19 There is no such thing as Being Stuck🔗

Let us look at these five modifications again: right knowledge, wrong knowledge, imagination, sleep and memory. Yesterday, we understood right knowledge and wrong knowledge. Today we will enter into imagination. Imagination can also lead you to joy or to pain, to suffering or to ecstasy. Understand, almost all meditation techniques are based on imagination. Except the initiations which are directly received from the Master, all other techniques use imagination. The science of unclutching, the first technique which Patanjali spoke about, is a straight initiation. 'Your mind is not a thing; it is an action, stop it. ' This is not something you need to do by using your imagination. It is a straight click. Other than a few techniques like this, all other techniques use imagination. When imagination is used to lead you to pleasure, to make you experience ecstasy, it is called meditation. When the same imagination is used to lead you to suffering, it is called mind!

There are only two things your mind can do: it can either continuously condition you or it can continuously liberate you. Your imagination can either go this way or that way; it cannot stand still. It cannot stand still. We need to understand this one fact. We always think, 'I may not be progressing spiritually, but I am better off than when I started, it is just that I am stuck somewhere.' Please be very clear, there is no such thing as being stuck. Either you progress or you are going down. There is no such thing as stuck. Either you are going up or going down, like skiing. There is no such thing as stop, stand or stuck! No. It doesn't happen in the inner field.

If your imagination is used by you to liberate yourself, to de-condition yourself, it is called meditation. If your imagination is used by you to bind you more and more, to create more and more bondage for you, it is called mind, conditioning.

I have seen people using even the great knowledge about yoga to create one more conditioning! I have seen people reading the Yoga Sutras and getting depressed, because they misuse this knowledge, they abuse it, they misinterpret it; they start imagining whatever they want using this knowledge. That is why these great truths should be heard directly from an enlightened being. The enlightened being knows how to interpret Patanjali. He knows where Patanjali put a comma, where Patanjali gave a strong emphasis, where Patanjali gave a gap. He knows.

problem starts.

So, if you put one comma, 'There is only One, God' - then it is a spiritual experience. This statement means there is only ONE thing, nothing else. So, when you listen to these great truths from an enlightened Master, you know where to put the comma, you know where Patanjali gave the gap, you know where he emphasized, you know where he is connecting or disconnecting words.

Imagination can either lead you to hell or heaven. Imagination is like a drug, like LSD. Many people experience ecstasy when they take a drug. Many people experience suffocation and suffering also. If you are accustomed to nightmares, when you take LSD you will have a feeling of suffocation; your LSD experience will be nightmarish. If you are accustomed to sweet dreams, if you take LSD, you will feel you are in heaven, that is all. The drug experience is nothing but the intensification of your imagination. Your imagination can move either in this direction or in that direction.

The other day I was reading a beautiful line - 'God is nowhere!'; somebody had put a comma next to 'w', so that it read as, 'God is now, here!' Sometimes, you need an enlightened person to put the comma, to create the gap, in the right place.

Another slogan I read was, 'There is only one God.' Someone had put a comma next to 'one', so it read, 'There is only one, God'! The first line - 'There is only one God' - is more like a moral science, uniting all the religions, creating peace. The second line - 'There is only one, God' - is a spiritual experience, a spiritual truth. These two statements may look similar, but their significance is totally different.

'There is only one God' can be uttered by anybody. Everybody utters the same thing, but they say at the end: there is only one God, and that is my God, not your God! That is where the problem starts. Everybody accepts that there is only one God, but everybody says that that God is my God, not your God, and my path to God is the only path, not your path. That is where the

I can give you thousands of examples, thousands of stories, because I am constantly working with people's imagination! It's my life. I am working with the imaginations of millions of people, directly and indirectly, trying to remove their imagination, or alter their imagination, or redirect their imagination! Many times, the imagination becomes so strong, they can either move completely away from the spiritual path or completely get enlightened.

Just today one of my disciples was telling me that whenever she used to come to the ashram, her daughter would object, asking her, 'Why are you going there? You don't care about us, you don't care about the family!' Recently her daughter attended a meditation program. Now she says, 'How could you come back from the ashram? How were you able to come back home at all?' Both are her imagination! When she had the wrong imagination, she was fighting with her mother asking, 'Why are you going?' Now, when she has the right imagination, she is fighting with her saying, 'How could you come back?' That is the mind! Both are imagination.

People sometimes ask me, 'How can imagination lead to enlightenment? After all, it is a mental activity. How can it lead to enlightenment, which is beyond the mind?' Understand, it is just like somebody taking poison. Taking poison is an action, but that can lead them to death, which is beyond all actions! If the right imagination is taken, it will lead you beyond the mind. You will be beyond mind, you will experience the no-mind state of ecstasy.

There is no such thing as being stuck in the same place. If I am not progressing, it means I am going down.