Question 1

IS THERE A SLEEP CHAKRA TOO?

Each chakra has a sleep part, except the last -- the SAHASRAR. At the seventh chakra, awareness is total: it is pure awareness. That's why Krishna says in the Gita: The yogi never sleeps. "The yogi" means one who has come to the last center of his being, to the ultimate flowering; one who has become a lotus. He never sleeps. His body sleeps, his mind sleeps: he never sleeps. Even when a Buddha is sleeping, deep in the innermost core of his being a light goes on burning bright.

The seventh chakra has no sleep part to it, otherwise all the six chakras have both: yin, yang. Sometimes they sleep and sometimes they are awake: day, night -- they have both aspects. When you feel hungry, the center for hunger is awake. If you have ever tried fasting, you would be surprised. If you try fasting, then for two, three days in the beginning you will feel hunger, and then sometimes hunger will disappear completely. It will come again, it will disappear again, it will come again... and you are not eating at all, so you cannot say, "The hunger disappears because I have eaten." You are fasting: sometimes hunger comes with great power, tries to overpower you -- and if you remain undisturbed by it, the hunger goes. The chakra has fallen asleep -- it will awake again in its turn when the day will come; it will fall back into sleep again.

The same happens with the sex center. You feel so hungry for love, then you have made love -- and then suddenly all desire for love disappears. The chakra has fallen asleep. If you try celibacy, without repression, then you will be surprised. If you don't repress your sexual desire, you simply watch it.... Try it for three months -- just be watchful. When the desire comes, sit silently, let it be there, let it knock on your doors, listen to it, be attentive -- but don't be carried away by it. Let it be there: don't repress it, and don't indulge in it. Be a witness -- and you will be surprised again. Sometimes the desire comes with such intensity that one feels one may go crazy. And then automatically on its own accord it disappears, and sex becomes irrelevant. Again it comes, again it disappears. The chakra goes on moving: sometimes it is day, then sex arises; sometimes it is night, then sex goes to sleep.

And so is true about all the six chakras below the seventh. Sleep does not have a separate chakra; sleep has a counterpart with each chakra, except SAHASRAR. So one thing more to be understood: as you grow higher and higher in your chakras, you will have a better quality of sleep because a higher chakra has a deeper quality of relaxation. The man who lives with the first -- MULADHAR -- will not have a deep sleep. His sleep will be very superficial because he lives with the physical, the material.

I can describe these chakras in this way too. First, the material -- MULADHAR. Second, the vital -- SVADHISTHAN. Third, the sexual, the electrical -- MANIPURA. Fourth, the moral, aesthetic -- ANAHATA. Fifth, the religious -- VISUDDHI. Sixth, the spiritual -- AJNA. And seventh, the divine -- SAHASRAR.

As you move higher, your sleep will go deeper and will have a new quality to it. The man who is food-obsessed and lives only to eat and eat and eat, his sleep will be very disturbed. His sleep will not have silence, peace to it; his sleep will not have music in it. His sleep will be nightmarish. the man who is a little higher than the food-addict, a man who is more interested in persons that in things and wants to absorb people, will have a deeper sleep -- but not very deep. The sexual person will have the deepest, in the lower realm. That's why sex is used almost as a tranquillizer. If you cannot fall asleep, make love -- and immediately you will be falling asleep. Love relieves you of tensions. In the West, doctors go on prescribing sex for those who suffer from sleeplessness. Now they even prescribe sex for people who are prone to heart-attacks, because sex relaxes, gives you deep sleep.

On the lowest plane, sex gives you the deepest sleep. Then if you move still higher, with the fourth -- ANAHATA -- sleep becomes tremendously tranquil, silent, very purifying and refined. When you love somebody, your relaxation is tremendous, immense. Just the idea that somebody loves you and you love somebody, relaxes you; all tensions are gone. The world is no longer alien, it is a home. With love, the house is transformed into a home and the alien world becomes a community, and nothing is far away. Through the person you love, God has come very much closer. A loving person knows a deep sleep. Hate, and you will miss your sleep. Be angry, and you will miss your sleep -- you will fall lower. Love, have compassion, and you will have a deep sleep.

With the fifth, sleep becomes almost prayerful. Hence, all the religions of the world have been insisting that before you go into sleep, pray. Let prayer be associated with sleep. Never fall into sleep without prayer, so the rhythm goes on vibrating in your sleep. The reverberations of the prayer will transform your sleep. The fifth is the center of prayer -- and if you can pray, and if you can fall asleep praying, you will be surprised in the morning: you will awake, and you will awake praying. Your very wakefulness will be a sort of prayer. With the fifth, sleep becomes prayer. It is no longer ordinary sleep. You are not only going into sleep, you are going in a subtle way into God.

Sleep is a door when you forget your ego; and it is easier to drop into God than while you are awake, because when you are awake the ego is very strong. When you fall deep into sleep your healing powers function to their total optimum capacity. Hence the physicians say that if a person is ill and cannot sleep then there is no possibility for his being healed -- because healing comes from within. Healing comes when the ego is absolutely nonexistential: when the ego is not, then the healing power flows from the within -- it wells up. The man who has moved to the fifth, the VISUDDHI chakra -- to the chakra of prayer -- his life becomes a benediction. You can see: even if he walks you will feel the quality of relaxation in his gestures, in his movements.

The sixth chakra -- AJNA -- is the last, where sleep becomes perfect, beyond which sleep is not needed: the work is finished. Up to the sixth, sleep is needed. With the sixth, sleep becomes meditative -- not even prayerful but meditative -- because in prayer there is a duality: I and Thou, the devotee and the deity. With the sixth, even that duality disappears. Sleep is profound... as profound as death. In fact, death is nothing but a great sleep, and sleep is nothing but a small death. With the sixth, sleep penetrates to your deepest core... and then the work is finished. When you come out of the sixth to the seventh, sleep is no more needed. You have gone beyond duality. Then you are never tired, so sleep is not needed.

This state of the seventh is the state of pure absolute awareness -- call it the state of Christ, Buddha, God.

The same person has asked another question, related to the first:    IF SEX CHANGES INTO LOVE, DOES THE URGE TO DOMINATE BECOME WILL, OR THE EFFORT TO BE CONSCIOUS?

This too has to be understood. The first three lower centers are deeply related with the second part -- the three higher centers. First, MULADHAR, SVADHISTHAN, MANIPURA: these are the first three. The second three are: ANAHATA, VISUDDHI, AJNA. These are the two pairs. They are joined together deeply, and it has to be understood -- it will be helpful for you, for your journey.

The first chakra is concerned with food and the fourth chakra is concerned with love. Love and food are deeply related, joined together. Hence it happens that whenever somebody loves you, you don't eat much. If a woman is loved she remains lean, thin and beautiful. If she is not loved she starts becoming fat, ugly, goes on accumulating; she starts eating too much. Or, vice versa too: if a woman does not want to be loved, she starts eating too much. That becomes a protection -- then nobody will be attracted towards her.

Have you watched it? If a beloved comes to your home, a friend has come, and you are so happy, and so full of love -- that day, appetite disappears. You don't feel like eating -- as if something more subtle than food has fulfilled you, something more subtle than food is inside you and the emptiness is not there. You are full, you feel full. Miserable people eat too much, happy people don't eat too much. The more happy a person, the less he is addicted to food -- because he has a higher food available: love. Love is food on a higher plane. If food is food for the body, love is food for the spirit.

Now even scientists are suspecting it. When a child is born, the mother can give just milk, bodily food. She may not give love -- then the child will suffer; his body will grow but his spirit will suffer. Just bodily nourishment is not enough: spiritual nourishment is needed. If a mother only gives food and not love then she is not a mother, she is only a nurse. And the child will suffer for his whole life -- something will remain stuck, ungrown, retarded. The child needs food, the child needs love: love is needed even more than food.

Have you watched it? If a child is given love he does not bother about food much. If the mother loves the child she is always worried that the child is not drinking as much milk as he should. But if the mother is nonloving then the child drinks too much milk. In fact it is difficult to take him away from the breast because the child becomes afraid: love is not there, he has to depend only on physical food -- the subtle food is missing.

And this goes on happening in your whole life. Whenever you feel that you are missing love, you go on stuffing your body with food -- it becomes a substitute. Whenever people feel empty and they don't have that thrill that love brings, that zest that love brings, that energy that love releases, they start stuffing their body with food. They have fallen back to their childhood; they are in a regressed state.

Children who are given enough love are never addicted much to food. Their spirit is so full: the higher is available -- who bothers about the lower?

Remember, all the religions have talked about fasting for a certain reason. Unless you are taken out of your food obsession prayer will not happen. Hence, fasting gives a great possibility to pray. I am not telling you to become a fast-addict. I am not telling you to start torturing yourself. But if you are a food-addict then fasting is the medicine. If you have been eating too much ten bring a balance. Eating too much you remain too attached to the physical... and you cannot fly into the sky. You are too burdened: a little fasting will be helpful. And in fasting people have observed that their prayer becomes very easy, simple; it is no more a problem. Because when you are not burdened too much by food and the body, the spirit is weightless, can fly: the spirit has wings....

The first and the fourth are related. And my experience is this: that if people are helped to be more loving they forget about food by and by. The old religions insist for fasting, I insist for love -- and you can see the connection. The old religions insist for fasting, so that you can be taken away from your too-much-food obsession. I insist for love -- my technique is more subtle. Then, without even becoming aware, if you are loving you will be taken away from your food obsession. The old religions sometimes can be dangerous, because the food-addict can turn into a fast-addict. He can become another sort of neurotic person: first he was eating too much, now he may start starving himself. In both the cases he remains concerned with food.

I have watched many Jaina monks: they continuously think about food. They believe in fasting, they do fasting, but they are continuously thinking about food -- what to eat, what not to eat, how to eat, when to eat -- their whole psychology is based on food. Food becomes too much of a problem. Hence, I don't insist on fasting, I insist on love -- and fasting comes as a shadow. If you are tremendously in love, one day you will find you don't want to eat today. The love is so much, and you don't want to destroy it. You are flowing so high, you don't want to stuff yourself and bring yourself low... you don't want to move on earth today. And the fasting comes naturally -- you don't think about it, you don't take a vow about it, you don't take a decision about it: suddenly you feel that higher food is available and the lower is not needed... and the fasting happens. Then fasting is beautiful.

The second chakra is related to the fifth. The second chakra is political -- domination, domination over others -- and the fifth chakra is spiritual power -- domination over oneself. With the second chakra you try to overpower people, with the fifth you try to overpower yourself. With the second you try to conquer others, with the fifth you try to conquer yourself. With the second you become a politician, with the fifth you become a priest. And priests and politicians have always remained together: there is a conspiracy between the priest and the politician. The kings and the priests, the politicians and the popes -- they are joined together. They may not be aware, but this is the basic cause behind it: the politician needs the support of the priest, and the priest feels somehow in tune with the politician, because both hanker for power -- one over others, the other over oneself, but the goal is power.

Remember it. I would not like you to become a politician and I would not like you to become a priest either. In fact there is no need to dominate others and there is no need to dominate oneself. Domination as such should be dropped: one should simply be. The very idea to dominate is egoistic -- whether you dominate others or yourself makes no difference. Have you not observed it? -- a person who feels that he has great self-control becomes a great egoist. He goes on declaring that he has tremendous control over himself. His ego is strengthened -- there is danger.

Domination as such has to be dropped. You should not become a priest. Become religious -- don't become a priest. To become religious is one thing, to become a priest is another. The priest by and by starts declaring that he not only has power over himself, he has power over God. The priest by and by starts declaring that he has power over spiritual forces, psychic forces, occult, esoteric... he becomes more and more obsessed with inner powers. But ALL power is an ego-trip.

Be aware of the second, and be aware of the fifth too: there are pitfalls, there are dangerous possibilities. And once a person becomes a priest he stops; his growth is no more going on. Once you have become a priest you are no more religious; your whole energy has become stagnant. The religious person is always flowing: from first to second, from second to third, from third to fourth, he is always flowing. Up to the seventh he knows no stopping -- there is no station on the way. And with the seventh he also does not stop, because with the seventh he disappears... there is nobody to stop.

Up to the sixth you can stop and become stagnant. With each center there is a possibility that you may fall and become stagnant. If you become stagnant with the first, you will know only the material. If you become stagnant with the third, you will know only the sexual -- and so on and so forth. The second and fifth are joined together, and so are the third and sixth. The third is the sex center and the sixth is the tantra center.

Now, one thing to be remembered always: if you are not very alert you may go on believing that you are moving into tantra, and you may be simply rationalizing your sexuality -- it may be nothing but sex, rationalized in the terminology of tantra. If you move into sex with awareness, it can turn into tantra. If you move into tantra with unawareness, it can fall and become ordinary sex. It has happened in India -- because only India has tried it.

All tantra schools in India, sooner or later, were reduced to sex orgies. It is very difficult to keep aware... it is almost impossible to keep aware. If from the very beginning the discipline has not gone very deep in you, there is every possibility that you will start deceiving yourself. Tantra schools arose in India with great energy, with great insight. And they had something -- because that is the last center humanly available: the seventh is superhuman, the seventh is divine. The sixth is the spiritual center.

From sex to tantra: a great revolution, a mutation, is possible in man. And in the Eat, people became aware that if you become meditative while making love, the quality of sex changes and something new enters into it -- it becomes tantric, it becomes prayerful, it becomes meditative... it becomes SAMADHI. And a natural flow happens: from the third you can jump to the sixth -- you can bypass the fourth and the fifth. It is a great temptation, a great leap -- you can bypass, a shortcut -- but dangerous too, because you may be simply deceiving yourself... and man is very clever -- very clever in finding rationalizations.

I have heard...

From the diary of a globe-trotting young cinema queen:

MONDAY: The Captain saw me on deck and was kind enough to ask me to sit at his table for the rest of the trip.

TUESDAY: I spent the morning on the bridge with the Captain. He took my picture leaning against the "Passengers not allowed on this bridge" sign.

WEDNESDAY: The Captain made proposals to me, unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.

THURSDAY: The Captain threatened to sink the ship unless I agreed to his proposals.

FRIDAY: I saved eight hundred lives today.

You can find rationalizations. The temptation is always there -- you can find good reasons for wrong motives.

Tantra can any moment become just a garbed sexuality; just in the guise of tantra, nothing but sexuality. Then it is dangerous, more dangerous than ordinary sex -- ordinary sex is at least honest. You don't pretend, you don't claim something higher; you simply say it is ordinary sex. But tantra can be dangerous: you start pretending that this is something higher, something superhuman, something not of this world. Keep this in mind. The third and the sixth are very deeply related. The third can become the sixth, the sixth can fall into the third. A great awareness is needed.