I have heard...

A man was browsing through an antique shop near Mount Vernon and ran across a rather ancient-looking axe. 'That's a mighty old axe you have there,' he said to the shop owner.

'Yes,' said the man, 'it once belonged to George Washington.'

'Really?' said the customer. 'It certainly stood up well.'

'Of course,' said the antique dealer, 'it has had three new handles and two new heads.'

But that's how life is -- it goes on changing handles and heads; in fact, it seems that everything goes on changing and yet something remains eternally the same. Just watch. You were a child -- what has remained of that now? Just a memory. Your body has changed, your mind has changed, your identity has changed. What has remained of your childhood? Nothing has remained, just a memory. You cannot make a distinction between whether it really happened, or you saw a dream, or you read it in a book, or somebody told you about it. Was the childhood yours or somebody else's? Sometimes have a look at the album of old photographs. Just see, this was you. You will not be able to believe it, you have changed so much. In fact everything has changed -- handles and heads and everything. But still, deep down, somewhere, something remains a continuity; a witnessing remains continuous.

There is a thread, howsoever invisible. And everything goes on changing but that invisible thread remains the same. That thread is beyond life and death. Life and death are two wings for that which is beyond life and death. That which is beyond goes on using life and death as two wheels of a cart, complementaries. It lives through life; it lives through death. Death and life are its processes, like inhalation and exhalation.

But something in you is transcendental. THAT ART THOU...that which is transcendental.

But we are too identified with the form -- that creates the ego. That's what we call 'I'. Of course the 'I' has to die many times. So it is constantly in fear, trembling, shaking, always afraid, protecting, securing.

A Sufi mystic knocked at the door of a very rich man. He was a beggar and he wanted nothing but enough to have a meal.

The rich man shouted at him and said, 'Nobody knows you here!'

'But I know myself,' said the dervish.'How sad it would be if the reverse were true. If everybody knew me but I was not aware of who I was, how sad it would be. Yes, you are right, nobody knows me here, but I know myself.'

These are the only two situations possible, and you are in the sad situation. Everybody may know about you -- who you are -- but you yourself are completely oblivious of your transcendence, of your real nature, of your authentic being. This is the only sadness in life.

You can find many excuses, but the real sadness is this: you don't know who you are. How can a person be happy not knowing who he is, not knowing from where he comes, not knowing where he is going? A thousand and one problems arise because of this basic self-ignorance.

A bunch of ants came out of the darkness of their underground nest in search of food. It was early in the morning. The ants happened to pass by a plant whose leaves were covered with morning dew. 'What are these?' asked one of the ants, pointing to the dew-drops. 'Where do they come from?'

Some said, 'They come from the earth.'

Others said, 'they come from the sea.'

Soon a quarrel broke out -- there was a group who adhered to the sea theory, and a group who attached themselves to the earth theory.

Only one, a wise and intelligent ant, stood alone. He said, 'Let us pause a moment and look around for signs, for everything has an attraction towards its source. And, as it is said, everything returns to its origin. No matter how far into the air you throw a brick it comes down to the earth. Whatever leans towards the light, must originally be of the light.'

The ants were not totally convinced yet and were about to resume their dispute, but the sun had come up and the dew-drops were leaving the leaves, rising, rising towards the sun and disappearing into it.

Everything returns to its original source, has to return to its original source. If you understand life then you understand death also. Life is a forgetfulness of the original source, and death is again a remembrance. Life is going away from the original source, death is coming back home. Death is not ugly, death is beautiful. But death is beautiful only for those who have lived their life unhindered, uninhibited. unsuppressed. Death is beautiful only for those who have lived their life beautifully, who have not been afraid to live, who have been courageous enough to live -- who loved, who danced, who celebrated.

Death becomes the ultimate celebration if your life is a celebration. Let me tell you in this way: whatsoever your life was, death reveals it. If you have been miserable in life, death reveals misery. Death is a great revealer. If you have been happy in your life, death reveals happiness. If you have lived only a life of physical comfort and physical pleasure, then of course, death is going to be very uncomfortable and very unpleasant, because the body has to be left. The body is just a temporary abode, a shrine in which we stay for the night and leave in the morning. It is not your permanent abode, it is not your home.

So if you have lived just a bodily life and you have never known anything beyond the body, death is going to be very, very ugly, unpleasant, painful. Death is going to be an anguish. But if you have lived a little higher than the body, if you have loved music and poetry, and you have loved, and you have looked at the flowers and the stars, and something of the non-physical has entered into your consciousness, death will not be so bad, death will not be so painful. You can take it with equanimity, but still it cannot be a celebration.

If you have touched something of the transcendental in yourself, if you have entered your own nothingness at the centre -- the centre of your being, where you are no more a body and no more a mind, where physical pleasures are completely left far away and mental pleasures such as music and poetry and literature and painting, everything, are left far away, you are simply, just pure awareness, consciousness -- then death is going to be a great celebration, a great understanding, a great revelation.

If you have known anything of the transcendental in you, death will reveal to you the transcendental in the universe -- then death is no longer a death but a meeting with God, a date with God.

So you can find three expressions about death in the history of human mind.

One expression is of the ordinary man who lives attached to his body, who has never known anything greater than the pleasure of food or sex, whose whole life has been nothing but food and sex, who has enjoyed food, has enjoyed sex, whose life has been very primitive, whose life has been very gross, who has lived in the porch of his palace, never entered it, and who had been thinking that this is all life is. At the moment of death he will try to cling. He will resist death, he will fight death. Death will come as the enemy.

Hence, all over the world, in all societies, death is depicted as dark, as devilish. In India they say that the messenger of death is very ugly -- dark, black -- and he comes sitting on a very big ugly buffalo. This is the ordinary attitude. These people have missed, they have not been able to know all the dimensions of life. They have not been able to touch the depths of life and they have not been able to fly to the height of life. They missed the plenitude, they missed the benediction.

Then there is a second type of expression. Poets, philosophers, have sometimes said that death is nothing bad, death is nothing evil, it is just restful -- a great rest, like sleep. This is better than the first. At least these people have known something beyond the body, they have known something of the mind. They have not had only food and sex, their whole life has not been only in eating and reproducing. They have a little sophistication of the soul, they are a little more aristocratic, more cultured. They say death is like great rest; one is tired and one goes into death and rests. It is restful. But they too are far away from the truth.

Those who have known life in its deepest core, they say that death is God. It is not only a rest but a resurrection, a new life, a new beginning; a new door opens.

 

When a Sufi mystic, Bayazid, was dying, people who had gathered around him -- his disciples -- were suddenly surprised, because when the last moment came his face became radiant, powerfully radiant. It had a beautiful aura.

Bayazid was a beautiful man, and his disciples had always felt ar aura around him, but they had not known anything like this; so radiant.

They asked, 'Bayazid, tell us what has happened to you. What is happening to you? Before you leave us, give us your last message.'

He opened his eyes and he said, 'God is welcoming me. I am going into his embrace. Goodbye.'

He closed his eyes, his breathing stopped. But at the moment his breathing stopped there was an explosion of light, the room became full of light, and then it disappeared.

When a person has known the transcendental in himself, death is nothing but another face
of God. Then death has a dance to it. And unless you become capable of celebrating death itself, remember, you have missed life. The whole life is a preparation for this ultimate.

This is the meaning of this beautiful story.

His whole life had been just a preparation, a preparation to learn the secrets of dying.

All religions are nothing but a science -- or an art -- to teach you how to die. And the only way to teach you how to die is to teach you how to live. They are not separate. If you know what right living is, you will know what right dying is.

So the first thing, or the most fundamental thing is: how to live.

Let me tell you a few things. First: your life is your life, it is nobody else's. So don't allow yourself to be dominated by others, don't allow yourself to be dictated to by others, that is a betrayal of life. If you allow yourself to be dictated to by others -- maybe your parents, your society, your education system -- your politicians, your priests, whosoever they are -- if you allow yourself to be dominated by others you will miss your life. Because the domination comes from outside and life is within you. They never meet.

I am not saying that you should become a no-sayer to each and everything. That too is not of much help. There are two types of people. One is an obedient type, ready to surrender to any and everybody. They don't have any independent soul in them; they are immature, childish, always searching for a father-figure, for somebody to tell them what to do and what not to do. They are not able to trust their own being. These people are the greater part of the world, the masses.

Then there are, against these people, a small minority who reJect society, who reject the values of the society. They think they are rebellious. They are not, they are only reactionaries. Because whether you listen to society or you reject society, if society remains in either way the determining factor, then you are dominated by the society.

Let me tell you an anecdote.

Once Mulla Nasrudin had been away for a while and arrived back in town wearing a long beard. His friends naturally kidded him about the beard and asked him how he happened to acquire the fur-piece. The Mulla with the beard began to complain and curse the thing in no uncertain terms. His friends were amazed at the way he talked and asked him why he continued to wear the beard if he did not like it.

'I hate the blasted thing!' the Mulla told them.

'If you hate it then why don't you shave it off and get rid of it?' one of his friends asked.

A devilish gleam shone in the eyes of the Mulla as he answered, 'Because my wife hates it too!'

But that does not make you free. The hippies, the yippies and others, they are not really rebellious people, they are reactionaries. They have reacted against the society. A few are obedient, a few are disobedient, but the centre of domination is the same. A few obey, a few disobey, but nobody looks at his own soul.

A really rebellious person is one who is neither for society nor against society, who simply lives his life according to his own understanding. Whether it goes against society or it goes with society is not a consideration, it is irrelevant. Sometimes it may go with the society, sometimes it may not go with the society, but that is not the point to be considered. He lives according to his understanding, according to his small light. And I am not saying that he becomes very egoistic about it. No, he is very humble. He knows that his light is very small, but that is all the light that there is. He is not adamant, he's very humble. He says, 'I may be wrong, but please allow me to be wrong according to myself.'

That is the only way to learn. To commit mistakes is the only way to learn. To move according to one's own understanding is the only way to grow and become mature. If you are always looking at somebody to dictate to you, whether you obey or disobey makes no difference. If you are looking at somebody else to dictate to you, to decide for or against, you will never be able to know what your life is. It has to be lived, and you have to follow your own small light.

It is not always certain what to do. You are very confused. Let it be so. But find a way out of your confusion. It is very cheap and easy to listen to others because they can hand over dead dogmas to you, they can give you commandments -- do this, don't do that. And they are very certain about their commandments. Certainty should not be sought; understanding should be sought. If you are seeking certainty you will become a victim of some trap or other.

Don't seek certainty, seek understanding. Certainty can be given to you cheap, anybody can give it to you. But in the final analysis you will be a loser. You lost your life just to remain secure and certain, and life is not certain, life is not secure.

Life is insecurity. Each moment is a move into more and more insecurity. It is a gamble. One never knows what is going to happen. And it is beautiful that one never knows. If it was predictable, life would not be worth living. If everything was as you would like it to be, and everything was certain, you would not be a man at all, you would be a machine. Only for machines is everything secure and certain.

Man lives in freedom. Freedom needs insecurity and uncertainty. A real man of intelligence is always hesitant because he has no dogma to rely upon, to lean upon. He has to look and respond.

Lao Tzu says, 'I am hesitant, and I move alertly in life because I don't know what is going to happen. And I don't have.any principle to follow. I have to decide every moment. I never decide beforehand. I have to decide when the moment comes!'

Then one has to be very responsive. That's what responsibility is. Responsibility is not an obligation, responsibility is not a duty -- it is a capacity to respond. A man who wants to know what life is has to be responsive. That is missing. Centuries of conditioning have made you more like machines. You have lost your manhood, you have bargained for security. You are secure and comfortable and everything has been planned by others. And they have put everything on the map, they have measured everything. This is all absolutely foolish because life cannot be measured, it is immeasurable. And no map is possible because life is in constant flux. Everything goes on changing. Nothing is permanent except change. Says Heraclitus, 'You cannot step in the same river twice.'

And the ways of life are very zig-zag. The ways of life are not like the tracks of a railway train. No, it does not run on tracks. And that's the beauty of it, the glory of it, the poetry of it, the music of it -- that it is always a surprise.

If you are seeking for security, certainty, your eyes will become closed. And you will be less and less surprised and you will lose the capacity to wonder. Once you lose the capacity to wonder, you have lost religion. Religion is the opening of your wondering heart. Religion is a receptivity for the mysterious that surrounds us.

Don't seek security; don't seek advice on how to live your life. People come to me and they say, 'Osho, tell us how we should live our life.' You are not interested in knowing what life is, you are more interested in making a fixed pattern. You are more interested in killing life than in living it. You want a discipline to be imposed on you.

There are, of course, priests and politicians all over the world who are ready, just sitting waiting for you. Come to them and they are ready to impose their disciplines on you. They enjoy the power that comes through imposing their own ideas upon others.

I'm not here for that. I am here to help you to become free. And when I say that I am here to help you to become free, I am included. I am to help you to become free of me also. My sannyas is a very paradoxical thing. You surrender to me in order to become free. I accept you and initiate you into.sannyas to help you to become absolutely free of every dogma, of every scripture, of every philosophy -- and I am included in it. Sannyas is as paradoxical -- it should be -- as life itself is. Then it is alive.

So the first thing is: don't ask anybody how you should live your life. Life is so precious. Live it. I am not saying that you will not make mistakes, you will. Remember only one thing -- don't make the same mistake again and again. That's enough. If you can find a new mistake every day, make it. But don't repeat mistakes, that is foolish. A man who can find new mistakes to make will be growing continuously -- that is the only way to learn, that is the
only way to come to your own inner light.

I have heard.

One night the poet, Awhadi of Kerman (a very great Muslim poet) was sitting on his porch bent over a vessel. Shams-e-Tabrizi, a great Sufi mystic, happened to pass by.

Shams-e-Tabrizi looked at the poet, at what he was doing. He asked the poet, 'What are you doing?'

The poet said, 'Contemplating the moon in a bowl of water.'

Shams-e-Tabrizi started laughing, with an uproarious laughter, a mad laughter. The poet started feeling uncomfortable; a crowd gathered. And the poet said, 'What is the matter? Why are you laughing so much? Why are you ridiculing me?'

Shams-e-Tabrizi said, 'Unless you have broken your neck, why don't you look directly at the moon in the sky?'

The moon is there, the full moon is there, and this poet was sitting with a bowl of water arid looking into the bowl of water at the reflection of the moon.

Seeking truth in scriptures, seeking truth in philosophies, is looking at the reflection. If you ask somebody else how you should live your life, you are asking for misguidance, because that man can only talk about his own life. And never, never, are two lives the same.

Whatsoever he can say or impart to you will be about his own life -- and that too only if he has lived. He may have asked somebody else, he may have followed somebody else, he may have been an imitator himself. Then it is a reflection of a reflection. And centuries pass and people go on reflecting the reflection of the reflection of the reflection -- and the real moon is always there in the sky waiting for you. It is your moon, it is your sky, look directly. Be immediate about it. Why borrow my eyes or anybody else's eyes? You have been given eyes, beautiful eyes, to see, and to see directly. Why borrow understanding from anybody?

Remember, it may be understanding to me. but the moment you borrow it, it becomes knowledge to you -- it is no more understanding, Understanding is only that which has been experienced by the person himself. It may be
understanding for me, if I have looked at the moon, but the moment I say it to you it becomes knowledge, it is no longer understanding. Then it is just verbal, then it is just linguistic. And language is a lie.

Let me tell you an anecdote.

A chicken farmer, dissatisfied with the productivity of his flock, decided to use a bit of psychology on his hens. Accordingly he purchased a gay-coloured, talking parrot and placed him in the barnyard. Sure enough, the hens took to the handsome stranger immediately, pointed out the best tidbits for him to eat with joyous clucks, and generally followed him around like a bevy of teen-age girls following a new singing star sensation. To the delight of the farmer even their egg-laying capacities improved.

The barnyard rooster, naturally jealous of being ignored by his harem, set upon the attractive interloper, assailed him with beak and claws, pulling out one green or red feather after the other. Whereupon the intimidated parrot cried out in trepidation, 'Desist sir! I beg of you, desist! After all, I am only here in the capacity of a language professor!'

Many people live their life as language professors. That is the falsest kind of life. Reality needs no language, it is available to you on a non-verbal level. The moon is there; it needs no bowl and no water, it needs no other medium. You have just to look at it; it is a non-verbal communication. The whole of life is available -- you just have to learn how to communicate with it non-verbally.

That's what meditation is all about -- to be in a space where language does not interfere, where learned concepts don't come in between you and the real.

When you love a woman don't be bothered about what others have said about love, because that is going to be an interference. You love a woman, the love is there, forget all that you have learned about love. Forget all Kinseys, forget all Masters and Johnsons, forget all Freuds and Jungs. Please don't become a language professor. Just love the woman and let love be there, and let love lead you and guide you into its innermost secrets, into its mysteries. Then you will be able to know what love is.

 

What others say about meditation is meaningless.

Once I came upon a book written by a Jaina saint about meditation. It was really beautiful but there were just a few places by which I could see that the man had never meditated himself -- otherwise those places could not be there. But they were very few and far between. The book on the whole, almost ninety-nine per cent, was perfect. I loved the book.

Then, I forgot about it. For ten years I was wandering around the country. Once in a village of Rajasthan, that saint came to meet me. His name sounded familiar, and suddenly I remembered the book. And I asked the saint why he had come to me. He said, 'I have come to you to know what meditation is.'

I said, 'I remember your book. I remember it very well, because it really impressed me. Except for a few defects which showed that you have never meditated, the book was perfectly right -- ninety-nine percent right. And now you come here to learn about meditation. Have you never meditated?'

He looked a little embarrassed because his disciples were also there.

I said, 'Be frank. Because if you say you know meditation, then I am not going to talk about it. Then finished!
You know. There is no need. If you say to me frankly -- at least be true once -- if you say you have never meditated, only then can I help you towards meditation.'

It was a bargain, so he had to confess. He said, 'Yes, I have never said it to anybody. I have read many books about meditation, all the old scriptures. And I have been teaching people, that's why I feel embarrassed before my disciples. I have been teaching meditation to thousands, and I have written books about it, but I have never meditated.'

You can write books about meditation and never come across the space that meditation is. You can become very efficient in verbalising, you can become very clever in abstraction, in intellectual argumentativeness, and you can forget completely that all the time that you have been involved in these intellectual activities has been a sheer wastage.

I asked the old man, 'How long have you been interested in meditation?'

He said, 'My whole life.' He was almost seventy. He said, 'When I was twenty I took sannyas, I became a Jaina monk, and those fifty years since then I have been reading and reading and thinking about meditation.'

Fifty years of thinking and reading and writing about meditation, even guiding people into meditation, and he has not even tasted once what meditation is! But this is the case with millions of people. They talk about love, they know all the poetries about love, but they have never loved. Or even if they thought they were in love, they were never in love. That too was a 'heady' thing, it was not of the heart. People live and go on missing life. It needs courage. It needs courage to be realistic, it needs courage to move with life wherever it leads, because the paths are uncharted, there exists no map. One has to go into the unknown.

Life can be understood only if you are ready to go into the unknown. If you cling to the known, you cling to the mind, and the mind is not life. Life is non-mental, non-intellectual, because life is total. Your totality has to be involved in it, you cannot just think about it. Thinking about life is not life. beware of this 'about-ism'. One goes on thinking about and about: there are people who think about God, there are people who think about life, there are people who think about love. There are people who think about this and that.

Mulla Nasrudin became very old and he went to his doctor. He was looking very weak so the doctor said, 'I can say only one thing. You will have to cut your love-life to half.'

The Mulla said, 'Okay. Which half? Talking about it or thinking about it?'

That's all. Don't become a language professor, don't become a parrot. Parrots are language professors. They live in words, concepts, theories, theologies, and life goes on passing, slipping out of their hands. Then one day suddenly they become afraid of death. When a person is afraid of death, know well that that person has missed life. If he has not missed life there cannot be any fear of death. If a person has lived life, he will be ready to live death also. He will be almost enchanted by the phenomenon of death.

When Socrates was dying he was so enchanted that his disciples could not understand what he was feeling so happy about. One disciple, Credo, asked, 'Why are you looking so happy? We are crying and weeping.'

Socrates said, 'Why should I not be happy? I have known what life is, now I would like to know what death is. I am at the door of a great mystery, and I am thrilled! I am going on a great journey into the unknown. I am simply full of wonder! I cannot wait!'

And remember, Socrates was not a religious man; Socrates was not in any way a believer.

Somebody asked, 'Are you so certain that the soul will survive after death?'

Socrates said, 'I don't know.'

To say, 'I don't know' takes the greatest courage in the world. It is very difficult for the language professors to say, 'I don't know'. It is difficult for the parrots. Socrates was a very sincere and honest man. He said, 'I don't know.'

Then the disciple asked, 'Then why are you feeling so happy? If the soul does not survive, then...?'

Socrates said, 'I have to see. If I survive there can be no fear about it. If I don't survive, how can there be fear? If I don't survive, I don't survive. Then where is the fear? There is nobody there, so fear cannot exist. If I survive, I survive. There is no point in getting afraid about it. But I don't know exactly what is going to happen. That's why I am so full of wonder and ready to go into it. I don't know.'

To me, this is what a religious man should be. A religious man is not a Christian, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist, or a Mohammedan. All these are ways of knowledge. A Christian says, 'I know.' And his knowledge comes from the Christian dogmas. The Hindu says, 'I also know.' And his knowledge comes from the Vedas and the Gitas and his dogmas. And a Hindu is against the Christian, because he says, 'If I am right, you cannot be right. If you are right, then I cannot be right.' So there is great argument and there is much dispute and much debate and unnecessary conflict.

A religious man, a really religious man -- not the so-called religious people -- is one who says.'I don't know.' When you say 'I don't know' you are open, you are ready to learn. When you say 'I don't know' you don't have any prejudice this way or that, you don't have any belief, you don't have any knowledge. You have only awareness. You say, 'I am aware and I will see what happens. I will not carry any dogma from the past.'

This is the attitude of a disciple, the attitude of one who wants to learn. And discipline simply means learning. A disciple means a learner, one who is ready to learn, and discipline means learning.

I am not here to teach you any dogmas; I am not imparting any knowledge to you. I am simply helping you to see that which is. Live your life whatsoever the cost. Be ready to gamble with it.

I have heard about a business man. He was walking from his office to a restaurant for lunch when he was stopped by a stranger who said to him, 'I don't think that you remember me, but ten years ago I came to this city broke. I asked you for a loan and you gave me twenty dollars because you said you were willing to take a chance to start a man on the road to success.'

The business man thought for a while and then he said. 'Yes, I remember the incident. Go on with your story.'

'Well,' remarked the stranger, 'are you still willing to gamble?'

Life asks you the same question again and again and again: 'Are you still willing to gamble?' It is never certain. Life has no insurance to it; it is simply an opening, a wild opening, a chaotic opening. You can make a small house around you, secure, but then that will prove to be your grave. Live with life.

And we have been doing that in many ways. Marriage is man-created; love is part of life. When you create marriage around love you are creating security. You are making something which cannot be made -- love cannot be made legal. You are trying to do the impossible, and if, in that effort, love dies, it is no wonder. You become a husband, your beloved becomes a wife. You are no longer two alive persons, you are two functionaries. The husband has a certain function, the wife has a certain function: they have certain duties to fulfil. Then life has ceased to flow, it is frozen.

Watch a husband and wife. You will always see two persons frozen, sitting side by side, not knowing what they are doing there, why they are sitting there. Maybe they have nowhere to go.

When you see love between two persons, something is flowing, moving, changing. When there is love between two persons they live in an aura, there is a constant sharing. Their vibrations are reaching to : each other; they are broadcasting their being to each other. There is no wall between them, they are two and yet not two -- they are one also.

The husband and wife are as far away as it is possible to be, even though they may be sitting by the side of each other. The husband never listens to what the wife is saying; he has become deaf long ago. The wife never sees what is happening to the husband; she has become blind to him. They take each other absolutely for granted; they have become things.

They are no longer persons because persons are always open, persons are always uncertain, persons are always changing. Now they have a fixed role to fulfil. They died the day they got married. Since that day they have not lived.

I'm not saying not to get married, but remember that love is the real thing. And if it dies then marriage is worthless.

And the same is true about everything in life, about everything. Either you can live it -- but then you have to live with this hesitation, not knowing what is going to happen the next moment -- or you can make everything certain about it.

There are people who have become so certain about everything that they are never surprised. There are people whom you cannot surprise. And I am here to deliver to you a message which is very surprising -- you will not believe it, I know. You cannot believe it, I know. I am here to tell you something which is absolutely unbelievable -- that you are gods and goddesses. You have forgotten

Let me tell you an anecdote.

Harvey Firestone, Thomas A. Edison, John Burroughs and Henry Ford stopped at a rural service station on their way to Florida for the winter. 'We want some bulbs for our headlights,' said Ford. 'And by the way, that is Thomas Edison sitting there in the car, and I am Henry Ford.'

The fellow at the service station did not even look up, just spat out some tobacco juice with obvious contempt. 'And,' said Ford, 'we would like to buy a new tire if you have any Firestone tires. And that other fellow in the car is Harvey Firestone himself.'

Still the old fellow said nothing. While he was placing the tire on the wheel, John Burroughs, with his long white beard, stuck his head out the window and said, 'How do you do, stranger?'

Finally the old man at the service station came alive. He glared at Burroughs and said, 'If you tell me you are Santa Claus I will be damned if I don't crush your skull with this lug wrench.'

He could not believe that in one car Harvey Firestone, Thomas A. Edison, John Burroughs and Henry Ford were travelling. They were all friends and they used to travel together.

When I say to you you are gods and goddesses you will not believe it because you have completely forgotten who is travelling within you, who is sitting within you, who is listening to me, who is looking at me. You have completely forgotten. You have been given some labels from the outside and you have trusted those labels -- your name, your religion, your country -- all bogus! It does not make any sense if you are a Hindu or a Christian or a Mohammedan if you don't know your self. These labels make no sense at all except that they may be of a certain utility. What sense does it make whether you are a Hindu, or a Christian, or a Mohammedan, or an Indian, or an American, or Chinese? How does it make sense, how does it help you to know your being? All are irrelevant -- because the being is neither Indian, nor Chinese, nor American; and the being is neither Hindu, nor Mohammedan, nor Christian. The being is simply a pure 'is-ness'.

The pure 'is-ness' is what I call God. If you can understand your inner divinity you have understood what life is. Otherwise you have not been able yet to decode life. This is the message. The whole life is pointing at one thing, continuously -- that you are gods. Once you have understood it, then there is no death. Then you have learned the lesson. Then in death, gods will be returning back to their homes.

The whole life...just a training for how to go back home, how to die, how to disappear. Because the moment you disappear, God appears in you. Your presence is God's absence; your absence is God's presence.

 

 

DON'T accumulate anything whatsoever: power, money, prestige, virtue, knowledge, even the so-called spiritual experiences. Don't accumulate. If you don't accumulate you are ready to die any moment, because you have nothing to lose. The fear of death is not really fear of death; the fear of death comes out of the accumulations of life. Then you have too much to lose so you cling to it. That is the meaning of Jesus' saying: Blessed are the poor in spirit.

I don't mean become a beggar, and I don't mean renounce the world. I mean be in the world but don't be of the world. Don't accumulate inside, be poor in spirit. Never possess anything -- and then you are ready to die. Possessiveness is the problem, not life itself. The more you possess, the more you are afraid to lose. If you don't possess anything, if your purity, if your spirit is uncontaminated by anything, if you are simply there alone, you can disappear any moment; whenever death knocks on the door it will find you ready. You are not losing anything. By going with death you are not a loser. You may be moving into a new experience.

And when I say don't accumulate, I mean it as an absolute imperative. I'm not saying don't accumulate things of this world but go on accumulating virtue, knowledge, and so-called spiritual experiences, visions -- no. I am talking in absolute terms: don't accumulate. There are people, particularly in the East, who teach renunciation. They say, 'Don't accumulate anything in this world because it will be taken away from you when death comes.' These people seem to be basically more greedy than the ordinary worldly people. Their logic is: don't accumulate in this world because death will take it away, so accumulate something that death cannot take away from you -- accumulate virtue, PUNYA; accumulate character, morality, knowledge; accumulate experiences, spiritual experiences, experiences of kundalini, meditation, this and that; accumulate something that death cannot take away from you.

But if you accumulate, with that accumulation comes fear. Each accumulation brings fear in the same proportion...then you are afraid. Don't accumulate and fear disappears. I don't teach you renunciation in the old sense; my sannyas is an absolutely new concept. It teaches you to be in the world and yet to be not of it. Then you are always ready.

I have heard about a great Sufi mystic, Abraham Adam.

The purity of the spirit is the real poverty. The word 'sufi' comes from an Arabic word 'safa'. Safa means purity. Sufi means one who is pure in the heart.

And what is purity? Don't misunderstand me, purity has nothing to do with morality. Don't interpret it in a moralistic way. Purity has nothing to do with puritans. Purity simply means an uncontaminated state of mind, where only your consciousness is and nothing else. Nothing else really enters into your consciousness, but if you hanker to possess, that hankering contaminates you. Gold cannot enter into your consciousness. There is no way. How can you take gold into your being? There is no way. Money cannot enter into your consciousness. But if you want to possess, that possessiveness can enter into your consciousness. Then you become impure. If you don't want to possess anything, you become fearless. Then even death is a beautiful experience to pass through.

A man who is really spiritual has tremendous experiences but he never accumulates them. Once they have happened he forgets about them. He never remembers, he never projects them into the future. He never says that they should be repeated or that they should happen again to him. He never prays for them. Once they have happened they have happened. Finished! He is finished with them and he moves away from them. He is always available for the new, he never carries the old.

And if you don't carry the old you will find life absolutely new, incredibly, unbelievably new at each step. Life is new, only the mind is old; and if you look through the mind, life also looks like a repetition, a boring thing. If you don't look through the mind.... Mind means your past, mind means the accumulated experiences, knowledge and everything. Mind means that through which you have passed, but on to which you are still hanging. Mind is a hang-over, dust from the past covering your mirrorlike consciousness. Then when you look through it everything becomes distorted. Mind is the faculty of distortion. If you don't look through the mind you will know that life is eternal. Only mind dies -- without mind you are deathless. Without mind nothing has ever died; life goes on and on and on forever. It has no beginning and no end.

Accumulate, then you have a beginning, and then you will have an end.

How to prepare yourself for death.... When I say 'how to prepare for death', I don't mean preparing for the death that will come in the end -- that is very far away. If you prepare for it you will be preparing for the future and again the mind will come in. No, when I say prepare for death, I don't mean the death that will come finally, I mean the death that visits you every moment with each exhalation. Accept this death each moment and you will be ready for the final death when it comes.

Start dying each moment to the past. Clean yourself of the past each moment. Die to the known so that you become available to the unknown. With dying and being reborn each moment you will be able to live life and you will be able to live death also. And that's what spirituality is really all about: to live death intensely, to live life intensely; to live both so passionately that nothing is left behind unlived, not even death. If you live life and death totally, you transcend. In that tremendous passion and intensity of life and death, you transcend duality, you transcend the dichotomy, you come to the One. That One is really the truth. You can call it God, you can call it life, you can call it truth, samadhi, ecstasy, or whatsoever you choose.

 

 

The Second Question:

The questioner says, 'At times you seem to intend to confuse us'. No, you have not listened to me well. I am always confusing, not only at times. Confusion is my method.

What I am trying to do by confusing you is to uproot you from your mind. I would not like you to have any roots in the mind in the name of love, or in the name of meditation, or in the name of God. Your mind is very cunning. It can thrive on anything; on meditation, on love, it can thrive. The moment I see that your mind is thriving on anything, I immediately have to uproot you from it. My whole effort is to create a no-mind state in you. I am not here to convince you about anything. I am not here to give you a dogma, a creed to live by. I am here to take all creeds away from you because, only then will life happen to you. I am not giving you anything to live by, I am simply taking all props away from you, all crutches.

The mind is very clever. If you say, 'Drop money' the mind says, 'Okay. Can I cling to meditation?' If you say to the mind, 'Renounce the world' the mind says, 'Okay. Can I now possess spiritual experiences?' If you say, 'Renounce the world', the mind says, 'I can renounce the world, but now I will cling to the idea of God.'

And nothing is a greater barrier to God than the idea of God.

The word 'God' has become a great barrier, the belief in God has become a great barrier. If you want to reach to God you will have to drop all ideas about God, all beliefs about God -- Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. You will have to be absolutely silent, unclinging, not-knowing. In that profound ignorance God reveals himself to you -- only in that profound ignorance.

My effort is totally different from your effort. What you are doing here is diametrically opposite to what I am doing here. My effort is to create a profound ignorance in you, so I will have to confuse you. Whenever I see that some knowledge is being gathered, I immediately jump on it and destroy it. By and by you will learn -- being close to me you are bound to learn -- that it is futile to accumulate because this man will not leave you in peace. If you cling to something he is going to take it away. So what is the point? One day you will simply listen to me, not clinging, not making any belief out of it, not creating a philosophy, a theology out of it -- simply listening as you listen to the birds, as you listen to the wind passing through the pines, as you listen to the river rushing towards the ocean, as you listen to the wild roar of the ocean waves. Then you don't create a philosophy, you simply listen.

Let me be a wild ocean roaring in front of you, or a wind passing through the trees, or birds singing in the morning. I am not a philosopher, I am not imparting knowledge to you. I am trying to point to something which is beyond knowledge.

So the moment I see that you are nodding, the moment I see that you are saying, 'Yes, this is true', the moment I see that you are accumulating something, immediately I have to jump upon it and contradict it to confuse you. Confusion is my method, I am doing it all the time. I will not leave you to rest unless you drop that whole effort of philosophising, unless you start listening to me without any mind, out of the sheer joy of it, as you listen to music. When you start listening to me in that way then you will never feel confused. You feel confused because first you cling to something, then in the next step I destroy it. You feel confused. You were making a house and again I come there and destroy it.

Your confusion is in fact created by yourself. Don't create that house then I cannot destroy it. If you create, I am going to destroy. If you stop creating houses -- card-houses they are -- if you stop creating houses, if you say, 'This man will come and destroy,' if you simply wait and listen and you don't bother to make any house to live in, then I cannot confuse you. And the day I cannot confuse you will be a great day of rejoicing for you. Because that very moment you will be able to understand me -- not by your intellect but by your being. It will be a communion, not a communication. It will be a transfer of energy, not of words. You will have entered into my house.

I will not allow you to create any house because that will be a barrier. Then you will start living in that house and I am trying to bring you into my house. Jesus says to his disciples, 'In my God's house there are many mansions.' I also say to you, 'I am taking you on a journey where a great palace is waiting for you.' But I see you making houses by the side of the road and I have to destroy them otherwise your journey will be destroyed and you will never reach the goal. You start worshipping anything. You are in such a hurry, you are so impatient, that whatsoever I tell you, you simply grab it.

I am not going to allow it to happen. So, be alert. If you are alert there will be no need to confuse you. In fact, if you are alert, whatsoever I do I cannot confuse you. The day you can say, 'Now, Osho, you cannot confuse me. Whatsoever you say I listen, I rejoice in it, but I don't make any conceptualisation' is the day I cannot confuse you. Until that moment I am going to confuse you again and again and again.

The third question:

Sex is more closely related to birth than to death. Birth is out of sex; birth is a sexual phenomenon. Naturally, sex is also closely related to death -- but as a by-product. Because birth is out of sex, death is also going to be out of sex. Hence the nonsensical idea arose in the East that if you remain celibate, if you remain a BRAHMACHARY, if you go beyond sex, you will never die -- you will become an immortal. That is foolish, because death is not something that is going to happen in the future, it has already happened with birth. You cannot avoid it. You can indulge in sex or you can indulge in celibacy, it is going to make no difference.

Mulla Nasrudin had completed his hundredth year, and a few journalists came to interview him. He was the first citizen of his town who had become a centenarian. They asked how he had attained to such great age. He said, 'I never touched wine, I was never interested in women. That must be the reason for it.'

Immediately something in the next room fell very loudly and there was a racket. The journalists became very alert. They said, 'What is going on?'

Mulla said, 'It must be my Dad. It seems he is again running after the maid, and he seems to be drunk.'

The old man must be one hundred and twenty-five. Mulla had said, 'I have attained to this age because of celibacy and because I never touched any wine. I have remained away from women'. But, here is his father still rushing, drunk, trying to catch hold of a woman.

Death had already happened the moment you became incarnated in the body. The moment you entered the womb, death had already happened. Your clock, the clock of your life, can run only so far -- seventy years, eighty years -- it depends on a thousand and one things. But your clock can only run so far. It makes no difference how you live your life. Death is going to happen. Death cannot be avoided.

The questioner has asked:

The first thing is that birth and death are both related to sex, but just by becoming celibate you are not going to transcend death. Death has already happened in birth, there is no way to transcend it. It is going to happen because in fact it has already happened. It is only a question of time unfolding. You are rushing towards it each moment.

So don't try to be celibate just to avoid death because that again is fear. The people who try to become celibate are afraid of death, and one who is afraid of death can never know what death is, can never know what deathlessness is. So don't be afraid.

And celibacy can only be spontaneous. You ask:

Celibacy can only be spontaneous, there is no other type of celibacy. If it is not spontaneous, it is not celibacy. You can force it. you can control your sexuality, but that is not going to help. You will not be celibate, you will be only more and more sexual. Sex will spread all over your being. It will become part of your unconscious. It will move your dreams, it will become your motivation in dreams, it will become your fantasy. In fact, you will become more sexual than you ever were before. You will think more about it and you will have to repress it again and again. And whatsoever is repressed has to be repressed again because victory is never complete. There is no way to destroy sex by force, by violence. There is no way to control and discipline it. The people who have tried to control and discipline it have made the world very p0rnographic. Your so-called saints have a very p0rnographic mind. If a window can be created and a hole can be made in their heads, you will be able to see just sex, p0rnography. it is bound to be so. It is natural.

Never enforce any celibacy on yourself. Try to understand what sexuality is, go deep into it. It has a tremendous beauty of its own. It is one of the profoundest mysteries of life. Life comes out of it -- it has to be a great mystery. Sex is not sin; repression is a sin. Sex is very natural, very spontaneous. You have not done anything to have it, it is inborn, it is part of your being. Don't condemn it, don't judge it, don't fear it, don't fight with it. Simply go into it more -- more meditatively. Let it happen in such silence, in such deep acceptance, that you can know the very core of it. The moment you penetrate to the very core of sexual ogasm you will see sex is losing its appeal for you, you r energy is moving in a higher plane, you are becoming more loving and less sexual. And this happens spontaneously.

I am not saying become more loving. I am saying that if you go deep into the mystery of sex, love arises out of it naturally. You become more loving and sexuality becomes less and less and less. And one day there is just a pure flame of love, all the smoke of sex has disappeared. The crude energy of sex has been transformed into a more subtle perfume -- the perfume of love.

Then I will say go deep into love. If you go deep into love, again you will come to the very core of it. And in that moment prayer will arise. That too happens spontaneously. In sex you are more concerned with the body; in love you are more concerned with the psyche; in prayer you suddenly become concerned with the soul. These are the three possibilities hidden in the seed of sex. And when sex has disappeared into love and love has disappeared into prayer, there is a spontaneous celibacy.

The Indian term for it is very beautiful. It is BRAHMACHARYA. The word literal!y means 'living like a God'. BRAHMACHARYA means living like a God. The whole energy is just prayer, the whole energy is just grace, a gratitude, a benediction. One becomes absolutely divine.

But I am not saying that sex is not divine. It is the seed. Love is the tree, prayer is the flowering. Prayer arises out of sex energy. You have to be grateful towards it, you have to respect it. Sex should be respected because everything is going to happen out of it. Life has happened out of it; death is going to happen out of it; love, prayer and God are going to happen out of it. Sex carries the whole blueprint of your destiny. To me, sex is not just sex, sex is all.

So if from the very beginning you take an 'anti' attitude you will be missing the whole journey of life. And you will get involved in a fight which leads nowhere, you will get involved in a fight in which your defeat is certain. You cannot defeat sexual energy because in sexual energy God is hidden, in sexual energy love and prayer are hidden. How can.you defeat it? You are very tiny and sexual energy is very universal. This whole existence is full of sexual energy.

But the word 'sex' has become so condemned. It has to be taken out of the mud. It has to be cleaned.A temple has to be made around it. And remember, celibacy can only be spontaneous, there is no other type of celibacy. It is not a control, it is not a discipline; it is a tremendous understanding of your energies and their possibilities.

 

The fourth question:

In the first place I am a nobody. Now listen to the question again:

"You said nobody should dictate what you should do with your life."

Don't surrender to me because I dictate to you. But if you feel like surrendering, what can I do? If you feel like surrendering, it is your feeling. If I am dictating to you to surrender to me, don't listen to me. But if your heart is dictating, then what are you going to do? If I tell you to be available to me, don't listen at all. But if your own understanding says, 'Be available to this man', then be.

And here there is nobody. If you look deeply into me you will not find anybody there. The house is empty, the whole space is yours, just for the asking. I am just a space. The man you see here sitting in the chair died long before. There is no entity who can dictate anything to you.

Just last night one woman seeker was saying, 'I would like to do what other sannyasins are doing, but I cannot surrender. I cannot lose my freedom. I have lived in many confinements from my very childhood, in many disciplines. Now I am afraid to get involved in another imprisonment.' I said, 'Don't be worried. I confer freedom upon you, an absolute freedom.'

Sannyas is freedom. If you understand rightly, it is absolute freedom.

And the woman understood the point because I said, 'Now you are afraid that you may get into another trap. But are you aware that your ego itself can become the trap, and the greatest of all? You have lived within many other commitments and you found they all became imprisonments -- but your own ego can become the imprisonment. When you surrender to a nobody he cannot imprison you, and the very danger of your own, ego becoming an imprisonment for you also disappears. When you surrender to me you are not really surrendering to me, because I am not here. And I'm not enjoying your surrender at all -- whether you surrender or not makes no difference to me. In fact, when you surrender to me, you surrender yourself. You don't surrender to me. You simply surrender your ego. I am just a device, an excuse. It will be difficult for you to go and surrender to the river, or to the sky, or to the stars -- it will be very difficult and you will look a little ridiculous. So I pretend to be here just to help you so that you don't feel ridiculous. You can put you r ego here. There is nobody to receive it and nobody to be happy about it, but it helps.

Buddha used to call such things devices -- UPAYA. It is just a UPAYA, a device to help those who cannot put their egos down unless they find some feet. I make my feet available to you, but inside there is nobody.

_____________________________________

The fifth question:

You must be hankering for it. I have not called you swami to be swami for others. The word 'swami' means lord. Don't hanker for others to call you lord. I have called you 'swami' just to indicate your path -- so that you become lord of yourself. It is not to make others slaves to you, it is just to make a master of you. The word 'swami' is intended for self-mastery. So don't feel frustrated if nobody calls you swami. In fact, if somebody calls you swami, be alert, because there is danger. You may start thinking that you are a swami, you may start thinking that you are some holy man or something. Don't carry that type of nonsense. I am not here to make you holy or saintly or anything.

You ask why I give you these religious titles, because they seem absurd. They are. Really, my whole intention is to make you so ridiculous, so absurd, that others laugh at you and you-can also laugh at yourself. That is the whole trick in it.

And for another purpose also I call you 'swami'. I give you these religious titles because to me the profane and the sacred are not two separate things: the profane is the sacred, the ordinary is the extraordinary, and the natural is the super-natural.

God is not somewhere away from the world. God is in the world, immanent. That's my whole approach...that everything is divine as it is. The old concept of a religious man is that he is anti-life. He condemns this life, this ordinary life -- he calls it 'mundane', 'profane',
'illusion'. He denounces it. I am so deeply in love with life that I cannot denounce it. I am here to enhance the feeling for it.

When I give you these religious titles, I am not making you in any way superior to others. Don't carry any idea of 'holier than you', don't carry any idea of that sort. That is stupid.

My sannyas is the most complicated phenomenon

I give you these orange clothes. These clothes have been used for centuries down through the ages for a specific purpose -- to make a demarcation between the ordinary life and the religious life. I want to dissolve all those differences. Hence I give you these robes and I don't take you away from life.

You will be sitting in ordinary life, working in ordinary life, walking in ordinary life. You will be in the marketplace, you will be in the shop or in the factory, you will be a labourer, a doctor, an engineer. I am not making you special in any way -- because that very desire to become special is irreligious. And I have given you these robes to destroy the whole concept completely. That's why the traditional sannyasins are very much against me.

I am destroying their whole superiority. Now sooner or later there will be no distinction. My swamis are growing so fast that the old traditional swamis will be simply lost in the jungle of my swamis. And people will not know who is who. That's the purpose behind it. I
want to make religious life ordinary life, because this is the only life there is. All else is just an ego trip. And this life is so beautiful, there is no need to create another life superior to it.

Go deeper into it, move deeper into it, and profounder depths will be revealed to you. This ordinary life is carrying tremendous possibilities. So I don't want you to become religious in the sense that others are not religious. I want to drop all distinctions between the profane and the sacred, between the holy and the unholy. It is a great revolution. You may not even be aware of what is happening.

And if the traditionalists are against me, I can understand. I am destroying their whole 'holier than you' attitude.

That's why I have chosen the orange particularly. That has been the traditional dress for sannyasins. But I have chosen only the dress nothing else is there in you -- nothing else of the traditional discipline. There is just awareness, a love for Life, a respect for life, a reverence for life. I have given you the orange robe, but the day I see that now the traditional distinction has been destroyed, I will free you from the orange robe. There is no need then. But it will take time because they have been creating the distinction for centuries.

You cannot conceive of what is happening. When an orange-robed sannyasin walks with his girlfriend on the street, you cannot conceive what is happening. It has never happened in India, not for ten thousand years. People cannot believe it -- and you are expecting that they should call you 'swami'? It is enough that they are not killing you! You are destroying their whole tradition. A sannyasin was one who would never LOOK at a woman. Touching was out of the question -- and holding the hand, impossible! That was enough to throw him into hell.

I have made you a totally new kind of sannyasin. It is a neo-sannyas. And behind whatsoever I am doing there is a method. You may be aware of it, or not. I want to destroy the whole traditional attitude. Life should be religious and religion should not have any life. The distinction between the marketplace and the monastery should not be there. The monastery should be in the marketplace; the divine dimension should become part of everyday life.

Somebody asked Bokoju, 'What do you do? What is your religious discipline?'

He said, 'I live an ordinary life. That is my discipline. When I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel sleepy I sleep.' Yes, this is exactly how it should be.

The questioner was puzzled. He said, 'But I don't see anything special in it.'

Bokoju said, 'That is the point. There is nothing special.' All hankering for the special is of the ego.

The questioner was still puzzled. He said, 'But this is what everybody else is doing -- when hungry they eat, when feeling sleepy they sleep.'

Bokoju laughed. He said, 'No, when you eat, you do a thousand and one things also. You think, you dream, you imagine, you remember. You are not there Just eating. When I eat, I simply eat. Then there is only eating and nothing else. It is pure. When you sleep you do a thousand and one things -- you dream, fight, have nightmares. When I sleep, I simply sleep, there is nothing else. When sleep is there, there is only sleep. Not even Bokoju exists. When eating is there, there is only eating. Not even Bokoju exists. When there is walking, there is only walking -- no Bokoju. There is only walking, simply walking.'

This is what I would like you to become. Be ordinary, but bring a quality of awareness to your ordinary life. Bring God to your ordinary life, introduce God into your ordinary life. Sleep, eat, love, pray, meditate, but don't think that you are making or doing something
special. And then you will be special. A man who is ready to live an ordinary life is an extraordinary man. Because to be extraordinary, to desire to be extraordinary, is a very ordinary desire. To relax and to be ordinary is really extraordinary.

 

 

The sixth question:

Now, not only do I give you absurd answers, you have started asking absurd questions...

"Why is this life so mysterious?"

How am I supposed to know? It is so! It is simply a fact, I am not talking about theories. I'm not saying that it is my theory that life is mysterious -- then you could ask 'why?'. It is simply so. The trees are green. You ask why. The trees are green because they are green. There is no question of why.

If you can ask why and the question can be answered, then life will not be a mystery. If the why can be answered, then life cannot be a mystery. Life is a mystery because no 'why?' is relevant.

Now you make me feel guilty, as if I am responsible for life having no beginning and no end. It should have. I agree perfectly with you, but what to do? It has no beginning and no end.

I have heard...

Mulla Nasrudin was saying to one of his disciples that life is like a woman. I was surprised, so I listened attentively to what he was saying.

He was saying, 'The man who says he understands women is bragging. The man who thinks he understands them is gullible. The man who pretends to understand them is ambiguous. The man who wants to understand them is wistful. On the other hand, the man who does not say he understands them, does not think he understands them, does not pretend to understand them, does not even want to understand them -- he understands them!'

And that's how life is also. Life is a woman. Try to understand life and you will become a mess. Forget all about understanding. Just live it and you will understand it. The understanding is not going to be intellectual, theoretical; the understanding is going to be total. The understanding is not going to be verbal; it is going to be non-verbal. That is the meaning when we say life is a mystery. It can be lived but it cannot be solved.

You can know what it is, but you cannot say what it is. That is the meaning of mystery. When we say that life is a mystery, we are saying that life is not a problem. A problem can be solved. A mystery is that which cannot be solved. Insolubility is unbuilt. And it is good that life cannot be solved, otherwise what would you do then? Just think of it. If life is not a mystery and somebody comes and explains it to you -- then what will you do? There will be nothing left except to commit suicide. Even that will look meaningless.

Life is a mystery; the more you know it, the more beautiful it is. A moment comes when suddenly you start living it, you start flowing with it. An ogasmic relationship evolves between you and life, but you cannot figure out what it is. That's the beauty of it, that's its infinite depth.

And yes, there is no beginning and no end. How can there be any beginning to life and any end to life? Beginning will mean that something came out of nothing, and end will mean that something was there and went into nothing. That will be an even bigger mystery. When we say life has no beginning we simply say it has always been there. How can there be a beginning? Can you mark a line and say that at this moment life started, as Christian theologians used to say? Just four thousand years before Jesus Christ, they say, life started on a certain Monday. Of course, it must have been in the morning. But how can you call it Monday if there was no Sunday before it?And how can you call it morning if there was no night before it? Just think of it.

No, you cannot make a mark, that is foolish. It is not possible to mark a line because even to mark a line something is needed. Something is needed to precede it, otherwise demarcation is not possible. You can mark a line if there are two things, but if there is only one thing how can you mark a line? The fence around your house is possible because there is a neighbour. If there is no neighbour, nothing beyond your fence, the fence cannot exist. Just think of it. If there is absolutely nothing beyond your fence, your fence will fall down into nothing. How can it exist? Something is needed beyond the fence to hold it.

If on a certain Monday life started, a Sunday is needed to precede it. Otherwise the Monday will fall, topple down and disappear. And in the same way there is no possibility of any end. Life is, life simply is. It has been, it will be. It is eternity.

And don't start thinking about it. Otherwise you will be missing it, because all the time that you waste in thinking about it, is simply waste. Use that time, use that space, use that energy to live it.

The seventh question:

Because I know your ego will like it very much if I called it the art of growing. The art of dying comes like a shock.

Let me tell you an anecdote.

One day Mulla Nasrudin saw a crowd gathered around the town well. A Moslem priest with a huge turban on his head had fallen into the water, and was calling for help. People were leaning over and saying, 'Give me your hand, Reverend, give me your hand!' But the priest didn't pay attention to their offer to rescue him. He kept wrestling with the water and shouting for help.

Finally Mulla Nasrudin stepped forward: 'Let me handle this!' He stretched out his hand towards the priest and shouted at him, 'Take my hand!' The priest grabbed Mulla's hand and was hoisted out of the pond.

People were very surprised and asked Mulla for the secret of his strategy. 'It is very simple,' he said. 'I know this miser would not give anything to anyone, not even his hand. I know this miser would not give anything to anyone, so instead of saying, "Give me your hand" I said, "Take my hand, your Reverence." And sure enough, he took it.'

I know you would like it to be called the art of growing. Then your ego would feel perfectly good. 'So it is a question of growth; so I am going to remain and grow.' That's what the ego always wants.

I have knowingly called it the art of dying. Meditation is the art of dying. Then your ego will be shocked.

And it is also truer to calI it the art of dying, because your ego is not going to grow, your ego is going to die in meditation. These are the only two possibilities: either your ego goes on growing more, it becomes stronger, or, it disappears. If your ego goes on growing and becomes more and more strong, you are getting more and more into the mud. You are getting more and more into fetters, you are getting more and more into the imprisonment of it. You will be suffocated. Your whole life will become a hell.

The growth of the ego is a canceric growth. It is like cancer, it kills you. Meditation is not growth of the ego, it is death of the ego.

 

The eighth question:

When I say 'to die' I really mean: live intensely; I really mean: live passionately. How can you die unless you have lived totally? In total life there is death, and that death is beautiful. In a passionate, intense life, death comes spontaneously -- as a silence, as a profound bliss. When I say 'to die', I am not saying anything against life; in fact, if you are afraid of death you will be afraid of life also. That's what has happened to the questioner.

A man who is afraid of death will be afraid of life also, because life brings death. If you are afraid of the enemy and you close your door, the friend will also be prohibited. And you are so afraid of the enemy that you close the door; the enemy may enter so you close the door for the friend also. And you become so afraid that you cannot open for the friend, because who knows? The friend may turn out to be the enemy. Or, when the door is open, the enemy may enter.

People have become afraid of life because they are afraid of death. They don't live because at the highest points, peaks, death always penetrates into life. Have you watched this happening? The majority of women have lived a frigid life -- they are afraid of 0rgasm, they are afraid of that wild explosion of energy. For centuries women have been frigid; they have not known what 0rgasm is.

And the majority of men suffer because of that fear too -- ninety-five per cent of men suffer from premature ejaculation. They are so afraid of 0rgasm, there is so much fear, that somehow they want to finish it, somehow they want to get out of it.

Again and again they go into love-making and there is fear. The woman remains frigid and the man becomes so afraid that he cannot stay in that state any longer. The very fear makes him ej@culate sooner than is natural, and the woman remains rigid, closed, holding herself. Now 0rgasm has disappeared from the world because of the fear. In the deepest 0rgasm death penetrates; you feel as if you are dying. If a woman goes into 0rgasm she starts moaning, she starts crying, screaming. She may even start saying, 'I am dying. Don't kill me!'

That actually happens. If a woman goes into 0rgasm she will start mumbling, she will start saying that 'I am dying! Don't kill me! Stop!' A moment comes in deep 0rgasm where ego cannot exist, death penetrates. But that is the beauty of 0rgasm.

People have become afraid of love because in love also, death penetrates. If two lovers are sitting side by side in deep love and intimacy, not even talking.... Talking is an escape, an escape from love. When two lovers are talking that simply shows they are avoiding the intimacy. Words in-between give distance -- with no words distance disappears, death appears. In silence there is death just lurking around -- a beautiful phenomenon. But people are so afraid that they go on talking whether it is needed or not. They go on talking about anything, everything -- but they cannot keep silent.

If two lovers sit silently, death suddenly surrounds them. And when two lovers are silent you will see a certain happiness and also a certain sadness -- happiness because life is at its peak, and sadness because at its peak death also comes in. Whenever you are silent you will feel a sort of sadness. Even looking at a rose flower, if you are sitting silently and not saying anything about the rose flower, just looking at it, in that silence you will suddenly feel it is there -- death. You will see the flower withering, within moments it will be gone, lost forever. Such a beauty and so fragile! Such a beauty and so vulnerable! Such a beauty, such a miracle and soon it will be lost forever and it will not return again. Suddenly you will become sad.

Whenever you meditate you will find death moving around. In love, in ogasm, in any aesthetic experience; in music, in song, in poetry, in dance -- wherever you suddenly lose your ego, death is there.

So let me tell you one thing. You are afraid of life because you are afraid of death. And I would like to teach you how to die so that you lose all fear of death. The moment you lose the fear of death you become capable of living.

I am not talking against life. How can I talk against life? I am madly in love with life! I am so madly in love with life, that because of it, I have fallen in love with death also. It is part of life. When you love life totally how can you avoid death? You have to love death also.

When you love a flower deeply, you love its withering away also: When you love a woman deeply, you love her getting old also, you one day love her death also. That is part, part of the woman. The old age has not happened from the outside, it has come from the inside. The beautiful face has become wrinkled now -- you love those wrinkles also. They are part of your woman. You love a man and his hair has grown white -- you love those hairs also. They have not happened from the outside; they are not accidents. Life is unfolding. Now the black hair has disappeared and the grey hair has come. You don't reject them, you love them, they are a part. Then your man becomes old, becomes weak -- you love that too. Then one day the man is gone -- you love that too.

Love loves all. Love knows nothing else than love. Hence I say love death. If you can love death it will be very simple to love life. If you can love even death, there is no problem.

The problem arises because the questioner must have been repressing something, must be afraid of life. And then repression can bring dangerous outcomes. If you go on repressing, repressing, one day you will lose all aesthetic sense. You lose all sense of beauty, sense of grace, sense of divinity. Then the very repression becomes such a feverish state that you can do anything which is ugly.

Let me tell you a beautiful anecdote. Chinmaya has sent this. He sends beautiful jokes!

This marine is sent to a distant island outpost where there are no women, but there is a large monkey population. He is shocked to see that without exception his fellow marines all make love with the monkeys. And he swears to them that he will never get that horny. They tell him not to be closed-minded. But as the months passed by, the marine can hold out no longer. He grabs the first monkey he can and gets caught in the act by his buddies, who start laughing their heads off.

Surprised, he says to them, 'What are you guys laughing at? You keep telling me to do it!'

They answered, 'Yeah, but did you have to pick the ugliest one?'

If you repress, the possibility is that you may choose the ugliest life. Then the very fever is so much that you are not in your consciousness. Then you are almost in neurosis. Before the repression becomes too much, relax, move into life. It is your life! Don't feel guilty. It is your life to live and love and to know and be. And whatsoever instincts God has given to you, they are just indications of where you have to move, where you have to seek, where you have to find your fulfillment.

I know that this life is not all -- a greater life is hidden behind it. But it is hidden BEHIND it. You cannot find that greater life against this life; you have to find that greater life only by indulging deeply in this life. There are waves on the oceans. The ocean is hidden just behind the waves. If, seeing the turmoil and the chaos, you escape from the waves, you will be escaping from the ocean and its depth also. Jump in, those waves are part of it. Dive deep and waves will disappear, and then there will be the depth, the absolute silence of the ocean.

So this is my suggestion for the questioner. You have waited long, now no more. Enough is enough. Let me tell you an anecdote, an old Italian joke.

The Pope's personal waiter was delivering His Holiness' breakfast, when he slipped and threw the food all over the floor. 'Godammit!' he screamed as he fell.

His Holiness came out of the door of his room and said, 'No cursing in here, my son. Say instead, Ave Maria.'

The following morning as he attempted to deliver His Holiness' breakfast, the waiter slipped again, throwing the food on the floor. 'Godammit!' screamed the poor man. 'No, my son,' said the Pope. 'Ave Maria.'

On the third day the waiter was trembling with fear, but this time he remembered. 'Ave Maria!' he yelled out as soon as he started falling with the breakfast on the floor.

'No!' exclaimed the Pope. 'Godammit! This is my third day of skipping breakfast! Enough is enough!'

It is your life. There is no need going on skipping breakfast every day. And Ave Maria twice is good, but when it comes finally, it is Godammit!

--------------------------------------

The last question:

Everybody is a piece of rock. Unless you attain to your uttermost glory, you are bound to be a piece of rock. But nothing is wrong in being a piece of rock. The piece of rock is nothing but God fast asleep, snoring.A piece of rock is God asleep. Nothing is wrong in the piece of rock, it has to be awakened. Hence, I have given you sannyas [a.k.a. 'Seeker of Truth / Ultimate Freedom'].

You say:

Sannyas is nothing but an effort to awaken you, an effort to shake you, an effort to shock you into awareness. Sannyas is nothing but an alarm.

That's how the rock avoids its own growth, the rock avoids its own future -- by dreaming. Dreaming is the barrier. By dreaming we are avoiding the reality, by dreaming we avoid the real. It is our escape. You don't have any other escape. This is the only escape route -- dreaming.

When you are listening to me, you can dream also. Sitting here you can have a thousand and one thoughts roaming around in your mind. You can think of the future or of the past. You can be for and against what I am saying, you can argue, you can debate with me inside yourself. But then you are missing me. I am a fact here. You need not dream here, you can just be here with me. And tremendous will be the result of it.

But we go on dreaming. People are dreamers, and that is their way. When they are making love to a woman, they are dreaming; when they are eating, they are dreaming. When they are walking on the road -- they have gone for a walk in the morning, the sun is rising, the day is beautiful, the.people are getting up, life is coming back again -- they are dreaming. They are not looking at anything.

We go on dreaming. Dreaming functions as a blindfold, and we go on missing the reality.

Because those are your possibilities. The rock can fly; the rock can grow wings. I myself was a rock one day. Then I started growing wings, so l know. I know your possibility, you may not know it. Hence I talk about the rivers, the ocean and the sky. The rock can become a flower, the rock can become a river, the rock can become the ocean, the rock can become the sky -- infinite are your possibilities! Your possibilities are as many as God's possibilities. You are multi-dimensional.

That's why I go on talking about the rivers and the ocean and the sky. Some day or other a great thirst will possess you, a new passion will arise for the impssible and you will be able to fly into the sky. It is yours, claim it! You only look like a rock. Rocks also only look like rocks. If they make a little effort, if they shake themselves a little, they will find wings are hidden there. They will find infinite possibilities opening, doors upon doors.

But dreaming functions as the barrier. Being a rock is not a problem: being too much in dreams is the problem. Start dropping dreams. They are futile, meaningless, a wastage and nothing more. But people go on dreaming, go on dreaming.... By and by people start thinking that dreaming is their only life. Life is not a dream and dreaming is not life. Dreaming is avoiding life.

Let me tell you an anecdote...

On his seventy-fifth birthday, Turtletaub rushed into a physician1s office. 'Doctor,' he exclaimed, 'I have got a date tonight with a twenty-two-year-old girl. You gotta give me something to pep me up.'

The M.D. smiled sympathetically and supplied the old man with a prescription. Later that night, out of curiosity, the medical man phoned his elderly patient, 'Did the medicine help?'

'It's wonderful,' replied Turtletaub. 'Seven times already.'

'That's great,' agreed the doctor.

'And what about the girl?'

'The girl?' said Turtletaub. 'She didn't get here yet!'

Don't go on dreaming, otherwise you will miss the girl. You will miss life. Stop dreaming, look at that which is. And it is already in front of you. It is already around, it is within and without. God is the only presence if you are not dreaming. If you are dreaming, then your dreams occupy your inner space. They become the hindrances for God to enter into you. This dreaming we call maya. Maya-means a magic show, a dream show. When you are not dreaming, when you are in a state of no-dream, the reality is revealed.

The reality is already there, you are not to achieve it. You have only to do one thing: you have to put aside your dreams. And you will no longer be a rock, you can fly with me to the very end of the sky.

Receive my invitation, receive my challenge. That's what sannyas is all about.

 

EXISTENCE is paradoxical; paradox is its very core. It exists through opposites, it is a balance in the opposites. And one who learns how to balance becomes capable of knowing what life is, what existence is, what God is. The secret key is balance.

A few things before we enter into this story.... First, we have been trained in Aristotelian logic - which is linear, one-dimensional. Life is not Aristotelian at all, it is Hegelian. Logic is not linear, logic is dialectical. The very process of life is dialectic, a meeting of the opposites - a conflict between the opposites and yet a meeting of the opposites. And life goes through this dialectical process: from thesis to antithesis, from antithesis to synthesis - and then again the synthesis becomes a thesis. The whole process starts again.

If Aristotle is true then there will be only men and no women, or, only women and no men. If the world was made according to Aristotle then there will be only light and no darkness, or, only darkness and no light. That would be logical. There would be either life or death but not both.

But life is not based on Aristotle's logic, life has both. And life is really possible only because of both, because of the opposites: man and woman, yin and yang, day and night, birth and death, love and hate. Life consists of both.

This is the first thing you have to allow to sink deep into your heart - because Aristotle is in everybody's head. The whole education system of the world believes in Aristotle - although for the very advanced scientific minds Aristotle is out of date. He no longer applies. Science has gone beyond Aristotle because science has come closer to existence.

And now science understands that life is dialectical, not logical.

I have heard.

Noah must have been an Aristotelian. The tom-cat knew better.

Love is a sort of fight, love is a fight. Without fight love cannot exist. They look opposite - because we think lovers should never fight. It is logical: if you love somebody how can you fight? It is absolutely clear, obvious to the intellect, that lovers should never fight - but they do. In fact, they are intimate enemies; they are continuously fighting. In that very fight the energy that is called love is released. Love is not only fight, love is not only struggle, that's true - it is more than that. It is fight too, but love transcends. The fight cannot destroy it. Love survives fight but it cannot exist without it.

Look into life: life is non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidean. If you don't force your concepts on life, if you simply look at things as they are, then you will be suddenly surprised to see that opposites are complementaries. And the tension between the opposites is the very basis on which life exists - otherwise it would disappear. Think of a world where death does not exist.... Your mind may say 'then life will be there eternally', but you are wrong.

If death does not exist life will simply disappear. It cannot exist without death; death gives it the background, death gives it colour and richness, death gives it passion and intensity.

So death is not against life - the first thing - death is involved in life. And if you want to live authentically you have to learn how to continuously die authentically. You have to keep a balance between birth and death and you have to remain just in the middle. That remaining in the middle cannot be a static thing: it is not that once you have attained to a thing - finished, then there is nothing to be done. That is nonsense. One never achieves balance forever, one has to achieve it again and again and again.

This is very difficult to understand because our minds have been cultivated in concepts whiCh are not applicable to real life. You think that once you have attained meditation then there is no need of anything more, then you will be in meditation. You are wrong.

Meditation is not a static thing. It is a balance. You will have to attain it again and again and again. You will become more and more capable of attaining it, but it is not going to remain forever, like a possession in your hands. It has to be claimed each moment - only then is it yours. You cannot rest, you cannot say, 'I have meditated and I have realised that now there is no need for me to do anything more. I can rest.' Life does not believe in rest; it is a constant movement from perfection to more perfection.

Listen to me: from perfection to more perfection. It is never imperfect, it is always perfect, but always more perfection is possible. Logically these statements are absurd.

I was reading an anecdote....

But logic won't do in life. You cannot go free so easily.

You can come out of a legal trap legally and logically because the trap consists of Aristotelian logic - you can use the same logic to come out of it. But in life you will not be able to come out because of logic, because of theology, because of philosophy, because you are very clever - clever in inventing theories. You can come out of life or you can go beyond life only through actual experience.

There are two types of people who are religious. The first type is childish; it is searching for a father-figure. The first type is immature; it cannot rely upon itself, hence it needs a God somewhere or other. The God may exist or not - that is not the point - but a God is needed. Even if the God is not there the immature mind will invent him, because the immature mind has a psychological need - it is not a question of truth whether God is there or not, it is a psychological need.

In the Bible it is said God made man in his own image, but the reverse is more true: man made God in his own image. Whatsoever is your need you create that sort of God, that's why the concept of God goes on changing in every age. Every country has its own concept because every country has its own need. In fact, every single person has a different concept of God because his own needs are there and they have to be fulfilled.

So the first type of religious person - the so-called religious person - is simply immature. His religion is not religion but psychology. And when religion is psychology it is just a dream, a wish-fulfillment, a desire. It has nothing to do with reality.

I was reading....

This is the God of the majority. Ninety per cent of the so-called religious people are immature people. They believe because they cannot live without belief; they believe because belief gives a sort of security; they believe because belief helps them to feel protected. It is THEIR dream, but it helps. In the dark night of life, in the deep struggle of existence, without such a belief they will feel left alone. But their God is THEIR God, not the God of reality. And once they get rid of their immaturity, their God will disappear.

That's what has happened to many people. In this century many people have become irreligious - not that they have come to know that God does not exist but only because this age has made man a little more mature. Man has come of age; man has become a little more mature. So the God of the childhood, the God of the immature mind, has simply become irrelevant.

That is the meaning when Friedrich Nietzsche declares that 'God is dead'. It is not God that is dead, it is the God of the immature mind that is dead. In fact to say that God is dead is not right because that God was never alive. The only right expression will be to say that 'God is no more relevant'. Man can rely more upon himself - he does not need belief, he does not need the crutches of belief.

Hence people have become less and less interested in religion. They have become indifferent to what goes on in the church. They have become so indifferent to it that they will not even argue against it. If you say, 'Do you believe in God?' they will say, 'It's okay whether he is or not, it doesn't make any difference, it doesn't matter.' Just to be polite, if you believe, they will say, 'Yes, he is.' If you don't believe, they will say, 'No, he is not.l But it is no more a passionate concern.

This is the first type of religion; it has existed for centuries, down the centuries, down the ages, and it is becoming more and more outmoded, out of date. Its time is finished. A new God is needed - who is not psychological; a new God is needed - who is existential, the God of reality, the God as reality. We can even drop the word 'God' - 'the real' will do, 'the existential' will do.

Then there is a second type of religious people for whom religion is not out of fear. The first type of religion is out of fear, the second type - also bogus, also pseudo, also so- called - is not out of fear, it is only out of cleverness. There are very clever people who go on inventing theories, who are very trained in logic, in metaphysics, in philosophy.

They create a religion which is just an abstraction: a beautiful piece of art work, of intelligence, of intellectuality, of philosophising. But it never penetrates life, it never touches life anywhere, it simply remains an abstract conceptualisation.

Once Mulla Nasrudin was saying to me, 'I have never been what I oughta been. I stole chickens and watermelons, got drunk and got in fights with my fists and my razor, but there is one thing I ain't never done: in spite of all my meanness I ain't never lost my religion.'

Now what kind of religion is that? It has no impact on life.

You believe, but that belief never penetrates your life, never transforms it. It never becomes an intrinsic part of you, it never circulates in your blood, you never breath it in or breathe it out, it never beats in your heart - it is simply something useless. Ornamental maybe, at the most, but of no utility to you. Some day you go to the church; it is a formality, a social need. And you can pay lip service to God, to the Bible, to the Koran, to the Vedas, but you don't mean it, you are not sincere about it. Your life goes on without it, your life goes on in a totally different way - it has nothing to do with religion.

 

Watch...somebody says he is a Mohammedan, somebody says he is a Hindu, somebody says he is a Christian, somebody says he is a Jew - their beliefs are different but watch their life and you will not find any difference. The Mohammedan, the Jew, the Christian, the Hindu - they all live the same life. Their life is not at all touched by their belief. In fact, beliefs cannot touch your life, beliefs are devices. Beliefs are cunning devices through which you say 'I know what life is' - and you can rest at ease, you are not troubled by life. You hold a concept and that concept helps you to rationalise. Then life does not bother you much because you have all the answers to all the questions.

But remember... unless religion is personal, unless religion is not abstract but real, deep in your roots, deep in your guts, unless it is like blood and bone and marrow, it is futile, it is of no use. It is the religion of the philosophers not the religion of the sages. When the third type comes in...and that is the real type, these other two are the falsifications of religion, pseudo dimensions. cheap, very easy, because they don't challenge you.

The third is very difficult, arduous; it is a great challenge; it will create a turmoil in your life - because the third, the real religion, says God has to be addressed in a personal way. You have to provoke him and you have to allow him to provoke you and you have to come to terms with him; in fact, you have to struggle with him, you have to clash against him. You have to love him, and you have to hate him; you have to be a friend and you have to be an enemy; you have to make your experience of God a living experience.

I have heard about a small child - and I would like you to be like this small child. He was really smart....

If you call 'mother' there are so many mothers - the place is full of them. You have to call in a personal way, you have to call the first name.

Unless God is also called in a personal way, addressed with the first name, it will never become a reality in your life. You can go on calling 'father' but whose father are you talking about? When Jesus called him 'father' it was a personal address, when you call, it is absolutely impersonal. It is Christian but impersonal. When Jesus called him 'father' it was-meaningful; when you call 'father' it is meaningless - you have made no contact, no real contact with him. Only experience of life - neither belief nor philosophy - only experience of life will make you able to address him in a personal way. Then you can encounter him.

And unless God is encountered you are simply deceiving yourself with words...with words which are empty, hollow, with words which have no content.

There was a very famous Sufi mystic, Shaqiq was his name. He trusted God so deeply, so tremendously, that he lived only out of that trust.

Jesus says to his disciples, 'Look at those lilies in the field - they Labour not and yet they are so beautiful and so alive that not even Solomon was so beautiful in all his glory.'

Shaqiq lived the life of a lily. There have been very few mystics who have lived that way but there have been people who have lived that way. The trust is so infinite, the trust is so absolute that there is no need to do anything - God goes on doing things for you: In fact, even when you are doing them he is doing them; it is only that you think you are doing them.

This is what trust is. Trust in life then you cannot lose anything.But that trust cannot come by doctrination, that trust cannot come by education, preaching, studying, thinking - that trust can only come by experiencing life in all its opposites, in all its contradictions, in all its paradoxes. When with in all the paradoxes you come to the point of balance, there is trust. Trust is a perfume of balance, the fragrance of balance.

If you really want to attain to trust, drop all your beliefs. They will not help. A believing mind is a stupid mind; a trusting mind has pure intelligence in it. A believing mind is a mediocre mind; a trusting mind becomes perfect. Trust makes perfect.

And the difference between belief and trust is simple. I am not talking about the dictionary meaning of the words - in the dictionary it may be so: belief means trust, trust means faith, faith means belief - I am talking about existence. In an existential way belief is borrowed, trust is yours. Belief you believe in but doubt exists just underneath.

Trust has no doubt element in it; it is simply devoid of doubt. Belief creates a division in you: a part of your mind believes, a part of your mind denies. Trust is a unity in your being, your totality.

But how can your totality trust unless you have experienced it? The God of Jesus wont do, the God of MY experience won't do for you, the God of Buddha's experience won't do - it has to be your experience. And if you carry beliefs you will come again and again to experiences which don't fit the belief, and then there is the tendency of the mind not to see those experiences, not to take note of them because they are very disturbing. They destroy your belief and you want to cling to your belief. Then you become more and more blind to life - belief becomes a blindfold on the eyes.

Trust opens the eyes; trust has nothing to lose. Trust means whatsoever is real is real - 'I can put my desires and wishes aside, they don't make any difference to reality. They can only distract my mind from reality.'

If you have a belief and you come against an experience which the belief says is not possible, or, the experience is such that you have to drop the belief, what are you going to choose - the belief or the experience? The tendency of the mind is to choose the belief, to forget about the experience. That's how you have been missing many opportunities when God has knocked at your door.

Remember it is not only you who are seeking truth - truth is also seeking you. Many times the hand has come very close to you, it has almost touched you, but you shrugged yourself away. It was not fitting with your belief and you chose to choose your belief.

I have heard a very beautiful Jewish joke.

 

Now, if the vampire is Christian, good! You can show the cross. But if the vampire is Jewish. then what? Then 'Oy vey, bubbula! Have you ever got the wrong vampire!'

If you have a certain belief and life does not fit with it, what are you going to do? You can go on showing your crucifix - but the vampire is a Jew. Then he is not going to take any note of your cross. Then what are you going to do?

Life is so vast and beliefs are so small; life is so infinite and beliefs are so tiny. Life never fits with any belief and if you try to force life into your beliefs you are trying to do the impossible. It has never happened; it cannot happen in the nature of things. Drop all beliefs and start learning how to experience.

 

Now this story.

A few things about Hasidism: First, the word 'hasid' comes from a Hebrew word which means pious, pure. It is derived from the noun 'hased' which means grace. This word 'hasid' is very beautiful. The whole standpoint of Hasidism is based on grace.

It is not that YOU do something - life is already happening, you just be silent, passive, alert, receiving. God comes through this grace, not through your effort. So Hasidism has no austerities prescribed for you. Hasidism believes in life, in joy. Hasidism is one of the religions in the world which is life-affirmative. It has no renunciation in it; you are not to renounce anything. Rather, you have to celebrate. The founder of Hasidism, Baal-Shem, is reported to have said, 'I have come to teach you a new way. It is not fasting and penance, and it is not indulgence, but joy in God.'

The Hasid loves life, tries to experience life. That very experience starts giving you a balance. And in that state of balance, some day, when you are really balanced, neither leaning on this side nor leaning on that side, when you are exactly in the middle, you transcend. The middle is the beyond, the middle is the door from where one goes beyond.

If you really want to know what existence is, it is neither in life nor in death. Life is one extreme, death is another extreme. It is just exactly in the middle where neither death is nor life is, where one is simply unborn, deathless. In that moment of balance, equilibrium, grace descends.

I would like you all to become Hasids, receivers of grace. I would like you to learn this science, this art of balance.

The mind very easily chooses the extreme. There are people who indulge: they indulge in sensuality, sexuality, food, clothes, houses, this and that. There are people who indulge - they lean too much towards life, they fall down, they topple. Then there are people, who, seeing people toppling down from the tightrope of existence into indulgence, falling into the abyss of indulgence, become afraid; they start leaning towards the other extreme. They renounce the world, they escape to the Himalayas. They escape from the wife, the children, the home, the world, the marketplace and they go and hide themselves in monasteries. They have chosen another extreme. Indulgence is the extreme life; renunciation is the extreme death.

So there is some truth in Friedrich Nietzsche's comment upon Hinduism - that Hinduism is a religion of death. There is some truth when Nietzsche says that Buddha seems to be suicidal. The truth is this: you can move from one extreme to another.

The whole Hasidic approach is not to choose any extreme, just to remain in the middle, available to both and yet beyond both, not getting identified with either, not getting obsessed and fixated with either - just remaining free and joyously enjoying both. If life comes, enjoy life; if death comes, enjoy death. If out of his grace God gives love, life - good; if he sends death, it must be good - it is his gift.

Baal-Shem is right when he says, 'I have come to teach you joy in God.' Hasidism is a celebrating religion. It is the purest flowering of the whole Judaic culture. Hasidism is the fragrance of the whole Jewish race. It is one of the most beautiful phenomena on the earth.

Hasidism teaches life in community. It is a very communal approach. It says that man is not an island, man is not an ego - should not be an ego - should not be an island. Man should live a life of community.

We are growing a Hasidic community here. To live in a community is to live in love; to live in a community is to live in commitment, caring for others.

There are many religions which are very, very self-oriented: they only think of the self, they never think of the community. They only think of how I am going to become liberated, how I am going to become free, how I should attain moksha - MY moksha, MY freedom, MY liberation, MY salvation. But everything is preceded by MY, by the self. And these religions try hard to drop the ego but their whole effort is based on the ego. Hasidism says if you want to drop the ego, the best way is to live in a community, live with people, be concerned with people - with their joy, with their sadness, with their happiness, with their life, with their death. Create a concern for the others, be involved, and then the ego will disappear on its own accord. And when the ego is not, one is free. There is no freedom of the ego, there is only freedom FROM the ego.

Hasidism uses community life as a device. Hasids have lived in small communities and they have created beautiful communities, very celebrating, dancing, enjoying the small things of life. They make the small things of life holy - eating, drinking. Everything takes the quality of prayer. The ordinariness of life is no longer ordinary, it is suffused with divine grace.

This is the difference. If you see Jaina monks sitting, you never see any brotherliness - it is not possible. The very approach is different. Each Jaina monk is an island, but the Hasids are not islands. They are a continent, a deep brotherliness.

Remember it. The community I would like to grow here should be more like the hasidim, less like Jaina monks, because a man alone, confined to himself, is ugly. Life is in love, life is in flow, in give and take and sharing.

You can go to a Jaina monastery or a Jaina temple where Jaina monks are sitting - you can just watch. You will see exactly how everybody is confined to himself; there is no relationship. That is the whole effort: how not to be related. The whole effort is how to disconnect all relationship. But the more you are disconnected with community and life, the more dead you are. It is very difficult to find a Jaina monk who is still alive. And I know it very deeply because I was born a Jaina and I have watched them from my very childhood. I was simply surprised! What calamity has happened to these people? What has gone wrong? They are dead. They are corpses. If you don't go near them already prejudiced, thinking that they are great saints. if you simply go, observing without any prejudice, you will be simply puzzled, confused. What illness, what disease has happened to these people? They are neurotic. Their concern about themselves has become their neurosis.

Community has completely lost meaning for them - but all meaning is in community.

Remember...when you love somebody, it is not only that you give love to them - in giving, you grow. When love starts flowing between you and the other, you both are benefitted. And in that exchange of love your potentialities start becoming actualities.

That's how self-actualisation happens. Love more and you will be more; love less and you will be less. You are always in proportion to your love. The proportion of your love is the proportion of your being.

Can you think of any saint with pipe in hand?

Ordinary life has to be hallowed, has to be made holy, even a pipe. You can smoke in a very prayerful way. Or, you can pray in a very unprayerful way. It is not a question of what you do...you can go into the temple, you can go into the mosque, but still you can pray in a very unprayerful way. It depends on you; it depends on the quality you bring to your prayer. You can eat, you can smoke, you can drink, and you can do all these small thingS, mundane things, in such gratitude that they become prayers.

Just the other night a man came. He bowed down and touched my feet. The way he was doing it was, I could see, very unprayerful. He was an Indian so he was doing it just out of duty, it seemed. Or he was not even conscious of what he was doing - he must have been taught. But I could feel, I could see his energy was absolutely unprayerful. And I was wondering why he had come. He wanted to become a sannyasin. I never refuse but I wanted to refuse him. I thought for a moment what to do. If I refuse, it doesn't look good - but the man was absolutely wrong. Finally I said, 'Okay, I will give you sannyas' - because I cannot refuse, I cannot say no. I find that word very difficult to use.

So I gave him sannyas, and then everything became clear. Immediately after sannyas he said, 'I have come to your feet, now help me. I am posted' - he is in the army - 'I have been posted somewhere in Palanpur. Now, Osho, with your spiritual power, help me to be transferred to Ranchi.' My spiritual power has to be used for his transfer to Ranchi. Now what type of concept does he have of spiritual power? Now everything was clear. He was not interested in sannyas - that taking sannyas was just a bribery. He must have thought that if he asks for the transfer without sannyas it won't look good. So first become a sannyasin and then ask.

Just to THINK in these terms is unprayerful, unspiritual. And that man thinks he is very spiritual. He says he is a follower of Paramahansa Yogananda and the way he said it was so egoistic, he felt so good, so superior - 'I am a follower of Paramahans Yogananda; I am a disciple. And I have been working on myself for many years...and that's why 'I want to go to Ranchi.' Ranchi is the centre of Paramahans Yogananda's disciples.

Now this man is absolutely unspiritual. His whole approach is unspiritual, unprayerful.

The point that I want to make clear to you is this: that it does not depend on what you DO. You can touch my feet in a very unprayerful way - then it is meaningless; but you can smoke and you can do it in a prayerful way and your prayer will reach to God.

It is very difficult for people who have very fixed concepts about religion, spirituality, but I would like you to become more liquid. Don't have fixed concepts. Watch.

Yes, only in deep friendliness can something be asked. And only in deep friendliness can something be answered. Between the Master and the disciple there is a deep friendship. It is a love affair. And the disciple has to wait for the right moment and the Master has also to wait for the right moment; when the friendship is flowing, when there is no hindrance, then things can be answered. Or even, sometimes, without answering them, they can be answered; even without using verbalisation the message can be delivered.

In fact, that is the answer of all those who know. 'How should I know?' - 'How to serve God? You are asking such a great question, I am not worthy to answer it,' said the Master. 'How should I know?' Nothing can be known about love; nothing can be known about how to serve God - it is very difficult.

First he says, 'How should I know?' First he says that knowledge is not possible about such things. First he says that he cannot give you any knowledge about such things. First he says that he cannot make you more knowledgeable about these things - there is no way. But then he tells his story.

A story is totally different to talking in terms of theories. A story is more alive, more indicative. It does not say much but it shows much. And all the great Masters have used stories, parables, anecdotes. The reason is that if you say something directly, it kills much. A direct expression is too crude primitive, gross, ugly. The parable is saying the thing in a very indirect way. It makes things very smooth; it makes things more poetic, less logical, closer to life, more paradoxical. You cannot use a syllogism for God, you cannot use any argument, but you can tell stories.

And the Jewish race is one of the richest races on the earth for parables. Jesus was a Jew and he has told a few of the most beautiful parables ever uttered. Jews have learnt how to tell stories. In fact, Jews don't have much philosophy but they have beautiful philosophical parables. They say much; without saying, without hinting anything directly, they create an atmosphere. In that atmosphere something can be understood. That is the whole device of a parable.

First he said, 'How should I know?' First he simply denies knowledge of any possibility of knowing about it. A philosopher says, 'Yes, I know' and a philosopher proposes a theory in clear-cut statements, logical, mathematical, syllogistic, argumentative. He tries to convince. He may not convince but he can force you into silence.

A parable never tries to convince you. It takes you unawares, it persuades you, it tickles you deep inside.

The moment the Master says, 'How should I know?' he is saying to them, 'Relax, I am not going to give any argument for it, any theory for it. And you need not be worried that I am going to convince you about something. Just enjoy a little parable, a little story.' When you start listening to a story, you relax; when you start listening to a theory, you become tense. And that which creates tension in you cannot be of much help. It is destructive.

A parable has an atmosphere, a very homely atmosphere - as if your grandmother is telling you a story when you are falling asleep. Children ask, 'Tell us stories.' It helps them relax and go into sleep. A story is very relaxing and does not create any pressure on your mind; rather, it starts playing with your heart. When you listen to a story, you don't listen from the head - you cannot listen to a story from the head - you listen from the head you will miss. If you listen from the head there is no possibility of understanding a story; a story has to be understood from the heart. That's why races and countries which are very 'heady' cannot understand beautiful jokes. For example, Germans! They cannot understand. They are one of the most intelligent races of the world but they don't have any good stock of jokes.

A man was telling a German that he had heard a very beautiful German joke.

The German said, 'But remember, I am a German.'

So the man said, 'Okay, then I will tell it very, very slowly.'

lt is very difficult. Germany is the country of the professors, logicians - Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach - and they have always been thinking through the head. They have cultivated the head, they have created great scientists, logicians, philosophers, but they have missed something.

In India we don't have many jokes; there is a great poverty of spirit. You cannot find a specifically Hindu joke, no. All the jokes that go on in India are borrowed from the West. No Indian joke exists. I have not come across any. And you can rely on me because1 have come across all the jokes of the world! No Hindu joke, as such, exists. What is the reason?Again, very intellectual people. They have been weaving and spinning theories; from Vedas to Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan they have been just weaving and spinning theories and theories and they have got into it so deeply that they have forgotten how to tell a beautiful story or how to create a joke.

The Rabbi started telling this story - the disciples must have become relaxed, must have become relaxed AND attentive. That's the beauty of a story: when a story is told you are attentive and yet not tense. You can relax and yet you are attentive. A passive attentiveness arises when you listen to a story. When you listen to a theory you become very tense because of you miss a single word you may not be able to understand it. You become more concentrated. When you listen to a story you become more meditative - there is nothing much to be lost. Even if a few words are lost here and there, nothing will be lost because if you just have the feel of the story you will understand it, it does not depend so much on the words.

The disciples must have relaxed, and the Master told this story.

Now, this sentence is very pregnant -

JESUS says many times to his disciples, 'Come unto me if you want life in abundance. If you want life in abundance, come to me.' But life in abundance happens only to people who go beyond birth and death, who go beyond the duality, to the other shore. The other shore, the other side, is just symbolic of the transcendental. But it is just a hint. Nothing is particularly said, just a hint is given.

And then the story moves on.

Now these are the two types of people.

The first simply got safely across. Ordinarily we would like to enquire how to go on a rope. A tightrope stretched over a chasm - it is dangerous. Ordinarily we would like to know the ways, the means, the method, how to go. We would like to know how? The technique - there must be a technique. For centuries people have walked on tightropes.

But the first one simply walked without enquiring, without even waiting for the other.

This is the natural tendency: to let the other go first. At least you will be able to watch and observe and that will be helpful for you. No, the first simply walked. He must have been a man of tremendous trust; he must have been a man of undoubting confidence. He must have been a man who has learnt one thing in life: that there is only one way to learn and that is to live it, to experience. There is no other way.

You cannot learn tightrope-walking by watching a tightrope-walker - no, never. Because the thing is not like a technology that you can observe from the outside, it is some inner balance that only the walker knows. And it cannot be transferred. He cannot just tell you about it; it cannot be verbalised. No tightrope-walker can tell anybody how he manages.

You ride a bicycle. Can you tell anybody how you ride it? You know the balance; it is a sort of tightrope-walking, just on two wheels straight in one line. And you go fast and you go so trustingly. If somebody asks what the secret is, can you reduce it to a formula, just like H20? Can you reduce it to a maxim? You don't say, 'This is the principle, I follow this principle,' you will say, 'The only way is for you to come and sit on the bike and I will help you to go on it. You are bound to fall a few times and then you will know the only way to know is to know.' The only way to know swimming is to swim - with all the dangers involved in it.

The first man must have come to a deep understanding in his life - that life is not like a textbook. You cannot be taught about it, you have to experience it. And he must have been a man of tremendous awareness. He did not hesitate, he simply walked, as if he had always been walking on a tightrope. He had never walked before; it was for the first time.

But for a man of awareness everything is for the first time, and a man of awareness can do things - even when he is doing them for the first time - perfectly. His efficiency does not come out of his past, his efficiency comes out of his present. Let this be remembered. You can do things in two ways. You can do something because you have done it before - so you know how to do it, you need not be present, you can simply do it in a mechanical way. But if you have not done it before, and you are going to do it for a first time, you have to be tremendously alert because now you don't have any past experience. So you cannot rely on the memory, you have to rely on awareness.

These are the two sources of functioning: either you function out of memory, out of knowledge, out of the past, out of mind; or you function out of awareness, out of the present, out of no-mind.

The first man must have been a man of no-mind, a man who knows that you can simply be alert and go on and see what happens. And whatsoever happens is good. A great courage.

The second is the majority mind, the mass mind. The second wants to Know first how to cross it. Is there a method to it? Is there a technique to be learnt? He is waiting for the other to say.

The other must be a believer in knowledge. The other must have been a believer in others' experiences.

Many people come to me. They say, 'Osho, tell us. What happened to you?' But what are you going to do about it? Buddha has told it, Mahavir has told it, Jesus has told it - what have you done about it? Unless it happens to you it is futile. I can tell you one more story and then you can join that story also in your record of memories, but that is not going to help.

Waiting for others' knowledge is waiting in vain because that which can be given by the others has no worth, and that which is of any worth cannot be given and cannot be transferred.

Even though he had crossed he still said, 'I don't know anything but this....' Because, in fact, life never becomes knowledge; it remains a very suffused experience, never knowledge. You cannot verbalise it, conceptualise it, put it into a clear-cut theory.

'This much only can be said: that there were two extremes, left and right, and whenever I felt that I was going too much towards the left and the balance was getting lost, I leaned towards the right. But again I had to balance because then I started going too much to the right and again I felt the balance was getting lost. Again I leant towards the left.'

So he said two things. One, 'I cannot formulate it as knowledge. I can only indicate. I don't know exactly what happened but this much I can give as a hint to you. And that is not much; in fact, you need not have it. You will come across the experience yourself. But this much can be said.'

Buddha was asked again and again, 'What has happened to you?' And he would always say, 'That cannot be said but this much I can say to you - I can say in what circumstances it happened. That may be of some help to you. I cannot tell about the ultimate truth but I can tell how, on what path, with what method, in what situation I was when it happened, when the grace descended on me, when the benediction came to me.'

The man says,

'That's all. Nothing much to it. That's how I balanced, that's how I remained in the middle.' And in the middle is grace.

The Rabbi is saying to his disciples, 'You ask how we should serve God?' He was indicating with this parable: remain in the middle.

Don't indulge too much and don't renounce too much. Don't be only in the world and don't escape out of it. Go on keeping a balance. When you feel that now you are falling into too much indulgence, lean towards renunciation, and when you feel that now you are going to become a renunciate, an ascetic, lean back again to indulgence. Keep in the middle.

On the road in India you will find boards saying 'Keep to the Left' - in America you will find 'Keep to the Right'. In the world there are only two types of people: a few keep to the left, a few keep to the right. The third type is the very pinnacle of consciousness. And there the rule is 'Keep to the Middle'. Don't try it on the road but on life's way keep to the middle: never to the left, never to the right. Just to the middle.

And in the middle there will be glimpses of balance. There is a point - you can understand, you can feel it - there is a point when you are not leaning to either extreme, you are exactly in the middle. In that split-second suddenly there is grace, everything is in equilibrium.

And that's how one can serve God. Remain in balance and it becomes a service to God; remain in balance and God is available to you and you are available to God.

Life is not a technology, not even a science; life is an art - or it would even be better to call it a hunch. You have to feel it. It is like balancing on a tightrope.

The Rabbi has chosen a beautiful parable. He has not talked about God at all; he has not talked about service at all; he has not really answered the question at all directly. The disciples must have themselves forgotten about the question - that's the beauty of a parable. It doesn't divide your mind into a question and an answer, it simply gives you a hunch that this is how things are.

Life has no 'know-how' about it. Remember, life is not American, it is not a technology.

The American mind, or to be more specific, the modern mind, tends to create technologies out of everything. Even when there is meditation the modern mind immediately tends to create a technology out of it. Then we create machines, and man is getting lost, and we are losing all contact with life.

Remember, there are things which cannot be taught but which can only be caught. I am here, you can watch me, you can look into me and you will see a balance and you will see a silence. It is almost tangible, you can touch it, you can hear it, you can see it. It is here.

I cannot say what it is, I cannot specifically give you techniques how to attain to it. At the most I can tell you a few parables, a few stories. They will be just hints. Those that understand will allow those hints to fall into their hearts like seeds. In their time, in the right season, they will sprout and you will understand me really only on the day you also experience the same that I am experiencing. I have crossed to the other shore, you are shouting from the other side, 'Tell me, friend, how did you manage to cross?' I can tell you only one thing:

Keep to the middle. Keep continuously alert that you don't lose the balance, and then everything will take care of itself.

If you can remain in the middle, you remain available to God, to his grace. If you can remain in the middle you can become a Hasid; you can become a receiver of grace. And God is grace. You cannot do anything to find him, you can only do one thing: not stand in his way. And whenever you move to an extreme you become so tense that that very tension makes you too solid; whenever you are in the middle, tension disappears, you become liquid, fluid. And you are no longer i n the way. When you are in the middle you are no longer in God's way - or let me tell you it in this way: when you are in the middle you are not. Exactly in the middle that miracle happens - that you are nobody, you are a nothingness.

This is the secret key. It can open the lock of mystery of existence to you.

 

The first question:

THE HUMAN MIND  tends to convert every experience into a question. That is a very destructive step. Please avoid it. Here near me the whole purpose is to know that which is not knowable, to know that which is not expressible, to know that which cannot be put into words. When it starts happening, don't make a problem out of it, don't create a question out of it - because your very questioning will become a stopping. Then your mind will have started something else and you are distracted.

When it starts happening, enjoy it, love it, be nourished by it, savour it, dance it, sing it, but don't make a question about it. Just be it. And allow it total space. It will grow. It needs space in you to grow.

Don't be in a hurry to make a theory out of it. Theories are very dangerous. They can kill the child in the womb. The moment you start thinking in terms of analysing, knowing what it is and what it is not, comparing, labelling, you are moving towards an abortion. You will miss something that was going to grow - you killed it. Don't be suicidal, don't be analytical, just allow it. Feel its presence - but not with the mind. Feel its presence with your totaility. Let your heart be open to it and it will grow.

And in that very growth, by and by understanding will come. Understanding is not going to come through analysis, through thinking, through brooding, through logic. Understanding is going to come by deeper and deeper experience.

You say something has happened to you through me but it is something which is inexpressible. Let it be so. Be happy. You are blessed. When something inexpressible starts happening then you are on the right track, you are moving towards God, the ultimate mystery. Whenever you have something within you which you cannot understand, that simply shows something bigger than you has entered in you - otherwise you could have understood it, you could have figured it out. Something bigger than the mind has penetrated you, a ray of light in the dark soul, a ray of light in the dark night of the mind. The mind cannot comprehend it; it is beyond its understanding. But not beyond understanding, remember. Beyond the understanding that is possible for the mind but not beyond understanding - because there is understanding which is not of the mind: the understanding of the total organ, of your total being, of your totality.

But that comes not by analysis, not by dissection; it comes by absorbing the experience. Eat it! That which is inexpressible has to be eaten by you. Jesus says to his disciples, 'Eat me.' That's what he means: eat the inexpressible, eat the unknown. Digest it, let it circulate into your blood. Let it become part of you. And then you will know. And the knowing will arise as suddenly as the experience has arisen.

Now a ray has entered in you. Allow it to become part of you - only then will you understand it.

This understanding is not the understanding you have been acquainted with up to now. You have known only the mind and its ways. It labels things very immediately. Whenever you ask what this is, what are you asking really? You see a bush and a flower and you say, 'What is this?' Somebody says 'a rosebush' and you think you have understood. Somebody has just uttered a word 'rose' and you think you have understood.

But if you don't know the name you feel a little disturbed. That unknown flower confronts you, challenges you. You feel your prestige is at stake. Because that unknown flower continuously says, 'You don't know me, so what kind of knowledge is yours? You don't know even me?' The flower goes on hitting hard at you and you start feeling disturbed. You want to know so that you can finish with this challenge. You go to the library, you look at the books, at the Encyclopedia Britannica; you find out what the name of this rose is. It is 'rose' - okay, you have labelled it. Now you can be at ease.

But what have you done? Just by putting a word to the rosebush do you think you have understood it? You have lost an opportunity of understanding. You have lost a great challenge. Because remember well - the name 'rose' is given by man to the rosebush, the rosebush does not know the name at all. If you talk about the rosebush to the rosebush, the rosebush will not understand it. What are you talking about? What nonsense are you talking about? The rosebush has no name as far as the bush itself is concerned - the name is given by others, given by people like you who cannot tolerate the unknowable anywhere.

The unknowable is such an uneasy thing, it creates so much discomfort. You see somebody; you say, 'Who is this man?' And then somebody says he is a Chinese, or an African, or a Japanese, and you feel at ease. What have you known? Just by saying that he is a Chinese.... There are millions of Chinese - eight hundred million - and no other Chinese is like him. In fact, nothing exists like THE Chinese. There are millions and millions of Chinese - each individual is unique, different; each has his own signature, his own being. What have you understood by labelling a man as a Chinese? But you feel at ease.

What religion does he belong to? He is a Buddhist. Another label has come into your hand. You know a little more now. To what party does he belong? He is a communist. Still a few more labels you gather - and then you think you have known the man.

Is knowledge as cheap as the mind thinks? Labelling is not knowledge. Labelling is a way to avoid the opportunity that was open. You could have known the man if you had got involved with him. You could have known the rosebush if you had meditated alone with it, if you had allowed its fragrance to enter into your nostrils and into your heart; if you had touched it with love. If you had had a communion with this rosebush you might have known something.

I don't say you can know the rosebush totally. If you can know a single rosebush totally then you have known the whole universe - because in the single rosebush the whole universe is involved: the sun and the moon and the stars and the past and the present and the future. All time and all space is converging on that small roseflower. If you can know it in its totality you will have known the whole universe. Then nothing is left behind. Each small thing is so great.

And when something like an unknown flower starts blooming within you, don't be in a hurry to dissect it; don't put it on the table and cut it and start looking for the ingredients. Enjoy it. Love it. Help it to grow. A grace has descended upon you. You have become a Hasid.

That is the meaning of Hasid - grace.

 

The second question:

No, I will not say anything about those techniques - because Hasidism is absolutely non-technical. The whole approach is non-technical. Hasidism has no technique - just a sheer joy in life.

Hasidism is not a path of meditation, it is a path of prayer. Prayer has no technique. Meditation can have millions of techniques because meditation is a scientific approach to inner reality. Hasidism is not a science, it is an art. Hasidism does not believe in techniques but in love.

Remember well, the technological mind is a mathematical mind. The mind of the lover is non-mathematical; the mind of the lover is the mind of the poet. Love is a romance, not a technique. Love is a dream, not a technique. Love has a totally different approach to life.

Hasidism has no techniques; it has no yoga, no Tantra in it. It simply says: trust life, trust God, and whatsoever has been given to you, enjoy it. Enjoy it so deeply and with such gratitude that every ordinary thing becomes hallowed, becomes holy, each small thing in life becomes sacred. Transform everything into a sacred thing - the profane disappears when you bring your energy of love, grace, gratitude.

Love is not a technique, so nobody can teach you how to love. And if you come across books which say that they can teach you how to love, beware of those books. If you once learn the techniques of love you will never be able to love again. Those techniques will become a barrier. Love is a natural spontaneous phenomenon. Even animals are loving - they don't have Kinseys and Masters and Johnsons and they are achieving 0rgasm perfectly, without any scientific help. They don't have any sex therapists and they don't go to any guru to be taught how to love. It is an inborn quality. Each being born brings it with himself.

There are a few things which you bring with your birth. A child is born...nobody can teach the child how to breathe. If it depended on teaching, then nobody would be able to be alive, because time would be needed to teach the child. He would first have to be sent to school, taught language, disciplined, and then finally, after at least seven, eight or ten years, we would be able to teach him how to breathe - he doesn't understand even the word 'breathe'. No, it doesn't depend on any teaching. The child is born with the capacity to breathe; it is inborn. It is as inborn as a flower on a bush. It is as inborn as water rushing towards the ocean - naturally.

The moment a child is born the whole being of the child hankers, becomes hungry for breath - not knowing what is happening because he has never breathed before. Nobody has ever taught him, he has never done it, he has no experience about it - it simply happens.

In exactly the same way, one day, at the age of fourteen, the child starts feeling a tremendous attraction towards the other sex. Nobody has taught it; in fact, teachers have been teaching against it. The whole human history seems to be a teaching against sexuality. against sex energy. Religions, cultures, civilisations, priests and politicians - they have all been teaching how to suppress sex. But still it cannot be suppressed. It seems it is impossible to suppress it.

It is a natural phenomenon. It arises. It arises even when you are against it - see the truth of it. Even when you are against it, it arises in spite of you. It is bigger than you. You cannot control it. It is natural.

Hasidism says that if a man starts living a natural life, one day, suddenly, love of God arises as naturally as love for the woman or love for the man arises; as naturally as breathing arises after birth. That precious moment cannot be managed; you cannot plan for it, you cannot prepare for it, there is no need. You simply live a natural life. Don't fight with nature, float with it, and one day suddenly you will see that grace has descended on you. A tremendous urge has arisen in your being, a new Love towards existence - call it God. Because when love arises, existence becomes personal. Then it is no more 'it'; it becomes 'thou'. Then it is a relationship between 'I' and 'thou'.

Hasidism simply says don't be unnatural and prayer will be born on its own accord. It has no techniques. And that's the beauty of it.

If you have missed the natural flowering of prayer - then techniques are needed. Meditation is a substitute for prayer; it is second to prayer. If you have missed prayer then meditation is needed but if prayer has arisen in you then there is no need for any meditation. Prayer is spontaneous meditation; meditation is prayer with effort. Prayer with technique is meditation; meditation without technique is prayer.

Hasidism is the religion of prayer, that's why in Hasidism there is no renunciation. A Hasid lives the natural life that God has conferred on him. Wherever God has placed him, he lives, he loves; he enjoys the small pleasures of life. And once you start enjoying the small pleasures, the total cumulative effect is a great bliss in your being.

This has to be understood. Don't wait for some great bliss to descend on you. It never happens. Great bliss is nothing but small pleasures accumulating in your being. The total of all the small pleasures is the great bliss. Eating, enjoy it. Drinking, enjoy it. Taking a bath, enjoy it. Walking, enjoy it. Such a beautiful world, such a beautiful morning, such beautiful clouds...what else do you need to celebrate? The sky full of stars...what more do you need to be prayerful? The sun rising from the east...what more do you need to bow down? And amidst a thousand and one thorns a small roseflower arises, opening its buds, so fragile, so vulnerable, yet so strong, so ready to fight with the wind, with the lightning, with the thunderings. Look at the courage...what more do you need to understand trust?

Techniques are needed when you have missed these small openings towards God. If you go on looking in the small openings, the total effect is a great-door. And suddenly you start seeing what prayer is. Not only seeing, you start living it.

Hasidism is a totally different approach to Tantra. And Hasidism is far superior to any Tantra, because it is the natural Tantra, it is the natural way. It is the way of Tao.

But the mind is very cunning. The mind wants to manipulate. The mind wants to manipulate even the relationship of love; the mind wants to manipulate even the mysterious phenomenon of prayer. The mind is a great controller. The obsession of the mind is to control everything, not to allow anything beyond control - hence technique. The mind is always asking for techniques and the mind goes on planning for every possibility.

If you plan for every possibility, if you manage for everything on your own, you never give a chance for God to penetrate you, to take control onto his shoulders. You never allow God to help you. You think you have to be independent; you think there is no other way than self-help. You remain unnecessarily poor.

A small child was playing around his father who was sitting in the garden. And the small child was trying to pull up a big rock. It was too big and he could not do it. He tried hard. He was perspiring.

The father said, 'You are not using all your energies.'

The child said, 'Wrong. I am using all my energy. And I don't see what more I can do?'

The father said, 'You have not asked me to help. That too is your energy. I am sitting here and you have not asked me to help. You are not using all your energy.'

A man who lives through techniques may think he is using all his energies but he has not asked for God's help. A man who is simply meditating with techniques is a poor man. An Hasid is tremendously rich because he is really using all his energy. An Hasid is open; a technique-oriented mind is a closed mind. It goes on planning everything. Even if your plans are fulfilled you will not be happy, because they are your plans. They are as small as you are. Even if you succeed you will be a failure; even in your success you will have the taste of frustration. Because what will you get? Or, if you fail, you will of course be frustrated. When you fail you are frustrated, but when you succeed then you are frustrated too.

Open yourself to the divine. You live naturally; not trying to improve, not living through ideas, not living through moral disciplines - just living a natural life. Nature should be your only discipline, and whatsoever is natural is good because that's how God wills it to be, wants it to be. If you can accept your life with such gratefulness, that this is how God wants it to be.... If he has given sex to you, he has given sex to you - he knows better.

You need not try to enforce any celibacy on yourself. An enforced celibacy is ugly, more ugly than a natural sex. And if you accept natural sex you will find that beyond a certain point natural sex becomes natural celibacy. Then BRAHMACHARYA arises. Then you start living in a totally different way, it comes floating with the river of life.

Do you see? A river descends from the mountains, moves thousands of miles, then one day disappears into the ocean. If the river were a great thinker, and it started thinking, 'This is going downwards. I should not do that. My abode is on the mountains. A river is first just snow peaks of the Himalayas - there is my abode. And I am falling. This is sin. Falling down in a glacier, moving towards the earth, from the height of the heaven....' If rivers were thinkers they would go crazy, because this is going down, descending into hell. But rivers are not thinkers, they are very fortunate. They accept it. It was God's will to be on the hilltop, it is his will now to explore the depths.

And a person who really wants to know the height has also to know the depth, otherwise he will not be able to know. Depth is the other part of the height. The higher the peak of the mountain, the deeper the valley. If you want to know the tree, you have to know the roots also. The tree goes upwards and roots go downwards. And the tree exists between this: the upward movement and the downward movement. This is the tension that gives life to the tree.

The river moves, trusting, not knowing where she is going - she has never gone before and she has no road map available, no guide to guide. But she goes trusting: if this is how it is happening it must be good. She goes singing and dancing. And then one day every river - whether it runs towards the East or whether it runs towards the West or the South or the North, it makes no difference - every river finally, eventually, reaches the ultimate, disappears into the ocean. In the ocean she has attained the final depth.

Now the journey is complete. She has known the peaks of the Himalayas, now she has known the depth of the ocean. Now the experience is total; now the circle is complete. Now the river can disappear into nirvana; now the river can disappear into moksha. This is what liberation is.

An Hasid lives like a river. He trusts. A man who is too obsessed with technique is a non-trusting man, a doubting man. He cannot trust in life, he trusts in his own techniques.

I have heard a very beautiful anecdote. Bodhi has sent it to me.

Now this is the technique-oriented mind. It arranges for everything, for every possibility. It does not leave a loophole in the system.

A religious man cannot live in such a planned way, it is not possible. He has to leave many loopholes for God to enter in. In fact, if you understand rightly, a religious man is one who plans nothing - because how can we plan? And, what are our capacities for planning? We are limited. We have a small light of intelligence but it is too tiny. Trusting it totally creates a very mediocre life. The vast never enters into this mediocre life; the infinite never enters into this mediocre life; the endless never enters into this mediocre life.

Hasidism is a very revolutionary step - a great risk is involved. The risk is in dropping the mind which seems to be our only security; dropping the mind which seems to be our only certainty; dropping the mind which seems to be our only capacity. And then trusting the no-mind - call it God; trusting existence, not trusting oneself. Hasidism is a great surrender.

 

The third question:

I can understand and appreciate your difficulty. I am talking about too many Masters and too many paths and too many doors - and it is natural that you may start getting confused.

But you can get confused only if you cling to my words. If you don't cling to my words, I am saying the same thing again and again and again even though the words may be different and I may be using different approaches. And when I use any approach, any path, I am totally with it. Then I don't care about anything else. Even things that I have said before, I don't care about.

When I am talking about Hasids, I am a Hasid. And then I am totally involved in it. That's the only way to reveal its secret to you. If I remain uninvolved, if I remain without any passion, if I am just a spectator, a professor, just explaining things to you, it won't give you the insight that is Intended, it won't give you the vision. Then you will collect information and you will go home - you will become more knowledgeable, but not wise.

So whenever I am speaking about any Master or any path or any scripture, I am totally in it, my involvement is absolute. In those moments nothing else exists for me because I am in a passion, I am passionately in love with that teaching.

Of course, I can understand your difficulty, because when I say passionately that Hasidism is the way, you become disturbed because one day I was saying Tantra is the way, another day I was saying Zen is the way, and another day I was saying Tao is the way. So now what is the way?

When I am talking about one way, I am that way. Don't cling to my words, listen to the wordless message. And if it hits your heart, if it sings in your heart, then you have found your way. Then forget everything I have said before or whatsoever I am going to say in future. Then you need not worry. You have found your key. Now you can open the lock.

I will go on talking because I am talking for millions. When you have found your key, enjoy whatsoever I say but don't again and again get disturbed by it. You have found your key, now I must talk for somebody else who has not yet found his key. When you have found your peace, your silence, your bliss, you have got what you were needing, but there are many others who have not got it. I will be talking for them and I will be using all the possibilities.

For example, when I am talking on Hasidism it may hit your heart deeply and your love may arise for this path. My passion may inflame you. That's why I speak with passion. If I speak with indifference as professors do.... I am not a professor. When I am speaking on Hasidism I am a Hasid rabbi. It is my path then that I am talking about. It is not somebody else's path that I am describing to you, it is my path that I have travelled, that J have loved, that I have known, that I have tasted. I am talking about my own experience, and if it hits and something clicks in your heart and prayer becomes your path, then forget whatsoever I am saying, then you need not reconsider again and again.

If it has not happened then you have to consider. If it has not happened then don't worry about it, forget all about it, I will be talking about something else, I will be opening another door. Maybe that is the door for you. But when you have found the door then don't be worried about other doors that I will be opening because all the doors lead to the same. Don't you be worried that you should enter THIS door - maybe Osho is going to open another bigger and golden door. But they are all the same.

And the door that you have fallen in love with is the golden door for you. Now there is no other door if you have fallen in love with this door. And you will find others entering from other doors but when you reach to the very centre of existence, you will all be meeting there in tremendous love and brotherhood. Somebody will be a Hasid and somebody will be a Zen monk and somebody will be a Tibetan lama and somebody will be a Sufi and somebody has come through sitting silently and somebody has come dancing - but in deep brotherhood at the centre all seekers meet.

I know it is very difficult. If you start choosing two Masters you will be in conflict. Never choose two Masters - one is enough, more than enough.

When Mulla Nasrudin was dying he called his son, told him to come close and said to him, 'My son, I have one thing to say to you - even though I know you will not listen, because I didn't listen to my own father when he was dying. He told me, "Nasrudin, don't chase women too much." But I could not resist; the temptation was too much. And I got involved with one woman, another woman....' He married nine women - the maximum that the Koran permits.

And he said, 'I have created a hell. I suffered much. I know you don't listen but still I am saying it, because now I am departing and there will be no chance to say it to you. I know you will fall in love with women but at least remember one thing from your old man: My son, one at a time, one at a time. At least do that much.'

One at a time. If you fall in love with two women at a time, what does it show? It shows you have a split personality. You are schizophrenic, you are not one, you are two. If you fall in love with three women at a time then you are three. And there are people who fall in love with any woman they see. Whosoever is passing, suddenly they are in love. Every woman is their love object. They are a crowd. You can count how many persons live in you by counting how many women you fall in love with simultaneously. That's a very beautiful way to measure how many persons live in you, a very easy criterion.

But to fall in love with one woman makes you a unity, gives you a unison, you become total. You become sane because then there is no conflict.

I have heard.

The bride and bridegroom stepped into the hotel elevator and the pretty girl operator said, 'Hello, darling' to the bridegroom. Not another word was spoken until the couple alighted at their floor, when the bride exclaimed, 'Who was that hussy?'

'Now, don't you begin anything,' said the bridegroom quite worriedly. 'I'm going to have enough trouble on my hands explaining you to her tomorrow.'

Even to fall in love with two women is dangerous - but to fall in love with two Masters is a million-fold more dangerous. Because the love of the woman may be only of the body, so the spirit goes only that far. Or at the most, the love of the woman may be of the mind, and the spirit goes only that far. But the love of the Master is of the soul and if you fall in love with two Masters your soul will be dividing, you will be totally disintegrated you will start falling in parts, you will not be able to remain together. You will simply lose all shape and all form, all integrity. And the whole point in being with a Master is to attain to integration.

Once you fall in love with a Master, remain. I am not saying that even when you are disillusioned remain with him. When you are disillusioned, he is no more your Master. Then there is no point in remaining with him. Then seek another.

But never be with two Masters in your mind simultaneously. Be decisive about it - because this decision is no ordinary decision, it is very momentous. It will decide your whole being: its quality, its future.

 

15-October 1976 in the a.m.

CONSCIOUSNESS has two dimensions: one is that of having and the other is that of being. And there are only two categories of human beings: one who is struggling hard to have more and more, and one who has understood the futility of it and has changed their life into the other direction, the direction of being. These people are trying to know who they are.

In the world of having you only believe that you have something, but really you don't have anything. You come alone empty-handed and you go alone empty-handed. And all that happens in-between is almost like a dream. It appears to be true, while it is there it appears to be real, but once it is gone then you understand that nothing was really happening. The reality has remained untouched by your dreaming. The world of having is nothing but a world of dreaming.

The religious person is one who has become aware of the futility of it all. You cannot have anything except yourself [except for your self]. And all that you have, except yourself, is a deception. It is an illusion. And, in fact, that which you have possesses you more than you possess it. The possessor finally becomes the possessed. You think you have so many things - riches, power, money - but deep down you are being possessed by those same things, you are being encaged, enchained, imprisoned by those same things.

Look at the rich people. They don't possess riches - they are as poor as any other poor man in the world, they are as beggarly as any other beggar. In fact, whatsoever they possess possesses them. They are burdened by it.

So the first thing to be understood is that these are the two doors: having, being. If you are still lost in the dream of having, you are in the world. You may be sitting in a cave in the Himalayas, that makes no difference - the world is still there because the world is in the very desire to possess. And nobody has ever possessed anything.

Only one thing can be possessed and that you already have with you - your own self, your own consciousness. But to have that being one has to work hard. You cannot get to it easily. First you will have to detach yourself from the world of having. That will be almost like a death because that's where you have got identified - you are your car, your house; you are your bank balance. And when you start awakening out of this dream you start feeling as if you are disappearing because all your old identities start disappearing.

One identity disappears, one part of you disappears. There is emptiness left behind. When all your identities disappear - and simply you are left, there is only pure space - as pure as life, as pure as death. Nothing else is there. That is your being. Only that being can be possessed because it is already there. You can possess only that which is already there, you cannot possess anything else. All desiring is desiring for the futile. It leads only into frustration.

Ordinarily, even when people become religious, they go on thinking in terms of having - possessing heaven or possessing the pleasures of heaven - but still they go on thinking in terms of having. Their heaven is nothing but their projected desire of having everything. All that they have missed here they would like to have in the after-life. But it is the same desire.

The really religious person is one who has become aware of the futility of desiring, of the impossibility of having anything here in this world or thereafter in the other world. You can only possess yourself. You can only be the master of your own being. If you are not trying for that.... It is hard work, there is no shortcut to it; notwithstanding what Timothy Leary says, there is no shortcut to it. Acid, drugs, are not going to help you there. That is very cheap, it is very cunning. It is a chemical deception. You want to get into the world of your innermost being without any effort. It is a dishonesty. Without earning it you want to possess it.

When a Mahavira possesses it, he has worked hard for it; when a Baal-Shem possesses it, he has worked hard for it. He has sacrificed his whole being for it. His whole being has become just a prayer, a devotion, a sacrifice to the divine. He is not there, he has simply offered himself totally. Then he possesses. Or a Kabir or a Zarathustra...they have all worked the hard way. The hard way is the only way. There exists no shortcut.

But man has tried to invent shortcuts always, in many ways. The drug trip is the latest invention of the cunningness of the human mind. Just by taking a tablet or injecting a certain chemical into your body you think you can become a Buddha, you think you can attain to that total possession of your being. You will simply become a slave of-the chemical, not the master of your being. Now there will arise a craving for the chemical - more and more, again and again. Bigger and bigger quantities will be needed. Soon you will be a wreck, soon you will be a wasteland, soon you will be deserted by all that is beautiful and true and all that is divine. But the lure is there. The human mind thinks it can find some shortcuts.

You may all remember certain dreams. In dreams, if you are travelling in the train, you skip many stations. You are in London and then suddenly you are in Tokyo - you skip the whole journey. The unconscious continually craves for shortcuts. In dreams it is okay but in real life it is not possible - you cannot skip any stage and you cannot skip any station on the way. Howsoever fast you go, there is no way to skip anything. Faster or slower, it eventually does not make any difference. But you have to go all the way and you have to go the hard way.

Acid and drugs have always lured man. It is nothing new. It is as old as man himself - in the Vedas they used to have SOMA. In India they have continued to use drugs down the centuries - charas and ganga and opium - they have tried everything. Now the madness is spreading all over the world. Now people are trying to find a shortcut - a very easy and cheap thing - that you can possess, that you can just swallow. Samadhi cannot be swallowed. And God is not a chemical phenomenon; you have to earn it, only then can you have it.

Then there are others - there are other methods also. It is not only drugs that are a shortcut, there are other methods also. They all guarantee you that, with very little effort, in fact with no effort at all, you can reach to the goal - for example, just chanting a mantra a few minutes every day. Chanting a mantra can only dull your mind; all repetition dulls the mind, makes you silly and stupid. If you simply go on chanting a mantra, it kills your sensitivity, it creates boredom, it brings a sort of slumber to your consciousness - you become more unconscious than conscious, you start slipping into sleep. Mothers have known always that when a child is restless and cannot go to sleep they must sing a lullaby. A lullaby is a mantra. The mother repeats something again and again and again and the child feels bored. The constant repetition creates a monotonous atmosphere. The child cannot escape anywhere - the mother is sitting by the side of the bed and repeating a lullaby. The child cannot escape; the child cannot say, 'Shut up!' He has to listen. The only escape available is to go into sleep. So that he tries - to avoid this lullaby and to avoid this mother.

The mantra works in the same way: you start repeating a certain word and then you create a monotonous state for yourself. All monotony is deadening; all monotony dulls you, destroys your sharpness.

It has been tried in many ways. In the old monasteries all over the world - Christian. Hindu, Buddhist - in all the monasteries they have tried the same trick on a bigger scale. The life of a monastery is routine, absolutely fixed. Each morning you have to get up at three o'clock or five o'clock, and then the same circle starts. Then you have to do the same activity the whole day for your whole life. This is spreading a mantra all over your whole life, making a routine.

By and by, doing the same thing again and again, a person becomes more like somnambulist. Whether he is awake or asleep makes no difference, he can simply go on making the empty gestures and empty movements. He loses all distinction between sleeping and waking.

You can go to the old monasteries and watch monks walking in their sleep. They have become robots. Between when they get up in the morning and when they go to sleep, there is no distinction - the territories are overlapping. And it is exactly the same every day. In fact, the word 'monotonous' and the word 'monastery' come from the same root. They both mean the same.

You can create such a monotonous life that intelligence is not needed. When intelligence is not needed you become dull. And when you become dull, of course you start feeling a certain sort of peace, a certain silence - but it is not real, it is pseudo. The real silence is very alive, throbbing. The real silence is positive; it has energy in it, it is intelligent, aware, full of life and zest. It has enthusiasm in it.

The false silence, the pseudo silence, is simply dull. You can see it. If a stupid person is sitting there - an idiot, an imbecile - you will feel a certain silence around him; it is the same silence as you can feel near a cemetery. He has a space around him which is very dull. He seems to be very indifferent to the world, not in contact at all, disconnected; he is sitting there - like a lump of mud. There is no vibration around him of any life, of any energy; there is nothing streaming around him. This is not real silence. He is simply stupid.

When you come close to a Buddha, he is silent because of his intelligence, he is silent because of his awareness, he is silent, not because he has forced himself to be silent, he is silent simply because he has understood the pointlessness of being disturbed in any way. He is silent because he has understood that there is no point in being worried and there is no point in being tense. His silence is out of understanding. It is overflowing understanding. When you come near a Buddha you will have a totally different fragrance - the fragrance of consciousness.

And not only will you feel a freshness, a breeze around him, you will feel that you have also become more alive, aflame. Just by being close to him your own inner being is lit; a lamp starts burning within you. When you are close to him, with just the very affinity, the closeness, you suddenly feel you are no longer so depressed. His presence is pulling you out of the mud in which you had established yourself perfectly. His very presence is uplifting - you will feel life, love, compassion, beauty, reality.

A person who goes on chanting a mantra and living a monotonous life of routine is dead; he just goes into the gestures and motions because he has to. And he has done the same things so many times that there is no need to be alert about it - he can do it in his sleep. He has become very efficient, but his efficiency simply means that he has become mechanical. That's why he is silent. You will see this type of silence if you come across people who practise Transcendental Meditation. They have stilled themselves by repeating a certain mantra; they have forced their mind to keep quiet. But this is cheap and you cannot get the real with such cheap measures.

The real becomes available only when you work for it with your totality.

But remember, I am not saying that the real becomes available by your work...there is a paradox in it. You have to work hard, you have to work in a total, passionate way and yet you have to remember that it does not happen by your work alone. It happens by grace. That is the message of Hasidism.

You work hard - it never happens without you working hard, that is certain; it happens only when you have worked hard, but that only creates the situation for it to happen. It is not like cause and effect. It is not that you heat water to a hundred degrees and then it has to evaporate - it is not like that. It is not a natural law; it has nothing to do with the world of gravitation. It is a second law, a totally different law - the law of grace. You work hard, you come to a hundred degrees, then you wait there - throbbing, expectant, alive, happy, celebrating, singing, dancing. You wait there at the hundred-degree point. It is a must, you must come to the hundred-degree point - but now you have to wait, you have to wait patiently, lovingly. When the right moment comes, when your work is complete and your waiting is also complete, then the grace descends. Or, you can say that the grace ascends - both mean the same because it comes from the deepest core of your being. It looks like it is descending because you have not known your innermost core up to now. It seems as if from somewhere above it is coming to you - but it really comes from somewhere within you. The within is also the beyond.

Hard work is needed to attain to grace but the real thing finally happens only because of grace. This is a paradox. It is difficult to understand it. Because of this paradox millions of people have lost their-way. There are a few who say - and they are very logical, their logic is impeccable - there are a few who say that if it comes only by their effort then why bother about grace and God? If it happens only by their effort, then okay, they will make all the effort, they will make it happen. So they don't talk about grace or God. They will miss, because it never happens only by your own effort.

Then there are people who say that if it happens only by grace and never happens by our own effort, then why bother? We should wait - and whenever God wills it, it is going to happen.

They both miss. One misses because of egoism - 'Only my effort is enough. Only I am enough' - the other misses because of laziness, lethargy. Both miss.

The one who arrives home has to follow the paradoxical path. This is the paradox: 'I have to work hard, not only hard, I have to put myself totally at the stake - only then will I become capable of receiving grace. But it happens through grace. A moment comes when I have done all that I can do and then I pray that now no more is possible from my side, now something is needed from the other end, now you also do something.' And God starts working on you only when you have done all that you could have done. If something is still lacking and a part of your being is still not involved, then God cannot come to your help. God helps only those who help themselves.

This is the paradox of the Hasid. He works hard and still he trusts that the ultimate flowering is going to be only by His grace, by God's grace.

And it is beautiful. We are very small. Our effort cannot create much. Our fire is very small - by this fire alone we cannot set the whole existence aflame. We are just drops. We cannot create oceans out of these drops. But if the drop can drop into a deep prayer, the ocean becomes available. When the drop relaxes, it becomes capable of containing oceans in itself. It is small if you look only at its periphery; it is tremendously vast if you look at its centre.

Man is both, man is a paradox. He is the tiniest particle of consciousness, an atom, very atomic, and yet he contains the vast. The whole sky is contained in him.

So first these two languages have to be understood: the language of having and the language of being. And you have to change your gears from the language of having to the language of being.

 

"My Precious!"

Let me tell you a few anecdotes.

A Japanese high official confronted his daughter, 'I have been told that you are going out on dates with a foreigner. Furthermore, he is an American soldier, and what's more, he is Jewish.'

The girl shot back, 'What schmuck told you that?'

Now the word 'schmuck' tells everything. There is no need for anybody to say anything anymore.

The person who knows only the language of 'having' has a totally different quality to his being: the way he walks, the way he sits. the way he talks, the words that he uses, the words that he avoids using, the people he mingles with and the people that he avoids, the places that he visits and the places that he does not visit - everything indicates something. Even single, ordinary words indicate something. Even if he comes to a Master, a man who is always trying to have more and more and more can be seen, by the way he comes, by the desire with which he comes. Even if he surrenders, in his very surrender you can find his language.

A man came to see me. By the way he came, I could see that he was absolutely indifferent towards me. It was so clear, it was so loud. He was not flowing towards me, he had no flow in his being; he was a stagnant pool of energy.

I was surprised. I wondered why he had come to me. And then he started talking about God. The word 'God' was simply irrelevant on his tongue. It made no sense. He was speaking some language which he did not know how to use. I was waiting, because there must have been something else behind these words about Bod. He was saying, 'I want to realise God and I want to realise myself.' But by the way he was saying it and by the way he was expressing it, it was absolutely clear that he had not come for these things. Maybe just to be polite towards me or just to start a dialogue, he was using these props.

And then by and by he said, 'I will come one day and become a sannyasin also.'

So I said, 'If you have come, and you are a seeker, and you want to realise God, then why waste any more time? As it is, you have wasted enough already.' He must have been almost sixty-five. He said, 'That's right. But right now I am contesting the election.' There was a by-election going on. 'So I have come for your blessings.' I said, 'Then why did you waste so much time talking about God, talking about the soul, talking about meditation?'

Indians are very proficient about such things - just by tradition they have learned these words. These words are in the air, they have caught them. They don't have any roots in their being, they just float in their heads. These words exist in them without any roots, and unrelated to them.

I said, 'Why did you waste so much time talking about God and the soul? You should have said the real thing in the beginning.' He was a little embarrassed. And I told him, 'From the very beginning I was wondering why you have come to me - because you were coming towards me and yet you were not coming towards me. Your language was clear and loud. You were sitting here and yet you were not sitting here and I could see that your presence was false, only physical. And I could see the politician in you; in fact, you were talking about God as a political strategy. It was your politics.'

There are those people who say, 'Honesty is the best policy.' Even honesty they have made into a policy. Policy means politics. 'It pays to be honest,' they say. So honesty is also a useful instrument to earn more money, to earn more prestige, to be more respectable. But how can honesty be a policy? Just to say such things - that honesty is the best policy - is to utter a profanity. It is almost saying that God is the best policy, or that meditation is the best policy, or that love is the best policy.

If your language is of 'having', you can use God and meditation and things, but they will be just garbs, masks, and something else will be hidden behind them.

'I'm afraid it's bad news,' said the doctor to the husband of a nagging wife. 'Your wife has only a few hours left to live. I hope you understand there's nothing more to be done. Don't let yourself suffer!'

'It's all right, Doc,' said the husband. 'I've suffered for years - I can suffer a few more hours!'

People have different languages. Even if they use the same words they don't use them with the same meaning. Listen to the meaning and never listen to the words. If you listen to the words you will never understand people. Listen to the meaning - the meaning is a totally different thing.

Whenever you are listening, listen to the meaning. Whenever you are listening to a person, listen to his whole personality - and you will immediately be able to see whether the person lives in the dimension of 'having' or in the dimension of 'being'.

And that will be very helpful for your own inner growth and your own change of gears. Just watch people. It is easier to watch people than to watch yourself, in the beginning, because people are more objective, and there is a little distance between you and them. And you can be more objective about people because you are not involved in them. Just watch. Make it a point.

Buddha used to say to his disciples, "Watch everybody passing by; coming and going in the streets, watch people. See exactly what is happening - Don't listen to their words because they are very cunning, they have become very deceptive. When somebody is saying something, listen to his face, to his eyes, to his being, to the gesture, and you will be simply surprised how, up to now, you have lived only with words. A person may be saying, 'I love you' and his eyes may be simply denying it. A person may be smiling with his lips and his eyes may be ridiculing you, rejecting you. A person may be saying 'Hullo' and holding your hand, and his whole being may be condemning you."

Listen to the language of the body, the language of the gesture - the language behind the language. Listen to that meaning.

And first become alert about it in others. Let everybody who comes to you be an experiment of awareness. Then by and by you will become able to watch yourself. Then turn your whole flood of life upon yourself; then use the same with yourself. When you say to somebody 'I love you' listen to what you really are saying - not these words. Words are almost always fake.

Language is very tricky and can garb things so beautifully that the container becomes very important and you lose sight of the content. People have become very sophisticated as far as their surface is concerned but their innermost core remains almost primitive. Listen to the centre of the circumference. Go into each word.

First others have to be watched, then watch yourself. And then by and by you will see that there are a few moments when you also move into the dimension of 'being'. These moments are the moments of beauty, the moments of happiness. In fact, whenever you see that you are feeling very happy, you have come in contact with the dimension of 'being' - because there is no other happiness possible.

But if you don't observe it accurately, you may misunderstand it. You are sitting with a woman you love, or with a man you love, or with a friend, and suddenly you feel a deep well-being arising in you, a deep joy - for no reason at all, for no visible cause. You are just aglow. Then you start finding causes outside: you think maybe it is because the woman is sitting by your side and she loves you so much. Or it is because you have met the friend after so many years. Or it is because the full moon is so beautiful. You will start finding causes.

But those who have become alert in listening to their heart, to their real meanings, will not be looking for causes outside. They will look inside. They have come in contact with their being. Maybe the woman you loved functioned as a situation, as a jumping-board, and you jumped into yourself.

It is difficult to jump into yourself when there is some antagonism outside. You have to be outside then. When somebody loves you, you can drop all defense measures, you can drop all your strategies, you can drop your politics, you can drop your diplomacy. When somebody loves you, you can be vulnerable; you can trust that he or she is not going to take advantage of you, that you can be defenceless and you will not be killed and crushed, that you can be defenceless and the presence of your friend will be soothing, it will not be poisoning you. Whenever there is a situation where you can leave yourself defenceless and you can drop your strategies and your armours, suddenly you are in contact with your being - you have moved from the dimension of having to the dimension of being. Whenever it happens, there is happiness, there is joy, there is rejoicing. Even if it is only for a split second, suddenly the doors of heaven are open. But again and again you lose it because you are not aware. It happens only accidentally.

Remember, a religious person is one who has understood this accidental happening and who has understood the innermost key of it. And now he does not move into his dimension of being only accidentally, he has the key - and whenever he wants to move, he opens the door, he unlocks the door and goes into it.

This is the only difference. In ordinary happiness and the happiness of a religious person, the only difference is this: that the religious person has become capable of moving any time, any place, into his 'being'. Now he knows the direct route and he does not depend on outside props.

You depend too much on outside props. Sometimes you are in a beautiful house; it feels good. You are travelling in a beautiful car - the car is humming and everything is going beautifully - it feels good. In that feeling you start coming closer to your 'being'. But you misunderstand; you think it is because of this car so you have to possess this car. Maybe the car functioned as a situation but the car is not the cause. Maybe a beautiful house functioned as a situation but it is not the cause.

If you think it is the cause then you move into the world of 'having'; then you must have the most beautiful car - you have to have it. Then you have to have the best house, you have to have the best garden, you have to have the best woman and the best man. And you go on collecting and collecting and collecting and one day suddenly you recognise or realise that your whole life has been a wastage. You have collected much but you have lost all sources of happiness. You got lost in collecting things. The basic logic was that with whatever you felt good and happy, that thing had to be possessed.

Listen to me...that thing need not be possessed. You just watch what is happening inside you and you can start having that happening without any outside help. That's what a sannyasin does. It is not that you have to have all, that you have to possess all, but you have to remain alert that you cannot possess ANYTHING in this world. All that you possess can function only as a situation - it is not the cause. The cause is inside. And you can open the door without any outside prop, at any time, in any place, and you can go in and you can rejoice.

You are no longer attached. You can use things, they are useful....I am not against things, remember. Neither are the Hasids against things, remember. Use things but don't believe that things can cause you happiness. Use things, they have a utility, but don't believe that they are the goals. They are not the ends, they are only the means. The goal is within you, and the goal is such that one can move directly into it without any outside help. Once you know it, you become a master of your being.

 

Whatsoever I am saying to you - it has to be experienced by you. Just by my saying it and just by your listening to it and understanding it intellectually, it is not going to help much.

Mulla Nasrudin refused the cow-puncher's command to drink, for three reasons. "Name them!" roared the terror of the town.

"First," said the Mulla, "it is prohibited in my religion. Second, I promised my grandmother on her death-bed that I would handle not, touch not, taste not, the accursed stuff."

"And the other reason, the third?" insisted the bully, somewhat softened.

"And besides, I have just had a drink," said Nasrudin.

If you only listen to me, if you only understand me intellectually and never experiment in your own inner lab of consciousness, whatsoever I am saying will remain just in your head. It will never become a lived experience.And unless it becomes a lived experience it is worthless knowledge, it is junk. Again you can start collecting knowledge, then again you are into the same trip - the dimension of having. And you can go on collecting as much knowledge as is available. It is one of the misfortunes of modern man that so much knowledge has become available. It was never so.

The thing that has proved the greatest calamity for modern man is the tremendous amount of knowledge which has become available. It was never available before. A Hindu used to live with Hindu scriptures; the Mohammedan used to live with Mohammedan scriptures; the Christian used to live with the Bible - and they were all secluded and nobody went into the other's world of knowledge. Things were clearcut; there was no overlapping.

Now everything is overlapping and a tremendous amount of new knowledge has become available. We are living in a 'knowledge explosion'. In this explosion you can start gathering information; you can become a great scholar very cheaply, very easily, but it is not going to transform you at all.

Again, remember, knowledge belongs to the dimension of having; knowing belongs to the dimension of being. They look alike but they are not. Not even are they not alike, they are diametrically opposite to each other. A man who goes on collecting knowledge goes on losing knowing. Knowing needs a mirror-like mind - pure, uncorrupted. I am not saying that knowledge is useless. If you have your knowing, clear, mirror-like, fresh, you can use your knowledge in a tremendously useful way. It can become beneficial. But the knowing has to be there in the first place.

Knowledge is very easy; knowing is very difficult. For knowing you have to pass through many fires. For knowledge nothing is needed - as you are you can go on adding more and more knowledge to yourself.

A gay man-about-town, long on charm but short on cash, surprised his friends by his sudden marriage to an extremely ugly woman whose only virtue was her well-padded bankroll.

After the marriage, his friends were doubly mystified by his insistence on taking his wife everywhere with him. "I can understand your marrying that painfully ugly woman for her money," one of his close friends remarked frankly, "but why do you have to bring her with you every time you go out?"

"It's simple," the husband explained. "It's easier than kissing her good-bye."

It is easier to have knowledge, very cheap, costs nothing; it is very difficult, arduous, to attain to knowing. That's why very few, very rare people try to meditate, very rare people try to pray, very rare people ever make any effort towards knowing what truth is. And whatsoever you have not known on your own is meaningless. You can never be certain about it. The doubt never disappears; the doubt remains like a worm underneath, sabotaging your knowledge. You can shout loudly that you believe in God but your shouting does not prove anything. Your shouting only proves one thing: that there is doubt. Only doubt shouts loudly. You can become a fanatic believer but your fanaticism simply shows one thing: that there is doubt.

Only a man who has doubt within himself becomes a fanatic. A fanatic Hindu means one who does not really trust that Hinduism is right. A fanatic Christian simply means one who has doubts about Christianity. He becomes fanatic, aggressive - not to prove anything to others, he becomes fanatic and aggressive to prove to himself that whatsoever he believes he really believes. He has to prove it.

When you really know something, you are not a fanatic at all. A man of knowing, one who has come to know even glimpses of God. glimpses of his being, becomes very, very soft, sensitive, fragile. He is not fanatic. He becomes feminine. He is not aggressive. He becomes deeply compassionate. And, by knowing, he becomes very understanding of others. He can understand even the diametrically opposite standpoint.

I have heard about a Hasid rabbi.

This is tremendous understanding. No fanaticism. A man of knowing attains to a sense of humour. Let this always be remembered. If you see someone who has no sense of humour, know well that that man has not known at all. If you come across a serious man, then you can be certain that he is a pretender. Knowing brings sincerity but all seriousness disappears. Knowing brings a playfulness; knowing brings a sense of humour. The sense of humour is a must.

If you find a saint who has no sense of humour, then he is not a saint at all. Impossible.

His very seriousness says that he has not achieved. Once you have some inner experiences of your own you become very playful, you become very innocent, childlike.

The man of knowledge is very serious. The man of knowledge always carries a serious, gloomy atmosphere around him. Not only does he carry a serious atmosphere, he makes anybody he comes into contact with, serious. He forces seriousness on them. In fact, deep down, he is worried that he does not know anything. He cannot relax. His seriousness is a tension. He is anguished. He knows that he knows only for its name's sake, he knows that his knowledge is all fake - so he cannot laugh at it.

Now listen to it.

The rabbi said, "Life is like a river And a disciple asked, 'Why?"

And the rabbi said, "How can I know? Am I a philosopher?"

And another day the rabbi said again, "Life is like a river."

Another disciple asked, "Why?"

And the rabbi said, "Right you are. Why should it be?"

You see the non-seriousness? You see the tremendous sense of humour?

Hasidism has created a few of the greatest saints of the world. And my respect towards them is immense because they are not serious people. They can joke and they can laugh - - and they can laugh not only at others, they can laugh at themselves. That's the beauty. If you go on collecting knowledge, you can have a great amount of knowledge but it is not going to be of any help when the need arises. You can go on throwing it around and showing and exhibiting it, but whenever the need arises and the house is on fire you will suddenly see you have forgotten all that you knew - because you never knew in the first place. It was just in your memory.

Wherever there is an emergency situation...for example, when a person is dying. He will forget all his knowledge. In that moment he will not remember that the soul is immortal.

That was advice for others. In that moment he will not remember that he is going back to God - and that one should go happily and dancing. In that moment he will start clinging, to life; all his knowledge will be gone.

I used to know a very learned man, a very intellectual man, famous all over the country. He was not only learned, he was a follower of J. Krishnamurti. He used to come to see me sometimes and he would say that there is no need for any meditation - Krishnamurti says so.

I used to listen to him and laugh. He would ask me, "Why do you laugh whenever I say these things?" I told him again and again, "I listen to YOU, I don't listen to what you say. Your being gives me a totally different message. If there is really no need for meditation, there is no need for scriptures, there is no need for any methods, there is no need even for prayer - and you have understood it, then this would have transformed you totally." He would answer seriously, "That's right. I have understood intellectually but some day I will understand it nonintellectually also. I have taken the first step, the second will be coming."

Then one day his son came running to me to tell me, "Father is very ill, it seems like a heart attack and he remembers you." So I rushed to him. He was lying on the bed repeating Ram, Ram, Ram. I shook his head and I said, "What are you doing? Your whole life you said there is no meditation - what are you doing repeating Ram, Ram, Ram...?"

He said, "Now don't disturb me at this moment. Death is at the door. I am dying. Who knows? Maybe God is. And who knows, maybe the people who have always said remember his name and he will forgive you, are right. This is no time to create a debate or an argument; let me repeat it."

For forty years he had not said a single mantra, but now, suddenly, forty years of knowledge is discarded. It is of no use - in this dangerous situation when death is there, he forgets Krishnamurti completely. He becomes again an ordinary Hindu. It was okay for an ordinary Hindu villager to repeat Ram, Ram - he can be forgiven - but this man?

He had written books, he had lectured all over the country, he had helped many people to drop their mantras and to drop their meditations and their scriptures. And now suddenly he is repeating a mantra.

But he survived the heart attack and he came to see me after two or three months - and again he was back to his knowledge. I said, "Now stop your foolishness. Death will come again and you will repeat Ram, Ram, Ram. So what is the point of it all?"

And,

A very rich old man had remained a bachelor. Now he was nearing seventy-five. Then suddenly a friend, a married friend, convinced him that he should get married. 'You should not miss this pleasure,' he said.

So he decided to get married. Because he had so much money he immediately found a beautiful girl. Off they went on their honeymoon.

He took the married friend and his wife with him as guides in this new exploration. The next morning they met in the motel at breakfast. The friend had given him every bit of information about sex and how to make love and what to do and what not to do. "What a fantastic time I had last night," said the married man. "We went to bed last night. My wife was eager, I was eager and we had a marvellous night of love. What about you, old man?"

"Oh, my God!" said the old rich man. "I forgot clean about it!"

After a whole life of bachelorhood, even if somebody guides you, tells you things and you memorise them, they don't have any deep contact with your being - they simply float above your head. They don't touch you.

The old man said, "Oh my God! I forgot clean about it!" Seventy-five years of sleeping alone creates a mechanical habit of its own.

If you go on accumulating knowledge, it creates a habit; it never gives you any knowledge but it gives you a habit, a habit for accumulating more, a very dangerous habit. Even if you come across a Buddha or a Jesus, you will miss, because there also you will be accumulating. You will be taking notes inside the mind - 'Yes, this is right, worthy of being remembered.' Your accumulation will become bigger and bigger but you will be just a dead museum, or, a museum of dead things.

And the more you are concerned with this 'having knowledge', the less will be the possibility for the real knowledge to be there; the knowledge that comes by knowing being, by BEING, will be missed.

Remember, the mind is nothing but that which you have collected up to now. The mind is all that you have inside your being. Beyond the mind is your real being, beyond having is your real being. Outside you have collected things; inside you have collected thoughts - both are in the dimension of having.

When you are no longer attached to things and when you are no longer attached to thoughts, suddenly - the open sky, the open sky of being. And that's the only thing worth having and the only thing that you can really have.

 

Now the story...

A tremendously significant saying. Maybe the peasant hasn't meant it in such a significant way but the rabbi took it in that way. It was a precious stone. Out of that ordinary peasant.... He may not have meant it the way the rabbi understood it - you understand only in the way that you can understand.

The old man must have meant it in the ordinary way. He was saying that in this life you can have only that which you have worked for. There is no other way. One has to work hard to have something.

That is the experience of an ordinary farmer. The farmer was not a king; a king can have much that he has not earned by his own labour.

A very great, rich man was once asked by a poor man, 'What is the best way to get rich in the world?'

The rich man said, 'The best way is to find the right parents.'

You can have much without ever having earned it if you were clever enough to find the right womb. Very few people are that clever. They simply rush into any womb available!

You can rob, you can cheat, you can exploit...there are a thousand ways. But the farmer, the peasant, really lived by his own earning. He was not a king, he was not a politician, he was not a rich man - whatsoever he earned, that's all he had.

The farmer must have said it in the very ordinary sense, but look at the beauty of it. Whatsoever you hear, you hear from your dimension. The rabbi heard it in a totally different way. It became a very illuminated saying in his being. It was a simple, ordinary statement, but the rabbi was in a deep meditation, the rabbi was in his other dimension - the dimension of being.

When you are in the dimension of being, small things, ordinary pebbles, become precious stones. Ordinary things take on so much colour, become so colourful. Ordinary events become so psychedelic...it depends on you, on your vision.

This is true. In the innermost world it is absolutely true - although it may not be so true in the outside world. In the outside world there are a thousand and one ways to be dishonest, to cheat, to rob, to steal, to exploit. In fact, in the outside world the workers don't have much, only the cheaters. The cunning people have much. Those who work don't have much. Those who don't work, they have much.

But in the inside world the statement is absolutely true. You cannot have anything there in your being that you have not earned. And it is earned the hard way; there are no shortcuts. So don't try to cheat God.

A man who is deluded by having things, loses all opportunities of attaining to the state of being.

I have heard.

A husband took a shot at his mother-in-law, so she brought charges against him. 'You were drinking,' said the judge, 'so I must tell you something. It was liquor that inflamed you. It was liquor that made you hate your mother-in-law. It was liquor that got you to buy the revolver to shoot her. It was liquor that made you go to your mother-in-law's house, point the revolver, pull the trigger and fire. And note, it was liquor that made you miss her!'

It is the same story, the same liquor. Throughout your whole life it is your ambition to have that functions like the liquor. So watch it. Beware of it. That is the only illusion in the world.

One day when you go, then you will realise - but then it will be too late.

I have heard about a man.

He went to Florida with his wife, and became fascinated by the spectacle of eight horses chasing each other around a track. He and his wife bet heavily, and after a few days they had only two dollars left between them. But he was a hopeful type and he convinced his wife that everything would be all right if she let him go out to the track alone.

A friend drove him out. There was a forty-to-one shot in the first race, and he decided to bet on it. The horse came in.

In every race the man backed the long shot, and in every race he won. By the end of the last race he had over ten thousand dollars, and he decided to press his lucky streak. On the way back to the hotel he stopped off at a little gambling club and ran his stake up to forty thousand on the roulette wheel. One more play, he decided, and he would leave. He put the entire forty thousand on black.

The wheel spun. The croupier announced, 'Number fourteen, red.'

The man walked back to the hotel. His wife called him from the verandah. 'How did you make out?' she asked eagerly.

The husband shrugged: 'I lost the two dollars.'

In the end, when death comes, the whole game of thousands and thousands of dollars, achieving this, attaining that, becoming this, becoming that, the power, the prestige, the money, the respectability - nothing counts. Finally you have to say only, 'I have lost my being.'

In running, rushing into the dimension of having, only one thing happens - you lose your being. Life is a great opportunity, a great opportunity. In fact, there are millions of opportunities in it to attain to yourself, to know who you are. But that comes the hard way. You have to work for it.

Don't try to borrow. Nothing can be borrowed in that inner world. And don't try to become just knowledgeable. Attain to a clarity, attain to a vision where no thought exists in your mind. This is the hardest thing in the world. To drop thoughts is the hardest thing in the world, the greatest challenge. All other challenges are very small. This is the greatest adventure that you can take and those who are courageous, they accept the challenge and go into it.

The greatest challenge is how to drop the mind, because only when the mind ceases, the God can be. Only when the known disappears, the unknown can be. Only when there is no mind, no you, nothing of you left, suddenly there is that which you have been seeking forever and forever. God is when you are not. This is the hardest thing to do.

The last anecdote.

Rabbi Grossman and Father O'Malley were seated beside each other at a banquet. 'Have some ham,' offered the priest. 'I'm afraid not,' answered the rabbi. 'C'mon, try some,' the priest encouraged. 'It's real good!'

'Thanks, but I don't eat that kind of meat because of my religion.'

'It's really delicious !' said Father O'Malley five minutes later.

'You oughta try this ham, you'd like it!'

'No thank you!' replied Rabbi Grossman.

After dinner, the two men shook hands. 'Tell me,' said the Jewish clergyman, 'do you enjoy sex with your wife?'

'Oh, Rabbi, you should know I'm not allowed to be married,' said the priest. 'I can't have sex!'

'You ought to try it,' said the rabbi. 'It's better than ham!'

That's all that I can say to you. You ought to try the state of no-mind, the state of being. It is better than all the worlds put together.

The world of being is the only real world, the world of truth. And unless you have come to it, you go on wandering in foreign lands. You can never come home. You come home only when you have come into the innermost core of your being - which is possible. It is difficult, but not impossible; arduous, but not impossible. It is difficult certainly, but it has happened. It has happened to me, it can happen to you.

But don't cling to cheap remedies. Don't try to cheat, chemically or otherwise. Don't try to borrow knowledge. Don't go on accumulating.

It is already there, accumulations only hide it. It is already there. Once you stop accumulating and you drop all the junk you have accumulated inside you - that's what your mind is, the junk. If you drop that junk, suddenly it is there in its absolute purity, in its absolutely beauty, in its absolute benediction.

Let me repeat it: "When you realise the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge."

The container is your consciousness, the content is your mind. The container is your being, the content is all that you have accumulated. When you realise the distinction between the content and the container - between the mind and the being - you will have knowledge. In a single split moment, when you remember and you recognise that you are not the content, you are the container - there is a mutation, there is a revolution. And that is the only revolution there is.