Hindus have always believed that samadhi is conscious sleep. In sleep it happens automatically that you are no more. The existence is, and you are no more; but you are deeply unconscious so you don’t know what is happening. If this same phenomenon can happen consciously, you become enlightened. Buddha moves to the same source, to the same source that you move every night in deep sleep, in dreamless sleep. But Buddha moves to that source consciously, alert, aware. He knows where he is moving to, he knows what is happening, and when he comes back from that deep source, he comes totally different. The old has disappeared and a new being, a new energy has arisen out of it. Of this being, the center is the universe; and with this transfer of the center, all your worry, all your anguish, all your hell disappears, simply disappears. It is not solved, it is simply not there. It cannot exist there without the ego.

So how to be consciously deep asleep? How to move into sleep consciously? How to remain alert while you are losing the ego? The ego is a by-product, a by-product of your whole upbringing, a by-product of the natural course of life. It has to be there. There is no other way. No being can evolve without being involved with the ego. But a point comes when the ego can be dropped and should be dropped, and the being should transcend it.

The ego is just like the shell of the egg. It is needed, it protects. Just like the shell of a seed, it is needed, it protects. But the protection can become dangerous also, if it protects too much. If it goes on protecting and doesn’t allow the seed to sprout, then it becomes a hindrance. It must dissolve into the earth so that the inner life evolves out of it. It must die.

The seed must die. Every man is born as a seed. The ego is the outer covering; it protects the child. If a child is born without the ego, without the feeling that “I exist,” he cannot survive. He will to be able to protect himself, he will not be able to struggle, he will not be able in any way to exist. He needs a strong center. Even if it is false, it is needed. But a moment comes when this help becomes a hindrance. It protects you from outside, but it become so strong that it will not allow you, the inner being, to spread, to go beyond it, to sprout. So ego is needed – and then ego-transcendence is needed.

If someone dies with the ego, he has died as a seed. He has died without really attaining the destiny that was possible, without attaining existence consciously These techniques are for how to destroy this seed.

The first technique:

Feel the consciousness of each person as your own consciousness.
So, leaving aside concern for self, become each being.

Feel the consciousness of each person as your own consciousness. In reality it is so, but it is not felt so. You feel your consciousness as yours, and others’ consciousnesses you never feel. At the most you infer that others are also conscious. You infer because you think that because you are conscious, other beings like you must be conscious. This is a logical inference; you don’t feel them as conscious. It is just like when you have a headache you feel your headache, you have a consciousness of it. But if someone else has a headache, you infer – you cannot feel the other’s headache. You simply infer that whatsoever he is saying must be true and he must have something like you. But you cannot feel it.