“Whatsoever you are is revealed at birth without any effort. Every child, while he is being born, knows the truth because he has not yet been hypnotized. He has no desires; he is still innocent, virgin, not corrupted by any intention. His attention is pure, unfocused. The child is naturally meditative. He is in a sort of samadhi, he is coming out of the womb of existence. His life river is yet absolutely fresh, just from the source. He knows the truth, but he does not know that he knows. He knows it, not knowing that he knows it. The knowledge is absolutely simple. How can he know that he knows? There has never been a moment of not knowing.

      “To feel as if you know something, you have to have some experience of non-knowledge. Without ignorance you cannot feel knowledge. Without darkness you cannot see the stars. In the day you can’t see the stars because it’s all light. In the night you see the stars because it is all dark. Contrast is needed.

      “A child is born in perfect light; he cannot feel that it is light. To feel it, he will have to pass through the experience of darkness. Then he will be able to compare and see, and know that he knows. His knowledge is not yet aware. It is innocent. It is simply there, as a matter of fact. And he is not separate from his knowledge, he is his knowledge. He has no mind, he has simple being.

      “What Patanjali is saying is this: what you are seeking you have known before. Without knowing it, you have known it before. Otherwise, there would be no way to seek it because we can only seek something that we have known in some way, maybe very dimly, vaguely. Maybe the awareness was not clear – it was clouded in mist – but how can you seek something that you have not known before? How can you seek? How can you seek bliss? How can you seek truth? How can you seek the self, the supreme self? You must have tasted something of it, and that taste, the memory of that taste, is still treasured somewhere within your being. You are missing something; that’s why search, seeking arises.

      “The first experience of samadhi, the first experience of infinite power, siddhi, of potentiality, of being, is revealed at birth. But at that time, you cannot make knowledge out of it. For that, you will have to go through a dark night of the soul, you will have to go astray. For that you will have to sin. The word sin is very beautiful. It simply means going offtrack, missing the right path, or missing the target, missing the goal. Adam has to go out of the Garden of Eden. It is a necessity. Unless you miss God, you will not be able to know him. Unless you come to a point where you don’t know whether God is or is not, unless you come to a point where you are miserable, in pain and anguish, you will never be able to know what bliss is. Agony is the door to ecstasy.

      “Patanjali’s first sutra is simply saying that whatsoever is attained by the yogis is nothing new. It is a recovery of something lost. It is a remembrance. That’s why in India when somebody attains samadhi, we call it a rebirth; he is reborn. We call him dwij, twice born. One birth was unconscious, the first birth; the second birth is conscious. He has suffered, gone astray, and come back home” Osho