ONE DAY, a king called his clever jester and gave him a staff in front of all the court saying, 'Take this staff as a wand of office and keep it till you find a greater fool than yourself. If you find one, give this wand to him.'

Some time later, the king was sick and lay dying. He wanted to see his jester, of whose truthfulness he was sure. When the jester came, the king said to him, 'I have called you to tell you that I am going on a long journey.'

'Where are you going?' asked the jester.

'To a faraway country - to another world.'

'My master, have you made provision for your journey and your stay there?'

'None whatever, my little fool.'

'Have you any friends to welcome you there?'

'No one!' replied the king.

Then the jester shook his head sadly and put the staff into the king's hand and said, 'Take this staff, your Majesty. This belongs to you, for you are going to another world without preparation. Surely this wand belongs to you and to nobody else.'

Life is an occasion to prepare for death and the beyond. If you don't prepare for death and for the beyond you are a fool; you are missing a great opportunity.

Life is only an opportunity. This life that you know is not real life, it is only an opportunity to attain to real life. The real life is just hidden somewhere within this life, but it has to be provoked, it has to be awakened. It is fast asleep, it is not yet aware of itself. And if your real life is not aware of itself, your whole so-called life will be nothing but a long dream. And it cannot be sweet either - it will become a nightmare.

To live without being rooted in the real life is to live like a tree without being rooted in the soil. That's why there is no beauty, that's why there is no grace. That's why you don't see the splendour of man that the Buddhas talk about.

Jesus goes on saying again and again, 'The kingdom of God is within you.' But you don't seem to be like an emperor. Jesus says to his disciples, 'Look at the lilies in the field. How beautiful they are! Even Solomon, the great king, was not so beautiful attired in all his grandeur as these poor lily flowers.'

Why are the lilies so beautiful and man so ugly? Why is only man ugly? Have you ever seen an ugly parrot, or an ugly peacock, or an ugly lion, or an ugly deer? Ugliness seems to be something human.

A peacock is a peacock and a deer is a deer. But a man is not necessarily a man. A man is man only when he is a Buddha or a Christ or a Krishna - when he has become aware of his total being. Otherwise, you live groping in the dark; you live in the dark caves of the unconscious. You only appear to be conscious. Your consciousness is very fragile, it is very momentary. It is a very thin surface - it is not even skin-deep - just a little scratch and you lose your consciousness.

Somebody insults you; just a word, or just a glance, and all your consciousness is gone and you are a rage, anger, violence, aggression. In a moment your humanity disappears, you are again wild, again an animal. And man can fall below the animals, because when he falls there is nothing to stop him. Man can rise above the angels, but it rarely happens because to rise above the angels is an uphill task, arduous. One has to work for it. It needs hard work, it needs guts, courage, to explore the unknown.

Millions of people are born and die, but they never live. Their life is only apparent, because they remain rooted in unconsciousness. And whatsoever you do on the surface may not be true about you at all; in fact, exactly the opposite is the case. That's why Sigmund Freud has to go into your dreams to see your reality. Just see the irony of it: your reality has to be searched for in your dreams, not in your reality. You cannot be believed - what you say about yourself. Your dreams have to be asked, because you have become so false and you are wearing so many masks that it is almost impossible to penetrate to your original face.

It is very difficult to know your original face even from dreams and dream analysis. Who is going to do the analysis? Freud is as unconscious as you are. One unconscious person is trying to interpret the dreams of another unconscious person. His interpretations are bound to be very limited; his interpretations will reflect more about him than about you.

That's why if you go to a Freudian analyst with the same dream you will get a different interpretation than you will get if you go to a Jungian analyst or to an Adlerian analyst. And now there are many.

And you will be puzzled: a single dream has different interpretations. They are not saying anything about you, they are saying something about themselves. The Jungian is saying, 'I am a Jungian. This is my interpretation.'

Your dreams cannot reveal your truth. If your conscious activities cannot reveal you, how can your sleep activities reveal you? But, still, Freud is on the right track. One has to go a little more deeply.

One has to go beyond the dreams to a state of mind where no thought, no dream, no desire exists; when all thinking... And dreaming is a kind of thinking, a primitive kind of thinking, thinking through pictures, but it is still thinking. When you have gone beyond thinking, and if you can still remain alert, aware - as if one is fast asleep but still alert, and deep down at the very core of one's being a lamp goes on burning, a small candle of light - then you will see your original face. And to see your original face is to be back in the Garden of Eden. Then you drop all your clothes.

Your personality consists only of clothes and clothes and clothes - clothes upon clothes. Remember two words which will be very important to understand this strange but immensely valuable book, THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER: one word is 'essence', the other word is 'personality'.

'Personality' comes from a root, PERSONA which means a mask. In ancient days, the actors in Greek dramas used to wear masks. PERSONA means a mask. 'Personality' comes from PERSONA. The actors used to wear one mask, you are wearing many, because for different situations you need different masks. When you are talking to your boss you need one kind of mask. And when you are talking to your servant, of course, you need another kind of mask. How can you use the same mask?

Have you ever watched? When you are talking to your boss, you are all smiles; your every breath says, 'Yes, sir.' Even though you are offended, angry, you are ready to kiss his feet. And when you are talking to your servant, have you seen the arrogance on your face? You have never smiled. How can you smile talking to your servant? It is impossible. You have to dehumanize him. How can you smile and relate to him as a human being? You have to possess him as a thing: he is a slave. You have to behave in a different way than you behave with your boss. There, you are a servant; he remains arrogant, he remains bossy. When you are talking to a friend you have a different mask to use. When you are talking to a stranger, of course, a different mask is needed.

You have to use many masks, and you have many faces, and you go on changing them as circumstances change. Your personality consists only of false faces.

And what is essence? Essence is your original face, without any masks. Essence is that which you brought into the world when you were born. Essence is that which was with you in the womb. Essence is that which has been given to you by God - or whatsoever you call totality, the whole, existence. Essence is a gift from existence to you.

Personality is a gift of the society, parents, school, college, culture, civilization. Personality is not you, it is pseudo. And we continue to polish this personality, and we have completely forgotten the essence. And unless you remember the essence, you will have lived in vain, because real life consists of essence. A real life is the life of essence. You can call it 'soul', or 'God within you', or whatsoever you will. But remember the distinction. You are not your clothes - not even your psychological clothes.

I must remind you of Moses. When he came face to face with God, when he saw God on the mountains as fire arising out of a green bush - and the bush was not burning, the bush was as fresh, as green as ever - he was puzzled. He could not believe his eyes. It was impossible... such fire! The bush was aflame and yet the bush was not burning. And then he heard from the bush a voice coming to him, 'Moses, put off your shoes, because you are on holy ground.'

This is one of the most beautiful of Jewish parables.

God is the fire, your personality is just the bush. And God is a cool fire - it will not burn your personality, the personality can remain green. God gives you so much freedom that if you want to be false, it is allowed, it is okay with him. If you want to be pseudo, it is allowed. Freedom means that you can be right or you can be wrong - this is up to you. Your essence is there, the flame is there, and your personality is also there. The personality is false, and naturally one will think, 'Why doesn't the fire within you burn it?' The fire is cool, the fire cannot burn it. If you have decided to have this personality, the fire allows it. You can remain green in your personality, the personality can go on gathering more and more foliage: you can become more and more false, you can become utterly false. You can be lost in the falsehood of the personality and God is not going to interfere.

Remember this: God never interferes; freedom is total. That is the dignity of man, the glory of man, and the agony too.

If you were not given freedom you would not be false. No other animal is false, no animal has personality. And I am not counting pet animals. Because they live with you, they are destroyed, they start having personalities. Your dogs forget their essence. The dog may be angry but goes on wagging his tail. This is personality. He knows who is the boss, and he knows how to buttress the ego of the boss. He has become diplomatic, he is as much a politician as the people who live in New Delhi; he goes on wagging his tail.

Have you seen the dog puzzled sometimes? A stranger comes in and the dog does not know how to behave - what face to show to the stranger. Ambiguous, he barks - maybe that is the right thing to do - and still he goes on wagging his tail. He is watching for the right hints from the boss - whether the person who has entered the house is a friend or a foe. If he is a foe he will stop wagging his tail. If he is a friend he will stop barking at him. He is waiting for a hint, a signal - how the master behaves. He has become a shadow of the master, he is no longer a real dog. To live with human beings is contagious; they destroy.

You even destroy animals if they live with you. You don't allow them their natural essence, you civilize them just as you have become civilized. You don't allow nature to have its own way, you don't allow Tao to have its own flow.

Essence is that which you bring into the world. The personality is that which the world imposes upon your essence. The world is very afraid of the essence because the essence is always rebellious, the essence is always individualistic. And the world does not need any individuals, it needs sheep. It does not need rebellious people, it does not need people like Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tzu, no; these people are dangerous. It wants people who are obedient - obedient to the status quo, obedient to the vested interests, obedient to the organized church, obedient to the state and the stupid politicians.

Society requires obedience, and society requires efficiency. The more mechanical you are, the more efficient you are. When you are more alive, you cannot be so efficient. A machine is more efficient than man. The society's effort is to reduce every man into a machine. And how to reduce a man into a machine? Make him more and more unconscious, make him more and more robot-like. Let his essence completely disappear from his consciousness. Let him become perfectly pseudo. Let him be a husband, let her be a wife; a servant, a boss, this and that, but never let him be his essential self. Don't allow that because that essential self is not obedient to anybody except to God. It has no other commitment. Its sole commitment is to the source. It knows no other masters.

That type of being will be very inconvenient to this so-called society, because this society is not created to fulfil the needs of human beings, it is created to exploit human beings. It is not according to you and for your growth; it has no intention to help you to grow. And it has every intention not to allow you to grow because the more you grow, the more independent you become. The less you grow, the more dependent you remain. And a dependent person is reliable because a dependent person is always afraid. A dependent person always needs somebody to lean on, ALWAYS needs somebody to lean on. He is childish. He leans on the parents, he leans on the priests, he leans on the politicians. He cannot stand on his own feet. The society goes on covering you with many many clothes - not only physical, but psychological clothes too.

The society is very much afraid of physical nakedness, because physical nakedness is the beginning of psychological nakedness. The society goes into a panic seeing a naked man because this is the beginning. If he is naked physically, he has taken the first step. Now, who is going to prevent him from becoming psychologically naked?

And the voice that called forth from the burning bush to Moses said, 'Put off your shoes.' It is a very symbolic thing. 'Put off all your clothes,' it says. 'Put off your shoes.' Shoes cover your feet. Shoes cover you. 'Be naked on the ground. Be without shoes.' The shoe represents personality, and nakedness represents essence. 'You are on holy ground, put off your shoes.'

The moment you encounter your essence, the burning bush within you, you will have to put off your shoes, you will have to put off all your clothes. You will have to put off ALL that is hiding your essence. That is revolution, METANOIA. That is the turning point in a life: the society disappears and you become an individual. And only individuals can relate with God.

But a great consciousness will be needed.