Vigyan Bhairav Tantra – Meditation Technique 55
“AT THE POINT OF SLEEP, WHEN THE SLEEP HAS NOT YET COME AND EXTERNAL WAKEFULNESS VANISHES, AT THIS POINT BEING IS REVEALED.”
Osho – There are some turning points in your consciousness. At these turning points you are nearer to your center than at other times. You change gears, and whenever you change a gear you pass through the neutral gear. That neutral gear is nearer. In the morning, when sleep is going, vanishing, and you are feeling awake but not yet awake, just at the midpoint, you are in a neutral gear. There is a point when you are not asleep and not awake, just in the middle.
There you are in a neutral gear. From sleep to waking, your consciousness changes the whole mechanism. It jumps from one mechanism to another. Between the two mechanisms, there is no mechanism; there is a gap. Through that gap you can have a glimpse of your being. The same happens in the night when you are again jumping from your waking mechanism to your sleeping mechanism, from your consciousness to the unconscious. For a single moment there is no mechanism, no grip of the mechanism on you, because you have to take a jump from one to another. Between the two if you can be awake, between the two if you can become aware, between the two if you can remember yourself, you will have a glimpse of your real being.
How to do it? While going to sleep, relax. Close your eyes, make the room dark. Just close your eyes and start waiting. The sleep is coming; just wait, don’t do anything, just wait! Your body is relaxing, the body is becoming heavy: feel it. Have the feeling of it. Sleep has its own mechanism, it starts working. Your waking consciousness is vanishing. Remember, because the moment will be very subtle and the moment will be atomic. If you miss, you miss. It is not a very long period — a single moment, a very small gap, and you will change from waking to sleep. Just wait, fully aware. Go on waiting. This will take time. It takes at least three months. Only then can you have the glimpse one day of the moment which is just in the middle. So don’t be in a hurry. You cannot do it just now; you cannot do it tonight. But you have to start and you may have to wait for months.
Ordinarily, within three months, one day it happens. It is happening every day, but your awareness and the meeting of the gap cannot be planned. It is a happening. You just go on waiting, and someday it happens. Someday, suddenly you become aware that you are neither awake nor asleep — a very weird phenomenon. You may even become afraid because you have known only the two: you know when you are asleep, you know when you are awake. But you don’t know a third point in your being when you are neither. At the first impact of it you may become afraid and scared. Don’t get scared and don’t be afraid. Anything which is so new, unknown previously, is bound to give a certain fear because this moment, when you will have experienced it again and again, will give you another feeling also: that you are neither alive nor dead, neither this nor that. This is an abyss.
These two mechanisms are like two hills; you jump from one peak to another. If you remain in the middle you fall into an abyss, and the abyss is bottomless: you go on falling, you go on falling. Sufis have used this technique, and before they give this technique to a seeker, they give another practice also just to safeguard. Whenever this technique is given in Sufi systems, before it another practice is given, and that is to imagine with closed eyes that you are falling into a deep well — dark, deep and bottomless. Just imagine falling into a deep well — falling and falling and falling, eternally falling. There is no bottom, you cannot reach to the bottom. Now this fall cannot stop anywhere. You can stop; you can open your eyes and say no more, but this fall in itself cannot stop. If you continue, the well is bottomless, and it gets more and more dark.
In Sufi systems, this well exercise — this bottomless, dark well exercise — is to be practiced first. It is good, helpful. If you have practiced it and you have realized the beauty of it, the silence, then the deeper you go into the well, the more silent you become. The world is left far away, and you feel that you have gone far away, far away, far away. Silence grows with darkness, and deep down there is no bottom. Fear comes to your mind, but you know that this is just imagination so you can continue.
Through this exercise, you become capable of this technique, and then, when you fall into the well between waking and sleeping, it is not imagination; it is a real fact. And it is bottomless, the abyss is bottomless. That is why Buddha has called this nothingness emptiness — SHUNYA. There is no end to it. Once you know it, you also have become endless. It is difficult to have this glimpse while awake. Then it is impossible, of course, while you are asleep because then the mechanism is functioning, and it is difficult to detach yourself from the mechanism. But there is a moment in the night and in the morning another moment — in twenty-four hours there are these two moments — when it is very easy, but one has to wait.
“AT THE POINT OF SLEEP, WHEN SLEEP HAS NOT YET COME AND EXTERNAL WAKEFULNESS VANISHES, AT THIS POINT BEING IS REVEALED:”
Then you know who you are, what is your real being, what is your authentic existence. We are false while we are awake, and you know it well. You are false while you are awake. You smile when tears would have been more real. Your tears are also not believable. They may be just a facade, ceremonial, a duty. Your smile is false, and those who study faces can say that your smile is just a painted smile. There are no roots within; the smile is just on your face, just on your lips. It is nowhere else in your being. There are no roots, there are no limbs. It is imposed. The smile is not coming from within to without; the smile has been forced from without.
Whatsoever you say and whatsoever you act is false, and it is not necessarily the case that you are doing this false business of life knowingly — not necessarily! You may be totally unaware — and you are! Otherwise it will be very difficult to carry such false nonsense continuously. It is automatic. This falseness continues while you are awake, and it continues even while you are asleep — in a different way, of course. Your dreams are symbolic, not real. It is surprising that even in your dreams you are not real, even in your dreams you are afraid, and you create symbols.
Now psychoanalysis goes on doing this business of analyzing your dreams. They have a big business because you cannot analyze your own dreams. They are symbolic, they are not real. They say something only in metaphors. If you want to kill your mother and get rid of her, you are not going to kill her even in your dream. You will kill someone else who looks like your mother. You will kill your aunt or someone else, but not your mother. Even in dreams you cannot be real. Then psychoanalysis is needed; a professional is needed to interpret — but you may describe the whole thing in such a way that even psychoanalysis is deceived.
Your dreams are also totally false. If you are real while you are awake, your dreams will be real. They will not be symbolic. If you want to kill your mother you will see a dream in which you kill your mother, and no interpreter will be needed to show you what your dream means. But we are so false. In dream you are alone, still afraid of the world and the society.
To kill a mother is the greatest sin, and I wonder whether you have ever thought about why to kill a mother is the greatest sin. It is the greatest sin because everyone feels a deep enmity toward his mother. It is the greatest sin, and it is taught, your mind is conditioned, that even to think of harming your mother is a sin. She has given birth to you. All over the world, in all societies, the same is taught. There is not a single society on the earth which will not agree to this, that to kill a mother is the greatest sin. She has given you birth and you are killing her?
But why this teaching? Deep down there is the possibility that everyone goes against his mother of necessity — because the mother has not only given birth to you, she has been the instrument of falsifying you; she has been the instrument of forcing you to be unreal. She has made you whatsoever you are. If you are a hell, she has a part in it, the greatest part. If you are miserable, your mother is there somewhere, hidden in you because the mother has given you birth, she has brought you up — or, really, she has brought you “down” from your reality. She has falsified you. The first untruth happened between you and your mother; the first lie happened between you and your mother — the first lie!
Even when there is no language and the child cannot speak, he can lie. The child sooner or later becomes aware that many of his feelings are not approved by his mother. Her face, her eyes, her behavior, her mood, everything shows that something in him is not accepted, appreciated. Then he starts suppressing. Something is wrong. There is no language yet; his mind is not functioning. But his whole body starts suppressing. Then be begins to feel that sometimes something is appreciated by the mother. He depends on the mother, his life depends on the mother. If the mother leaves him, he will be no more. His whole existence is centered on the mother.
Everything the mother shows, does, speaks, behaves, is significant. If the child smiles, and the mother loves him and gives him warmth and milk and hugs him, he is learning politics. He will smile while there is no smile in him because now he knows he can persuade the mother. He will smile a false smile. Then the liar is born; the politician has come into existence. Now he knows how to falsify, and this he learns in his relationship with his mother. This is the first relationship with the world. When he will become aware of his misery, of his hell, of his confusions, he will find that his mother is hidden somewhere.
There is every possibility that you may feel inimical towards your mother. That is why every culture insists that it is the greatest sin to kill your mother. Even in thought, even in dream, you cannot kill your mother. I am not saying that you SHOULD kill her, I am simply saying that your dreams are also false — symbolic, not real. You are so false that you cannot even dream a real dream.
These are our two false faces: one is there while you are awake, one is there while you are asleep. Between these two false faces there is a very small door, an interval. In that interval you can have a glimpse of your original face when you were not related to your mother, and through the mother to the society; when you were alone with yourself; when YOU WERE — not this and that, there was no division. Only the real was; there was no unreal. You can have a glimpse of that face, that innocent face between these two mechanisms.
Ordinarily we are not concerned with dreams, we are concerned with our waking hours. But psychoanalysis is more concerned with your dreams, not with your waking hours, because it feels that in waking hours you are a greater liar. In dreams something can be caught. You are less aware when you are asleep, and you are not forcing things, you are not manipulating. Then something real can be caught. You may be a celibate, a monk in your waking hours, but you have suppressed the sex urge. Then it will force itself into your dreams; your dreams are going to be sexual. It is very difficult to find a monk who is without sexual dreams — rather, impossible. You can find a criminal without sexual dreams, but you cannot find a religious man without sexual dreams. A debauchee may be without sexual dreams, but not so-called saints, because whatsoever you force down while you are awake will erupt in your dreams and will color your dreams.
Psychoanalysts are not concerned with your waking life because they know it is totally false. If something of the real can be glimpsed, it can be glimpsed only through your dreams. But tantra says that even dreams are not so real. They are more real — and this will look paradoxical because we think that dreams are unreal — they are more real than your waking hours because then you are less on guard. The censor is asleep, and things can come up, and the suppressed can express itself — of course symbolically, but symbols can be analyzed.
And all over the world human symbols are the same. You may speak a different language while awake, but while dreaming you speak the same language. All over the world the dream language is one. If sex is repressed, then the same symbols will come up. If the urge for food, the urge to eat, hunger, is repressed, then the same symbols will come — or similar ones. The dream language is one, but in dreams there are still problems because they are symbolic. And a Freud may interpret them in a different way, a Jung in a different way and an Adler still in a different way. And if you are analyzed by a hundred psychoanalysts, there will be a hundred interpretations. You will be still more confused than you were before, more confused with a hundred interpretations of one thing.
Tantra says in neither waking nor sleeping are you real. You are real only in between. So don’t be concerned with the waking, and don’t be concerned with dreaming and sleep. Be concerned with the gap; be aware of the gap. While passing from one state to another have a glimpse. And once you know when the gap comes, you become the master of it. You have the key; you can open that gap anytime and enter into it. A different dimension of being, the real dimension, opens.
