"Dream Sequences"

    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 the 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.