboos and ideas around this? Why do you destroy the joy of sex? Not that I am advocating indulgence or promiscuity but through abstinence and continence you will never achieve a thing.

There must be a living contact. There are no images here. There is no room for them. The sensory apparatus is completely occupied with the things I am looking at now. And so, if you are totally tuned in to the sensory activity, there is no room for fears about who will feed you tomorrow or for speculation about God, truth and reality. This is not a state of omniscience wherein all of man's eternal questions are answered, rather a state in which the questioning has stopped. It has stopped because those questions have no relation to the way the organism is functioning, and the way the organism is functioning leaves no room for those questions.

The body has an extraordinary mechanism for renewing itself. This is necessary because the senses in the natural state are functioning at the peak of their sensitivity all the time. So when the senses become tired the body goes through death. This is real physical death not some mental state. It can happen one or more times a day. You do not decide to go through this death. It descends upon you.

It feels, at first, as if you have been given an anaesthetic. The senses become increasingly dull, the heartbeat slows, the feet and hands become ice cold and the whole body becomes stiff like a corpse. Energy flows from all over the body towards some point. It happens differently every time. The stream of thoughts continues but there is no reading of the thoughts. At the end of this period you conk out. The stream of thought is cut. There is no way of knowing how long that cut lasts.

There is nothing you can say about that time of being conked out. That can never become part of your conscious existence or conscious thinking. You don't know what brings you back from death. If you had any will at that moment you could decide not to come back. When the conking out is over, the stream of thought picks up exactly where it left off. The dullness ends and clarity returns. The body feels very stiff then slowly it begins to move of its own accord, limbering itself up. It is an extraordinary movement. Those who have observed my body moving say it looks like the motions of a newly born baby. This conking out gives a total renewal of the senses, glands and nervous system. After it, they function at the peak of their sensitivity.

Life is action. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What is keeping you from being in your natural state? You are constantly moving away from yourself. You want to be happy either permanently or at least for this moment. You are dissatisfied with your everyday experiences and so you want some new ones. You want to perfect yourself, to change yourself. You are reaching out, trying to be something other than what you are. It is this that is taking you away from yourself.

Society has put before you the ideal of a perfect man. No matter in which culture you were born, you have scriptural doctrines and traditions handed down to you to tell you how to behave. You are told that through due practice you can even eventually come into the state attained by the sages and saints, and so you try to control your behavior, to control your thoughts, to be something unnatural. Your effort to control life has created a secondary movement of thought within you which you call the self.

This movement of thought within you is parallel to the movement of life but isolated from it. It can never touch life. You are a living creature yet you lead your entire life within the realm of this isolated, parallel movement of thought. You cut yourself off from life. That is something very unnatural. The natural state is not a thoughtless state. That is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated for thousands of years. You will never be without thought. Being able to think is necessary to survive but in this state thought stops choking you. It falls into its natural rhythm.

This is the crux of the whole problem. The one that is looking at what you call the self is the self. It is creating an illusory division of itself into subject and object, and through this division it is continuing. This is the divisive nature that is operating in you, in your consciousness. Continuity of its existence is all that interests it. As long as you want to understand yourself or to change yourself into something spiritual, into something holy, beautiful or marvelous, you will continue. If you do not want to do anything about it, it is not there. It's gone.

Through thinking you cannot understand a thing. You are translating what I am saying in terms of the knowledge you already have just as you translate everything else, because you want to get something out of it. When you stop doing that, what is there is what I am describing. The absence of what you are doing—trying to understand or trying to change yourself—is the state of being that I am describing. Because you are not interested in the everyday things and happenings around you, you have invented the beyond, timelessness, God, truth, reality, enlightenment or whatever, and search for it.
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There may not be any ultimate truth. You don't know a thing about it. Whatever you know is what you have been told, what you have heard, and you are projecting that information. What you call something is determined by the learning you have about it, and whatever knowledge you have about it is exactly what you will experience. The knowledge creates the experience and the experience then strengthens the knowledge. What you know can never be ultimate reality.

In the natural state the movement of self is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond but that can never be experienced by you. It is when the you is not there. The moment you translate, the you is there. You look at something and recognize it. Thought interferes with the sensation by translating. You are either thinking about something which is totally unrelated to the way the senses are functioning at the moment or else labeling. That is all that is there. The word separates you from what you are looking at, thereby creating the you. Otherwise, there is no space between the two.

Every time a thought is born, you are born. When the thought is gone, you are gone. But the you does not let the thought go and what gives continuity to this you is the thinking. Actually, there is no permanent entity in you, no totality of all your thoughts and experiences. You think that there is somebody who is thinking your thoughts, somebody who is feeling your feelings. That's the illusion. I can say it is an illusion but it is not an illusion to you.

Your emotions are more complex but it is the same process. There is a sensation in you and you name it. This brings into existence the one who is translating this sensation. Self is nothing but a word. This labeling is only necessary when you must communicate. You think the thoughts of your society, feel the feelings of your society and experience the experiences of your society. There is no new experience. So all that any man has ever thought or felt must go out of your system. And you are the product of all that knowledge. That's all you are.

All that you know about what you call thought is what you have been told. You are all the time trying to do something with it because somebody has told you that you must change this or replace that, hold on to the good thoughts and not the bad thoughts. Thoughts are thoughts; they are neither good nor bad.

As long as you want to do something with whatever is there you are thinking. Wanting and thinking are not two different things. Wanting to understand means there is a movement of thought. You are adding momentum to that movement, giving it continuity. The senses function unnaturally in you because you want to use them to get something. Why should you get anything? Because you want the self to continue you are protecting that continuity. Thought is a protective mechanism. It protects you at the expense of something or somebody else.
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If you could be in a state of awareness for a single moment once in your life the continuity would be snapped, the illusion of the experiencing structure, the you, would collapse and everything would fall into the natural rhythm. In this state you do not know what you are looking at. That is awareness. If you recognize what you are looking at you are there again experiencing the old, what you know. What makes one person come into his natural state and not another person, I don't know. Perhaps it's written in the cells. It is acausal. It is not an act of volition on your part. You can't bring it about. There is absolutely nothing you can do.

You can distrust any man who tells you how he got into this state. One thing you can be sure of is that he cannot possibly know himself and cannot possibly communicate it to you. There is a built-in triggering mechanism in the body. If the experiencing structure of thought happens to let go, the other thing will take over in its own way. The functioning of the body will be a totally different functioning without the interference of thought except when it is necessary to communicate with somebody. You have to throw in the towel, be totally helpless. No one can help you and you cannot help yourself.

This state is not in your interest. You are only interested in continuity. You want to continue, probably on a different level, and to function in a different dimension, but you want to continue somehow. You wouldn't touch this with a barge pole. This is going to liquidate what you call you, all of you. This structure is born of time and functions in time but does not come to an end through time.

You can't understand what I am saying. It is an exercise in futility on your part to try to relate the description of how I am functioning to the way you are functioning. This is a thing which I cannot communicate nor is any communication necessary. No dialogue is possible. When the you is not there, when the question is not there, what is, is understanding. You are finished. You'll walk out. You will never listen to anybody describing his state or ask any questions about understanding at all.

What you are looking for does not exist. You would rather tread an enchanted ground with beatific visions of a radical transformation of that non-existent self of yours into a state of being which is conjured up by some bewitching phrases. That takes you away from your natural state. It is a movement away from yourself. To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence. Nobody need give it to you. Nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a natural man.
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You see, the animal becomes a flower. That seems to be the purpose if at all there is any purpose in nature. I don't know. There are so many flowers there. Look at them! Each flower is unique in its own way. Nature's purpose seems to be (I cannot make any definitive statement) to create flowers like that, human flowers like that.

Man becomes man for the first time, and that is possible only when he frees himself from the burden of the heritage we are talking about, the heritage of man as a whole. Then only does he become an individual. For the first time he becomes an individual. That is the individual I am talking about. That individual will certainly have an impact on human consciousness. Like when you throw a stone in a pool it sets in motion circular waves. Maybe that's the only hope that man has.

That's the first time such an individual becomes a man. Otherwise, he is an animal. And he has remained an animal because of heritage, because his heritage has made it possible from the point of view of nature for the unfit to remain, or it would have rejected them a long time ago. It has become possible for the unfit to survive—not the survival of the fittest but of those unfit to survive—and religion is responsible for that.

He's not a perfect man. He's not an ideal man. He cannot be a model for others. He becomes freed from all the animal traits in him. Animals follow. Animals create leaders. And the animal traits are still persisting there in man. That is why he creates a leader and follows.

You become yourself. You see, the shock that your dependence on the entire heritage of mankind has been wrong, that realization dawns on you. It hits you like lightning that your dependence on this culture, be it Oriental or Occidental, has been responsible for this situation in you. That applies to the whole as well because the nation is the extension of the individual and the world is the extension of the different nations.

So you are freed from the burden of the past and become for the first time an individual. There is no relationship between these two flowers at all so there is no point in comparing and contrasting the unique flowers that nature has thrown up from time to time. They in their own ways have had their impact. Each flower has its own fragrance.

If it had not been for the heritage of man which we are so proud of we would have had so many flowers like this. It's not that I am interpreting or understanding nature's ways, the purpose of evolution or any such thing. There may not be any such thing as evolution at all. If it had not been for culture, nature would have thrown up many more flowers. It has become a stumbling block to man's freeing himself in his own way. What is responsible for his difficulty is culture. It is of no use to the society at all but it is there.

If it had not been for culture the world would have produced more flowers, different kinds and varieties of flowers, not only the one rose that you are so proud of. You want to turn everything into one model. What for? Whereas, nature would have thrown up from time to time different flowers unique each in its own way, beautiful each in its own way. That possibility has been destroyed by this culture which has a stranglehold on man, which prevents him from freeing himself from the burden of the entire past.

One ceases to be somebody else and is simply what one is. This shock, this lightning, hitting with the greatest force, shatters everything, blasts every cell and gland in the body. The whole chemistry seems to change. There's nothing to certify that but I'm not interested in satisfying anyone's curiosity because I am not selling this. I am not collecting followers and teaching them how to bring about this change. It's something which you cannot bring about through any volition or effort of yours. It just happens. I say it is acausal. What its purpose is I really don't know but it is something, you see.

The whole chemistry of the body changes so it begins to function in its own natural way. That means everything that is poisoned and contaminated by the culture is thrown out of the system. It is thrown out of your system and then that consciousness or life or whatever you want to call it expresses itself and functions in a very natural way. The whole thing has to be thrown out of your system.

This individual is neither a theist nor an atheist nor an agnostic. He is what he is. The movement that has been created by the heritage of man which is trying to make you into something different from what you are comes to an end and what you are begins to express itself in its own way, unhindered, un-handicapped, unburdened by the past of mankind as a whole. Such a man is of no use to the society. On the contrary, he becomes a threat. He doesn't think that he is chosen, chosen by some power to reform the world. He doesn't think that he is a savior or a free or enlightened man. And the moment followers fit him into the tradition, there arises a need for somebody else to break away from that tradition, that is all.

Whatever I say stands or falls by itself. It doesn't need the support of any authority of any kind. That is why such a man is a threat to the society. He's a threat to the tradition because he's undermining the whole foundation of the heritage. My talking to people is incidental. I mean it. Otherwise, I would get up on a platform. What is the point in getting up on a platform? I am not interested. I have no message to give.

It's not in anybody's hands but you have a hundred per cent certainty because it is not that it is my special privilege or that I'm specially chosen by anything. It's there in you. That's what I mean by saying there's no power outside of man. It is the same power, the same life, that is functioning there in you. Something is trying to express itself and the culture is pushing it down. When once it throws the culture out then it expresses itself in its own way.

That is the fragrance of this flower. Such an individual cannot retire into a cave or hide himself. He has to live in the midst of the world. He has no place to go to. That is the fragrance of this flower. When you stop trying to understand what this flower is and what this perfume is which you have never known, there is another flower, not a copy of that flower. The moment you stop trying to compare this, trying to understand and even imagine what this flower is, what its fragrance is, there is a new flower there which has no relationship whatsoever with all the flowers that we have around us.

When this thing happened to me I realized that all my search was in the wrong direction and that this is not something religious, not something psychological, but a purely physiological functioning of the senses at their peak capacities. You want to know what my state is and make it part of knowledge, i.e. the tradition, but knowledge must come to an end. Your wanting to know only adds momentum to your knowledge. It is not possible to know what this is because knowledge is still there and is gathering momentum. The continuity of knowledge is all you are interested in.

I want to make it very clear that there is no movement. You are not going to move from what you are. You haven't even taken one step. There is no need for you to take any step. This consciousness which is functioning in me, in you, is the same. In me it has no frontiers. In you there are frontiers. You are enclosed in that.

Probably, this unlimited consciousness pushes you, I don't know. Not me, I have nothing to do with it. It is like the water finding its own level, that's all. That is its nature. That is what is happening in you. Life is trying to destroy the enclosing thing, that dead structure of thought and experience which is not of its nature. It's trying to come out, to break open. You don't want that. As soon as you see some cracks there you bring some plaster and fill them in and block it again. It doesn't have to be a person that pushes you. Anything teaches you just the same if only you let it.
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You will never know what life is. Nobody can say anything about life. You can give definitions but those definitions have no meaning. You can theorize about life but that is a thing which is not of any value to you. It cannot help you to understand anything. When the question burns itself out what is there is energy. You can't say anything about that energy. It is already manifesting itself, expressing itself in a boundless way. It has no limitations, no boundaries. It is not yours, not mine. It belongs to everybody. You are part of that. You are an expression of that. Just as the flower is an expression of life, you are another expression of life.

You are not different from the animal. You don't want to accept that fact. The only difference is that you think. Thinking is there in the animal also but it has become very complex in the case of man. That's the difference. Don't tell me that animals do not think. They do. But in man it has become a very complex structure and the problem is how to free yourself from this structure and use it only as an instrument to function in this world. It has no other use at all. It has only a contingent value—to communicate something, to function in the world—that's all, not philosophical concepts. That has no meaning at all.

Wanting anything other than the basic needs is self-deception. All this thinking has no meaning at all. Thinking is unnecessary except to communicate with somebody. Everyone is talking to themself. It is wearing you out and all methods that we use are adding more and more to that, unfortunately. All techniques and systems are adding to that. There is nothing you can do to end thinking. You see, you have to come to a point where you say to yourself, “I am fed up with this kind of thing.” Nobody can push you there.

Thought is there when there is a demand for it. When there is no demand for it you don't know whether it is there or not. But when there is a need for it, when there is a demand for it, it is there to guide you and to help you communicate with someone. What decides that demand is not here it is out there. The situation demands its use. It is not self-initiated.

You have no way at all of finding out for yourself the seat of human consciousness because it is all over and you are not separate from that consciousness. For some reason or the other the culture has limited the possibility of the potential evolving into its completeness and wholeness.

Somewhere along the line possibly thought was necessary but it has become th