Vigyan Bhairav Tantra - Meditation Technique 7

 

 

The seventh technique:

 

WITH INTANGIBLE BREATH IN CENTER OF FOREHEAD, AS THIS REACHES HEART AT THE MOMENT OF SLEEP, HAVE DIRECTION OVER DREAMS AND OVER DEATH ITSELF.

 

 

More and more you are entering deeper layers. WITH INTANGIBLE BREATH IN CENTER OF FOREHEAD... If you have known the third eye then you know the intangible breath, the invisible prana in the center of the forehead, and then you know the showering -- the energy, the light showers. AS THIS REACHES HEART... When the shower will reach your heart... AT THE MOMENT OF SLEEP, HAVE DIRECTION OVER DREAMS AND OVER DEATH ITSELF

 

Take this technique in three parts. One, you must be able to feel the prana in breath -- the intangible part of it, the invisible part of it, the immaterial part of it. It comes if you are attentive between the two eyebrows; then it comes easily. If you are attentive in the gap, then too it comes, but a little less easily. If you are aware of the center at your navel where breath comes and touches and goes out, it also comes, but with less ease. The easiest way to know the invisible part of breath is to be centered at the third eye. But wherever you are centered, it comes, you begin to feel the prana flowing in.

 

If you can feel the prana flowing in you, you can know when you are going to die. Six months before the day of your death you begin to know, if you can feel the invisible part of breath. Why do so many saints declare the day of their death? It is easy, because if you can see the content of the breath, the prana flowing into you, the moment the process reverses you can feel it. Before you die, six months before you die, the process reverses: prana begins to flow out of you. Then the breath is not taking it in. Rather, on the contrary, the breath is taking it out -- the same breath.

 

You cannot feel it because you do not know the invisible part -- you know only the visible, you know only the vehicle. The vehicle will be the same. Now the breath is carrying prana in, leaving it there; then the vehicle goes back empty. Then again it is filled with the prana and it comes in. So the ingoing breath and the outgoing breath are not the same, remember. The ingoing breath and the outgoing breath are the same as vehicles, but the incoming breath is filled with prana and the outgoing breath is empty. You have taken in the prana and the breath has become empty.

 

The reverse happens when you are nearing death. The incoming breath comes prana-less, empty, because your body cannot suck prana from the cosmos. You are going to die; there is no need for it. The whole process has reversed. And when the breath goes out, it takes your prana out. One who has been able to see the invisible can know his day of death immediately. Six months before, the process reverses.

 

This sutra is very, very significant: WITH INTANGIBLE BREATH IN CENTER OF FOREHEAD, AS THIS REACHES HEART AT THE MOMENT OF SLEEP, HAVE DIRECTION OVER DREAMS AND OVER DEATH ITSELF. While you are falling into sleep this technique has to be practiced -- then only, not at any other time. While you are falling asleep, only then; that is the right moment to practice this technique. You are falling asleep. By and by, by and by, sleep is overtaking you. Within moments, your consciousness will dissolve; you will not be aware. Before that moment comes, become aware -- aware of the breath and the invisible part prana, and feel it coming to the heart.

 

Go on feeling that it is coming to the heart. The prana enters from your heart into the body. Go on feeling that the prana is coming into the heart, and let sleep come while you are continuously feeling it. You go on feeling, and let sleep come and drown you.

 

If this happens -- that you are feeling invisible breath coming into the heart and sleep overtakes you -- you will be aware in dreams. You will know that you are dreaming. Ordinarily we do not know that we are dreaming. While you dream you think that this is reality. That too happens because of the third eye. Have you seen anyone asleep? His eyes move upwards and become focused in the third eye. If you have not seen, then see.

 

Your child is sleeping... just open his eyes and see where his eyes are. His pupils have gone up and they are focused in the third eye. I say look at children, do not look at grown-ups -- they are not believable because their sleep is not deep. They will just be thinking that they are asleep. Look at children, their eyes move up. They become focused in the third eye. Because of this focusing in the third eye you take your dreams as real, you cannot feel they are dreams -- they are real. You will know when you get up in the morning. Then you will know that "I was dreaming." But this is the later, retrospective realization. You cannot realize in the dream that you are dreaming. If you realize it, then there are two layers: dream is there but you are awake, you are aware. For one who becomes aware in dreams, this sutra is wonderful. It says, HAVE DIRECTION OVER DREAMS AND OVER DEATH ITSELF.

 

If you can become aware of dreams, you can do two things. You can create dreams -- one. Ordinarily you cannot create dreams. How impotent man is! You cannot even create dreams. If you want to dream a particular thing you cannot dream it; it is not in your hands. How powerless man is! Even dreams cannot be created. You are just a victim of dreams, not the creator. A dream happens to you; you cannot do anything. Neither can you stop it nor can you create it.

 

But if you move into sleep remembering the heart being filled with prana, continuously being touched by prana with every breath, you will become a master of your dreams -- and this is a rare mastery. Then you can dream whatsoever dreams you like. Just note while you are falling asleep that "I want to dream this dream," and that dream will come to you. Just say, while falling asleep, "I do not want to dream that dream," and that dream cannot enter your mind.

 

But what is the use of becoming the master of your dreaming? Isn't it useless? No, it is not useless. Once you become master of your dreams you will never dream -- it is absurd. When you are master of your dreams, dreaming stops; there is no need for it. And when dreaming stops, your sleep has a different quality altogether, and the quality is the same as of death.

 

Death is deep sleep. If your sleep can become as deep as death, that means there will be no dreaming. Dreaming creates superficiality in sleep. You move on the surface because of the dreams; because of hanging on to the dreams, you move on the surface. When there is no dreaming you just drop into the sea, its depth is reached.

 

Death is the same. That is why people in India have always been saying that sleep is a short duration of death, and death is a long sleep -- qualitatively they are the same. Sleep is a day-to-day death. Death is a life-to-life phenomenon, a life-to-life sleep. Every day you are tired. You fall into sleep and you regain your vitality, your aliveness in the morning; you are reborn. After a life of seventy or eighty years you are tired completely. Now such short durations of death won't do; you need a great death. After that great death or great sleep, you are reborn with a totally new body.

 

Once you can know dreamless sleep and can be aware in it, then there will be no fear of death. No one has ever died, no one can die -- that is the only impossibility.

 

Just a day before I was telling you that death is the only certainty, and now I say to you that death is impossible. No one has ever died and no one can die -- that is the only impossibility -- because the universe is life. You are again and again reborn, but the sleep is so deep that you forget your old identity. Your mind is washed clean of the memories.

 

Think of it in this way. Today you are going to sleep: it is just as if there were some mechanism -- and soon we will have this -- like that which can erase on a tape recorder, which can wipe a tape clean so that whatsoever was recorded is no more there. The same is possible with memory, because memory is really just a deep recording. Sooner or later we will have a mechanism which can be put on the head and it will clean your mind completely. In the morning you will no longer be the same person because you won't be able to remember who it was who went to sleep. Then your sleep will look like death. There will be a discontinuity; you won't be able to remember who went to sleep. This is happening naturally. When you die and you are reborn, you cannot remember who died. You start again.

 

With this technique, first you will become the master of your dreams -- that is, dreaming will cease. Or if you want to dream you will be able to dream, but dreaming will become voluntary. It will not be non-voluntary, it will not be forced upon you; you will not be a victim. Then the quality of your sleep will become just like that of death. Then you will know that death is sleep.

 

That is why this sutra says: HAVE DIRECTION OVER DREAMS AND OVER DEATH ITSELF. you will know that death is just a long sleep -- and helpful and beautiful because it gives you new life; it gives you everything anew. Death ceases to be... with cessation of dreaming, death ceases to be.

 

There is another meaning to gaining power over death, direction over death. If you can come to feel that death is just a sleep, you will be able to direct it. If you can direct your dreams, you can direct your death also. You can choose where you are to be born again, to whom, when, in what form; you will become master of your birth also.

 

Buddha died... I am not referring to his last life, but to his last-but-one life, before he became Buddha. Before dying he said, "I will be born to such and such parents; such will be my mother, such will be my father. But my mother will die immediately... when I am born my mother will die immediately. Before I am born my mother will have certain dreams." Not only do you gain power from your dreams, you gain power from others' dreams also. So Buddha, as an example, said, "Certain dreams will be there. When I will be in the womb, my mother will have certain dreams. So whenever any woman has these dreams in this sequence, know well I am going to be born to her."

 

And it happened. Buddha's mother dreamed the same sequence. The sequence was known all over India, because it was no ordinary statement. It was known to everyone, particularly those who were interested in religion and the deeper things of life and the esoteric ways of life. It was known, so the dreams were interpreted. Freud was not the first interpreter -- and, of course, not the deepest. Only in the West was he the first.

 

So Buddha's father immediately called dream interpreters, the Freuds and Jungs of those days, and he asked, "What does this sequence mean? I am afraid. These dreams are rare, and they go on repeating in the same sequence. There are one, two, three, four, five, six dreams continuously being repeated. There are the same dreams, as if one is seeing the same film again and again. What is happening?"

 

So they told him, "You are going to be the father of a great soul -- one who is going to be a buddha. But then your wife is going to be in danger, because whenever this buddha is born it is difficult for the mother to survive."

 

The father asked, "Why?" The interpreters said, "We cannot say why, but this soul who is going to be born has made a statement that when he will be born again, the mother will die immediately."

 

Later on Buddha was asked, "Why did your mother die immediately?" He said, "Giving birth to a buddha is such a big event that everything else becomes futile afterwards. So the mother cannot exist. She will have to be born again to start anew. It is such a climax giving birth to a buddha, it is such a peak, that the mother cannot exist beyond it."

 

So the mother died. And Buddha had said in his previous life that he would be born while his mother was standing under a palm tree -- and it happened. The mother was standing under a palm tree -- standing while Buddha was born. And he had said, "I will be born while my mother is standing under a palm tree, and I will take seven steps. Immediately, I will walk. These are the signs I give to you," he said, "so that you will know that a buddha is born." And he carried out everything.

 

And this is not only so about Buddha. It is so about Jesus, it is so about Mahavir, it is so about many others. Every Jain TIRTHANKARA has predicted in his previous life how he is going to be born. And they have given particular dream sequences -- that such and such will be the symbols -- and they have told how it will happen.

 

You can direct. Once you can direct your dreams you can direct everything, because dream is the very stuff of this world. This life is made out of the stuff of dreams. Once you can direct your dreams you can direct everything. This sutra says, OVER DEATH ITSELF. Then one can give a certain birth, a certain life to oneself.

 

We are just victims. We do not know why we are born, why we die. Who directs us -- and why? There seems to be no reason. It all seems just a chaos, just accidental. It is because we are not masters. Once we are masters it is not like this.

 

-Osho, "Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, Vol 1, #5"