Osho : Yoga’s third sutra… I told you that existence has two forms. Energy – the first sutra. Second – energy has two forms – non-existence and existence. And the third sutra – existence has two forms. One we call conscious, the other we call unconscious. But they are two forms, not two separate things.
Those whom we call religious people, take it to be two things. They assume that consciousness is separate and unconsciousness is separate, body is separate and the soul is separate. But there is no such separateness. If you understand rightly, the part of soul that is within the grasp of the senses, is called the body and the part of body that is not in the grasp of the senses, is known as soul.
Consciousness and unconsciousness are two aspects of existence. A stone is lying there. It exists but it is unconscious. You are standing near it. You also exist. There is no difference in existence, both exist but one is conscious and the other is unconscious. But a stone can become conscious and you can become stone. They are convertible. That’s why you eat wheat and it becomes blood.
That’s why iron goes into your body and becomes alive. If we take out all the material from the body of a man and put it on a table, then it is not going to cost more than five rupees. A little iron, aluminium, phosphorus, copper, will come out. The major part is water. Hardly five rupees worth of material can be found in man’s body. But within the body of the man, there is something more, things have become conscious.
If your hand is hurt, it feels the pain and if the same hand had not been part of the body earlier, it would not have felt the pain. Tomorrow again it won’t be part of your body. Under the place where you are sitting, at least ten people must have been buried. The people that have lived on the whole earth, are so many that wherever we are standing, on that small place of one square foot, at least ten people’s bodies have turned into dust.
All the ten were alive at sometime – today they are lying like dust below your feet. Today you are alive, but for how long? Tomorrow, you will also lie like dust. Consciousness and unconsciousness are two aspects of the existence. There are not two existences, but two forms of one existence. Hence they are convertible. Hence unconsciousness can come out of consciousness, unconscious can move into the conscious.
It’s happening every day. We are doing it every day. Every day we are eating unconscious material as our food and it goes on becoming conscious inside us and every day all kinds of excreta comes out of our bodies and goes on becoming part of the unconscious. So at the one end man is consciousness and at the other end he is unconsciousness. And as he takes the unconscious in, it turns into the conscious within.
Consciousness and unconsciousness are also not two things. There has been a great misunderstanding about it also. Atheists say that only unconsciousness exists, but they find great difficulty in explaining this. They feel difficulty because if there is only unconsciousness then from where does consciousness come? Then, an atheist like Marx has to say that it is a by-product. Consciousness is not any real thing.
This has happened as a result of meeting and merging of the matter. It is not a thing, but an event. Charvak has to say that man’s consciousness is like a betel man who makes betel by mixing lime, catechu etc. on the betel leaf and when you chew it, red color is produced.
That red color is neither in the lime, nor in catechu, nor in the betel leaf, but it is produced by mixing all the three. That is the result of the close contact of all, that is a by-product, that is a cumulative by-product. It is like a case of wine. If you take all the ingredients separately that constitute the wine, you won’t get intoxicated. But when we take them collectively as the wine, they intoxicate.