So when you become a witness to what is happening in you, all that society has taught you to repress will begin to rise, because witnessing means that the weight holding it all down is removed. Right now you are sitting on top of it, so everything remains suppressed. People come to me to tell me about the strange states arising out of their meditations. They expected meditation to bring them peace, and instead they find themselves facing inner tempests. They expected meditation to bring them satisfaction, and find themselves aflame with dissatisfaction. They thought anger would disappear, and find themselves, to their dismay, hot with anger!
In the beginning this is bound to happen. You have been sitting on the lid that covers your repressions, and you have been riding on that lid a long time, trying continuously to hold down everything beneath it. To become a witness means that you have finally jumped off the lid; now you will only stand aside and will not do anything. Now you will no longer repress, now you will just witness. So everything suppressed will arise, all the repressions will catch fire; you will find flames leaping where there were only ashes.
All the anger and sex and turmoil will surge up, will surround you, but even in these moments you maintain your witnessing. It will not last for long, because it is just the explosion of the repressions. As these flames flare up, and fade, the fire below will begin to disappear; and as the smoke is dispelled into the vastness, you will find a clear, smokeless space within. A day comes when you find suddenly that you are standing alone, nothing is left to be seen. The witness is there, but there is nothing to be witnessed — no anger, no sex, no hatred, no envy, no jealousy. But this will take time….
If you were dealing with the accumulated repressions of only one lifetime, it would be different. But these are the repressions of numerous lives. Nobody knows how many times you have been born, and how many societies have crushed you. And each time a different society, and all these societies destroying you in different ways… this is why you carry so many inner contradictions.
Once you were a Hindu, and you were taught that this is right and that is wrong. Then once you were a Mohammedan and you were taught exactly the opposite, that this is wrong and that is right. Once you were a Jaina, and once a Buddhist… the number of societies you have wandered through is endless. You have learned so many rights and so many wrongs, and they are so contradictory to each other that you are in deep inner conflict and great confusion. So many people have carved and shaped you that no single image of you has developed. So many images have been carved, and your stone would have looked so much more beautiful if it had been left untouched. The sculptors have made it deformed and ugly.
The process of witnessing will take time, and this will depend on the effort you put into witnessing, and also on how much is repressed within you. If your effort is really profound, things may happen very quickly. If the effort is only lukewarm, you may begin to feel the effects only after a few lives, or may never feel it at all. The time taken will depend on how intensely, how enthusiastically and how totally you give yourself to the effort to become grounded in witnessing. If your witnessing can be total, all the turmoils can come to an end in an instant! If you become the very awareness, if in the moment of awareness all your energy becomes awareness itself — no doer remains at all, only the watcher — then even in an instant such a seeing will burn up everything lying suppressed within you
