Tuesday 26 February 2013

Awareness Vs Suppression

In the past some schools of Yoga taught about achieving through suppression. Can this approach suit some people today?

The first thing: never! — nobody who knows has ever taught suppression.
The second: never has anybody attained through it.
How can you suppress a part of your being with another part? It is just like trying to win by your right hand trying to defeat your left hand. You can pretend. After a little activity you can pretend that the right is on top and the left is suppressed. But do you think it is suppressed or it is conquered? How can you conquer a part of your own being by another part? — just pretensions.
If you suppress sex, the brahmacharya will be a pretension, a hypocrisy. It is just the right hand Lying and waiting there, helping you to pretend. Any moment it can upset everything again, and it will upset. That which you have conquered has to be conquered again and again, because it is never a real victory. In the end you find that you have been fighting the whole life and nothing has been achieved. In fact, only you will be defeated, nothing else. Your whole life will be defeated.
No master who knows, no master who is enlightened has ever preached suppression.
A person who wants to suppress the hunger and who has gone on a fast, as Jains go every year, what will they do? They will try to distract the mind somewhere else so that the hunger is not felt. They will chant mantras, or they will go to the temple and recite sutras, or they will go to their religious leader to listen him, so that the mind is engaged, and they need not pay attention to the hunger which is there. This is suppression. Suppression means: something is there and you don’t look at it and you pretend as if it is not there. So if you are occupied deeply in the mind, then the hunger cannot penetrate and cannot bring your attention to itself. The hunger will go on knocking on the door but you are reciting a mantra so loudly that you don’t hear the knock. Suppression means distracting your mind from the reality of your being.
You feel hunger. In fact, you have never been hungry. The body has been hungry, you have never been hungry. But you are identified with the body that, “I am the body.” That’s why you feel you are hungry. When you pay attention to hunger a distance is created, the identity breaks down. The identification is no more there. You are no more the body; the body is hungry and you are the watcher. And suddenly a blissful freedom arises in you that “I am not the body, I have never been the body. The body is hungry; I am not hungry.”
The bridge is broken; you are separate. What happens, what is miraculous.... When you are separate, when the bridge is broken, you are not identified with the body, you don’t say, “I am the body,” you say, “I am in the body, but not the body. I live in this house but I am not the house. I am in these clothes but the clothes are not me.” When you have come to attain this — and I say attain because intellectually you know it already. That is not the point; you have not realized it. When you realize it through deep attention to hunger or to sex or anything, suddenly the bridge disappears between the body and the embodied soul. When the gap is there and you have become a witness, then the body lives through your cooperation.
When in hunger, one watches the hunger, the cooperation is not there. It is a temporary death. You are not supporting the body. When you are not supporting the body, how the body can feel hunger? — because the body cannot feel anything; the feeling is of your being. Hunger may be there in the body but the body cannot feel, it has no feelers.
The fasting of a Mahavira or a Buddha is a totally different fasting from the fasting of Jains and Buddhists. The brahmacharya of Mahavira is totally different than the brahmacharya of Jain monks. Mahavira is not avoiding it, he is simply watching it. Watching, it disappears. Witnessing, it is not found there. Avoiding, it follows you. In fact, not only follows you, it haunts you.
No Yoga teaches suppression — cannot teach — but there are yogis who teach. They are teachers; they have not realized their innermost being. So there exists not even a single person who can attain to buddhahood through suppression. It is not possible, it is simply not possible. Through awareness one achieves, not through suppression.

Osho, Yoga: The Mystery Beyond Mind





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