In the same way, a mantra, a repeated sound vibration, causes deep sleep. When a particular mantra is being repeated continuously, you are bored. There is nothing mysterious about it. Constantly repeating a particular word bores you, you cannot live with it anymore. Now you will begin to feel sleepy, you will go into a sort of sleep; you will become unconscious. The whole method of hypnosis, in fact, depends upon boredom. If your mind can be bored with something then you go into a sleep, sleep can be induced.

Our whole consciousness depends on new objects. That is why there is so much longing for the new – for new sensations, a new dress, a new house – for anything that is new, even if it is not better. With something different, you feel a sudden upsurge of consciousness.

Because life is an evolution of consciousness – this is good. As far as life is concerned, it is good. If a society is longing for new sensations, life progresses, but if it settles down with the old, not asking for the new, it becomes dead; consciousness cannot evolve.

For example, in the East we try to be content with things as they are. This creates a boredom because nothing is ever new. Then for centuries everything goes on continuously as it is. You are just bored. Of course, you can sleep better – the West cannot sleep; insomnia is bound to exist when you are constantly asking for the new – but there is no evolution. And these are the two things that seem to happen: either the whole society becomes sleepy and dead, as has happened in the East, or else the society becomes sleepless, as has happened in the West.

Neither is good. You need a mind that can be aware even when there are no new objects. Really, you need a consciousness that is not bound with the new, not bound with the object. If it is bound with the object, it is going to be bound with the new. You need a consciousness that is not bound with the object at all, which is beyond object. Then you have freedom: you can go to sleep when you like, and you can be awake when you like; no object is needed to help you. You become free, really free, from the objective world.

The moment you are beyond object you go beyond subject also, because they both exist co-jointly. Really, subjectivity and objectivity are two poles of one thing. When there is an object you are a subject, but if you can be aware without the object, there is no subject, no self.

This is to be understood very deeply: when the object is lost and you can be conscious without objects – just conscious – then the subject is also lost. It cannot remain there. It cannot! Both are lost, and there is simply consciousness, unbounded consciousness. Now there are no boundaries. Neither the object is the boundary nor the subject.

Buddha used to say that when you are in meditation there is no self, no atman, because the very awareness of one’s self isolates you from everything else. If you are still there, objects are still there. “I am,” but “I” cannot exist in total loneliness; “I” exists in relationship with the outside world. “I” is a relata. Then the self, the “I am,” is just something inside you that exists in relationship to something outside. But if the outside is not there this inside dissolves; then there is simple, spontaneous consciousness.