There is an old Tibetan technique called “The Lion’s Roar.” If you are angry, sexual, filled with hatred, jealousy, then the Tibetan master will give you this technique, “The Lion’s Roar.” You have to sit before a mirror, and you are to imagine that you are a lion, not a man. You have to make your face like a lion, you have to put your tongue out, and you have to roar. And you have to practice it so that the imagination becomes so true that you forget that you are a man daydreaming that he is a lion. And when the point comes when you have really fallen prey to your own imagination, and you have become the lion, and a real roar comes out of you, suddenly you are transformed. In that roar, all hatred, anger, sex, disappears, and you will fall into a deep silence such as you have not known before. In old Tibetan monasteries they have a special room with many mirrors. Whenever someone is suffering from something like anger, hatred, or jealousy, he is to be sent to that mirrored room and he has to remain there until he comes to a climax. And when he comes to the climax, the whole monastery will know, because a real lion will be roaring there. To us, he has gone mad. The whole monastery will gather and welcome the man, and he will come out a totally different man. It may take three days, it may take seven days. Food will be supplied to him, but he is not allowed to come out. He has to persist in imagining that he is a lion, until from the very roots of the unconscious the roar comes. The whole body is involved, every cell of it; every cell in it roars, and in that roar everything is thrown out. It is the deepest catharsis possible. And you will never see that man angry again because now the poison is not there. For the first time the face will become human.

Your face cannot be human because so much is suppressed there. The jealousy, the hatred, the anger that you have suppressed, is there – layers upon layers are just hidden under the skin. They are making your face. But they can be released – just by this daydream, a directed daydream.

In the West they now have another technique they call psychodrama. That too is one of the oldest Buddhist methods – to become a part of a drama, to act it so totally that you forget that you are simply acting. The acting becomes action, and you are not the actor, you become a real doer in it. It changes you.

Tantra says that if you can change dreaming, imagination, if you can change your mind and the pattern of it, the reality behind will be different. Because it is deeply rooted in reality, you can move through the mind. These techniques are just to change the way and the style in which your mind has been behaving up to now.

The first technique:

Feel your substance, bones, flesh, blood, saturated with the cosmic essence.

Try with simple experiments. For seven days try one simple experiment: feel your blood, your bones, your flesh, your body, filled with sadness – every cell of the body sad; dark night around you; very heavy, depressed; not a single ray of light; no hope, gloomy, just as if you are going to die. Life is not throbbing in you; you are just waiting for death. It is as if death has already settled, or is settling. For seven days contemplate on the feeling that death has entered throughout the body; it has penetrated deep to the bone, to the very marrow. Go on thinking in this way, don’t disturb this mood. And then, after seven days, see how you feel.

You will be just a dead weight. All feeling will have disappeared, the body will not be felt as alive. And what have you done? You have been eating, you have been doing everything the same as you have always been doing; the only change has been in the imagination – there is a new pattern of imagination around you.

If you succeed in it…. You will succeed. Really, you have already succeeded in it; you are doing it, you are expert in doing this, unknowingly. That’s why I say start with sadness. If I say be filled with bliss, it will be very difficult. You cannot conceive of it. But if you can do it with sadness, then you will become aware that if sadness can happen to you, why not happiness? If you can create a sad milieu around you and become a dead thing in it, then why can’t you create an alive milieu around you and be alive, dancing? The other becomes conceivable.