Osho on Seven Bodies and their Tensions

 

Question 1:

Please Tell us some thing about the Tensions and Relaxation of the Seven Bodies

 

 

The original source of all tension is becoming. One is always trying to be something; no one is at ease with himself as he is. The being is not accepted, the being is denied, and something else is taken as an ideal to become. So the basic tension is always between that which you are and that which you long to become.

 

You desire to become something. Tension means that you are not pleased with what you are, and you long to be what you are not. Tension is created between these two. What you desire to become is irrelevant. If you want to become wealthy, famous, powerful, or even if you want to be free, liberated, to be divine, immortal, even if you long for salvation, moksha, then too the tension will be there.

 

Anything that is desired as something to be fulfilled in the future, against you as you are, creates tension. The more impossible the ideal is, the more tension there is bound to be. So a person who is a materialist is ordinarily not so tense as one who is religious, because the religious person is longing for the impossible, for the far-off. The distance is so great that only a great tension can fill the gap.

 

Tension means a gap between what you are and what you want to be. If the gap is great, the tension will be great. If the gap is small, the tension will be small. And if there is no gap at all, it means you are satisfied with what you are. In other words, you do not long to be anything other than what you are. Then your mind exists in the moment. There is nothing to be tense about; you are at ease with yourself. You are in the Tao.

 

To me, if there is no gap you are religious; you are in the dharma. The gap can have many layers. If the longing is physical, the tension will be physical. When you seek a particular body, a particular shape – if you long for something other than what you are on a physical level – then there is tension in your physical body. One wants to be more beautiful.

 

Now your body becomes tense. This tension begins at your first body, the physiological, but if it is insistent, constant, it may go deeper and spread to the other layers of your being. If you are longing for psychic powers, then the tension begins at the psychic level and spreads. The spreading is just like when you throw a stone in the lake. It drops at a particular point, but the vibrations created by it will go on spreading into the infinite.

 

So tension may start from any one of your seven bodies, but the original source is always the same: the gap between a state that is and a state that is longed for. If you have a particular type of mind and you want to change it, transform it – if you want to be more clever, more intelligent – then tension is created. Only if we accept ourselves totally is there no tension. This total acceptance is the miracle, the only miracle. To find a person who has accepted himself totally is the only surprising thing.

 

Existence itself is non-tense. Tension is always because of hypothetical, non-existential possibilities. In the present there is no tension; tension is always future-oriented. It comes from the imagination. You can imagine yourself as something other than you are. This potential that has been imagined will create tension. So the more imaginative a person is, the more tension is a possibility. Then the imagination has become destructive.

 

Imagination can also become constructive, creative. If your whole capacity to imagine is focused in the present, in the moment, not in the future, then you can begin to see your existence as poetry. Your imagination is not creating a longing; it is being used in living. This living in the present is beyond tension.

 

Animals are not tense, trees are not tense, because they do not have the capacity to imagine. They are below tension, not beyond it. Their tension is just a potentiality; it has not become actual. They are evolving. A moment will come when tension will explode in their beings and they will begin to long for the future. It is bound to happen. The imagination becomes active.

 

The first thing the imagination becomes active about is the future. You create images and because there are no corresponding realities, you go on creating more and more images. But as far as the present is concerned, you cannot ordinarily conceive of the imagination in relation to it. How can you be imaginative in the present? There seems to be no need. This point must be understood. If you can be consciously present in the present, you will not be living in your imagination. Then the imagination will be free to create within the present itself.

 

Only the right focus is needed. If the imagination is focused on the real, it begins to create. The creation may take any form. If you are a poet, it becomes an explosion of poetry. The poetry will not be a longing for the future, but an expression of the present. Or if you are a painter, the explosion will be of painting. The painting will not be of something as you have imagined it, but as you have known it and lived it. When you are not living in the imagination, the present moment is given to you. You can express it, or you can go into silence.

 

But the silence, now, is not a dead silence that is practiced. This silence too is an expression of the present moment. The moment is so deep that now it can be expressed only through silence. Not even poetry is adequate; painting is not adequate. No expression is possible. Silence is the only expression. This silence is not something negative but, rather, a positive flowering. Something has flowered within you, the flower of silence, and through this silence all that you are living is expressed.

 

A second point is also to be understood. This expression of the present through the imagination is neither an imagination of the future nor a reaction against the past. It is not an expression of any experience that has been known. It is the experience of experiencing – as you are living it, as it is happening in you. Not a lived experience, but a living process of experiencing. Then your experience and experiencing are not two things. They are one and the same. Then there is no painter. The experiencing itself has become the painting; the experiencing itself has expressed itself.

 

You are not a creator. You are creativity, a living energy. You are not a poet; you are poetry. The experience is neither for the future nor for the past; it is neither from the future nor from the past. The moment itself has become eternity, and everything comes from it. It is a flowering. This flowering will have seven layers, just like tension has seven layers. It will exist in every body. For example, if it happens on the physiological level, you will become beautiful in quite a new sense. This beauty is not of form but of the formless, not of the visible but of the invisible. And if you can feel this non-tense moment in your body, you will know a well-being that you have not known before, a positive well-being.

 

We have known states of well-being that are negative: negative in the sense that when we are not ill we say we are healthy. This health is simply a negation of disease. It has nothing positive about it; it is just that disease is not there. The medical definition of health is that if you are not ill then you are healthy. But health has a positive dimension also. It is not just the absence of illness; it is the presence of health.

 

Your body can be non-tense only when you are living a moment-to-moment existence. If you are eating and the moment has become eternity, then there is no past and no future. The very process of eating is all that is. You are not doing something; you have become the doing. There will be no tension; your body will feel fulfilled. Or if you are in sexual communion and the sex is not just a relief from sexual tension but, rather, a positive expression of love – if the moment has become total, whole, and you are in it completely – then you will know a positive well-being in your body.

 

If you are running, and the running has become the totality of your existence; if you are the sensations that are coming to you, not something apart from them but one with them; if there is no future, no goal to this running, running itself is the goal – then you know a positive well-being. Then your body is non-tense. On the physiological level, you have known a moment of non-tense living. And the same is true with each of the seven bodies. To understand a non-tense moment in the first body is easy because we already know two things that are possible in the body: disease, a positive illness; negatively defined well-being, an absence of illness. This much we have already known, so we can conceive of a third possibility, that of positive well-being, health. But to understand what non-tension is in the second body, the etheric, is a bit more difficult, because you have not known anything about it. Still, certain things can be understood.

 

Dreams are basically concerned with the second body, the etheric. So ordinarily when we talk about dreams what we are talking about are dreams of the etheric body. But if your physical body has been living in tension, then many dreams will be created by it. For example, if you have been hungry or on a fast, then a particular type of dream is created. This is physiological dreaming. It is not concerned with the etheric body.

 

The etheric body has its own tension. We know the etheric body only in dreams, so if the etheric body is tense, the dream becomes a nightmare. Even in your dream you will be tense now; the tension will follow you. The first tension in the etheric body is concerned with the fulfillment of your desires. We all have dreams about love. Sex is physiological; love is not. Love has nothing to do with the physical body, it is concerned with the etheric body; but if it is not fulfilled, then even your physical body may suffer because of it. Not only does your physical body have needs that have to be fulfilled, but your etheric

body also has needs. It has its own hungers; it also needs food. Love is that food.

 

We all go on dreaming about love, but we are never in love. Everybody dreams about love – how it should be, with whom it should be – and everyone is frustrated in it. Either we are dreaming about the future or, in frustration, about the past; but we are never loving. There are other tensions in the etheric body as well, but love is the one that can be most easily understood. If you can love in the moment, then a non-tense situation is created in the etheric body. But you cannot love in the moment if you have demands, expectations, conditions for your love, because demands, expectations and conditions are concerned with the future.

 

The present is beyond our specifications. It is as it is. But you can have expectations about the future: how it should be. Love too has become a ”should”; it is always about what ”should be.” You can be loving in the present only if your love is not an expectation, a demand, only if it is unconditional. Also, if you are loving only to one person and not to someone else, then you can never love in the present. If your love is a relationship and not a state of mind, you cannot love in the present because, very subtly, that too is a condition. If I say I can be loving only to you, then when you are not there I will not be loving. For twenty-three hours I will be in a state of not-loving and only for one hour, when I am with you, will I be loving. This is impossible! You cannot be in a state of love one moment and not be in love another moment.

 

If I am healthy, I am healthy for twenty-four hours. It is impossible to be healthy for one hour and unhealthy for the other twenty-three hours. Health is not a relationship; it is a state of being. Love is not a relationship between two persons. It is a state of mind within yourself. If you are loving, you are loving to everybody – not only to persons, but to things as well. Love moves from you to objects also. Even when you are alone, when no one is there, you are loving. It is just like breathing.

 

If I take an oath that I will breathe only when I am with you, only death can follow. Breathing is not relationship; it is not tied to any relationship. And for the etheric body, love is just like breathing. It is its breath. So either you are loving, or you are not loving. The type of love that humanity has created is very dangerous. Even disease has not created as much nonsense as this so-called love has created. The whole humanity is diseased because of this wrong notion of love.

 

If you can love and be loving, irrespective of whom, then your second body can have a sense of well-being, a positive at-easeness. Then there are no nightmares. Dreams become a poetry. Then something happens in your second body, and the perfume of it not only pervades you but others also. Wherever you are, the perfume of your love spreads. And of course it has its own response, its own echoing.

 

Real love is not a function of the ego. The ego is always asking for power, so even when you love – because your love is not real, because it is just a part of the ego – it is bound to be violent. Whenever we love it is a violence, a type of war. Father and son, mother and daughter, husband and wife – they are not lovers; we have converted them into enemies. They are constantly fighting, and only when they are not fighting do we say it is love. The definition is negative. Between two battles there is a gap, a period of peace.

 

But really, between two wars there is no possibility of peace. The so-called peace is only a preparation for the coming war. There is no peace between husband and wife, no love. The gap that we call love is only a preparation for the coming fight. We think that there is health when we are between two illnesses, and we think that there is love when we are between two fights. It is not love. It is only a gap between fights. You cannot go on fighting for twenty-four hours, so at some point you begin to love your enemy.

 

Love is never possible as a relationship but only as a state of mind. If love comes to you as a state of mind, then your second body – the etheric body – becomes at ease, non-tense. It is relaxed. There are other reasons for tension in the second body, but I am talking about the one that can be most easily understood. Because we think we know love, it can be talked about.

 

The third body is the astral body. It has its own tensions. They are concerned not only with this life but with your previous lives. Tension in the third body is because of the accumulation of everything you have been and of everything you have been longing for. Your total longing, thousands and thousands of lives and their repetitive longings, are in the astral body. And you have always been longing! It does not matter for what. The longing is there.

 

The astral body is a storehouse of your total longings, your total desires. That is why it is the most tense part of your being. When you go into meditation you become aware of astral tensions, because meditation starts from the third body. People who have begun to be aware of these tensions through meditation come to me and say, "Since I started meditating, tensions have increased." They have not increased, but you have become aware of them now. Now you know something that you were not aware of before.

 

These are astral tensions. Because they are essences of so many lives, they cannot be described by any particular word. Nothing can be said about them that can be understood. They can only be lived, and known.

 

Desiring itself is the tension. We are never without the desire for something or other. There are even people who desire desirelessness. It becomes a total absurdity. In the third body, the astral body, you can desire to be desireless. In fact, the desire to be desireless is one of the strongest desires. It can create one of the biggest gaps between what is and what you want to be.

 

So accept your desires as they are, and know that you have had so many desires throughout so many lives. You have desired so much, and the whole thing has been accumulated. So for the third body -- the astral body -- accept your desires as they are. Do not fight with them; do not create a desire against desires. Just accept them. Know that you are full of desires, and be at ease with it. Then you will become non-tense in the astral body.

 

If you can accept the infinite crowd of desires within you without creating a desire against these desires; if you can be in the crowd of desires -- they are your whole accumulated past -- and accept them as they are; if this acceptance becomes total, then, in a single moment, the whole crowd disappears. They are no longer there, because they can exist only against a background of desiring, a constant desiring for that which is not.

 

The object of desire does not matter; it is irrelevant. Desire even desirelessness and the background is there; the whole crowd will be there. If you accept your desire, a moment of desirelessness is created. You accept your desire as it is. Now there is nothing to desire; desiring is not there. You accept everything as it is, even your desires. Then the desires evaporate; nothing has to be done with them. The astral body becomes at ease; it comes to a state of positive well-being. Only then can you proceed to the fourth body.

 

The fourth body is the mental body. Just as there are desires in the astral body, in the mental body there are thoughts: contradictory thoughts, a whole crowd of them, each thought asserting itself as the whole, each thought possessing you as if it were the whole. So the tension in the fourth body is created by thoughts. Being without thoughts -- not asleep, not unconscious, but a thoughtless consciousness -- is the health, the well-being of the fourth body. But how can one be conscious and thoughtless?

 

Every moment, new thoughts are being created. Every moment something of your past is coming into conflict with something of your present. You were a communist and now you are a Catholic and believe in something else, but the past is still there. You can become a Catholic, but you cannot throw off your communism. It remains in you. You can change your thoughts, but the discarded thoughts are always there waiting. You cannot unlearn them. They reach into your depths; they go into the unconscious. They will not show themselves to you because you have discarded them, but they will remain there, waiting for their chance. And the chance will come. Even in a period of twenty-four hours, there will be a moment when you will be a communist again and then again you will be a Catholic. This will go on and on, back and forth, and the total effect will be confusion. So for the mental body, tension means confusion -- contradictory thoughts, contradictory experiences, contradictory expectations -- and ultimately results in a confused mind. And the confused mind will only become more confused if it tries to go beyond confusion, because out of a state of confusion, no-confusion cannot be achieved.

 

You are confused. Spiritual seeking will create a new dimension for your confusion. All your other confusions are still there, and now a new confusion has been added. You meet this guru, then that, then the next, and each guru brings new confusion to you. The old confusion will be there, and a new one will be added. You will be a madhouse. This is what happens in the fourth body, the mental body. There, confusion is the tension.

 

How can one cease to be confused? You can cease to be confused only if you do not deny one particular thought in favor of another, if you do not deny anything -- if you do not deny communism in favor of religiousness, if you do not deny God in favor of a philosophy of atheism. If you accept everything that you think, there is no choice to be made and tensions disappear. If you go on choosing, you go on adding to your tensions.

 

Awareness must be choiceless. You must be aware of your total thought process, the total confusion. The moment you become aware of it, you will know that it is all confusion. Nothing is to be chosen; the whole house must be discarded. Once you know it is just a confusion, the house can be discarded at any time; there is no difficulty in discarding it.

 

So begin to be aware of your total mind. Do not choose; be choiceless. Do not say, "I am an atheist," or, "I am a theist." Do not say, "I am a Christian," or, "I am a Hindu." Do not choose. Just be aware that sometimes you are an atheist and sometimes a theist, sometimes you are a Christian and sometimes a communist, sometimes a saint and sometimes a sinner. Sometimes one ideology appeals to you and sometimes another, but these are all fads.

 

Be totally aware of it. The very moment you become aware of the total process of your mind is a moment of nonidentity. Then you are not identified with your mind. For the first time you know yourself as consciousness and not as mind. Mind itself becomes an object to you. Just as you are aware of other people, just as you are aware of the furniture in your house, you become aware of your mind, the mental process. Now you are this awareness -- unidentified with the mind.

 

The difficulty with the fourth body, the mental body, is that we are identified with our minds. If your body becomes ill and someone says you are ill, you do not feel offended; but if your mind becomes ill and someone says, "Your mind is ill; you seem to be going insane," then you are offended. Why?

 

When someone says, "Your body seems to be ill," you feel that he has sympathized with you. But if someone says something about mental illness -- that as far as your mind is concerned, you seem to be derailed; you are neurotic -- then you are offended because there is a deeper identification with the mind than with the body.

 

You can feel yourself to be separate from the body. You can say, "This is my hand." But you cannot say, "This is my mind," because you think: "My mind means me." If I want to operate on your body you will allow me, but you will not allow me to operate on your mind. You will say, "No, this is too much! My freedom will be lost!" Mind is much more deeply identified. It is us. We do not know anything beyond it, so we are identified with it.

 

We know something beyond the body: the mind. That is why the possibility of being nonidentified with the body exists. But we do not know anything beyond the mind. Only if you become aware of thoughts can you come to know that mind is nothing but a process, an accumulation: a mechanism, a storehouse, a computer of your past experiences, your past learning, your past knowledge. It is not you; you can be without it. The mind can be operated on. It can be changed; it can be thrown from you.

 

And now, new possibilities are there. Someday even your mind will be able to be transplanted into someone else. Just as the heart can be transplanted, sooner or later memory will be able to be transplanted. Then a person who is dying will not die completely. At least his memory can be saved and transplanted into a new child. The child will acquire the whole memory of the person. He will talk about experiences through which he has not passed but he will say, "I have known." Whatever the dead man knew the child will know, because the whole mind of the dead person has been given to him.

 

This seems dangerous, and it is possible that we will not allow it to happen because our own identity will be lost. We are our minds! But to me, the possibility has much potentiality. A new humanity may be born out of it. We can be aware of the mind because the mind is not us; it is not "me." My mind is as much a part of my body as my kidney is. Just as I can be given a new kidney and I will still be the same person, with nothing changed, so too I can go on living with a transplanted mind with nothing changed. I can go on being the old self I was, but with a new mind added to me. Mind too is a mechanism. But because of our identification with it, tension is created.

 

So with the fourth body, awareness is health and unawareness is disease; awareness is non-tension and non-awareness is tension. Because of thoughts, because of your identification with them, you go on living in your thoughts and a barrier is created between you and your existential being.

 

There is a flower within your reach, but you will never come to know it because you are thinking about it. The flower will die, and you will go on thinking about it. Thinking has created a film between you and the experience -- transparent, but not so transparent; only an illusion of transparency.

 

For example, you are listening to me. But it may be that you are not really listening. If you are thinking about what I am saying, you have ceased listening. Then you have gone ahead or gone back; you are not with me. Either it is the past you will be repeating in your mind or it will be the future projected through the past, but it will not be what I am saying.

 

It is even possible that you can repeat verbatim what I have said. Your mechanism is recording it. It can repeat what I have said, reproduce it. Then you will claim, "If I have not heard you, how can I reproduce it?" But a tape recorder does not hear me. Your mind can go on working just like a machine. You may be present, or you may not be. You are not needed. You can go on thinking and still be listening. The mind -- the fourth body, the mental body -- has become a barrier.

 

Between you and that which is, there is a barrier. The moment you come to touch, you move away from the experience. The moment you come to look, you move away. I take your hand in my hand. This is an existential thing. But it may be that you are not there. Then you have missed. You have known -- you have touched and experienced -- but you were in your thoughts.

 

So at the fourth body one must be aware of one's thought process, taken as a whole. Not choosing, not deciding, not judging; just aware of it. If you become aware, you become nonidentified. And nonidentification with the mechanism of the mind is non-tension.

 

The fifth body is the spiritual body. As far as the spiritual body is concerned, ignorance of oneself is the only tension. All the time you are, you know perfectly well that you do not know yourself. You will pass through life, you will do this and that, you will achieve this and that, but the sense of self-ignorance will be with you continuously. It will be lurking behind you; it will be a constant companion no matter how much you try to forget it, how much you try to escape from it. You cannot escape from your ignorance. You know that you don't know. This is the disease at the fifth level.

 

Those in Delphi who wrote on the temple, Know Thyself, were concerned with the fifth body. They were working on it. Socrates continuously repeated: Know Thyself. He was concerned with the fifth body. For the fifth body, atma gyana, self-knowledge, is the only knowledge.

 

Mahavira said, "By knowing oneself, one knows all." It is not so. One cannot know all by knowing oneself. But the antithesis is correct. By not knowing oneself, one cannot know anything. So to balance this, Mahavira said, "By knowing yourself, you will know all." Even if I know everything, if I do not know myself, what is the use? How can I know the basic, the foundational, the ultimate, if I have not even known myself? It is impossible.

 

So with the fifth body, the tension is between knowing and ignorance. But remember, I am saying knowing and ignorance; I am not saying knowledge and ignorance. Knowledge can be gathered from scriptures; knowing cannot be gathered from anywhere. There are so many persons operating under this fallacy, this misunderstanding between knowledge and knowing. Knowing is always yours. I cannot transfer my knowing to you; I can only transfer my knowledge. Scriptures communicate knowledge, not knowing. It can say you are divine, you are atman, you are the Self, but this is not knowing.

 

If you cling to this knowledge, great tension will be there. Ignorance will be there along with false, acquired knowledge and information -- borrowed knowledge. You will be ignorant, but you will feel that you know. Then there is much tension. It is better to be ignorant and know perfectly that "I am an ignorant man." Then tension is there, but it is not so great. If you do not delude yourself with knowledge acquired from others, then you can seek and search within yourself, and knowing is possible.

 

Because you are, this much is certain: that whatever you are, you are. This cannot be denied. Another thing: you are someone who knows. It may be that you know others, it may be that you know only illusions, it may be that what you know is not correct, but you know. So two things can be taken for granted: your existence and your consciousness.

 

But a third thing is lacking. The essential personality of man can be conceived through three dimensions: existence, consciousness and bliss -- sat-chit-anand. We know that we are existence itself; we know that we are someone who knows -- consciousness itself. Only the bliss is lacking. But if you seek inside yourself, you will know the third also. It is there. The blissfulness, the ecstasy of one's existence is there. And when you know it, you will know yourself completely: your existence, your consciousness, your bliss.

 

You cannot know yourself completely unless bliss is known, because a person who is not blissful will go on escaping from himself. Our whole life is an escape from ourselves. Others are significant to us because they help us to escape. That is why we are all other-oriented. Even if one becomes religious, he creates God as the other. He becomes other-oriented again; the same fallacy is repeated.

 

So at the fifth stage, one has to be in search of oneself from within. This is not a search, but a "being in search."

 

Only up to the fifth body are you needed. Beyond the fifth, things become easy and spontaneous.

 

The sixth body is cosmic. The tension is between you -- your feelings of individuality, of limitation -- and the unlimited cosmos. Even in the fifth stage you will be embodied in your spiritual body. You will be a person. That "person" will be the tension for the sixth. So to achieve a non-tense existence with the cosmos, to be at one with the cosmos, you must cease to be an individual.

 

Jesus says, "Whoever loses himself will find himself." This statement is concerned with the sixth body. Up to the fifth it cannot be understood, because it is completely anti-mathematical. But from the sixth, this is the only mathematics, the only rational possibility: to lose oneself.

 

We have been enhancing ourselves, crystallizing ourselves. Up to the fifth body the crystallization, the selfhood, the individuality can be carried. But if someone insists on being an individual, he remains with the fifth. So many spiritual systems stop with the fifth. All those who say that the soul has its own individuality, and the individuality will remain even in a liberated state -- that you will be an individual, embodied in your selfhood -- any system that says this, stops with the fifth. In such a system, there will be no concept of God. It is not needed.

 

The concept of God comes only with the sixth body. "God" means the cosmic individuality, or, it would be better to say, the cosmic no-individuality. It is not that "I" am in existence; it is the total within me that has made it possible for me to exist. I am just a point, one link among infinite links of existence. If the sun does not rise tomorrow, I will not be. I will go out of existence; the flame will go out. I am here because the sun exists. It is so far away, but still it is linked with me. If the earth dies, as so many planets have died, then I cannot live because my life is one with the life of the earth. Everything exists in a chain of existence. It is not that we are islands. We are the ocean.

 

At the sixth, the feeling of individuality is the only tension against an oceanic feeling -- a feeling without limitation, a feeling that is beginningless and endless, a feeling not of me but of we. And the "we" includes everything. Not only persons, not only organic beings, but everything that exists. "We" means the existence itself.

 

So "I" will be the tension at the sixth. How can you lose the "I" how can you lose your ego? You will not be able to understand right now, but if you achieve the fifth, it will become easy. It is just like a child who is attached to a toy and cannot conceive of how he can throw it. But the moment childhood is gone, the toy is thrown. He never goes back to it. Up to the fifth body the ego is very significant, but beyond the fifth it becomes just like a toy that a child has been playing with. You just throw it; there is no difficulty.

 

The only difficulty will be if you have achieved the fifth body as a gradual process and not as a sudden enlightenment. Then, to throw the "I" completely in the sixth becomes difficult. So beyond the fifth, all those processes that are sudden become helpful. Before the fifth, gradual processes seem to be easier; but beyond the fifth, they become a hindrance.

 

So at the sixth, the tension is between individuality and an oceanic consciousness. The drop must lose itself to become the ocean. It is not really losing itself, but from the standpoint of the drop it seems so. On the contrary, the moment the drop is lost, the ocean has been gained. It is not really that the drop has lost itself. It has become the ocean now.

 

The seventh body is the nirvanic. The tension in the seventh body is between existence and non-existence. In the sixth, the seeker has lost himself, but not existence. He is -- not as an individual, but as the cosmic being. Existence is there. There are philosophies and systems that stop with the sixth. They stop with God or with moksha: liberation. The seventh means to lose even existence into non-existence. It is not losing oneself. It is just losing. The existential becomes non-existential. Then you come to the original source from which all existence comes and into which it goes. Existence comes out of it; non-existence goes back into it.

 

Existence itself is just a phase. It must go back. Just as day comes and night follows, just as night goes and day follows, so existence comes and non-existence follows; non-existence comes and existence follows. If one is to know totally, then he must not escape from non-existence. If he is to know the total circle, he must become non-existential.

 

Even the cosmic is not total, because non-existence is beyond it. So even God is not total. God is just part of Brahma; God is not Brahman itself. Brahman means all light and darkness combined, life and death combined, existence and non-existence combined. God is not death; God is only life. God is not non-existence; God is only existence. God is not darkness; God is only light. He is only part of the total being, not the total.

 

To know the total is to become nothing. Only nothingness can know the wholeness. Wholeness is nothingness, and nothingness is the only wholeness -- for the seventh body.

 

So these are the tensions in the seven bodies, beginning with the physiological. If you understand your physiological tension, the relief of it and the well-being of it, then you can very easily proceed to all seven bodies. The realization of at-easeness in the first body becomes a stepping stone to the second. And if you realize something in the second -- if you feel a non-tense etheric moment -- then the step toward the third is taken.

 

In each body, if you start with well-being, the door to the next body opens automatically. But if you are defeated in the first body it becomes very difficult, even impossible, to open up further doors.

 

So begin with the first body and do not think of the other six bodies at all. Live in the physical body completely, and you will suddenly know that a new door has opened. Then continue on further. But never think of the other bodies or it will be disturbing and will create tensions.

 

So whatever I have said -- forget it!

 

-Osho, “The Psychology of the Esoteric, #8”