Question 1:

THIS is one of the paradoxes of spiritual life: the more one dissolves into the Divine, the more unique one becomes. The dissolution is not of the individuality but of the self. The dissolution is not of the uniqueness but of the ego. The more you are an ego, the more you are like others, because everyone is an egoist.

The ego is the most ordinary thing in the world. Everyone is an egoist; even a newborn child is an egoist - a perfect egoist. So it is not anyone's achievement; it is not extraordinary. Really, it can be said that to be just ordinary is the most extraordinary thing possible because no one feels just ordinary. So to feel oneself extraordinary is just the most ordinary thing. Everyone feels like that! So ego is not something unique.

If you have an ego, it is not something unique. Really, egolessness is the most unique thing, the most uncommon - rare. It happens only sometimes. Centuries pass and rarely the event happens that someone becomes egoless - a Buddha, a Jesus. But when we say that someone becomes egoless, it does not mean that he is not. Really, for the first time, now he is - authentically grounded into the very Being. He is no more an ego.

So take it from a different root: ego is a false phenomenon - just an appearance, not a reality. It is not something grounded in the Being - just a dream, a thought, just a mental construction. So the more you belong to the ego, the less you belong to the Existence. The more you concentrate on your ego, the less and less you are authentic. You become false - an existential lie.

When we talk about becoming empty, nothing, valley-like, we mean that there is no ego - but you ARE! Let me say it in this way: I say "I am", but when the ego dissolves there remains the pure "am-ness". The "I" is no longer there, but "am-ness" is there, and for the first time pure, total, uncontaminated. The ego contaminates it.

The word "personality" and the word "individuality" must not be confused. They are totally different They do not mean any similar entity: they are not the same at all. Personality belongs to the ego. Individuality belongs to the Being. Personality is just a facade. The ego is the center and the personality is the circumference. It is not individuality at all.

This word "personality" is very meaningful. It is derived from the Greek word "persona". "Persona" means a mask. In Greek drama, the characters, the actors, will use masks to hide their faces so the real face is hidden and the masked face becomes the reality. "Personality" means a mask - that which you are not but only appear to be.

So we have many faces; really, no one has one personality, mmm? - we have multi-personalities.

Everyone has to change faces the whole day. You cannot remain with one face. It will be so difficult because every time you face someone else you have to use another face. Before your servant you cannot have the same face as you have before your master. Before your wife you cannot have the same face as you have before your beloved. So, continuously, we have a flexible system of changing faces.

For the whole day, the whole life, we are continuously changing faces. You can be aware of this.

You can feel when you change a face and why you change it and how many faces you have. So, really, a personality means a system of flexible faces, and when you say that someone has a great personality it only means that he has a more flexible system. He is not a fixed man: he has a more flexible system. He can change very easily. He is a big actor.

This is personality; you have to construct it every moment. So no one can be at ease with his personality. It is a constant effort. So if you are tired, your personality will lose its lustre. In the morning your personality has a lustre, in the evening it is lost. The whole day of utility: it is constantly changing. So when I use the word "personality", I mean a false appearance which you have created around yourself.

Individuality is something else. Individuality does not mean something constructed and created by you, but the very nature of your being. Again, the word "individuality" is very meaningful. It means that which cannot be divided, which is indivisible. We have an inherent intrinsic nature which cannot be divided, which is indivisible. Carl Gustav Jung chooses the word "individuation" as one of the deepest phenomena. He said individuation is the way towards Truth, towards the Divine - individuation: being an individual.

The Indian term "yoga" means the same thing as individuation. The term "yoga" means to conjoin again that which has become divisible, to join again that which has become divided, to come again to the indivisible. So when translating "yoga" into English, it would be better if we call it "the way to individuation". This individuality remains and becomes more penetrating, becomes more sharp.

The moment you lose the ego, the moment you discard your personalities, you become individual.

This individuality is a unique phenomenon. This is unrepeatable. A Buddha cannot be repeated; a Gautam Siddharth can be repeated. A Jesus can be repeated, but not Jesus Christ. Jesus means the personality; Jesus Christ means the individuality. Gautam Siddharth is just ordinary; he can be repeated. Anyone can be Gautam Siddharth. But the moment Gautam Siddharth becomes Enlightened and becomes the Buddha, now the phenomenon is unrepeatable. It is unique! It has never been before and it will never be again. This Buddhahood, this peak of realization, is so unique that it cannot be repeated.

So when I said to be just like a valley and when I said that every valley will echo differently, I meant that every valley has its own individuality. Buddha has his own, Jesus his, Krishna his. So, really, this will be good to understand.

Why do Krishna, Christ and Buddha differ so much? They differ! They differ as much as there is any possibility to differ, but still they are, in a very deep way, one. As far as individuation is concerned they are one; as far as individualities are concerned they are different. They have come to the Undivided. They have realized the Undivided, the basic unity of Existence. But because of this basic unity and its realization, it does not mean that now they are not unique. now they are really unique. That's why I say this is one of the paradoxes.

Two ordinary persons can differ, but their difference can never be total, absolute - never! Even in their difference they have similarities. Really, their difference is always of degrees. Even if they are totally contrary to one another, their difference is of degrees. A person who is a communist and a person who is anticommunist, even they are different only in degrees. The person who is anti-communist is still communist to a lesser degree; and the person who is a communist is still a capitalist to a lesser degree. The difference is always of degrees. And they can change, they can change camps very easily; there is no problem. Ordinarily, they change. The difference is just like that of cold and heat - only of degrees. But a Buddha and Krishna, a Christ and Mohammed, and a Lao Tzu and Mahavir - their difference is not of degrees. They can never meet. And this is the paradox: they have come to Oneness, and yet they can never meet. The difference is not of degrees. The difference is of their uniqueness.

What do I mean by this uniqueness?

We can conceive of oneness very easily. A drop of water drops into the ocean and becomes one with it, but that oneness is just dead - a dead oneness. The drop lost itself completely; it is nowhere now. A Buddha is not dropping in that way. His dropping is in a different way. If you put a flame before the sun, the flame becomes one with the sun, but the individuality is not lost; it still remains itself. If we burn fifty flames in this room they will create one light, but every flame will be a flame unique m itself. So this dissolution into the Cosmic is not a simple dissolution. It is very complex.

The complexity is this: the one who dissolves, remains. Rather, on the contrary, for the first time, he is.

This individuality echoes differently, and that is the beauty of it. It is beautiful! Otherwise it will be just ugly. Just think: if Buddha responds in the same way as Jesus, the world will be poorer for it. Very poor. A Buddha responds in his own way, a Jesus in his own way. The world is richer for it and there is beauty. The world is freer and you can be yourself.

But this distinction must be remembered: when I say that you can be yourself, I do not mean your ego. When I say you can be yourself, I mean your nature, your Tao, your Existence. But it has an individuality. That individuality is not personality. So I say they belong to the same Existence, yet individually. They respond from the same depth, but individually. No sense of ego is there, but the uniqueness remains.

This world is not just a colourless unity; it is not monotonous. It has multi-colours; it is multi-tonal.

You can create music with one note also, but then it will be just monotonous and boring. It cannot be lively; it cannot be beautiful. A more subtle and complex harmony is achieved through many notes - multi-phonal. A harmony runs through, but it is not a monotonous thing. And each note has its own individuality. It contributes to the total harmony, and it contributes only because it has its own individuality.

A Buddha contributes only because he is a Buddha, and a Jesus contributes only because he is a Jesus. He gives a new note. a new vibration. A new harmony is born because of him. But that is possible only because he has an individuality. And this is not only for deeper things. Even for very trivial and small things, a Buddha and Jesus differ. A Buddha walks in his own way; no one else can walk like that. A Jesus looks in his own way; no one else can look like that. Even their eyes, the very gestures, the very words they use, are unique. The other cannot even conceive....

This world is a harmony of unique notes, and the music is richer for that - every valley echoing in its own way.

All those good-wishers who try to impose a dead unity, and who try to wash out individuality from everywhere, who say that the Koran means the same thing as the Gita, who say that Buddha teaches the same thing as Mahavir, are not really aware of what nonsense they are talking. And if they could win, the world would become just a poor world. How can the Koran say the same thing as the Gita?

And how can the Gita say the same thing as the Koran? The Koran has its own individuality - no Gita can say that, and no Koran can repeat the Gita - because Krishna has his own aura, Mohammed his own. They never meet, and yet, I say, they stand on the same ground. They never meet, and this is the beauty. And they will never meet. They will be just like parallel lines running to infinity.

They will never meet! This is what I mean by uniqueness: they are like peaks. The higher the peak goes, the less is the possibility of meeting with another peak. You can meet when you are on the ground; everything is meeting. But the higher you go, the more of a peak you become, and the less is the possibility of any meeting. So they are like Himalayan peaks, never meeting. And if you try to impose a false unity over them, you will just destroy the peaks.

They are different, but their difference need not be inimical, their difference need not be a conflict.

The conflict arises only because we are not ready to accept differences. Then we try to find similarities. Either we must have similarities or we will have conflict. Either we must speak the same thing or we must be enemies. We have only two alternatives - and both are wrong. They belong to one attitude. Why should they not be different? - altogether different, meeting nowhere?

What is the need of conflict? Really, different notes create a beautiful harmony. Then there is a deeper meeting - no meeting in the notes themselves, but in what the notes create; in the harmony there is a meeting.

But one must begin to feel that harmony. If one only knows a jarring note - a Mohammed, a Jesus, a Buddha, are just notes - no harmony is felt. And the universe is a harmony. If you can begin to feel the gaps and the underlying unity and the soaring peaks meeting nowhere, and if you can see this whole in a totality, in a comprehensive unity, you then accept both - the individuality and the common harmony. Then there is no problem. There is not!

Question 2:

They cannot meet! - even physically. They came, so many times, very near meeting. Once they were both staying in one SARAI - inn - in one part Mahavir and in another part Buddha. But there was no meeting. They passed through the same villages. Their whole lives they were confined to Bihar, a very small area. They visited the same villages; they remained in the same villages; they talked to the same audiences. Their followers went on coming from Buddha to Mahavir and from Mahavir to Buddha. There was much controversy; there was much conversion. But they never met.

They cannot meet! Their very beings are now such peaks that the meeting is not possible. The meeting has become intrinsically impossible. Even if they just sit side by side, they can never meet.

Even if to us they appear to be meeting and embracing each other, they can never meet. Their meeting has become impossible. They are so unique, they are so peak-like, the inner meeting is impossible. What is the use of meeting outwardly? It is useless, it is meaningless!

This seems inconceivable to us. We think that two good persons should meet. For us, the non- meeting attitude is something bad. But really, there is no non-meeting attitude - there is impossibility!

It is not that Buddha would not like to meet Mahavir. It is not that Mahavir is resistant. No - it is simply impossible; it just cannot happen. There is no attitude about it. So, really, this is miraculous.

Mahavira Meditated With Eyes Open

They remained in one village, they stayed in one sarai, but never, neither in Buddhist literature nor in Jain scriptures, is there any reference to anyone suggesting that they should meet - not a single reference. There is not even a reference that it was suggested that it would have been better if they both met. This is miraculous - surprising! Neither has denied the other. Neither Buddha nor Mahavir has said, "I will not meet." Why didn't they meet? It is a sheer impossibility! It is not possible!

For us who stand on the ground it looks strange. But if you stand on the peak, then it will not look strange. Why not ask a Himalayan peak to meet another? They are so near - so near! Why can they not meet? Their very being, their very peak-hood, creates the impossibility. So it is not a question of why they never met - they cannot, they will never. The very door is closed. And yet I say they are one: howsoever one peak may differ from another, in their very roots they are one. They may both belong to the same part of earth, but only in the roots are they one.

There is another point to be pondered over: because they are so much one in the roots, there is not even any necessity to meet. Only those who are not one in the ground will try to meet, because basically they know there is no meeting.

Many people have asked me why I have not tried a great synthesis of all the religions. Gandhi has tried; many others, including Theosophists, have tried. They have tried for a great synthesis of all the religions. I say that if you try, you show that you know there is no synthesis. The effort shows that you feel that somewhere religions are divided. I do not feel this at all. In the roots they are one, and in the peaks they are divided and they must be divided. Every peak has its own beauty. Why destroy it? Why try to create a false thing which is not there? A peak must be a peak - an individual.

In the earth they are one.

So the Koran must remain purely Koran. Nothing should be imposed, infiltrated from the Gita or the Ramayana or anything else. No interpolation, no mixing! The Koran must remain in its purity the Koran. It is a peak - a beautiful peak. Why destroy it? This is possible only if you are aware of a deeper unity in the ground, in the roots.

Religions are one in their roots, but never in their expression - and they should not be. So as the world progresses more, as human consciousness becomes more conscious, more integrated, there will be more religions. Not less - more! Ultimately, if every human being becomes a peak. there will be as many religions as there are human beings. Why should anyone follow Mohammed if he himself can become a peak? Why should he follow Krishna if he himself can become a peak?

This is unfortunate, that one has to follow anybody. This is just a necessary evil. If you cannot become a peak, only then do you have to follow. But follow in such a way that the sooner you can become a peak the better. We can have a beautiful world, a greater world with a greater humanity, with everyone as a unique peak. But that peak can come only through individuation, through dissolving the ego and the false personality, and remaining centered in your nature, in your pure being. Then you become like a valley, and then there are echoes.

Chiyono

Question 3:

Intellectual listening means that when you are listening you are simultaneously arguing with it. A constant argument is going on. I am saying something to you, you are listening, and constantly there is an argument inside: whether this is right or wrong. You are comparing with your own concepts, your own ideology, your own system. So constantly, when you are listening to me, you are comparing whether I confirm your ideas or not, whether I am according to you or not; whether you can concede to me or not, whether I am convincing or not. How is listening possible in this way?

You are too full of yourself, so it is miraculous that within this constant inner turmoil you are capable of listening to something. And even then, whatsoever you have heard will not be what I have said. It cannot be - because when the mind is full with its own ideas, it goes on giving colors to everything that comes to it. It hears not what is being said, but what it wants to hear. It chooses, it drops, it interprets, and only then does something penetrate in - but that has a completely different shape.

So this is what is meant by intellectual listening.

If you want to go deep in understanding what is being said. this inner turmoil must stop. It must cease! It must not continue! Otherwise, you are in your own way, and constantly destroying the very possibility of something which can happen to you. You can miss, and everyone is missing much.

We live enclosed in our own minds, and we carry that enclosure with us everywhere. So whatsoever we see, whatsoever we hear, whatsoever happens around us, it is never transmitted to the inner consciousness directly. The mind remains in between, always playing tricks.

One must be aware that this is happening. This is the first thing in order to go deep. This is the first thing for the second stage of listening - to be aware of what your mind is doing to you. It is coming in between. Wherever you move, it moves before you. It is not like a shadow which follows. you have become a shadow to it. It goes, and you have to move. It moves before you and colors everything.

So you are never in contact with the "facticity" of anything. The mind creates a fiction.

You must be aware of this phenomenon of what the mind is doing. But you are not - because we are identified with the mind, we never think that the mind is doing something. When I say something and it does not tally with your thought, it is not that you will think that your mind is not tallying with the thought. You will think, "No, I am not convinced." You do not have a gap between you and your mind. You are identified - and that is really the problem. That is how the mind can play tricks with you.

You are identified with a thought or with a thought process. And this is strange, because only two days before this, the thought was not yours. You heard it somewhere; now you have absorbed it and it has become your own. And now this thought will say, "No - this is not right because this is not according to me." You will not feel the difference that this is mind speaking, memory speaking, the mechanism speaking. You will not feel that "I must remain aloof".

Even if you have to compare, even if you have to judge, you must remain aloof - aloof from your memory, from your mind, from your past. But there is a subtle identification: "My mind is me." So I say, "I am a Communist" or "I am a Catholic" or "I am a Hindu." I never say, "My mind has been brought up in such a way that my mind is Hindu " This is the fact: you are not Hindu. How can you be a Hindu? It is only the mind. If you are the Hindu, then there is no possibility of any transformation.

The mind can be changed, and you must remain capable of changing it. If you become identified with it, then you lose your freedom. The greatest freedom is to be free of one's own mind. The greatest, I say - to be free from one's own mind - because it is a subtle bondage, so deep that you never feel it as a bondage The very prison becomes your home.

Be constantly aware that your mind is not your consciousness. And the more you are aware, the more you will feel that consciousness is something totally different. Consciousness is the energy, mind is just the thought content. Be the master of it! Don't allow it to be the master; don't allow it to just go ahead of you everywhere. Let it follow you, use it, but don't be used by it. It is an instrument, but we are identified with this instrument. Mm? So break the identification. Remember that you are not the mind.

But, really, so-called religious persons always remember: "We are not the body." They never remember: "We are not the mind." And body is not a bondage at all. Mind is the bondage! Your body is not a bondage at all! Your mind is. And, really, your body comes from nature, from the Divine, and your mind from the society. So body has a beauty, but never the mind. Mind is always ugly. It is a cultivated thing, a false construct. The body has a very beautiful realm. And if you can drop the mind, then you will not feel any conflict at all with the body. The body becomes just a door to the greater - to the infinite expanse. There is nothing ugly in the body - mmm? - it is a natural flowering. But the so-called religious people are always against the body and always for the mind.

They have created such a nuisance! They have created such confusion! And they have destroyed all sensitivity, because body is the source of all sensitivity. If once you begin to be against your body, you will become insensate, unfeeling.

The mind is just an accumulation of past knowledge, information, experiences. It is just a computer.

We are identified with it. One is a Christian, one is a Hindu, one is a Communist. one is a Catholic, one is this and that, but one is never oneself - always identified somewhere with something.

Remember this: be aware, and create a distance between you and your mind. Never create any distance between you and your body. Create a distance between you and your mind! You will be more alive and more childlike and more innocent and more aware.

So the first thing is to create a distance: that is, not to identify. Remember you are not the mind, then the first listening will change into the second.

The second is emotional - deeply felt, sympathetic. It is a love attitude. You are hearing some music or seeing a dance, so you don't just remember the intellect - you begin to participate. When you are seeing a dance, your feet begin to participate. When you are listening to music, your hands begin to be participants; you begin to be part of it. This is a sympathetic way of listening, deeper than intellect. That's why, whenever you can listen with your heart and feeling, you feel elated, you feel transported to somewhere else. Then you are not in this world. Really, you are in this world, but you feel that you are not in this world. Why? Because you are not in the world of the intellect.. A different realm opens - you begin to be actively in it.

Intellect is always an onlooker standing out - never in. So the more intellect grows in the world, the more we become just passive observers - in everything. You will not dance, but you will watch others dancing. If this goes on as it is going on, day by day. soon you will not be doing anything. You will just be looking at others doing. This will be possible some day: you will not love - it has become possible, it is there now - you will just watch others loving. What are you watching in a film? Others loving! You are just an onlooker - a dead, passive onlooker. You are watching others playing. You are watching others singing, others dancing.

Somewhere one character of Camus says, "Love is not for me. My servants will do it for me" - love!

A really rich man! - even love has to be done by his servants. Why should he do it? The logic is the same. If servants can play music for you, if servants can do prayer for you, why not love? A servant is doing worship for you in the temple, so why not love? If a servant can be used in between you and the Divine, why not between you and your lover or beloved? What is wrong in it? The logic is the same. And, really, soon those who are rich will not do their loving themselves. because servants can do it! Only poor ones will do their own loving and will feel very miserable because of it.

Everything can be deputed. You can be just an onlooker, because intellect is basically an onlooker - never a participant. If we create a world around intellect, then it is going to happen.

The second center is more involved. You begin to participate. I say you will understand more if you begin to participate, because the moment you are sympathetic your mind is open - more open than when you are in a constant fight. It is open, receptive, inviting.

This is how one can listen through feeling. But still there is a depth even deeper than feeling and that depth I call total listening, with your full being - because feeling is again a part. Intellect is a part, feeling is a part, the source of action is another. There are many parts in your existence, in your being. You can listen with feeling better than with intellect, but still it is only a part. And when you are listening with your feeling, the intellect will just go to sleep; otherwise it will disturb. It will just go to sleep!

The third is to listen totally - not even participating with it, but being one with it. One way is to watch dance through intellect; another is to feel dance and begin to participate in it. Sitting in your seat, the dancer is dancing. You begin to participate; you begin to keep the beat. And the third is becoming the dance oneself - not the dancer, but the dance. The total being is involved. You are not even out to feel it: you are it!

So remember that the deepest knowledge is possible only when you become one with something.

This is by faith.

How to come to it? Be aware of your intellect; be unidentified with the mind. Then come to the second - feeling. Then be aware that feeling is just a part and your whole being is just Lying dead.

The whole is not there, so bring the whole into it. When you bring the whole in. it is not that the intellect is denied or feeling is denied. They are in it, but now in a different harmony. Nothing is negated. Everything is there, but now in a different pattern. The whole being is participating - is in it - has become it.

So when you listen, just listen as if you have become the listening. When I am saying something, let it go into you not with a fight, not with a sympathy, but with a totality. Be it! Let it go. Vibrate - with no resistance, with no feeling, but with totality! Experiment with it, and you will begin to experience a new dimension of listening. And that goes not only for listening: it is for everything. You can eat that way, you can walk that way, you can sleep that way - you can live that way!

Kabir sends his son, Kamal, to the field one day. Kabir's cows have no food today, so he sends Kamal to cut some grass from the field. Kamal goes and has not returned. The afternoon has come and the evening has come, and Kabir is just waiting and the cows are hungry. Where has Kamal gone? So Kabir goes to find out.

Kamal is standing in a grass field. The sun is setting, the wind is blowing, the grass is moving wavelike, and Kamal is standing there moving wavelike just with the grass. The whole day has passed like that, and Kabir comes and says, "Have you gone mad, Kamal? What are you doing?" Suddenly Kamal is brought back to a different world and he says, "Oh, I had forgotten that I am Kamal; I became just grass. I was not! I became just grass! I moved with it, I danced with it, and I forgot for what I had come here. Now tell me, for what had I come?" Kabir says, "To cut the grass!" So Kamal laughs and says, "How can one cut oneself? Today it is not possible. I will come again and try, but I cannot promise because I have known a different realm. A different world has opened before me." Kabir, on this day, named him Kamal. Kamal means "a miracle".

This is the miracle! If you can be totally in anything, the miracle happens. And this is not only for listening: it is for everything. Be total! Move totally! Don't divide yourself. Never divide yourself. Any division is just wasting your energy, any division is just suicidal. Don't divide! If you love, love totally - don't withhold. If you listen, listen totally - don't withhold anything. Just move totally.

Only this total movement can bring you to a realization where ego cannot be found. It can be found with intellect. it can be found with feeling - but never with your total being. It can be found with intellect because intellect has no center of its own. It will not allow the center of the total to come into operation, so the intellect has to create its own center. It becomes the ego. Feeling will not allow the total, so feeling has its own center - it becomes the ego.

That's why men and women have different types of egos, because man's ego is intellect-centered and woman's ego is feeling-centered. They have different qualities of ego. And that's why a man can never understand a woman, a woman never understands a man. They have different types of centers and different languages.

When intellect says 'yes', it means 'yes'. When emotion says 'yes', it does not necessarily mean 'yes'.

When emotion says 'no', it may mean 'yes'; it may just be an invitation to be persuaded more. And if you take a woman at her word, you will be in difficulty because her word is not an intellectual assertion. It has a different way of movement, a different quality. Intellect has a direct, mathematical ego. You can understand it easily. So to understand a man is not very difficult because the logic is straight: two and two make four. To understand a woman is different because the logic is not straight. It moves in circles, so two and two never make four. They can make anything, but never four! The logic moves in a circle. Emotion moves in a circle; logic and intellect move in a straight line.

When something moves in a circle, you can never be certain because it may mean just the contrary.

Soon it will move in a circle, and it will be the opposite of its own assertion. So with a woman one has to be aware not of what she has said but of what she means. The actual assertion is not to be given much importance - what she means. And the meaning may be something very different.

So it has always happened that very intellectual persons have never been at ease with their wives - never! Socrates, a very intelligent person, an intellectual genius, knew every nook and corner of logic, but was never at ease with his wife, Xanthippe - never. He could not understand what she was saying! That is, he understood what she was saying, but he never understood what she meant.

He was so logical that he always missed the point. He went direct, straight, and she went in circles.

Intellect has its own ego - direct, straight; emotion has its own ego - circular. They both have egos. But the totality has no ego. The totality has individuality. So when you reach totality, you are neither man nor woman. You are both and you are neither. You transcend and comprehend both.

That is what is meant by ARDHANARISHWAR - half-man, half-woman: a deep communion inside happens. You have become total, one, with no division.

One thing you must note: this is not a fixed arrangement. When I say that a man has an intellectual ego, it is not a fixed arrangement. In some moments he may just regress to an emotional ego; in some moments a woman may come up to an intellectual ego. Then things are more confused.

When a man is in difficulty, he will just regress to an emotional ego. He will begin to weep and begin to talk in ways which are not even comprehensible to him. And he will say later on, "What happens I cannot say! In spite of myself I begin to weep; I begin to act in ways in which I would not like to act." A very strong man, in a particular situation, may begin to behave in a very emotional way. And a very emotional woman, in a particular situation, may begin to behave very manlike. In a different setting the ego may change from one center to another. That creates even more difficulties - but one has to be aware.

With feeling or with intellect, the ego is bound to be there. Only with totality is there no ego. So this I give you as a criterion: If you are and you don't feel any "I", you are total. You are sitting here: listen as if there is no "I" in you. Ears are there, a listening process is there, your consciousness is there, but no "I", then you are total. How can you be divided without an "I"? Without an ego, how can you be divided? The ego is the division.

And just as I said that there are many personalities, there are also many egos. Each center has its own ego. Intellect has its own, emotion has its own, the sex center has its own ego - its own "I". If you go deep down into the bio-structure of the body, each cell has its own ego. That is the division.

If you are without an ego, if just you are, with no "I-feeling" anywhere, then you are total. And in that totalness - even for a single moment if you are total - you will be Awakened suddenly. And then anything can awaken you - anything!

A zen nun is carrying an earthen water-pot from the well. For thirty years she has been in this monastery - working continuously, meditating, making every effort to achieve a tranquillity, a state of stillness where the Truth can reflect. But it has not come.

Suddenly the water-pot falls down and is broken, shattered. She stands there, sees it shatter, and the water flows out - and she is Awakened. Suddenly she achieves the Enlightenment. She runs, she dances, she goes into the temple.

Her Master comes and touches her feet and says, "Now you are a Buddha: you have achieved." But the nun asks, "Tell me, how did this happen? - because I tried and tried and tried continuously for thirty years, and it was not happening. And this morning I decided that this seems just absurd and it will not come, so I left every effort. So why, this day, has this happened?"

The Master says, "Because for the first time you were total and without an ego. Effort creates an ego. The very effort was the barrier. Now, without any effort, without any motive, without any ambition, you were just carrying a water-pot and suddenly the pot falls - bang! - the pot has fallen and broken, and suddenly you become aware, with no ego. And the very listening the very breaking of the pot, the shattering, the noise, the flowing of the water, and you there without any ego, listening totally - the thing has happened!"

So when I say listen totally, I mean this.

Question 4:

It is a difficult question - difficult because the happening is always inside, in a way private. And you cannot know of it or about it from the outside. You can never decide from the outside whether someone has achieved the cosmic sound AUM. The deeper you go, the more private is the happening. The public world from where you can decide is just outside. So how to decide whether one has achieved the cosmic sound, whether one has gone to the deepest ground, has known?

You cannot decide it from the outside; that is one thing. Of course, many things which can be known from the outside will begin to happen through the person who has reached. But still, the feeling that he has reached the cosmic ground will just be an inference - an inference from his behaviour. And behaviour can be false; behaviour can be imitated. Buddha walks a certain way; Buddha sleeps a certain way; Buddha talks a certain way. You can imitate it without being a Buddha. And sometimes it happens that you can imitate better than Buddha - mmm? - because Buddha is just unaware.

Whatsoever is happening is just happening. So you can imitate it in a better way; you can practise it; you can become an expert. And Buddha may not even be able to compete with you because he may not ever have repeated anything.

So from outside, imitation is possible - very easily possible. To achieve the authentic is arduous; to imitate is easy - very easy, because inside you remain the same; just outside you can create. So it is difficult. It is difficult to say from outside what has happened inside. One thing: you cannot decide from outside. But from inside if you ask, "How can I know whether I have achieved the cosmic sound AUM or not?" - if you ask this, then I will say that when you achieve it you know it. If someone asks, "How can I know whether I am alive or dead? How can I know?" what will we say to him? We will say that even if you can think this much - whether you are alive or dead - you are alive.

When you come to the cosmic sound, to the very ground of being; when you hear the AUM - not uttered by you, not uttered by anyone, but just as a cosmic sound all around - you know. The phenomenon is so real that, really, the question never arises whether this AUM, this sound, is real.

The question arises whether I am real now or not. You fade, you become just unreal. You become just a phantom, a ghost. Now your reality is not like it has ever been. All around, the real is.

But it may even be a dream. You also feel in a dream that everything is real, so how to decide whether this sound that you are hearing is a dream or a reality? The decision comes from a certain source. You will never be the same again - the before and after. This hearing of the sound will be a discontinuity in your existence. You will never be the same again. You will not even be able to connect yourself with your past; it will just drop. You will only remember it as if it belonged to someone else. Your memory will not be yours now. After this experience you will be reborn, and your rebirth will be the evidence. You will never be the same again. The old has dropped; you cannot find the old man again. It is nowhere now. It was there. it is now not there. For you this will be the evidence that you have heard.

But I think there is a third implication also. One can go on repeating AUM, so how will one find out whether the AUM one is repeating and the AUM one has come upon are different or just the same?

You will feel it, because you are the center of the AUM that you utter, and then it vibrates outside.

Mmm? - this is the dimension. You create it just as you throw a stone into a silent lake. The stone becomes the center, and then there are waves which go outward towards the banks. When you say AUM, you create a center in yourself: you drop a stone, and then the sound goes out and out and out, far off from you. This is the dimension, the direction.

When you hear the sound AUM, the cosmic sound, it is different. It comes; it never goes. It is not a going away from you: it is a coming to you. And the center is nowhere to be found. It just goes on coming and coming and coming and coming. You are overflowed with it. You see the difference?

You are not the center. Rather, you are the bank, and from some unknown center the sound waves come to you. They go on coming, they never stop. So this direction - the sound center you, and the waves going outward - is AUM uttered by you. You not as the center, and sound waves coming and coming and coming from somewhere - the center is never known and will never be known....

Someone asked Jacob Boehme, "Where is the center of God? Where is the center of the universe?" He said, "Either everywhere or nowhere." Both mean the same.

So when you begin to feel that the AUM is coming to you... let me say it in a different way. Ordinarily, seekers go towards the Divine, but until the Divine comes to you, remember, you may just be in a fantasy, just in a dream. If you go to the Divine, to God, to find the center, you will go on searching, but you will never find it.

How can you find the center? The center can only come to you. So it is always a false relationship - the seeker going towards God. The real relationship is completely different - God coming to the seeker. When you are ready, He comes. When you are open, He becomes the guest. When your invitation is valid, total, He is there. It is always a coming, never a going. So, really, there is not a phenomenon of man in search of God, but, rather, it is God in search of man.

But you are hiding, escaping, so He cannot find you. Wherever He comes, you escape. You are a closing, never an opening. He goes on knocking, and your doors are shut. So when this AUM begins to come, when it is a coming to you, you are just filled, you are just bathed in it - and the source is not found. If you can find the source, again it may be that someone is creating the sound from outside - and it is coming! Someone may be playing AUM on some instrument, and it is coming.

There is no source of it. That's why mystics have always said that God is the sourceless One. There is no source. It comes as if from nowhere - just out of the blue - and it is here. When you feel this, then you know that the AUM is now cosmic. It doesn't belong to you.

In Zen they use koans - puzzles, absurd puzzles - as meditation objects. Rinzai always gave to his disciples the koan of hearing the sound of one hand clapping. It is impossible! How can you hear the sound of one hand? So whenever seekers would be there he would say, "First go and find out what is the sound of one hand clapping. Hear it! and then come to me and tell me." It looks absurd, but when a man like Rinzai would say this to someone, the person would go, close the door, sit down in meditation, and he would think. Then he would come within hours and say, "What nonsense you have asked! How can it be?" Rinzai would say, "I have heard it, so you go and again try. I also said to my Teacher, 'How is this possible?' but he said, 'I have heard, so you try.' And I tried, and now I have heard. So you try - and it will come." The person would go on coming. Every morning he would have a DARSHAN - go to see his Teacher - and then the Teacher would ask, "Have you heard?" He would say, "No, I have not heard yet." The Teacher would tell him to try harder. So he would begin to imagine the sound. because it is very frustrating to go every day with nothing to show to the Teacher. So he would say, "Oh yes, I have heard it. It is just like wind passing through leaves." But the Teacher would say, "No, it is not, because wind and leaves are two things. It must be of one. Wind passing through leaves is just an ordinary sound. Two things can create friction, so it is still of two hands. You cannot befool me! Wind passing through the trees - it is of two hands. Never come again unless you hear the sound of one hand!" And he would come, and again and again he would say, "I have heard this and that, or I have heard the sound of the water-drops falling on the roof." With so many things he would come, and he would be denied. And this would go on for months.

Then suddenly one day Rinzai asked, "Where is that man? He has not come and it has been so long. Go and find out what he is doing." He was found in his cell or under some tree just lost, and he was brought to the Teacher. And the Teacher said, "Now you have heard. Haven't you heard?" And he said, "I have heard! I have heard!" What sound has he heard? There is only one sound: that is the sound of the cosmic AUM which is without friction - not two things, but simply the sound. It is not created by any clapping.

The moment someone says, "I have heard," he will be a different person. You cannot be the same again. Mm? And the difference will always be: sound coming to you from nowhere - sourceless sound, uncreated. Then it is the cosmic AUM.

Baizhang Huaihai

Question 1:

THE past is not dynamic at all: it is totally dead. But still it has a weight - a dead weight. That dead weight works; it is not dynamic at all. Why the dead weight works has to be understood.

The past is so forceful because it is the known, the experienced, and mind always feels fearful of the unknown, the unexperienced. And how can you desire the unknown? You cannot desire the unknown. Only the known can be desired. So desires are always repetitious. They repeat, they are circular. You always move in the same pattern, in the same circle. The mind becomes just a groove of repetitions, and the more you repeat a particular thing, the more weighty it becomes, because the groove goes deep.

So the past is important not because it is dynamic; it forces you to do something and to desire not because it is forceful, powerful, alive - but only because it is a dead groove. And the past has been repeated so many times that to repeat it has become easy and automatic. The more you repeat a particular thing, the more easy and convenient it becomes. The basic convenience is this: that if you are repeating a thing, you need not be aware.

Awareness is the most inconvenient thing. If you are repeating a particular thing, then you need not be aware. You can be just deep asleep, and the thing can be repeated automatically, mechanically.

So it is convenient to repeat the past because you need not be aware. You can go on sleeping, and the mind will repeat itself.

That's why those who say that desirelessness is the state of bliss also say that desirelessness is synonymous with awareness. You cannot be desireless unless you are totally aware. Or, if you are aware you will find that you are desireless, because desires can have a repetitive force upon the mind only when you are not aware. So the more asleep the mind is, the more repetitive and the more mechanical. So the past has the grip only because it is a repetition - and because it is the known. How can you desire the unknown?

For the unknown there can be no desire. The unknown is inconceivable. That's why, even when we begin to desire God, we are not desiring the unknown. By "God" we must mean something which is known. So go deep: what do you mean by "God"? - particularly YOUR God. What do you mean by it? You will find under the garb of "God" something known, something previously experienced.

It may be eternal pleasure. So the so-called religious persons go on saying, "Why are you wasting your life in desires which are momentary? Come to us! Here is the fulfillment; here is the possibility to achieve permanent, eternal pleasure." The language can be understood. You know the momentary pleasure, so you can desire permanent pleasure - but under the garb of God there is pleasure.

You may be seeking God only because you are fearful of death. Then, under the garb of God, you are really asking for immortality, not to die ever, an eternal life. You know this life - that is your experience - now you want to make it eternal. So whenever we talk about God, the Divine, Liberation, mokhsa, don't be deceived by the words because the words may be hiding something totally different. And they are hiding it - because how can you desire the unknown? How can you conceive of it? How can you ask for it?

Really, the phenomenon is quite different. When you are not in desire, the unknown comes to you - you cannot desire it. When you are desireless the unknown comes to you. You cannot desire it!

The state of desirelessness is the opening for the unknown to come. You cannot desire it because the very desire will become the hindrance.

So mind goes on repeating; it is a mechanical thing. So the dynamism is not in the mind - mind is just a dead, mechanical thing - the dynamism is in your consciousness, and if your consciousness is identified with the mind then the dead mind becomes dynamic. The dynamism belongs to your energy, it is not part of your mind. You are the dynamism behind it. If you are identified with the mind, if you think that you are the mind, then the mind begins to be dynamic. If you are not identified with the mind, then the mind is just dead - just a dead weight, just a mechanical accumulation.

It is a long accumulation - millennia of evolution, many, many, many lives are accumulated there. It is not only that your mind belongs to this life - it belongs to life as such. It has evolved, so it has deep grooves. It is not only that you fall in love: your father and mother have fallen in love before you; their fathers and their mothers and theirs and theirs - they have all fallen in love. The mind has a deep groove of falling in love, so when you fall in love don't be deceived that you are falling in love. The whole humanity is behind you; the whole humanity has made the groove. It is in your bones, it is in your cells, it is in your very metabolism. Every cell has a sex part in it, and every cell has a groove, and every cell has a mind, memory - long memories, beginningless memories. So if you are identified with this mind, it becomes a force - a dynamic force. You give the energy, but the dead machine begins to move. You pedal it.

So remember: energy belongs to you; dynamism belongs to you. Mind is a mechanical thing produced by millennia of evolution, but it has deep grooves. And if you are identified, then you will have to flow through those grooves. There is no escape then.

So the first thing is how not to identify, how to remember constantly that mind is one thing and you are something else. It is difficult, it is arduous - but it is possible. It is not impossible. And once, if you have even a moment's glimpse of the unidentified Existence, then you will never be the same again.

Once you come to know that mind is not the force: "I am the force, the vitality comes from me," if even for a single moment you have the glimpse of your mastery, then mind will never be master again. And only then can you move into the unknown.

Mind cannot move into the unknown: it is produced by the known. It is a product of the known, so it cannot move into the unknown. That's why mind can never know what Truth is, what God is. Mind can never know what freedom is, mind can never know what life is - because intrinsically mind is dead. It is made up of past things. It is dead: dust accumulated through centuries and centuries - just dust, memory dust.

It seems that mind forces you. It doesn't force you really, it only gives you the easiest grooves.

It supplies to you only the repeated routine tracks, and you fall victim to convenience - because to break a new route and to create a new track and to move in a new groove is very difficult and inconvenient. That is what is meant by TAPA - austerity. If you begin to move in some new grooves which are created not by the mind but created by consciousness, then you are in TAPASCHARYA - in austerity. It is arduous.

Gurdjieff had many exercises. One exercise was to deny the mechanism sometimes. You are hungry: just deny and let your body suffer. You be just calm and quiet, and remember that the body is hungry. Don't suppress it; don't force it not to be hungry. It is hungry; you know. But at the same time say to it, "I am not going to fulfill this hunger today. Be hungry, suffer! Now, I am not going to move today in this supplied groove. I will remain aloof." And, suddenly, if you can do this, you begin to feel a gap. The body is hungry, but somewhere there is a distance between you and it. If you try to occupy your mind, then you have missed the point.

If you go to the temple and begin to do kirtan and singing just to forget the hunger, then you have missed the point. Let the body be hungry. Don't occupy your mind to escape from hunger. Remain hungry, but just tell the body, "Today I am not going to fall in the trap." You remain hungry, you suffer.

There are persons who are doing fasting, but meaninglessly because whenever they fast they try to occupy the mind so that the hunger should not be known and should not be felt. If the hunger is not felt, the whole point is missed! Then you are playing tricks. Let the hunger be there in its totality, in its intensity. Let it be there; don't escape from it. Let the fact of it be there, present, and remain aloof and tell the body, "Today I am not going to give you anything." There is neither conflict nor suppression nor any escape.

If you can do this, then suddenly you become aware of a gap. Your mind asks for something. For example, someone has become angry. He is angry with you, and the mind begins to react, to be angry. Just tell the mind, "I am not going to fall in the trap this time." Be aloof. Let the anger be there in the mind, but be aloof. Don't cooperate, don't be identified, and you will feel that anger is somewhere else. It surrounds you, but it is not in you, it doesn't belong to you. It is just like smoke around you. It goes on, goes on, and waits for you to come and cooperate.

There will be every temptation. This is what is really meant by temptation, mmm? - no devil is there to tempt you. Your own mind tempts you, because that's the most convenient way to be and to behave.

Convenience is the temptation; convenience is the devil. The mind will say, "Be angry!" The situation is there and the mechanism is just on. Always, whenever this situation was there, you have been angry, so the mind supplies you again with the same reaction.

As far as it goes it is good because mind makes you ready to do something you have always been doing; but sometimes just stand off, off the track, and tell the mind, "Okay, anger is there outside. Someone is angry with me. You are supplying me with an old reaction, a stereotyped reaction, but this time I am not going to cooperate. I will just stand here and observe and see what happens." Suddenly the whole situation changes.

If you don't cooperate the mind falls dead, because it is your cooperation which gives it dynamism, energy. It is your energy, but you only become aware when it is used by the mind. Don't give it any cooperation, and the mind will just fall down as if without a backbone - just a dead snake with no life. It will be there, and for the first time you will become aware of a certain energy in you which doesn't belong to the mind but belongs to you.

This energy is pure energy, and with this energy one can move into the unknown. Really, this energy moves into the unknown if it is not associated with the mind. If it is associated with the mind, then it moves into the known. If it moves into the known, then it takes the shape of desire. If it moves into the unknown, then it takes the shape of desirelessness. Then there is sheer movement - a play of energy, a sheer dance of energy, an overflowing energy moving into the unknown.

Mind can only supply the known. If you can be detached from your mind, the energy will have to move, it cannot remain static. That is what is meant by energy: it has to move! Movement is its very life. Movement is not a quality of energy: movement is the very life! It is not that energy cannot be without movement - no! It is the very life, intrinsic.

Energy means movement, so it moves. If mind supplies grooves, then energy moves into the grooves.

If there is no supply of grooves and if you have just put off the mind, then too it moves, but now the movement is into the uncharted. This movement is the play, the leela, this movement is creative; this movement is spiritual. And it is desireless. It is not because there is some desire that you move. It is because you cannot do anything else but move: you are energy and movement. So see the difference.

When mind works, it works as a dead weight, a mechanical weight, through the past. It pushes you towards the future. Because the past is pushing towards the future, the past again projects its own desires. So first understand the repetitiveness of desires.

There are not so many desires. Really, there are very few. You go on repeating them. Just count how many desires you have. They are not many - very few! You will not even be able to find enough to count on your fingers. How many desires do you have? Very few! And, really, if you look deeply, you may even find that only one desire is there. There are modifications of it, but really only one desire, and the same desire is being repeated continuously. Life after life it is being repeated. You go on repeating and then it begins to seem, it begins to appear, that you are helpless, that the wheel is moving and you cannot do anything. It is not so. You are helpless only because you have forgotten totally that the energy by which the wheel is moving is given by you.

Because of the past, the future is just a repetition. It is the projected past. You again desire the same thing, and you go on again and again. That's why I said that past and future are parts of mind, not parts of time. Time is just here and now, the present. If mind is not working, then energy will be here and now in the moment. It will move because it is energy, but now the movement will be into the unknown. The known is not there at all. Mind is not, so the known is not.

Someone asked Hui-Hai, "How did you achieve? How did you reach?" Hui-Hai said, "When I became a no-mind, then I achieved, then I reached."

We are minds. That means: tethered to the past. If we can become no-minds that means untethered to the past - then the moment is free, fresh, and energy moves - not for something but because it is energy. Remember the difference exactly: it moves not for something; it moves because it is energy.

A river is moving; ordinarily we think it is moving for the sea. How can it know? It is not moving for the sea. It is moving because it is energy. Ultimately, the sea happens to be there; that is another thing. So when you move into the unknown, ultimately you reach to the Divine. It happens to be there. If your movement is pure, you reach it.

The river goes on moving without knowing, without any map. The past cannot supply the map because the river is not going to move on the past tracks again, so every step is into the unknown. And where it is going, there is no way to know. It is not moving because of any desire; it is not moving for something. The future is unknown - just unknown, dark. It moves. Why does it move? It moves because it is energy.

A seed is moving, a tree is growing, stars are moving. Why do they move? Have they to reach somewhere? No! They move because they are energy; pure energy is moving. Because pure energy cannot do anything else, it moves. So when you become just pure energy. not mind but no-mind energy, you move; and then every step is just into the unknown. Then life becomes a bliss, it becomes ecstatic, because the old is never repeated again. Never will the morning be the same again, never again this moment. Now it is a sensation, a thrill every time. This thrill creates Meera's dance; this thrill creates Chaitanya's singing with this thrill, every moment something new is bursting, exploding. A Buddha is never bored. He looks fresh.

Maulingputta came to Buddha. He was a very inquiring young man, a great scholar, one who knew all that can be known from scriptures, a great pundit. When he came to Buddha he began to ask many questions. The second day again he asked many questions. The third day again he asked many questions.

Ananda, another disciple of Buddha's, was just bored. He asked Buddha, "Are you not bored? He is repeating the same questions again and again." Buddha asked Ananda, "Has he repeated? Has he repeated a single question?"

Every moment is so new for a Buddha-conscious mind. For a Buddha-like mind, everything is so new, how can you repeat the old question again? Even the questioner does not remain the same. How can you ask the same question you asked yesterday? The Ganges has flowed so much, so how can you ask the same question again? You will never be the same again yourself.

And Buddha said, "Even if he is asking the same questions, he is not asking the same person. So how can I say he is repeating? He must have asked someone else. Yesterday where was l? The energy has moved."

Someone was very angry, insulted Buddha; then felt sorry, and the next day came to ask Buddha's forgiveness.

Buddha was just bewildered, and he said, "You are a strange man! You insult one person and then you ask pardon from somebody else."

The man said, "What are you saying? Am I strange, or are you? I came yesterday and insulted you. I felt very sorry and I couldn't sleep."

Buddha said, "That's why you are still repeating. But I could sleep and now I am a different man. The river has gone on. It is not the same bank again, and I will never be the same so now you are in difficulty, because you cannot ask pardon of a man you will never meet. If I ever meet him I will tell him whatsoever you have said to me."

This energy moves into the unknown. It is fresh, young, so a Buddha can never be old. The body, of course, will become old, but a Buddha can never be old. He will remain young. That's why we have never pictured Ram, Krishna or Buddha as old. They became old, but we have no pictures of Krishna's old age, of Ram's old age, of Buddha's old age, of Mahavir's old age. We have no pictures!

It is not that they never became old - the body has to follow the common lot - but by not creating pictures of their old age we have just meant something more. Really, they were never old because they were so moving - so moving and so young. For such persons death is not an end. It is again a further movement. It is not an end at all.

So mind is not dynamic: mind is mechanical. It can become dynamic if you cooperate with it. Don't cooperate with it! Remember your aloofness, create a distance. Be aware, and then the mind will be there but you will be outside.

The English word "ecstasy" is very beautiful and meaningful. You may not have even conceived of what this word means - "ecstasy". It means to stand outside; the word means to stand outside. If you can stand outside of yourself, if you can be outside of yourself, you are in ecstasy. Someone has suggested that to translate "Samadhi" as "ecstasy" is not good because the word "Samadhi" doesn't mean to stand outside. Really, Samadhi means to stand inside. So someone has suggested a new word, he has coined a new word: instead of ecstasy he says it is better to translate Samadhi as "instasy" - to stand inside.

Really, these two words mean two different things, but in a certain way they mean the same. If you can stand out of your mind, then you will be able to stand within yourself. If you can stand outside yourself - the so-called self - then you will be, for the first time, inside. So ecstasy IS "instasy". Then you will be in your center.

If you are out of your mind, then you will be centered in yourself. So going out of the mind is going into consciousness. That's why mind has to be understood as mechanical, as a mechanism, as accumulation, as the past. And once you feel it, you are out of it. But we go on, we continue to identify ourselves with it.

Whenever you say, "This is my thought," you are identifying. Change the language, and sometimes it helps very much - if you can just change the language! Language has such a deep grip. Say, "This belongs to my past mind," and feel the difference. When you say, "This is my thought," you are identified. Say, "This belongs to my mind, my past mind," and feel how only a change of language creates a distance.

For example, we say, "My mind is tense." Then you are identified. We even say, "I am tense." Then there is even more identification. When I say, "I am tense," there is no gap. When I say, "My mind is tense," there is a little gap. If I can say, "I am aware that the mind is tense," then there is a greater gap, and the greater the gap, the less will be the tension.

When we say, "I am tense," it looks as if someone else is responsible. So psychology suggests never to say "I am tense," because subtly it makes someone else responsible. They say that rather than to say "I am tense," one should say, "I am tensing." Then the responsibility is yours.

So break the old habits of language, mind, thoughts, and then your energy will move. And once the mind is not there, you are free for the first time.

Thanatos

Question 2:

Desire is related to life, but life can be desireless also. But then bodily life will become impossible.

Really, desire is the link between life and body. If all the desires drop, then the body cannot continue any more because body is just an instrumentality for desires to be fulfilled. Now biologists say that we have developed the senses because of desires, and if you can desire persistently then your body will develop new senses.

Eyes_Wide_Shut

It is only because of desires that we have eyes. Ordinarily, we think that because there are eyes we see. No! Biologists say that because there is a desire to see, eyes develop. If the desire is not there to see, then eyes will just drop. The whole body comes into existence because of desires.

Buddha lived forty years after his Enlightenment, so there was a question: If desires have stopped totally, then Buddha must die - how is he alive?

The body has a momentum. If you are running and want to stop suddenly, you cannot stop. Your mind has stopped. you have decided to stop, but you will have to run a little more because of the momentum. You have been pedalling a bicycle, and now you have stopped pedalling, but the wheels have accumulated momentum. They will run on, and it will take a little more time for the bicycle to stop completely. That's why I always say that if the bicycle is going uphill, then it will stop soon. If you have stopped pedalling and the bicycle is going uphill, then it will stop soon. It may even stop the same moment you stop pedalling. But if it is going downhill, it may go on much longer.

So if Enlightenment happens before the age of thirty-five. the body may die soon. If it happens after thirty-five then it is downhill, it may continue more. So a Shankara dies soon. He was just thirty-three, and he became Enlightened at the age of twenty - so it was rare! And he had to die.

He couldn't complete the thirty-fifth year, he couldn't reach even to the middle. If the Enlightenment happens after thirty-five, then you are downhill, then the body can continue.

With desires stopping totally, really you have stopped being a body. Now the old momentum will work, and it will depend on many things.

Buddha died because of food poisoning, and he could not be cured; not because the food poisoning was so dangerous - it was very ordinary - but he had no bodily link, so he couldn't be helped. So now medicine accepts this: that if you have a lust for life, medicines will he more helpful. If you don't have any lust for life, then medicines may not prove helpful at all.

So now there are many experiments. Two persons are ill, just on their deathbeds. One is more serious, and there is no hope for him - but he is hopeful and he wants to live longer. Medical science is not hopeful, doctors are not hopeful, but he himself is hopeful. Another is not in such a serious state. Everyone is just hopeful: "He will survive; there is no problem." But he himself is hopeless. He doesn't want to survive. Suddenly, inside, something has dropped from the body. Now medicine cannot help. He will die - and the seriously ill man will survive. Medicine can help him.

Body and consciousness are related by desires. That's why, if a person dies without desire, then he will not be reborn; because now there is no necessity, no causality to create a body again.

I have seen one person who cannot go to sleep because he is fearful of death. Death may occur in sleep, then what can he do? So he is afraid; he cannot sleep. And I think his fear is valid, his fear has a significance - because he has no desire to live. He is not desireless! He just has no desire to live. Rather, he has a desire to die, and if a person has a desire to die, he can die in sleep very easily.

You can get up in the morning again, not only because the morning has come, but because you have something which forces you to get up. This person has nothing; nothing forces him to get up. So he cannot sleep because of the fear, and in the morning he doesn't feel at all like getting up. There is nothing! Still, I say. he is not desireless. He is just frustrated; all his desires have become frustrations. When all desires are frustrated, you create a new desire - a desire to die.

Eros

Freud, in his old age, stumbled upon a new thing of which he had never dreamed. For his whole life he worked on "libido" - the desire to live. He based his whole structure of thinking on this force of libido - this sex, this desire for life - and in the end he stumbled upon a second desire. The first desire he calls "Eros" and the second he calls "Thanatos". Thanatos means deathwish, a desire to die. Freud began to feel that if there is no desire to die, how can a man die? There must be hidden somewhere a desire to die; otherwise, biologists say that the body itself can continue - even forever. There is no necessary reason why a man should die so soon, because the body has a built-in process to renew itself. It can continue renewing - but there are many things....

The body is born, as we have said always, because of some desire to live, mmm? Really, Freud is right. A second desire is needed to complete the circle. A desire must be hidden there to die. That death-desire helps you to die, and the life-desire helps you to be reborn. That death-desire comes many times to everyone. Many times you become suddenly aware of it. Whenever something is frustrated, such as in the case of someone having lost a lover or beloved, suddenly the death-desire comes up and you want to die - not because you have become desireless, but because your most longed-for desire is now impossible. So you begin to desire death.

This difference has to be noted, because many religious persons are really not religious - they are only desiring death, they are suicidal. It is very easy to change the desire from life to death. It is very easy, because life and death are not just two things - they are two aspects of one phenomenon, so you can change.

So it happens that the persons who commit suicide are really those who are very, very deeply attached to life. Because they are so much attached to life, whenever they are frustrated they cannot do anything else but commit suicide. A person who is not too much attached to life cannot commit suicide. And suicides can be committed in two ways: they can be long-term and they can be short-term. You can take poison just now, or you can go on dying slowly for many years. It depends how much courage you have.

Sometimes it happens that you have no courage to live and you have no courage to die, then you have to die slowly. Then a long-term suicide is chosen. Then one just goes on dropping by and by - dying, dying, dying. Then death is a long, delayed process - by degrees.

This deathwish is also there, and there are many things, many implications in it.

Bernard Shaw, in his later life, left city life and went to live in a small village. And someone asked him, "Why have you chosen this village?" He said. "I was just passing by the cemetery and I came upon a stone on which it was written: 'This man died at the age of one hundred and ten - the death was untimely.' So I thought this village is worth living in. If people here think that one hundred and ten is untimely, then it is good to be here." And, really, he lived very long.

Psychologists say it is a fixation. If the whole country thinks that seventy is the maximum, then it becomes a fixed mind-attitude. If the country thinks that one hundred is the maximum, then one hundred will become the maximum. If the country begins to think as a whole, collectively, that there is no need to die so soon and that a man can live three hundred years, if the whole country becomes fixed with three hundred years as the maximum, then the body can live for three hundred years. It is just a collective hypnosis.

We know a person is going to be old at a particular age, everyone knows. The child becomes aware of when one becomes old. The young man knows when youth will be gone. Everyone knows! And it is so repeatedly known, it is so suggestive, that everyone knows that seventy, or eighty at the maximum, is going to be the limit. We die at eighty because we believe that eighty is the limit. If you can change the limit, there is no need to die so soon. Basically, there is no need for the body to die so soon. It is a self-regenerating process. It goes on regenerating, it can continue.

This collective hypnosis and the deathwish become conjoined, they both become one. But if life needs desires, then death also needs desires. That is why we never say that Krishna died - never!

We say that he entered Samadhi. We never say Buddha died - mmm? - it was Nirvana, deliverance.

We never say that they died because, really, for them, how can death be possible when life has become impossible? Understand the implication: if for Buddha life has become an impossibility, then how can death be possible? A person who cannot desire life, how can he desire death? If he has become so desireless that life is impossible, then death will also be impossible. So we never say that a Buddha dies. We say only that he enters a greater life. We never say that he dies.

How is it that we die? We die because we live, because we are attached to life. We have to be detached from life, broken. When a Buddha lives, he lives as a momentum. He is in the car, and the car is going downhill. Wherever it stops he will not have any grudge - wherever. At the very moment the car stops, he will get down. Not for a single moment will he feel something wrong. He will not feel anything is wrong: it is as it should be. He can live as if not living; he can die as if not dying. But if you want to continue, then some desire has to be there.

Ramakrishna

Ramakrishna tried to be alive for some time just to give the message to a right person. He felt that if there was no desire left and no momentum either, then the body would just drop. So he cultivated, he created, he forced a desire to be there. He continuously tried that at least one desire must be alive until the moment he could deliver the message to a right person. It never happened to a Buddha; it never happened to a Mahavir. Why did it happen to Ramakrishna?

Really, it is not a question of why it happened to Ramakrishna. It is a question concerned not with Ramakrishna, but with our age. At Buddha's time it was never impossible to find persons - never! There were so many, and at any moment the message could be delivered to anyone. But for Ramakrishna it was such an impossibility to find a person. So for the first time, Ramakrishna alone is the man, in the whole history of mankind, who tried forcibly to be alive a little more - just to get the right man.

Vivekananda

And when Vivekananda came to him for the first time, Ramakrishna said, "Where have you been? I have waited so long! I have waited so long!" And when Vivekananda, for the first time, achieved the first glimpse of Samadhi, Ramakrishna stopped him; he said, "Now no more, because then you will also have the same difficulty. So just remain here, don't go further. Just remain here until the message is delivered. Now I will take your keys with me so you will not have to suffer the same as I have suffered. First I achieved something, then I had to be rooted in the earth and it was very difficult - very difficult. So now I will take your keys with me, and these keys will be given to you only before your death - three days before." And Vivekananda remained without having the glimpse again. Then he couldn't achieve. This happening, what Ramakrishna had said, became the barrier. He couldn't cross the barrier. He crossed only before his death - three days before.

Life is desire - mmm? - the life we know is desire. But there is another life which is desirelessness - the life we don't know. This life is through body; that life is through pure consciousness - direct, immediate. This life is through body, through mind, through instruments. That's why it is so dim and faint. It is not an immediate thing.

When something reaches you through many mediums, it is distorted. It is bound to be. You have never seen the light: your eyes see the light. Then the light is transformed into chemicals, into electric waves. You have never seen those electric waves, you have never seen those chemicals.

Those chemicals carry the message, then they are decoded in your mind. They are just codes.

Then they are decoded, and the mind gives you the message that you have seen the light. And then you begin to say, "I have seen the light; the sun has risen." You have never seen the sun rising. It is just a chemical process that reaches you - never the sunrise. It is only the picture that is again decoded.

Our whole experience is like this - indirect. I touch the hand of my beloved, of my lover, of my friend. I have never touched them. I cannot - because touch remains at my fingertips. And then, just through my system, an electric wave comes to my mind. That wave is decoded and I say, "How beautiful!" This touch can be created if my eyes are closed; this touch can be created by a mechanical device. And if the same wave frequency can be created as is created by my beloved's touch, I will say, "How beautiful!" No touch is even needed if the message-carrying system in the mind can be stimulated by an electrode. Again I will feel, "How beautiful!" Just an electrode can be put in your skull, and if we know what the frequencies of your experiences are - when you feel love, what frequency waves you receive - then we can push the buttons and the same frequency is created by the electrode in the mind and you begin to be in love. What frequency do you receive when you interpret it as anger?

The electrode can create the same frequency and you will begin to be angry.

What are you living in life? What have you known? You have known nothing - because everything is through so many mediums that only an indirect message reaches you.

There is another life without the body, without the mind. Then the experience is immediate, without any medium. It is direct, there is nothing in between. If the light is there, there is nothing in between, then for the first time you are filled with light, not with a coded message. That experience is the experience of the Divine.

I can say it in this way: if you are experiencing Existence through mediums, it is the world. If you are experiencing the Existence without any mediums, it is God. That which is experienced is the same: only the experiencer experiencing in different ways. One way is through something else. I give you a message, then you give it to somebody else, then he to somebody else. Then it reaches to whomever it was to be given - to whom it may concern. Then it reaches - and it has changed. Every time it is given to someone, it is changed. With our eyes we don't see alike. We cannot see alike because in a subtle way every instrument is different.

So when I see light I feel it in a different way. When you see light you feel it in a different way. When a Van Gogh sees the sun, certainly he sees it in a different way, because he will become just mad, begin to dance, cry, scream. He will just be mad when he sees the sun. For one year Van Gogh continuously painted only sun pictures. He would not sleep: he was just mad. And in Arles, where the sun is very hot, for one year continuously the sun was beating down on his head, and he was in the field painting - painting for one year continuously. He went mad. For one year he had to be put in a madhouse, and the only reason was that he couldn't stand so much sun.

But no one goes so mad! He committed suicide and he wrote a letter. And in the letter he had written, "Because I have painted all the faces of the sun, now there is no need to live. I have painted all the faces possible. I have known the sun in every mood - now there is no need to live. Now I can drop dead." Certainly he must have seen the sun in a different way. No one goes so mad after the sun. Why this madness?

He must have had a different message system. And now psychologists say he must have had some different chemicals, built-in chemicals. It is possible that soon we will come to a conclusion that poets have a different quantity of certain chemicals, and only because of that do they begin to be mad after flowers, after clouds. For all others it is just nonsense. It is okay that there is a flower, but it is nonsense to go on painting it, creating poetries and living for it. Certainly something like LSD must be a built-in chemical with them. A dancer has a different chemistry. It seems that the bioenergy works in a different way.

So when I say that life is bound with desires, I mean this life, not that. This life is bound with desires.

So the more desires you have, the more you will have the feeling of this life, mmm? That's why those who are after desires, running and running, seem to us to be very much alive; we say they are very much alive. What are you doing? Run! Everyone is running and everyone is so alive! Are you just dead?

But there is another life also - greater, deeper, more vital, more immediate and direct. We have a word for it, aparokshanubhuti - immediate experiencing. God must be seen, but not by eyes. He must be heard, but not by ears. He must be embraced, but not by hands, not by the body. But how can it happen?

We know only two things - life of desires and death of desires. We don't know another dimension - desireless life and desireless Liberation. But if we become aware of the very mechanism of desire, we can create a gap; and the moment the gap is created, life begins to move into another life.

Meher Baba

Question 3:

Many things are possible, and it will depend. Certainly many desires will drop and many actions also. Those actions which were just caused by desires will drop. If I was running for a particular desire, how can I run if the desire has dropped? My running will stop. At least the same running on the same route will stop. So when a person becomes desireless, at least for an interim period, for an interval - and how long it will be will depend on the individual - he will become inactive. The desires will have dropped - and all the actions that he had been doing were concerned with desires, so how can he continue? They will drop.

But by dropping desires and actions, energy will be accumulated - and now energy will begin to move. When it moves, how it moves will vary from individual to individual, but now it will move.

There will be a gap, an interim period, an interval. This I call a pregnancy period. The seed is born, but now it will gestate for at least nine months. And it may seem strange, but it happens. This nine months period is meaningful. Near about this, eight months or ten months, will be the interim period, and you will just become inactive. This inactivity will also vary. Someone may become so inactive that people may think that he has just gone into a coma. Everything stops.

For Meher Baba it happened like that. For one year he was just in a coma. He couldn't even move his limbs. Action was far off, he couldn't stand up because even the desire to stand had gone. He couldn't eat; he had to be forced. He couldn't do anything! For one year continuously he became just helpless - a helpless child. This was a pregnancy period, and then, suddenly, a different man was born. The man who became inactive was no more: a new energy - energy accumulated.

Lives and lives of dissipated energy create this gap - because you do not have enough energy.

When desire is not there to invoke, provoke, stimulate, you just drop. Your energy is not really energy, but just a pushing and pulling. Anyhow you go on running because the goal seems just nearby. A few moments' endeavour more and you will reach! You pull yourself on; somehow you carry yourself and run. But when the goal is dropped, when there is no desire, you will drop. An inactivity will be there. If you can be patient in this inactivity period, after it you will be reborn. Then energy will begin to move without desires.

Babajan

But I say it depends. It may happen suddenly as it happened for Meher Baba: that was a sudden case. It happened in Bombay. It happened by a kiss from an old lady, Babajan. Meher Baba was just passing, coming back from his school. Babajan was an old Sufi mystic, an old lady who was just sitting under a tree for years and years and years. Meher Baba was just coming, and Babajan called him. He knew this old lady. She was sitting for years under the tree, and he had passed by that street daily on his way towards his school and towards his home. She called and he came near.

She kissed him - and he dropped as if dead just there. Then he had to be carried home.

For one year continuously the kiss remained on him and he was in a coma. It may happen suddenly like this, mmm? This was a great transfer, and Babajan died afterwards because she had just been waiting for this moment to give someone the whole energy. This was her last life, and there was not enough time even to explain what she was giving. And also, she was not the type to have explained.

She was a silent mystic. She had not touched anybody for years. She was a only waiting for this moment when she was to kiss someone and the whole energy was to be transferred in a single transfer. Before this she had not even touched anyone, so this touch was to be total.

And this child was simply unaware of what was going to happen. He was ready - otherwise this transfer would not have been possible - but he was not aware. He had worked through his past lives. He was just coming up. He might have become aware later on, but just now he was completely unaware. This happened so suddenly that he had to go again through a second pregnancy. For one year he was as if not. Many medicines were given; many, many doctors and physicians tried to help, but nothing could be done. And the woman who could do something, she disappeared, she died.

After one year he was a different man - totally different.

If it happens so suddenly, then it will be a deep coma. If it happens through some exercises, then it will never be so deep a coma. If you are doing awareness exercises, meditation, then it will never happen so suddenly. It will come so gradually, so gradually, that you will never even become aware of when it has happened. By and by, inactivity will be there, activity will be there, and very gradually inside everything will have changed. And the desire will drop, the activity will drop, but no one will ever feel that you have been lethargic or that you have become inactive.

This is the gradual process. So those who follow yoga or any method will not feel the suddenness.

There are also methods in which sudden happenings become possible, but one can be prepared.

Babajan never prepared this boy; she never even asked his permission. It was a one-way affair. She just transferred the energy.

Zen monks also transfer, but before transferring they prepare the ground. A person can be made ready to receive the energy, then this reaction will not be there. He may feel lethargy for some days, for some months, but no one will feel outside that inside everything has become inactive. But that needs preparation, and that can happen only in schools. And when I say "school", I mean a group working.

Babajan was alone; she never made anyone her disciple. There was no school, there was not a following in which she could have prepared anyone. And, also, she was not the type. She was not the teacher type; she couldn't teach. But she had to give to someone, to whomsoever passed and she felt: "Now is the moment, and this one will be able to carry it," so she could just deliver it.

So it depends. Inactivity is bound tb be there - more or less, but it will be there, a period will be there.

And only then can you be reborn, because the whole mechanism has to change completely. The mind drops, old roots drop, the old habits drop, the old association of consciousness and desires, consciousness and mind, drops - everything old drops and everything has to be new.

A waiting is needed, patience is needed. And if one is patient, one has not to do anything: just to wait is enough. The energy begins to move by itself. You just sow the seed and then wait! Don't be in a hurry; don't go every day to pull the seed out and see what is happening. Just put it inside and wait. The energy will take its own course. The seed will die, and the energy will sprout and will begin to move. But don't be impatient. One has to wait.

And the greater the seed, and the greater the possibility, the potentiality of the tree that is going to be, the more will be the waiting. But it comes. It comes! The deeper the waiting, the sooner it comes.

Question 1:

THE UNCONSCIOUS is not really unconscious. Rather, it is only less conscious. So the difference between conscious and unconscious is not of polar opposites, but of degrees. Unconscious and conscious are related, joined; they are not two. But our ways of thinking are based on a particular false system of logic which divides everything into polar opposites.

Reality is never divided like that; only logic is divided. Our logic says either 'yes' or 'no'; our logic says either light or darkness - and there is nothing in between as far as logic goes. But life is neither white nor black. It is, rather, a great expanse of grey. One extreme becomes white, another extreme becomes black, and life is a great expanse of grey, degrees of grey. But for logic white and black are realities and there is nothing in between - but life is always in between these two. So, really, every problem should be understood not as a logical problem, but as a life problem - only then can you do something with it. If you are too fixed with this false logic, then you will never be able to solve any problem.

Aristotle has proved to be one of the greatest menaces, blocks to the human mind, because he created a system - which became dominant all over the world - that divides everything into two opposites. Really, this is a strange fact. We have nothing for the inbetween reality - not even words.

De Bono, a modern non-Aristotelian logician, has created a new word - "po". He says that we have only two words, "yes" or "no", and there is no neutral word. "Yes" is one opposite, "no" is another - there is no neutral word. So he has coined a new word - "po". "Po" means "I am neither for nor against." If you say something and I say "po" it means, "I have heard you I am neither for nor against. I am not making any judgment."

Or, to say "po" means: "Perhaps you are right, perhaps you are wrong. Both are possible." Or, the use of the word "po" means: "This is also one point of view. I need not be on the 'yes' side or the 'no'. It is not a compulsion." De Bono has derived this word from words like hyPOthesis or POtentiality. This "po" is a neutral word, not loaded with any judgment, condemnation or appreciation. Just use the word "po" and you will feel the difference. You are not taking any standpoint in the polar opposites.

So when I say "conscious" and "unconscious", I don't mean the Freudian opposition. For Freud, conscious is conscious and unconscious is unconscious. The difference is that of white and black, yes and no, life and death. When I say "unconscious" I mean "less conscious". When I say "conscious" I mean "less unconscious". They overlap each other.

So what to do to encounter the unconscious? As far as Freud is concerned the encounter is impossible. Because it is unconscious, how can you encounter it? The question means the same as if someone says, "How to see in darkness?" - mmm? The question is irrelevant, meaningless. If you put it in this way, "How to see in darkness?" and if I say, "With light," then the question has not been answered at all because you ask, "How to see in darkness?" and if there is light then there is no darkness - you are seeing light.

So really, in darkness no one can see. When we say "darkness" we mean that now seeing is not possible. What do you mean when you say "darkness"? You mean that now seeing is not possible.

What do you mean when you say "light"? You mean that now things can be seen. Really, you have never seen light: you have only seen light reflected in things which you can see. You have never seen light itself - no one can see it. We see only things, not light, and because things are seen, we assume, infer, that light is there.

You have not seen darkness; no one has seen it. Really, darkness is just an inference. Because nothing is seen, you say there is darkness. So when someone asks, "How to see in darkness?" the words look meaningful, but they are not. Language is very deceptive, and unless one becomes careful in using language one will never be able to solve any problem. Ninety-nine percent of problems are just linguistic problems, but if you don't know how to penetrate the garb of language you will never be able to tackle the real problem.

If you ask Freud how to encounter the unconscious, he will say, "It is nonsense; you cannot encounter it. If you encounter it, it will become conscious, because encountering is a conscious phenomenon." But if you ask me how to encounter the unconscious, I will say, "Yes, there are ways to encounter it" - because for me, the first thing to be noted is that "unconscious" means simply "less conscious".

So if you grow more conscious, you can encounter it - so it depends.

Secondly, unconscious and conscious are not fixed boundaries. They change every moment - just like the retina of the eye. It is changing constantly. If there is more light, it is narrowed down. If there is less light, then it widens. It is constantly making an equilibrium with the light outside. So your eye is not really a fixed thing; it is constantly changing. Just like that is your consciousness. Really, to understand the phenomenon of consciousness by the analogy of the eye is very relevant, because consciousness is the inner eye, the eye of the soul. So just like your eye, your consciousness is constantly expanding or shrinking. It depends.

For example, if you are angry, you become more unconscious. The unconscious is now more spread, and only a very minor part of you remains conscious. Sometimes even that part is not there either - you become completely unconscious. But in a sudden accident: you are on the road and suddenly you feel that an accident is going to be there and you are on the verge of death - you suddenly become conscious and there is no unconscious at all. The whole mind is conscious. And this change is continuously taking place.

So when I say conscious and unconscious, I don't mean any fixed boundaries. There are none, there are no fixed boundaries. It is a fluctuating phenomenon. It depends on you to be less conscious or more conscious. You can create consciousness; you can train and discipline yourself for more consciousness or for less consciousness. If you train yourself for less consciousness you will never be able to encounter the unconscious. Really, you will even become incapable of encountering the conscious.

When someone has taken some intoxicant, he is training his mind to be totally unconscious. When you go into sleep, or if you can be hypnotized, or if you can autohypnotize yourself, then you lose consciousness. There are many tricks, and many of those tricks which help you to be more unconscious are even known as religious practices. If you do any monotonous, repetitive thing - for example, if you go on continuously saying "Ram-Ram-Ram-ram", in a very monotonous tone, you will become less conscious. And this constant repetition of "Ram-Ram-Ram", in a monotonous tone, will be just auto-hypnotic. You will go to sleep: it is good for sleep.

If you can create monotony then you will be less conscious, because a bored mind cannot remain conscious. The boredom is too much, and the mind would like to go to sleep.

Every mother knows, how to put a child to sleep. A lullaby does nothing but create boredom. Every mother knows how to put a child to sleep. With a lullaby - a constant repetition of certain words - the child is bored, so he goes into sleep. This lullaby can be created by movement, by anything which is monotonous - by anything! Just move the child monotonously, rotate the child monotonously, and he will go to sleep because he feels bored. Even if you put the child's head near your heart he will go to sleep, because your heartbeat is a very boring thing. So put the child near your heart, and he will feel bored because of the constant repetition of the heartbeat. The child knows it very well because for nine months continuously he has heard it. Even old persons can use the "tick-tick" of a clock for going into sleep, and the reason is only the resemblance to the heartbeat.

So if you feel that sleep is not coming, just concentrate on your clock and feel the beat, and soon you will drop into sleep.

You can create unconsciousness by creating boredom. By taking any intoxicant, by taking any drug, any sedative, any tranquillizer, you can create unconsciousness. Consciousness also can be created, but then quite different methods have to be used.

Sufi mystics use whirling dances. With such vigorous whirling you cannot sleep. It is impossible.

How can you fall asleep when dancing? Someone seeing your dance may go to sleep; for him it may become a boring thing - but you cannot go. So Sufis use dance to create more activity inside, more vitality, so that consciousness spreads. And these dances are not really dances. They look like dances. The Sufi who is doing the dance is constantly remembering every movement of the body. No movement should be done unconsciously. Even if a hand is raised, then this hand must be raised with full consciousness that you are raising the hand - now the hand is raised; now you are dropping it again. No movement should be allowed unconsciously. You are whirling around, dancing vigorously; no movement is to be made unconsciously. Every movement must be done consciously, with full alertness.

Then suddenly the unconscious drops, and with three months of dancing continuously, for hours, you encounter the unconscious. You penetrate deep, deep, deep, and suddenly you become aware of everything that is inside. That is what I mean by encountering the unconscious. Nothing remains which is not in clear vision. Your totality, all your instincts, all your suppressions, your whole biological structure, everything - not only of this life, but of all lives - suddenly is revealed. You are thrown into a new world which was hidden or, rather, to which you were not alert. It was there, but you were asleep - or your consciousness was so narrowed down that it escaped.

Your consciousness is just like a torch - narrowed. You enter darkness with a torch; you have a light, but it is a narrow, focused light. You can see something, but all else remains in darkness.

When I say that nothing unconscious remains, I mean unfocused consciousness - unfocused. A focused consciousness will always choose something to see and choose many things not to see; it is a choice. So I use the similarity: just like a torch, narrowed down. One point will become very clear, but everything else will be in darkness. This is what we ordinarily do through concentration.

The more you concentrate, the less you will be able to encounter the unconscious. You will be able to know something very definitely at the cost of not knowing many things. That's why experts, by and by, become just ignorant - ignorant of the whole world: because they have narrowed down their minds to a particular thing in order to know more about it. So it has been said that an expert is a person who knows more and more about less and less. In the end, only a point remains focused which he knows at the cost of ignoring everything else.

This is how concentration works. So through concentration you can never encounter the unconscious. You can encounter the unconscious only with meditation - and this is the difference between concentration and meditation. Meditation means your mind working not as a torch but like a flame: everything is enlightened around it - everything. It is not narrowed down, the light is diffused. It is not moving in one direction - it is moving in all directions simultaneously so the whole is enlightened.

How to do it? I said Sufis use dance as an active meditation and then they can encounter the unconscious. Zen monks in Japan use absurd problems to encounter it. You face some problem which cannot be solved - which cannot be solved at all! Howsoever you try, the problem is such that it cannot be solved. They call such problems "koans" - absurd problems.

For example, they will say to some seeker, "Find out what your original face is." And by original face they mean the face you had before you were born, or the face you will have after you die - the original face. They will say, "Find out how your original face looks." How can you find it out? One has to meditate on it. The problem is such that you cannot solve it by intellect, by reason. You have to ponder over it, meditate over it, go on meditating and searching: "What is my original face?" And the teacher will be there with his staff, and he will look around to see if someone is going into sleep.

Then the teacher's staff will be on your head. You cannot sleep; sleep is not allowed at all. You have to be constantly awake.

So a Zen teacher is a hard taskmaster. You have to meditate before him, and he will not allow you to drop into sleep - because the moment when you are dropping into sleep is the moment to encounter the unconscious. If you can remain out of sleep, then the unconscious will be revealed - because that is the line. The very line from where you drop into sleep is the line where you can enter into the unconscious.

You can try this. You have been sleeping every day, but you have not encountered sleep yet. You have not seen it - what it is, how it comes, how you drop into it. You have not known anything about it. You have been dropping into it daily, coming out of it, but you have not felt the moment when sleep comes on the mind - what happens. So try this, and with three months' effort, suddenly, one day, you will enter sleep knowingly: drop on your bed, close your eyes, and then remember, remember that sleep is coming and "I am to remain awake when the sleep comes." It is very arduous, but it happens. One day it will not happen, one week it will not happen. Persist every day, constantly remembering that sleep is coming and, "I am not to allow it without knowing. I must be aware when sleep enters. I must go on feeling how sleep takes over, what it is."

And one day, suddenly, sleep is there and you are still awake. That very moment you become aware of your unconscious also. And once you become aware of your unconscious you will never be asleep again in the old way. Sleep will be there, but you will be awake simultaneously. A center in you will go on knowing. All around will be sleep, and a center will go on knowing. When this center knows, dreams become impossible. And when dreams become impossible, daydreams also become impossible. Then you are asleep in a different sense, and then you will be awake in the morning in a different sense. That different quality comes by the encounter.

But this may look difficult, so I suggest to you a more simple exercise to encounter the unconscious.

mirror meditation

Close the doors of your room and put a big mirror just in front of you. The room must be dark. And then put a small flame by the side of the mirror in such a way that it is not directly reflected in it. Just your face is reflected in the mirror, not the flame. Then constantly stare into your own eyes in the mirror. Do not blink. This is a forty-minute experiment, and within two or three days you will be able to keep your eyes open without blinking.

Even if tears come, let them come, but persist in not blinking and go on staring constantly into your eyes. Do not change the stare. Go on staring into the eyes, your own, and within two or three days you will become aware of a very strange phenomenon. Your face will begin to take new shapes. You may even be scared. The face in the mirror will begin to change, distort. Sometimes a very different face will be there which you have never known as yours.

But, really, all these faces belong to you. Now the subconscious mind is beginning to explode.

These faces, these masks, are yours. Sometimes even a face that belongs to a past life may come in. After one week of constant staring for forty minutes, your face will become a flux, just a film-like flux. Many faces will be coming and going constantly. After three weeks, you will not be able to remember which is your face. You will not be able to remember your own face, because you have seen so many faces coming and going.

If you continue, then any day, after three weeks, the most strange thing happens: suddenly there is no face in the mirror. The mirror is vacant, you are staring into emptiness. There is no face at all.

This is the moment: close your eyes, and encounter the unconscious. When there is no face in the mirror, just close the eyes - this is the most significant moment - close the eyes, look inside, and you will face the unconscious. You will be naked - completely naked, as you are. All deceptions will fall.

This is the reality, but the society has created many, many layers in order that you will not be aware of it. Once you know yourself in your nakedness, your total nakedness, you begin to be a different person. Then you cannot deceive yourself. Then you know what you are. And unless you know what you are you can never become transformed, because any transformation becomes possible only in this naked reality: this naked reality is potential for any transformation. No deception can be transformed. Your original face is now here and you can transform it. And, really, just a will to transform it will effect the transformation.

But you cannot become transformed! You cannot transform your false faces. You can change them, but you cannot transform them: by "change" I mean you can replace them with another false face.

A thief can become a monk, a criminal can become a saint. It is very easy to change, to replace the masks, the faces. These are not transformations at all. Transformation means becoming that which you really are. So the moment you face the unconscious, encounter the unconscious, you are face to face with your reality, with your authentic being.

The false societal being is not there, your name is not there, your form is not there, your face is not there. The naked forces of nature are there, and with these naked forces any transformation is possible - and by just willing it! Nothing is to be done. You just will, and things begin to happen. If you face yourself in this nakedness, just will whatsoever you like and it will be.

In the Bible it is said: "God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light." In the Koran it is said: "God said, 'Let there be the world,' and there was the world." Really, these are parables - parables of the willpower which is hidden in you. When you encounter your naked reality, the basic, elemental forces, you become a creator, a god. Just say, utter a word, and it happens. Say, "Let there be light," and there will be light. Before the encounter, if you are trying to transform darkness into light it is not possible. So this encounter is basic, foundational, for any religious happening.

Many, many methods have been invented. There are sudden methods, there are gradual methods.

I have told you about a gradual method. There are sudden methods, but with a sudden method it is always very difficult - because with a sudden method it can happen that you may simply die. With a sudden method it can happen that you may suddenly go mad - because the phenomenon is so sudden that you cannot conceive of it. You just drop, shattered.

This happened in the Gita. Arjuna is forcing Krishna to reveal his cosmic form. Krishna goes on talking about other things, but Arjuna is persistent and he says, "I must see. I cannot believe unless I see. If you are really a god, then reveal to me your cosmic form!" Krishna reveals it, but it is so sudden, and Arjuna is not prepared at all. He begins to cry and says to Krishna, "Close it! Close it! I am scared to death!"

So if you come to it through some sudden method, it is dangerous. Sudden methods are there, but they can be practised only in a group - in a group where others can help you. Really, ashrams were created for these sudden methods because they cannot be practised alone. A group is needed, adepts are needed, and a constant vigilance is needed, because sometimes you may drop unconscious for months continuously. Then if there is no one who knows what to do, you may be taken for dead. You may be buried or burnt. Many times Ramakrishna happened to go into deep Samadhi. For six days or for two weeks continuously he had to be forcefully spoon-fed because he was just as if unconscious. A group is needed for sudden methods, and a teacher becomes an absolute necessity.

Sudden methods dropped from Indian practices because of Buddha, Mahavir and Shankaracharya because they insisted that monks should travel continuously. They didn't allow monks to be in ashrams. They were not to remain anywhere for more than three days. There was a need for this because at the time of Mahavir and Buddha, ashrams became just exploitation centers; they became just big businesses. So Mahavir and Buddha both insisted that a sannyasin shouldn't remain anywhere more than three days. And three days is a very psychological limit, because in order to be attuned with some place or with some people you need more than three days.

In a new house, you cannot feel at ease unless three days have passed. This is a psychological attuning time. If you remain in a house for more than three days, then the house begins to look as if it is yours. So a sannyasin must not remain anywhere more than three days. Buddha and Mahavir insisted. But because of their insistence, ashrams were destroyed and school methods dropped out of practice - because a wandering monk cannot practise sudden methods. He may be in a village, but no one may know anything about it, and if he practises a sudden method and the happening happens, then he will be in danger: he will have to die.

Mahavir_ Shankaracharya_ Buddha

So Mahavir, Buddha and, later on, Shankaracharya, all these three, insisted that monks go on wandering continuously. They must not remain in one place; they should be homeless wanderers.

So it was good in one way, and it proved bad in another. It proved good because establishments were destroyed, but it proved bad also because with establishments certain very, very significant practices, methods, just went into oblivion.

Sudden methods require the constant vigilance of a group. A teacher becomes a necessity. So Buddha could say, "You can know even without me," but a Patanjali cannot say that. Krishnamurti can say, "No teacher is needed," but a Gurdjieff cannot say that. And the real reason for these differences is their methods: Gurdjieff has school methods and Krishnamurti belongs to the tradition of wanderers, no school methods, so no teacher is needed.

With gradual methods you can proceed alone because there is no danger. You have to proceed inch by inch, and as far as a one-inch happening is concerned, you can control it yourself. But if you have to take a jump with no steps in between, then you will need someone who knows where you are going to fall, who knows what can happen. A teacher is not really needed to show you the methods; he is needed really, afterwards when the method has done something and you have moved into the unknown.

So there are sudden methods, but I will not talk about them. I have given you one gradual method, and there are many. I will not talk about the sudden methods because it is dangerous to talk about them. If someone is interested, then he can be led - but talking is impossible. That's why school teaching has always insisted that nothing should be written - because once you write something it becomes public and anyone can do it. Anyone can become just a victim of his own curiosity, and then no help will be coming. So even when something is written about sudden practices, a basic link is always missing.

So those who begin practices through scriptures are always in danger, and many times it happens that they just go mad - because a missing link is always bound to be there, and that missing link is always supplied by word of mouth from the teacher to the disciple. And it is a private and secret process, the missing link. because that is the key. No scripture is really complete and no scripture can ever be really complete, because those who know can never write a thing completely. Something must remain hidden, as a key, so no one can use it. You can read about it, you can comment on it, you can write a thesis upon it, but you cannot practise it because a certain key is not given in the scripture itself. Or, if it is given, it is given in such a way that you cannot decode it; the technique to decode it is not given in it.

So nothing about sudden practices - but you can do something gradually. And this mirror meditation is a very powerful method - very powerful - to know one's own abyss and to know one's own naked reality. And once you have known it, you become the master. Then just say something, and things begin to take shape. In that encounter, if you say, "I must die this moment," you will die that very moment. If you say, "I must become a Buddha this very moment," you will become a Buddha that very moment. Time is not required at all - just a will.

You may begin to think that then it is very easy, but it is a difficult problem. First, to reach it is difficult, though not so difficult, but to will in that moment is very difficult. Such a vital silence takes you over, you cannot even think. Your mind cannot even move. You are in such awe, everything stops - even breathing. A very still moment, totally silent, and will becomes impossible. So one has to train oneself how to will in that still moment - how to will without words, how to will without thoughts. That is possible, but then one has to practise for it.

You are looking at a flower: look at the flower, feel the beauty of it - but don't use the word "beautiful", not even in the mind. Look at it, let it be absorbed in you, reach to it, but don't use words. Feel the beauty of it, but don't say, "It is beautiful," not even in the mind. Don't verbalize, and gradually you will become capable of feeling a flower as beautiful without using the word.

Really, it is not difficult: it is natural. You feel first; then the word comes. But we are so habituated with words that there is no gap. The feeling is there, and suddenly, you have not even felt, and the word comes. So create a gap. Just feel the beauty of it, but don't use the word.

If you can dissociate words from feeling, then you can dissociate even feeling from Existence. Then let the flower be there and you be there as two presences, but don't allow the feeling to come in.

Don't even feel now that the flower is beautiful. Don't feel! Let the flower be there and you be there arrowed in a deep embrace without any ripple of feeling. Then you will feel beauty without feeling.

Really, then you will be the beauty of the flower. It will not be a feeling; you will be the flower. Then you have existentially felt something. When you can do this, you can will. When everything is lost - thought, words, feeling - then you can will existentially.

To help this will, many things have been used. One is that the seeker must constantly go on thinking, "When the thing comes, when that happening happens, what am I going to be?" The sutras of the Upanishads like "AHAM BRAHMASMI" - I am the Brahman - are not meant as literal statements.

These sutras are not meant as statements, they are not meant as philosophical theories, they are meant to engrave a deep will in the very cells of your being. So when that moment comes, you don't need your mind to tell you, "I am the Brahman." Your body begins to feel it, your cells begin to feel it, your every fibre begins to feel it: "AHAM BRAHMASMI." And this feeling does not need to be created by you. It will have gone deep into your existence. Then suddenly when you encounter the unconscious and the moment of will has come, and you can become a creator - your whole existence begins to vibrate "AHAM BRAHMASMI." And the moment your existence begins to vibrate "AHAM BRAHMASMI," you become a Brahma - you become! Whatsoever you can feel, you become.

This should not be known as metaphysics - it is not! It is an experience. So you can know it only through experiencing. Do not decide whether it is right or wrong; do not think in terms of yes and no. Just say, "Po - okay," and make some effort. Just say, "Okay! It may be." Don't decide - because we are very hasty deciders. Someone will say, "No, it is not possible." Really, he is saying. "I am not going to try"; he is not saying it is not possible. He is deceiving himself. He is saying, "I am not going to try," and because of this "I am not going to try", how can it be possible? He is rationalizing for himself.

Someone else says, "Yes, it is possible. It has happened to many. It has happened to my guru, to my teacher, it has happened to this one and that." He is also not going to try because he is making it a trivial fact: "It has happened to many, so it is not such a thing for which one has to try!" He feels, "It can happen to me also." No, don't say 'yes' or 'no'. Just take it as an experiment, a hypothesis, to be worked out. Religion is not a given thing; one has to create it in oneself. It is not something which is given to you or which can be given; it is something which you have to uncover in yourself.

So don't decide unless you experience, don t decide unless you know. Never decide beforehand.

Otherwise you can go on continuously listening to things, thinking about them, and doing nothing - because thinking is not doing; thinking is just an escape from doing.

Question 2: Re: Dynamic Meditation:

It is gradual! It is gradual! Really, sudden techniques cannot be given publicly. They cannot be given!

And for sudden techniques one has to bracket the whole life out, because for sudden techniques your totality will be needed. For gradual techniques your totality is not needed. You can do them for one hour and then remain in the world for twenty-three hours. But for sudden techniques your totality will be needed; you cannot be allowed to do anything else. So the whole life has to be just bracketed out, and you have to be totally for the technique. The whole consciousness must be prepared for it because even a single part remaining unprepared will prove dangerous - and anything can prove dangerous because the moment is so potential. The moment is so potential, you must be purified of all that goes on around you. So you have to bracket - bracket everything out. With gradual methods religion can be one thing among others. For sudden methods religion has to be totalitarian; nothing else can be allowed.

When someone would go to Gurdjieff, he would ask, "Are you ready to die for it? Nothing less will do. Are you ready to die for it?" That means, "Are you ready to leave everything for it?" Total consciousness is needed. It is not necessary to die, but one has to be ready to die for it.

For gradual methods, such is not the requirement. You can go on living and doing something. By and by, the doing will gradually become greater, and without even becoming aware, some day you will become ready to die for it. But this growth is like the growth of a pregnancy: by and by. Even the mother is not aware of what is going on, of what is happening. The child goes on growing and growing and growing. After nine months the child has grown so much that now the mother is not needed at all. That's why he comes out. The mother feels so much pain! The reason is not only physical: deep down it is psychological. It is because her own child has grown so much that it is leaving her. This is the first betrayal. Now many betrayals will follow. This is the first birth pain; now many will follow. When the child becomes sexually mature, he will again leave his mother - for some other woman.

So birth is a constant process, and a mother has to go through many pains. And if she cannot understand it, then she unnecessarily creates troubles. She creates them! Even when the child is going to be born, the mother creates trouble: she contracts her whole body. That's why the pain is created; otherwise bodily pain is unnecessary. It is really a conflict. The mother is not ready to give up and the child is forcing to come out. That's why many children have to take their birth in the night - eighty percent, more than eighty percent - because when the mother is sleepy she resists less.

Now there are scientific methods and psychological ones also. If a mother can be persuaded to cooperate, there is no pain. In Paris, Dr. Lorenzo has worked with many, many methods - psychological, persuasive methods. He has delivered thousands of births, helped mothers, and there was no pain at all - not at all! The method is to cooperate with the child coming out - not to resist, but to cooperate; to help the child; to feel that you have to help the child to come out.

Lorenzo may persuade many mothers, but there is a still greater problem when the child goes to another woman, to make a wife. He will have to persuade the mother not to feel hurt. Rather, she should help the child to go to someone else. She should help, cooperate, because it is a second birth and she is unnecessarily troubled.

With gradual methods you grow like a pregnancy - by and by. Then suddenly one day you are reborn. With sudden methods it is different - totally different. One needs to give up everything for sudden methods. Sannyas, in the old days, began with sudden methods. That's why it was necessary to leave everything. Particularly in India, we emphatically pressed the point that no one should leave for sannyas unless he was very old. There is a psychological reason: when you are so old, you can leave life totally. Then total renunciation becomes easy - because in a subtle way life is renouncing you, so you can renounce life. You have become a dry leaf. Now you can leave the tree without hurting the tree or any hurt to yourself. The tree will not even know when the dry leaf has dropped. Pull out a young leaf that is fresh and green, and the tree is hurt and the leaf also.

The wound may remain forever. So for sudden methods, it was decided that a man should leave only when life itself was leaving him. Then he could leave totally. With gradual methods, it was not necessary.

Now in the world, sudden methods have become impossible because there are really no authentic schools, no communities, intimate communities, where you can practise sudden methods. So it is not necessary for someone to renounce the world and go to the hills or the forest. Now you can remain wherever you are and practise gradual methods. The achievement is the same; only more time is needed for gradual methods, less time for sudden methods.

Sowing the Seeds of Schizophrenia

Question 3:

It is a complex problem, multi-dimensional, but some basic points can be understood. One: a good society is possible only if children are not taught the antagonism, the dichotomy, between body and consciousness. The first thing is that they must not be taught the following: It must not be taught to children, "You are in the body"; it must not be taught, "You possess the body."

Instead, it must be taught to children, "You are the body." And when I say that it must be taught, "You are the body," I don't mean a materialist conception. Really, only out of this can a whole spiritual being be born. The unity must not be disturbed.

The child is born as a unity, but as part of the society, we then separate & divide him into two. The first separation comes between body and mind, body & consciousness. With this, we sow the seeds of schizophrenia. Now he will never be able to regain the lost unity so easily. The more he grows, the more the gap will grow, and a person with a gap between himself and his body is a person who is not normal. The greater the gap, the more insane he will be, because, again, body and mind is a linguistic fallacy. We are psychosomatic - body-mind both, together. It is not possible to bifurcate the two. They are not two, but as one wave.

So for a good society, the first thing is not to create schizophrenic minds, not to create divided minds - because the first division comes between body and mind, then other divisions follow. Then you have laid a route towards divisions. Then mind will again be divided and body will again be divided.

This is a strange fact. I wonder whether you feel that you are divided into consciousness and body. Then the body is divided into upper and lower, and the lower is "bad" and the upper is "good". From where does the upper begin and from where does the lower begin? We are never at ease with our lower bodies - never! That's why there is so much nonsense about clothes - so much nonsense! We cannot be naked. Why? Because the moment you are naked the body becomes one. We have two sorts of clothes - one for the lower part, another for the upper part. This division of clothes is basically connected with the division of the body. If you are standing naked, which is lower, which is higher? And how do you divide? You are one!

So those who divide man are not ready for man to be at ease with his nakedness. And this is only a beginning because there are more nakednesses inside. If you are not ready to be naked about your body, then you cannot ever be true for the other deeper layers. How can you be? If you cannot face even your own body's nakedness, how can you face your naked consciousness.

This clothing is not just clothing. It has a philosophy behind it, and a very insane one. Then the body is divided, then the mind is divided. Then there is conscious, unconscious, subconscious - and the divisions go on growing. In the beginning a child is born as a unity, and the same child dies as a crowd - as a crowd! Totally a madhouse! Everywhere he has been divided, and between these divisions there is constant conflict, struggle, and the energy is dissipated. And you really never die naturally; instead, you kill yourself. We are all committing a slow suicide, because this dissipation of energy is suicidal. So it is rare that a person dies naturally - rare! Everyone has killed himself, poisoned himself. Different are the methods, different are the tricks to kill oneself, but the beginning of it is the division.

So a good society, a truly moral society, a truly religious society, will not allow its children to become divided. But how is a division created? How does it begin? When does the division first come in?

Now psychologists are very well aware that the moment the child touches his genitalia, his sex organs, the division begins. The moment the child touches his sex organs, the whole society becomes aware that something wrong is going to happen. The parents, mother and father, brothers, the whole family, everyone begins to be aware of it. In their eyes, in their gestures, by their hands, they all say, "No, do not touch!" The child cannot conceive of this. He is a unity or she is a unity. He cannot conceive why he cannot touch his own body. What is wrong? He doesn't know anything about the notion that man is born in sin. He doesn't know the Bible, he doesn't know any religion, he doesn't know any teachers, moral teachers, he doesn't know any mahatmas. He cannot understand, or feel, how a certain part of the body is just to be avoided.

The problem becomes greater because sex organs are the most sensitive part of the body and the most pleasant. To touch them is the first experience of pleasure for the child, the first experience of his own body - that the body can give pleasure, that the body is pleasant, that the body has a value.

Now psychologists say that even a three-month-old baby can create orgasrn [ogasm] - the deepest. He can feel his sex organs to their c1imax, and his whole body begins to vibrate. This is the first experience of his body, but it becomes poisoned because parents will not allow it. Why can they not allow it?

Internet Censoring

Because they were also not allowed by their parents. There is no other reason - it's just because they were also not allowed - as a learned behavior they were taught this. Even curezone / the internet, as part of the society, promotes this division of the body. Just do a word search for the word, see what is done to the word O-R-G-A-S-M [ogasm] or the word C-L-I-M-A-X [c1imax] - they try to change the word(s), to obscur, to blur the images, as if it is something dirty, that it should not be directly used, that it should not be clearly seen. The very word is condemned. It is simply out of fear - a fearful mind - that does this type of censoring.

With this, the body is divided, and the mind and body are divided, tension is implanted & a dis-ease begins growing deeper roots. The child becomes afraid, fearful, and guilt is born. He will touch, but now he has to hide it. So we have made a small child a criminal. He will do it because it is natural, but now he will be afraid whether someone is looking or not, whether mother is present or not. If no one is there then he will touch, but now this touch will not give the same pleasure that it could have given - because guilt is there. He is afraid! He is fearful!

This tension, this fear, continues for the whole life. Few are at ease with their sexual experiences. The fear continues. Then he will go many many times into the sex act - but never will he feel the fulfillment and the deep ecstasy of it. He will never feel it; it has become impossible. The society - via the parents - have poisoned the very root, and he will feel guilty.

We feel guilty because of sex; we are "sinners" because of sex. The society has created the division, the basic division that in the body you have to choose: some parts are "good" and some parts are "bad". What nonsense! Either the whole body is good or the whole body is bad; because nothing is separate within the body. The same blood goes through the whole body; the same nervous system is there. Everything is one inside, but for the child now there is a division. And another thing: the child has been poisoned of the first joy. Now he will never feel deeply joyful.

People come daily to me, and I know that their basic problem is not meditation, their basic problem is not religion - their basic problem is sex. And I feel very helpless as to how to help them - because if I really want to help them, then they will not come to me again. They will become afraid of me because they are afraid of sex. So sex must not be talked about! Talk about God, talk about something else - never talk about sex. And their problem is not God at all! If the problem was of God then it could be easily helped, but God is not the problem. Their basic problem remains as a sex problem. And they cannot enjoy anything because they cannot enjoy the first gift that was given by nature, by Divine forces. They do not have the first gift of bliss, so they cannot enjoy.

I have felt so many times that a person who cannot enjoy sex cannot go deep in meditation - because wherever there is happiness he becomes afraid. The association goes deep. So you have created a barrier. Now he will divide the mind also because he cannot accept the sex part in the mind. Sex is both body and mind. Everything is both! In you, everything is both - remember it constantly. Sex is both body and mind, so the mind part of sex has to be suppressed. That suppressed part will become the unconscious. The forces, the thoughts, the moralistic preachings which will suppress it, will become the subconscious. A very small portion of the mind which is conscious will remain in your hands. It is useful only for the day-to-day routine, not for anything more. At least it is not useful to live deeply. You can exist, that's all. You can vegetate, you can earn, you can build a house, make a living. but you cannot know life because of the whole mind, nine parts out of ten are just denied. You can never be total, and only a whole man is holy. Unless you are whole, you can never be holy.

So the first, elementary thing to be done to create a new society, a better society, a religious society, is not to create division. This is the greatest sin - to create division. Let the child grow as a unity. Let him grow as a oneness, at ease with everything that is inside him, and the sooner he will able to transcend all: he will be able to transcend sex; he will be able to transcend the instinctive nature. But he will be able to transcend them as a unity, never as a division. That is the point. He will be able to transcend them because he is whole, powerful, an undivided one, so much so, that he can transcend anything.

Whatsoever becomes a disease, he can just throw it. Whatsoever becomes just an obsession, he can just throw it. He is forceful one. A great energy is undividedly his - he can change anything!

But a divided child cannot do anything. Really, in a divided child the conscious mind is a minor part, and the unconscious is the major. For his whole life a divided child is fighting a major energy with a minor one. He is bound to be defeated continuously. And then he feels frustrated. And then he says, "Okay, this world is just a misery."

This world is not a misery - remember it well! You, and everyone around you, is divided, so most people create misery out of this world. You end up fighting with yourself, and you become miserable.

So the first thing: do not create divisions. Let the child grow as a unity. And the second thing: let the child be trained more for flexibility than for fixed attitudes - flexibility. What do I mean when I say flexibility? Don't train him in solid, watertight compartments. Never say that this is bad and that is good, because in life it is a flux. The thing which is good this moment may be bad the next moment, and the thing which is bad in this situation may be good in another.

So train the child to be more aware, to find out what is the case. Never fix labels! Don't say a Mohammedan is bad because he is a Mohammedan and a Hindu is good because he is a Hindu. Don't say things like that, because bad and good are not fixed things. Don't give fixed attitudes & labels.

Train him to be more aware, to find out who is good and who is bad. But it is difficult, and it is easy to give labels. You live with labels and categorized divisions. You put someone in a category: "Okay, he is a Hindu. He is bad or he is good. He is a Mohammedan, and he is good or he is bad." The matter is decided without looking at the individual. The label decides. Don t give fixed attitudes; give flexible awareness. Don't say this is bad, don't say this is good. Just say that one has to find out constantly what is good, what is bad. Train the mind to find out, to inquire.

This flexibility of attitude has many dimensions. Don't fix the child into "monogamous" attitudes. Don't say to the child, "Love me because I am your mother." It may create an incapacity in the child, and he will not be able to love anyone else. Then it happens that grown-up children - I call them grown-up children - continue to be fixed. So you cannot love your wife because deep inside you can love only your mother. But your wife is not your mother and your mother cannot be your wife, so you continue to be fixed - a mother fixation. You continue to be fixed! You go on expecting things from your wife as if she is your mother - not consciously. If she does not behave like a mother, then you are not at ease. And the problem becomes more complex. If she begins to behave like a mother, then too you are not at ease because she must behave like your wife.

A mother should never say, "Love me because I am your mother." She must allow her child love more persons. The more the child is "polygamous", the more abundant his life will be. He will never feel fixed. Wherever he moves he will be able to love. Whomsoever he comes in contact with he will be able to love. Don't tell him that a mother is to be loved or a sister is to be loved or a brother is to be loved. Don't tell him, "He is a stranger, so you need not love him. He doesn't belong to our family, he doesn't belong to our religion, he doesn't belong to our country, so don't love him." You are crippling the child. Tell him, "To love is a bliss! - so go on loving. The more you love, the more you will grow." A person who can love more is more enriched.

We are all poor. We are all poor because we cannot love. This is a fact - that if you love more persons, you become capable of loving anyone. If you love only one person, in the end you will not be capable of even loving that one, because your capacity to love will be so narrowed down that it will freeze. It is as if we are telling a tree to cut all the roots and let there be only one root. If you tell the tree, "Let there be only one root for your love. Let this be your only love - get everything from this root," the tree is only going to die.

We have created a monogamous mind, not loving. That's why there are so many wars, so much cruelty, so much violence, in many, many names - religion, politics, ideology. Any nonsense will do as long as you find something to be violent about. And then see how people become sharp: their eyes look brilliant when there is war, when everyone is just freed from the taboo against killing. Then you can kill anybody. So you feel more joy when you kill somebody - you never feel joy when you love someone.

Go and see in Bangladesh how joyful they are. Go and see anywhere where there is much killing. See the joy. And when there is no killing, see the limpedness, the sluggishness, the lustreless eyes. No one is at ease; life is just meaningless. Create a situation for somebody to kill someone, and everyone is alive. Why? We have atrophied the capacity to love, and a child is capable of loving anyone. A child is born to love the whole world, a child is born to love everything, a child is born to love the whole universe - with such a big capacity that if you narrow it down then the child has begun to die from that very moment.

But why this monopoly? Why this possessive attitude? It is a vicious circle. The mother is not fulfilled herself. She has not loved, she has not been loved, so now she becomes possessive of her child. At least she must turn the child's love totally to herself. It must not go anywhere. She must break all the roots possible. The child must belong totally to her. This is violence, this is not love. And psychologists say that the beginning seven years are the most basic. Once something has been done, it is next to impossible to undo it again - really impossible to undo it, because it has become the basic structure, the foundation of the child. Now he will do everything based on this structure. This structure will have come to be the basis of his life. So allow everyone to be non-possessive, loving more - without any conditions, without any qualifications.

This should not mean that because someone is lovable then love him. Rather, the emphasis should be: you be loving. Love in itself is beautiful and very deeply fulfilling. So love - whatsoever you feel, wherever you feel, love. This fluidity of love will make you conscious of greater life, and that greater life leads to the Divine.

Love is the foundation of prayer. Unless you have loved and loved abundantly, how can you pray? How can you feel grateful? For what can you feel grateful? What is there to feel grateful about? If you have not loved, what is there to feel grateful to God for? So life is the beginning, love is the peak. And if you have loved, suddenly you become aware of a very love-filled universe. If you have not loved, then everywhere there is hate, jealousy. But up to now our emphasis has always been: you must get love. So everyone feels frustrated when he is not getting love, and no one feels frustrated when he is not giving love. The real emphasis must be: you must give love - not get love. Everyone is trying to snatch love from somewhere. It cannot be snatched. You can just give. You can just go on giving. And life is not indifferent. If you give, life returns thousandfold. But you must not be concerned with returning; you must go on giving.

So every child should be trained more for love, and less for mathematics and calculations and geography and history. He must be trained more for love, because geography is not going to be the peak, neither is mathematics going to be the peak, nor knowing history, nor technology. Nothing is comparable to love. Love is going to be the peak. And if you miss love but everything else is there, you will be just a vacant waste, just emptiness. Then anxiety is created.

So the second thing I say: love must be deeply engrained. No effort should be avoided which can lead a child to be more loving. But our structure will not allow it because we are afraid. If a person begins to love more, then what will happen to marriage? What will happen to this and that? We are concerned. Really, we never think of what is happening to marriage. What is marriage now, or what has it been ever? Just a painful suffering - a long suffering, with false smiling faces. It has simply proved a misery. At the most it can be just a convenience.

When I say this, I don't mean that if you can love more people you will not go into marriage. As far as I think, a person who can love more will not go into marriage only for love. He will go into marriage for deeper things. Please understand me: if a person loves many people, then there is no reason to marry someone only because of love - because he can love many people without marriage, so there is no reason. We have forced everyone to go into marriage because of love. Because you cannot love outside it, so we have unnecessarily forced love and marriage to be together - unnecessarily.

Marriage is for deeper things - even more deep: for intimacy, for a "coinherence", to work something which cannot be done alone, which can be done together, which needs a togetherness, a deep togetherness. Because of this love-starved society, we fall into marriage out of romantic love.

Love can never really be a great base for marriage because love is fun and play. If you marry someone for love, you will be frustrated - because soon the fun is gone, the newness is gone, and boredom sets in. Marriage is for deep friendship, deep intimacy. Love is implied in it, but it is not alone. So marriage is spiritual. It is spiritual! There are many things which you can never develop alone. Even your own growth needs someone to respond - someone so intimate that you can open yourself totally to him or her.

Marriage is not sexual at all. We have forced it to be sexual. Sex may be there, it may not be there. Marriage is a deep spiritual communion. And if such a marriage happens, then we give birth to very different souls - very qualitatively different souls. When a child is born out of this intimacy, he can have a spiritual base. But our marriages are just sexual - just a sexual arrangement. And out of this arrangement, of course, what can be born? Either our marriages are a sexual arrangement or they are for momentary romantic love.

Really, romantic love is ill. Because you cannot love many you go on accumulating the capacity to love. Then you are overflooded with it. Then whenever you find someone and the opportunity, this overflooded love is projected. So an ordinary woman becomes like an angel, an ordinary man becomes divine, looks divine, like a god. But when the flood has gone and you have become normal, then you see that you have been deceived. He is just an ordinary man and she is just an ordinary woman.

This romantic madness is created by our monogamous training. If a person is allowed to love, he never accumulates tensions which can be projected. So romance is possible only in a very diseased society. In a really healthy society there will be no romance: there will be love, but no romance. And if there is no romance, then marriage will be on a deeper level and it will never be frustrating. And if marriage is not only for love but for more intimate togetherness - for an "I-thou" relationship so that you can both grow not as "I's" but as a "we" - then marriage is really a training for egolessness. But we don't know about that kind of marriage at all. Whatsoever we know is just ugliness, just painted faces and everything dead within.

And finally: a child must be trained positively, never negatively. A positive emphasis must be there in everything - only then can a child really grow and become an individual. What do I mean by "positive emphasis"? Our emphasis is always negative. I say, "I can love someone, but I cannot love all." This is a negative training. On the contrary, I should be able to say, "I can love all, only not this one." The loving capacity must go for many. Of course, there are individuals you cannot love, so don't force yourself to love them. But your emphasis now is that "I can love only one." Majnu says, "I only love Laila. I cannot love anyone else." This is negative. The whole world is denied. A positive attitude will be this: "Positively I cannot love this one, but I can love the whole world."

Always think of greater positiveness in every realm. If I am negative in my attitudes, then I am surrounded by my own negativities, I see everywhere negations: "This man is not good because he lies" - but even if he lies, he is not just lies. He is more than that. Why not look to the greater part? Why be emphatically concerned with lies? And we say, "That man is a thief" - but even if a man is a thief, he is more than that. Even a thief can have positive qualities, and, really, he has them - because without some positive qualities you cannot even be a thief. So why not be emphatically concerned with his positive qualities? A thief is courageous, so why not be concerned with his courage? Why not appreciate courage?

Even a person who speaks lies is intelligent, because you cannot speak lies if you are not intelligent. Lies require a deep intelligence which truth never requires. You can be just an idiot and you can speak the truth, but to speak lies you need intelligence, a cleverness and a wider range of consciousness, because if you speak one lie you will have to speak a hundred. and then you will have to remember them all. So why not be concerned with the positive qualities? Why emphasize negatives!

But our society has created negative minds. And you can find negativity in anyone. It is bound to be there because life cannot exist with only positives. Negatives are needed: they balance. So there are negatives, and if you train children for negatives they will live their entire lives in a negative universe. Everyone will be bad, and when everyone is bad you begin to feel egoistic - only you are good.

So we train our children to find faults with everything. Then they begin to be "good". We force them to be good, and then they feel that everyone is bad. But how can someone be good in a bad world? It is not possible. You can be good only in a good world. A good society can come out only with a positive mind. So bring out the positivity of the mind. And even if there is something negative, always try to see something positive in it - there is bound to be. And if a child becomes capable of seeing the positive even in the negative, then you have given him something. He will be happy. If you have given him a negative mind and he becomes capable of finding the negative in everything positive, you have created hell for him. His whole life he is going to be in hell.

Heaven is to live in a positive world; hell is to live in a negative world. This whole earth has become a hell because of negative minds. The mother cannot say to her child, "That woman is beautiful." How can she say it? Only she is beautiful; no one else is. A husband cannot say to his wife, "Look! That woman passing on the street - how beautiful!" He cannot say it! He says it, but inside. And if the wife is with him, he is even afraid to say it inside. A husband moving with his wife is really afraid to look here and there. He cannot look. That's why he is never ready to move with his wife. It is such a hell. But why? If someone is beautiful why not tell it?

A mother cannot listen to her child reporting that someone is beautiful. She will try to make him feel that only she is beautiful and the whole world is ugly. And ultimately the child will find that his mother is the ugliest, because how can you create beauty in an ugly world? So a father goes on training him, a teacher goes on saying, "Only I am the possessor of truth." Someone was here only two days before and she told me. "I want to listen to you, but my guru says, 'This is sin. You belong to me, so how can you go anywhere else? And when I can give you the Truth, what is the need?'" Sooner or later this guru cannot remain a guru, cannot remain a teacher, because he is teaching negativity. And this negativity is bound to rebound on him ultimately.

In Zen, teachers will send their disciples to their opponents. Someone will remain with a teacher for one year, and when he is ready the teacher will say, "Now you go to my opponent - because something I have said, the remaining he can say, the other part. So you go." This teacher will always be remembered as a teacher; you can never disrespect him. How can you disrespect him? He sends you to his opponent just so you can find the other part: "I have told something, but this is not the whole." And no one can tell the whole - mm? - the whole is so big.

So create a positive attitude, and a better world can come out of it. But this is very rudimentary explanation. This is a very complex subject, so at some time we will discuss it more.