“Your personality is a social phenomenon. Your being is buried deep down under this personality. You need a shock, so that the personality is thrown open, or for some moments you are identified with it no more and you reach the center. There, everything is empty.
The whole art of meditation is, how to leave the personality easily, move to the center, and be not a person. Just to be and not be a person is the whole art of meditation, the whole art of inner ecstasy.”
“THERE IS NO PERSONALITY. Personality as such is false. The word 'personality' has to be understood. It comes from 'persona'; persona means a mask. In ancient Greek drama the actors used to wear masks; those masks were called persona -- persona because the sound was coming from behind the mask. 'Sona' means sound. The masks were apparent to the audience and from behind the mask the sound was coming. From that word 'persona' has come the word 'personality'.
All personality is false. Good personality, bad personality, the personality of a sinner and the personality of a saint -- all are false. You can wear a beautiful mask or an ugly mask, it doesn't make any difference.”
“Individuality is exactly what it means. It is individual. Personality is not individual; it is social. Society wants you to have personalities, not individualities, because your individualities will create conflict. The society hides your individuality and gives a personality.
Personality is a learned thing. The word 'personality' comes from a Greek root which means mask -- PERSONA. In Greek drama, the actors used to wear masks to hide their real faces and to show some other face. From PERSONA comes the word personality. It is a face that you wear; it is not your original face.
When the personality disappears, don't be afraid. Then for the first time you become authentic. For the first time you become real. For the first time you attain to essence. That essence in India has been called ATMA, the soul.
The ego is the center of personality, and God is I he center of essence. That's why so much insistence, from every corner, that ego has to be dropped. Because you must know what you are, not what you are expected to be.
Personality is false; it is the greatest lie. The whole society depends on personality. The state, the church, the organizations, the establishments -- they are all lies. The Western psychology goes on thinking too much about the personality. That's why the whole Western psychology is a psychology based on a basic lie.
In the East, we think of the essence, not of the personality. That which you have brought, that which is your intrinsic nature, SWABHAVA, that which is your intrinsic essence -- THAT has to be known. And that has to be lived.
Personality is that which you are not, but try to show that you are. Personality is that which, when you move in society, you have to use as a convenience.”
“I say to you, be one with the universe; you have to disappear and let the existence be. You just have to be absent so that the existence can be present in its totality. But the person who has to disappear is not your reality, it is only your personality. It is just an idea in you. In reality you are already one with existence; you cannot exist in any other way.
But the personality creates a deception, and makes you feel separate. You can assume yourself to be separate -- existence gives you total freedom, even against itself. You can think of yourself as a separate entity, an ego. And that is the barrier that is holding you back from melting into the vastness that surrounds you every moment.”
“The ordinary, unconscious human being has no individuality; he has only a personality.
Personality is that which is given by others to you -- by the parents, by the teachers, by the priest, by the society -- whatever they have said about you. And you have been desiring to be respectable, to be respected, so you have been doing things which are appreciated, and the society goes on rewarding you, respecting you more and more. This is their method of creating a personality.
But personality is very thin, skin-deep. It is not your nature. The child is born without a personality, but he is born with a potential individuality. The potential individuality simply means his uniqueness from anybody else -- he is different.
So first, remember that individuality is not personality. When you drop personality, you discover your individuality -- and only the individual can become enlightened. The false cannot become the ultimate realization of truth.”
“Emptying oneself brings individuality, more and more individuality. Emptying oneself means emptying oneself of all that is implied in personality.
Personality is a farce, personality is pseudo, personality is that which is given to you by the society. Personality is imposed on you from the outside; it is a mask. Individuality is your very being. Individuality is that which you bring into the world, individuality is God's gift.
Personality is ugly because it is pseudo. And the more personality you have, the less is the possibility for individuality to grow. The personality starts occupying the whole of your space. It is like a cancerous growth. It goes on growing, it possesses you totally. It leaves no space for individuality to have even its own corner. The personality has to be dropped, so that the individuality can be.
Individuality is a non-egoistic phenomenon; it is pure am-ness, it has no 'I' in it. Personality is nothing but 'I': it has no am-ness in it. Personality is aggressive, violent, dominating, political. Individuality is silent, loving, compassionate; it is religious.”
“But people are upside down: the head has become the master and the heart has become the servant. Logic rules, love is not even heeded. Personality has become more important than individuality. Personality is that which is conferred on you by others, individuality is that which is given to you by God. Personality is just a mask, persona; individuality is your uniqueness.
The society wants you to have beautiful personalities; the society wants you to have personalities which are comfortable for the society, convenient for the society. But the person is not the real thing, the individual is the real thing. The individual is not necessarily always comfortable to the society -- in fact he is very inconvenient.”
“The ego is the child of the personality. Many people would like to drop the ego, but they don't understand the inner connection. They would like to drop the ego because it gives so much misery. It continuously hurts, it is like a wound. It never allows you any rest, it always keeps you restless. It is a disease. Many people by and by start feeling that it is better if they can get rid of the ego, but they never think that this is the child of the personality. If you want to get rid of the ego, you will have to drop your personality.”
“The ideas that we gather from others give us a personality, and the knowledge that we come to know from within gives us individuality. Personality is false, individuality is real. Personality is borrowed; reality, individuality, your authenticity, can never be borrowed. Nobody can say who you are.”
“You have not only personality, you have personalities, each one of you many personalities, because you need different faces in different situations with different people. When you are talking to your wife you need one personality: the personality of a husband. When you are talking to your girlfriend you talk differently; you are using the personality of a lover. When you are talking to the priest, you certainly behave in a different way.”
“If you go against your personality that the society has created, you will lose all respect; your ego will start collapsing. And that creates great fear in you, so you go on fulfilling the demands of the parents, of the teachers, of the priests, of the politicians, of all kinds of people who surround you and are trying to exploit you in every possible way. They depend on personality, and they go on enforcing the personality against the individuality. The individuality has to be repressed, completely forgotten, so that you start living in the false and the phony.
Socialism destroys individuality more than any other kind of political ideology, because socialism means society is the goal, not the individual. The individual has to be sacrificed for the society, not vice versa; the society cannot be sacrificed for the individual. And in fact "society" is a beautiful word; behind that beautiful word is hiding the ugly state. It is really the state that dominates in socialism, and the state does not want any kind of individuality in people. It effaces all individuality, it creates robots. It wants everybody to be just an efficient machine, nothing more.
This kind of socialism I am certainly against, but there is certainly a different kind of socialism which I am absolutely for. But the process is totally different, just diametrically opposite: the individuality has to be saved and the personality has to be dissolved.”
“Your personality is all that you know about yourself -- I am making it absolutely simple so that you can be alert -- and your individuality is that which you don't know and you are.
Meditation is an effort to get rid of personality and to reach to your living sources of life, your individuality, your flame, that you have brought from your mother's womb -- and that you had before your birth, even before you entered the womb of the mother. You have had your individuality since eternity. It is your essential consciousness which is covered with so many layers of so many lives that it is lost completely and you have forgotten the way how to reach back to it.
And every life goes on adding more and more layers of dust around your essential life. That essential life is immortal; your personality is mortal.
Your personality is dependent on other people; hence you are always afraid of other people. A famous man can become nobody if people change their minds. And people change their minds so easily. There is not much difficulty in it.”
“The master's function is to destroy your personality. He knows you as an individual, but he does not know you as a person.
Personality is something created, invented. Individuality is something born.
The master is deeply concerned with your individuality, just the way you were born, your self nature, uncontaminated, unpolluted. But he is not interested in whether you are a doctor, an engineer, a plumber, a president; whether you are successful in life or a failure, whether you are Hindu or Mohammedan or Christian, whether you have a black skin or a white skin. All these non-essentials make your personality. Only your consciousness makes your individuality. And as far as individuality is concerned, it is the same -- it is universal. This is the greatest mystery of life -- that the most individual thing in you is at the same time the most universal, because it is the same in everyone.”
“So really, a sannyasin doesn't mean a person who renounces the world. A sannyasin means a person who renounces the personality -- that belongs to you! You are the creator of it, so you can renounce it. Nothing else! You cannot renounce anything that doesn't belong to you. The personality belongs to you; you can renounce it, but you can renounce only when you begin to be aware that you are not the personality. This is known as KSHETRAGYA, the knower of the field. The field is personality, and the knower, the center which becomes aware of this personality. If you become aware of the center, of the knower, then there is not difficulty in renouncing the personality. It is just a clothing, JUST a clothing, and very dirty and very diseased.”
"Personality is always stubborn, individuality never. Personality has to be stubborn, because it is false. If it is not stubborn it cannot exist at all. It has to be maintained continuously -- you have to fight for it. The personality consists of nothing but ego, self, greed, anger, violence, because deep down you are aware of the trembling, of the fear of death. Deep down you know your inferiority. The personality brags about its superiority.
Remember always, whatsoever the personality brags about is exactly the opposite of your reality. If you are feeling unintelligent inside, your personality will project intelligence. If you are feeling unloving inside, your personality will create a very sweet, smiling, loving quality. It is not just to deceive others; it is really, basically, to deceive oneself. You want to forget your unlovingness. If you are feeling empty inside, your personality will start gathering a thousand and one possessions.”
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Be Still and Know
Great truths take time to sink in. And this is the greatest of all, that you all are potentially buddhas. It is impossible for your mind to accept it. You can accept somebody far away, a Siddhartha Gautam being a Buddha, a Jesus Christ, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu. They are so far away, millions of light years away; they have become mythological. They are no more thought to be real persons. They have lost all substance, they have become pure shadows ― pure poetry with no words, pure silence with no sound. You can imagine them, but you cannot feel them.
Hence, although I go on repeating again and again that you can become a buddha...in fact you are a buddha, unaware of the fact. On the circumference maybe there is a great storm, just as on the surface the sea is stormy ― sometimes more, sometimes less, but there are always waves, bigger or smaller; there is always turbulence, disturbance. But at the depth there is not even a ripple: all is silence.
You are the center of the cyclone, but you are not aware of your center. And down the ages priests have condemned you so much that it has become almost impossible for you to conceive of yourself as a buddha. The priests have condemned you according to your circumference; they know only your circumference. In fact they are interested only in condemning you, so whatsoever they can condemn they see very predominantly in you. They choose that which can be condemned, because through condemnation you are reduced to slaves: slaves of religion ― Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Jaina, Buddhist; and slaves of societies, cultures, civilizations, political ideologies ― communist, fascist, Gandhian.
The only way to reduce you to a slave is to condemn you so badly that you lose all self-respect. And it can be done because your circumference is there, and you also are aware only of the circumference. You are fast asleep snoring at the center. Only at the circumference are you a little bit awake, and that too because of the disturbance, noise. In the marketplace you are a little bit more alert.
When you sit silently in your meditation room you start falling asleep, because the only kind of alertness that you know is that which is created by the noise around you. You know only one kind of awareness, which is pathological because it is out of disturbance, not out of stillness.
That's why it is one of the basic experiences of all meditators that the moment they start meditating they start falling asleep. Hence the Zen master has to walk amongst his disciples with a stick in his hand: whenever he sees somebody asleep, he hits him immediately. The hit you can understand, because it is on the circumference. Suddenly the energy rushes upwards in your spine, and you are awake, alert. The Zen tradition says that when the master hits you, bow down to him in deep respect. He has obliged you; he has taken great trouble to hit you.
You know only one kind of alertness ― when you are hit, when you are in some danger, when you are in some accident. It is because of this that people go mountain climbing, because when they are climbing mountains and the danger is great they become a little alert. It is because of this that people compete in car races, because the speedier the car goes, the more danger is close by: death can happen any moment, you have to become alert.
Danger has an attraction. The only attraction of danger is that you become a little alert, but this is a superficial kind of alertness.
Real alertness has to happen at the center, otherwise you can remain alert on the circumference because of the noise, disturbance, but it is coming from others, it is not your own, and your center can go on sleeping.
I go on telling you this again and again. Why do I say it again and again? So that it can sink in and can reach your center. It takes time, and it takes a right moment.
If you look deep down, everybody is simple. The society makes you complex, but you are born simple and innocent. Everybody is born a buddha; the society corrupts you.
And the function of a master is to take away all the corruption that the society has worked on you. the function of the master is to undo that the society has done to you, and you will be a buddha again.
The child when he is born functions from the center; we teach him how to function from the circumference. That is our whole educational system all over the world: teaching the child how to function from the circumference. We pull him away from his center, we make him more and more accustomed to the circumference, to living on the circumference...twenty-five years of conditioning, education: good names we have given to ugly things. We call it education ― it is not education, nothing can be a greater mis-education.
The very word "education" means drawing something out, to draw something out. When you draw water out of the well it is education. Just like that, when something is drawn outwards from your center it is education. But this is not what is going on in the name of education; it is forcing things upon you. It is not bringing your center to function. It is not sharpening your center; it is dulling it, making it more and more sleepy, dozy.
The society succeeds the day your center goes into a coma and your circumference remains functioning. Then you are a robot, a machine, no more a man.
Because we function from the circumference buddhas look so unreal ― of course, because they function from a totally different center. That's why I say that unless you are in contact with a living buddha, you will never believe that you can become a buddha.
But a living buddha also, slowly slowly, appears far away. It is because of your mind working; it is a strategy of the mind to save itself from going through that revolution. So you create a distance ― it is imaginary.
Lao Tzu is simply saying there is no need to be a great genius to know God. God is available to all, unconditionally to all, categorically to all. You do not have to fulfill certain conditions, you do not have to rise to a certain level. God is available to you as you are, because God has become you. There is nobody else inside you. Just a look....
So it is beautiful in a commune, because when you live in a commune you live with people not knowing whether this man is going to become a buddha; then one day suddenly the lotus opens: that man has become a buddha. It gives you great courage. You know this man, he is just like you. You have been drinking tea with him, gossiping with him, reading the same newspaper, listening to the same radio, looking at the same TV, you have been to the same movie. You know him, inside and out; he was just like you. If he can become a buddha, then why not you? In fact, his becoming a buddha becomes the greatest uplifting force in your life.
That is the beauty of a commune, because many many people with whom you were working will one day become buddhas. Somebody was working under you ...for example, one day Deeksha finds that the man who has been washing the pots has become a buddha! Then Deeksha can believe that: "Although I am an Italian, and nobody has ever heard of any Italian becoming a buddha, still I can become one."
Have you ever heard about any Italian...? At least I have not heard of it. But it is going to happen here, because this commune is ninety percent Italian: you eat Italian food, you drink Italian water ― everybody is turning ninety percent Italian. My effort in creating a commune is simply to make you alert and aware that one day the cobbler of the ashram becomes enlightened, another day the guard becomes enlightened, and people go on blossoming. Each blossoming brings new courage, new inspiration, and in that courage and inspiration your spring comes closer to you. A great self-respect arises, and a trust: And it is going to be sooner than later ― because if so many people start flowering, then the season has come and it is time not to resist. It is time not to fight any more, but to be in a let-go.
Hence, although I go on repeating again and again that you can become a buddha...in fact you are a buddha, unaware of the fact. On the circumference maybe there is a great storm, just as on the surface the sea is stormy ― sometimes more, sometimes less, but there are always waves, bigger or smaller; there is always turbulence, disturbance. But at the depth there is not even a ripple: all is silence.
You are the center of the cyclone, but you are not aware of your center. And down the ages priests have condemned you so much that it has become almost impossible for you to conceive of yourself as a buddha. The priests have condemned you according to your circumference; they know only your circumference. In fact they are interested only in condemning you, so whatsoever they can condemn they see very predominantly in you. They choose that which can be condemned, because through condemnation you are reduced to slaves: slaves of religion ― Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Jaina, Buddhist; and slaves of societies, cultures, civilizations, political ideologies ― communist, fascist, Gandhian.
The only way to reduce you to a slave is to condemn you so badly that you lose all self-respect. And it can be done because your circumference is there, and you also are aware only of the circumference. You are fast asleep snoring at the center. Only at the circumference are you a little bit awake, and that too because of the disturbance, noise. In the marketplace you are a little bit more alert.
When you sit silently in your meditation room you start falling asleep, because the only kind of alertness that you know is that which is created by the noise around you. You know only one kind of awareness, which is pathological because it is out of disturbance, not out of stillness.
That's why it is one of the basic experiences of all meditators that the moment they start meditating they start falling asleep. Hence the Zen master has to walk amongst his disciples with a stick in his hand: whenever he sees somebody asleep, he hits him immediately. The hit you can understand, because it is on the circumference. Suddenly the energy rushes upwards in your spine, and you are awake, alert. The Zen tradition says that when the master hits you, bow down to him in deep respect. He has obliged you; he has taken great trouble to hit you.
You know only one kind of alertness ― when you are hit, when you are in some danger, when you are in some accident. It is because of this that people go mountain climbing, because when they are climbing mountains and the danger is great they become a little alert. It is because of this that people compete in car races, because the speedier the car goes, the more danger is close by: death can happen any moment, you have to become alert.
Danger has an attraction. The only attraction of danger is that you become a little alert, but this is a superficial kind of alertness.
Real alertness has to happen at the center, otherwise you can remain alert on the circumference because of the noise, disturbance, but it is coming from others, it is not your own, and your center can go on sleeping.
I go on telling you this again and again. Why do I say it again and again? So that it can sink in and can reach your center. It takes time, and it takes a right moment.
If you look deep down, everybody is simple. The society makes you complex, but you are born simple and innocent. Everybody is born a buddha; the society corrupts you.
And the function of a master is to take away all the corruption that the society has worked on you. the function of the master is to undo that the society has done to you, and you will be a buddha again.
The child when he is born functions from the center; we teach him how to function from the circumference. That is our whole educational system all over the world: teaching the child how to function from the circumference. We pull him away from his center, we make him more and more accustomed to the circumference, to living on the circumference...twenty-five years of conditioning, education: good names we have given to ugly things. We call it education ― it is not education, nothing can be a greater mis-education.
The very word "education" means drawing something out, to draw something out. When you draw water out of the well it is education. Just like that, when something is drawn outwards from your center it is education. But this is not what is going on in the name of education; it is forcing things upon you. It is not bringing your center to function. It is not sharpening your center; it is dulling it, making it more and more sleepy, dozy.
The society succeeds the day your center goes into a coma and your circumference remains functioning. Then you are a robot, a machine, no more a man.
Because we function from the circumference buddhas look so unreal ― of course, because they function from a totally different center. That's why I say that unless you are in contact with a living buddha, you will never believe that you can become a buddha.
But a living buddha also, slowly slowly, appears far away. It is because of your mind working; it is a strategy of the mind to save itself from going through that revolution. So you create a distance ― it is imaginary.
Lao Tzu is simply saying there is no need to be a great genius to know God. God is available to all, unconditionally to all, categorically to all. You do not have to fulfill certain conditions, you do not have to rise to a certain level. God is available to you as you are, because God has become you. There is nobody else inside you. Just a look....
So it is beautiful in a commune, because when you live in a commune you live with people not knowing whether this man is going to become a buddha; then one day suddenly the lotus opens: that man has become a buddha. It gives you great courage. You know this man, he is just like you. You have been drinking tea with him, gossiping with him, reading the same newspaper, listening to the same radio, looking at the same TV, you have been to the same movie. You know him, inside and out; he was just like you. If he can become a buddha, then why not you? In fact, his becoming a buddha becomes the greatest uplifting force in your life.
That is the beauty of a commune, because many many people with whom you were working will one day become buddhas. Somebody was working under you ...for example, one day Deeksha finds that the man who has been washing the pots has become a buddha! Then Deeksha can believe that: "Although I am an Italian, and nobody has ever heard of any Italian becoming a buddha, still I can become one."
Have you ever heard about any Italian...? At least I have not heard of it. But it is going to happen here, because this commune is ninety percent Italian: you eat Italian food, you drink Italian water ― everybody is turning ninety percent Italian. My effort in creating a commune is simply to make you alert and aware that one day the cobbler of the ashram becomes enlightened, another day the guard becomes enlightened, and people go on blossoming. Each blossoming brings new courage, new inspiration, and in that courage and inspiration your spring comes closer to you. A great self-respect arises, and a trust: And it is going to be sooner than later ― because if so many people start flowering, then the season has come and it is time not to resist. It is time not to fight any more, but to be in a let-go.
Perfectly Imperfect
I am infallibly fallible! First, I am not a perfectionist because to me perfectionism is the root cause of all neurosis. Unless humanity gets rid of the idea of perfection it is never going to be sane. The very idea of perfection has driven the whole of mankind to a state of madness. To think in terms of perfection means you are thinking in terms of ideology, goals, values, shoulds, should-nots. You have a certain pattern to fulfill and if you fall from the pattern you will feel immensely guilty, a sinner. And the pattern is bound to be such that you cannot achieve it. If you can achieve it then it will not be of much value to the ego.
So the intrinsic quality of the perfectionist ideal is that it should be unattainable; only then is it worth attaining. You see the contradiction? And that contradiction creates a schizophrenia: you are trying to do the impossible, which you know perfectly well is not going to happen ― it cannot happen in the very nature of things. If it can happen then it is not much of a perfection; then anybody can do it. Then there is not much ego nourishment in it: your ego cannot chew on it, cannot grow on it. The ego needs the impossible and the impossible, by its very nature, is not going to happen. So only two alternatives are left: one is, you start feeling guilty. If you are innocent, simple, intelligent, you will start feeling guilty ― and guilt is a state of sickness.
I am not here to create any guilt in you. My whole effort is to help you to get rid of all guilt. The moment you are free of guilt, rejoicing bursts forth. And guilt is rooted in the idea of perfection.
The second alternative is: if you are cunning then you will become a hypocrite, you will start pretending that you have achieved it. You will deceive others and you will even try to deceive yourself. You will start living in illusions, hallucinations, and that is very unholy, very irreligious, very unwholesome. To pretend, to live a life of pretensions is far worse than the life of a guilty man. The guilty man at least is simple, but the pretender, the hypocrite, the saint, the so-called sage, the mahatma, is a crook. He is basically inhuman ― inhuman to himself because he is repressing; that's the only way to pretend. Whatsoever he finds in himself which goes against perfection has to be repressed. He will be boiling within, he will be full of anger and rage. His anger and rage will come out in thousands of ways; in subtle ways, indirect ways, it will surface.
Even people like Jesus ― nice, good ― are full of anger, rage. And they are against such innocent things, you cannot believe.
Jesus comes followed by his followers, that bunch of fools they call apostles. He is hungry, that whole bunch is hungry. They come to a fig tree, and the fig tree is not in season. It is not its fault, but Jesus gets so angry that he condemns the fig tree, he curses the fig tree. Now, how is this possible? On the one hand he says, "Love thy enemy as thyself." On the other hand he cannot even forgive a fig tree which has no fruits because it is not the season.
This dichotomy, this schizophrenia has prevailed over humanity for thousands of years.
He says, "God is love," but still God manages a hell. If God is love, the first thing to be destroyed should be hell; hell should be immediately burned, removed. The very idea of hell is of a very jealous God. But Jesus was born a Jew, lived a Jew, died a Jew; he was not a Christian, he had never heard the word "Christian." And the Jewish idea of God is not a very beautiful idea.
The Talmud says ― the declaration is made in God's own words ― "I am a jealous God, very jealous. I am not nice! I am not your uncle!" This God is bound to create hell. In fact, to live even in heaven with such a God who is not your uncle, who is not nice, who is jealous, will be hell. What kind of paradise will you attain by living with him? There will be a despotic, dictatorial atmosphere ― no freedom, no love.
Jealousy and love cannot exist together.
So even the so-called good people have been causes of human misery. It hurts because we have never pondered over these things. We have never tried to excavate our past, and all the root causes of our misery are in our past. And, remember perfectly well, your past is more dominated by Jesus, Mahavira, Confucius, Krishna, Rama, Buddha, than by Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, Nadir Shah. History books talk about these people, but they are not part of your unconscious. They may be part of history, but they don't make up your personality; your personality is made by so-called good people. Certainly, they had a few good qualities in them, but side by side there was a duality, and the duality arose from the idea of perfection.
Jainas say that Mahavira never perspired. How can a perfect man perspire? I can perspire ― I am not a perfect man! And perspiration in summer is so beautiful that I would rather choose perspiration than perfection! Because a man who does not perspire simply has a plastic body, synthetic, non-breathing, non-porous. The whole body breathes, that's why you perspire; perspiration is a natural process of keeping your body temperature constantly the same. Now, Mahavira must be burning inside like hell! How will he manage to keep his body temperature constant? Without perspiration it cannot be done, it is impossible.
Jainas say that when a snake wounded Mahavira's feet, not blood but milk flowed out of the feet. Now, milk is possible only if Mahavira's feet were not feet but breasts, and a man who has breasts on his feet should be put in a circus! This is their idea of perfection: a perfect man cannot have a dirty thing like blood, a bloody thing like blood, he is full of milk and honey. But just imagine: a man full of milk and honey will stink! Milk will turn into curd and the honey will attract all kinds of mosquitoes and flies; he will be completely covered with flies! I don't like this kind of perfection.
Mahavira is so perfect that he does not urinate, does not defecate; these things are for imperfect human beings. You cannot imagine Mahavira sitting on a toilet seat, impossible! But then where does all his shit disappear to? Then he must be the shittiest man in the world.
I have read in the medical journals about a man ― the longest case of constipation: eighteen months. These medical people are not aware of Mahavira. This is nothing; forty years! This is the longest period that any man has been able to control his bowels. This is real yoga! The greatest case of constipation in the whole history of man...and I don't think anybody is going to defeat him.
These stupid ideas have been perpetuated just to make humanity suffer. If you have these ideas in your mind then you will feel guilty about everything. Pissing, you are guilty ― what are you doing? Sitting on a toilet, and you are falling into hell! If blood comes out of your body, a deep humiliation.
Jesus walks on water, tries to revive a dead friend, but cannot himself survive on the cross; tries to cure blind people, deaf people, but cannot make a single stupid man enlightened, cannot help a single fool to come out of his foolishness, cannot save a single human being by hitting him hard on the head and saying, "See, the goose is out!"
I am very fallible because I am not a neurotic, I am not psychotic, I am not a perfectionist. And I love my imperfections...I love this world because it is imperfect. It is imperfect, and that's why it is growing; if it was perfect it would have been dead. Growth is possible only if there is imperfection.
Perfection means a full stop, perfection means ultimate death; then there is no way to go beyond it.
I would like you to remember again and again, I am imperfect, the whole universe is imperfect, and to love this imperfection, to rejoice in this imperfection is my whole message.
The psychiatrist leaned back and placed the tips of his fingers together while he soothed the deeply-troubled man who stood before him. "Calm yourself, my good fellow," he gently urged. "I have helped a great many others with fixations far more serious than yours. Now, let me see if I understand the problem correctly. You indicate that in moments of great emotional stress you believe that you are a dog, a fox terrier. Is that not so?"
"Yes, sir," mumbled the patient. "A small fox terrier with black and brown spots. Oh, please tell me you can help me, doctor. If this keeps up much longer, I don't know what I'll do...."
The doctor gestured toward the couch. "Now, now," he soothed, "the first thing to do is lie down here, and we'll see if we can't get to the root of your delusion."
"Oh, I couldn't do that, doctor," said the patient. "I'm not allowed up on the furniture."
Once you get an idea deep-rooted in you, it starts becoming a reality. Perfectionism is a neurotic idea. Infallibility is good for stupid Polack popes but not for intelligent people. An intelligent person will understand that life is an adventure, a constant exploration through trial and error. That's its very joy, its very juice!
I don't want you to be perfect. I want you to be just as perfectly imperfect as possible. Rejoice in your imperfections! Rejoice in your very ordinariness! Beware of so-called "His Holinesses" ― they are all "His Phoninesses." If you like such big words like "His Holiness" then make a title such as "His Very Ordinariness" ― HVO, not HH! I preach ordinariness. I make no claims for any miracles; I am a simple man. And I would like you also to be very simple so that you can get rid of these two polarities: that of guilt and that of hypocrisy. Exactly in the middle is sanity.
St. Peter challenged the Archangel Gabriel to a game of golf. St. Peter's first drive resulted in a hole-in-one. Gabriel's first drive produced the same result. The same thing happened at the next shot. St. Peter looked at Gabriel thoughtfully and then said, "What do you say we cut out the miracles and play some golf?"
I am not infallible, and I would never like to be infallible either, because that is suicidal.
I would like to commit as many mistakes as possible and I would like to go on committing mistakes to the very end of my last breath, because that means life. If you are capable of committing mistakes even at the very last breath you have conquered death.
A Zen Master was dying...and I have a deep love for the Zen approach for the simple reason that they also rejoice in ordinariness. That's the beauty of Zen: no religion has been able to rise to such heights of ordinariness.
The Master was very old, nearabout eighty. He gathered his disciples and said, "Now this is my last day. I don't think I will be able to see the sunset, and the sun is setting on the horizon. I have called you all to suggest to me some new way to die."
They were a little puzzled. They said, "What do you mean by 'new way'?"
He said, "People have died in bed, people have died in the bathroom, people have died this way and that. All those things have been done before, and I always like to do things in a new way, in my own way. Can you suggest something? Have you ever heard of somebody dying in a standing posture?" There was silence. One man said, "Yes, I have heard about a Zen Master who died standing."
He said, "Then that is dropped! Have you heard of anybody dying standing upside-down, on his head, doing a sirshasan, a headstand?"
Everybody said, "We have not heard of such a thing. We have not even imagined such a thing, that anybody would die standing on his head!"
So he said, "That will do!" The old man stood on his head, and it is said that there were all the visible signs that he was dead. But there was a difficulty: the difficulty was that the Zen disciples were in a very puzzling situation; what to do with this old man now? They had never heard of any ritual for somebody dying standing on his head. What had to be done? They knew perfectly well what had to be done when somebody died in bed, but what to do with this man? And he was standing there dead, on his head!
Somebody suggested: "We should run.... His old sister lives very close by; she is a nun. She may be able to do something or suggest something. And she is even crazier than this old man!"
So they ran. The sister came and shouted at her brother and said, "Look, your whole life you have been a trouble! At least die peacefully, don't make much fuss about it! And why are you driving these poor disciples crazy? Get up and lie down on the bed!"
The old man laughed, got up and lay down on the bed, and he said, "Who has brought this crazy sister of mine here? She won't even let me die in an improper way!"
But he said, "Okay, you be happy. This is your last desire, and I have never followed any advice of yours. At least this much I can do before I depart." But the woman did not stand there to see him depart. She said, "You just lie down there, I am going. And die on the bed in a proper way! No more trouble."
And she left, and the old man died in the bed in a proper way.
This is how life should be lived.
I am not a saint, I am not a sage. All those hocus-pocus words don't mean anything to me. I am certainly a little bit crazy, and it is because of my craziness that you can rely on me! Never rely on saints, never rely on sages ― they will drive you nuts!
It was teatime in the pad, and the air hung heavy in thick blue folds as the beat bunch and their tourist friends lit up. Suddenly, a loud voice in the hall demanded that they open the door in the name of legality. The smokers frantically gathered their still-smoking weeds and stuffed them in the cuckoo clock. The police entered, searched diligently, found nothing and left. The bunch breathed a sigh of relief and made for the cuckoo clock just as the clock's hands announced 3 a.m. The little door popped open, the bird poked his head out and said, "Hey, man, what time is it?"
So the intrinsic quality of the perfectionist ideal is that it should be unattainable; only then is it worth attaining. You see the contradiction? And that contradiction creates a schizophrenia: you are trying to do the impossible, which you know perfectly well is not going to happen ― it cannot happen in the very nature of things. If it can happen then it is not much of a perfection; then anybody can do it. Then there is not much ego nourishment in it: your ego cannot chew on it, cannot grow on it. The ego needs the impossible and the impossible, by its very nature, is not going to happen. So only two alternatives are left: one is, you start feeling guilty. If you are innocent, simple, intelligent, you will start feeling guilty ― and guilt is a state of sickness.
I am not here to create any guilt in you. My whole effort is to help you to get rid of all guilt. The moment you are free of guilt, rejoicing bursts forth. And guilt is rooted in the idea of perfection.
The second alternative is: if you are cunning then you will become a hypocrite, you will start pretending that you have achieved it. You will deceive others and you will even try to deceive yourself. You will start living in illusions, hallucinations, and that is very unholy, very irreligious, very unwholesome. To pretend, to live a life of pretensions is far worse than the life of a guilty man. The guilty man at least is simple, but the pretender, the hypocrite, the saint, the so-called sage, the mahatma, is a crook. He is basically inhuman ― inhuman to himself because he is repressing; that's the only way to pretend. Whatsoever he finds in himself which goes against perfection has to be repressed. He will be boiling within, he will be full of anger and rage. His anger and rage will come out in thousands of ways; in subtle ways, indirect ways, it will surface.
Even people like Jesus ― nice, good ― are full of anger, rage. And they are against such innocent things, you cannot believe.
Jesus comes followed by his followers, that bunch of fools they call apostles. He is hungry, that whole bunch is hungry. They come to a fig tree, and the fig tree is not in season. It is not its fault, but Jesus gets so angry that he condemns the fig tree, he curses the fig tree. Now, how is this possible? On the one hand he says, "Love thy enemy as thyself." On the other hand he cannot even forgive a fig tree which has no fruits because it is not the season.
This dichotomy, this schizophrenia has prevailed over humanity for thousands of years.
He says, "God is love," but still God manages a hell. If God is love, the first thing to be destroyed should be hell; hell should be immediately burned, removed. The very idea of hell is of a very jealous God. But Jesus was born a Jew, lived a Jew, died a Jew; he was not a Christian, he had never heard the word "Christian." And the Jewish idea of God is not a very beautiful idea.
The Talmud says ― the declaration is made in God's own words ― "I am a jealous God, very jealous. I am not nice! I am not your uncle!" This God is bound to create hell. In fact, to live even in heaven with such a God who is not your uncle, who is not nice, who is jealous, will be hell. What kind of paradise will you attain by living with him? There will be a despotic, dictatorial atmosphere ― no freedom, no love.
Jealousy and love cannot exist together.
So even the so-called good people have been causes of human misery. It hurts because we have never pondered over these things. We have never tried to excavate our past, and all the root causes of our misery are in our past. And, remember perfectly well, your past is more dominated by Jesus, Mahavira, Confucius, Krishna, Rama, Buddha, than by Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, Nadir Shah. History books talk about these people, but they are not part of your unconscious. They may be part of history, but they don't make up your personality; your personality is made by so-called good people. Certainly, they had a few good qualities in them, but side by side there was a duality, and the duality arose from the idea of perfection.
Jainas say that Mahavira never perspired. How can a perfect man perspire? I can perspire ― I am not a perfect man! And perspiration in summer is so beautiful that I would rather choose perspiration than perfection! Because a man who does not perspire simply has a plastic body, synthetic, non-breathing, non-porous. The whole body breathes, that's why you perspire; perspiration is a natural process of keeping your body temperature constantly the same. Now, Mahavira must be burning inside like hell! How will he manage to keep his body temperature constant? Without perspiration it cannot be done, it is impossible.
Jainas say that when a snake wounded Mahavira's feet, not blood but milk flowed out of the feet. Now, milk is possible only if Mahavira's feet were not feet but breasts, and a man who has breasts on his feet should be put in a circus! This is their idea of perfection: a perfect man cannot have a dirty thing like blood, a bloody thing like blood, he is full of milk and honey. But just imagine: a man full of milk and honey will stink! Milk will turn into curd and the honey will attract all kinds of mosquitoes and flies; he will be completely covered with flies! I don't like this kind of perfection.
Mahavira is so perfect that he does not urinate, does not defecate; these things are for imperfect human beings. You cannot imagine Mahavira sitting on a toilet seat, impossible! But then where does all his shit disappear to? Then he must be the shittiest man in the world.
I have read in the medical journals about a man ― the longest case of constipation: eighteen months. These medical people are not aware of Mahavira. This is nothing; forty years! This is the longest period that any man has been able to control his bowels. This is real yoga! The greatest case of constipation in the whole history of man...and I don't think anybody is going to defeat him.
These stupid ideas have been perpetuated just to make humanity suffer. If you have these ideas in your mind then you will feel guilty about everything. Pissing, you are guilty ― what are you doing? Sitting on a toilet, and you are falling into hell! If blood comes out of your body, a deep humiliation.
Jesus walks on water, tries to revive a dead friend, but cannot himself survive on the cross; tries to cure blind people, deaf people, but cannot make a single stupid man enlightened, cannot help a single fool to come out of his foolishness, cannot save a single human being by hitting him hard on the head and saying, "See, the goose is out!"
I am very fallible because I am not a neurotic, I am not psychotic, I am not a perfectionist. And I love my imperfections...I love this world because it is imperfect. It is imperfect, and that's why it is growing; if it was perfect it would have been dead. Growth is possible only if there is imperfection.
Perfection means a full stop, perfection means ultimate death; then there is no way to go beyond it.
I would like you to remember again and again, I am imperfect, the whole universe is imperfect, and to love this imperfection, to rejoice in this imperfection is my whole message.
The psychiatrist leaned back and placed the tips of his fingers together while he soothed the deeply-troubled man who stood before him. "Calm yourself, my good fellow," he gently urged. "I have helped a great many others with fixations far more serious than yours. Now, let me see if I understand the problem correctly. You indicate that in moments of great emotional stress you believe that you are a dog, a fox terrier. Is that not so?"
"Yes, sir," mumbled the patient. "A small fox terrier with black and brown spots. Oh, please tell me you can help me, doctor. If this keeps up much longer, I don't know what I'll do...."
The doctor gestured toward the couch. "Now, now," he soothed, "the first thing to do is lie down here, and we'll see if we can't get to the root of your delusion."
"Oh, I couldn't do that, doctor," said the patient. "I'm not allowed up on the furniture."
Once you get an idea deep-rooted in you, it starts becoming a reality. Perfectionism is a neurotic idea. Infallibility is good for stupid Polack popes but not for intelligent people. An intelligent person will understand that life is an adventure, a constant exploration through trial and error. That's its very joy, its very juice!
I don't want you to be perfect. I want you to be just as perfectly imperfect as possible. Rejoice in your imperfections! Rejoice in your very ordinariness! Beware of so-called "His Holinesses" ― they are all "His Phoninesses." If you like such big words like "His Holiness" then make a title such as "His Very Ordinariness" ― HVO, not HH! I preach ordinariness. I make no claims for any miracles; I am a simple man. And I would like you also to be very simple so that you can get rid of these two polarities: that of guilt and that of hypocrisy. Exactly in the middle is sanity.
St. Peter challenged the Archangel Gabriel to a game of golf. St. Peter's first drive resulted in a hole-in-one. Gabriel's first drive produced the same result. The same thing happened at the next shot. St. Peter looked at Gabriel thoughtfully and then said, "What do you say we cut out the miracles and play some golf?"
I am not infallible, and I would never like to be infallible either, because that is suicidal.
I would like to commit as many mistakes as possible and I would like to go on committing mistakes to the very end of my last breath, because that means life. If you are capable of committing mistakes even at the very last breath you have conquered death.
A Zen Master was dying...and I have a deep love for the Zen approach for the simple reason that they also rejoice in ordinariness. That's the beauty of Zen: no religion has been able to rise to such heights of ordinariness.
The Master was very old, nearabout eighty. He gathered his disciples and said, "Now this is my last day. I don't think I will be able to see the sunset, and the sun is setting on the horizon. I have called you all to suggest to me some new way to die."
They were a little puzzled. They said, "What do you mean by 'new way'?"
He said, "People have died in bed, people have died in the bathroom, people have died this way and that. All those things have been done before, and I always like to do things in a new way, in my own way. Can you suggest something? Have you ever heard of somebody dying in a standing posture?" There was silence. One man said, "Yes, I have heard about a Zen Master who died standing."
He said, "Then that is dropped! Have you heard of anybody dying standing upside-down, on his head, doing a sirshasan, a headstand?"
Everybody said, "We have not heard of such a thing. We have not even imagined such a thing, that anybody would die standing on his head!"
So he said, "That will do!" The old man stood on his head, and it is said that there were all the visible signs that he was dead. But there was a difficulty: the difficulty was that the Zen disciples were in a very puzzling situation; what to do with this old man now? They had never heard of any ritual for somebody dying standing on his head. What had to be done? They knew perfectly well what had to be done when somebody died in bed, but what to do with this man? And he was standing there dead, on his head!
Somebody suggested: "We should run.... His old sister lives very close by; she is a nun. She may be able to do something or suggest something. And she is even crazier than this old man!"
So they ran. The sister came and shouted at her brother and said, "Look, your whole life you have been a trouble! At least die peacefully, don't make much fuss about it! And why are you driving these poor disciples crazy? Get up and lie down on the bed!"
The old man laughed, got up and lay down on the bed, and he said, "Who has brought this crazy sister of mine here? She won't even let me die in an improper way!"
But he said, "Okay, you be happy. This is your last desire, and I have never followed any advice of yours. At least this much I can do before I depart." But the woman did not stand there to see him depart. She said, "You just lie down there, I am going. And die on the bed in a proper way! No more trouble."
And she left, and the old man died in the bed in a proper way.
This is how life should be lived.
I am not a saint, I am not a sage. All those hocus-pocus words don't mean anything to me. I am certainly a little bit crazy, and it is because of my craziness that you can rely on me! Never rely on saints, never rely on sages ― they will drive you nuts!
It was teatime in the pad, and the air hung heavy in thick blue folds as the beat bunch and their tourist friends lit up. Suddenly, a loud voice in the hall demanded that they open the door in the name of legality. The smokers frantically gathered their still-smoking weeds and stuffed them in the cuckoo clock. The police entered, searched diligently, found nothing and left. The bunch breathed a sigh of relief and made for the cuckoo clock just as the clock's hands announced 3 a.m. The little door popped open, the bird poked his head out and said, "Hey, man, what time is it?"
Relaxation is Just Being Natural
Get out of the trap the mind creates of never being quite blissful in the moment, and be patient, letting the grass grow by itself.
The East has come up with something very close to the truth. There are religions born in India and religions born outside India; the religions born outside all believe in one life ― that is, seventy years. Naturally, one is in a hurry; one has to be in a hurry ― such a small life and so much to do, so much to experience, so much to explore. That's why the Western mind is speedy, wanting to do everything faster and faster, quickly, because his conception of life is too small. You cannot blame him.
The religions born in India have an eternal expanse ― life after life. There is no hurry, there is no haste. But man is so stupid that you solve one question, and out of the solution a thousand other questions will arise.
The idea of many lives was really to help you to relax: there is no hurry; the eternity is yours, so don't run, just walk the way you go for a morning walk ― at ease, relaxed.
That was the idea of the people who gave the conception of reincarnation, but people are such that rather than becoming relaxed, they became lazy. They said, "There is no hurry, so why bother even to walk? Running is out of question but even to go for a morning walk, what is the need? Eternity is ours ― you can go any time for your morning walk."
The East became poor because of this, because no technology was evolved. Technology is just to make things quickly, to produce things faster than man can do with his own hands. The people remained poor, went on becoming poorer. The idea was good, but the consequences proved not to be good.
The West has just the opposite idea ― of a small life. It created great tension and anxiety, but it created technology, scientific developments, richness, comfort, luxuries; it created everything. But the man inside was lost, because he was always running. He was never where he was; he was always going for something else. And that goal where you can stop never comes. So in the West people have means of speed, and they are going fast. But don't ask them, "Where are you going?" Don't waste their time in asking such stupid questions! All that matters is that they are going fast; it does not matter where they are going and why they are going.
Both ideas have failed.
Eastern religions have not been of help; Western religions have not been of help. They both tried to give you an idea, but they never gave you an insight into your own being.
That's where I differ.
For example, your question is that you understand, "Relax and let the grass grow by itself," but still you go on pushing.
No, you don't understand. The first thing for you to understand is that you don't understand the meaning of the grass growing by itself. If you understand that, the pushing, the forcing, will disappear. When I say it will disappear, I am not saying it will stop. It will differ with different people.
If you understand what it means that the grass grows by itself... such a vast universe is going so silently, so peacefully; millions of solar systems, millions of stars moving day in, day out, from eternity to eternity... If you understand that existence is happening, it is not doing, then if pushing is your nature you will accept it. It is not a question of stopping it, because that will be again doing. You simply understand that things are happening, that this is how you are: that you push, that you force. Then there is a great acceptance of it, and in that acceptance, the tension disappears.
For a few others the pushing may disappear ― if it is not part of their nature, if they are imitating somebody else, if they are competing with somebody else and because everybody else is pushing, they are pushing. It may stop, understanding that things are happening, and you need not unnecessarily bother about them; you can enjoy silently the way things are happening. You can contribute without any anxiety anything that comes naturally to you; but not beyond that.
So each individual will have different things happening out of the same understanding. If pushing is your nature, then there is nothing wrong in it.
Enjoy it, push as much as you can ― but with a song and with a dance, and without being worried that you are pushing. This is you. This is your grass, and it grows this way. There are grasses and grasses.
Just one thing has to be remembered, that anything that you are doing is joyfully done, rejoicingly done ― that's enough. Different people will be doing different things, and the world needs that different people should do different things. It is the richness of the world, that all are not alike, and should not be alike. But on one point they should meet; and that is the cosmic center of being relaxed.
In Japan they have developed strange things for meditative purposes... Japan has done a tremendous service to humanity. Meditation was developed in India, but it remained a very limited phenomenon ― just sitting in a lotus posture witnessing your thoughts, becoming silent. It did the work, but Japan tried different dimensions, strange dimensions: swordsmanship, but with meditation. Two swordsmen bent upon killing each other have to remain centered in themselves without tension, without fear, without anger, without revenge, just playful.
To the observer it is a question of life and death, but to those two meditators it is playfulness. And a strange thing has been observed again and again: if both the meditators are of the same depth in meditation, nobody wins, nobody is killed. Even before one person raises the sword to hit the other person at a certain point ― even before he has done that ― just that idea of his has reached to the other, and his sword is ready to protect him.
It is impossible to declare who is the winner. Ordinarily it is difficult to think of swordsmanship and meditation, aikido and meditation, jujitsu and meditation, wrestling and meditation. But in Japan they have tried every dimension possible, and they have found that it doesn't matter what you are doing; what matters is, are you centered?
If you are centered then you can do anything and it will not create any tension; your relaxation will remain the same.
So don't be worried about pushing. Just try to understand that we are so small compared to this immense universe; what we do or don't do makes no difference to existence. We are not to be serious about it. I was not here and existence continued; I will not be here, and existence will continue. I should not take myself seriously.
That is a fundamental understanding of a meditator ― that he does not take himself seriously. Then relaxation comes automatically. And with relaxation, whatsoever is natural to you continues, and whatsoever is not natural to you falls on its own accord.
The East has come up with something very close to the truth. There are religions born in India and religions born outside India; the religions born outside all believe in one life ― that is, seventy years. Naturally, one is in a hurry; one has to be in a hurry ― such a small life and so much to do, so much to experience, so much to explore. That's why the Western mind is speedy, wanting to do everything faster and faster, quickly, because his conception of life is too small. You cannot blame him.
The religions born in India have an eternal expanse ― life after life. There is no hurry, there is no haste. But man is so stupid that you solve one question, and out of the solution a thousand other questions will arise.
The idea of many lives was really to help you to relax: there is no hurry; the eternity is yours, so don't run, just walk the way you go for a morning walk ― at ease, relaxed.
That was the idea of the people who gave the conception of reincarnation, but people are such that rather than becoming relaxed, they became lazy. They said, "There is no hurry, so why bother even to walk? Running is out of question but even to go for a morning walk, what is the need? Eternity is ours ― you can go any time for your morning walk."
The East became poor because of this, because no technology was evolved. Technology is just to make things quickly, to produce things faster than man can do with his own hands. The people remained poor, went on becoming poorer. The idea was good, but the consequences proved not to be good.
The West has just the opposite idea ― of a small life. It created great tension and anxiety, but it created technology, scientific developments, richness, comfort, luxuries; it created everything. But the man inside was lost, because he was always running. He was never where he was; he was always going for something else. And that goal where you can stop never comes. So in the West people have means of speed, and they are going fast. But don't ask them, "Where are you going?" Don't waste their time in asking such stupid questions! All that matters is that they are going fast; it does not matter where they are going and why they are going.
Both ideas have failed.
Eastern religions have not been of help; Western religions have not been of help. They both tried to give you an idea, but they never gave you an insight into your own being.
That's where I differ.
For example, your question is that you understand, "Relax and let the grass grow by itself," but still you go on pushing.
No, you don't understand. The first thing for you to understand is that you don't understand the meaning of the grass growing by itself. If you understand that, the pushing, the forcing, will disappear. When I say it will disappear, I am not saying it will stop. It will differ with different people.
If you understand what it means that the grass grows by itself... such a vast universe is going so silently, so peacefully; millions of solar systems, millions of stars moving day in, day out, from eternity to eternity... If you understand that existence is happening, it is not doing, then if pushing is your nature you will accept it. It is not a question of stopping it, because that will be again doing. You simply understand that things are happening, that this is how you are: that you push, that you force. Then there is a great acceptance of it, and in that acceptance, the tension disappears.
For a few others the pushing may disappear ― if it is not part of their nature, if they are imitating somebody else, if they are competing with somebody else and because everybody else is pushing, they are pushing. It may stop, understanding that things are happening, and you need not unnecessarily bother about them; you can enjoy silently the way things are happening. You can contribute without any anxiety anything that comes naturally to you; but not beyond that.
So each individual will have different things happening out of the same understanding. If pushing is your nature, then there is nothing wrong in it.
Enjoy it, push as much as you can ― but with a song and with a dance, and without being worried that you are pushing. This is you. This is your grass, and it grows this way. There are grasses and grasses.
Just one thing has to be remembered, that anything that you are doing is joyfully done, rejoicingly done ― that's enough. Different people will be doing different things, and the world needs that different people should do different things. It is the richness of the world, that all are not alike, and should not be alike. But on one point they should meet; and that is the cosmic center of being relaxed.
In Japan they have developed strange things for meditative purposes... Japan has done a tremendous service to humanity. Meditation was developed in India, but it remained a very limited phenomenon ― just sitting in a lotus posture witnessing your thoughts, becoming silent. It did the work, but Japan tried different dimensions, strange dimensions: swordsmanship, but with meditation. Two swordsmen bent upon killing each other have to remain centered in themselves without tension, without fear, without anger, without revenge, just playful.
To the observer it is a question of life and death, but to those two meditators it is playfulness. And a strange thing has been observed again and again: if both the meditators are of the same depth in meditation, nobody wins, nobody is killed. Even before one person raises the sword to hit the other person at a certain point ― even before he has done that ― just that idea of his has reached to the other, and his sword is ready to protect him.
It is impossible to declare who is the winner. Ordinarily it is difficult to think of swordsmanship and meditation, aikido and meditation, jujitsu and meditation, wrestling and meditation. But in Japan they have tried every dimension possible, and they have found that it doesn't matter what you are doing; what matters is, are you centered?
If you are centered then you can do anything and it will not create any tension; your relaxation will remain the same.
So don't be worried about pushing. Just try to understand that we are so small compared to this immense universe; what we do or don't do makes no difference to existence. We are not to be serious about it. I was not here and existence continued; I will not be here, and existence will continue. I should not take myself seriously.
That is a fundamental understanding of a meditator ― that he does not take himself seriously. Then relaxation comes automatically. And with relaxation, whatsoever is natural to you continues, and whatsoever is not natural to you falls on its own accord.
Psychology of the Esoteric
Something about the tensions and relaxation of the seven bodies.
The original source of all tension is becoming. One is always trying to be something; no one is at ease with himself as he is. The being is not accepted, the being is denied, and something else is taken as an ideal to become. So the basic tension is always between that which you are and that which you long to become.
You desire to become something. Tension means that you are not pleased with what you are, and you long to be what you are not. Tension is created between these two. What you desire to become is irrelevant. If you want to become wealthy, famous, powerful, or even if you want to be free, liberated, to be divine, immortal, even if you long for salvation, moksha, then too the tension will be there.
Anything that is desired as something to be fulfilled in the future, against you as you are, creates tension. The more impossible the ideal is, the more tension there is bound to be. So a person who is a materialist is ordinarily not so tense as one who is religious, because the religious person is longing for the impossible, for the far-off. The distance is so great that only a great tension can fill the gap.
Tension means a gap between what you are and what you want to be. If the gap is great, the tension will be great. If the gap is small, the tension will be small. And if there is no gap at all, it means you are satisfied with what you are. In other words, you do not long to be anything other than what you are. Then your mind exists in the moment. There is nothing to be tense about; you are at ease with yourself. You are in the Tao. To me, if there is no gap you are religious; you are in the dharma.
The gap can have many layers. If the longing is physical, the tension will be physical. When you seek a particular body, a particular shape -- if you long for something other than what you are on a physical level -- then there is tension in your physical body. One wants to be more beautiful. Now your body becomes tense. This tension begins at your first body, the physiological, but if it is insistent, constant, it may go deeper and spread to the other layers of your being. If you are longing for psychic powers, then the tension begins at the psychic level and spreads. The spreading is just like when you throw a stone in the lake. It drops at a particular point, but the vibrations created by it will go on spreading into the infinite. So tension may start from any one of your seven bodies, but the original source is always the same: the gap between a state that is and a state that is longed for.
If you have a particular type of mind and you want to change it, transform it -- if you want to be more clever, more intelligent -- then tension is created. Only if we accept ourselves totally is there no tension. This total acceptance is the miracle, the only miracle. To find a person who has accepted himself totally is the only surprising thing.
Existence itself is non-tense. Tension is always because of hypothetical, non-existential possibilities. In the present there is no tension; tension is always future-oriented. It comes from the imagination. You can imagine yourself as something other than you are. This potential that has been imagined will create tension. So the more imaginative a person is, the more tension is a possibility. Then the imagination has become destructive. Imagination can also become constructive, creative. If your whole capacity to imagine is focused in the present, in the moment, not in the future, then you can begin to see your existence as poetry. Your imagination is not creating a longing; it is being used in living. This living in the present is beyond tension.
Animals are not tense, trees are not tense, because they do not have the capacity to imagine. They are below tension, not beyond it. Their tension is just a potentiality; it has not become actual. They are evolving. A moment will come when tension will explode in their beings and they will begin to long for the future. It is bound to happen. The imagination becomes active.
The first thing the imagination becomes active about is the future. You create images and because there are no corresponding realities, you go on creating more and more images. But as far as the present is concerned, you cannot ordinarily conceive of the imagination in relation to it. How can you be imaginative in the present? There seems to be no need. This point must be understood.
The original source of all tension is becoming. One is always trying to be something; no one is at ease with himself as he is. The being is not accepted, the being is denied, and something else is taken as an ideal to become. So the basic tension is always between that which you are and that which you long to become.
You desire to become something. Tension means that you are not pleased with what you are, and you long to be what you are not. Tension is created between these two. What you desire to become is irrelevant. If you want to become wealthy, famous, powerful, or even if you want to be free, liberated, to be divine, immortal, even if you long for salvation, moksha, then too the tension will be there.
Anything that is desired as something to be fulfilled in the future, against you as you are, creates tension. The more impossible the ideal is, the more tension there is bound to be. So a person who is a materialist is ordinarily not so tense as one who is religious, because the religious person is longing for the impossible, for the far-off. The distance is so great that only a great tension can fill the gap.
Tension means a gap between what you are and what you want to be. If the gap is great, the tension will be great. If the gap is small, the tension will be small. And if there is no gap at all, it means you are satisfied with what you are. In other words, you do not long to be anything other than what you are. Then your mind exists in the moment. There is nothing to be tense about; you are at ease with yourself. You are in the Tao. To me, if there is no gap you are religious; you are in the dharma.
The gap can have many layers. If the longing is physical, the tension will be physical. When you seek a particular body, a particular shape -- if you long for something other than what you are on a physical level -- then there is tension in your physical body. One wants to be more beautiful. Now your body becomes tense. This tension begins at your first body, the physiological, but if it is insistent, constant, it may go deeper and spread to the other layers of your being. If you are longing for psychic powers, then the tension begins at the psychic level and spreads. The spreading is just like when you throw a stone in the lake. It drops at a particular point, but the vibrations created by it will go on spreading into the infinite. So tension may start from any one of your seven bodies, but the original source is always the same: the gap between a state that is and a state that is longed for.
If you have a particular type of mind and you want to change it, transform it -- if you want to be more clever, more intelligent -- then tension is created. Only if we accept ourselves totally is there no tension. This total acceptance is the miracle, the only miracle. To find a person who has accepted himself totally is the only surprising thing.
Existence itself is non-tense. Tension is always because of hypothetical, non-existential possibilities. In the present there is no tension; tension is always future-oriented. It comes from the imagination. You can imagine yourself as something other than you are. This potential that has been imagined will create tension. So the more imaginative a person is, the more tension is a possibility. Then the imagination has become destructive. Imagination can also become constructive, creative. If your whole capacity to imagine is focused in the present, in the moment, not in the future, then you can begin to see your existence as poetry. Your imagination is not creating a longing; it is being used in living. This living in the present is beyond tension.
Animals are not tense, trees are not tense, because they do not have the capacity to imagine. They are below tension, not beyond it. Their tension is just a potentiality; it has not become actual. They are evolving. A moment will come when tension will explode in their beings and they will begin to long for the future. It is bound to happen. The imagination becomes active.
The first thing the imagination becomes active about is the future. You create images and because there are no corresponding realities, you go on creating more and more images. But as far as the present is concerned, you cannot ordinarily conceive of the imagination in relation to it. How can you be imaginative in the present? There seems to be no need. This point must be understood.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Yoga vs Meditation
What About Yoga?
Yoga means union, the science of union... [and] meditation is the suprememost phenomenon as far as union with reality is concerned. Meditation is the god of yoga. But yoga has fallen into wrong hands, and not only recently -- for centuries it has been in the wrong hands.
The original fault must go to the founder, Patanjali himself. Patanjali has divided yoga into eight parts. His division is clear-cut, very scientific, but he was not really aware of human stupidity. He started with the body -- and that's the right way to start. The first part of yoga must be physiological because man lives on the circumference, in the body, so the work has to start there, only then can it reach the mind. And when one has gone beyond the body and beyond the mind, then the third, meditation, happens.
So according to Patanjali the first part belongs to the body. But he was not clearly aware that millions of people would remain entangled with the first part. Hence yoga has become synonymous with yoga postures: people standing on their heads and doing all sorts of contortions -- that has become synonymous with yoga.
It is not a true yoga, it is just the preface, the introductory part; and the person who thinks the introduction is the whole book is idiotic.
But Patanjali did not warn people. If he had warned people it would have been better. People like Patanjali believe in others' intelligence -- which is not there! They trust. Their trust is immense, their trust is as immense as people's stupidity is! They respect people's intelligence. So he did not warn people, but the warning was absolutely necessary: "Don't get entangled in the physiological part."
A few people, only very few -- if a hundred people become interested in yoga then only one person will get out of physiological entanglement. And that one person will become entangled in the psychological. If a hundred persons are entangled in the psychological then only one person gets out of it -- and only when you get out of the mind does the real yoga begin.
The physiological part of yoga will give you great physiological powers; it can make you live a really long, healthy life. But what are you going to do with a long life? If you are idiotic, instead of being idiotic for seventy years you will be idiotic for two hundred years. It is not going to help anybody, it will be a calamity.
There was a man called Nadir Shah -- one of the most notorious, murderous men in the whole history of humanity. He invaded India at least one hundred and eight times. He killed more people in India than anybody else. And he had his own ways of torturing: he would put the whole town on fire and surround the town with his army so nobody could escape -- and he would enjoy it! This man asked an astrologer, because he had heard of his fame, "What do you say? What is your advice? -- should a man live long, very long, or should one live only the average, seventy years?"
The astrologer must have really a wise man. He said, "It all depends. If a man like you lives long, it is bad, it is unfortunate. In the first place a man like you should not be born; and in the second place, if he is born, then he should die immediately. And in the third place, if he manages to live somehow, then the sooner he dies, the better."
Nadir Shah was very angry. This was the first man who had not bothered about his murderous attitude, this was the first man who had said the truth as it was. Nadir Shah said "I will kill you." The astrologer said "That doesn't matter, you can kill me, but I have to tell the truth. The truth is that if men like you do live, they should sleep twenty-four hours a day and drink as much as they can!"
Nadir Shah was so shocked but the man was so truthful that even Nadir Shah had to leave him alone. Even he could not gather courage to kill such a man. He felt shaken and he remembered him again and again: "What a man! Almost a dragon! He made me tremble -- the way he looked at me and the way he said things. I had never expected anybody would have such courage." But he respected the astrologer.
Yoga can make a person live long, but what will you do? That physiological part should not be paid so much attention. Yes, a little bit is good to keep physically fit, but just a little bit; otherwise it is a vast jungle: one can be lost in its subtleties, in its complexities.
And the second part is even vaster than the physiological. If you get into it you can have many psychic powers, you can read people's thoughts -- but what is the point? Your own rubbish is so much, what is the point of reading somebody else's rubbish? He is tortured by his rubbish and you are reading his thoughts -- and you think you are doing something great!
The real thing is to get rid of thoughts, not to read them. One even has to get rid of one's own thoughts; what is the point of reading other people's thoughts? And what is there? You can stand by the side of the road and you can see a man is walking along and thinking of his dog -- so what?
If you listen to people's thoughts, what will you find? Somebody is thinking of his cow, somebody is thinking of his buffalo, somebody is thinking of his wife, somebody is thinking of somebody else's wife! And you are thinking what they are thinking! Maybe the other person is also a yogi and is reading somebody else's thoughts... then things become very complicated!
The physiological part is ordinary, the psychological part is ordinary. Both can give power, but power is not the goal of meditation. Power is politics, all kinds of power is politics. And power corrupts -- all kinds of power -- it corrupts unconditionally and absolutely; it always corrupts.
Hence I say the only essential thing, the real core of all religion, of all yoga, of all methods of search, is meditation. One should put aside everything non-essential. You can use things as stepping stones, but not more than that -- just like jumping boards. You need not bother too much about them. Your whole concern should be one-pointed; you should move like an arrow towards meditation, only then in this small life, with so little time, power and energy available and with so many problems surrounding you, can you hope that the arrow will reach the target.
And the moment you know something of meditation -- not about it, but the very taste of it -- a great release comes. a great relief comes. Suddenly all tensions disappear: anxieties, anguishes, are found no more. Even if you want them just for a change, you cannot find them. I have tried and failed! Sometimes I try very hard to find some anxiety but I cannot, it simply does not work. I have tried all possible ways, from this side and that side, but I come to the same end: it does not work.
Once you have tasted meditation it is impossible for you to be in any misery. Bliss becomes inevitable, a natural showering, and it goes on showering like flowers showering from the sky.
Yoga means union, the science of union... [and] meditation is the suprememost phenomenon as far as union with reality is concerned. Meditation is the god of yoga. But yoga has fallen into wrong hands, and not only recently -- for centuries it has been in the wrong hands.
The original fault must go to the founder, Patanjali himself. Patanjali has divided yoga into eight parts. His division is clear-cut, very scientific, but he was not really aware of human stupidity. He started with the body -- and that's the right way to start. The first part of yoga must be physiological because man lives on the circumference, in the body, so the work has to start there, only then can it reach the mind. And when one has gone beyond the body and beyond the mind, then the third, meditation, happens.
So according to Patanjali the first part belongs to the body. But he was not clearly aware that millions of people would remain entangled with the first part. Hence yoga has become synonymous with yoga postures: people standing on their heads and doing all sorts of contortions -- that has become synonymous with yoga.
It is not a true yoga, it is just the preface, the introductory part; and the person who thinks the introduction is the whole book is idiotic.
But Patanjali did not warn people. If he had warned people it would have been better. People like Patanjali believe in others' intelligence -- which is not there! They trust. Their trust is immense, their trust is as immense as people's stupidity is! They respect people's intelligence. So he did not warn people, but the warning was absolutely necessary: "Don't get entangled in the physiological part."
A few people, only very few -- if a hundred people become interested in yoga then only one person will get out of physiological entanglement. And that one person will become entangled in the psychological. If a hundred persons are entangled in the psychological then only one person gets out of it -- and only when you get out of the mind does the real yoga begin.
The physiological part of yoga will give you great physiological powers; it can make you live a really long, healthy life. But what are you going to do with a long life? If you are idiotic, instead of being idiotic for seventy years you will be idiotic for two hundred years. It is not going to help anybody, it will be a calamity.
There was a man called Nadir Shah -- one of the most notorious, murderous men in the whole history of humanity. He invaded India at least one hundred and eight times. He killed more people in India than anybody else. And he had his own ways of torturing: he would put the whole town on fire and surround the town with his army so nobody could escape -- and he would enjoy it! This man asked an astrologer, because he had heard of his fame, "What do you say? What is your advice? -- should a man live long, very long, or should one live only the average, seventy years?"
The astrologer must have really a wise man. He said, "It all depends. If a man like you lives long, it is bad, it is unfortunate. In the first place a man like you should not be born; and in the second place, if he is born, then he should die immediately. And in the third place, if he manages to live somehow, then the sooner he dies, the better."
Nadir Shah was very angry. This was the first man who had not bothered about his murderous attitude, this was the first man who had said the truth as it was. Nadir Shah said "I will kill you." The astrologer said "That doesn't matter, you can kill me, but I have to tell the truth. The truth is that if men like you do live, they should sleep twenty-four hours a day and drink as much as they can!"
Nadir Shah was so shocked but the man was so truthful that even Nadir Shah had to leave him alone. Even he could not gather courage to kill such a man. He felt shaken and he remembered him again and again: "What a man! Almost a dragon! He made me tremble -- the way he looked at me and the way he said things. I had never expected anybody would have such courage." But he respected the astrologer.
Yoga can make a person live long, but what will you do? That physiological part should not be paid so much attention. Yes, a little bit is good to keep physically fit, but just a little bit; otherwise it is a vast jungle: one can be lost in its subtleties, in its complexities.
And the second part is even vaster than the physiological. If you get into it you can have many psychic powers, you can read people's thoughts -- but what is the point? Your own rubbish is so much, what is the point of reading somebody else's rubbish? He is tortured by his rubbish and you are reading his thoughts -- and you think you are doing something great!
The real thing is to get rid of thoughts, not to read them. One even has to get rid of one's own thoughts; what is the point of reading other people's thoughts? And what is there? You can stand by the side of the road and you can see a man is walking along and thinking of his dog -- so what?
If you listen to people's thoughts, what will you find? Somebody is thinking of his cow, somebody is thinking of his buffalo, somebody is thinking of his wife, somebody is thinking of somebody else's wife! And you are thinking what they are thinking! Maybe the other person is also a yogi and is reading somebody else's thoughts... then things become very complicated!
The physiological part is ordinary, the psychological part is ordinary. Both can give power, but power is not the goal of meditation. Power is politics, all kinds of power is politics. And power corrupts -- all kinds of power -- it corrupts unconditionally and absolutely; it always corrupts.
Hence I say the only essential thing, the real core of all religion, of all yoga, of all methods of search, is meditation. One should put aside everything non-essential. You can use things as stepping stones, but not more than that -- just like jumping boards. You need not bother too much about them. Your whole concern should be one-pointed; you should move like an arrow towards meditation, only then in this small life, with so little time, power and energy available and with so many problems surrounding you, can you hope that the arrow will reach the target.
And the moment you know something of meditation -- not about it, but the very taste of it -- a great release comes. a great relief comes. Suddenly all tensions disappear: anxieties, anguishes, are found no more. Even if you want them just for a change, you cannot find them. I have tried and failed! Sometimes I try very hard to find some anxiety but I cannot, it simply does not work. I have tried all possible ways, from this side and that side, but I come to the same end: it does not work.
Once you have tasted meditation it is impossible for you to be in any misery. Bliss becomes inevitable, a natural showering, and it goes on showering like flowers showering from the sky.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Problems & Happiness
What will meditation do to solve my problems?
If you are clear, if you can see, your life-problems dissolve. Let me remind you about using the word 'dissolve'. I am not saying you find the answers, solutions to your problems, no. And I am only talking about life-problems.
This is the most important thing about life-problems to understand: they are created by your unclarity of vision. So it is not that first you see them clearly, then you find the solution, and then you try to apply the solution. No, the process is not that long; the process is very simple and short.
The moment you can see your life-problem clearly, it dissolves. It is not that you have now found an answer that you will apply, and someday you will succeed in destroying the problem. The problem existed in your unclarity of vision. You were its creator.
Remember again, I am talking about life-problems. I am not saying that if your car is broken down you just sit silently and see clearly what the problem is: the problem is clear, now do something. It is not a question that you simply sit under a tree and meditate and just once in a while open your eyes and see whether the problem is solved or not.
This is not a life-problem, it is a mechanical problem. If your tire is punctured you will have to change the wheel. Sitting won't do; you just get up and change the wheel. It has nothing to do with your mind and your clarity, it has something to do with the county road.
What can your clarity do with the county road? Otherwise, three thousand meditators here cannot mend one county road? Just meditation would have been enough -- and in the morning you would find an asphalt road.
But the question is only about life-problems. For example, you are feeling jealous, angry, you are feeling a kind of meaninglessness. You are dragging yourself somehow. You don't feel that life is juicy anymore. These are life-problems and they arise out of your unclarity of mind.
Because unclarity is the source of their arising, clarity becomes their dissolution. If you are clear, if you can see clearly, the problem will disappear.
You have not to do anything other than that. Just seeing, just watching its whole process: how the problem arises, how it takes possession of you, how you become completely clouded by it, blinded by it; and how you start acting madly, for which you repent later on, about which you realize later on that it was sheer insanity, that "I did it in spite of myself. I never wanted to do it, still I did it. And even when I was doing it I knew that I didn't want to do it." But it was as if you were possessed...
Will meditation help me to be happy?
Many people come to me and they say they are unhappy, and they want me to give them some meditation. I say: First, the basic thing is to understand why you are unhappy. And if you don't remove those basic causes of your unhappiness, I can give you a meditation, but that is not going to help very much -- because the basic causes remain there.
The man may have been a good model, beautiful dancer, and he is sitting in an office, piling up files. There is no possibility for dance. The man may have enjoyed dancing under the stars, but he is simply going on accumulating a DataBase. And he says he is unhappy: "Give me some meditation." I can give him! -- but what is that meditation going to do? what is it supposed to do? He will remain the same man: accumulating money, competitive in the market. The meditation may help in this way: it may make him a little more relaxed to do this nonsense even better.
That's what Transcendental Meditation is doing to many people in the West -- and that is the appeal of transcendental meditation, because Maharishi Mahesh Yogi goes on saying, "It will make you more efficient in your work, it will make you more successful. If you are a salesman, you will become a more successful salesman. It will give you efficiency. And American people are almost crazy about efficiency. You can lose everything just for being efficient. Hence, the appeal.
Yes, it can help you. It can relax you a little -- it is a tranquillizer. By constantly repeating a mantra, by continuously repeating a certain word, it changes your brain chemistry. It is a tranquillizer! a sound-tranquillizer. It helps you to lessen your stress so tomorrow in the market place you can be more efficient, more capable to compete -- but it doesn't change you. It is not a transformation.
You can repeat a mantra, you can do a certain meditation; it can help you a little bit here and there -- but it can only help you to remain whatsoever you are.
Hence, my appeal is only for those who are really daring, dare-devils who are ready to change their very pattern of life, who are ready to stake everything -- because in fact you don't have anything to put at the stake: only your unhappiness, your misery. But people cling even to that.
I have heard: In a remote training camp, a squad of rookies had just returned to their billet after a day's route-march under the boiling sun. "What a life!" said one new soldier. "Miles from anywhere, a sergeant who thinks he's Attila the Hun, no women, no booze, no leave -- and on top of all that. my boots are two sizes too small. "You don't want to put up with that, chum," said his neighbor. "Why don't you put in for another pair?" "Not likely." came the reply. "Taking 'em off is the only pleasure I've got!"
What else do you have to put at stake? Just the misery. The only pleasure that you have is talking about it. Look at people talking about their misery: how happy they become! They pay for it: they go to psychoanalysts to talk about their misery -- they pay for it! Somebody listens attentively, they are very happy. People go on talking about their misery again and again and again. They even exaggerate, they decorate, they make it look bigger. They make it look bigger than life-size. Why? Nothing do you have to put at the stake. But people cling to the known, to the familiar. The misery is all that they have known -- that is their life. Nothing to lose, but so afraid to lose. With me, happiness comes first, joy comes first. A celebrating attitude comes first. A life-affirming philosophy comes first. Enjoy! If you cannot enjoy your work, change. Don't wait! because all the time that you are waiting you are waiting for Godot. Godot is never to come. One simply waits -- and wastes one's life. For whom, for what are you waiting? If you see the point, that you are miserable in a certain pattern of life, then all the old traditions say: you are wrong. I would like to say: The pattern is wrong. Try to understand the difference of emphasis.
You are not wrong! Just your pattern, the way you have learned to live is wrong. The motivations that you have learned and accepted as yours are not yours -- they don't fulfill your destiny. They go against your grain, they go against your element.... Remember it: nobody else can decide for you. All their commandments, all their orders, all their moralities, are just to kill you. You have to decide for yourself. You have to take your life in your own hands. Otherwise, life goes on knocking at your door and you are never there -- you are always somewhere else. If you were going to be a dancer, life comes from that door because life thinks you must be a dancer by now. It knocks there but you are not there -- you are a banker. And how is life expected to know that you would become a banker? God comes to you the way he wanted you to be; he knows only that address -- but you are never found there, you are somewhere else, hiding behind somebody else's mask, in somebody else's garb, under somebody else's name. How do you expect God to find you? He goes on searching for you. He knows your name, but you have forgotten that name. He knows your address, but you never lived at that address. You allowed the world to distract you. God can find you only in one way, only in one way can he find you, and that is your inner flowering: as he wanted you to be. Unless you find your spontaneity, unless you find your element, you cannot be happy. And if you cannot be happy, you cannot be meditative.
Why did this idea arise in people's minds? that meditation brings happiness. In fact, wherever they found a happy person they always found a meditative mind -- both things got associated. Whenever they found the beautiful, meditative milieu surrounding a man, they always found he was tremendously happy -- vibrant with bliss, radiant. They became associated. They thought: Happiness comes when you are meditative. It was just the other way round: meditation comes when you are happy. But to be happy is difficult and to learn meditation is easy. To be happy means a drastic change in your way of life, an abrupt change -- because there is no time to lose. A sudden change -- a sudden clash of thunder -- a discontinuity.
That's what I mean by sannyas: a discontinuity with the past. A sudden clash of thunder, and you die to the old and you start afresh, from ABC. You are born again. You again start your life as you would have done if there had been no enforced pattern by your parents, by your society, by the state; as you would have done, must have done, if there had been nobody to distract you. But you were distracted. You have to drop all those patterns that have been forced on you, and you have to find your own inner flame.
If you are clear, if you can see, your life-problems dissolve. Let me remind you about using the word 'dissolve'. I am not saying you find the answers, solutions to your problems, no. And I am only talking about life-problems.
This is the most important thing about life-problems to understand: they are created by your unclarity of vision. So it is not that first you see them clearly, then you find the solution, and then you try to apply the solution. No, the process is not that long; the process is very simple and short.
The moment you can see your life-problem clearly, it dissolves. It is not that you have now found an answer that you will apply, and someday you will succeed in destroying the problem. The problem existed in your unclarity of vision. You were its creator.
Remember again, I am talking about life-problems. I am not saying that if your car is broken down you just sit silently and see clearly what the problem is: the problem is clear, now do something. It is not a question that you simply sit under a tree and meditate and just once in a while open your eyes and see whether the problem is solved or not.
This is not a life-problem, it is a mechanical problem. If your tire is punctured you will have to change the wheel. Sitting won't do; you just get up and change the wheel. It has nothing to do with your mind and your clarity, it has something to do with the county road.
What can your clarity do with the county road? Otherwise, three thousand meditators here cannot mend one county road? Just meditation would have been enough -- and in the morning you would find an asphalt road.
But the question is only about life-problems. For example, you are feeling jealous, angry, you are feeling a kind of meaninglessness. You are dragging yourself somehow. You don't feel that life is juicy anymore. These are life-problems and they arise out of your unclarity of mind.
Because unclarity is the source of their arising, clarity becomes their dissolution. If you are clear, if you can see clearly, the problem will disappear.
You have not to do anything other than that. Just seeing, just watching its whole process: how the problem arises, how it takes possession of you, how you become completely clouded by it, blinded by it; and how you start acting madly, for which you repent later on, about which you realize later on that it was sheer insanity, that "I did it in spite of myself. I never wanted to do it, still I did it. And even when I was doing it I knew that I didn't want to do it." But it was as if you were possessed...
Will meditation help me to be happy?
Many people come to me and they say they are unhappy, and they want me to give them some meditation. I say: First, the basic thing is to understand why you are unhappy. And if you don't remove those basic causes of your unhappiness, I can give you a meditation, but that is not going to help very much -- because the basic causes remain there.
The man may have been a good model, beautiful dancer, and he is sitting in an office, piling up files. There is no possibility for dance. The man may have enjoyed dancing under the stars, but he is simply going on accumulating a DataBase. And he says he is unhappy: "Give me some meditation." I can give him! -- but what is that meditation going to do? what is it supposed to do? He will remain the same man: accumulating money, competitive in the market. The meditation may help in this way: it may make him a little more relaxed to do this nonsense even better.
That's what Transcendental Meditation is doing to many people in the West -- and that is the appeal of transcendental meditation, because Maharishi Mahesh Yogi goes on saying, "It will make you more efficient in your work, it will make you more successful. If you are a salesman, you will become a more successful salesman. It will give you efficiency. And American people are almost crazy about efficiency. You can lose everything just for being efficient. Hence, the appeal.
Yes, it can help you. It can relax you a little -- it is a tranquillizer. By constantly repeating a mantra, by continuously repeating a certain word, it changes your brain chemistry. It is a tranquillizer! a sound-tranquillizer. It helps you to lessen your stress so tomorrow in the market place you can be more efficient, more capable to compete -- but it doesn't change you. It is not a transformation.
You can repeat a mantra, you can do a certain meditation; it can help you a little bit here and there -- but it can only help you to remain whatsoever you are.
Hence, my appeal is only for those who are really daring, dare-devils who are ready to change their very pattern of life, who are ready to stake everything -- because in fact you don't have anything to put at the stake: only your unhappiness, your misery. But people cling even to that.
I have heard: In a remote training camp, a squad of rookies had just returned to their billet after a day's route-march under the boiling sun. "What a life!" said one new soldier. "Miles from anywhere, a sergeant who thinks he's Attila the Hun, no women, no booze, no leave -- and on top of all that. my boots are two sizes too small. "You don't want to put up with that, chum," said his neighbor. "Why don't you put in for another pair?" "Not likely." came the reply. "Taking 'em off is the only pleasure I've got!"
What else do you have to put at stake? Just the misery. The only pleasure that you have is talking about it. Look at people talking about their misery: how happy they become! They pay for it: they go to psychoanalysts to talk about their misery -- they pay for it! Somebody listens attentively, they are very happy. People go on talking about their misery again and again and again. They even exaggerate, they decorate, they make it look bigger. They make it look bigger than life-size. Why? Nothing do you have to put at the stake. But people cling to the known, to the familiar. The misery is all that they have known -- that is their life. Nothing to lose, but so afraid to lose. With me, happiness comes first, joy comes first. A celebrating attitude comes first. A life-affirming philosophy comes first. Enjoy! If you cannot enjoy your work, change. Don't wait! because all the time that you are waiting you are waiting for Godot. Godot is never to come. One simply waits -- and wastes one's life. For whom, for what are you waiting? If you see the point, that you are miserable in a certain pattern of life, then all the old traditions say: you are wrong. I would like to say: The pattern is wrong. Try to understand the difference of emphasis.
You are not wrong! Just your pattern, the way you have learned to live is wrong. The motivations that you have learned and accepted as yours are not yours -- they don't fulfill your destiny. They go against your grain, they go against your element.... Remember it: nobody else can decide for you. All their commandments, all their orders, all their moralities, are just to kill you. You have to decide for yourself. You have to take your life in your own hands. Otherwise, life goes on knocking at your door and you are never there -- you are always somewhere else. If you were going to be a dancer, life comes from that door because life thinks you must be a dancer by now. It knocks there but you are not there -- you are a banker. And how is life expected to know that you would become a banker? God comes to you the way he wanted you to be; he knows only that address -- but you are never found there, you are somewhere else, hiding behind somebody else's mask, in somebody else's garb, under somebody else's name. How do you expect God to find you? He goes on searching for you. He knows your name, but you have forgotten that name. He knows your address, but you never lived at that address. You allowed the world to distract you. God can find you only in one way, only in one way can he find you, and that is your inner flowering: as he wanted you to be. Unless you find your spontaneity, unless you find your element, you cannot be happy. And if you cannot be happy, you cannot be meditative.
Why did this idea arise in people's minds? that meditation brings happiness. In fact, wherever they found a happy person they always found a meditative mind -- both things got associated. Whenever they found the beautiful, meditative milieu surrounding a man, they always found he was tremendously happy -- vibrant with bliss, radiant. They became associated. They thought: Happiness comes when you are meditative. It was just the other way round: meditation comes when you are happy. But to be happy is difficult and to learn meditation is easy. To be happy means a drastic change in your way of life, an abrupt change -- because there is no time to lose. A sudden change -- a sudden clash of thunder -- a discontinuity.
That's what I mean by sannyas: a discontinuity with the past. A sudden clash of thunder, and you die to the old and you start afresh, from ABC. You are born again. You again start your life as you would have done if there had been no enforced pattern by your parents, by your society, by the state; as you would have done, must have done, if there had been nobody to distract you. But you were distracted. You have to drop all those patterns that have been forced on you, and you have to find your own inner flame.
Vipassana
Meditation is simple. Precisely because it is simple, it looks difficult. Your mind is accustomed to dealing with difficult problems, and it has completely forgotten how to respond to the simple things of life. The more simple a thing is, the more difficult it looks to the mind, because the mind is very efficient in solving difficult things. It has been trained to solve difficult things, it does not know how to tackle the simple. Meditation is simple, your mind is complex. It is not a problem that meditation is creating. The problem is coming from your mind, not from meditation.
Vipassana is the most simple meditation in the world. It is through vipassana that Buddha became enlightened, and it is through vipassana that many more people have become enlightened than through any other method. Vipassana is the method. Yes, there are other methods also, but they have helped only very few people. Vipassana has helped thousands, and it is really very simple; is not like yoga.
Yoga is difficult, arduous, complex. You have to torture yourself in many ways: distort your body, contort your body, sit this way and that, torture, stand on your head -- exercises and exercises... but yoga seems to be very appealing to people.
Vipassana is so simple that you don't take any note of it.
In fact, coming across vipassana for the first time, one doubts whether it can be called a meditation at all. What is it? -- no physical exercise, no breathing exercise; a very simple phenomenon: just watching your breath coming in, going out... finished, this is the method; sitting silently, watching your breath coming in, going out; not losing track, that's all. Not that you have to change your breathing -- it is not pranayam; it is not a breathing exercise where you have to take deep breaths, exhale, inhale, no. Let the breathing be simple, as it is. You just have to bring one new quality to it: awareness.
The breath goes out, watch; the breath comes in, watch. You will become aware: the breath touching your nostrils at one point, you will become aware. You can concentrate there: the breath comes in, you feel the touch of the breath on the nostrils; then it goes out, you feel the touch again. Remain there at the tip of the nose. It is not that you have to concentrate at the tip of the nose; you have just to be alert, aware, watchful. It is not concentration. Don't miss, just go on remembering. In the beginning you will miss again and again; then bring yourself back If it is difficult for you -- for a few people it is difficult to watch it there -- then they can watch the breath in the belly. When the breath goes in, the belly goes up; when the breath goes out, the belly goes in. You go on watching your belly. If you have a really good belly, it will help.
Have you watched? If you see Indian statues of Buddha, those statues don't have real bellies -- in fact, no belly at all. Buddha looks a perfect athlete: chest coming out, belly in. But if you see a Japanese statue of Buddha you will be surprised: it does not look buddhalike at all -- a big belly, so big that you cannot see the chest at all, almost as if Buddha is pregnant, all belly. The reason why this change happened is that in India, while Buddha was alive, he himself was watching the breath at the nose, hence tr he he belly was not important at all. But as Vipassana moved from India to Tibet to China to Korea to Burma to Japan, slowly, slowly people became aware that it is easier to watch in the belly than at the nose. Then Buddha-statues started becoming different, with bigger bellies.
You can watch either at the belly or at the nose, whichever feels right for you or whichever feels easier for you. That it be easier is the point. And just watching the breath, miracles happen.
Meditation is not difficult. It is simple. Precisely because it is simple you are feeling the difficulty. You would like to do many things, and there is nothing to do; that is the problem. It is a great problem, because we have been taught to do things. We ask what should be done, and meditation means a state of non-doing: you have not to do anything, you have to stop doing. You have to be in a state of utter inaction. Even thinking is a kind of doing -- drop that too. Feeling is a kind of doing -- drop that too. Doing, thinking, feeling -- all gone, you simply are. That is being. And being is meditation. It is very simple.
In your mother's womb you were in the same space. In vipassana you will be entering again into the same space. And you will remember, you will have a deja-vu. When you enter into deep vipassana, you will be surprised that you know it, you have known it before. You will recognize it immediately because for nine months in your mother's womb you were in the same space, doing nothing, just being.
You ask me, "I thought that meditation was simple thing, but seeing people doing vipasssana I am losing all hope of every becoming a successful meditator."
Never think about meditation in terms of success
Because that is bringing your achieving mind into it, the egoistic mind into it. Then meditation becomes your egotrip. Don't think in terms of success or failure. Those terms are not applicable in the world of meditation. Forget all about that. Those are mind terms; they are comparative. And that's the problem: you must be watching others succeeding, reaching, ecstatic, and you will be feeling very low. You will be feeling silly, sitting and looking at your breath, watching your breath. You must be looking very silly and nothing is happening. Nothing is happening because you are expecting something to happen too much.
And in the beginning, every new process looks difficult. One has to learn the taste of it.
A lady's husband was a souse, yet she had never in her life tasted alcohol.
"Here, you souse, give me that bottle. I want to taste whatever it is that has made you the bum you are."
Taking the bottle of cheap whiskey, she took a good gulp of it. "Aargh... glompf... breecch... fuy... brrrit... ptui!" she gasped. "That is the most vile-tasting liquid I have ever had the misfortune to let pass my lips. It tastes terrible!""Y'see?" said the old man. "An' all these years you thought I was having a good time."
Just wait a little, Paul. Just a little patience. In the beginning everything looks difficult, even the simplest thing. And don't be in a hurry.
That is one of the problems with the Western mind -- hurry. People want everything immediately. They think in terms of instant coffee, instant meditation, instant enlightenment.
A city slicker had just inherited a farm full of cows and, being a shrewd operator, decided to increase his herd right away. Accordingly, he imported three of the finest bulls in the area and locked them in the barn overnight with the cows. The next morning he called the owner of the bulls to complain.
The stud-man laughed. "What did you expect?" he asked. Did you think you'd find calves the next day?"
"Maybe not," retorted the city slicker. "But I sure did expect to see a few smiling faces on those cows!"
No, not even that is going to happen soon. Just sitting for one day in vipassana, you will not come out of it smiling. You will come out utterly tired -- tired because you were told not to do anything, tired because you have never been in such a silly thing ever before. Not doing anything? You are a doer! If you had chopped wood the whole day you would not have been so tired. But sitting silently, doing nothing, just watching your silly breath going in, coming out... many times the idea arises, "What am I doing here?" And the time will look very, very long, because time is relative. The time will become very long. One day's meditation will look as if years and years have passed -- "And what has happened? Is not the sun going to set today? When is it going to finish?"
If you are in a hurry, if you are in haste, you will never know the taste of meditation.
The taste of meditation needs great patience, infinite patience.
Meditation is simple, but you have become so complex that to relax it will take time. It is not the meditation that is taking time -- let me remind you again -- it is your complex mind. It has to be brought down to a rest, to a relaxed state. That takes time.
And don't think in terms of success and failure. Enjoy! Don't be too goal-oriented. Enjoy the sheer silence of watching your breath coming in, going out, and soon you will have a beauty, a new experience of beauty and beatitude. Soon you will see that one need not go anywhere to be blissful. One can sit silently, be alone, and be blissful. Nothing else is needed, just the pulsation of life is enough. If you can pulsate with it, it becomes a deep inner dance.
Meditation is a dance of your energy, and breath is the key.
Vipassana is the most simple meditation in the world. It is through vipassana that Buddha became enlightened, and it is through vipassana that many more people have become enlightened than through any other method. Vipassana is the method. Yes, there are other methods also, but they have helped only very few people. Vipassana has helped thousands, and it is really very simple; is not like yoga.
Yoga is difficult, arduous, complex. You have to torture yourself in many ways: distort your body, contort your body, sit this way and that, torture, stand on your head -- exercises and exercises... but yoga seems to be very appealing to people.
Vipassana is so simple that you don't take any note of it.
In fact, coming across vipassana for the first time, one doubts whether it can be called a meditation at all. What is it? -- no physical exercise, no breathing exercise; a very simple phenomenon: just watching your breath coming in, going out... finished, this is the method; sitting silently, watching your breath coming in, going out; not losing track, that's all. Not that you have to change your breathing -- it is not pranayam; it is not a breathing exercise where you have to take deep breaths, exhale, inhale, no. Let the breathing be simple, as it is. You just have to bring one new quality to it: awareness.
The breath goes out, watch; the breath comes in, watch. You will become aware: the breath touching your nostrils at one point, you will become aware. You can concentrate there: the breath comes in, you feel the touch of the breath on the nostrils; then it goes out, you feel the touch again. Remain there at the tip of the nose. It is not that you have to concentrate at the tip of the nose; you have just to be alert, aware, watchful. It is not concentration. Don't miss, just go on remembering. In the beginning you will miss again and again; then bring yourself back If it is difficult for you -- for a few people it is difficult to watch it there -- then they can watch the breath in the belly. When the breath goes in, the belly goes up; when the breath goes out, the belly goes in. You go on watching your belly. If you have a really good belly, it will help.
Have you watched? If you see Indian statues of Buddha, those statues don't have real bellies -- in fact, no belly at all. Buddha looks a perfect athlete: chest coming out, belly in. But if you see a Japanese statue of Buddha you will be surprised: it does not look buddhalike at all -- a big belly, so big that you cannot see the chest at all, almost as if Buddha is pregnant, all belly. The reason why this change happened is that in India, while Buddha was alive, he himself was watching the breath at the nose, hence tr he he belly was not important at all. But as Vipassana moved from India to Tibet to China to Korea to Burma to Japan, slowly, slowly people became aware that it is easier to watch in the belly than at the nose. Then Buddha-statues started becoming different, with bigger bellies.
You can watch either at the belly or at the nose, whichever feels right for you or whichever feels easier for you. That it be easier is the point. And just watching the breath, miracles happen.
Meditation is not difficult. It is simple. Precisely because it is simple you are feeling the difficulty. You would like to do many things, and there is nothing to do; that is the problem. It is a great problem, because we have been taught to do things. We ask what should be done, and meditation means a state of non-doing: you have not to do anything, you have to stop doing. You have to be in a state of utter inaction. Even thinking is a kind of doing -- drop that too. Feeling is a kind of doing -- drop that too. Doing, thinking, feeling -- all gone, you simply are. That is being. And being is meditation. It is very simple.
In your mother's womb you were in the same space. In vipassana you will be entering again into the same space. And you will remember, you will have a deja-vu. When you enter into deep vipassana, you will be surprised that you know it, you have known it before. You will recognize it immediately because for nine months in your mother's womb you were in the same space, doing nothing, just being.
You ask me, "I thought that meditation was simple thing, but seeing people doing vipasssana I am losing all hope of every becoming a successful meditator."
Never think about meditation in terms of success
Because that is bringing your achieving mind into it, the egoistic mind into it. Then meditation becomes your egotrip. Don't think in terms of success or failure. Those terms are not applicable in the world of meditation. Forget all about that. Those are mind terms; they are comparative. And that's the problem: you must be watching others succeeding, reaching, ecstatic, and you will be feeling very low. You will be feeling silly, sitting and looking at your breath, watching your breath. You must be looking very silly and nothing is happening. Nothing is happening because you are expecting something to happen too much.
And in the beginning, every new process looks difficult. One has to learn the taste of it.
A lady's husband was a souse, yet she had never in her life tasted alcohol.
"Here, you souse, give me that bottle. I want to taste whatever it is that has made you the bum you are."
Taking the bottle of cheap whiskey, she took a good gulp of it. "Aargh... glompf... breecch... fuy... brrrit... ptui!" she gasped. "That is the most vile-tasting liquid I have ever had the misfortune to let pass my lips. It tastes terrible!""Y'see?" said the old man. "An' all these years you thought I was having a good time."
Just wait a little, Paul. Just a little patience. In the beginning everything looks difficult, even the simplest thing. And don't be in a hurry.
That is one of the problems with the Western mind -- hurry. People want everything immediately. They think in terms of instant coffee, instant meditation, instant enlightenment.
A city slicker had just inherited a farm full of cows and, being a shrewd operator, decided to increase his herd right away. Accordingly, he imported three of the finest bulls in the area and locked them in the barn overnight with the cows. The next morning he called the owner of the bulls to complain.
The stud-man laughed. "What did you expect?" he asked. Did you think you'd find calves the next day?"
"Maybe not," retorted the city slicker. "But I sure did expect to see a few smiling faces on those cows!"
No, not even that is going to happen soon. Just sitting for one day in vipassana, you will not come out of it smiling. You will come out utterly tired -- tired because you were told not to do anything, tired because you have never been in such a silly thing ever before. Not doing anything? You are a doer! If you had chopped wood the whole day you would not have been so tired. But sitting silently, doing nothing, just watching your silly breath going in, coming out... many times the idea arises, "What am I doing here?" And the time will look very, very long, because time is relative. The time will become very long. One day's meditation will look as if years and years have passed -- "And what has happened? Is not the sun going to set today? When is it going to finish?"
If you are in a hurry, if you are in haste, you will never know the taste of meditation.
The taste of meditation needs great patience, infinite patience.
Meditation is simple, but you have become so complex that to relax it will take time. It is not the meditation that is taking time -- let me remind you again -- it is your complex mind. It has to be brought down to a rest, to a relaxed state. That takes time.
And don't think in terms of success and failure. Enjoy! Don't be too goal-oriented. Enjoy the sheer silence of watching your breath coming in, going out, and soon you will have a beauty, a new experience of beauty and beatitude. Soon you will see that one need not go anywhere to be blissful. One can sit silently, be alone, and be blissful. Nothing else is needed, just the pulsation of life is enough. If you can pulsate with it, it becomes a deep inner dance.
Meditation is a dance of your energy, and breath is the key.
The Messiah
Kahlil Gibran
Kahlil Gibran... the very name brings so much ecstasy and joy that it is impossible to think of another name comparable to him. Just hearing the name, bells start ringing in the heart which do not belong to this world. Kahlil Gibran is pure music, a mystery such that only poetry can sometimes grasp it, but only sometimes.
He is one who is the most beloved of this beautiful earth. Centuries have passed; there have been great men but Kahlil Gibran is a category in himself. I cannot conceive that even in the future, there is a possibility of another man of such deep insight into the human heart, into the unknown that surrounds us.
He has done something impossible. He has been able to bring at least a few fragments of the unknown into human language. He has raised human language and human consciousness as no other man has ever done. Through Kahlil Gibran, it seems all the mystics, all the poets, all creative souls have joined hands and poured themselves.
Although he has been immensely successful in reaching people, still he feels it is not the whole truth, but just a glimpse. But to see the glimpse of truth is a beginning of a pilgrimage that leads you to the ultimate, to the absolute, to the universal.
Another beautiful man, Claude Bragdon has said about Kahlil Gibran, a few beautiful words. He says, "His power came from some great reservoir of spiritual life, else it could not have been so universal and so potent. But the majesty and beauty of the language with which he clothed it were all his own."
I have always loved this statement of Bragdon, even though not agreeing with it. One need not agree with a beautiful flower; one need not agree with the sky full of stars -- but one can still appreciate. I make a clear-cut distinction between agreement and appreciation -- and a man is civilized if he can make the distinction. If he cannot make the distinction, he's still living in a primitive, uncivilized state of consciousness.
I agree in a sense, because whatever Bragdon is saying is beautiful; hence, my appreciation. But I cannot agree because whatever he is saying is simply guesswork. It is not his own experience.
Have you noted? -- he says, "His power came from some great reservoir of spirituality, of spiritual life, else it could not have been so universal and so potent." It is rational, logical, but it has no roots in experience. He feels that something beyond the grasp of mind has come through Kahlil Gibran but he is not certain. And he cannot be certain, because it is not his experience. He is immensely impressed by the beautiful language; each word is a poetry unto itself. But he himself is unaware of that great reservoir of spirituality. He himself has not tasted it. He has loved Kahlil Gibran but he has not lived him.
With me, the situation is totally different. Hence, there are a few things I would like to say to you before I make my commentaries on the statements of Kahlil Gibran.
First, he is certainly a great poet, perhaps the greatest that has ever been born on the earth, but he is not a mystic; and there is a tremendous difference between a poet and a mystic. The poet, once in a while, suddenly finds himself in the same space as the mystic. In those rare moments, roses shower over him. On those rare occasions, he is almost a Gautam Buddha -- but remember, I'm saying almost.
These rare moments come and go. He's not the master of those rare moments. They come like the breeze and the fragrance and by the time you have become aware -- they are gone. A poet's genius is that he catches those moments in words. Those moments come into your life too. They are free gifts of existence -- or in other words, glimpses to provoke in you a search, to come to a moment when this space will become your very life, your blood, your bones, your marrow. You will breathe it, your heart will beat it. You will never be able to lose it, even if you want to.
The poet is for moments a mystic, and the mystic is a poet forever.
But this has always created a very difficult question, and nobody been able to solve it.
I have a humble solution. The problem has been posed again and again, thousands of times all over the world: if the poet gets only glimpses, yet creates so much beauty, so much poetry -- words start becoming alive the moment he touches them -- why have the mystics not been able to produce the same kind of poetry? They are twenty-four hours a day, day and night in that creative state, but their words don't carry that beauty. Even the words of Gautam Buddha or Jesus Christ fall very much short of the words of people like Kahlil Gibran, Mikhail Naimy, Rabindranath Tagore. It certainly seems to be strange; because the people who have only moments create so much and the people who have the universal consciousness available to them, waking or sleeping... what happens? Why have they not been able to produce Kahlil Gibrans? And nobody has answered it.
My own experience is that if a beggar finds a gold mine, he will sing and he will dance and he will go mad with joy -- but not an emperor.
A poet once in a while becomes the emperor -- but only once in a while; that's why he cannot take it for granted. But the mystic is not just for a moment merged with the universal consciousness -- he is merged. There is no way of coming back.
Those small glimpses may be translated into words, because they are only dewdrops. But the mystic has become the ocean; hence, silence becomes his song. All words seem so impotent, nothing seems to be capable of bringing his experience into any kind of communication. And the ocean is so vast and he is continuously one with it; naturally, he himself forgets that he is separate.
To create, you have to be there to create.
To sing a song, you have to be there.
But the mystic has become the song.
His presence is his poetry. You cannot print it, you cannot paint it, you can only drink it.
To communicate with a poet is one thing but to be in communion with a mystic is totally different. But it is good to begin with poets, because if you are not able even to absorb dewdrops, the ocean is not for you. Or better to say, you are not for the ocean.
To you, even the dewdrop will appear like a vast ocean.
Speaking on Kahlil Gibran is a very rare, almost impossible thing because I am not a poet.
I am poetry.
I am not a painter; I am the painting. Where the painter has got lost into the painting, I don't know.
An ancient story is: One Japanese emperor told all the painters of his country and the neighboring countries that he wanted a painting which looked as if it were real: "If you have painted a door, it will not look like a painting. Everybody will be mistaken and will try to enter it. Unless a painting is so real, I do not consider it a painting. And one who can paint such a thing, whatever he wants... even if my whole empire is his desire, he will be rewarded."
Thousands of painters came to the palace. They tried... but how can you paint a painting which will give the exact impression of the real?
But one painter said he would paint only on one condition: While he is painting, he should not be disturbed. No limitation of time should be imposed on him. And he does not paint on canvasses -- he will paint on a big wall inside the palace. And unless the painting is complete, nobody is allowed to come in. The first man to see it complete will be the emperor.
The conditions were accepted. It took him almost six years. The emperor was getting old, but he had promised not to interfere. He kept his word. After six years, the painter came and told the emperor, "You can come."
The painter took the emperor into the room. The emperor could not believe it. It really looked real. There were tall trees and a small winding foot path in the painting. The emperor asked, "Where does this path go?"
The painter said, "You can walk on it...."
And believe it or not -- I don't believe it, but it is so lovable -- the painter entered with the emperor to show him the path and they have not returned.
If you try to think of it as a historical, factual thing you will miss the whole point. It is a parable. And it is absolutely true -- not factual.
The real painter dissolves himself into his painting, and the real poet disappears into his poetry. But that kind of creativity is of the mystic -- and because the mystic disappears in his creativity, he has no time even to sign his painting, or his poetry. The poets can do that, because for a moment the window opens, they see the beyond, and the window closes.
Kahlil Gibran has written almost thirty books. THE PROPHET, which we are going to discuss, is his first book; the remaining are rubbish. This is a strange phenomenon -- what happened to the man? When he wrote this, he was just young -- twenty-one years of age. One would have thought that now more and more would be coming. And he tried hard; for his whole life he was writing but nothing came even close to the beauty and the truth of THE PROPHET. Perhaps the window never opened again.A poet is accidentally mystic. It is just by accident... a breeze comes, you cannot produce it. And because he became world famous -- this is one book which must have been translated in almost all the languages of the world -- he tried hard to do something better, and that's where he failed. It is unfortunate that he never came across a man who could have told him a simple truth: "You had not tried when you created THE PROPHET, it happened. And now you are trying to do it."
It has happened; it is not your doing. You may have been a vehicle. Something that was not yours... just like a child is born of a mother. The mother cannot create the child, she is simply a passage. THE PROPHET belongs to the category of a very small number of books which are not dependent on your action, your intelligence, on you; on the contrary, they are possible only when you are not, when you allow them to happen, when you don't stand in the way. You are so relaxed that you don't interfere.
This is one of those rarest of books. In it, you will not find Kahlil Gibran -- that's the beauty of the book. He allowed the universe to flow through him; he is simply a medium, a passage, just a hollow bamboo which does not hinder the flute player.
In my experience, books like THE PROPHET are holier than your so-called holy books. And because these books are authentically holy, they have not created a religion around themselves. They don't give you any ritual, they don't give you any discipline, they don't give you any commandments. They simply allow you to have a glimpse of the same experience which happened to them.
The whole experience cannot come into words, but something... perhaps not the whole rose, but a few petals. They are enough proof that a rose exists. Your window just has to be open, so a breeze sometimes can bring petals.
Those petals coming through a breeze into your being are really invitations of the unknown. God is calling you for a long pilgrimage. Unless that pilgrimage is made, you will remain meaningless, dragging somehow, but not really living. You will not have laughter in your heart.
Kahlil Gibran avoids his own name by creating a fictitious name, Almustafa. That's the beginning of THE PROPHET. Almustafa is the prophet.
Kahlil Gibran... the very name brings so much ecstasy and joy that it is impossible to think of another name comparable to him. Just hearing the name, bells start ringing in the heart which do not belong to this world. Kahlil Gibran is pure music, a mystery such that only poetry can sometimes grasp it, but only sometimes.
He is one who is the most beloved of this beautiful earth. Centuries have passed; there have been great men but Kahlil Gibran is a category in himself. I cannot conceive that even in the future, there is a possibility of another man of such deep insight into the human heart, into the unknown that surrounds us.
He has done something impossible. He has been able to bring at least a few fragments of the unknown into human language. He has raised human language and human consciousness as no other man has ever done. Through Kahlil Gibran, it seems all the mystics, all the poets, all creative souls have joined hands and poured themselves.
Although he has been immensely successful in reaching people, still he feels it is not the whole truth, but just a glimpse. But to see the glimpse of truth is a beginning of a pilgrimage that leads you to the ultimate, to the absolute, to the universal.
Another beautiful man, Claude Bragdon has said about Kahlil Gibran, a few beautiful words. He says, "His power came from some great reservoir of spiritual life, else it could not have been so universal and so potent. But the majesty and beauty of the language with which he clothed it were all his own."
I have always loved this statement of Bragdon, even though not agreeing with it. One need not agree with a beautiful flower; one need not agree with the sky full of stars -- but one can still appreciate. I make a clear-cut distinction between agreement and appreciation -- and a man is civilized if he can make the distinction. If he cannot make the distinction, he's still living in a primitive, uncivilized state of consciousness.
I agree in a sense, because whatever Bragdon is saying is beautiful; hence, my appreciation. But I cannot agree because whatever he is saying is simply guesswork. It is not his own experience.
Have you noted? -- he says, "His power came from some great reservoir of spirituality, of spiritual life, else it could not have been so universal and so potent." It is rational, logical, but it has no roots in experience. He feels that something beyond the grasp of mind has come through Kahlil Gibran but he is not certain. And he cannot be certain, because it is not his experience. He is immensely impressed by the beautiful language; each word is a poetry unto itself. But he himself is unaware of that great reservoir of spirituality. He himself has not tasted it. He has loved Kahlil Gibran but he has not lived him.
With me, the situation is totally different. Hence, there are a few things I would like to say to you before I make my commentaries on the statements of Kahlil Gibran.
First, he is certainly a great poet, perhaps the greatest that has ever been born on the earth, but he is not a mystic; and there is a tremendous difference between a poet and a mystic. The poet, once in a while, suddenly finds himself in the same space as the mystic. In those rare moments, roses shower over him. On those rare occasions, he is almost a Gautam Buddha -- but remember, I'm saying almost.
These rare moments come and go. He's not the master of those rare moments. They come like the breeze and the fragrance and by the time you have become aware -- they are gone. A poet's genius is that he catches those moments in words. Those moments come into your life too. They are free gifts of existence -- or in other words, glimpses to provoke in you a search, to come to a moment when this space will become your very life, your blood, your bones, your marrow. You will breathe it, your heart will beat it. You will never be able to lose it, even if you want to.
The poet is for moments a mystic, and the mystic is a poet forever.
But this has always created a very difficult question, and nobody been able to solve it.
I have a humble solution. The problem has been posed again and again, thousands of times all over the world: if the poet gets only glimpses, yet creates so much beauty, so much poetry -- words start becoming alive the moment he touches them -- why have the mystics not been able to produce the same kind of poetry? They are twenty-four hours a day, day and night in that creative state, but their words don't carry that beauty. Even the words of Gautam Buddha or Jesus Christ fall very much short of the words of people like Kahlil Gibran, Mikhail Naimy, Rabindranath Tagore. It certainly seems to be strange; because the people who have only moments create so much and the people who have the universal consciousness available to them, waking or sleeping... what happens? Why have they not been able to produce Kahlil Gibrans? And nobody has answered it.
My own experience is that if a beggar finds a gold mine, he will sing and he will dance and he will go mad with joy -- but not an emperor.
A poet once in a while becomes the emperor -- but only once in a while; that's why he cannot take it for granted. But the mystic is not just for a moment merged with the universal consciousness -- he is merged. There is no way of coming back.
Those small glimpses may be translated into words, because they are only dewdrops. But the mystic has become the ocean; hence, silence becomes his song. All words seem so impotent, nothing seems to be capable of bringing his experience into any kind of communication. And the ocean is so vast and he is continuously one with it; naturally, he himself forgets that he is separate.
To create, you have to be there to create.
To sing a song, you have to be there.
But the mystic has become the song.
His presence is his poetry. You cannot print it, you cannot paint it, you can only drink it.
To communicate with a poet is one thing but to be in communion with a mystic is totally different. But it is good to begin with poets, because if you are not able even to absorb dewdrops, the ocean is not for you. Or better to say, you are not for the ocean.
To you, even the dewdrop will appear like a vast ocean.
Speaking on Kahlil Gibran is a very rare, almost impossible thing because I am not a poet.
I am poetry.
I am not a painter; I am the painting. Where the painter has got lost into the painting, I don't know.
An ancient story is: One Japanese emperor told all the painters of his country and the neighboring countries that he wanted a painting which looked as if it were real: "If you have painted a door, it will not look like a painting. Everybody will be mistaken and will try to enter it. Unless a painting is so real, I do not consider it a painting. And one who can paint such a thing, whatever he wants... even if my whole empire is his desire, he will be rewarded."
Thousands of painters came to the palace. They tried... but how can you paint a painting which will give the exact impression of the real?
But one painter said he would paint only on one condition: While he is painting, he should not be disturbed. No limitation of time should be imposed on him. And he does not paint on canvasses -- he will paint on a big wall inside the palace. And unless the painting is complete, nobody is allowed to come in. The first man to see it complete will be the emperor.
The conditions were accepted. It took him almost six years. The emperor was getting old, but he had promised not to interfere. He kept his word. After six years, the painter came and told the emperor, "You can come."
The painter took the emperor into the room. The emperor could not believe it. It really looked real. There were tall trees and a small winding foot path in the painting. The emperor asked, "Where does this path go?"
The painter said, "You can walk on it...."
And believe it or not -- I don't believe it, but it is so lovable -- the painter entered with the emperor to show him the path and they have not returned.
If you try to think of it as a historical, factual thing you will miss the whole point. It is a parable. And it is absolutely true -- not factual.
The real painter dissolves himself into his painting, and the real poet disappears into his poetry. But that kind of creativity is of the mystic -- and because the mystic disappears in his creativity, he has no time even to sign his painting, or his poetry. The poets can do that, because for a moment the window opens, they see the beyond, and the window closes.
Kahlil Gibran has written almost thirty books. THE PROPHET, which we are going to discuss, is his first book; the remaining are rubbish. This is a strange phenomenon -- what happened to the man? When he wrote this, he was just young -- twenty-one years of age. One would have thought that now more and more would be coming. And he tried hard; for his whole life he was writing but nothing came even close to the beauty and the truth of THE PROPHET. Perhaps the window never opened again.A poet is accidentally mystic. It is just by accident... a breeze comes, you cannot produce it. And because he became world famous -- this is one book which must have been translated in almost all the languages of the world -- he tried hard to do something better, and that's where he failed. It is unfortunate that he never came across a man who could have told him a simple truth: "You had not tried when you created THE PROPHET, it happened. And now you are trying to do it."
It has happened; it is not your doing. You may have been a vehicle. Something that was not yours... just like a child is born of a mother. The mother cannot create the child, she is simply a passage. THE PROPHET belongs to the category of a very small number of books which are not dependent on your action, your intelligence, on you; on the contrary, they are possible only when you are not, when you allow them to happen, when you don't stand in the way. You are so relaxed that you don't interfere.
This is one of those rarest of books. In it, you will not find Kahlil Gibran -- that's the beauty of the book. He allowed the universe to flow through him; he is simply a medium, a passage, just a hollow bamboo which does not hinder the flute player.
In my experience, books like THE PROPHET are holier than your so-called holy books. And because these books are authentically holy, they have not created a religion around themselves. They don't give you any ritual, they don't give you any discipline, they don't give you any commandments. They simply allow you to have a glimpse of the same experience which happened to them.
The whole experience cannot come into words, but something... perhaps not the whole rose, but a few petals. They are enough proof that a rose exists. Your window just has to be open, so a breeze sometimes can bring petals.
Those petals coming through a breeze into your being are really invitations of the unknown. God is calling you for a long pilgrimage. Unless that pilgrimage is made, you will remain meaningless, dragging somehow, but not really living. You will not have laughter in your heart.
Kahlil Gibran avoids his own name by creating a fictitious name, Almustafa. That's the beginning of THE PROPHET. Almustafa is the prophet.
Sannyas
Sannyas simply means a quantum leap into the unknown. The mind lives in the known; it moves within the known. It goes in circles, round and round; it is repetitive. It cannot enter into any communion with the new, with the unknown, with the unknowable. Sannyas is a jump. It is like a snake slipping out of its old skin. You must be getting tired of your old skin, you must be dragging it. And you must be seeing people here rejoicing in their new birth. And the longing must be arising in you too: why not take the jump?
Initiation into sannyas means that you are breaking away from your past: whatsoever it was -- communist, Catholic, Hindu, Mohammedan -- you are breaking away from your past. You are closing your past completely and starting a fresh. This is a resurrection -- a death and a resurrection: the death of the past and the resurrection of something absolutely new, so absolutely new that it has nothing to do with the past; it is discontinuous with the past.
Sannyas means entering into a new world, the world of the no-ego. The ordinary world is the world of egos. The ordinary world is nothing but an ego trip. Sannyas is falling out of those trips, dropping out of those trips and, rather than looking outwards, turning in. That is the only way to know who you really are.
We have to start a new human being. A totally new vision of life has to begin: the life of surrender, the life of let-go. Be in tune with nature; there is no need to fight. Be in tune with other people; there is no need to be ambitious. And be in absolute tune with yourself. Don't divide yourself, don't' become schizophrenic; remain one, integrated, individual. And that's what sannyas is all about: a different lifestyle the lifestyle of let-go.
Sannyas is basically a rebellion about all structures, hence the difficulty to define. Sannyas is a way of living life unstructuredly. Sannyas is to have a character which is characterless. By 'characterless' I mean you don't depend anymore on the past. Character means the past, the way you have lived in the past, the way you have become habituated to living -- all your habits and conditionings and beliefs and your experiences -- that's what your character is. A sannyasin is one who no longer lives in the past or through the past; who lives in the moment, hence, is unpredictable. A man of character is predictable; a sannyasin is unpredictable because a sannyasin is freedom. A sannyasin is not only free, he is freedom. It is living rebellion. But still, I will try: a few hints can be given, not exact definitions, a few indications, fingers pointing to the moon. Don't get caught with the fingers. The fingers don't define the moon, they only indicate. The fingers have nothing to do with the moon. They may be long, they may be short, they may be artistic, they may be ugly, they may be white, they may be black, they may be healthy, they may be ill -- that doesn't matter. They simply indicate. Forget the finger and look at the moon.
What I am going to give is not a definition; that is not possible in this case. And, in fact, definition is never possible about anything that is alive. Definition is possible only about something which is dead, which grows no more, which blooms no more, which has no more possibility, potentiality, which is exhausted and spent. Then definition is possible. You can define a dead man, you cannot define an alive man. Life basically means that the new is still possible. So these are not definitions. The old sannyasin has a definition, very clear-cut; that's why he is dead. I call my sannyas 'neo-sannyas' for this particular reason: my sannyas is an opening, a journey, a dance, a love affair with the unknown, a romance with existence itself, in search of an orgasmic relationship with the whole. And everything else has failed in the world. Everything that was defined, that was clear-cut, that was logical, has failed. Religions have failed, politics have failed, ideologies have failed -- and they were very clear-cut. They were blueprints for the future of man. They have all failed. All programs have failed. Sannyas is not a program anymore. It is exploration, not a program. When you become a sannyasin I initiate you into freedom, and into nothing else. It is great responsibility to be free, because then you have nothing to lean upon. Except your own inner being, your own consciousness, you have nothing as a prop, as a support. I take all your props and supports away; I leave you alone, I leave you utterly alone. In that aloneness... the flower of sannyas. That aloneness blooms on its own accord into the flower of sannyas. Sannyas is characterlessness. It has no morality; it is not immoral, it is amoral. Or, it has a higher morality that never comes from the outside but comes from within. It does not allow any imposition from the outside, because all impositions from the outside convert you into serfs, into slaves. And my effort is to give you dignity, glory. My effort here is to give you splendor.
All other efforts have failed. It was inevitable, because the failure was built-in. They were all structure-oriented, and every kind of structure becomes heavy on the heart of man, sooner or later. Every structure becomes a prison, and one day or other you have to rebel against it. Have you not observed it down through history? -- each revolution in its own turn becomes repressive. In Russia it happened, in China it happened. After every revolution, the revolutionary becomes antirevolutionary. Once he comes intopower he has his own structure to impose upon the society. And once he starts imposing his structure, slavery changes into a new kind of slavery, but never into freedom. All revolutions have failed. This is not revolution, this is rebellion. Revolution is social, collective; rebellion is individual. We are not interested in giving any structure to the society. Enough of the structures! Let all structures go. We want individuals in the world -- moving freely, moving consciously, of course. And their responsibility comes through their own consciousness. They behave rightly not because they are trying to follow certain commandments; they behave rightly, they behave accurately, because they care. Do you know, this word accurate comes from care. The word accurate in its root means to care about. When you care about something you are accurate. If you care about somebody, you are accurate in your relationship. A sannyasin is one who cares about himself, and naturally cares about everybody else -- because you cannot be happy alone. You can only be happy in a happy world, in a happy climate. If everybody is crying and weeping and is in misery, it is very, very difficult for you to be happy. So one who cares about happiness -- about his own happiness -- becomes careful about everybody else's happiness, because happiness happens only in a happy climate. But this care is not because of any dogma. It is there because you love, and the first love, naturally, is the love for yourself. Then other loves follow.
Other efforts have failed because they were mind-oriented. They were based in the thinking process, they were conclusions of the mind. Sannyas is not a conclusion of the mind. Sannyas is not thought-oriented; it has no roots in thinking. Sannyas is insightfulness; it is meditation, not mind. It is rooted in joy, not in thought. It is rooted in celebration, not in thinking. It is rooted in that awareness where thoughts are not found. It is not a choice: it is not a choice between two thoughts, it is the dropping of allthoughts. It is living out of nothingness.
Initiation into sannyas means that you are breaking away from your past: whatsoever it was -- communist, Catholic, Hindu, Mohammedan -- you are breaking away from your past. You are closing your past completely and starting a fresh. This is a resurrection -- a death and a resurrection: the death of the past and the resurrection of something absolutely new, so absolutely new that it has nothing to do with the past; it is discontinuous with the past.
Sannyas means entering into a new world, the world of the no-ego. The ordinary world is the world of egos. The ordinary world is nothing but an ego trip. Sannyas is falling out of those trips, dropping out of those trips and, rather than looking outwards, turning in. That is the only way to know who you really are.
We have to start a new human being. A totally new vision of life has to begin: the life of surrender, the life of let-go. Be in tune with nature; there is no need to fight. Be in tune with other people; there is no need to be ambitious. And be in absolute tune with yourself. Don't divide yourself, don't' become schizophrenic; remain one, integrated, individual. And that's what sannyas is all about: a different lifestyle the lifestyle of let-go.
Sannyas is basically a rebellion about all structures, hence the difficulty to define. Sannyas is a way of living life unstructuredly. Sannyas is to have a character which is characterless. By 'characterless' I mean you don't depend anymore on the past. Character means the past, the way you have lived in the past, the way you have become habituated to living -- all your habits and conditionings and beliefs and your experiences -- that's what your character is. A sannyasin is one who no longer lives in the past or through the past; who lives in the moment, hence, is unpredictable. A man of character is predictable; a sannyasin is unpredictable because a sannyasin is freedom. A sannyasin is not only free, he is freedom. It is living rebellion. But still, I will try: a few hints can be given, not exact definitions, a few indications, fingers pointing to the moon. Don't get caught with the fingers. The fingers don't define the moon, they only indicate. The fingers have nothing to do with the moon. They may be long, they may be short, they may be artistic, they may be ugly, they may be white, they may be black, they may be healthy, they may be ill -- that doesn't matter. They simply indicate. Forget the finger and look at the moon.
What I am going to give is not a definition; that is not possible in this case. And, in fact, definition is never possible about anything that is alive. Definition is possible only about something which is dead, which grows no more, which blooms no more, which has no more possibility, potentiality, which is exhausted and spent. Then definition is possible. You can define a dead man, you cannot define an alive man. Life basically means that the new is still possible. So these are not definitions. The old sannyasin has a definition, very clear-cut; that's why he is dead. I call my sannyas 'neo-sannyas' for this particular reason: my sannyas is an opening, a journey, a dance, a love affair with the unknown, a romance with existence itself, in search of an orgasmic relationship with the whole. And everything else has failed in the world. Everything that was defined, that was clear-cut, that was logical, has failed. Religions have failed, politics have failed, ideologies have failed -- and they were very clear-cut. They were blueprints for the future of man. They have all failed. All programs have failed. Sannyas is not a program anymore. It is exploration, not a program. When you become a sannyasin I initiate you into freedom, and into nothing else. It is great responsibility to be free, because then you have nothing to lean upon. Except your own inner being, your own consciousness, you have nothing as a prop, as a support. I take all your props and supports away; I leave you alone, I leave you utterly alone. In that aloneness... the flower of sannyas. That aloneness blooms on its own accord into the flower of sannyas. Sannyas is characterlessness. It has no morality; it is not immoral, it is amoral. Or, it has a higher morality that never comes from the outside but comes from within. It does not allow any imposition from the outside, because all impositions from the outside convert you into serfs, into slaves. And my effort is to give you dignity, glory. My effort here is to give you splendor.
All other efforts have failed. It was inevitable, because the failure was built-in. They were all structure-oriented, and every kind of structure becomes heavy on the heart of man, sooner or later. Every structure becomes a prison, and one day or other you have to rebel against it. Have you not observed it down through history? -- each revolution in its own turn becomes repressive. In Russia it happened, in China it happened. After every revolution, the revolutionary becomes antirevolutionary. Once he comes intopower he has his own structure to impose upon the society. And once he starts imposing his structure, slavery changes into a new kind of slavery, but never into freedom. All revolutions have failed. This is not revolution, this is rebellion. Revolution is social, collective; rebellion is individual. We are not interested in giving any structure to the society. Enough of the structures! Let all structures go. We want individuals in the world -- moving freely, moving consciously, of course. And their responsibility comes through their own consciousness. They behave rightly not because they are trying to follow certain commandments; they behave rightly, they behave accurately, because they care. Do you know, this word accurate comes from care. The word accurate in its root means to care about. When you care about something you are accurate. If you care about somebody, you are accurate in your relationship. A sannyasin is one who cares about himself, and naturally cares about everybody else -- because you cannot be happy alone. You can only be happy in a happy world, in a happy climate. If everybody is crying and weeping and is in misery, it is very, very difficult for you to be happy. So one who cares about happiness -- about his own happiness -- becomes careful about everybody else's happiness, because happiness happens only in a happy climate. But this care is not because of any dogma. It is there because you love, and the first love, naturally, is the love for yourself. Then other loves follow.
Other efforts have failed because they were mind-oriented. They were based in the thinking process, they were conclusions of the mind. Sannyas is not a conclusion of the mind. Sannyas is not thought-oriented; it has no roots in thinking. Sannyas is insightfulness; it is meditation, not mind. It is rooted in joy, not in thought. It is rooted in celebration, not in thinking. It is rooted in that awareness where thoughts are not found. It is not a choice: it is not a choice between two thoughts, it is the dropping of allthoughts. It is living out of nothingness.
Technique & Therapy
Is it possible to meditate without any technique?
The question you have asked is certainly of great importance because meditation, as such, needs no technique at all. But techniques are needed to remove the obstacles in the way of meditation.
So it has to be understood very clearly: meditation itself needs no techniques, it is a simple understanding, an alertness, an awareness. Neither alertness is a technique, nor awareness is a technique. But on the way to being alert, there are so many obstacles. For centuries man has been gathering those obstacles -- they need to be removed. Meditation itself cannot remove them, certain techniques are needed to remove them.
So the work of the techniques is just to prepare the ground, is just to prepare the way, the passage. The techniques in themselves are not meditation. If you stop at the technique, you have missed the point. J. Krishnamurti was insisting his whole life that there is no technique for meditation. And the total result was not that millions of people attained to meditation; the total result was that millions of people became convinced that no technique is needed for meditation. But they forgot all about what they were going to do with the obstructions, the hindrances. So they remained intellectually convinced that no technique is needed.
I have met many followers of J. Krishnamurti, very intimate ones, and I have said to them, "No technique is needed -- I agree absolutely. But has meditation happened to you or to anyone else who has been listening to J. Krishnamurti?" Although what he is saying is essentially true, he is saying only the positive side of the experience. There is a negative side also. And for that negative side all kinds of techniques are needed -- are absolutely needed -- because unless the ground is well prepared, and all the weeds and wild roots are taken away from the ground, you cannot grow roses and other beautiful flowers. Roses are in no way concerned with those roots, with the wild plants that you have removed. But the removal of those weeds was absolutely necessary for the ground to be in a right situation where roses can blossom.
You are asking, "Is it possible to meditate without any technique?" It is not only possible, it is the only possibility. No technique is needed at all -- as far as meditation is concerned. But what are you going to do with your mind? Your mind will create a thousand and one difficulties. Those techniques are needed to remove the mind from the way, to create a space in which the mind becomes quiet, silent, almost absent. Then meditation happens on its own accord.
It is not a question of technique. You don't have to do anything. Meditation is something natural, something that is already hidden inside you and is trying to find its way to reach to the open sky, to the sun, to the air. But mind is surrounding it from all sides; all doors are closed, all windows are closed. The techniques are needed to open the windows, to open the doors. And immediately the whole sky is available to you, with all its stars, with all its beauty, with all its sunsets, with all its sunrises. Just a small window was preventing you... just a small piece of straw can go into your eye and it will prevent you from seeing the vast sky because you cannot open your eyes. It is absolutely illogical that just a small piece of straw or sand can prevent you from seeing the great stars, the infinite sky. But in fact they can -- they do. Techniques are needed to remove those straws, those pieces of sand, from your eyes.
And meditation is your nature, is your very potential. It is another name of alertness.
The young father, taking his baby for a walk in the pram in the park, seemed quite unperturbed by the wails emerging from the pram. "Easy now, Albert," he said quietly. "Keep calm, there's a good fellow.
"Another howl rang out. "Now, now, Albert," murmured the father, "keep your temper."
A young mother, passing by, remarked, "I must congratulate you. You certainly know how to speak to babies." Then, patting the baby on the head, she cooed, "What is bothering you, Albert?"
"No, no," interrupted the father. "His name is Johnnie; I am Albert.
"He was simply trying to keep himself alert: "Albert, don't lose your temper." He does not want to forget, otherwise he would like to throw this baby into the lake!
Meditation is simply awareness without any effort, an effortless alertness; it does not need any technique. But your mind is so full of thoughts, so full of dreams, so much of the past, so much of the future -- it is not here now, and awareness has to be here now. The techniques are needed to help you to cut your roots from the past, to cut your dreams from the future, and to keep you in this moment as if only this moment exists. Then there is no need of any technique.
Hymie Goldberg was visiting his friend, Mr. Cohen, who was dying. "Do us a favor," said Hymie Goldberg, "when you go to heaven could you find a way of letting me know whether they play baseball up there?"
Mr. Cohen said he would certainly try to contact his old friend if at all possible. Only a few days after Mr. Cohen died, Hymie Goldberg had a phone call. "Hello, Hymie," said Mr. Cohen. "It is your old friend here."
"Cohen? Is it really you?" asked Hymie. "Sure," answered his friend. "I have some good news and some bad news. First, there sure is baseball in heaven. And the bad news is that you are pitching next Sunday."
Life is a complicated affair. There is good news, and there is bad news. The good news is that there is no need of any technique; but the bad news is, without any technique you are not going to get it.
What is the role of therapy in meditation?
Buddha never needed any psychotherapy for his sannyasins; those people were innocent. But in these twenty-five centuries, people have lost their innocence, they have become too knowledgeable. People have lost their contact with existence. They have become uprooted.
I am the first person who uses therapy but whose interest is not therapy but meditation, just as it was with Chuang Tzu or Gautam Buddha. They never used therapy because there was no need. People were simply ready, and you could bring the rosebushes without clearing the ground. The ground was already clear. In these twenty-five centuries man has become so burdened with rubbish, so many wild weeds have grown in his being that I am using therapy just to clean the ground, take away the wild weeds, the roots, so the difference between the ancient man and the modern man is destroyed.
The modern man has to be made as innocent as the ancient man, as simple, as natural. He has lost all these great qualities. The therapist has to help him -- but his work is only a preparation. It is not the end. The end part is going to be the meditation.
The question you have asked is certainly of great importance because meditation, as such, needs no technique at all. But techniques are needed to remove the obstacles in the way of meditation.
So it has to be understood very clearly: meditation itself needs no techniques, it is a simple understanding, an alertness, an awareness. Neither alertness is a technique, nor awareness is a technique. But on the way to being alert, there are so many obstacles. For centuries man has been gathering those obstacles -- they need to be removed. Meditation itself cannot remove them, certain techniques are needed to remove them.
So the work of the techniques is just to prepare the ground, is just to prepare the way, the passage. The techniques in themselves are not meditation. If you stop at the technique, you have missed the point. J. Krishnamurti was insisting his whole life that there is no technique for meditation. And the total result was not that millions of people attained to meditation; the total result was that millions of people became convinced that no technique is needed for meditation. But they forgot all about what they were going to do with the obstructions, the hindrances. So they remained intellectually convinced that no technique is needed.
I have met many followers of J. Krishnamurti, very intimate ones, and I have said to them, "No technique is needed -- I agree absolutely. But has meditation happened to you or to anyone else who has been listening to J. Krishnamurti?" Although what he is saying is essentially true, he is saying only the positive side of the experience. There is a negative side also. And for that negative side all kinds of techniques are needed -- are absolutely needed -- because unless the ground is well prepared, and all the weeds and wild roots are taken away from the ground, you cannot grow roses and other beautiful flowers. Roses are in no way concerned with those roots, with the wild plants that you have removed. But the removal of those weeds was absolutely necessary for the ground to be in a right situation where roses can blossom.
You are asking, "Is it possible to meditate without any technique?" It is not only possible, it is the only possibility. No technique is needed at all -- as far as meditation is concerned. But what are you going to do with your mind? Your mind will create a thousand and one difficulties. Those techniques are needed to remove the mind from the way, to create a space in which the mind becomes quiet, silent, almost absent. Then meditation happens on its own accord.
It is not a question of technique. You don't have to do anything. Meditation is something natural, something that is already hidden inside you and is trying to find its way to reach to the open sky, to the sun, to the air. But mind is surrounding it from all sides; all doors are closed, all windows are closed. The techniques are needed to open the windows, to open the doors. And immediately the whole sky is available to you, with all its stars, with all its beauty, with all its sunsets, with all its sunrises. Just a small window was preventing you... just a small piece of straw can go into your eye and it will prevent you from seeing the vast sky because you cannot open your eyes. It is absolutely illogical that just a small piece of straw or sand can prevent you from seeing the great stars, the infinite sky. But in fact they can -- they do. Techniques are needed to remove those straws, those pieces of sand, from your eyes.
And meditation is your nature, is your very potential. It is another name of alertness.
The young father, taking his baby for a walk in the pram in the park, seemed quite unperturbed by the wails emerging from the pram. "Easy now, Albert," he said quietly. "Keep calm, there's a good fellow.
"Another howl rang out. "Now, now, Albert," murmured the father, "keep your temper."
A young mother, passing by, remarked, "I must congratulate you. You certainly know how to speak to babies." Then, patting the baby on the head, she cooed, "What is bothering you, Albert?"
"No, no," interrupted the father. "His name is Johnnie; I am Albert.
"He was simply trying to keep himself alert: "Albert, don't lose your temper." He does not want to forget, otherwise he would like to throw this baby into the lake!
Meditation is simply awareness without any effort, an effortless alertness; it does not need any technique. But your mind is so full of thoughts, so full of dreams, so much of the past, so much of the future -- it is not here now, and awareness has to be here now. The techniques are needed to help you to cut your roots from the past, to cut your dreams from the future, and to keep you in this moment as if only this moment exists. Then there is no need of any technique.
Hymie Goldberg was visiting his friend, Mr. Cohen, who was dying. "Do us a favor," said Hymie Goldberg, "when you go to heaven could you find a way of letting me know whether they play baseball up there?"
Mr. Cohen said he would certainly try to contact his old friend if at all possible. Only a few days after Mr. Cohen died, Hymie Goldberg had a phone call. "Hello, Hymie," said Mr. Cohen. "It is your old friend here."
"Cohen? Is it really you?" asked Hymie. "Sure," answered his friend. "I have some good news and some bad news. First, there sure is baseball in heaven. And the bad news is that you are pitching next Sunday."
Life is a complicated affair. There is good news, and there is bad news. The good news is that there is no need of any technique; but the bad news is, without any technique you are not going to get it.
What is the role of therapy in meditation?
Buddha never needed any psychotherapy for his sannyasins; those people were innocent. But in these twenty-five centuries, people have lost their innocence, they have become too knowledgeable. People have lost their contact with existence. They have become uprooted.
I am the first person who uses therapy but whose interest is not therapy but meditation, just as it was with Chuang Tzu or Gautam Buddha. They never used therapy because there was no need. People were simply ready, and you could bring the rosebushes without clearing the ground. The ground was already clear. In these twenty-five centuries man has become so burdened with rubbish, so many wild weeds have grown in his being that I am using therapy just to clean the ground, take away the wild weeds, the roots, so the difference between the ancient man and the modern man is destroyed.
The modern man has to be made as innocent as the ancient man, as simple, as natural. He has lost all these great qualities. The therapist has to help him -- but his work is only a preparation. It is not the end. The end part is going to be the meditation.
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