The First Question:

Venu Gopal, mind lives in illusions. And to live in illusions is to be miserable, because they cannot be fulfilled. You can go on hoping but you will always be moving into a mirage. The moment you reach the place you were hoping for, the mirage will disappear, you will be in utter despair. Out of your despair you will again hope.

Hope is just an effort to keep oneself alive somehow. You will again create illusion. And this is how the whole game goes on: you are in despair, out of despair you create an illusion. Out of illusion more despair is created, and out of more despair, more illusions. And one goes on from despair to illusion, from illusion to despair. No energy is left to celebrate. You are in a constant tension between despair and hope. Your life becomes nothing but a tension between that which is and that which should be.

You cannot feel being, you remain engrossed in becoming. Becoming is misery, being is celebration.

Celebration is not because some desire is fulfilled - no desire is ever fulfilled. Desire as such cannot be fulfilled. Desire is only a way to avoid the present moment. Desire creates the future and takes you far away. Desire is a drug. It keeps you stoned, it does not allow you to see the reality - that which is herenow.

Celebration means: dropping this whole trip of becoming and just being here. When becoming disappears, all the smoke of becoming disappears, there is the flame of being. And that very flame is celebration.

Celebration is without any cause. Celebration is simply because we are. We are made out of the stuff called celebration. That's our natural state: to celebrate - as natural as it is for the trees to bloom, for birds to sing, for rivers to flow to the ocean. Celebration is a natural state. It has nothing to do with your desires and their fulfilment, with your hopes and their fulfilment; it is already the case. But to see the celebration that is already happening at the deepest core of your being you will have to drop becoming, you will have to understand the futility of becoming.

So something tremendously beautiful is happening, Gopal. Allow it.

Yes, it is exactly so. When you are utterly disillusioned and you don't create any more illusions - that is what I mean by utterly disillusioned.. . Disillusionment comes many times in everybody's life, but out of disillusion you again create new illusions. You cannot live without illusions; it has become a habit, a habit of many lives. You cannot live in the reality as it is, you want it to be something else - you are always wanting it to be something else, somewhere else. And reality has no obligation to anybody to change itself. And it is good that it doesn't bother about your desires, otherwise there will be chaos, because there are so many people desiring, projecting.

Reality remains as it is, utterly unaffected by what you desire. It never takes any notice of your desires. But once you are absolutely disillusioned... and by 'absolute disillusionment' I mean you no longer create any more illusions, you simply remain with it - even if it is despair, you remain with it.

You remain in it, you accept it. The moment you accept despair, it starts disappearing, because it can exist only as a shadow of hope; it cannot exist on its own. You cannot just be in despair without any illusion, that is impossible - it is as impossible as if there were just a shadow walking on the road. If you walk there will be a shadow, but the shadow cannot walk alone. Despair is a shadow of illusion. If you are utterly disillusioned, despair starts disappearing. And a new being, a fresh being, a resurrection, a celebration arises in you.

Aniruddha has written a question saying that when he came here he was thinking about me as vast, special, extraordinary. Now he says, 'Living here with you for so many days, you appear ordinary, just as any other man. So what is the fuss all about?'

I have no obligation to fulfil your demands. I am just as I am, utterly ordinary. Reality is ordinary. The rose is a rose is a rose. The rock is a rock, the river is a river. Reality is absolutely ordinary, utterly ordinary. I am an ordinary man. Then what is the difference between you and me? The difference is: I celebrate my ordinariness, you don't celebrate it. That is where the difference is. I welcome it, I am utterly blissful with it; you are not. I am a being, you are a becoming. There is the difference. Not that I am special and you are ordinary - that is utter nonsense - if I am special then everybody is special, if you are ordinary, then I am ordinary. We belong to the same reality. I am utterly ordinary.

But the difference is that I am celebrating it. I have no grudge, I have no complaint, I am not trying to become somebody that I am not. I have accepted myself in absoluteness - not even a single thing do I want to change. In this relaxation, in this acceptance, celebration has started happening to me.

Now Aniruddha says he is in a difficulty. He has created his difficulty himself. I have never told anybody that I am special. That was your idea, your projection. And, in fact, why was Aniruddha thinking that I am special? Deep down he wants to be special, that's why he stayed here, seeing that 'Here is a special man, so there must be some secrets to being special. Learn from this man so you can also become special, so you are no longer ordinary.'

People have such condemnation for the ordinary. I have tremendous respect for it because the ordinary is the real. God is the most ordinary thing in existence - has to be. How can he be special?

- compared to what, compared to whom? He alone is, he cannot be special. He can only be ordinary, as ordinary as the rose and the peacock and the eagle, and the river and the rock and the cloud.

But Aniruddha must have had a desire deep down to become special. People search for Masters in order to become special. People search for Masters out of their ego desires. The very search is an ego trip. Then, naturally, one day you will be disillusioned. That was your illusion; I have nothing to do with it. If you project something on me, how am I supposed to be responsible for it? You project; sooner or later your projection will fall down. In fact, I will help in every way so that it is broken, shattered, so that you can see me as I am, so that one day you can see yourself too as you are.

My whole teaching is: drop all these stupid efforts to become special, extraordinary. Just enjoy reality as it is wherever you are, whosoever you are. Celebrate it. This I call prayer, this I call being religious: celebrating one's being. It is a gift from God. Just to be is more than you can ask for. Just to be is the greatest miracle. What more of a miracle can happen?

Venu Gopal, something tremendously beautiful is on the way. Don't create any more illusions again. The mind will try. Don't listen to the mind. Remain disillusioned. It will be a kind of dying, because you have lived up to now through illusions. That has been your nourishment. You will feel like dying.

But die; and with this death a new life will arise in you, you will be resurrected. Let this be a death - and a total death. Don't die in a lukewarm way, die totally, wholly. Allow this death to happen, and the next moment, out of this death, some new life arises that you have not seen and that has been always within you - but you were not available to And to Aniruddha also I would like to say: It is very good, Aniruddha. Now you are seeing my reality.

I am an ordinary man, and I am here to make you ordinary also. I am here to help you come out of your ego trips. I am here to help you to celebrate this immense ordinariness. Only then are you grateful to God.

What are you trying to do? - trying to become somebody else, trying to decorate yourself? But all those decorations will be falsifications. You can never be anybody else, you can only be yourself. There is no way for the rose flower to become a lotus. There is no way for the lotus to become a rose flower. You can only be yourself. If you allow it, there will be celebration, because there will be no possibility of misery. And the energy that becomes misery becomes celebration. If you don't allow it to move into becoming misery, what else will you do? It is the same energy that cries in you - it can become laughter. It is the same energy that becomes hate in you, sour, bitter - it becomes love. It is the same energy that can become destruction - it becomes creation. The energy is not different. When you are engaged in an ego trip of becoming somebody special, then your whole life will be nothing but a long tragedy.

What is the difference between Alexander and a Buddha? Alexander wants to be special, wants to possess the whole world, wants to be unique. And Buddha? - Buddha is simply settled in being himself.

There is no need to go anywhere, there is no need to become at all. No future is needed. No time is required. Buddha can be this very moment what he wants to be because he already is that. But for Alexander, even millions of lives will not be enough. His journey will remain incomplete; he will never be able to bring it to a conclusion. It is a vicious circle. He will be frustrated again and again, and out of frustration he will create bigger illusions, stronger illusions. He will need bigger illusions and stronger illusions.

It is like a drug, I say again. If you take a drug, any drug, sooner or later you become accustomed to it. Then you need more quantities of it, stronger doses of it, and so on and so forth. Small illusions won't do; Once you have become accustomed to them, you will need greater illusions.

This is how people become mad. A madman is one whose illusions have gone completely contrary to reality. Now he lives only in his illusions - there are not even intervals when he sees reality as it is, not even moments of truth. He simply lives in his illusions. He is a madman. And what others are may be a lesser madness, but the madness is there. The difference is only of degree, quantity, but not of quality. Unless you are ready to relax into your being as you are, you are not sane.

I am ordinary, and I say to you Bud&a is ordinary. And I say to you all the Buddhas have always been ordinary. That is their specialness, because in this world nobody wants to be ordinary. That is their extraordinariness, because they are people who have chosen to be ordinary. That is their humbleness. Jesus says, 'Blessed are the meek for theirs is the kingdom of God.' By 'meek' he means exactly this: to be just what God has meant you to be; not to aspire to anything at all; to live in a relaxed state.

It is good, Aniruddha, that your illusion is broken. Thank me for it. Feel grateful for it, that I have not supported your illusion at all. If you carried it for so many months it was just your work. I was not a support to it.

But his question shows that now he thinks, I am ordinary, the problem is arising for him again. Then what is he doing here? Then he should go again to somebody else who is extraordinary. Now will be the decisive moment for him. If, seeing that I am ordinary, he understands the beauty of being ordinary, celebration will start. If he is feeling frustrated - as if I had deceived him, as if I had been pretending to be extraordinary and now he has found that I am not - then he will have new illusions.

He will project his desires onto somebody else. He will find another screen and again he will be frustrated. And he will need bigger and bigger doses, and sooner or later he will be a victim of somebody who is there to exploit people, who is there to pretend according to your illusion.

That's why I am so much against Satya Sai Baba. He is trying to help your projections. That is my criticism of his effort. He tries to go with your projections. He is not an independent man, he depends on you. You project and he will try to fulfil your projections - at least he will pretend that you are in the close vicinity of a special man who can do miracles, who can make things appear from nowhere.

Now Aniruddha can become a victim of a man like Satya Sai Baba because then he will think this is special; no ordinary man can do it. That's true, but ordinary magicians ARE doing it. But these tricks are very dangerous. They are very subtle in their exploitation. Aniruddha can easily become a victim of any charlatan, of any deceiver. Now will be the decisive moment for him. He will have to decide either to live with this man who is ordinary and drop all desire for extraordinariness and all projections and to become ordinary himself and let celebration happen, or he will have to project his illusions somewhere else.

And then you can go on and on. That's how you have been going on for centuries. For so many lives you have been going on and on. You simply change your screen, but you don't drop your projection.

You carry your projector and your whole film of hopes, dreams, desires. You just become frustrated with the screen - 'This screen is not right' - so you find another screen. When are you going to drop the projector and the film? When are you going to burn the whole ego trip? In that very moment death has happened, and resurrection.

Venu Gopal, you say,

That's how it will happen in the beginning: you will die a little bit and you will be born a little bit. Learn a lesson from it: die totally so that you can be born totally. And then you know that each moment one has to die so that each moment one again becomes fresh, young - is born. This can happen each moment, and a true life consists of death-resurrection, death-resurrection. Each moment it happens, each moment one has to die to the past. Only then does the present become available and there is celebration, and there is great joy, and there is great flowering. The Golden Flower blooms if you are ready to die to the past, if you are utterly in the present. And you can be utterly in the present only if you have no desire to be anywhere else in the future, if you have no desire to be somebody else. This I call enlightenment.

The second question:

Question 2:

Love and awareness is the highest form of polarity - just like man/woman, life/death, darkness/light, summer/winter, outer/ inner, yin/yang, the body and the soul, the creation and the creator. Love and awareness is the highest form of polarity, the last polarity, at which transcendence happens.

Love needs two. It is a relationship, it is outgoing, it is energy moving outwards. There is an object:

the beloved. The object becomes more important than yourself. Your joy is in the object. If your beloved is happy, you are happy; you become part of the object. There is a kind of dependence, and the other is needed. Without the other you will feel lonely.

Awareness is just being with yourself in utter aloneness, just being alert. It is not a relationship, the other is not needed at all. It is not outgoing, it is ingoing.

Love is the movement of the light out of your being. Awareness is the reverse movement, the backward movement of the light to the source again, returning to the source. This is what Jesus calls repentance - not in the sense of repentance, but in the sense of returning to the source.

Patanjali calls it PRATYAHARA, coming back home, Mahavir calls it PRATIKRAMAN, coming back to oneself; the circle is complete. THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER is based, totally based, on this backward movement of your energy. But the backward movement is possible only if you have moved forward. You have to go into love, you have to relate in order to come to yourself. It looks paradoxical.

The child has to get lost into the world to become a child again. The innocence has to go into all the turmoil of cunningness and calculation to become really innocent again. A child is innocent, but his innocence is that of ignorance. A saint is also innocent, but his innocence is not of ignorance but of experience, of ripeness, of maturity. He is again innocent, but that again has great importance - he cannot be distracted from his innocence anymore. The child is bound to get distracted: every Adam has to leave the Garden of Eden, the world of innocence. Every Adam has to go into the world, into the mud of it, because only there will you mature, will you ripen. Only there will you learn, only there will you see in contrast the beauty of innocence, will you understand the splendour of innocence.

The day you have learned the beauty of innocence, you have become aware of it, you will have come back home.

The Adam cannot become Christ if he does not leave paradise; he will remain a child. Adam means outward movement, Christ means inward movement. Adam means love, Christ means awareness. The circle is complete. The difference between Adam and Christ is only that of direction. Adam is going extrovertedly, and the same person, when he turns back and becomes introverted, is Christ.

Adam is the potential Christ, Christ is the actualized Adam.

Love is very essential. You have to lose yourself to gain yourself. Love is the only possibility of losing yourself totally. When you are lost totally, then you will be able to remember what you have done.

It is like a fish which has always lived in the ocean. It will never become aware of the ocean and the benediction of it. It has to be caught in a net, a fisherman has to come to take it out, throw it on the shore. Only on the shore, in the hot sun, will it remember for the first time. Although it lived for years in the ocean, it was oblivious, completely oblivious, of the ocean. Now the thirst, the heat, makes it mindful of the ocean. A great longing arises to go back to the ocean. It makes every effort to jump back into the ocean.

That is the state of a seeker: thirsty to be back at the original source. And if this fish can enter the ocean again... can't you imagine the celebration! And the fish has lived in the ocean forever but there was no celebration. Now there is the possibility of celebration. Now it will feel so delighted, so blessed.

Love is a must for spiritual growth. And, moreover, love functions as a mirror. It is very difficult to know yourself unless you have looked at your face in the eyes of someone who loves you. Just as you have to look into the mirror to see your physical face, you have to look in the mirror of love to see your spiritual face. Love is a spiritual mirror. It nourishes you, it integrates you, it makes you ready for the inner journey, it reminds you of your original face.

In moments of deep love there are glimpses of the original face, although those glimpses are coming as reflections. Just as on a full moon night you see the moon reflected in the lake, in the silent lake, so love functions as a lake. The moon reflected in the lake is the beginning of the search for the real moon. If you have never seen the moon reflected in the lake you may never search for the real moon. You will go again and again into the lake to search for the moon because in the beginning you will think, 'This is where the real moon is, somewhere deep down at the bottom of the lake.' You will dive again and again and you will come up empty-handed; you will not find the moon there.

Then one day it will dawn on you that maybe this moon is just a reflection. That is a great insight.

Then you can look upwards. Then where is the moon if this is a reflection? If it is a reflection you have to look in the opposite direction. The reflection was there, deep in the lake - the real must be somewhere above the lake. For the first time you look upwards and the journey has started.

Love gives you glimpses of meditation, reflections of the moon in the lake - although they are reflections, not true. So love can never satisfy you. In fact, love will make you more and more dissatisfied, discontented. Love will make you more and more aware of what is possible, but it will not deliver the goods. It will frustrate you; and only in deep frustration - the possibility of turning back to your own being. Only lovers know the joy of meditation. Those who have never loved and have never been frustrated in love, those who have never dived into the lake of love in search of the moon and are never frustrated, will never look up to the real moon in the sky; they will never become aware of it.

The person who loves is bound to become religious sooner or later. But the person who does not love - the politician, for example, who cannot love any person, he loves only power - will never become religious. Or the person who is obsessed with money, who loves only money, who knows only one love - love of money, will never become religious. It will be very difficult for him for so many reasons. Money can be possessed; you can have money and you can possess it. It is easy to possess money, it is difficult to possess a beloved - impossible, in fact. You will try to possess, but how can you possess a living person? The living person will resist in every way, will fight to the last.

Nobody wants to lose their freedom.

Love is not as valuable as freedom is. Love is a great value, but not higher than freedom. So one would like to be loving, but one would not like to be imprisoned by love. Hence, sooner or later you become frustrated. You try to possess, and the more you try to possess, the more impossible love becomes and the more the other starts going away from you. The less you possess, the closer you feel to the other. If you don't possess at all, if there is freedom flowing between the lovers, there is great love.

Firstly, the effort to possess a person is bound to fail: in that frustration you will be thrown back on yourself. Secondly, if you have learned not to possess the person, if you have learned that freedom is a higher value than love, a far more superior value than love, then sooner or later you will see:

freedom will bring you to yourself, freedom will become your awareness, meditation.

Freedom is another aspect of meditation. Either start with freedom and you will become aware, or start with awareness and you will become free. They go together. Love is a kind of subtle bondage - they go together - but it is an essential experience, very essential for maturity.

There is a beautiful definition of realness through love in Margery William's beautiful book THE VELVETEEN RABBIT.

'What is REAL?' asked the Rabbit one day. 'Does it mean having that buzz inside of you, and a stick-out handle?'

'REAL isn't how you were made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become REAL.

'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.

'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are REAL, you don't mind being hurt.'

'Does it happen all at once like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'

'It doesn't happen all at once.' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are REAL, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are REAL, you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand... Once you are REAL, you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always.'

Love makes you real; otherwise you remain just a fantasy, a dream, with no substance in it. Love gives you substance, love gives you integrity, loves makes you centred. But it is only half of the journey; the other half has to be completed in meditation, in awareness. But love prepares you for the other half. Love is the beginning half and awareness is the ending half. Between these two you attain to God. Between love and awareness, between these two banks, the river of being flows.

Don't avoid love. Go through it, with all its pains. Yes, it hurts, but if you are in love it doesn't matter.

In fact, all those hurts strengthen you. Sometimes it really hurts badly, terribly, but all those wounds are necessary to provoke you, to challenge you, to make you less sleepy. All those dangerous situations are necessary to make you alert. Love prepares the ground, and in the soil of love the seed of meditation can grow - and only in the soil of love.

So those who escape from the world out of fear will never attain to meditation. They can sit in the Himalayan caves for lives together, they will not attain to meditation. It is not possible - they have not earned it. First it has to be earned in the world; first they have to prepare the soil. And it is only love that prepares the soil.

Hence my insistence for my sannyasins not to renounce the world. Be in it, take its challenge, accept its dangers, its hurts, wounds. Go through it. Don't avoid it, don't try to find a short-cut because there is none. It is a struggle, it is arduous, it is an uphill task, but that is how one reaches the peak.

And the joy will be more, far more, than if you were dropped on the peak by a helicopter, because you will have reached there ungrown; you will not be able to enjoy it. Just think of the difference...

You try hard to reach Everest. It is so dangerous - every possibility of dying on the way, every possibility of never reaching to the peak; hazardous, dangerous; death waiting for you at each step; so many traps and so many possibilities of being defeated rather than being successful. Out of one hundred possibilities there is only one possibility that you may reach. But the closer you come to the peak, the higher the joy rises in you. Your spirit soars high. You earn it; it is not free. And the more you have paid for it, the more you will enjoy it. Then think: you can be dropped from a helicopter on the top. You will stand on the top and you will just look silly, stupid - what are you doing here?

Within five minutes you will be finished, you will say, 'So I have seen it! There is nothing much here!'

The journey creates the goal. The goal is not sitting there at the end of the journey, the journey creates it at each step. The journey is the goal. The journey and the goal are not separate, they are not two things. The end and the means are not two things. The end is spread over all the way; all the means contain the end in them.

So never miss any opportunity of living, of being alive, of being responsible, of being committed, of getting involved. Don't be a coward. Face life, encounter it. And then slowly slowly something inside you will crystallize.

Yes, it takes time. The Skin Horse is right: 'Generally, by the time you are REAL, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are REAL, you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand... Once you are REAL, you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always.' It is forever.

But one has to earn it. Let me repeat it: in life you cannot get anything free. And if you do get it, it is useless. You have to pay, and the more you pay for it the more you will get out of it. If you can risk your whole life in love, great will be your attainment. Love will send you back to yourself; it will give you a few reflections of meditation. The first glimpses of meditation happen in love. And then a great desire arises in you to attain to those glimpses, not only as glimpses but as states, so that you can live in those states forever and forever. Love gives you the taste of meditation.

A loving ogasmic experience is the first experience of SAMADHI, of ecstasy. It will make you more thirsty. Now you will know what is possible and now you cannot be satisfied with the mundane. The sacred has penetrated you, the sacred has reached your heart. God has touched your heart, you have felt that touch. Now you would like to live in that moment forever, you would like that moment to become your whole life. It does become - and unless it becomes man remains discontented.

Love on the one hand will give you great joy and on the other hand will give you a thirst for eternal joy.

The Third Question:

Question 3:

Why not?

I am an old Jew! You know Jews - if you ask them a question, they answer it with another question.

There is a famous story about a king. He had many Jews in his court because they were rich people, but he was very annoyed by their habit. Whenever he asked anything, they would answer it with another question. He became so tired, so irritated that he asked his Grand Vizier, 'What to do about these people? They cannot be thrown out of the court, but they annoy me very much. Whenever I ask something they always answer with another question.'

The Vizier said, 'It will be good if we ask the rabbi. Call the rabbi. He is a wise old man, he will help us and he will be able to explain to us what is the cause of this Jewish habit.'

So the rabbi was called and the king asked the rabbi, 'Why do you Jews always answer a question with another question?' And the rabbi said, 'Why not?'

You ask me,

There are four possibilities after you become enlightened. The first possibility Nanak and Marcus Aurelius followed. They were born as kings; after they became enlightened they remained kings.

The second possibility Jesus and Kabir followed. They were born as beggars, after they became enlightened they remained beggars.

The third possibility was followed by Mahavir and the Buddha: they were born as kings; when they became enlightened they remained beggars.

Then, I thought, for a change... I was born as a beggar; I decided to live as a king. That is the fourth possibility and there is no other, so I am finishing the last. Somebody had to do it, otherwise history would remain incomplete.

One Zen Master was dying. Just before he breathed his last he opened his eyes and asked his disciples, 'Please help me to find an alternative way to die.'

They asked, 'What kind of question is this?'

He said, 'Should I die lying down or sitting or standing? Have you ever heard of anybody dying sitting?'

They said, 'Yes, we have heard. Many people, particularly Buddhist monks - they sit in a SIDDHASAN in the full lotus posture and die. We have heard of many dying in a sitting posture.'

'Have you ever heard,' the Master asked, 'of anybody dying standing?'

They said, 'It is very rare, but we have heard one story that once a Master died standing.'

Then he said, 'Then no other alternative is left. I will die standing on my head.'

And he died - standing on his head.

Somebody has to fulfil it. All alternatives have to be tried.

The fifth question:

Question 4:

Jamia, the meaning of the quantum leap is that you find nobody there inside you who can jump.

You find no place where you can jump and you find no means to jump. That is the meaning of a quantum leap. The quantum leap is not a leap, it is a disappearance. The quantum leap is utter discontinuity with the past. If it is continuous it is just a leap, not quantum. That is the meaning of the word 'quantum'.

You have been somebody up to now; if you do something, then you will remain continuous with the past because the doer will be the past. If you ask how to take the quantum leap, who will use the methodology? The old, the past, the mind, the accumulated mind will use the methodology. But how will you become new? It is the old trying to become new. You may have new clothes, a new face, new varnish, but you will remain the same; you continue.

A quantum leap is a moment of understanding that the past is no more there, that it is just a memory, just a figment of imagination now; it has no reality. If the past is no more there, who are you? - because you consist only of your past.

Krishnamurti says, 'The process of thought creates the thinker.' And he is right - it is not vice versa.

Ordinarily you think, 'I am a thinker, hence the process of thought.' It is not so. There is no thinker in you but only a process of thought. And when you think about the whole process of thought and you take it together, the thinker is born. The thinker is not there. Let thoughts disappear, and as thoughts disappear, the thinker will disappear. If there is no thought, there is no thinker inside. So 'thinker' is nothing but another name for the whole thought continuum.

If you can understand this - that the past is just nothing but thoughts - suddenly a great emptiness will arise in you, a great abyss. You are not, nobody is there inside. This is what Buddha calls ANATTA, no-self, no ego. In that moment when you cannot find yourself, the quantum leap has happened.

The Emperor Wu of China asked Bodhidharma, 'My mind remains very tense, in anxiety. I am always feeling restless, uneasy. I never find any peace of mind. Help me, sir.'

Bodhidharma looked into his eyes. And that was not an ordinary look - Bodhidharma was a very ferocious Master. The emperor was a very brave man, had fought in many battles and won, but he started trembling when Bodhidharma looked into his eyes.

And he said, 'Okay, come tomorrow, early in the morning at four o'clock, and bring your mind to me and I will put it at ease forever.'

When the king was going down the steps, Bodhidharma shouted again, 'Listen, don't forget to bring your mind! Come at four o'clock and bring your mind. And I am going to put it at ease forever!'

The emperor was a little puzzled. 'What does he mean, "Bring the mind, don't forget"? Can I come without the mind too? I and my mind are the same. This man looks mad! And the way he looked at me... those ferocious eyes... And he looks murderous too! And going alone, early in the morning at four o'clock when it is dark, to this madman... and one never knows what he will do, how he will treat me.'

But he could not sleep. Many times he decided not to go, but there was a great attraction too, something like a great magnetic pull. The man was ferocious, but there was great love in his eyes too. Both were there - his eyes were like swords and also like lotuses. He could not resist. He said, 'I have to take this risk.' And at four o'clock he had to go.

Bodhidharma was waiting with his big staff. He told the emperor-king, 'Sit in front of me. And where is your mind? I told you to bring it with you!'

And the king said, 'What nonsense are you talking about? If I am here, so is my mind. Mind is something inside me. How can I forget it? How can I "not bring it?"'

Bodhidharma said, 'So, one thing is certain: that mind is inside. So close your eyes and go inside and try to find it. And whenever you catch it, just tell me and I will put it at rest forever. But first it has to be caught, only then can I treat it.'

The king closed his eyes. The whole thing was stupid, but there was nowhere to go now - it had to be done. He closed his eyes. And the Master was sitting there with his staff - and he might beat or he might hit, so it was no ordinary situation. He could not go to sleep. He had not slept the whole night - he had been thinking of whether to come or not to come... And the presence of the Master and the silence of the forest and the darkness of the night and the whole weird situation: that this man could even cut his head... He became very alert. The danger was such that he became very attentive.

For the first time in his life he looked inside himself - what the book, THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER, calls 'turning the light inwards'. For the first time he looked inside, he searched inside. He really searched, sincerely he searched. And the more he searched, the more aware he became that there is no mind, there is nobody inside. It is an empty house; we had only believed in it. We have accepted others' belief about the soul, the self, the ego. We never looked at it, we never checked it. And the more he found that there is nobody to be found, the more happy, joyous, he became. His face relaxed; a great grace surrounded him. Hours passed, but for him there was no question of time at all. He was sitting and sitting, and enjoying this blissfulness that he was tasting for the first time in his life.

Something immensely delightful was descending on him.

Then the sun started rising, and with the first rays of the sun, Bodhidharma said to him, 'Sir, it is time enough! Now open your eyes. Have you found yourself inside or not?'

And the emperor-king opened his eyes, looked at the Master, saw the beauty, saw that the ferociousness was out of compassion, saw the love, bowed down, touched the feet of the Master and said, 'You have put it at rest forever. It is not there. Now I know that I was creating an unnecessary fuss about something which doesn't exist at all.'

This is the quantum leap. Searching inside you find you are not. Then there is no question of 'how' and no question of 'where'. It has already happened.

Jamia, I would like to tell you: just close your eyes for a few hours every day, become as alert as Emperor Wu became, remember me just in front of you with a sword in my hand, ready to cut you at any moment if you fall asleep, and go in. And, one day the quantum leap. You will know only when it has happened. You don't do it, it is nothing of your doing, it is a happening. You can't do it because you are the hindrance - how can you do it? There is nowhere to jump, nobody to jump, no method to jump. When all these three things have been realized, it has happened.

Then one lives as an emptiness, utterly empty and yet utterly full.

The sixth question:

Question 5:

But you are caught, you are trapped! Now it will be very difficult to escape. It is always difficult to choose the new, but only those live who choose the new. To choose the old is to choose death, not life. To choose the familiar is to remain in the prison of the familiar, to choose the known is to avoid really the unknown that is knocking on the door. To choose the known is to reject God, because God is always unknown - not only unknown, but unknowable.

God is always fresh, as fresh as the dewdrops. God is always utterly new, unfamiliar, unmapped, unscheduled, uncalculated. God comes only as the unknown. And if you become afraid, if you shrink back, then you have to live in your so-called dark hole.

What is your past that you cling to? What is there to cling to, except that it is familiar? It is all misery, it is all tragedy. But people even cling to miseries if they are familiar, if they look friendly. Even if health is knocking on your door, you don't listen to the knock, you cling to your tuberculosis, to your cancer, because it is familiar; you have lived with it so long. It looks almost like a betrayal to leave it and become healthy.

That is why people are clinging to miseries. Even when opportunities arise when miseries can be dropped and the celebration can start, they continue to cling to the misery. They persist in it, they insist on it. Even if it drops they catch hold of it again and again. If one misery disappears, they create a similar misery immediately. They don't even give a little interval for joy to enter in their being.

But remember, only those live who choose the new. Life means readiness to go into the uncalculated, unscheduled. Life means to be ready always to listen to the challenge that comes from the unknown source. It is dangerous, but to live is dangerous. The most secure and safe place in the world is the grave - there, nothing ever happens.

In a small village where Mulla Nasrudin lives, the Municipal Committee was thinking of creating a wall around the graveyard. Mulla Nasrudin was also a member of the Committee. He stood up, and he said, 'There is no need.'

The whole Committee looked puzzled, because everybody was in favour of making a wall around the graveyard. People don't want to see graves and people don't want to see death. People don't want to become aware that death is. That's why graveyards are made outside the town, far away.

When you have to go there, only then do you go there; otherwise it is better to avoid.

The village had grown bigger and the graveyard that used to be outside the town was no longer outside the town - the town had grown and spread. So the whole Committee was agreeing. But Mulla said, 'There is no need.'

And the president asked, 'Why do you say that there is no need?'

He said, 'For two reasons. One: those who are outside - they don't want to go in so they don't need any wall to prevent them. And, two: those who are inside - they cannot come out. So what is the point of making a wall? The wall is needed only to prevent either those who are in from coming out or to prevent those who are out from coming in. Those who are out, they don't want to go in; they go only in utter helplessness. When they have to go, when they have to be carried by four persons, then they go. And once they are in they cannot come out - nobody has ever heard of anybody coming out. It is pointless!'

The grave is the most safe and secure place in the world, because nothing new will ever happen there. Remember it: don't become a grave.

Sannyas is new for you, and you did not come here to become a sannyasin... Do you think all those who are sannyasins here came to become sannyasins? They have been caught unawares!

Before they could escape I caught hold of their hearts. You are also caught now. If you escape, you escape at your own risk. You will repent forever and you will feel sorry forever, because there was an opportunity of being transformed, an opportunity to learn the ways of let-go, an opportunity of falling into your own being, resting into your own being, an opportunity to bloom. But you became afraid. 

Meditate on these lines of Robert Frost.

Life grows only by choosing challenges. Life grows only by going into the storms. Life grows only by risking, gambling.

Sannyas needs courage. The old sannyas was not so dangerous. People think my sannyas is easier than the old, ancient idea of sannyas. They are utterly wrong. The old sannyas was very simple because it expected - not only expected but demanded - that you renounce the world. It was simple. You went into a monastery; you lived there, undisturbed, undistracted by the world.

Meditation became your whole life with no distractions. It was a monotonous life.

The word 'monastery' and 'monotony' come from the same root. So does the word 'monk'. Life was settled, monotonous, repetitive, the same, and the world was left far behind. It was easy.

My sannyas is far more complex. You have to live in the market-place and yet live as if you were living in a monastery. You have to accept all the distractions of life and yet remain undistracted. You have to be in the world and not be of it.

I have thrown a great challenge to you. The old concept of sannyas was not challenging enough. It was very appealing to the cowards, to the escapists - those who were weary of life, those who were tired of life, those who were incapable of life, those who were feeling somehow incompetent, inferior.

It became very attractive to the inferior, the untalented, the unintelligent.

If you go to the Himalayas or into a monastery and look at the monks, you will be surprised: one thing you are bound to find is that their faces show no signs of intelligence, their eyes don't shine with any light from the beyond. They look dull, insipid, stupid, unintelligent, incompetent. They have escaped from life.

It is life that gives you sharpness, otherwise your sword will never be sharp. It is the struggle in life that provokes all the springs of your talents to come to the surface. You have to be intelligent to survive. In the monastery you are protected by the monastery, by the sect, by the church. You need not make any effort to survive. Food is given, clothes are given, and you just have to do some prayer, some chanting, and you have to repeat, parrot-like, the words of others. Naturally, if one becomes unintelligent there is no wonder in it. It will be a wonder if somebody becomes intelligent there, because all the opportunities for intelligence have been prevented - because they are the same opportunities which are opportunities for distraction too.

Distraction is an opportunity. You can be distracted - that is for you to decide - or you can remain undistracted, then it will give you centring, crystallization.

My sannyas is the most complicated phenomenon that has ever happened on the earth because I don't say to you leave the world, I say live in it, indulge in it, love it, enjoy it, go as deeply as possible so your intelligence is sharpened, your life provoked, your dormant sources of energies become dynamic, flowing. And yet, keep yourself centred in your being - a watcher on the hills. Remain an actor and let the life be just a drama where you are fulfilling a certain role. But don't get identified with the role. Remember continuously that this is a role - that you are a carpenter or a doctor or an engineer or a teacher, husband, wife, mother, father, son - that these are all roles, and the earth is a great stage and a great drama is on. God is the author of it and the director of it, and you are just actors, participating. When the curtain falls your roles will disappear. You will again be just a pure being. You will not be the role that you had played.

The world has to be transformed into an opportunity to remember yourself, for self-remembering.

Hence sannyas is arduous. And I know that everybody hesitates before they take the jump, but if the desire has arisen, if the longing is there, don't kill it, because that will be suicidal. Experiment with it, explore this new dimension. You have lived one way - what is the point of going on repeating it again and again? Live this new style too. Who knows? - you may come across God on this way.

Who knows? - fulfilment may await you on this path.

The last question:

Question 6:

Tushara, you don't know yet what love is. You don't know yet that many other things masquerade as love, play tricks on you - many things. Yes, sometimes even hate can have the mask of love; sometimes sheer sexuality pretends to be love. And this must be so.

You say, 'Why do I love, then hate and then show indifference to the same person?'

You have not loved yet; it is just a sexual appetite in you. And I call it appetite knowingly. When you are hungry you are interested in food. The aroma coming from Vrindavan attracts you; everything else becomes unimportant. You find yourself moving towards Vrindavan. Once you have eaten, all interest in food disappears; and if you have eaten too much, you even become repelled by food. If you have eaten too much, more than was needed, you feel nauseous - a sickness arising in you.

And when you are satiated with food, you can pass by Vrindavan; you don't smell the aromas. You can go on thinking a thousand and one thoughts and you can remain indifferent to food.

Your love is nothing but sexual appetite. That's why first you feel attracted, in 'great love'. That attraction you call love. Just as people say they love ice cream, that's the way you love people. But how long can you love ice cream? You can eat, but how much?

Once I stayed with a family in Bombay. The people are beautiful people, but they have a strange idea of how to serve a guest. Because I was staying there, they invited many people; they gave a feast.

And then the four brothers started forcing each guest to eat more and more. They actually started physically forcing food into people's mouths, and people were saying, 'No!' looking very aghast and puzzled, 'What is happening?' And there were four persons on each guest!

I asked, 'What is the matter? What are you doing? If they don't want to eat, leave them to themselves!'

They said, 'But this is our tradition. In our family, unless the guest starts fighting, we have to... otherwise we have not been real hosts.'

And this was their idea of being a real host! Unless the guest starts fighting... And that actually happened. When the guest... how long can you suffer? There is a limit! The body is not infinite and the stomach has a limit. And the guests started shouting. And they were very happy because they had been good hosts.

First, you THINK you are in love, Tushara. But that is not love - just a physical appetite, a bodily phenomenon, a chemical phenomenon - nothing to do with love.

Love is a very different thing. It has not necessarily anything to do with sex. Sex may be a part of it, may not be a part of it. You can be in love with a person without any sexual relationship. That's what we call friendship. It has disappeared from the world. Now friendship has almost disappeared from the world because we know only one kind of love, which is sexual. A non-sexual love has become non-existent. In fact, that IS love. Friendship is a deeper love than sexual relationship because friendship gives and asks nothing in return.

Sexual relationship is mutual exploitation: you are exploiting the other's body and he or she is exploiting your body. Both are using each other. But just to say it is pure sex looks ugly so we call it love. It will be very good if you call it simple sex; it will be true, sincere and there will be no problem arising, because then you will know it is appetite. You are fulfilled one moment and then, if the other goes on demanding and you go on playing the game, there will be hate, because you will be repulsed. And sooner or later you will become indifferent, because you have explored the other's body and he has explored your body. Now there is no more to it; the territories are known. Now there is no more intrigue, no more mystery to go into. You are finished. Indifference arises.

Tushara, what you call love is just sex. Call it sex, don't call it love. And it will be good to call it sex because then you know it is sex. There is no need to pretend. If you don't pretend, it will not turn into hate. If you pretend that it is love and it is not, sooner or later you will see it is turning into hate. If you don't pretend, if you call it simply sex, you will be grateful to the other, you will not hate the other. And it will never become indifference; you will always feel thankful.

But calling it by a big name, 'love', creates the whole trouble. Then the problem arises - why does it turn into hate? Love never turns into hate. Love goes on becoming more and more love. Love ultimately becomes prayer and God.

But this is not love. The first thing - my suggestion - is: call it simple, pure sex. And there is nothing wrong in pure, simple sex; it is natural. There is no need to hide it behind the beautiful word 'love'.  There is no need to create a cloud of romance around it. Be simple, be true, sincere. If this is done, half the work is done. Then one day you will be able to see the difference. One day you will fall in love and you will see it is not just physiological, chemical attraction, but something higher, something superior - two vibes falling in tune, two spirits feeling close, two beings feeling harmonious.

My own words are: if two bodies are feeling attracted to each other, it is sex; if two minds are feeling attracted to each other, it is love; if two souls are feeling attracted to each other, it is prayer. And prayer is the highest form. Sex is the lowest form. Don't think of the lower as the higher; otherwise you remain misguided.

A man and woman had been going together for some time and finally she agreed to go to bed with him. While going to his apartment, they passed some swank shops. The woman admired some expensive Italian shoes. 'Don't worry, baby, I'll get them for you,' he said.

Then she saw a real Parisian dress.  'Don't worry, baby, I'll get that for you, too.'

Finally, a mink coat caught her eye. 'Don't worry, baby, I'll get that coat for you.'

'Oh, and there is the dress.' 

'Come on away from there,' was again the reply.

Finally she saw the shoes and pointed them out. Again he responded, 'Come on away from there.' She began to cry and sobbed, 'I don't understand. Before we made love, you promised me all those things. Now, just two hours later, you are breaking your promises.'

'Baby, it's like this. When I am hard, I am soft, but when I am soft, I am hard.'

Enough for today.

The First Question:

Bhadra, it is very natural. If all your life you have been saying 'yes', it must have been false, it must have been pseudo. You must have forced yourself to say 'yes', you must have repressed your 'no' continuously. And I teach relaxation, and I teach expression. So the repressed 'no' is coming up, surfacing. Allow it. Please don't repress it anymore.

If you repress it here, then where are you going to express it? Once it is expressed, you will be free of it, and then the real 'yes' will come. The 'yes' that you have known up to now was not real. You have been cultivating this 'yes'. It was just on the surface. Deep down the 'no' has always existed in you.

But this is how we are brought up. This is how we are conditioned. This is how people have become utterly false, hypocritical, split. Their face says one thing, their being is saying just the opposite. This is how the whole of humanity has been turned into a kind of schizophrenia.

My approach is that 'yes' and 'no' are both absolutely necessary, part of the inner rhythm. The man who cannot say 'no' cannot say 'yes' either; and if he says 'yes', his 'yes' will be impotent. Only the man who can say 'no' vitally can say 'yes' vitally. They depend on each other, just as life and death depend on each other, just as darkness and light depend on each other, just as love and hate depend on each other. This is the intrinsic polarity of life.

In a better world, with more freedom, with more understanding, a child will not be taught to say 'yes' when he feels like saying 'no', he will be taught courage. Whenever he feels like saying 'no', he will have to say 'no'. And then his 'yes' will have meaning.

A child will not be taught religion, because religion is 'yes'-saying. He will not be forced to become a theist - Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan - he will be encouraged by the parents, by the school, by the university, to be honest, to be sincere, and to wait for the real 'yes' to come on its own.

The world has become so false. Can't you see from where this falsity is arising? Millions of people go to the churches, temples, mosques, gurudwaras, and not a single person is religious. What kind of neurosis is this? They go just as a formality, they go because they have been taught to go, they go because they have become addicted to the habit of going. It is just a habit. If they don't go, they feel guilty. If they don't go they feel as if they are betraying their parents, their society. If they go, there is no joy in it. They simply drag themselves into it. They simply wait there until the ritual ends, the prayer ends, so that they can escape out of the temple, out of the church. It is a bogus kind of religion.

And the reason is that they have never been allowed to say 'no'. 'No' has to come first, only then can 'yes' come. To really be a theist, first one has to go through the process of atheism. To really be a believer in God, first one has to go through the dark night of doubt, only then - the dawn. There is no other alternative.

It is good, Bhadra, that the 'no' is arising. You are being true for the first time in your life. Let it happen, and the 'yes' will follow just as day follows night.

But this mischief has been done to you - and in the name of great things: God, prayer, country, love, religion, church, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna. In the name of these great things much mischief has been done to you. You have been manipulated. And what is the outcome? You have become a plastic phenomenon; you don't have that sincerity which can make a person really religious.

My own observation is this: that a person who has not said 'no' to God will never be able to say 'yes', or if he says it, his 'yes' will be pointless.

The so-called religion is what Gregory Bateson calls the double-bind. One is ordered to do two things which are mutually exclusive: to be sincere and to believe. How can you be sincere if you are told to believe? To believe means to be insincere. To believe means to believe in something that you don't know, to which your whole heart says, 'No, I don't know. How can I believe?'

Belief is insincerity. And you have been told to be sincere and to believe. This creates a double-bind in you. Your religion, your so-called religion, is based on insincerity - how can it be religious? The very beginning is poisoned, the very source has gone sour. No child should be taught religion. Every child should be taught inquiry, doubt, logic, reason.

And why are you so afraid of logic, doubt and reason? Because if a child really goes deep into doubt, he will find the futility of it on his own. And out of that finding trust arises. And then that trust has beauty, grandeur.

If a child reasons to the very end, he will come to the point where he will be able to see that now reasoning has come to an end but existence goes on and on. Existence is something beyond reasoning. But let every child feel it in his own guts!

To be true a religion has to be a religion of the guts, not of belief. Let the child think as much as he can, to his full capacity; let him burn with doubt, logic, reasoning, to the maximum, and he will see the limitations of the intellect. It is bound to happen. And when the limitations of the intellect have been seen, experienced, by yourself, you start moving into the beyond; you start surpassing the mind.

Belief is of the mind. This so-called 'yes'-saying is of the mind. I teach you another kind of 'yes', which is not afraid of 'no', another kind of trust, which is not afraid of scepticism, which on the contrary uses scepticism as a jumping-board, which uses doubt as a process of cleansing.

Truth has to be trusted: to trust is an act of faith. But any statement of truth has to be tested too: to test it is an act of doubt. Faith and doubt both serve truth - this is what I teach you. Faith and doubt are two wings of the bird called trust. If you cut off one wing, the bird cannot fly. 'Yes' and 'no' are two wings; use them, and use them in their totality. Never be insincere, not even in the name of God.

Sincerity is far more valuable than any dogma, than any Christianity, Hinduism, Islam. Sincerity is the foundation. But to be sincere means you have to give expression to all that is within you. Sometimes it is 'yes', and sometimes it is 'no'. And you have to accept both.

So, Bhadra, it is something beautiful that is happening, don't be worried. I am not trying to force any 'yes' on you, I am simply helping you to go through the whole process of both 'yes' and 'no', so that one day you become aware that they are not enemies, not opposites, but complementaries.

Man is a question mark. And it is a blessing - celebrate it. It is a blessing because only man is a question mark. No dog is. No tree is. The rose bush is beautiful, but not as beautiful as man, and the moon is beautiful, but not as beautiful as man - because they are all unconscious. Only man is consciously on a quest. And how can you be on a quest if you don't have a question mark in your being?

God sends you with a question mark in your being. Celebrate it - it is a great responsibility, a great heritage. Ask questions. Inquire. Doubt. And don't be worried, because I know that if you doubt long enough you will arrive at trust. And that arrival is incredible, because then you have arrived on your own. It is your own experience; it is no longer belief, it is knowing.

Sri Aurobindo was asked by a philosopher, 'Do you believe in God?' and he said, 'No.' The philosopher was, for a moment, shocked. He had come a long way, believing that this man had come to know God, and this man says, 'I don't believe in God. For a moment he could not gather courage to ask anything else. Shocked, he was dumb. Then he said, 'But I thought that you had seen God.'

Sri Aurobindo laughed and said, 'Yes, I have seen, that's why I say I don't believe. Belief is out of ignorance. I know! I don't "believe".'

And remember it: you have to know, you are not here to believe. My help is available for you to know. Belief is a trick of the mind. Without knowing, it gives you the feeling that you have known.

Man is a question mark - and it is a blessing. Celebrate it, dance it, rejoice in it, because without that question mark there could be no faith, or doubt - nothing but dead certainty. That's where animals live: in dead certainty. And that's why your priests and your politicians want you to live in dead certainty.

Life hesitates. Life is uncertain. Life is insecure. That's why it is life: because it moves.

Socrates is reported to have said, 'I would not like to become a contented pig. Rather than being a contented pig, I would like to remain a discontented Socrates.'

Meditate over it. It is a statement of immense value. The pig is contented, absolutely certain. That's why people who are stubborn and think themselves absolutely certain are called piggish, pig-headed.

For example, poor Morarji Desai is called piggish.

People who are stubborn are bound to be stupid. A man who is alive moves into uncertainties, moves into the unknown. He cannot live in a dead certainty. Certainty simply means you have not doubted.

There is another kind of knowing which comes out of doubting, which comes out of growth. And when that kind of knowing comes, again you are not certain. But now the uncertainty has a totally different flavour. If you had asked Buddha about God he would have kept quiet. That's where he is far superior to Sri Aurobindo. He would have kept absolutely silent, he would not have said 'yes' or 'no'. Why? - because he says, 'The ultimate is so tremendously vast that to say 'yes' will be wrong, to say 'no' will be wrong, because our words are so small they cannot contain the ultimate. The ultimate can only be conveyed through silence.'

A Zen Master was asked, 'Can you say something about God?' He remained utterly silent, he listened to the question with open eyes and then he closed his eyes. A few moments went by. For the questioner those few moments seemed very long. He was waiting and becoming restless, and the Master had moved into some other space. There was great ecstasy on his face but no answer.

That ecstasy was the answer. There was utter silence in his being, and the silence was vibrant all around him - you could have almost touched it, it was so solid. But the restless questioner was not aware of it at all, he was too concerned with his question, and he was waiting for the answer.

He shook the Master, and said, 'What are you doing? I have asked a question, and you closed your eyes and you are sitting in silence. Answer it!'

And the Master says, 'But that's what I was doing. This is my answer.'

Certainly this is far superior to Sri Aurobindo's answer. But the man, the questioner, was not satisfied. He wanted something conveyed verbally. He insisted, and he would not leave the Master.

So the Master said, 'Okay.'

They were sitting on a river bank. The Master wrote in the sand with his finger: Meditation. Now, the question is about God, and the answer is about meditation. It is utterly irrelevant.

And the questioner was right to say, 'Are you joking or something? I am asking about God, and you write on the sand: Meditation.'

And the Master said, 'That's all that I can say or that I am allowed to say. You ask about the goal, I talk about the way, because the goal is so incomprehensible, so mysterious, that nothing can be said about it. I can simply sit in silence. If you have eyes to see, see! If you have ears to hear, hear! Hear my silence, and the song that my silence is, and the music that arises in it. If you cannot hear it, that simply shows you need meditation. So meditate.'

The man said, 'Just this much - one word, "meditation"? Won't you elaborate on it a little?' He wrote again in bigger letters: MEDITATION. That was his elaboration.

The man was puzzled and he said, 'But you are simply repeating. Just writing it in bigger letters won't help.'

So he wrote again in even bigger letters: MEDITATION. He said, 'Nothing more can be said about it. You will have to do it. You will have to be it.'

There is a kind of uncertainty when you don't know, because how can you be certain when you don't know? And there is a kind of uncertainty when you know, because how can you be certain about the ultimate? It is so vast; to be certain about it will make it small, to be certain about it will show that it is in your grasp, that it is in your fist. And God cannot be possessed; on the contrary, you have to be possessed by God.

Accept your 'no', accept your 'yes'. And don't think that they are opposites; they are not. Just as there can be no courage without danger, so there can be no faith without uncertainty, without doubt. Risk is part of the game that we are born to play. We must learn to lean on possibilities - not on certainties but on possibilities.

I can only say to you God is possible. I can only say to you 'yes' is possible. Lean on the possibilities, don't ask for certainties. Because you ask for certainties, you create authorities. Out of your need to be certain you become victims of people who are stubborn, ignorant, but certain. Only parrots can be certain because they have ready-made answers. Pundits can be certain because pundits are nothing but parrots.

A real man of knowledge will help you to be silent: will help you to go through 'yes' and through 'no', through faith and through doubt, through warmer moments and through cooler moments; will help you to go through days and nights, peaks and valleys. And he will not teach any dogma, but will only teach you courage, adventure, quest.

Listening to your question, I remembered two stories.

There was a boy five or six years old who had acquired the habit of using swear words in his ordinary conversation. His parents tried their best to break him of this habit, and in final desperation hit upon a plan which they thought would work. They called their son into a family consultation and laid out the facts before him, saying, 'Now, son, we just can't have a little boy in our home who continues to use this kind of language. So we have decided that if you cannot break yourself of the habit, something drastic must be done. We are giving you fair warning that the very next time we hear a swear word in your conversation, you are simply going to have to pack your bag and move out of this house. We can't put up with that language any longer. Do you understand?'

He did not say anything, although he did nod his head. But the habit, it seemed, was too great for him to break all at once, and they soon heard him interspersing his favourite swear words in conversation.

His mother said, 'Son, we have given you fair warning and now you are going to move out. Go pack your bag.' The boy went to his bedroom reluctantly, packed his suitcase, said goodbye to his mother and left.

He did not know what in the world he was going to do, so he sat on the front steps trying to collect his thoughts. As he waited there a neighbour came by, looked at him and asked, 'Is your mother home, dear?'

He looked at her with a sour face, and said, 'How the hell should I know? I don't live here anymore.'

You cannot force, you cannot repress, you cannot order these things. These things need understanding. And parents are doing it all the time, just saying, 'Don't do this, do that'; just giving commandments, never giving understanding insight. Children need insight, not commandments.

They need your love, they need your help to understand things. They don't want to imitate you. In fact, they should not be forced to imitate you, because if you force them to imitate you, you will be destroying their very soul. Give your love and give them freedom, and help them to become aware. Help them to be more meditative.

But that is not being done. We simply force. Forcing a thing seems to be a very short-cut procedure.

Who bothers? Because you don't love enough, that's why you don't bother. Who bothers to give an insight to a child? It is very simple: 'Just go and do this because I say so, because I am your father and I know more because I am older than you.' The child may be forced to do a certain thing because he is helpless, but deep down he will carry the wound. And, Bhadra, you must have been carrying many wounds deep down.

My love to you, my help to you is bringing your wounds to the surface. It is good, because once the wounds come to the surface, in the sunlight they can be healed. There is no other way to heal them. You are coming to health. Don't be afraid. Let all those 'no's come up. They will be released, and you will be free of them.

A little girl had disobeyed her parents and they decided she should be punished. They took her upstairs to the bedroom, put her in the clothes-closet, closed the door and said, 'Now dear, you just take time to think it over, and see if you can't make up your mind to be more loving toward your parents and not disobey them.'

After a few minutes the parents consciences began to bother them, and they went up, knocked on the door, and said, 'Dear, how are you?'

'Oh, I am fine.'

'What are you doing?' asked her mother.

'Well,' she replied, 'I spit on your dress, I spit on your coat, I spit on your shoes, and I am just sitting here waiting for more spit.'

The second question:

Question 2:

This is really surprising from a politician, because the politicians are the people who destroy the images of countries. From the peon to the Prime Minister, the politicians are the people who are the most corrupt. Their corruption is not going to help the image of the country in the world. They should think about it. Their continuous quarrelling for stupid reasons destroys the image of a country - and nowhere else can you find more quarrelsome politicians than in India. And the quarrels have no ideological basis at all; the quarrels are simply quarrels which are personal - their own personal greed.

L.K. Advani

The Indian politicians seem to be the most greedy - greedy for power, hungry for power; continuously fighting with each other. Their whole time is wasted in quarrelling. The country is going to the dogs, and sitting in New Delhi, all that they do is fight with each other - how to topple the other. Everyone wants to become Prime Minister. And once you become Prime Minister, all that you do is to protect your prime ministership. Your whole time is wasted in becoming the Prime Minister - almost your whole life. Morarji Desai's whole life was wasted in becoming Prime Minister. Now, at the age of eighty-three, he has arrived. Now the whole time is wasted - how to remain in the seat till you die?

And once you are in the seat you don't want to die. You can do anything. He drinks his own urine. He thinks he is going to become immortal through it.

Now, is this urine-drinking Prime Minister helping the Indian image abroad? They should think about it. They should not be worried about me and my people. But politicians are the lowest as far as intelligence is concerned. They are the most inferior people in the world.

I have heard...

A politician went to the psychoanalyst, and he said, 'I suffer from an inferiority complex.'

The psychiatrist worked upon the politician - many sessions of analysis. And then, finally he said to him, 'You need not worry.' The politician said, 'I need not worry? So there is no problem?' And the psychiatrist said, 'Yes, there is no problem, because you are simply inferior. You need not suffer from any inferiority complex. It is simply so.'

Once I was staying in a circuit house with a politician. In the morning we were sitting on the lawn. He was reading the newspaper. That's all they read - that is their Koran, Bible, Gita. Suddenly he looked up at me and said, 'I'll never be able to understand how people always seem to die in alphabetical order.'

And another time...

I was travelling in a train and, unfortunately, in the same compartment was a politician. I say 'unfortunately' because they stink. Nothing stinks like politics. It is the dirtiest thing in the world.

He started talking to me, and I asked him if he had heard the latest joke about politicians.

'I am warning you,' he said, 'I am a politician myself.'

'That's all right,' I told him, 'I will tell it very very slowly.'

I am not part of any tradition, that's what is creating trouble for the Indian politicians. I don't belong to the past, I belong to the future. They cannot understand me - it is impossible for them. If I had belonged to the past, there would have been no difficulty. But I don't belong to the past. A really religious person never belongs to the past. Buddha never belonged to the past, that's why Hindus were angry. Jesus never belonged to the past, that's why Jews were angry. Jesus, Buddha, Krishna - they are all pointing to the future, not to the past.

Do not embrace the past or you will have missed the whole point. Tradition is not religion. Religion is always a surpassing, a transcending, a going beyond.

If I had been a Hindu there would have been no difficulty. I am not. If I had been a Mohammedan there would have been no difficulty. I am not - neither am I a Buddhist or a Jaina. And they are very confused: they cannot categorize me, they cannot pigeonhole me. No authentic religious person can ever be pigeonholed, because basically religion is freedom - freedom from the past, freedom to be herenow, and freedom to be available to the future.

What I am trying to bring to you is something of the future. People will be able to understand it only after hundreds of years have past. And then these same politicians will pay respect, as they pay respect to Jesus. And these are the people who crucified him, and these are the people who stoned Buddha and Mahavir. And these are the people who poisoned Socrates. These are the same people.

Beware of them!

They are always against the future. Why are they against the future? - because their vested interest is always rooted in the past. They can manipulate the past, they cannot manipulate the future. They can exploit the past, they cannot exploit the future. They can exploit irreligious people, they cannot exploit religious people. They can exploit the pseudo-religious very easily, there is no problem in it, because a pseudo-religious person is almost a shadow, not a reality. And the pseudo-religious person is always ready to be manipulated, to be transformed, into a slave.

I am creating rebellious people here, rebellious in a multi-dimensional way. The politicians are bound to be afraid. And they will find excuses.

Now he says, 'The Rajneesh film won't reflect the real image of India...'

I would like to say to him: Do you understand the meaning of the real? The real means that which is happening, and this ashram is happening, I am happening. Any image of India that does not include me will be unreal - only because it will not include something which is happening. What do you mean by 'real image'?

A real image means: that which is existential, that which is happening. You may not like me, you may not like my people, but you cannot say that I don't reflect the real image of India. You may be against me, but still I am part of this country. I am here, and I am going to be here! And my people are going to increase. This is part of reality. This may be just a seed now, but soon it will become a great tree. How can you deny its reality?

We have 200,000 sannyasins all over the world. Nobody else can claim that. And we have almost a million lay followers, lay disciples. It is part of reality now. Three thousand sannyasins are almost always present here. Every year nearabout 25,000 people visit from all the countries all over the world. No other place can claim this. How can you say this is not real?

I think, Mr. Advani, you will have to learn language a little bit more. Real is that which is happening.

It may not be according to you - right, that is another point - but it is real. And I would like to tell you also that it is not something which is alien to the spirit of India, what is happening is this phenomenon which is really the very soul of India. It happened in Buddha's time, it happened in Mahavir's time, it happened in Krishna's time. It has happened again and again. The REAL India - if you really want to say what the real India is - consists not of politicians but of the mystics. The politicians come and go; the mystics remain.

Do you remember any politician's name of the time of Buddha? Where are they? And they must have been as noisy as Mr. Advani. In their own time they must have been very noisy; they must have created much fuss. Do you remember the politicians who crucified Jesus? And if you remember the name of Pontius Pilate, you remember it only because he crucified Jesus; otherwise who would have remembered? There have been thousands of governor-generals in the world.

A politician said to the dying Socrates, 'We are sorry that you had to be sentenced to death.'

Socrates opened his eyes and said, 'Don't be worried. You cannot kill me, I will live. And remember, your name will be remembered only because of me.'

And that is so.

The real India is a quest of the innermost soul of man - not the geography, not the political history, but the inner journey. The journey of meditation is the real India. Mahavir represents it. Buddha represents it. Krishna and Christ and Nanak - they represent the real India. And I have the heritage of all of them - and much more.

But it has been always so. If Advani were Minister of Broadcasting in Mahavir's time, he would have stopped the BBC from filming Mahavir because Mahavir used to live naked. Or, if he had been a minister in Lalla's time... Lalla was a mystic woman; she lived naked. Certainly he would have prevented any television unit, any film unit from approaching these people for the same reason: that they don't represent, they don't reflect, the real image of India.

Does Mr. Advani reflect the real image of India? You will be gone down the drain soon, I predict.

By the next election you will be heard of no more. You and your whole company will just go down the drain, because the country has seen that you have deceived and cheated it. In the name of democracy all kinds of wrong people have become powerful in India. And they have not done a single thing since they have been in power except quarrel.

I must remind you of the three monkeys of Mahatma Gandhi. You must have heard of them - those three monkeys are very famous. He had always a statue of them. Somebody from Japan or from China had presented him with three monkeys. One monkey keeps his hands on his eyes, representing that you should not see that which is wrong. Another monkey keeps his hands on his ears, symbolizing that you should not hear that which is not worth hearing. And the third monkey keeps his hands on his mouth: you should not say what is not worth saying, you should keep quiet.

These three monkeys have come to rule. Now they are called the TRIMURTI - the three monkeys are Mahatma Gandhi. The chief monkey keeps his hands on his ears; he will not listen. The whole country is shouting, 'We are dying. We are starving. The population is growing.' But he will not listen. His name is Mahatma Morarji Desai. He will not listen. The whole country is crying, 'Your son is a criminal; his activities should be investigated - he is accumulating money by illegal means.' But he will not listen. He is the chief monkey of Mahatma Gandhi. He keeps his ears shut and goes on smiling; drinks his own urine and keeps himself healthy. That's all that he is doing.

The other monkey keeps his eyes shut, because he represents the untouchables, the down-trodden, the lowest of the low - and they are being burned alive! They are being killed, butchered, murdered, raped. And never before has it happened like this. All over the country their lives are in danger. And the man who represents them, Jagjivan Ram, simply keeps his eyes closed, because if he opens his eyes and sees what is happening he will not be able to say that he is their representative there.

But the third monkey, who was supposed to keep quiet and not say anything, has betrayed the others and has said something - Charan Singh. And because of his saying something he has been thrown out of the trinity. But he is trying to get back in again. And the other two monkeys are trying to keep him out because he started saying things that he should not say. And why did he start saying things? - because he is getting old. Heart attacks and everything are happening to him, and he seems to have no chance of becoming Prime Minister of India. He has to speak. Time is running out fast. He has to struggle; he cannot keep quiet anymore.

These monkeyish people in New Delhi, do they think that they represent the real India? They simply represent the neurotic part of India; they represent the people who suffer from inferiority complexes. That's what the great psychologist Adler says: a man goes into politics only if he suffers from an inferiority complex. He wants to prove to himself that he is somebody. He has to prove it, otherwise there is great anguish in his being, that 'I am inferior.' Untalented people, unintelligent people go into politics. Those who are talented become artists, painters, poets, philosophers, mystics, dancers. They have a thousand and one other beautiful things to do, not politics. Only the third rate, the most unintelligent part of a country, moves into politics. Those who cannot do anything else, at least they can go into politics. The politicians are almost hidden criminals; the same quality of people become criminals. If they cannot reach to power, they become destructive.

And what wrong is happening here that they are afraid should not be known in the world at large?

One thing. A great synthesis is happening here - something that has never happened before, of which they are afraid, and which needs to happen. It is a must for humanity's survival. I am trying to create a great synthesis: the synthesis between Zorba the Greek and Gautam the Buddha, the synthesis between materialism and spiritualism. I am trying to create a spiritual materialism.

These two things have always remained separate, antagonistic to each other. And because of their antagonism man has remained schizophrenic, because man is both body and soul. Man is not only soul, man is not only body. To insist that man is only body is materialism. To insist that man is only soul is spiritualism. Both are half, and both are wrong because they are half, and both are unsatisfactory alone. They have proved unsatisfactory.

Man has to be accepted in his totality. As far as the body is concerned, a man has to be Zorba the Greek. And as far as the soul is concerned, a man has to be Gautam the Buddha. If body and soul can exist together, why can Buddha and Zorba not exist together in a single man? That will be the highest synthesis.

The West has remained materialistic. It suffers from materialism. It has all the benefits of materialism: great technology, beautiful houses, better medical facilities, longer life, more beautiful bodies, more healthy bodies. It has all the benefits of materialism, it is rich, affluent, but it suffers because it has lost its soul. The inner world is empty, hollow. The West has all that is needed on the outside, but in managing the outside it has leaned too much towards materialism and forgotten its own inner world. The master is lost; the soul is lost. The kingdom is there but the king is dead, hence the Western anguish, hence the Western search for the king. Hence the inquiry into meditation, because meditation is the only way to seek and search for the inner king. Where has he gone? Where is the inner light?

The East has remained spiritual. It has all the beauties of spirituality: calmness, quietness, relaxedness, loving, compassion. It has a certain quality, a flavour of the inner, but the body is sick, and there is great poverty and starvation all around. And the outer world is ugly; it has suffered much too. And both are tense, because unless you are whole you will be tense.

Can't you see that the East is no more interested in meditation? That's why you don't see many Indians here in this ashram. The East is no more interested in meditation, it is no more interested in Buddha; its interest has shifted, and it is natural. It wants to know more about physics, chemistry, engineering, medical science. Eastern talent goes to the West, to Oxford, to Cambridge, to Harvard, to Princeton, to learn what has happened in the West. Eastern talent has only one desire: how to go to the West and learn something of modern science. The talented Eastern person cannot believe why you Westerners are coming to the East. You have Oxford and you have Harvard, why are you coming here? We are trying to get there and you are coming here. It looks so absurd.

But the West has to come to the East. Harvard and Oxford have proved lacking. They have given much, but they have not given inner richness. The West is affluent, and because the West is affluent, the West has become more aware in contrast to its affluence of the inner poverty, the inner black hole. The outside is so full of light that the inner black hole in contrast has become very clear. The search has started - the West is moving towards the East, the East is moving towards the West.

The Eastern intellectual becomes a communist, and the Western intellectual becomes a meditator.

This can go on, and this can lead again to another kind of shift and to misery. The West can become the East and the East can become the West, and the problem will remain the same.

My effort here is a great experiment in bringing the East and West together.

Kipling has said that East and West shall never meet. I would like to tell Kipling - he must be somewhere in his grave, because he is a Christian and he will not leave the grave before the Last Judgement Day - Sir, East and West ARE meeting. They have already met. They are meeting here in this place, which Advani says does not represent the real image of India.

It represents the East, but it represents more than the East: it represents East plus West, it represents the whole of humanity; it is an experiment in universal brotherhood. You will find Christians, Jews, Mohammedans, Parsees, Jainas, Buddhists, Hindus - all kinds of people - here.

They have all dropped their identities, they have fallen into a universal brotherhood. And you say this does not represent the real image of India?

And remember also: India is not a small country, it is a vast continent. It is not one tradition, it is many traditions. But the people who are in power now are basically Hindu chauvinists. A very wrong kind of person has come to power. Their whole idea is of a very narrow Hinduism - so narrow that it does not even contain the whole current of Hinduism. Hence it is very much afraid.

If these people are allowed to have their say, sooner or later they will bulldoze Khajuraho, Konarak, because they will say they don't represent the real image of India.

Why are they so much against me? - because here Yoga is happening, Sufism is happening, Zen is happening, Tao is happening, Tantra also. And Tantra is creating trouble.

These people in New Delhi are utterly sexually frustrated, repressed people.

Khajuraho is being born again here. To whom does Khajuraho belong? I have not made that temple.

I would suggest to Advani: Destroy Khajuraho, because the BBC people may come and film it. It is a beautiful temple, one of the most beautiful on the earth, because there is nothing more beautiful than love. There is nothing more graceful then a couple in deep love, in a deep loving embrace.

There is nothing more divine than that. Something of God descends when a couple is in deep love, in an ogasmic ecstasy. Khajuraho represents that. Konarak represents that. And there are thousands of Tantra scriptures. Please destroy them before anybody comes to know about them.

Destroy Vatsyayana's KAMA SUTRA.

Why are you so afraid of me and my people? They are not doing any harm to anybody. They are not training for any war, they are preparing for a more loving life. Yes, alongside with Yoga, Tao, Zen, Tantra is also a part. And because a few newspapers - and they also belong to the same repressed sexual mind - print some nude pictures taken in the ashram... That is all they have against me.

That nudity in itself is part of a long Indian tradition. Jaina DIGAMBARA MUNIS are nude - prevent them, they are still nude. Thousands of Hindu sannyasins live in nudity - prevent them. Destroy all the temples of the Jainas, because Mahavir and the other twenty-three TEERTHANKARAS have their nude statues there. And destroy all the Hindu temples of Shiva, because the SHIVA-LINGA is nothing but a phallic symbol.

Then only can you say... First, destroy all these things, then only can you say that Rajneesh and his ashram don't reflect the real image of India. Otherwise, India is a vast continent thousands of years have passed and many traditions have lived together. Tantra has existed side by side with Yoga.

Yoga is repressive, Tantra is expressive. Yoga is afraid of sex, Tantra rejoices in sex. Yoga says, 'Avoid sex if you want to go to God,' and Tantra says, 'Use sex if you want to go to God.' And my own observation is that Tantra is far more profound than Yoga, because sex is the energy given to you by God; repressing it will be very disrespectful to God. Use it. And it is the creative energy in you: it creates the child, it brings new life. It has some other aspects also, hidden aspects. If you use it meditatively, if you use it as prayer, it call create you anew, it can give you a rebirth. You will become a DWIJA, a twice-born.

Sex energy has two poles to it. One is: if it moves downwards, it reproduces children. A tremendous miracle, the birth of a child. If it moves upwards, it creates you: a new integrity, a new individuation, a new centre of being is born. Tantra is one of the greatest sciences ever born for the transformation of man. And this place is not an ordinary ashram, dull, dead, as Indians have become accustomed to ashrams, this place is an alchemical academy. We are doing great experiments in expanding human consciousness, and we are using all kinds of techniques available to humanity, both Eastern and Western. They are very much afraid of this.

He says, 'The Rajneesh film won't reflect the real image of India... it is felt that a film on the activities of the ashram would not reflect favourably on India's image abroad.'

But just by preventing the BBC, the Spanish TV unit, the Australian TV unit, the German TV unit, and journalists from reaching here, do you think you will be able to prevent me from reaching people?

If Jesus could reach without the BBC, do you think you will be able to prevent me from reaching people? If Buddha could reach without any modern media available to him, do you think you will be able to prevent me?

It cannot be prevented.

Truth can never be prevented. If there is some truth in me, it has to reach people. It will reach, and people will reach me. No government can prevent me from reaching people. Yes, you can prevent newspapers, you can prevent television stations, you can prevent radio. Who cares?

I will reach through my people to millions of people. If there is truth, people will come from all over the world, seeking and searching. If they are thirsty, they are bound to seek and search, because I have something here which can quench their thirst.

And without ever coming here... Advani has never come here, no other minister has ever come here.

Saying such silly things without coming here is not right.

And, sir, I would suggest to you... Your government is very skillful in creating commissions. That's an that you have done within this year and a half that you have been in power. All that you have done is to create commissions. Why don't you create a commission to visit the ashram to see what is happening here? Just remember one thing: be careful, because people who come here get caught.

And be careful also whom you send. All the information that you have about the ashram you depend on getting from your police departments. How can they understand? What can they understand?

All the information that you have you depend on getting from your government machinery. What can they understand?

So don't appoint a commission with some senile, retired judge. That won't help. Remember that what is happening here is something so scientific that only people who know something about modern developments in humanistic psychology, who know something about encounter therapy, gestalt, psychodrama, primal therapy, who know something about psychoanalysis, psychosynthesis, who know something about EST, Arica, who know something about Vipassana, Zazen, Sufi whirling - only they will be able to understand what is happening here.

This place has great intellect, great intelligence, great talent. We have hundreds of D.Litt.s, Ph.D.s, D.Phil.s, and thousands who have M.A.s, M.Sc.s and other qualifications. No other Indian university can claim as much talent as we have here. Even Ph.D.s are cleaning toilets!

So send some educated people, not your M.P.s - they won't understand a thing - and then decide.

You are also invited, Mr. Advani.

And what kind of democracy is this? You came to power in the name of democracy. Even Indira did not dare to interfere with my work. And you are democrats...? Nothing but Hindu chauvinists!

India is a vast continent. Do you think Charvarka and his materialism is not India? Do you think Buddha, who denies God, who denies the soul, who denies the world, who is a nihilist - an utter nihilist, a nihilist PAR EXCELLENCE - was he not a Hindu? Do you think Tilopa and Saraha were not Indians? Great tantrikas.

Who do you think is Indian? Just Mahatma Gandhi and Mahatma Morarji Desai - these two persons are Indian? Then you don't even know much about Mahatma Gandhi.

The whole of his life he repressed sex, and he found in his old age that he had been on a wrong path. And then he started - he had to start - Tantra experiments. What about that? In his last years of life he was sleeping with a naked young girl. His whole life of repression had failed because even when he was seventy he was suffering from wet dreams and sexual fantasies. Then, as an ultimate resort, as an ultimate shelter, he started looking into Tantra. He died a tantrika. What about that? And you call him the Father of the Nation? Stop calling him Father of the Nation; he does not represent the real image of India. What do you think about him - at the age of seventy, sleeping with a young girl, an eighteen-year-old girl, naked? And you call him Father of the Nation...

And one thing more. These are the people, Advani and company, who created the climate in which this man, Mahatma Gandhi, was murdered - these Hindu chauvinists. But what kind of hypocrisy is this? Now they pay tribute and call him Father of the Nation. And these are the murderers; they created the climate in the country to murder that man. And now they worship him. In his name now they are in power.

India has many currents. And it is beautiful. It is not a monolith, that's why it is beautiful. It is a rainbow, it has all the colours: Buddhists have an ideology, Jainas have a totally different ideology, and Hindus have many ideologies. Hinduism is not a narrow religion. In Hinduism there is nothing like a Pope or a church; it is not an organized religion at all. And that is the beauty of it; it allows all kinds of people to have all kinds of ways. It says: All ways lead to God. It is the most tolerant religion in the world.

But the Hindu chauvinist cannot tolerate it. He starts trying to make Hinduism also as narrow as he is narrow. These are the ideas in their minds. These ideas are creating trouble for them.

All kinds of people come to me. You will find scientists here, you will find psychologists here - in hundreds. You will find psychotherapists here, you will find poets, painters, artists, musicians, actors.

You will find all kinds of talented people here - except politicians.

Why is the politician so afraid to come here? There is a reason. The politician is the least religious person in the world, the most anti-religious person in the world. Politics and religion are polar opposites. Politics is ambition, religion is non-ambition. Politics is an ego trip, religion is the dissolution of the ego. Politics is struggle, a cut-throat competition; it is basically, essentially violent.

Religion is love - no competition, no comparison. Hence you will not find politicians here. And because I call a spade a spade, they are afraid of me. They can't come face to face with me. Mr. Advani, I invite you and your colleagues to come here and encounter me, encounter my people. It will give you some insight into what is happening here. It is one of the greatest experiments ever done: how to expand human consciousness without drugs.

And, let me tell you, politics is a drug. Politicians are alcoholics. Politics is a kind of neurosis. You can go to the parliament and sitting there for one day just watch and you will see: you will not see such madness even in a madhouse. And these people are going to decide who represents India?

India is vast, let me say it again. Nobody can represent the whole of India - nobody has that authority to represent the whole of India. It is not a tiny, small place; not one tradition, not one religion, not one language either. And these Hindu chauvinists are trying to force one language on the country.

Behind Hindi there is nothing but Hindu chauvinism. They are trying to force one language, Hindi, on the whole country - which is nonsense; it cannot be done, it should not be done. And remember, my own mother tongue is Hindi, and I love it; it is a beautiful language. But that is another matter.

This country has many beautiful languages. No language should be forced on the country, that will be violent, undemocratic. But that's what they are trying to do - directly, indirectly. And let me warn the country: if these people persist in trying to force Hindi on the whole of the country, that will be the reason one day or other that India becomes split. South India is bound to go on its own way against the North, because the North is becoming too Hindu chauvinistic.

If this country is going to be destroyed one day, the reason will be these people who are in power today. India cannot have one language. And if it can have one language, that language has to be neutral; either it will be English or Esperanto, but not Hindi, not Gujarati, not Marathi, not Bengali, not Tamil. It will have to be a neutral language. English is neutral; it is nobody's mother tongue in India. And English is international too, so it is perfectly good. I support a two-language formula:

English as the national language, because it is also international and as the second language, the mother tongue. Each child should be taught two languages. Forget all about Hindi, and forget all about creating one monolith in this country of variety, of multiplicity.

And they are trying to do the same thing with religion too, in the same way. They want to force me not to do what I am doing here because my approach is non-political. I have no vested interest in anything - in any language, in any province, in any religion, in any tradition. My approach is that the whole past is ours - and not only the Indian past, the whole past of humanity is ours. That's why I have chosen to speak on Chinese Masters, Japanese Masters, Greek Masters, Hebrew Masters. I am going to speak on all the Masters of the world, so that, listening to all these different songs, you can become universal.

They are afraid of all this. They would like me only to talk on the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita is beautiful, and I have talked on it, but I am not going to talk ONLY on this. I don't belong to any tradition, to any past. I claim the whole past as mine, and the whole future too.

It happens sometimes that a politician wants to come, but then he sends 'feelers', he sends people. And those people come and they want me to invite the politician. Why should I invite? All the people come here. Whosoever wants to come here can come here. We are not here to pay special respect to anybody, and to politicians, certainly not. They send messages to me that 'X is ready to come to inaugurate the ashram,' that 'Y is ready to lay the foundation for the new commune.'

I will not allow any politician to lay the foundation of my commune; it will be sacrilegious. I will not allow any politician to come and inaugurate my ashram. Politicians - what have they to do with religion? What do they know about religion? They have the dirtiest vibe possible.

BUt there were good days also in the past, and great people also. Listen to this anecdote.

The Emperor came to visit the Zen Master Joshu, who was meditating in his room. 'Tell him to come in and make his bows,' the Master said to his horrified attendant.

The Emperor entered and made his obeisance.

When Joshu was later asked about his rude behaviour, he explained, 'You just don't understand. If a visitor of low class comes, I go to the temple gate to greet him. For a middle class guest I get up from my seat. A great emperor cannot be treated like that.'

The Emperor, of course, had been delighted with his reception.

But those were great days. An emperor was delighted... But these poor politicians, they send messages that they should be received at the gate, garlanded; they should be treated as VIP's.

What nonsense! If I even allow you entry, that is enough respect for you. If Sant, the guard at the front gate, does not prevent you at the gate, you should feel fortunate enough.

In the new commune, I am going to put a board on the gate: Politicians and dogs are not allowed.

 

 

 

The First Question:

I am sorry. I apologize - because dogs are so innocent. It is not fair at all.

The Second Question:

Neurosis has never been so epidemic in the past as it is now. It is almost becoming a normal state of human mind. It has to be understood.

The past was spiritually more healthy, and the reason was that mind was not fed so many things simultaneously; the mind was not overloaded. The modern mind is overloaded, and that which remains unassimilated creates neurosis.

It is as if you go on eating and stuffing your body. That which is not digested by the body will prove to be poisonous. And what you eat is less important than what you hear and see. From your eyes, from your ears, from all your senses, you go on receiving a thousand and one things each moment. And there is no extra assimilation time. It is as if one were constantly sitting at the dining table, eating, eating, twenty-four hours a day.

This is the situation of the modern mind: it is overloaded; so many things are burdening it. It is not any surprise that it breaks down. There is a limit to every mechanism. And mind is one of the most subtle and delicate of mechanisms.

A really healthy person is one who takes fifty percent of his time to assimilate his experiences. Fifty percent action, fifty percent inaction - that is the right balance. Fifty percent thinking, fifty percent meditation - that is the cure.

Meditation is nothing but a time when you can relax utterly into yourself, when you close all your doors, all your senses, to the outside stimulus. You disappear from the world. You forget the world as if it exists no more - no newspapers, no radio, no television, no people. You are alone in your innermost being, relaxed, at home. In these moments, all that has become accumulated is assimilated. That which is worthless is thrown out. Meditation functions like a double-edged sword: on the one hand it assimilates all that is nourishing, and it rejects and throws out all that is junk.

But meditation has disappeared from the world. In the old days, people were naturally meditative. Life was uncomplicated, and people had enough time just to sit and do nothing, or look at the stars, or watch the trees, or listen to the birds. People had intervals of deep passivity. In those moments you become more and more healthy and whole.

Neurosis means you are carrying such a load in the mind that you are dying under it. You cannot move. There is no question of your consciousness flying. You cannot even creep - the burden is too much. And the burden goes on increasing every moment. One cracks up. It is very natural.

A few things to be understood. Neurosis is the mouse endlessly trying the dead end, not learning. Yes, not learning is neurosis - that is the first definition. You go on trying the dead end.

You have been angry. How many times have you been angry? And how many times have you repented of being angry? Still, let there be a stimulus and your reaction will again be the same. You have not learned a thing. You have been greedy and greed has created more and more misery. You know it - greed has never given anybody blissfulness - but you are still greedy, you still go on being greedy. You don't learn.

Non-learning creates neurosis, is neurosis.

Learning means assimilation. You try one thing and then you find that it doesn't work. You drop it. You move in another direction, you try another alternative. This is wise, this is intelligent. Just knocking your head against a wall where you know perfectly well there is no door is neurosis. People are getting more and more neurotic because they go on trying the dead end, they go on trying that which doesn't work. The man who is capable of learning never becomes neurotic - cannot become. He immediately sees the point that this is a wall. He drops the whole idea. He starts moving into other dimensions. There are other alternatives available. He has learned something.

It is said of Edison that he was trying one experiment in which he failed seven hundred times. His colleagues became desperate. Three years were wasted and he went on trying new alternatives again and again. And every morning he came with great enthusiasm - the same enthusiasm that he had come with on the first day. And three years were wasted.

One day his colleagues gathered together and they said to him, 'We don't see the point. We have failed seven hundred times. It is time to drop the experimentation.'

Edison is reported to have said, 'What are you saying - failed? We have learned that seven hundred alternatives were wrong alternatives. It has been a great experience! Today I am not going to try the same experiment, I have found another one. We are coming closer to the truth. How many false alternatives can there be? There must be a limit. If there are one thousand false alternatives, then seven hundred have already been dropped and only three hundred are left. And then we will be reaching the right point.'

This is learning. Trying one experiment, seeing that it doesn't work, trying an alternative, seeing that it doesn't work, the wise man drops it. The fool clings to it. The fool calls it consistency. The fool says, 'I did it yesterday and I am going to do it today, too. And I will do it tomorrow.' He is stubborn, pig-headed. He says, 'How can I leave it? I have invested so much in it. I cannot change it.' Then he goes on insisting on it and his whole life is wasted. And as death comes closer, he is desperate, he is hopeless. Deep down in his guts he knows perfectly well that he is going to fail. He has failed so many times and he is still trying the same thing without learning anything at all.

This creates neurosis. The man who is capable of learning will never become neurotic. A disciple will never become neurotic. A disciple means one who is capable of learning. Never become knowledgeable; always be in the process of learning. Knowledgeability drives people neurotic. It is not just accidental that professors, philosophers, psychiatrists, scholars, easily go mad. They have learned and they have reached the conclusion that there is no more to learn. The moment you decide that there is no more to learn, you have stopped growing. To stop growing is neurosis - that is the second definition.

The world was very different in the past, obviously. About six weeks' worth of sensory stimuli six hundred years ago is what we now get in a day. Six weeks' worth of stimulation, information, we are getting in a single day - about forty times the pressure to learn and adapt. Modern man has to be capable of learning more than man has ever been before, because there is more to learn now.

Modern man has to become capable of adapting to new situations every day because the world is changing so fast. It is a great challenge.

A great challenge, if accepted, will help tremendously in the expansion of consciousness. Either modern man is going to be utterly neurotic or modern man is going to be transformed by the very pressure. It depends on how you take it. One thing is certain: there is no way of going back. The sensory stimuli will go on increasing more and more. You will be getting more and more information and life will be changing, with faster and faster rhythms. And you will have to be capable of learning, of adapting, to new things.

In the past man lived in an almost static world. Everything was static. You would leave the world exactly as your father had left it to you. You would not have changed anything at all. Nothing was changed. There was no question of learning too much. A little bit of learning was enough. And then you had spaces in your mind, empty spaces, which helped people to remain sane. Now there is no more empty space, unless you create it deliberately.

Meditation is needed today more than ever before. Meditation is needed so much that it is almost a question of life and death. In the past it was a luxury; few people - a Buddha, a Mahavira, a Krishna - were interested in it. Other people were naturally silent, naturally happy, sane. There was no need for them to think of meditation; in an unconscious way they were meditating. Life was moving so silently, moving so slowly, that even the most stupid people were capable of adapting to it. Now the change is so tremendously fast, with such speed, that even the most intelligent people feel incapable of adapting to it. Every day life is different, and you have to learn again - you have to learn and learn again and again. You can never stop learning now; it has to be a life-long process.

To the very point of death you will have to remain a learner, only then can you remain sane, can you avoid neurosis. And the pressure is great - forty times greater. How to relax this pressure? You will have to go deliberately into meditative moments. If a person is not meditating at least one hour a day, then neurosis will not be accidental, he will create it himself.

For one hour he should disappear from the world into his own being. For one hour he should be so alone that nothing penetrates him - no memory, no thought, no imagination; for one hour no content in his consciousness, and that will rejuvenate him and that will refresh him. That will release new sources of energy in him and he will be back in the world, younger, fresher, more able to learn, with more wonder in his eyes, with more awe in his heart - again a child.

This pressure to learn, and the old habit of not learning, is driving people crazy. The modern mind is really super-loaded, and no time is given to digest it, to assimilate it into one's own being. That is where meditation comes in and becomes more significant than ever. Without giving time for the mind to rest in meditation we repress all of the messages that are pouring in continuously. We refuse to learn - we say we have not got time. Then the messages begin to accumulate. If you don't have time enough to listen to the messages that your mind is receiving continuously, they start accumulating - just like files accumulating on your table, piles of letters accumulating on your table, because you have not time enough to read and answer them. Exactly like that your mind becomes cluttered - so many files waiting to be looked into, so many letters to be read, to be answered, so many challenges to be taken, to be faced.

I have heard...

Mulla Nasrudin was saying one day, 'If something wrong happens today, I will not have time for at least three months to look into it. So many wrong things have already happened which are waiting there. If something wrong happens today,' he said, 'I will not have time to look into it for three months at least.'

A queue. You can see that queue inside yourself - and the queue goes on growing. And the bigger the queue, the less and less space you have; the bigger the queue, the more and more noise inside - because everything that you have accumulated demands your attention.

This usually starts at about the age of five when real learning virtually stops, and this lasts until death. In the old days it was okay. Five or seven years were enough to learn all that you would need in your life; that would do. Seven years' learning would do for seventy years of life. But now that is not possible. You cannot stop learning because new things are always happening and you cannot face those new things with old ideas. You cannot depend on your parents and their knowledge, you cannot even depend on your teachers in the school and the university, because what they are talking about is already out of date. Much more has happened. Much water has gone down the Ganges.

This was my experience. When I was a student I was surprised at my professors' knowledge because it was thirty years old. It was when they were young that they had gathered it from their teachers. Since then they had not looked at what had happened That knowledge was absolutely useless. I was constantly in conflict with my professors, I was thrown out of many colleges, expelled, because the professors said that they could not cope with me. And I was not creating any trouble, I was simply making them aware that what they were saying was out of date. But that hurts the ego.

They had learned it in their own university days and they were thinking that the world had stopped then and there. Now students cannot depend on teachers and children cannot depend on their parents, hence a great rebellion is on the way all over the world. It has nothing to do with anything else. Students cannot respect their teachers anymore unless those teachers continuously learn. They cannot be respected. For what? There is no reason. And children cannot respect their parents because the approach of their parents looks very primitive. Small children are becoming aware that what their parents say is out of date. Parents will have to continuously learn if they want to help their children to grow and teachers will have to continuously learn. Now no one can stop learning. And this speed is going to grow continuously.

So, one thing: learning has not to be stopped, otherwise you will go neurotic; because to stop learning means you are accumulating information which you have not assimilated, digested, which has not become your blood and your bones and your marrow. It will hang around you with great insistence to be taken in.

Secondly: you will need time to relax. This pressure is too much. You will need some time to disappear from this pressure. Sleep cannot help you anymore because sleep itself is becoming overburdened. Your day is so overloaded that when you go to sleep only the body falls limp on the bed, but the mind continues to sort things out. That's what you call dreaming: it is nothing but a desperate effort of the mind to sort things out because you won't give any time to it.

You have to relax consciously into meditation. A few minutes of deep meditation will keep you non-neurotic. In meditation the mind unclutters, experiences are digested, and the overload disappears, leaving the mind fresh and young and clear and clean.

In the past the input volume was one-tenth of one's time and the meditative time was nine-tenths. Now just the reverse is the case: nine-tenths input volume time and one-tenth meditative time. Very rarely do you relax. Very rarely do you just sit silently, doing nothing. Even that one-tenth time of unconscious meditation is disappearing. Once that happens, man will be utterly mad. And that is happening.

What do I mean by unconscious meditative time? You simply go into the garden, you play around with your children - that is unconscious meditative time. Or you swim in the swimming pool - that is unconscious meditative time. Or you mow your lawn, or you listen to the birds - that is unconscious meditative time. That too is disappearing because whenever people have time, they are sitting before their TVs, glued to their seats.

Now, tremendously dangerous information is being put into your mind by the TV. You will not be able to digest it. Or you are reading newspapers. All kinds of nonsense is being fed to you. Whenever you have time you put the radio or the TV on. Or someday you are feeling very good and you want to relax and you go to the movie. What kind of relaxation is this? The movie will not allow you relaxation, because information is continuously thrown into you.

Relaxation means no information is thrown into you. Listening to a cuckoo will do, because no information is fed to you. Listening to music will do, because no information is thrown into you. Music has no language; it is pure sound. It does not give any message; it simply delights you.  Dancing will be good, music will be good, working in the garden will be good, playing with children will be good, or just sitting doing nothing will be good. This is the cure. And if you do it consciously, the impact will be greater.

Create a balance. Neurosis is an unbalanced state of mind: too much activity and no inactivity at all, too much masculine and no feminine at all, too much yang and too little of yin. And you have to be fifty-fifty. You have to keep a deep balance. A symmetry is needed inside you. You have to be an ARDHANA-RISHWAR, half man, half woman, then you will never go neurotic.

And that is the whole process of the book, THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER. It will make you disappear as man, as woman; it will make you one whole, one unity; it will give you individuation. Individuality is neither male nor female, it is simple unity. Strive to achieve it between time spent doing versus time spent not doing. This is wholeness. This is what Buddha called his Middle Way, MAJJHIM NIKAYA. Just be exactly in the middle. And remember, you can become unbalanced to the other extreme too; you can become too inactive. That will be dangerous also. That has its own pitfalls and dangers. If you become too inactive, your life loses dance, your life loses joy, you start becoming dead.

So I am not saying become inactive, I am saying let there be a balance between action and inaction. Let them balance each other and you be just in the middle. Let them be two wings of your being. No wing should be bigger than the other.

In the West, action has become too great; inaction has disappeared. In the East, inaction became too great and action disappeared. The West knows affluence, richness, on the outside and poverty inside; the East knows richness, affluence, inside and poverty on the outside. Both are in misery because both have chosen extremes.

My approach is neither Eastern nor Western, my approach is neither male nor female, my approach is neither of action nor inaction, my approach is that of utter balance, symmetry, in you. Hence I say to my sannyasins: Don't leave the world. Be in the world and yet be not of it. This is what Taoists call WEI WU WEI, action through inaction - the meeting of yin and yang, anima and animus; it brings enlightenment. Imbalance is neurosis; balance is enlightenment.

 

 

The Third Question:

I have not said that - that all women are really soft, feminine and loving. Neither are all men hard, aggressive, violent & ambitious. Because deep down in you the consciousness is neither. The anima and the animus, the male and the female exist in your body chemistry. You can be a man physically, but deep inside you may have chosen the feminine part. A woman may be a woman physically but she may have chosen the masculine part - both parts are available - then the body remains feminine but the woman will become masculine.

That is what is happening to women connected with the Women's Liberation movement: they are dropping their feminineness, they are becoming as aggressive as man. They are trying to compete with all kinds of foolishnesses that man has. They want to have all those foolishnesses themselves, too - they cannot be left behind.

The idea of being equal is creating a foolish idea of being similar. To be equal does not mean to be similar. Equality is a totally different dimension; similarity is different.

Yes, a woman can choose her masculine part too much, she can become identified with it, then her softness will disappear. A man can choose his feminineness, then his hardness will disappear. The body will remain sexually male or female, but the quality surrounding the body, the vibe, will have to be that which you have chosen inside. A man can choose to be a woman inside, a woman can choose to be a man inside.

And it is not a choice that you make once and forever, you can change it every moment. There are moments when a woman is very soft and there are moments when she can be very hard, very cruel.

There are moments when a man is very hard, aggressive, but there are moments when he can be very soft. Even a Ghengis Khan is very soft to his children. To his wife he is very soft.

I have heard...

The plain and strongly-built daughter of a Field-Marshal was engaged to be married to a young officer on her father's staff. 'Couldn't you do something for Frank now that he has asked me to marry him?' she asked her father one day.

'There's not much I can do really,' replied the Field-Marshal, 'except get him a medal for gallantry.'

Another...

He was undersized, meek, diffident, and subdued, and he had applied for a job as a night-watchman.

'Yes,' said the manager, dubiously, 'but the fact is we want someone who is restless and uneasy, especially at night - someone who thinks the worst of everybody, someone who sleeps with one eye open. The kind of person, in short, who, when roused, is the devil himself.'

'Alright,' said the meek lad, as he walked away, 'I'll send my wife.'

It depends on what you choose inside you. It is a choice. The body is not your choice, but the vibe that will surround your body is a choice. And if you choose consciously, you will have great freedom in your being, because you will know who you are and what you are doing with your body.

The body is tremendously potential - much can happen through it - but people take it for granted.

It is as if a beautiful guitar has been given to you as a present and you just keep it, not knowing the potential of it. You can play on the guitar, you can learn to play on the guitar, and great music will be born. And then it depends on you what kind of music it will be. You can create a music which is sad, you can create a music which is celebrating, you can create music which is violent, you can create a music which is soothing, loving, silent.

There are kinds of music. Classical music has a different quality: it soothes, it brings you to a silence, rest. Modern pop music makes you restless, sexual; it drives you into a kind of frenzy. But the instruments are the same - as are bodies.

A really wise person chooses to play what kind of music he wants to play on the body. You can make your body like a Buddha or you can become a Mohammed Ali. It depends on you. Look at Buddha's body - how soft, although he is a man; how feminine, although he is a man. He has chosen grace.

It depends on you. It is your choice. You are not confined by your chemistry. You can be confined only if you remain unconscious in your chemistry, otherwise your chemistry has infinite potential: it can be put to a thousand and one uses. And to learn how to use one's body, how to behave with one's body, how to relate with one's body, is a great art. Millions of people just take their body for granted; they never search for its possibilities. Their body remains a seed. It never becomes a Golden Flower.

The fourth question:

Question 4:

My approach about everything is to bring it to the surface. So I never nip anything in the bud, I help it to become a flower. And after the flowering, the flower starts withering of its own accord. That's the natural way.

So in my commune, nothing is prevented. Ambitions are allowed, accepted, as being part of human beings, their ignorance, their unawareness. But I make my people aware that these are games. So play them, but play consciously. Become more and more alert and never let them become serious.

If they don't become serious, there is no need to become afraid of them. The problem is that when a game becomes so serious then you forget completely that it is a game.

That's where the politician is lost. He thinks he is doing something very serious. He is doing something very silly, but he thinks he is doing something very serious. All that is needed is to make him aware that this is a game. If you want to play it, play, but don't become so serious about it.

Keep a little bit of humour. A sense of humour is one of the greatest keys to transform human personalities.

Yes, you are right! Here also - because these people come from the world and they bring all kinds of infections from the world. They are not coming here fresh, they have been already conditioned.

Ambition has already been put into them - their parents, the society, church, school, college, university. Everywhere they have been poisoned; they bring all that poison here. You cannot nip it in the bud otherwise they will become split and hypocritical. Then on the surface they will show humility, humbleness, and deep down they will think, 'There is nobody more humble than me' - and politics has come in. Deep down they will think, 'I am the greatest egoless person in the world' - but the 'greatest'.

Now a new kind of ambition has entered. It is the same ambition, now the direction is new. And it is more subtle, and, of course, more dangerous too. And now it is pious, because it is in the name of religion. So even the poison no longer looks like poison; it is labelled nectar. It is religious poison, pious poison, and it is more difficult to get rid of the pious poison.

So I don't repress anything and I don't help any kind of repression, I help people to bring whatsoever they have in them to the surface. I help them to be aware of it, to watch it, to see the foolishness of it, to see the stupidity of it - not because I say it is stupid, because if I say something and you only believe it, you will repress it. I help you - my function here is to help you become aware on your own. The day you see the stupidity of it, it will drop of its own accord.

So I have created all kinds of games here. Yes, there is a hierarchy too so people who want to play, they can play the game of hierarchy. But sooner or later - because the whole effort is to make them conscious - they become aware that this is a game. And the moment they see it is a game, they are out of it. Seeing something as a game makes you laugh at it - a hearty laugh at your own self.

And when a man can laugh at his own stupidities he is becoming wise. Laughter has to come out of awareness.

Ambitious people also laugh. Just the other day I was reading that when Jimmy Carter came to power he was laughing so beautifully that you could have counted his teeth. And some people have counted - eleven teeth were showing. Now only seven are showing. Now the smile is disappearing because his prestige is falling every day. People's expectations are not fulfilled: what he has promised he cannot deliver. Only seven! Soon you will see five, three, two. By the time he goes, the smile will have disappeared completely. You will not see a single tooth. This is not real laughter. Even this laughter is political, managed, practised, cultivated.

There is a different kind of laughter that comes to you when you see all kinds of foolishnesses that you have been in - and how seriously. When you see the whole ridiculousness of your life pattern, your whole gestalt and its stupidity - but not because I say or Buddha says or Master Lu-tsu says...

It is not a question of belief, it is not a question of somebody else's belief, it is not a question of somebody else's knowledge and you borrow it - borrowed knowledge never helps - it has to arise in you.

My effort here is to make you aware of all that is hidden in you. All that you have been doing unconsciously has to be done consciously, that's all. And sometimes miracles happen.

Once a professor came to me. His problem, and it was really a problem, because to be a professor and have such a problem is really difficult - his problem was that he walked like a woman. So whenever he passed by students would come and laugh and giggle and he felt really bad. What to do about it? And he had been to the doctors and the psychoanalysts and they could not help. They said, 'What can we do?' From his very childhood he had been walking that way. And he tried not to walk like that, and the more he tried, the more he failed.

There is a certain law - hypnotists call it the law of reverse effect. You try hard to do something and just the opposite happens.

So he was trying hard. His whole effort, his whole mind was concerned with not walking like a woman, but he was walking like a woman more and more. I told him, 'Just do one thing - because it is a miracle that you can walk like a woman, it is really a miracle.'

He said, 'What are you saying?'

I said, 'It is a miracle! A woman can walk that way because of a different musculature. Because of the womb she walks in a certain way. No man can walk like that. You are unique!'

He said, 'What are you saying? And everybody is laughing at me.'

I said, 'You are really unique. You have done something miraculous. It is magical. You forget all about it. My suggestion is that you start walking consciously like a woman. Make it a point to walk like a woman.'

He said, 'What are you suggesting? I have tried my whole life not to walk like a woman, then too I walk like a woman. And if I start walking like a woman what will happen?'

I said, 'You just try in front of me.' And at least twenty, thirty people were sitting there. He said, 'Here?' I said 'Here. You try.'

He tried and he failed! He could not - he could not walk like a woman. And he looked very surprised. He said, 'What happened?'

I said, 'You have to understand the law of reverse effect. Now go to the university, anywhere, and consciously try to walk like a woman - because it is very difficult to walk like a woman unless you are a woman.'

And since then he has not walked like a woman. He became conscious of it. It was an unconscious mechanism. Unconsciousness was the root cause of it. Just become conscious, and it disappears.

Man's problems are rooted in the unconscious. And what do you go on doing? You go on repressing those problems into the unconscious. Where else will you repress them? There is nowhere else to repress them. Whenever you repress something, you repress it into the unconscious. That's how the unconscious is created.

I don't have an unconscious because I never repress anything. The unconscious is created by repressions. The child does not have an unconscious. By and by he will have. And the old man has more of the unconscious than the conscious because he has been repressing his whole life.

The unconscious functions like a basement. Whatsoever is useless, you throw into the basement. It accumulates there. It becomes a junkyard. That is what your unconscious is.

And from the unconscious, things arise and take possession of you. All the ghosts that take possession of you come from the unconscious not from the graveyards. Your unconscious is the graveyard where those ghosts are born, and whenever they can find an opportunity, an occasion, to sneak up and possess you, they will possess you. And they possess with revenge, with a vengeance.

Now, to repress it is to help the unconscious more. That is the law of reverse effect. Your unconscious will become more and more powerful. You are feeding it and nourishing it. My whole approach is that consciousness is liberation. Awareness is the solution. Just become more conscious of whatsoever you are doing.

Once it happened...

Nagarjuna

A thief came to a great Master, Nagarjuna. He had come for a certain reason. Nagarjuna used to live naked - one of the great Indian mystics and one of the greatest alchemists.

He would have been the right person to comment on THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER. C.G. Jung was not the right person to comment on it.

He came into a great capital. The queen was a follower of Nagarjuna. She came with a golden begging bowl and told Nagarjuna, 'Give your wooden begging bowl to me. I will keep it as a treasure.

And I have brought this golden begging bowl for you.' She was afraid that maybe Nagarjuna would say, 'I don't touch gold, I am an ascetic.' But Nagarjuna was an enlightened person, he said, 'Okay.' So he took the golden begging bowl studded with valuable diamonds.

A thief saw Nagarjuna moving with the golden begging bowl, naked, and all those diamonds shining in the sun. He said, 'Look! How long can this man have this? Somebody is going to take it from him. Why not me? This naked man cannot keep it long. From where did he get it?'

So the thief followed Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna was staying outside the capital in the ruins of an old temple where there were no doors, not even windows - nothing - just walls all falling down, just a small shelter. A little bit of roof was still safe. The thief said, 'How will he protect his valuable thing? In the night at least he will go to sleep.'

So he waited outside by the side of the wall near a window. Nagarjuna wanted to have a little sleep in the afternoon - that was his habit. Seeing the thief following him, he knew perfectly well why he was following. He was not following Nagarjuna, he was following the golden bowl, so why force him to wait there? He was going to take it anyway. 'When I fall asleep,' thought Nagarjuna, 'he will take it, so why force him to wait unnecessarily?'

He threw the begging bowl out of the window. The thief could not believe what was happening. But this man looked really charismatic naked, so beautiful, so divine-looking, with such a precious thing with him, and he had thrown it! Now the thief could not leave. He was so attracted by the person, so enchanted, almost hypnotized. He looked in through the window and said, 'Sir, can I come in and have a Little chit-chat with you?'

Nagarjuna said, 'That's why I threw the bowl outside - so that you could come in. You would have come in when I had gone to sleep but that would have been meaningless. Come in!'

The thief came in and he said, 'Looking at you, seeing that you can throw such a valuable thing away so easily - and I know why you have thrown it, you have thrown it away i-or me - a great desire has arisen in me. Will there ever be a time when I will also be so detached, so aloof, so free of possessions as you are?'

Nagarjuna said, 'The time has come. Accidentally you are already caught. I will give you the secret of how to become transcendental to the world, how to go beyond, how not to possess.'

The man said, 'But let me first tell you that I am a thief. And I have gone to many saints before, but they all say - because I am a well-known thief - they all say, "First stop stealing, only then can you meditate." So let me tell you first. You may not know.'

Nagarjuna said, 'Then it simply shows that you have never been to a saint up to now. They must have been ex-thieves; otherwise who cares who you are? And why make it a condition that first you have to stop stealing? I will give you the meditation. It is very simple: you go on stealing. Just do one thing: do it consciously, do it with full awareness. When you are going to steal, move fully aware, alert to what you are doing. And after fifteen days you report to me.'

But by the seventh day the thief was back and he said, 'You deceived me. For seven days continuously I have not been able to steal. And it was not that I was prevented, I reach the places where great treasures are available, but I cannot do it. If I become aware, I start laughing at my foolishness. What am I doing - stealing things which will be taken away from me? Sooner or later I will have to die. The whole thing looks so childish. If I become aware, I cannot steal. If I steal, I lose my awareness. Both cannot go together.'

Nagarjuna said, 'Then you decide. Whichever you choose, you can choose. You can drop awareness and steal or, if you want to have awareness, then drop stealing.'

And the man said, 'I have tasted awareness. It is impossible to drop it. I will drop stealing, because awareness is far more valuable, far more significant. I have only tasted a little bit of it, but it gives such joy. And I have been stealing my whole life, and I have accumulated many valuable things in my house, but they have never given me any joy. They only give me more and more fear.'

Awareness is the only secret key: it transforms. It doesn't matter what your illness is, awareness is the only medicine: it cures all illness. If you are politically minded - and everybody is... In some way or other everybody is trying to be more powerful than the other. Even in relationships politics continue - the husband tries to be more powerful than the wife, the wife tries to be more powerful than the husband - hence the constant conflict, even between parents and children. Everywhere there is conflict. It is all politics, different faces of politics.

So when you come to me I cannot expect you to come without politics - that is impossible. If you are without politics, you will not need to come - wherever you are, God will come to you. When you come here I accept all your human weaknesses. I have no condemnation. I don't tell you to repress; I don't want to make you feel guilty about anything. If you want to play the game of politics you are allowed to play it - with only one condition: become more and more alert while playing it. Have a sense of humour, and then all is well. Sooner or later it will wither away of its own accord.

And so is the case with sensuality, sexuality; so is the case with possessiveness; so is the case with everything that man suffers from.

 

 

The Fifth Question:

Saguna, you are a fool. You should have allowed it to happen. You missed a great opportunity. If at any time you again start feeling that you are dying in my presence, die immediately! That means your ego was on the verge of disappearing and something tremendously valuable was about to happen. You missed it.

But the first time it happens that way to everybody. One shrinks back in fear, escapes back into his ego, clings, holds. Where can you find a better place to die? If you can die in my presence you will attain to life, eternal life, life abundant. If you can die in satsang, in the presence of the Master, you will be resurrected.

But that courage has to be there. Gather your courage, and next time it starts happening, let it happen.

The Sixth Question:

No, not always. Sometimes it helps too.

Meditate on this story.

Felix Simons was a nice guy but a social flop. Although he was thirty-five, he had never conquered his childhood habit of bedwetting. Finally, one of his friends told him, 'Look, Felix, you might as well know the truth. We're all very fond of you, but nobody can stand to come into your house because it smells, and you're driving your wife up a wall. Why don't you see a psychiatrist about your problem? Enuresis is not too uncommon and it can be cured. Get it over with once and for all!'

Felix was convinced. After six months of treatment he ran into the same friend.

'Well, Felix, did you take my advice?'

'Yes,' answered Felix, 'I've been seeing a psychiatrist three times a week for six months now.'

'Well, have you had any results?'

'Oh,' beamed Felix, 'great results!'

'You don't wet your bed anymore?'

'I still do, but now I'm proud of it!'

Psychoanalysis helps only in this way. It makes you proud of things you have been guilty about. Religion has created guilt in people. Psychoanalysis has moved to the other extreme - psychoanalysis is a reaction to religious guilt. This has to be understood.

Religion has done a great wrong to humanity. It has wounded the human heart by creating guilt. It lives on guilt - the whole religious world. Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan, these are only different names for the same trick - how to create guilt in people. Once you have created guilt in people, they are caught in your net; you can exploit them. Guilt is the spider's net. Make people feel guilty and they are in your power. Then you can manipulate them. You can force them to surrender. You can force them to do things for you, for the church, for the priest. They are guilty. They are afraid they are going to suffer, they want to find a way out.

First create guilt, then they are bound to come to you, because they will have to find a way out of guilt. Then tell them to pray, then tell them to do some ritual, some mantra. But first the guilt has to be created.

I have heard...

Two persons were doing great business. They were partners. The business was simple. One would enter a town in the night and throw coal tar on peoples' windows, and after two, three days, the other would come to clean. And he would make it known in the town that he knew how to clean coal tar from the windows. By the time he had cleaned the windows, the other would have prepared another town for him. Then he would go to the other town. They were doing really great business. They were partners.

Religion depends on creating guilt. First throw coal tar on people's hearts and then tell them how to cleanse it. And then they have to pay for it.

Psychoanalysis is a reaction. I don't call it a revolution but only a reaction. It reacted against this whole business and it started doing the opposite: it makes you proud of your things. It says, 'This is perfectly normal. If you are wetting your bed this is perfectly normal. There is nothing wrong in it. You should be really proud of it.' It gives support to you as you are.

Religion condemns you as you are. Psychoanalysis convinces you that you are the only way you can be, and you are perfectly right, you are okay. That is the message of psychoanalysis. Both are wrong. Neither do you need to feel guilty nor do you need to feel perfectly okay. If you feel guilty you will fall victim to the church, to the priest, and they will exploit you. If you start feeling you are perfectly okay, you become dormant; your growth stops.

You have to know one thing: that life means evolution, growth, life means going higher and higher - to new planitudes, to new planes of being. There is no need to feel guilty for what you are, but there is every need to have a tremendous longing to rise higher, because you are a seed, a potential, and you can become God. If you accept yourself as you are and you settle with it, you will remain a seed.

You will never become a tree and you will never be able to have a dialogue with the stars. You will not be able to play with the wind and the rain and the sun. You will remain shrunk into a seed. But there is no need to feel guilty. A seed is a seed - there is no need to feel guilty - but the seed has to become a tree. There is really a great need to inquire into one's potential. Never feel guilty, never feel proud. Just feel tremendously happy that a great opportunity has been given to you to grow.

And this whole life is a challenge to growth. That is true religion and that is true psychology too - because a true religion cannot be anything other than a true psychology. I call that psychology 'the psychology of the Buddhas'. It does not make you feel guilty; it accepts you, it loves you, but it doesn't make you feel proud to be as you are. It gives you a great challenge to be more than you are. It gives you a divine discontent. It makes you aflame with a desire to go higher and higher - not higher than others, but higher than yourself. Tomorrow should not be just a repetition of today - that is the meaning of divine discontent. Today should not be just a repetition of yesterday, otherwise you have not lived. Today must bring some new gifts to you, some new flowers, some new rays. Some new windows must open today.

To feel guilty means to remain possessed by the past; to feel proud means to remain wherever you are, whatsoever you are. To have a divine discontent means to grow, to search, to seek, to explore. And life is nothing but an adventure, a constant adventure, into the unknown.

So I don't want you to feel guilty and I don't want you to feel proud. When you drop both, real life begins.

And the Last Question: Question 7:

It is not only difficult, it is impossible. It is really a miracle if sometimes it happens, because two persons are two persons. Their past experiences are different, their gestalt is different, their knowledge is different, their personalities are different. They are two worlds. They speak different languages; it may be the same language, but they speak different languages. They give different meaning to words, different nuances, different shades and different colours.

When you are looking at a rose flower and if there are five persons looking at the rose flower, don't think for a single moment that you are looking at the same rose flower - you cannot; only five Buddhas standing beside the flower will be able to look at the same rose flower. You cannot, because five Buddhas means five zeros, five no-minds. Only two no-minds can commune because there is nothing to hinder now, nothing to interpret with. It is direct.

But when five minds are standing beside the rose flower they only believe that they are looking at the same rose flower, because they have different ideas of the rose, different experiences of the rose, different past impacts of the rose. All that is there in their eyes, layer upon layer. This rose is so far away, so distant.

For example, one may have loved a woman who was obsessed by roses, but she betrayed him. Now the rose will only remind him of that betrayal and the woman. That is not the others' experience.

The other may have seen a dead man garlanded with a rose garland. The rose will remind him of death - he may feel a little fear. The third may have his own experience of the rose. It will depend.

And that's how it is with each experience .

Only two no-minds can communicate. Even without words, communication happens. It is a communion. But minds are bound to clash, conflict.

I will tell you a few stories.

First:

Seated in an elegantly appointed restaurant, Chico Marx was studying the oversized menu when the head waiter approached his table. The waiter folded his hands in front of him and with proper Continental demeanour enquired, 'And what is your pleasure, Monsieur?'

'Girls,' Chico replied. 'What's yours?'

The second story:

The young husband and his bride flew to Miami for their honeymoon and for days neither hide nor hair was seen of them. On the morning of the sixth day, they entered the dining-room for breakfast.

As the waiter approached them for their order the bride turned to her husband and said coyly, 'You know what I'd like, honey, don't you?'

'Yes, I know,' he replied wearily, 'but we have got to eat some time too!'

And the third story:

The boss had been after his secretary for almost a year. He had been suggesting all kinds of things to her. On this particular evening he was unusually persistent.

'Oh, come on!' he said. 'Let's go out and have supper, then go to the theatre, then to a nightclub and then we will go up to my apartment.'

The blond clipped back, 'I would like you to comprehend that I am adamant and didactic in my refusal of your salacious, mendacious and denigrating proposition.'

The boss said, 'I don't get it.'

The secretary answered, 'That's just what I have been trying to tell you.'

Language is the problem. Different experiences, different minds, different pasts, different patterns, different habits, different personalities.

You ask me why it is difficult to communicate. It is not only difficult, it is almost impossible. If once in a while it happens, feel tremendously fortunate. Yes, once in a while it happens. When you are deeply in love with somebody, it happens. Then language is not needed, then your very presence, your very vibe communicates. Then, for a moment, in deep love, you slip out of your minds. In deep love, for a moment you become Buddhas, you become no-minds.

So only in rare moments of love does communication happen, otherwise it is always a quarrel, a subtle conflict. You say one thing, the other understands something else. The other says something, you understand something else. If you really want to communicate, become more and more loving - because love is needed, not language. Language is a barrier, love is a bridge.

If you really want to communicate, start slipping out of your mind. Become more and more zeros, no-minds, and suddenly you will see miracles happening.

It is happening here. The new people who come here are not in tune with me. For a few days I say something, they understand something else. But as they become more and more open to my love, communication starts happening. To those who have really lived long with me and have become intimate, to those with whom the barrier of language has disappeared, just a look in their eyes or just a touch of my hand, and there is communication - not only communication, but communion.

That's why just recently I have started a new way of communing with my sannyasins: just to touch them, just to let them feel my energy. The more you become intimate with me, the less and less words will be needed - because you will start hearing me, and then there will be no need of words. I will continue to speak for those who will be coming - more and more will be coming, thousands are on the way - but those who have been here with me long enough or deep enough... And depth can happen even in a single moment. It is not only a question of time, it is a question of intensity.

Sometimes it happens that when a person comes to me for the first time, the first moment of contact, and he becomes intimate as if he has been with me for many lives. And not only do I feel that, he also immediately feels that he has come home, that this is the place he has been searching for his whole life or for many lives. Then communication immediately happens, then there is no conflict.

In fact, the moment that there is communion and there is no conflict is the moment of your real initiation. Then what I say is secondary, what I am becomes primary. Then you relate to me directly. Then you are not distracted by my words - because I am not a consistent man, I contradict myself.

And I contradict myself deliberately to help you to get rid of your expectation of consistency, to help you to get rid of language. Listening to me contradicting myself again and again, slowly slowly you will see that words are only games; you will not be serious about words. The day that awakening has happened in you, you relate to me directly. Then there is no medium needed; then you are bridged.

I am in love, I am love. The moment you are in love and you become love, communion happens. Communion is a function of love, not of language. In fact, language functions as a hindrance, not as a help.

Remember it: to be with me is to be with an emptiness, a nobody. I have nothing to offer to you, I have nothing to teach you, I have no philosophy. I am, but I have no philosophy. I am, but I have nothing to offer. I am, but I have nothing to teach. And you have to learn to be with this l-amness.

And then you will know what communion is. Communion is a phenomenon of love, a flowering of love. It has nothing to do with language, with words - not at all; it is silence.

The first question:

A new man is emerging. The image of the new man is not yet clear, but the horizon is becoming red and the sun will soon be there. The morning mist is there and the image of the new man is vague, but still a few things are very crystal clear about the new man.

And this is of tremendous importance because since the monkey became man, man has remained the same. A great revolution is on the way. It will be far more deep-going than the revolution that happened when monkeys started walking on the earth and became human beings. That change created mind, that change brought psychology in. Now another far more significant change is going to happen that will bring the soul in, and man will not only be a psychological being but a spiritual being too.

You are living in one of the most alive times ever.

The new man has already arrived in fragments, but only in fragments. And the new man has been arriving for centuries, but only here and there. That's how things happen. When the spring comes it starts with one flower. But when the one flower is there, then one can be certain: that spring is not faraway - it has come. The first flower has heralded its coming: Zarathustra, Krishna, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Jesus - these were the first flowers. Now the new man is going to be born on a greater scale.

According to me, this new consciousness is the most important thing that is happening today. I would like to tell you something about this new consciousness, its orientations, and its characteristics, because you are to help it come out of the womb - because, you have to be it. The new man cannot come from nowhere, he has to come through you. The new man can only be born through your womb. You have to become the womb.

Sannyas is an experiment to clean the ground so that new seeds can fall in. If you understand the meaning of 'the new man', you will be able to understand the significance of sannyas too. And it is because sannyas is concerned with the new man that the old orthodoxies of all kinds are going to be against - me & against sannyas - because this will be their end. If sannyas succeeds, if the new man succeeds, the old will have to go. The old can live only if the new man is prevented from coming.

It cannot be prevented now, because it is not only a question of the new man's coming into existence, it is a question of the survival of the whole earth, of consciousness itself, of life itself. It is a question of life and death.

The Old Man Has Created All The Wars & Misery

The old man has come to utter destructiveness. The old man has reached the end of his tether. Now there is no life possible with the old concept of man but only death. The old man is preparing for a global [nuclear] suicide. The old man is piling up atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, in order to commit a collective suicide. This is a very unconscious desire. Rather than allowing the new man to be, the old man would like to destroy the whole thing.

You have to understand, you have to protect the new, because the new carries the whole future with it. And man has come to a stage where a great quantum leap is possible.

The old man was other-worldly, the old man was against this world. The old man was always looking to the heavens. The old man was more concerned with life after death rather than life before death. The new man's concern will be life before death. The new man's concern will be 'this' life, because if 'this' life is taken care of, the other will follow of its own accord. One need not worry about it, one need not think about it.

The old man was too concerned with God. That concern was out of fear. The new man will not be concerned with God, but will live and love this world, and out of that love he will experience the existence of God. The old man was speculative, the new man is going to be existential.

The old man can be defined in the Upanishadic statement: NETI-NETI, not this, not this. The old man was negative - life-negative, life-denying. The new man will be life-affirming: ITI-ITI, 'this' and 'this'. The old man's concern was 'that', the new man's concern will be 'this', because out of 'this', 'that' is born, and if you become too concerned with 'that', you miss both.

Tomorrow is in the womb of today. Take care of today and you have taken care of tomorrow. There is no need to be in any way worried about tomorrow. If you become too worried about tomorrow you have missed today. And tomorrow will come as today - it always comes as today. If you have learned this suicidal habit of missing today, you will miss tomorrow also. You will go on missing.

The old man was continuously missing, was miserable, sad, angry. And because he was sad, he has been against the world, he blamed the world, he blamed samsara - the world. He said, 'It is because of the world that I am in misery.' It is not so. The world is immensely beautiful, it is all beauty, bliss and benediction. There is nothing wrong with the world. Something was wrong with the old mind. The old mind was either past-oriented or future-oriented, which are not really different orientations.

The old mind was concerned with that which is not. The new man will be utterly in tune with that which is, because it is God, it is reality: iti-iti, 'this is it'. This moment has to be lived in its totality. This moment has to be lived in its spontaneity, with no a priori ideas. The old man was carrying ready-made answers. He was stuffed with philosophy, religion and all kinds of nonsense.

The new man is going to live life without any a priori conclusion about it. Without any conclusion one has to face existence, and then one knows what it is. If you have already concluded, your conclusion will become a barrier. It will not allow you inquiry - your conclusion will become a blindfold. It will not allow you to see the truth - your investment will be in the conclusion. You will distort reality to fit your conclusion. That's what has been done up to now.

The new man will not be Hindu, will not be Mohammedan, will not be Christian, will not be communist. The new man will not know all these 'isms'. The new man will simply be an opening, a window to reality. He will allow reality as it is. He will not project his own mind upon it. He will not use reality as a screen. His eyes will be available; they will not be full of ideas.

The new man will not live out of belief, he will simply live. And remember, only those who can simply live, without belief, come to know what truth is. The believer or the disbeliever never come to know what truth is. Their beliefs are too heavy on their minds. They are surrounded too much by their belief systems. The new man will not know any belief system. He will watch, he will observe, he will see, he will live, and he will allow all kinds of experiences. He will be available, he will be multi-dimensional. He will not carry scriptures in his head, he will carry only alertness, awareness. He will be meditative.

The old man lived out of fear - even his God was nothing but a creation out of fear. His temples, mosques, gurudwaras, churches - they were all out of fear. He was trembling, he was afraid.

The new man will live out of love, not out of fear, because fear serves death, love serves life. And if you live out of fear you will never know what life is, you will only know death again and again. And remember, the person who lives out of fear creates all kinds of situations in which he has to feel more and more fear. Your fear creates situations, just as your love creates situations. If you love, you will find so many occasions to be loving. If you are afraid, you will find so many occasions to be afraid.

Love is going to be the taste of the new consciousness. Because fear was the taste of the old consciousness, it created wars. In three thousand years man has fought five thousand wars - as if we have not been doing anything else - continuous fighting somewhere or other. This is a very mad state of affairs. Humanity's past is insane.

The new man will become discontinuous with this insane past. He will believe in love, not in war. He will believe in life, not in death. He will be creative, not destructive. His science, his art - all will serve creativity. He will not create bombs. He will not be political, because politics is out of hatred.

Politics is rooted in fear, hate, destructiveness. The new man will not be political. He will not have any political ambition, because it is stupid to have political ambition. The new man is going to be very intelligent. The first signs of that intelligence are rising on the horizon. Those who have eyes - they can see it. The children are rebelling.

It is a great moment of rejoicing that all over the world young people are rebelling against all kinds of orthodoxies - whether the orthodoxy is that of church or state doesn't matter. They are not ready to obey - not that they are determined to disobey, they are not determined to disobey either. They will meditate, and if they feel like obeying they will obey. If they feel like disobeying, they will disobey.

They have no fixed ideology. 'My country right or wrong' - such stupid statements they cannot make. Sometimes it is wrong, sometimes it is right. When it is right, the new man will support it. When it is wrong... Whether it is one's own country or not will not matter. It may be one's own family, one's own father, mother, but if it is wrong, it is wrong.

The new man will live not out of prejudices but out of spontaneous responsibility. The old man was a slave, the new man will be free, the new man will have freedom at the very core of his being.

The old man was very serious, the old man was a 'workoholic'. The new man will be playful - homo ludens. He will believe in enjoying life. He will drop words like 'duty', 'sacrifice'. He will not sacrifice for anything. He will not be a victim to any altar - that of the state or of the religion, of the priest or of the politician. He will not allow anybody to exploit his life - 'Go and die because your country is at war.'

His commitment is towards life, his commitment is not towards anything else. He wants to live in joy, he wants to rejoice in all the gifts of God, he wants to celebrate. Alleluia will be his only mantra. Jesus says, 'Rejoice, rejoice. I say unto you rejoice.' Man has not rejoiced yet. Man has lived under a great burden of seriousness: Work for the country. Work for the family. Work for the wife. Work for the children. Work for your father and mother. Just go on working & working and then one day die and disappear into the grave. And then others will work. And it goes on & on & on. Nobody seems to have any time to enjoy life.

And I am not saying that the new man will not work. He will work, but that will not be his addiction. He will not be a 'workoholic', it will not be a drug, he will work because he needs a few things, but he will not continuously work for more and more. He will not be accumulative. He will not believe in having a big bank balance, and he will not believe in having a very high post; rather, he will want to sing a song, to play on the flute, on the guitar, to dance. He will not want to become famous, he will want to live, authentically live. He will be ready to be a nobody.

And that is already happening. The first rays are already available. It is still hidden in the morning mist, but if you search you will find it. The new children, the new generation, are a totally different kind of generation, hence the generation gap. It is very real. It has never been so - never before has there been any generation gap. This is the first time in the whole of human history that there is a gap. The children are speaking a different language from their parents. The parents cannot understand because the parents want them to succeed. And the children say, 'But what is the point of success if you cannot sing a song, and you cannot dance, and you cannot enjoy, and you cannot love? What is the point of being successful? Why? What is going to happen through success? Even if the whole world knows my name, what is that going to give me?'

The old generation believes in money. And you will be surprised that the belief in money is so deep that even those who renounce money - they also believe in money; otherwise there is no need to renounce it. And those who praise renunciation - they also believe in money. The more money you renounce, the greater you are. So the measurement is of money. Money remains the criterion. In the world if you have more money you are great. And even in the world of the monks: 'How much have you renounced?' If you have renounced more money, then you are more important. Money remains important even there.

The new generation is not going to be money-manic. And remember, I am not saying it is going to be against money, it will use money. In the past money has used man, in the past man has lived in such an unconscious way that he thought he possessed things, but things possessed him. The new man will be able to use things. The new man will use money, will use technology, but the new man will remain the master. He is not going to become a victim, an instrument. This, according to me, is the greatest thing that is happening.

A few characteristics. The new consciousness is going to run counter to all orthodoxies. Any kind of orthodoxy, Catholic or communist, Hindu or Jaina - any kind of orthodoxy - is a kind of paralysis of the mind. It paralyzes. You stop living. It becomes a rigidity around you. You become a fanatic, you become stubborn. You become rock-like. You don't behave like a liquid human being, you start behaving like a mule. One starts behaving in a mulish way, stubborn, dead set, no possibility of changing, no flexibility, no fluidity. But in the past that has been praised very much: people call it consistency, certainty. It is not. It is neither consistency nor certainty; it is simply deadness.

An alive person has to remain flowing. He has to respond to the changing situations. And situations are continuously changing. How can you remain fixed in your attitudes when life itself is not fixed? When life is a river how can you remain stubborn? And if you remain stubborn, you lose contact with life - you are already in your grave.

The new consciousness will be non-orthodox, non-fanatic; it will be fluid. It will not react, it will respond. And the difference between these two words is great.

Reaction is always rigid. You have a fixed idea, you react out of it. Before the question is raised, the answer is ready. Response is totally different. You listen to the question, you absorb the question, you see the situation, you feel the situation, you live the situation, and out of that very living your response arises. A responsible man cannot be stubborn, cannot be certain, cannot be rigid. He will have to live moment to moment. He cannot decide beforehand, he will have to decide every day, each moment. And because he has to move continuously with life and its changing challenges, he cannot be consistent in the old sense. His consistency will be only one: that he will always be in tune with life. That will be his consistency - not that he has a certain idea and he remains consistent with that idea and goes on sacrificing life for it.

There was a case against Mulla Nasrudin in the court and the magistrate asked him, 'Mulla, how old are you?'

He said, 'Forty.'

The magistrate said, 'But this is strange. You surprise me, because five years ago you were in court, and that time also you said forty.'

Mulla said, 'Yes, I am a consistent man. Once I have said something, you can believe me. I will never say anything else.'

This is one type of consistency.

The new man will find it ridiculous. But the old man has been consistent in this way: in his character, in his statements, in his hypocrisy. The old man used to decide once and for all. Psychologists say that almost fifty percent of your life is decided by the time you are seven years old - fifty percent! - and then you remain consistent with it. And life goes on changing - no wonder that you are left behind, that you start dragging, that you lose joy, that you lose the quality of dance. How can you dance? you are so far behind life. You are dead wood, you don't grow. An alive tree grows, changes; as the season changes, the tree changes. An alive person grows, and to the very moment of death he continuously goes on growing. He never knows any end to his growth.

Psychologists say the average mental age of man is thirteen. This is the situation. This is how the old man has lived up to now. A thirteen-year mental age means: at the age of thirteen people have stopped growing. Yes, they go on growing old, but they don't grow up. Growing old is one thing, growing up is totally different. Growing old is a physiological phenomenon; growing up means maturity, wisdom. And only those who go on flowing with life grow up.

The new man will not be obedient to stupid ideas that have been given from the past. And they may not have been stupid when they were born, they may have been relevant in those circumstances; but as circumstances change, things become stupid. If you carry them, if you go on persisting in your old fixed routines, you start behaving in an absurd way.

Now, look. Some religion is five thousand years old. That means five thousand years ago its rituals were born and since then they have remained fixed. How dangerous it is! How crippling! How can man be alive if these five-thousand-year-old rituals surround his soul?

The new man will be creative. Each moment he will find his religion, each moment he will find his philosophy. And everything will remain growing. He will not be obedient to the past, he cannot be - to be obedient to the past is to be obedient to death, because the past is dead; he will be obedient to the present. And in being obedient to the present, he will be rebellious against the past.

To be rebellious is going to be one of his most prominent characteristics. And because he will be rebellious he will not fit in with a dead society, he will not fit in with a dead church, he will not fit in with a dead army. He will not fit anywhere where obedience is a basic requirement.

The new man is bound to create a new society around himself. First consciousness becomes new, then society becomes new. There is going to be a long period in which the old will resist the new, will fight with the new, will try to destroy the new. But the old cannot succeed - time, the spirit of time, will not be in its favour. The old has to die. Just as the old body dies and makes space for some new child, so old societies, old orthodoxies, have to die. They have already lived overtime. They have lived too long!

The new consciousness will not be moralistic, will not be puritan; not that it will not have any morality, but it will have a different kind of morality - a morality that arises out of one's own feeling for life, one's sensitivity, one's own experiences - not a morality learned from others, borrowed. The new man will not be a man of character in the old sense, because all character is binding. It creates an armour around you. The new man will be characterless in the sense that he will not have any armour. The new man will be characterless in the sense that he will not have a prison cell around him. Not that he will not have character, but he will give a new definition to character. He will not be a hypocrite.

The old puritanism, the old moralistic attitudes have created hypocrisy in the world; they have made man schizophrenic: on the surface one thing, deep within something else - almost the opposite.

The old man lived a double life. The new man is going to live in a unitary way. He will live a single life. Whatsoever is inside him will also be his outside. He will be authentic. Remember this word 'authenticity' - that is going to be the new man's religion. That is going to be the new man's truth, his temple, his God - authenticity. And with authenticity neurosis disappears. The old man was neurotic because he was constantly in conflict: he wanted to do one thing and he was always doing something else, because something else was required. He was taught to do something against himself; he was repressive. His own authenticity was repressed, and on top of it a bogus character was imposed.

We have praised these phony people too long. Now the time has come - their phoniness should be exposed. We have praised these mahatmas and saints so long, now we have to see their neurosis.

They were all psychologically ill, they were pathological. A healthy person is a whole person. His inside and his outside are the same. If he loves, he loves passionately. If he is angry, he is angry passionately. His anger has truth in it as much as his love has truth in it. The old man boils within and smiles on the outside. He lives without passion, without energy. He lives without any flame. His whole life is an exercise in phoniness and, naturally, he suffers. A long futile story is all that his life is '... a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'

The new man will not be a tale told by an idiot, but will be a poem sung out of wholeness, will be a dance of immense joy for God's gift of life and being, for the flowers and the trees and the birds, and the sun and the sand and the sea. The new man will not look somewhere faraway for God, he will look here, close-by. Now will be his only time, here will be his only space.

The new man will be earthly. And by 'earthly' I don't mean materialistic. The new man will be a realist. He will love this earth. Because we have not loved this earth and our so-called religions have been teaching us to hate this earth, we have destroyed it. It is a beautiful planet, one of the most beautiful, because one of the most alive. This planet has to be loved, this planet has to be rejoiced in. It is a gift. This body has so many mysteries in it that even a Buddha is possible only because of this body. This body becomes the temple of the greatest possibility: Buddhahood, nirvana. This body has to be loved. This earth has to be loved.

The new man will find his religion in nature - not in dead stone statues, but in living dancing trees in the wind. He will find his religion surfing on the sea, climbing on the virgin mountain. He will find his prayer with the snow, with the moon, with the stars. He will be in dialogue with existence as it is. He will not live with abstract ideas, he will live with realities. His commitment will be to nature, and through that commitment he will come to know super-nature. God is hidden here in this earth, in this very body. This very body, the Buddha. This very earth, the paradise.

The new man will read the scripture of nature. This will be his Veda, his Koran, his Bible. Here he will find sermons in the stones. He will try to decipher the mysteries of life, he will not try to demystify life. He will try to love those mysteries, to enter in those mysteries. He will be a poet, he will not be a philosopher. He will be an artist, he will not be a theologian. His science will also have a different tone. His science will be that of Tao, not an effort to conquer nature, because that effort is just foolish. How can you conquer nature? - you are part of nature. His science will be of understanding nature, not of conquering nature. He will not rape nature, he will love and persuade nature to reveal its secrets.

The new man will not be ambitious, will not be political. Politics has no future; politics has existed because of the neurosis of humankind. Once the neurosis disappears, politics will disappear. Ambition simply means you are missing something and you are consoling yourself that you will get it in the future. Ambition is a consolation. Today it is all misery, tomorrow there will be joy. Looking at tomorrow you become capable of tolerating today & its misery: today is always hell, tomorrow is heaven. You keep on looking at heaven, you keep on hoping. But that hope is not going to be fulfilled ever because tomorrow never comes. Ambition means you are incapable of transforming your today into a beatitude; you are impotent. Only impotent people are ambitious: they seek money, they seek power. Only impotent people seek power and money.

The potential person lives. If money comes his way, he lives the money too, but he does not seek it, he is not after it. He is not afraid of it either. The old man was either after money or afraid of money, either after power or afraid of power; but in both ways his whole focus was on power and money. He was ambitious. The old man is pitiable. He was ambitious because he was unable to live, unable to love. The new man will be able to live and able to love. And his herenow is going to be so beautiful, why should he be worried about tomorrow? His concern will not be with having more, his concern will be with BEING more - another very important distinction to be remembered. His concern will be with being more, not having more.

Having more is just a substitute for being more. You have more money, so you think you are more. You have more power, so you think you are more. Deep down you remain the same beggar. Alexander dies as empty-handed as any beggar.

Being more is a totally different dimension. Being more means getting in touch with your reality, getting in tune with your being, and helping yourself to fall in harmony with the universe. To be in harmony with the universe you become more. The more you are in tune with existence, the more you are. If the harmony is total, you are a god. That's why we call Buddha a god, Mahavira a god - utter total harmony with existence, no conflict at all. They have dissolved themselves into the whole, they have become the whole - just as a dewdrop disappears into the ocean and becomes the ocean. They have died in their egos, now they live as existence itself.

The new man will have no use for sham, facade or pretense, he will be true, because only through truth is there liberation. All lies create bondages. Tell a single lie and you will have to tell a thousand and one to defend it - you will have to tell lies ad nauseam. Then there is no end to it. A single lie sooner or later will spread all over your being. It is like cancer.

Be truthful and you need not hide, you can be open. Be truthful and you need not protect yourself against existence, you can be vulnerable. In that vulnerability existence penetrates you, God reaches your heart. Tell a lie and you are afraid. You will be afraid of God too, you will be afraid of facing him. You will be afraid of facing yourself. You will be continuously escaping from yourself, from others, from God. You will be constantly hiding behind your pretensions. Hypocrisy will become your life style, and that's where hell exists. Hypocrisy creates hell. Authenticity is the only joy - the ONLY joy, I say. And if you are not authentic you will never be joyous.

The new consciousness will not put up with double-talk. The new consciousness will hate this kind of thing with a passion. This hatred for phoniness is the deepest mark of the new man. The new man will be opposed to structured, inflexible and infallible systems, because life is a beautiful flow. It is not structured, it is freedom. It is not a prison, it is a temple. He will want organizations to be fluid, changing, adapting and human. Our states are inhuman, our armies are inhuman, our churches are inhuman. They dehumanize man. They reduce man into a thing because they don't respect man's freedom. The new man will respect his freedom and respect others' freedom, too.

The old man is constantly interfering, poking his nose into everybody's affairs, trying to manipulate, criticizing, condemning, rewarding, punishing. The old man is continuously concerned with others: 'What are you doing?'

I was staying in Bombay once. A Parsee woman came to me because just the day before I had criticized Satya Sai Baba and had called him a phony guru. She came to see me and she said, 'I have come to tell you a few more things.' She was thinking that I would be very happy because she had brought some information against Satya Sai Baba. She said, 'He is a homosexual. And I know it from reliable sources.'

I said, 'But why should you be concerned? Homosexual or heterosexual - that is his business. It is his life. Who are you? Why should you be bothered about it?'

She was very shocked when I said that. She had come feeling that I would be very grateful to her, because she was giving me such great information.

Why should you be concerned? Can't you leave people to their own life? I criticize only when the other's life is concerned; otherwise there is no question of criticism. What Satya Sai Baba is doing with his sexuality is his business, it is nobody else's business.

But the old woman was constantly poking her nose into everybody's affairs.

It happens here every day. The old kind of people come and they are very much in agony because some man is holding some woman's hand. Why? - he is not holding your hand. And if those two persons have decided to hold hands, they have absolute freedom to do that. And if they are enjoying, who are you to interfere? If the man is holding some woman's hand against her will, then maybe your help is needed; but if they both are willing then you should not be concerned at all. But this is the old consciousness. It is always trying to find ways and means to manipulate others, to be dominant over others.

The new consciousness will leave everyone to his own life. Unless somebody is harming others, he should not be prevented. Unless somebody is a danger to others, he should not be prevented. Unless somebody is interfering in somebody else's freedom, he should not be interfered with.

The old world remained without individuality. It hated individuality, it liked only sheep, crowds - people behaving in the same way with everybody following the same routine and the same structure.

The new man will allow all kinds of possibilities. The new man will love liquid structures. He will be human, he will respect human beings. His respect will be almost religious. The new man will have to find new forms of community, of closeness, of intimacy, of shared purpose, because the old society is not going to disappear immediately. It will linger, it will put up all kinds of fight to the new society - as it always happens. It has so many vested interests, it cannot go easily. It will go only when it becomes impossible for it to remain in existence. Before it goes the new man will have to create new kinds of communes, new kinds of families, new communities of closeness, intimacy, shared purpose.

That's why I am trying to create a small commune where you can be totally yourself - away from the structured and the rotten world - and you can be given absolute freedom. It will be an experiment, because the future is going to move on those lines. It will be a small experiment but of immense significance.

The new consciousness will not have anything to do with institutions like marriage. The new man will have a natural distrust of marriage as an institution. A man-woman relationship has deep value for him only when it is a mutually enhancing, growing, flowing relationship. He will have little regard for marriage as a ceremony or for vows of permanence which prove to be highly impermanent. He will love the moment and live it in its totality.

Marriage has no future. Love has a future. In the past love was not a reality, marriage was a reality. In the future love is going to be the reality and marriage is going to become more and more unreal. In the past people were married to each other, hence by and by they started liking and loving. In the future people will love and like each other, only then will they live together. In the past to live together came first and, naturally, when you live together, a liking arises, a dependence arises. It was a need phenomenon. The husband needed the wife, the wife needed the husband, and then the children needed the parents to be together. It was, more or less, an economic phenomenon; but it was not out of love.

The future will know a different kind of relationship which is based purely on love and which will remain in existence only while love remains. And there will be no hankering for its permanence, because in life nothing is permanent; only plastic flowers are permanent. Real roses are born in the morning and are gone by the evening. And that is their beauty: they are beautiful when they come, and they are beautiful when their petals start withering away. Their life is beautiful, their birth is beautiful, their death is beautiful, because there is aliveness. A plastic flower is never born, never lives, never dies.

Marriage has been a plastic flower in the past. The new consciousness can have no respect for marriage. It will have to create a new kind of intimacy - friendship. And it will have to learn to live with the impermanent phenomenon of love and of everything.

It needs guts to live with the impermanence of life, because each time something changes you have to change yourself again. One wants to remain fixed - it seems safer, more secure. That's how the old man has lived. The old man was not adventurous; his whole concern was security. The new man will have the spirit of adventure; his concern will not be security, his concern will be ecstasy.

He will not believe, because belief is a search for security, he will explore. He may not have neat answers to every question, but he will accept every challenge to inquire, to explore. He will go as far as life can take him, he will try to reach to the stars; but he will remain open. He will not start with a belief, with a conclusion, he will start only with a quest, a question. To start with a belief is not to start at all. To start with a belief is just playing a game with yourself. You have already believed, how can you explore? To explore one has to be agnostic. And that is going to be the religion of the future: agnosticism.

One will be capable and courageous enough to say, 'I don't know, but I am interested in knowing. And I am ready to go into any dimension, into any adventure.' The new man will be ready to risk. The old man was very businesslike, never ready to risk. Risk was anathema; security was his goal. But with security you start dying. It is only in adventure, continuous adventure, that life grows to higher and higher plenitudes, that it reaches to the Himalayan peaks.

The new person will be a spontaneous person, unpredictable, willing to risk newness, often willing to risk saying or doing the wild, the far-out thing. He will believe that everything is possible and anything can be tried. He will not cling to the known, he will always remain available to the unknown, even to the unknowable. And he will not sacrifice for any future, because he will not be an idealist. He will not sacrifice for any abstract ideas, ideals, ideologies.

He will have a trust in his own experience and a profound distrust of all external authority. The new man will trust only his own experience. Unless he knows something, he will not trust it. No external authority can help the new man. Nobody can say, 'I say so, so you have to believe. Because we have always believed, so you have to believe. Because our forefathers believed, so you have to believe. Because it is written in the Vedas and the Bible, you have to believe.' The new man is not going to have anything to do with such nonsense, the new man will not believe, because he will know. This is real trust - trust in one's own possibilities, one's own potential. The new man will respect himself. To believe in external authorities is disrespectful towards one's own being.

And, finally, the new man will like being close to elemental nature: to the sea, the sun, the snow; flowers, animals, birds; to life, growth, death.

This, according to me, is the most important phenomenon that is happening today. A new man is coming into existence. The first rays are already on the horizon. Prepare yourself to receive the new man. Get ready. Become a host to the guest who is just about to knock on your doors at any moment. And that's what sannyas is all about: a preparation - getting ready to receive the new man. It is going to be a great adventure to receive the new man. It is going to be risky, too, because the old will not like it.

Now you can understand why the orthodox mind is against me. I am preparing their graveyard, and I am preparing for something new. I am preparing a garden for the new. You are to open your hearts for the new. Uproot all the weeds of the old, drop all the conditionings that the old has given to you, so you can receive the new.

And remember, the days of the messiahs are over. Don't wait for Christ's coming again, and don't wait for Buddha's coming again. Nobody comes again, at least not Buddha and Christ. Those who come again are the people who live without learning anything from life. Buddha has learned the lesson; he will not be coming again. Christ has learned the lesson; he will not be coming again.

Don't wait for any messiah to come; wait for a new consciousness, not for a messiah to deliver you. That is what the old man used to believe - somebody will come. Hindus think Krishna will come: 'When things are really dark and difficult and dismal, Krishna will come and deliver us.' All nonsense! All holy cowdung!

A new consciousness is going to deliver you, not some person - Buddha, Krishna, Christ. They were here and they could not deliver you. No single person can do it - it is impossible. Only a new consciousness can deliver man from his bondage. And the new consciousness can come only through you. You have to become the womb, you have to accept it, receive it, prepare yourself for it.

Sannyas is nothing but getting ready for something immensely valuable, so that when the gift comes you are not fast asleep, so that when the new consciousness knocks on your door you are ready to embrace it.