I never tell people to begin with just sitting. Begin from where beginning is easy. Otherwise, you will begin to feel many things unnecessarily—things that are not there. If you begin with sitting, you will feel much disturbance inside. The more you try to just sit, the more disturbance will be felt. You will become aware only of your insane mind and nothing else. It will create depression; you will feel frustrated, you will not feel blissful. Rather, you will begin to feel that you are insane. And sometimes you may really go insane! If you make a sincere effort to ‘just sit’, you may really go insane. Only because people do not really try sincerely does insanity not happen more often. With a sitting posture you begin to know so much madness inside you that if you are sincere and continue it, you may really go insane. It has happened before, so many times. So I never suggest anything that can create frustration, depression, sadness…anything that will allow you to be too aware of your insanity. You may not be ready to be aware of all the insanity that is inside you. You must be allowed to get to know certain things gradually. Knowledge is not always good. It must unfold itself slowly, as your capacity to absorb it grows. I begin with your insanity, not with a sitting posture. I allow your insanity. If you dance madly, the opposite happens within you. With a mad dance, you begin to be aware of a silent point within you; with sitting silently, you begin to be aware of madness. The opposite is always the point of awareness. With you dancing madly, chaotically, with crying, with chaotic breathing, I allow your madness. Then you begin to be aware of a subtle point, a deep point inside you which is silent and still, in contrast to the madness on the periphery. You will feel very blissful; at your center there is an inner silence. But if you are just sitting, then the inner one is the mad one. You are silent on the outside, but inside you are mad. If you begin with something active—something positive, alive, moving—it will be better. Then you will begin to feel an inner stillness growing. The more it grows, the more it will be possible for you to use a sitting posture or a lying posture—the more silent meditation will be possible. But by then things will be different, totally different. A meditation technique that begins with movement, action, helps you in other ways also. It becomes a catharsis. When you are just sitting, you are frustrated: your mind wants to move and you are just sitting. Every muscle turns, every nerve turns. You are trying to force something upon yourself that is not natural for you. Then you have divided yourself into the one who is forcing and the one who is being forced. And really, the part that is being forced and suppressed is the more authentic part; it is a more major part of your mind than the part that is suppressing, and the major part is bound to win. That which you are suppressing is really to be thrown, not suppressed. It has become an accumulation within you because you have been constantly suppressing it. The whole upbringing, the civilization, the education, is suppressive. You have been suppressing much that could have been thrown very easily with a different education, with a more conscious education, with a more aware parenthood. With a better awareness of the inner mechanism of the mind, the culture could have allowed you to throw many things. For example, when a child is angry we tell him, “Do not be angry”, He begins to suppress anger. By and by, what was a momentary happening becomes permanent. Now he will not act angry, but he will remain angry. We have accumulated so much anger from what were just momentary things. No one can be angry continuously unless anger has been suppressed. Anger is a momentary thing that comes and goes; if it is expressed, then you are no longer angry. So with me, I would allow the child to be angry more authentically. Be angry, but be deep in it. Do not suppress it. Of course, there will be problems. If we say, “Be angry,” then you are going to be angry at someone. But a child can be molded. He can be given a pillow and told, “Be angry with the pillow. Be violent with the pillow.” From the very beginning, a child can be brought up in a way in which the anger is just deviated. Some object can be given to him: he can go on throwing the object until his anger goes. Within minutes, within seconds, he will have dissipated his anger and there will be no accumulation of it. You have accumulated anger, sex, violence, greed—everything. Now this accumulation is a madness within you. It is there, inside you. If you begin with any suppressive meditation—for example, with just sitting—you are suppressing all of this, you are not allowing it to be released.
So I begin with a catharsis. First, let the suppressions be thrown into the air. And when you can throw your anger into the air, you have become mature. “If I cannot be loving alone, if I can be loving only with someone I love, then I am not really mature yet. Then I am depending on someone even to be loving. Someone must be there; only then can I be loving. That loving can be only a very superficial thing. It is not my nature. If I am alone in the room I am not loving at all, so the loving quality has not gone deep; it has not become a part of my being….” You become more and more mature when you are less and less dependent. If you can be angry alone, you are more mature. You do not need any object to be angry. So I make a catharsis in the beginning a must. You must throw everything into the sky, into the open space, without being conscious of any object. Be angry without the person with whom you would like to be angry. Weep without finding any cause. Laugh, just laugh, without anything to laugh at. Then you can just throw the whole accumulated thing. You can just throw it! And once you know the way, you are unburdened of the whole past. Within moments you can be unburdened of the whole life—of lives even. If you are ready to throw everything, if you can allow your madness to come out, within moments there is a deep cleansing. Now you are cleansed: fresh, innocent. You are a child again. Now, in your innocence, sitting meditation can be done—just sitting or just lying or anything—because now there is no mad one inside to disturb the sitting. Cleansing must be the first thing—a catharsis. Otherwise, with breathing exercises, with just sitting, with practicing asanas, yogic postures—you are just suppressing something. And a very strange thing happens: when you have allowed everything to be thrown out, sitting will just happen, asanas will just happen. It will be spontaneous. Begin with catharsis and then something good can flower within you. It will have a different quality, a different beauty—altogether different. It will be authentic. When silence comes to you, when it descends on you, it is not a false thing. You have not been cultivating it. It comes to you; it happens to you. You begin to feel it growing inside you just like a mother begins to feel a child growing. § When I used to lead meditation camps myself, there was one method where every afternoon all the participants in the camp used to sit together and everybody was allowed to do whatsoever he wanted—no restriction, just he was not to interfere in anybody else’s work. Whatever he wants to say, he can say; if he wants to cry, he can cry; if he wants to laugh, he can laugh—and one thousand people! It was such a hilarious scene! People you could never have imagined—serious people—doing such stupid things! Somebody was making faces, putting out his tongue as far as he can, and you know that this man is a police commissioner! One man I cannot forget, because he used to sit in front of me every day. He was a very rich man from Ahmedabad, and because his whole business was the share market, he was just continually on the phone. Whenever this one-hour meditation would begin, within two or three minutes he would take up the phone. He would start dialing the numbers: “Hello!” And he would say—it looked from his face as if he was getting the answer—“Purchase it.” This would continue for one hour, and he was again and again phoning to this place, to that place, and once in a while he would look at me and smile: “What nonsense I’m doing!” But I had to keep absolutely serious. I never smiled at him. So he would again start phoning: “Nobody is taking any notice, everybody is engaged in his own work.” One thousand people doing so many, things…and these things were continuously going on in their minds. This was a great chance for them to bring them out. It was such a drama. Jayanti bhai used to be in charge of the camp in Mount Abu, and one of his closest friends took off all his clothes. That was a surprise! Jayanti bhai was standing by my side, and he could not believe it. That man was a very serious man, very rich; what was he doing, taking off his clothes in front of a thousand people? And then he started pushing the car in which I had come to the place—it was Jayanti bhai’s car. We were in the mountains, and just ahead there was a thousand-foot drop, and he was naked, pushing the car. Jayanti bhai asked me, “What has to be done? He is going to destroy the car, and I had never thought that this man was against my car. We are close friends.” So I told him, “You push it from the other side; otherwise he is going to destroy it.” So Jayanti bhai was stopping the car, and his friend was jumping around and shouting, “Get out of my way! I have always hated this car”—because he did not have an imported car, and this was an imported car, which Jayanti bhai was keeping for me. I was going to Mount Abu three or four times a year, so he was keeping that car just for me. His friend must have been feeling jealous inside that he did not have an imported car. Then a few people, seeing the situation, rushed to help. When the man saw that so many people were preventing him, just out of protest he climbed a tree in front of me. Naked, he sat in the top of the tree and he started shaking the branches. There was every danger that he would fall, with the tree, on top of all those people. Jayanti bhai asked me, “What has to be done now?” I said, “He is your friend. Let him be, don’t be worried. Just move the people to this side and that, and let him do whatsoever he is doing. Now at least he is not destroying the car. At the most he will have multiple fractures.” As people moved away, the man also stopped. Silently he sat in the tree. After the meditation was over, he was still sitting in the tree, and Jayanti bhai said, “Now get down. The meditation is over.” As if he woke up from a sleep, he looked all around and saw that he was naked! He jumped out of the tree, rushed to his clothes, and said, “What happened to me?” In the night he came to see me and he said, “This was a very dangerous meditation! I could have killed myself or somebody else. I could have destroyed the car. And I am a great friend of Jayanti bhai’s, I had never thought …but certainly there must have been this idea in me. I hated the idea that you always come in his car, and I hated the idea that he has an imported car, but it was not at all conscious in me. And what was I doing in the tree? I must have been carrying so much violence in me, I wanted to kill people.” That meditation was immensely helpful. It relaxed people so much in one hour that, they told me, “It seems a heavy load has disappeared from the head. We were not aware what we were carrying in the mind.” But to become aware of it, there was no other way except an unlimited expression. It was only a small experiment; I told people to continue it: “Soon you will come to many more things, and one day you will come to a point where all is exhausted. Remember only not to interfere with anybody, not to be destructive. Say anything you want to say, shout abuse, whatever you want—and exhaust all that you have been collecting.” But this is a strange world. The government of Rajasthan passed a resolution in their assembly that I could not have meditation camps in Mount Abu, because they had heard all these things were happening there—“people who are perfectly all right become almost mad, start doing all kinds of things.” Now, the politicians in the assembly don’t have any idea of the human mind, its inhibitions and how to exhaust them, how to burn them. I had to stop that meditation because otherwise they were not going to allow me to have camps in Mount Abu
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