Vigyan Bhairav Tantra Prior to 10
From Bluetruth
Man has a center, but he lives off of it -- off the center. That creates an inner tension, a constant turmoil, anguish. You are not where you should be; you are not at your right balance. You are off balance, and this being off balance, off center, is the base of all mental tensions. If it becomes too much, you go mad. A madman is one who has gone out of himself completely. The enlightened man is just the reverse of the madman. He is centered in himself. You are in between. You have not gone completely out of yourself, and you are not at your center either. You just move in the gap. Sometimes you move very, very far away, so you have moments when you are temporarily mad. In anger, in sex, in anything in which you have moved too far away from yourself, you are temporarily mad. Then there is no difference between you and the madman. The difference is only that he is permanently there and you are temporarily there. You will come back.
When you are in anger it is madness, but it is not permanent. Qualitatively there is no difference; quantitatively there is a difference. The quality is the same, so sometimes you touch madness and sometimes, when you are relaxed, totally at ease, you touch your center also. Those are the blissful moments. They happen. Then you are just like a Buddha or like a Krishna, but only temporarily, momentarily. You will not stay there. Really, the moment you realize that you are blissful you have moved. It is so momentary that by the time you have recognized the bliss it is finished. We go on moving between these two, but this movement is dangerous.
This movement is dangerous because then you cannot create a self-image, a fixed self-image. You do not know who you are. If you constantly move from madness to being centered in yourself, if this movement is constant, you cannot have a solid image of yourself. You will have a liquid image. Then you do not know who you are. It is very difficult. That is why you even become afraid if you are expecting blissful moments, so you try to fix yourself somewhere in between. This is what we mean by a normal human being: he never touches his madness in anger and he never touches that total freedom, that ecstasy, either. He never moves from a solid image. The normal man is really a dead man, living between these two points. That is why all those who are exceptional -- great artists, painters, poets -- they are not normal.
They are very liquid. Sometimes they touch the center, sometimes they go mad. They move fast between these two. Of course, their anguish is great, their tension is much. They have to live between two worlds, constantly changing themselves. That is why they feel that they have no identity. They feel, in the words of Colin Wilson, that they are outsiders. In your world of normality, they are outsiders. It will be helpful to define these four types. First is the normal man who has a fixed, solid identity, who knows who he is -- a doctor, an engineer, a professor, a saint -- who knows who he is and never moves from there. He constantly clings to the identity, to the image. Second are those who have liquid images -- poets, artists, painters, singers.
They do not know who they are. Sometimes they become just normal, sometimes they go mad, sometimes they touch the ecstasy that a buddha touches. Third are those who are permanently mad. They have gone outside themselves; they never come back into their home. They do not even remember that they have a home. And fourth are those who have reached their home... Buddha, Christ, Krishna.
This fourth category -- those who have reached their home -- is totally relaxed. In their consciousness there is no tension, no effort, no desire. In one word, there is no becoming. They do not want to become anything. They are, they have been. No becoming! And they are at ease with their being. Whatsoever they are, they are at ease with it. They do not want to change it, do not want to go anywhere. They have no future. This very moment is eternity for them... no longing, no desire. That does not mean that a buddha will not eat or a buddha will not sleep.
He will eat, he will sleep, but these are not desires. A buddha will not project these desires: he will not eat tomorrow, he will eat today. Remember this. You go on eating in the tomorrow, you go on eating in the future; you go on eating in the past, in the yesterday. It rarely happens that you eat today. While you are eating today, your mind will be moving somewhere else. While you will be trying to go to sleep, you will start eating tomorrow, or else the memory of the past will come. A buddha eats today. This very moment he lives. He does not project his life into the future; there is no future for him. Whenever future comes, it comes as the present. It is always today, it is always now. So a buddha eats, but he never eats in the mind -- remember this. There is no cerebral eating. You go on eating in the mind. It is absurd because the mind is not meant for eating. All your centers are confused; your entire body-mind arrangement is mixed up, it is mad.
A buddha eats, but he never thinks of eating. And that applies to everything. So a buddha is as ordinary as you while he is eating. Do not think that a buddha is not going to eat, or that when the hot sun is there he is not going to perspire, or when cold winds come he will not feel cold. He will feel it, but he will feel always in the present, never in the future. There is no becoming. If there is no becoming there is no tension. Understand this very clearly. If there is no becoming, how can there be any tension? Tension means you want to be something else which you are not.
You are A and you want to be B; you are poor and you want to be a rich man; you are ugly and you want to be beautiful; or you are stupid and you want to be a wise man. Whatsoever the wanting, whatsoever the desire, the form is always this: A wants to become B. Whatsoever you are, you are not content with it. For contentment something else is needed -- that is the constant structure of a mind that is desiring. When you get it, again the mind will say that "This is not enough, something else is needed." The mind always moves on and on. Whatsoever you get becomes useless. The moment you get it, it is useless. This is desire. Buddha has called it TRISHNA: this is becoming. You move from one life to another, from one world to another, and this goes on. It can continue ad infinitum.
There is no end to it, there is no end to desire, desiring. But if there is no becoming, if you accept totally whatsoever you are -- ugly or beautiful, wise or stupid, rich or poor -- whatsoever you are, if you accept it in its totality, becoming ceases. Then there is no tension; then the tension cannot exist. Then there is no anguish. You are at ease, you are not worried. This non-becoming mind is a mind that is centered in the self.
On quite the opposite pole is the madman. He has no being, he is only a becoming. He has forgotten what he is. The A is forgotten completely and he is trying to be B. He no longer knows who he is; he only knows his desired goal. He doesn't live here and now, he lives somewhere else. That is why he looks crazy to us, mad, because you live in this world and he lives in the world of his dreams. He is not part of your world, he is living somewhere else. He has completely forgotten his reality here and now. And with himself he has forgotten the world around him, which is real.
He lives in an unreal world -- for him, that is the only reality. A buddha lives this very moment in the being and the madman is just the opposite. He never lives in the here and now, in the being, but always in the becoming -- somewhere on the horizon. These are the two polar opposites. So remember, the madman is not against you, he is against the buddha. And remember also, the buddha is not against you, he is against the madman. You are in between.
You are both, mixed; you have madnesses, you have moments of enlightenment, but both are mixed. Sometimes a glimpse into the center suddenly happens, if you are relaxed. There are moments when you are relaxed. You are in love: for a few moments, for a single moment, your lover, your beloved is with you. It has been a long desire, a long effort, and at last your beloved is with you. For a moment the mind goes off. There has been a long effort to be with the beloved.
The mind has been hankering and hankering and hankering, and the mind has always been thinking, thinking about the beloved. Now the beloved is there and suddenly the mind cannot think. The old process cannot be continued. You were asking for the beloved; now the beloved is there, so the mind simply stops. In that moment when the beloved is there, there is no desire. You are relaxed; suddenly you are thrown back to yourself. Unless a lover can throw you to yourself it is not love. Unless you become yourself in the presence of the beloved, it is not love. Unless mind completely ceases to function in the presence of the lover or the beloved, it is not love. Sometimes it happens that mind ceases and for a moment there is no desire.
Love is desireless. Try to understand this: you may desire love, but love is desireless. When love happens there is no desire; mind is quiet, calm, relaxed. No more becoming, nowhere to go. But this happens only for a few moments, if it happens at all. If you have really loved someone, then it will happen for a few moments. It is a shock. The mind cannot work because its whole function has become useless, absurd. The one for whom you were longing is there, and the mind cannot think what to do now. For a few moments the whole mechanism stops. You are relaxed in yourself. You have touched your being, your center, and you feel you are at the source of well-being. A bliss fills you, a fragrance surrounds you. Suddenly you are not the same man you were. That is why love transforms so much.
If you are in love you cannot hide it. That is impossible! If you are in love, it will show. Your eyes, your face, the way you walk, the way you sit, everything will show it, because you are not the same man. The desiring mind is not there. You are like a buddha just for a few moments. This cannot be continued for long because it is just a shock. Immediately the mind will try to find some ways and excuses to think again. For example, the mind may start thinking you have attained your goal, you have attained your love, so now what? What are you going to do? Then the prophesying starts, the arguments start. You begin thinking, "Today I have reached my beloved, but will it be the same tomorrow also?" The mind has started working. And the moment mind is working you have moved again into becoming.
Sometimes even without love, just through fatigue, tiredness, one stops desiring. Then too one is thrown to oneself. When you are not away from yourself you are bound to be at your self, no matter what may be the cause of it. When one is tired totally, fatigued, when one does not even feel like thinking or desiring, when one is frustrated completely, without any hope, then suddenly one feels at home.
Now he cannot go anywhere. All the doors are closed; hope has disappeared -- and with it desire, with it becoming. It will not be for long because your mind has a mechanism. It can go off for a few moments, but suddenly it will come alive again because you cannot exist hopelessly, you will have to find some hope. You cannot exist without desire. Because you do not know how to exist without desire, you will have to create some desire. In any situation where it happens that suddenly the mind ceases functioning, you are at your center. You are on a holiday, in a forest or at a hill station, or on a beach: suddenly your routine mind will not work. The office is not there, the wife is not there, or the husband is not there.
Suddenly there is a very new situation, and the mind will need some time to function in it, to be adjusted to it. The mind feels unadjusted. The situation is so new that you relax, and you are at your center. In these moments you become a buddha, but these will only be moments. Then they will haunt you, and then you would like to reproduce them again and again and repeat them. But remember, they happened spontaneously, so you cannot repeat them. And the more you try to repeat them, the more it will be impossible for them to come to you. That is happening to everyone. You loved someone, and in the first meeting your mind ceased for a few moments. Then you got married.
Why did you get married? To repeat those beautiful moments again and again. But when they happened you were not married, and they cannot happen in marriage because the whole situation is different. When two people meet for the first time, the whole situation is new. Their minds cannot function in it. They are so overwhelmed by it -- so filled by the new experience, by the new life, the new flowering! Then the mind starts functioning and they think. "This is such a beautiful moment! I want to go on repeating it every day, so I should get married." Mind will destroy everything. Marriage means mind.
Love is spontaneous; marriage is calculating. Getting married is a mathematical thing. Then you wait for those moments, but they will never come again. That is why every married man and woman is frustrated -- because they are waiting for certain things that happened in the past. Why are they not happening again? They cannot happen because you are missing the whole situation. Now you are not new; now there is no spontaneity; now love is a routine. Now everything is expected and demanded. Now love has become a duty, not a fun. It was fun in the beginning; now it is a duty. And duty cannot give you the same bliss that fun can give. It is impossible! Your mind has created the whole thing. Now you go on expecting, and the more you expect the less is the possibility of its happening.
This happens everywhere, not only in marriage. You go to a master and the experience is new. His presence, his words, his way of life are new. Suddenly your mind stops functioning. Then you think, "This is the man for me, so I must go every day." Then you get married to him. By and by frustration sets in because you have made it a duty, a routine. Now those same experiences will not be coming. Then you think this man has deceived you or that you were fooled somehow. Then you think, "The first experience was hallucinatory. I must have been hypnotized or something. It was not real." It was real. Your routine mind makes it unreal.
And then the mind tries to expect, but the first time it happened you were not expecting. You had come without any expectations, you were just open to receive whatsoever was happening. Now you come every day with expectations, with a closed mind. It cannot happen. It always happens in an open mind; it always happens in a new situation. That doesn't mean that you have to change your situation daily, it only means: do not allow your mind to create a pattern. Then your wife will be new every day, your husband will be new every day.
But do not allow the mind to create a pattern of expectations; do not allow the mind to move in the future. Then your master will be every day new, your friend will be every day new. And everything is new in the world except the mind. Mind is the only thing which is old. It is always old. The sun is rising anew every day. It is not the old sun. The moon is new; the day, the night, the flowers, the trees... everything is new except your mind. Your mind is always old -- remember, always -- because mind needs the past, the accumulated experience, the projected experience. Mind needs the past and life needs the present. Life is always blissful -- mind never is.
Whenever you allow your mind to come in, misery sets in. These spontaneous moments will not be repeated again, so what to do? How to be in a relaxed state continuously? These three sutras are for this. These are three techniques concerning the feeling of ease, techniques to relax the nerves. How to remain in the being? How not to move into the becoming? It is difficult, arduous, but these techniques can help. These techniques will throw you upon yourself. The first technique:
- Vigyan Bhairav Tantra 10You need JavaScript enabled for viewing comments
