Those six long years…. And they must have looked like sixty years to him, because they were really painful – all kinds of ascetic practices, long fasts, torturing the body, doing all kinds of yoga exercises, many of which are just stupid, standing on your head, distorting your body, utterly ridiculous postures – he did all. Whatsoever was said to him, he followed it literally, word for word. He went to all kinds of teachers; they must have all been pseudo. Not even a single one of them was a buddha, was yet enlightened. They gave him many strategies to work out.
If he had not been doing them perfectly well, they would have been safe. They would have told him, “Because you are not doing totally, hence you are missing.” But this was impossible. The man was so authentic, so sincere, so innocently total, that even those pseudo teachers had to tell him, “Excuse us, forgive us – this is all we know. And you have done it all, and we cannot expect more from you. Now you have to go somewhere else. This is all we know, and now you know that this is not going to give you enlightenment – it has not given enlightenment to us either. But it is very rare to find a person like you. People come and they do it very partially. With them we can always say, ‘Because you are not total, hence you are missing,’ but we cannot say this to you. Your innocence forbids it. Your totality…we are ashamed. In fact, we ourselves have not done these practices so totally. Forgive us, and find another teacher. And if you ever find enlightenment, don’t forget us. If you ever find truth, please remember us – we are also seeking and searching. We are also blind,” those teachers confessed to Buddha.
After six years of wandering, one evening, sitting silently underneath a tree, by the side of the River Niranjana, this revelation welled up within his being: that human effort cannot help you to transcend humanity. It can only happen. It cannot be caused. But now these six years of austerity had purified him; this fire had made him gold. These six years had helped him to see the utter uselessness of the mind. Now he was ready to be silent, effortless, passive.
That night he slept with no search, not even for truth, because search creates desires, desires can be fulfilled only through effort – the search disappeared. The desires disappeared. The efforts disappeared. For the first time he slept totally relaxed – neither worldly desires tortured him nor other-worldly desires. He had no dreams that night, that was the first night without dreams, because dreams are a by-product of your desires. The worldly people dream of worldly things, the other-worldly people dream of other-worldly things. And the worldly people are not so much deceived, because if in the night you see a dream that you have come upon a great treasure of diamonds – in the morning you know that it was only a dream. But the other-worldly people are very much deceived by their dreams.
Somebody sees Krishna playing on his flute; somebody sees Jesus Christ, somebody sees Rama, and so on and so forth. And they cannot say that these are dreams, they are so valuable to them. They start thinking that these are experiences. These are dreams as much as other dreams.