Vigyan Bhairav Tantra – Meditation Technique 101
BELIEVE OMNISCIENT, OMNIPOTENT, PERVADING
Osho – This too is based on inner power, inner strength. It is very seed-like. Believe that you are omniscient, all-knowing; believe that you are omnipotent, all-powerful; believe that you are pervading, all-pervading…. How can you believe it? It is impossible. You know you are not all-knowing, you are ignorant. You know you are not all-potent, you are absolutely powerless, helpless. You know you are not all-pervading, you are confined in a small body. So how can you believe it? And if you believe it, knowing well that this is not the case, the belief will be useless. You cannot believe against yourself. You can force a belief, but it will be useless, meaningless. You know it is not so. A belief becomes useful only when you know that it is so.
This has to be understood. A belief becomes powerful if you know that this is the case. True or untrue is not the point. If you know that this is the case, a belief becomes truth. If you know that this is not the case, then even a truth cannot become a belief. Why? Many things have to be understood.
Firstly, whatsoever you are is your belief: you believe in that way, you have been brought up in that way; you have been conditioned in that way, so you believe in that way. And your belief influences you. It becomes a vicious circle. For example, there are races where man is less powerful than woman, because those races believe that a woman is stronger, more powerful, than man. Their belief has become a fact. In those races, man is weaker and woman is stronger. The women do all the work that ordinarily, in other countries, men would do, and men do the work that in other countries women would do. Not only that, their bodies are weak, their structure is weak. They have come to believe that this is so. The belief creates the phenomenon. Belief is creative.
Why does this happen? Because mind is more powerful than matter. If mind really believes something, matter has to follow. Matter cannot do anything against the mind because matter is dead. Even impossibilities happen. Jesus says, “Faith can move mountains.” Faith CAN move mountains. If it cannot, it only means that you don’t have faith — not that faith cannot move mountains. Your faith cannot move them because you don’t have the faith.
Now much research is going on on this phenomenon of belief, and science is coming to many unbelievable conclusions. Religion always believed in them but science is finally coming to the same conclusions. It has to because many phenomena are being investigated for the first time. For example, you may have heard about placebo medicines. There are hundreds and hundreds of `pathies’ in the world — allopathy, ayurvedic, unani, homeopathy, naturopathy — hundreds, and they all claim that they can cure. And they do cure. Their claims are not false. This is the rare thing — their diagnosis is different, their treatment is different. There is one illness and there are a hundred and one diagnoses, and a hundred and one treatments, and every treatment helps. So the question is bound to be raised whether it is really the treatment that helps or the belief of the patient. This is possible.
In many ways, in many countries, in many universities, in many hospitals, they are working. Just water or something non-medicinal is given but the patient believes that a medicine has been given. And not only the patient, the doctor also believes it, because he also is not aware. If the doctor is aware whether it is medicine or not, it will have an effect, because the doctor gives a belief to the patient more that a medicine. So when you pay more and you have a greater doctor, you get well better and sooner. It is a question of belief. If the doctor gives you a four-penny medicine, just four pennies, you know well that nothing is going to happen. How can such a big patient with such a disease, such a great phenomenon, be cured by four pennies? Impossible!
The belief cannot be created. Every doctor has to create around him an aura of belief. It helps. So if the doctor knows that it is just water that he is giving, he will not give his belief with faith. His face will show, his hands will show, his whole attitude and behavior will show that he is giving just water, and the unconscious of the patient will be affected. The doctor must believe. The more he believes the better, because his belief is infectious. The patient looks at the doctor. If the doctor feels confident — “Don’t worry, this is a new treatment, a new medicine and this is going to help you. It is a hundred per cent certain. There is no doubt about it” — if the whole personality of the doctor gives the impression of a hundred per cent hope, then already, even before taking the medicine, the patient is being cured. The cure has already started. Now they say that whatsoever you use, thirty per cent of the patients will be cured almost immediately; whatsoever you use — allopathy, naturopathy, homeopathy, or any `pathy’ — whatsoever you do, thirty per cent of the patients will be cured immediately.
Those thirty per cent are believers. That’s the ratio. If I look at you, into you, thirty per cent are potential, are ones who can immediately be transformed. Once they get the belief, it will immediately start working. One third of humanity can be immediately transformed, changed, to new orders of being without any difficulty. The question is only how to create the belief in them. Once the belief is there, nothing can debar them. You may be one of those fortunate ones, one of the thirty per cent. But a great misfortune has happened to humanity, and that is that those thirty per cent are condemned. Society, education, civilization, all condemn them. They are thought to be stupid people. No, they are more potential people. They have a great power but they are condemned, and impotent intellectual people are praised — because they can praise with language, words, reason, they are praised.
Really, they are simply impotent. They cannot do anything in the real world of inner being, they can just go on with their mind. But they possess the universities, they possess the news media, they are the masters in a way. And they are artists in condemnation. They can condemn anything. And this thirty per cent of potential humanity, those who can believe and can get transformed, they are not so articulate — they cannot be. They cannot reason, they cannot argue, that’s why they can believe. But because they cannot argue their case they have themselves become self-condemning. They think something is wrong. If you can believe, you start feeling that something is wrong with you; if you can doubt, you think something is great with you. But doubt is not a force. Through doubt no one ever got to the innermost being, to the ultimate ecstasy, no one, ever.
If you can believe, then this sutra will be helpful. BELIEVE OMNISCIENT, OMNIPOTENT, PERVADING. You are that already so just by believing it, all that is hiding you, all that is covering you, will fall down immediately. But even for those thirty per cent it will be difficult because they are also conditioned to believe in something which is not the case. They are also conditioned to doubt; they are also trained to be skeptical; and they know their limitations, so how can they believe? Or, if they believe, people will think they are mad. If you say that you believe that inside you is the all-pervading, the omnipotent, the Divine, the all-powerful, then people will look at you and think you have gone crazy. How can you believe such things unless you are mad?
But try something. Start from the very beginning. Get a little feeling of this phenomenon, then belief will follow. If you want to use this technique, do this. Close your eyes and just feel that you have no body, feel as if the body has disappeared, melted away. Then you can feel your all-pervadingness. With the body it is difficult. That’s why many traditions go on teaching that you are not the body because with the body, limitation comes in. It is not difficult to feel that you are not the body, because you are not the body. It is just a conditioning, it is just a thought that has been forced upon your mind. Your mind has been impregnated with the thought that you are the body.
There are phenomena which demonstrate this. In Ceylon, Buddhist monks walk on fire. They do in India also, but the Ceylonese phenomenon is very rare — they walk for hours and they are not burned.
It happened once, just a few years ago, that a Christian missionary went to see the fire-walk. They do it on the night when Buddha became enlightened, a full moon night — because they say that on that day it was revealed to the world that the body is nothing, matter is nothing; that the inner being is all-pervading and the fire cannot burn it. But to do this for one year the monks who walk on the fire purify their bodies, through PRANAYAMA, breathing processes, and fasting. They meditate to purify their minds, empty their minds. For one year continuously they prepare.
They live in isolated cells just feeling that they are not in their bodies. For one year continuously a group of fifty or sixty monks goes on thinking that they are not their bodies. A year is a long time. Thinking every moment only one thing — that they are not their bodies — continuously hammering that the body is illusory, they come to believe it. Then too they are not forced to walk on the fire. They are brought to the fire and then whosoever thinks that he will not be burned, jumps into it. A few remain doubting, hesitating — they are not allowed to jump because this is not a question of fire burning or not, this is a question of their doubt. If they hesitate a little they are stopped. So sixty are prepared and sometimes twenty, sometimes thirty people jump into the fire and they dance in it for hours together without getting burned.
A missionary came to see it in nineteen-fifty. He was very surprised but he thought that if belief in Buddha could do this miracle, then why not belief in Jesus? So he thought for a while, hesitated a little, but then, with the idea that if Buddha could help, Jesus would also help, he jumped. He got burned, badly burned; he had to be hospitalized for six months. And he couldn’t understand the phenomenon. It was not a question of Jesus or Buddha, it was not a question of belief in someone, it was a question of belief. And that belief has to be hammered into the mind. Unless it reaches to the very core of your being, it will not start working.
That Christian missionary went back to England to study about hypnosis, mesmerism, and allied phenomena, and what happens during fire-walking. Then they invited two monks to Oxford University to give a demonstration. The monks went. They walked on fire. The experiment was tried many times. Then the two monks saw that one professor was looking at them, and he was looking so deeply and he was so involved that his eyes, his face, were ecstatic. The two monks went to the professor and said to him, “You can also come with us.” Immediately he ran with them, jumped into the fire, and nothing happened. he was not burned. The Christian missionary was also present, and he knew well that this professor was a professor of logic, a man who is professionally doubtful, whose profession is based on doubt. So he said to the man, “What! You have done a miracle. I couldn’t do it, and I am a believer.” The professor said, “In that moment I was a believer. The phenomenon was so real, so fantastically real, it gripped me. It was so clear that body is nothing and mind is everything and I felt so ecstatically in tune with the two monks that when they invited me, there was not a single hesitation. It was simple to walk, it was just as if there was no fire.”
There was no hesitation, no doubt — that is the key.
So first try this experiment. Sit with closed eyes for a few days just thinking that you are not your body — not only thinking but feeling that you are not your body. And if you sit with closed eyes a distance is created. Your body goes on moving away and away. You go on moving inwards. A great distance is created. Soon you can feel that you are not the body. If you feel you are not the body, then you can believe you are all-pervading, omnipotent, omniscient, all-knowing, all-powerful. This all-powerfulness or this all-knowingness is not concerned with so-called knowledge: it is a feeling, an explosion of feeling — that you KNOW. This has to be understood, particularly in the West, because whenever you say that you know, they will say, “What? What do you know?” Knowledge must be objective. You must know something. And if it is a question of knowing something you cannot be all-pervading, no one can be, because there are infinite facts to be known. No one can be all-knowing in that sense.
That’s why in the West they laugh when Jains claim that Mahavir was SARVAGYA, all-knowing. They laugh, because if Mahavir was all-knowing, then he must have known all that science is discovering now and even that which science will discover in future. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. He says many things which are obviously contradictory to science, which cannot be true, which are not factual. His knowledge, if it is all-pervading, should never be erroneous. But there are errors.
Christians believe that Jesus was all-knowing. But the modern mind will laugh because he was not all-knowing — all-knowing in the sense of knowing all about the facts of the world. He didn’t know that the earth was circular, that the earth was a globe — he didn’t know. He knew that the earth was flat ground. He didn’t know that the earth had been in existence for millions and millions of years, he believed that God created it just four thousand years before him. As far as facts, objective facts are concerned, he was not all-knowing.
But this word `all-knowing’ is totally different. When the Eastern sages say `all-knowing’, they don’t mean knowing all about the facts — they mean all-conscious, all-aware, fully inside, fully conscious, enlightened. They are not concerned with knowing something, they are concerned only with the pure phenomenon of knowing — not knowledge, but the very quality of knowing. When we say that Buddha knows we don’t mean that he knows what Einstein knows. He doesn’t know that. He is a knower. He knows his own being and that being is all-pervading. That feeling of isness is all-pervading. And in that knowing nothing remains to be known, that is the point. Now there is no curiosity to know anything. All questions have dropped. Not that all answers have been achieved, all questions have dropped. Now there is no question to be asked. All curiosity has gone. There is no problem to be solved. This inner quietness, this inner silence, filled with inner light, is infinite knowing. This is what is meant by omniscient. It is subjective awakening.
This you can do. But it will not happen if you go on adding more knowledge to your mind. You can go on adding knowledge for lives together — you will know something but you will never know all. The all is infinite; it cannot be known in that way. Science will always remain incomplete, it can never be complete — that’s impossible. It is inconceivable that it can be complete. Really, the more science knows, the more it comes to know that more has to be known.
This all-knowingness is an inner quality of awakening. Meditate, and drop your thoughts. When you don’t have any thoughts you will feel what this omniscience is, what this all-knowledge is. When there is no thought, consciousness becomes pure, purified; in that purified consciousness you don’t have any problem. All questions have dropped. You know yourself, your being, and when you know your being, you have known all, because your being is the center of everybody’s being. Really your being is everybody’s being. Your center is the center of the universe. In this sense, Upanishads have declared, “AHAM BRAHMASMI — I am the Brahman, I am the Absolute.” Once you know this little phenomenon of your being you have known the infinite. You are just like a drop of the ocean: if even one drop is known, all the secrets of the ocean become revealed.
BELIEVE OMNISCIENT, OMNIPOTENT, PERVADING. But this will come through faith, this you cannot argue with yourself. You cannot convince yourself with some argument, you will have to dig deep within you for such feelings, for sources of such feelings.
This word `believe’ is very significant. It doesn’t mean that you have a conviction, because conviction means a rational thing: you are convinced, you have argued it over, you have proofs for it. Belief means you don’t have any doubts about it, not that you have proofs. Conviction means you have proofs. You can prove, you can argue. You can say, “This is so.” You can reason it out. Belief means you don’t have any doubts. You cannot argue it, you cannot rationalize, you will be defeated if you are asked. But you have an inner grounding — you feel it is so. It is a feeling, not a reasoning.
But remember that such techniques can work only if you work with your feeling, not with your reasoning. So it has happened many times that very ignorant people, uneducated, uncultured, reach heights of human consciousness and those who are very cultured, educated, reasonable, rational, miss.
Jesus was just a carpenter. Friedrich Nietzsche writes somewhere that in the whole New Testament there was only one person really worth something, who was cultured, educated, philosophically knowledgeable, wise — that man was Pilate, the Roman governor who ordered Jesus to be crucified. Really he was the most cultured man, the governor-general, the viceroy. And he knew what philosophy was: at the last moment, when Jesus was going to be crucified, he asked, “What is truth?” It was a very philosophical question. Jesus remained silent — not because this puzzle was not worth answering, Pilate was the only person who could have understood deep philosophy — Jesus remained silent because he could speak only to those who could feel. Thinking was not of any use. He was asking a philosophical question. It would have been good if he had asked in a university, in an academy, but asking Jesus a philosophical question was meaningless. He remained silent because it was futile to answer. No communication was possible. But Nietzsche, himself a man of reason, condemns Jesus. He said he was uneducated, uncultured, unphilosophical — and he couldn’t answer, that’s why he remained silent. Pilate asked a beautiful question. If he had asked it of Nietzsche, Nietzsche would have talked about it for years together. “What is truth?” This one question is enough to talk about and discuss for years. All of philosophy is just this business: “What is truth?” One question and all the philosophers are involved in it.
Nietzsche’s criticism is really a criticism by reason, a condemnation by reason. Reason has always condemned the dimension of feeling because feeling is so vague, so mysterious. It is there, and you cannot say anything about it. Either you have got it or you haven’t got it; either it is there or it is not there. You cannot do anything about it and you cannot discuss it. You also have many beliefs but those beliefs are just convictions; they are not beliefs because you have doubts about them. You have crushed those doubts by your arguments, but they are there. You are sitting on top of them, but they are there. You go on fighting with them, but they are not dead. They cannot be. That’s why your life may be that of a Hindu, or a Mohammedan, or a Christian, or a Jain, but it is only because of conviction. Faith is not there.
I will tell you an anecdote. Jesus told his disciples to go by boat to the other bank of a lake where they were staying. And he said, “I will be coming later.” They went. When they were just in the middle of the lake a great wind came and there was much turmoil and they were afraid. The boat was rocking and they started crying and screaming. They started crying, “Jesus, save us!” The bank where Jesus was was very far away, but Jesus came. It is said that he came running on the water. And the first thing he said to his disciples was, “Men of little faith, why are you crying? Don’t you believe?” They were scared. Jesus said, “If you believe, then come out of the boat and walk towards me.” He was standing on the water. They saw with their own eyes that he was standing on the water, but still it was difficult to believe. They must have thought in their minds that it was a trick, or it was maybe just an illusion, or this was not Jesus. Maybe it was just the Devil, luring them or something. So they started looking at each other, “Who will walk?” Then one disciple got out of the boat and walked. Really, he could walk. He couldn’t believe his own eyes. He was walking on the water. When he came close to Jesus he said, “How? How is it happening?” Immediately the whole miracle disappeared. The “How?” — and he was under water. Jesus pulled him out and said, “Man of little faith, why do you ask how?”
But reason asks “Why?” and “How?” Reason asks, reason questions. Faith is the dropping of all questions. If you can drop all questions and believe, then this technique can work miracles for you.
