The Beloved - Vol 1

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The Beloved, Vol 1

Talks on the Baul Mystics

Talks given from 21/06/76 am to 30/06/76 am English Discourse series

10 Chapters

Year published: 1976

The Beloved, Vol 1

Chapter #1

Chapter title: Submission is the secret of knowledge 21 June 1976 am in Buddha Hall

Archive code: 7606210

ShortTitle: BELOV101

Audio: Yes Video: No Length: 97

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ONLY A CONNOISSEUR OF THE FLAVOURS OF LOVE CAN COMPREHEND THE LANGUAGE OF A LOVER'S HEART, OTHERS HAVE NO CLUE.

THE TASTE OF LIME RESTS IN THE CORE OF THE FRUIT, AND EVEN EXPERTS KNOW OF NO EASY WAY TO REACH IT. HONEY IS HIDDEN WITHIN THE LOTUS BLOOM -- BUT THE BEE KNOWS IT.

DUNG-BEETLES NESTLE IN DUNG, DISCOUNTING HONEY. SUBMISSION IS THE SECRET OF KNOWLEDGE.

I'M TREMENDOUSLY HAPPY TO INTRODUCE YOU TO THE WORLD OF THE

BAULS. I hope you will be nourished by it, enriched by it. It is a very bizarre world, eccentric, in-sane. It has to be so. It is unfortunate but it has to be so, because the world of the so-called sane people is so insane that if you really want to be sane in it you will have to be insane. You will have to choose a path of your own. It is going to be diametrically opposite to the ordinary path of the world.

The Bauls are called Bauls because they are mad people. The word 'Baul' comes from the Sanskrit root VATUL. It means: mad, affected by wind. The Baul belongs to no religion.

He is neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian nor Buddhist. He is a simple human being. His rebellion is total. He does not belong to anybody; he only belongs to himself.

He lives in a no man's land: no country is his, no religion is his, no scripture is his. His rebellion goes even deeper than the rebellion of the Zen Masters -- because at least formally, they belong to Buddhism; at least formally, they worship Buddha. Formally they have scriptures -- scriptures denouncing

scriptures, of course -- but still they have. At least they have a few scriptures to burn.

Bauls have nothing -- no scripture, not even to burn; no church, no temple, no mosque --

nothing whatsoever. A Baul is a man always on the road. He has no house, no abode.

God is his only abode, and the whole sky is his shelter. He possesses nothing except a poor man's quilt, a small, hand-made one-stringed instrument called AEKTARA, and a small drum, a kettle-drum. That's all that he possesses. He possesses only a musical instrument and a drum. He plays with one hand on the instrument and he goes on beating the drum with the other. The drum hangs by the side of his body, and he dances. That is all of his religion.

Dance is his religion; singing is his worship. He does not even use the word 'God'. The Baul word for God is ADHAR MANUSH, the essential man. He worships man. He says, inside you and me, inside everybody, there is an essential being. That essential being is all. To find that ADHAR MANUSH, that essential man, is the whole search.

So there is no God somewhere outside you, and there is no need to create any temple because you are His temple already. The whole search is withinwards. And on the waves of song and on the waves of dancing, he moves withinwards. He goes on moving like a beggar, singing songs. He has nothing to preach; his whole preaching is his poetry. And his poetry is also not ordinary poetry, not mere poetry. He's not consciously a poet; he sings because his heart is singing. Poetry follows him like a shadow, hence it is tremendously beautiful. He's not calculating it, he's not making it. He lives his poetry.

That's his passion and his very life. His dance is almost insane. He has never been trained to dance, he does not know anything about the art of dancing. He dances like a madman, like a whirlwind. And he lives very spontaneously, because the Baul says, "If you want to reach to the ADHAR MANUSH, the essential man, then the way, the way goes through SAHAJA MANUSH, the spontaneous man."

To reach to the essential man, you have to go through the spontaneous man.

Spontaneity is the only way to reach to the essence...so he cries when he feels like crying. You can find him standing in a village street crying, for nothing. If you ask, "Why are you crying?" he will laugh. He will say, "There is no why. I felt like, I felt like crying, so I cried." If he feels like laughing, he laughs; if he feels like singing, he sings -- but everything has to come out of deep feeling. He's not mind oriented, not in any way controlled and disciplined. He knows no rituals. He's absolutely against rituals because he says, "A ritualized person is a dead person." He cannot be spontaneous. And a person who follows rituals, formalities too much, creates so many habits around him that there is no need to be alert. Alertness is lost; habits are formed. Then the man of rituals lives through habits. If he goes to the temple he bows down, not in any way conscious and alert of what he is doing, but just because he has been taught to do so, he has learned to do so. It has become a conditioning.

So they don't follow any ritual, they don't have any technique, they don't have any habit.

So you cannot find two Bauls that are similar; they are individuals. Their rebellion leads them to become authentic individuals.

This has to be understood: the more you become a part of society, the less and less you are an individual, the less and less you are spontaneous -- because the very membership in the society will not allow you to be spontaneous. You will have to follow the rules of the game. If you enter a society, you accept to follow those rules that the society is playing, or has decided to play. That's what membership means: you enter into a certain organization; you have to play the game. Bauls have no organization, so each Baul is individual.

And that's what religion really is: it is an individual approach towards truth. One has to go alone, one has to go in his own way; one has to find one's own way. You cannot follow another, you cannot move on a readymade track. The more you search your own way, the closer you will be to God, or to truth, or to reality. In fact, the way is created by walking. You create it as you walk. It is not ready there for you, waiting to be walked on.

You walk and you create it.

It is as if you are lost in a forest. What do you do? You have no map and there is no way leading anywhere -- trees and trees and trees all around, and you are lost.

What do you do? You start walking, searching, seeking. By your very walk, by your very search, a path is created.

Life is wild, and it is good that it is wild. It is good that it has no map, that it is not charted, that it is still unknown. And its unknowability is such that there is no way to make it known. Otherwise, all charm will be lost, all beauty will be lost. Then life will not surprise you; and if surprise is lost, all is lost. Then there will be no wonder, no wondering. Then your eyes will go dead and your heart will stop beating; the passion will disappear. Love will not be possible. Awe, wonder, surprise: these are the ingredients of the charisma, of the mystery of life. So it is good that there are no scriptures; it is good that there are no ritualized religions; it is good that you are not on a super-highway.

The Baul is a rebellious person, and I say 'rebellious' with great consideration. He is not a revolutionary. A revolutionary is still thinking in terms of the society. How to change the society: that is the revolutionary's continuous brooding. But he remains society-focused, society-oriented: "How to change the world?" A rebellious person does not bother about the world because he understands that the world cannot be changed by him, and who is he to change the world? -- "What's my authority to change the world? And if the world decides to be the way it is, who am I to interfere with it?" He leaves the world to itself.

He does not interfere, he does not meddle with it. He starts changing himself. His revolution is inward; his revolution is absolutely inner.

A rebellious person is a drop-out. He simply drops out of that society which doesn't suit him. He does not wait for it to be transformed so that he can fit with it. That desire is foolish, stupid. Then you will be lost. And that day, that utopia will never happen -- when the society has changed so much that you can fit with it, and the society can fit with you.

It has never happened. Revolutionaries have lived down through the centuries, and died.

The world has remained the same, more or less, but the lives of those revolutionaries were wasted in changing it.

Just think of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, coming back and looking at the world -- they will start crying. This is the world for which they wasted their whole lives? This is the world for which they hoped and staked their whole lives, gambled with

their lives? They could not live their lives because they were trying to change the world. They were trying to change the world because they thought that only when the world had changed according to their wishes would they be able to live. Otherwise, how could they live? How can you live happily in an unhappy world? -- that is the revolutionary's question. Very significant:

"How can you be happy in an unhappy world?" -- so he tries to make the world happy.

The rebellious person says, "Leave the world to itself. Nobody has ever changed it." He is more practical and down to earth: "I can live my own way. I can create my own world within me." He is a drop-out. Bauls are drop-outs. They don't belong to any religion, to any society, to any nation. They are beggars, wanderers, vagabonds, hippies, gypsies, moving from one village to another, singing their song, dancing their dance, living their lives in their own way, doing their thing.

A rebellious person is one who says, "I'm not going to wait, I'm going to live right now."

The revolutionary hopes for the future. He says, "I am going to wait. I will wait for the right moment." The rebellious person says, "The right moment is here- now, and I'm not going to wait for anybody, I'm going to live right now." A rebellious person lives in the present.

And one thing more to be understood: a rebellious person is not against anybody. He may appear against because he is trying to live his own life, but he is not really against anybody. He may not go to the mosque but he is not against Mohammedans. He may not go to the temple but he is not against Hindus. He simply says, "I am not concerned; it is irrelevant." He simply says, "Please leave me alone. You do your thing and let me do my thing. Don't interfere with me and I will not interfere with you."

The vision of the rebellious mind is very realistic. Life is short. Nobody knows whether tomorrow will come or not. The future is not certain, and this is the only moment one can live. Why waste it in fighting with others? Why waste it in trying to convince others?

Enjoy it, delight in it. A Baul is a hedonist; he is epicurean. He starts living: he loves, he lives, he delights.

When a Baul dies, he is not afraid of death -- he is ready. He has lived his life. He is ripe.

The fruit is ripe and ready to fall to the ground, with no hesitation.

You will be afraid. You are already afraid of death because you have not been able to live. You have not lived yet and death has come or is coming. You have not yet had time to live and death has knocked at the door. How can you accept death? How can you welcome?

A Baul is ready to die any moment because he has not wasted a single moment of life. He has lived it as deeply as it was possible to live. He has no complaint, he has no grudge against life, and he has nothing to wait for. So if death comes, he is ready to live death also. He embraces death. He says, "Come in." He becomes a host to death also.

If you live rightly, you will be ready to die peacefully, blissfully. If you are not living rightly, if you are postponing, if you are simply putting aside your life and doing other things rather than enjoying life, doing a thousand and one things rather than delighting in life, then of course, naturally, you will be afraid of death. And when death comes, you will be a coward in front of death.

A Baul dies dancing, a Baul dies singing, a Baul dies playing his AEKTARA and his DUGGI. He knows how to live and how to die. And he is not worried about God; he's only worried about the ADHAR MANUSH, the essential man that resides in him. His whole search is to find this essential man that he is.'Who am I?' is his essential search.

And he's very respectful about other human beings because they all belong to that essential nature. All other forms are of that formless essential nature; all the waves belong to the ocean. He's very respectful, tremendously respectful. A Baul never condemns anything.

To me, that is the very criterion of a religious man: he has no condemnatory attitude. He accepts everything, his world includes everything. It does not exclude anything. Sex is accepted, SAMADHI also. His world is very rich because nothing is excluded from it. He says, "Everything comes from that essential core of your being, so why deny it? And if you deny it, how will you be able to reach to the source?" Wherever you deny something, you cling there, you stop there. Then the journey cannot move to the very core.

Life, as it is, is totally accepted. That does not mean that a Baul is a man of mere indulgence, no. He knows the alchemy of how to transform the baser into the higher. He knows how to transform iron into gold. He knows how to transform sex into SAMADHI; he knows the secret. And what is the secret of transforming life into eternal life, time into eternity? The secret is love. Between sex and SAMADHI, the bridge is love. Love is participated in by both: on the one hand sex, on the other hand SAMADHI. It is the bridge. One bank is sex, the other bank is SAMADHI. Love includes both, comprehends both. Through love, the Bauls say, one reaches to the eternal home.

So that is the only provision for the path: love. Love is their worship, love is their prayer, love is their meditation. The path of the Baul is the path of love. He loves tremendously.

There are two traditions in India: one is the tradition of the Vedas, the other is the tradition of the Tantras. Vedas are more formal, more of the nature of rituals. Vedas are more social, organizational. Tantras are more individual -- less concerned with rituals, forms, habits, more concerned with the essential; less concerned with the forms, more concerned with the soul.

Vedas are not all-inclusive. Much is excluded; it is more puritan, more moralistic. Tantras are non-puritan, allinclusive, more human, more earthly. Tantras say that everything has to be used and nothing is to be denied.

Bauls belong more to the Tantras than to the Vedas. There is only one improvement on Tantras; that is the only difference. Tantra is all-inclusive, more feminine than male. The Vedas are more male-oriented, the Tantras are more feminine. Of course, woman is more inclusive than man. Man is included in woman, but woman is not included in man. Man seems to be a sort of specialization. Woman seems to be more general, more fluid, more round. Tantra is the way of the feminine, just like Tao.

But the Bauls have improved upon Tantra also. Tantra is too technical. The very word

'Tantra' means technique. It is a little harsh, more scientific. Bauls are more poetic; Bauls are more soft -- singers and dancers.

Tantra uses sex to rise higher than it, but it uses it. Sex becomes instrumental. Bauls say that is not very respectful: "How can you USE some energy? How can

you use some energy as a means?" They don't use sex as a means; they delight in it, they enjoy it. They make a worship out of it, but without any technique. It is not technological. They love it, and through love the transformation happens on its own accord.

In Tantra, you are to remain unattached. Even while using sex as a means to go towards SAMADHI, you have to remain unattached to sex, absolutely neutral, absolutely like an observer, a witness, just like a scientist working in his lab. In fact, Tantras say that Tantra techniques cannot be used with the woman you love, because love will be a disturbance.

You will be too attached. You will not be able to remain detached and outside it. So Tantrics will find women with whom they are not in love at all so the attitude can remain absolutely of the observer.

That's where Bauls differ. They say it is too cruel; this passionless attitude is too cruel.

There is no need to be so hard and so harsh. Through love, the transformation is possible.

That's why I call their attitude more poetic, more human, and more worthy. The Bauls say you can live attached in the world and yet be unattached; you can love a woman and yet be a witness; you can be in the marketplace and yet be beyond it. You can live in the world and be not of it.

This vision is my vision also. That is the meaning of my SANNYAS: be in the world but don't be of it. And, nothing is of worth if it is not done through love.

That's where Tantra lacks something; it lacks humanity. If you love a woman, Tantra is not possible. If you love a man, Tantra is not possible. You should be completely aloof.

Then sex becomes very scientific. It becomes a technique, something to be manipulated, something to be done -- not something to be in, not something that absorbs you, not something oceanic, orgasmic, but something that you are doing. The very idea of doing something to a man or to a woman because you want to achieve SAMADHI, the very idea of using the other as an instrument, as a means, is ugly and immoral.

That's where Bauls have a totally different fragrance. They say, "There is no need to be so hard. There is no need to be so means-oriented. Love will do." And we will try to understand what they mean by love.

The first poem.…

These poems belong to different Bauls, but I'm not going to use their names. That is irrelevant. They all belong to the same vision. Different poems, but they remain, deep down, as the same poem; different words, different forms, but running through them is the same current. It is just like in a garland, many flowers are held together, but only one thread runs inside and holds them all. We will insist on that thread. We will not be bothered about who has written this poem. In fact, many of the poems are anonymous.

Nobody has ever known who wrote them, because in fact, they were never written.

Bauls are illiterate; maybe that's why they have such purity. They are not very cultured people, educated in the ways of the world. Maybe that's why there is such innocence.

They are children of the earth: uneducated, poor, humble, but very sincere. So, I will not be telling you who has sung this song, or the other songs that will follow in the coming twenty days. That is irrelevant. They come out of the same vision. They have a certain melody, so individual that it is called BAULSUR, the melody of the Baul; so special, the taste is so special and the fragrance is so individual that whenever you hear a song from the Bauls, you will immediately recognize it. It has its own individuality, its own style: wild, illiterate, uncultured, but very individualistic. Just as the ocean tastes the same --

from anywhere you taste it, and it is salty -- in these songs, immediately you will feel that they come from one vision, one attitude, one passion, one experience. And they were never written. Bauls have been singing them down through the centuries. Each Baul has dropped something, added something, made his own songs or used the old songs that he had heard from his Masters, but the vision is so clear that you can never miss when you hear a Baul song.

The first song:

ONLY A CONNOISSEUR OF THE FLAVORS OF LOVE CAN

COMPREHEND THE LANGUAGE OF A LOVER'S HEART, OTHERS HAVE NO CLUE..

THE TASTE OF LIME RESTS IN THE CORE OF THE FRUIT AND EVEN EXPERTS KNOW OF NO EASY WAY TO REACH IT.

HONEY IS HIDDEN WITHIN THE LOTUS BLOOM BUT THE BEE KNOWS IT.

DUNG BEETLES NESTLE IN DUNG DISCOUNTING HONEY. SUBMISSION IS THE SECRET OF KNOWLEDGE.

The first thing is: that love can be known only by loving. It is not something that can be made comprehensible by intellectual discussion about it. Love is not a theory. If you try to make a theory out of it, it remains incomprehensible. That is the first Baul standpoint: there are things which you can know only by doing them, by being them.

If you don't know swimming you don't know what it is, and there is no way to know about it. You may go and hear a thousand and one swimmers talking about it, but still you will never know it, what it is. It is incomprehensible in every other way; you will have to learn swimming. You will have to go down to the river; you will have to take the risk, the danger of being drowned. If you are very, very clever, you may say, "I will not step into the river unless I know swimming first" -- it is logical -- "How can I step into the river when I don't know swimming? So, first I must know swimming; only then can I step into the river." But then you will never be able to know swimming, because even to learn swimming, you will have to step into the river.

Swimming is known only by swimming; love is known only by loving; prayer is known only by praying. There is no other way. There are things which can be known without moving into them -- those are the futile things, those are intellectual things: philosophies, dogmas, creeds. But all that is real has to be lived, and all that is existential has to be penetrated, and the risk has to be taken. One has to be courageous, one has to be daring.

And it is a great daring, because when you love somebody you start losing yourself. To love somebody is to ]ose the ego; to love somebody is to be lost; to love somebody is to give power to somebody over you; to love somebody is to be possessed. To love somebody means surrendering...

... SUBMISSION IS THE SECRET OF KNOWLEDGE...

... because to the Baul, love is the only knowledge there is. You can read the Vedas: there is no need to submit, there is no need to surrender. You can read the Bible; there is no need to surrender. You can become very proficient, very skilled, very learned, but there is no need to surrender. If there is no need to surrender, it is not knowledge for the Baul.

The Baul criterion is this: that when something demands surrender, only then is there a possibility of real knowledge, otherwise not.

If you come to me and I just impart knowledge to you.…

Many people come to me and they say, "Is there any difficulty if we don't become SANNYASINS, if we are not surrendered to you? And still, we love what you say. Still we want to listen to it. Is there any problem? Can't we do that?"

I say, "You can do that; the problem is not there. But then you will collect only the superficial. You will collect the words. Then you will collect only the fallen dregs from the table. You will not really be a guest to me. You will miss all that is essential; only the non-essential wi!l be your fate. You have to decide."

Once you are surrendered, a totally different world opens between me and you. The heart-to-heart communication starts. Then you can listen to my words, but you listen in such a different way, with such deep sympathy and love, with such gratitude and receptivity, that those words are no longer words; they start becoming alive. You have made them alive with your receptivity. You become pregnant with what I am saying to you, with what I am communicating to you. Then, there happens a transfer; then words are just excuses. Hanging around the word, I send you something which cannot be managed in the word. Then not only is the word reaching you, but the climate that it carries through my heart.

If you are in love with me, then there is a totally different kind of understanding between me and you. If you are not in love with me, then we are far apart. Then

you are on some other planet, thousands and thousands of miles away from me. I may shout: you may hear a few words, but nothing special is going to happen that way. You may become more knowledgeable, but that is not the point. You should have more being, not more knowledge. If you are really becoming richer here, in close contact with me, then your being is growing. Then you are becoming more and more crystallized, more and more authentic, more and more alive, more and more divine. That is not possible without love.

And what is surrender? Surrender means surrendering the ego, surrender means surrendering all that you know. Surrender means surrendering your knowledge, your mind, your intellect. Surrender is a suicide, a suicide of the past. If you carry your past within you in a secret way, then your gesture of SANNYAS is impotent. You can take SANNYAS and still go on carrying your past, hiding and guarding it like a treasure. Then just on the surface you will be a SANNYASIN, but not surrendered to me. And then if you are not fulfilled, nobody else is responsible but you.

The first Baul standpoint is that existential things can be known only through existential ways. Love can be known only by loving.

Somebody asked Jesus, "How to pray?" and he said, "Pray." But he said, "That's what I am asking. I don't know how to pray." So Jesus said, "I will pray. You sit by my side and you also try."

How to teach prayer? It can be caught but it cannot be taught. If you are open to me, you can catch many things. If you are not open to me, nothing can be taught.

A prayer is like an infection. Love is also like an infection: it can be caught but not taught. You can catch it. It is flowing all around you, but if you remain like an island, closed, then there is no way to teach it to you.

The Bauls say,

GOD IS DESERTING YOUR TEMPLE AS YOU AMUSE YOURSELF BY

BLOWING CONCH SHELLS AND RINGING BELLS. THE ROAD TO YOU IS

BLOCKED BY TEMPLES AND MOSQUES. I HEAR YOU CALL, MY LORD, BUT I CANNOT ADVANCE. MASTERS AND TEACHERS BAR

THE WAY.

God is all around you, but you are so full of scriptures, knowledge, so full of your own ego that there is no space left inside you where God can penetrate and enter into you. It has become impossible. It is becoming impossible only because of you.

Jesus is right when he says, "Pray, if you want to know what prayer is"; and the man is also right. He says, "How to pray? That is my problem. You have not answered it." And Jesus says, "The only way is, I will pray. I will kneel down in prayer. You just sit by my side, open, vulnerable; you may catch it."

That's what I'm trying to do here. Just be open to me; you may catch it. There is every possibility once you are not barring your own path, once you start getting out of your own way. There is no problem -- because the essential man that is speaking to you is also hearing through you. Then the essential can meet with the essential. The ADHAR

MANUSH can meet with the ADHAR MANUSH. Just put your ego aside, because that is the non-essential. Face me with your essence, encounter me with your essence. Then suddenly you will see a new fire arising in you. A new love is born.

Yes, submission is the secret of knowledge, surrender is the secret of knowledge. It is not an intellectual effort, but a total submersion, a merging of the self. That's why Bauls talk more about love and less about knowledge, because love is the only thing in the world which cannot be attained in any other way than by loving.

Now, it is possible some day that even swimming can be taught to you without taking you to the river. They have invented ways to teach driving without ever taking you to the road. You simply sit in a car in a room: nothing moves, because there is nowhere, no place to move. You simply sit in the car behind the wheel, and a film is shown on the walls. The road moves, so you feel as if you are moving on the road. On both sides, the street is moving. A movie is shown fast; it goes on moving fast. There are turns and things, and you have to do the right things at the wheel. The teacher can show you whether you are doing wrong or right, and you are simply sitting in the car. The car is not moving, the road is moving in the movie, just on the sides. You can learn it. It seems to be safer. I

think someday or other you can just lie down on your mattress, and a movie of a river will be all around, and you can start. It is possible. At least a rudimentary knowledge may become possible.

But love? -- there seems to be no way. Many people are trying movies to learn about love. Many people go on trying pornographic literature to know about love. Many people go on reading novels and poetry and others' love letters in order to know about love. Yes, there is a danger that you may come to know many things about love, but to know about love is not to know love. In fact, the more you know about love, the less will be the possibility to know love. You will be lost in your knowledge. You will start thinking that you know.

Have you observed the fact that movie actors who are in the business of love are almost always failures in their own love lives? They never succeed. Even a Marilyn Monroe commits suicide. She was at the top; even President Kennedy was in love with her. The whole world was in love with her. But somehow, her whole life was empty. She committed suicide at the very peak of her career, of her fame; such a beautiful woman.

What happened? Why are actors and actresses always failures in their real love lives?

They have learned so much about love that they cannot be real about love. They go on acting the same roles, they go on playing the same games. As they are playing on the stage, they go on playing in life. On the stage it is okay because nothing is involved. But in real life, it is empty. So they go on making empty gestures.

Remember, you can know much about love, but that cannot help to know love. Love can be known only by loving. It means you have to move into love without knowing anything about it. That's why it needs courage. You have to move in the dark, with no map, nobody to guide, not even a torch. You have to move in the dark not knowing where you are moving, not knowing whether you are on the right track or not, not knowing whether you will find the path or you will fall in a ditch and be lost forever.

This is the courage.

Bauls are very courageous people. They say:

ONLY A CONNOISSEUR OF THE FLAVORS OF LOVE..

Love has many flavors... Love has many dimensions, many nuances. Love is not one single thing. It is very rich, tremendously rich. It has many aspects to it; it is multi-faceted. It is like a diamond: it has many facets and every facet gives it richness.

Only a connoisseur -- one who has loved in many ways, one who has loved, lived courageously, dangerously, one who knows all the flavors of love.

Have you watched? -- ' love' does not express all. It is a single word. All the ancient languages had many words for love, because there are so many loves. The English language is poor in that way, hmm?. -- because you love a car also, and you love your woman and you love your house and you love your country and you love your child and you love your mother. Only one word! You love a particular brand of cigarettes. It is very poor, because love has so many facets.

When you love a child, you love differently. It is not the same love as when you love a woman. It has no passion. It has compassion, but it has no passion. When you love your mother, it is totally different: it has reverence, it has deep gratitude. But when you love a woman it is totally different: it has great intensity, almost maddening -- but it is not the way you love your mother. You love your friend: that is totally different. It is affection, but not in the same way.

If you watch, you will find many nuances of love. The single word 'love' has many words hidden in it. And one has to know all about love by moving in all the dimensions. If you have not known any facet of love, your understanding about love will lack that much.

One has to know all the aspects and all the subtle differences. That's what the Bauls mean when they say,

ONLY A CONNOISSEUR OF THE FLAVORS OF LOVE CAN COMPREHEND THE LANGUAGE OF A LOVER'S HEART, OTHERS HAVE NO CLUE.

Yes, it is a language. A single word will not do; it is a complete language. And once you know, you will be simply surprised. You can touch somebody's hand

like a friend, and then the touch has a different flavor. And you can touch somebody's hand like a lover, then the touch has again a different flavor.

A connoisseur, with closed eyes, can just feel your hand and see...and understand the language.

Have you not watched it sometimes: when somebody looks at you with a deep lust in his eyes, you can immediately feel? When somebody looks with deep love, you can see the difference. When somebody looks with affection, you can feel the difference. But these are very rudimentary things because compassion also has many layers.

When a Buddha is there, his compassion has a totally different quality. When you have compassion it is more like sympathy, less like compassion. When a Buddha has compassion, it has nothing of sympathy in it. It is pure.

When Buddha has love showering on you, it has nothing that you have known about love up to now. Only a Buddha can know that. It has no passion in it; it is very cool. It is not hot -- not that it has no warmth; it has warmth, but still it is very cool. It will cool you down if you come close to a Buddha. It will help you to become less excited, more collected. It will not create a turmoil within you. It will subside all turmoil; it will be a soothing force. It will surround you like a subtle climate and soothe you. It will be like a lullaby. You will start feeling, falling asleep, as if just close to your mother's heart. It has something of the mother, something of the father, something of the beloved, something of the child. It has every subtle nuance in it. It has all the dimensions of love in a great harmony. When you come around Buddha, it is an orchestra of all the flavors of love.

Sometimes he looks like a child; you can play with him. His smile or his being simply gives you a feeling that he is just a child -- you can mother him. Sometimes he is like a mother and you are like a small child. Sometimes he looks like a beloved -- you can love him, only him, and nobody else. But sometimes he is just like a friend. He is all.

These changes happen because of you: your outlook changes, your vision changes. Your eyes are not yet clear and fixed. You cannot see his totality. You circum-locate him. At one time you see one aspect, at another time you see another aspect -- because you cannot comprehend the whole.

ONLY A CONNOISSEUR OF THE FLAVORS OF LOVE CAN COMPREHEND THE LANGUAGE OF A LOVER'S HEART, OTHERS HAVE NO CLUE.

Not even a clue is possible for others. You will have to move into the world of love; and don't ask how. You will have to move into the dark; And don't ask for a map -- because that very asking is against love. That's why trust is needed, SHRADDHA. If you trust a person, you say, "Okay. If you send me in the dark, I will go. If you send me into death, I will go."

On the path of love, trust is the most essential thing. On the path of meditation, you can move without trust. On the path of meditation you can move without surrender, but on the path of love, without surrender, without trust, there is no go because it is the very first door. Love demands so much. It demands almost the impossible, and on the first step.

Love is easy but very demanding. That's why even though the path is so easy, very few people travel it. The path of meditation is very difficult but not so demanding. That's why the path is difficult and arduous, yet still, many people travel it.

When you hear about love it seems very simple and easy; but look at the demands. On the path of meditation, that which will be demanded on the last step, is demanded on the first step on the path of love.

The meditator will be asked to surrender his ego only at the last step: when he moves from SAVIKALPA SAMADHI to NIRVIKALPA SAMADHI, when he moves from the mind to no mind; only at the last step. First he goes on purifying his mind, he goes on purifying his ego. He goes on making it more and more subtle, more and more subtle, refined, cultured. Then just a trace remains. On the last step, he has to drop that trace.

Love demands the impossible. It says: on the first step you have to drop the ego. There is no need to refine it and there is no need to work on it. Because one has to drop it, so why bother carrying it? Drop it here, now.

Trust arises on the path of meditation at the last stage. Trust arises only when you are arriving home. When the arrival is so close and when you are almost

approaching, and you can see the door and you can see the house and you can see that you have reached, then trust arises -- you say, "Yes."

But on the path of love, trust is asked on the first step. The first step of love is the same as the last step of meditation. The path is very easy if you are daring, if you are almost a dare-devil. If you are almost mad and ready to risk all without any condition, the path is very easy -- because it completes on the first step. The first step becomes the last step.

Here you surrender, and not even a split second is lost and you have arrived.

...THE LANGUAGE OF A LOVER'S HEART, OTHERS HAVE NO CLUE.

People who are very learned in the ways of meditation, in the ways of intellectual comprehension, contemplation, concentration, have no clue about love. They simply don't know that language.

THE TASTE OF TIME RESTS IN THE CORE OF THE FRUIT, AND EVEN EXPERTS KNOW OF NO EASY WAY TO REACH IT.

And this love the Bauls talk about, or rather, sing about, dance about, is just hidden inside you at the very core of your being. It is already there. You have just to find a way to reach to your own innermost core -- the ADHAR MANUSH, the essential man. It is not something that has to be achieved, it is already there. It is not something that has to be earned, it is a gift of God.

The moment you were created, that very same moment that treasure was handed over to you -- because who has ever known somebody to live without love? Have you known anybody to live without breathing? Love is the very breath of the soul.

Bauls say, "As the body cannot exist without breathing, the soul cannot exist without love." So you may know it, you may not know it, but continuously love is happening inside. It is throbbing there; it is your very beat. You just have to find a way to reach there, because you have gone out in search of other treasures that don't belong to you, in search of other treasures that can NEVER belong to you.

That's why a Baul lives like a beggar. That is simply symbolic. He says, "I am not searching for any other treasure. I am enough unto myself. My treasure is too much. I am a king already. I don't need any other kingdom; my kingdom is already here." He lives like a beggar, but if you come across a Baul you will see that he lives like a king. Even kings are not so kingly. Even-kings are not so blissful as a Baul is. His whole life consists of bliss. He knows no other taste: he knows no anxiety, he knows no worry. He lives in some unknown dimension with tremendous grace. Having nothing, he has everything.

Possessing nothing, he possesses the whole world. The Bauls sing,

THE MIRROR OF THE SKY REFLECTS MY SOUL. OH BAUL OF THE ROAD, OH

BAUL, MY HEART! THE MIRROR OF THE SKY REFLECTS MY SOUL.

OH, MY SENSELESS HEART, YOU HAVE FAILED TO CULTIVATE THE HUMAN

LAND. CULTIVATED, IT COULD HAVE YIELDED A HARVEST OF GOLD.

WHEN THE LIFE, THE MIND AND THE EYES ARE IN AGREEMENT, THE

TARGET IS WITHIN YOUR REACH. YOU CAN SEE THE FORMLESS ONE WITH

BARE EYES.

"When the life, the mind and the eyes are in agreement", hmm? -- that is the way to find the inside. When you are in agreement, when there is no conflict inside you, that is the way. That is why Bauls insist on being without conflict, on being natural, spontaneous.

Don't create any division within yourself, otherwise you will never be able to reach --

because a tremendous quality of agreement is needed. When you fall into

harmony, the door is open. "When the life, the mind and the eyes are in agreement, the target is within your reach. You can see the formless one with bare eyes."

"Forget not," they say, "that your body contains the whole of existence." "I am fulfilled,"

they sing, "being a blow of your own breath on your flute. What more can I wish for me than to be blown away with such melody?"

A Baul is fulfilled the moment he comes to a deep agreement within himself. His singing and his dancing is nothing but an effort to fall into agreement with himself. Have you watched somebody dancing? What happens? Have you observed yourself sometimes dancing? What happens? Dance seems to be one of the most penetrating things, in which one falls into a harmony. Your body, your mind, your soul all fall into a harmony in dancing. Dancing is one of the most spiritual things there is. If you really dance, you cannot think. If you really dance, the body is used so deeply that the whole energy becomes fluid. A dancer loses shape, fixity. A dancer becomes a movement, a process. A dancer is not an entity: he's movement, he's energy. He melts. Great dancers, by and by, melt. And a dancer cannot retain his ego because if he retains the ego, that will be a jarring note in his dance. A real dancer loses his ego in it. He forgets that he is. The dancer is lost; only the dance remains. Then the door opens because you are one unity.

Now the soul is not separate, the mind is not separate, the body is not separate. All have fallen in one line. All have become one, melting into each other, merging into each other.

It is said about Nijinsky, one of the greatest dancers in the world, that there were moments when he would take jumps, and he would come back so slowly that it was almost impossible. He would fall back featherlike, as if gravitation had lost its power over him. Scientists were worried: "This should not happen, it cannot happen" -- but it was happening. No other dancer has been capable in that way.

And of course, Nijinsky went mad; he became a Baul. His is one of the madnesses which has not yet been understood. And because he was in the West, it was impossible to comprehend what had happened to him. He was confined to a psychiatric hospital, forced, given electric shocks, insulin shots. Had he been in

the East he would have become one of the greatest Bauls. His madness was nothing to be treated, it was something to be revered.

But how did he become mad? He became mad through his dancing. When he was asked what happens to him, he said, "It happens only when I am lost, so I cannot say anything about it. If I am, then it never happens. I have tried it. If I am there, deliberately trying it, consciously trying, it never happens. But there are moments when I am lost. Then simply, I don't know who jumps -- and then it happens. I am also surprised. I have no explanation for it, but it happens only when I am lost."

That is what Bauls say: when you dance and you become a whirlwind and, by and by, you are completely lost in your dancing, it happens. Something breaks down inside you.

The barriers are lost. You become one unity. A great orgasm spreads all over your being.

You are in tune with existence in those moments. These moments are the SATORIS of Zen, but Bauls have a better way to attain them. Zen has to be worked on for twelve, fifteen, twenty, thirty years. It is a very slow process. It is the path of meditation.

Bauls can attain to it more easily. Just the day you decide that, "I am ready to drop my ego," you become available to God and God becomes available to you. The essential man suddenly arises over the non-essential; there is a mutation. And this is the moment when you are full of love, when you are love, when your energy is love. This is the moment when you can bless the whole existence. When there is no conflict within you, there cannot be any conflict between you and the existence. That is the secret: drop all conflict within you, and your conflict with the existence is also dropped simultaneously. Become one within you and you have become one with the existence.

THE TASTE OF TIME RESTS IN THE CORE OF THE FRUIT, AND EVEN EXPERTS KNOW OF NO EASY WAY TO REACH IT.

In fact, there is no easy way to reach it, because it is hard to drop the ego. And that is the only way.

HONEY IS HIDDEN WITHIN THE LOTUS BLOOM -- BUT THE BEE KNOWS IT.

DUNG-BEETLES NESTLE IN DUNG, DISCOUNTING HONEY.

Bauls say that intellectuals are dung-beetles. The PUNDITS, the scholars, are dung-beetles. They will never find the way to the lotus...only the bee.

Become a bee; become a lover. Because the bee LOVES honey, it finds the way. Why cannot the dung-beetle find the way? It finds a certain way; it finds the way to the dung.

Because love is the way.

Bauls say, "Whatsoever you love you become, and whatsoever is your love you will find." So be alert about your love: don't love a car, don't love a house, don't love a bank balance -- because you will become like that. You will become a dung-beetle. Don't love dung.

If you are to love, then love something of the divine, something...something that transcends things, something that transcends forms, something for which you will have to raise your eyes to the sky. Love a GOURISHANKAR; love the Himalayan peaks. If you love something like dung, you will move into dung because we always find the way.

Wherever our love moves, we move behind it. The bee loves the lotus; it finds it. The very love is the path. Howsoever the lotus is hiding, the bee will find it.

There is a story about Solomon:

A woman came; the woman was the queen of Ethiopia. She wanted to love Solomon, she wanted to become his beloved. She was very beautiful, but she wanted to love the wisest man in the world. So she tried a few tests on Solomon, about whether he was really as wise as he was said to be. She did many experiments; one of the experiments was this: she brought one false flower made of paper, but made so beautifully that it was almost impossible to detect that it was false. She went into the court of Solomon, she stood far away from Solomon, and she said, "I have a flower in my hand. Can you say from that far away whether it is real or unreal?"

Solomon said, "Light is not enough, and I'm an old man, and I cannot see rightly. Please open the windows." The windows were opened. He waited for two minutes and said,

"No, it is false."

Then the woman brought another flower from her bag and she said, "What about this?" It was exactly like the first, but it was real. Solomon pretended to look at it and then he said, "Yes, this is a real flower."

The woman was astounded. The whole court was astounded: "What has happened?" They asked him, "How could you find it?" He said, "Easy -- I opened the windows for the bees to come in. They decided. For the first flower, no bee came in; for the second they immediately rushed in."

When you love something, you have a supra-sense about where it is. Your love monitors you, it leads you, it becomes your guide.

A bee can smell from miles far away where the flowers are. Much experiment and research has been done with bees about how they find their way. Miles away the flowers have bloomed, and bees will come rushing. Almost a supra-sense exists in them; that supra-sense is-nothing but love.

You will find your way to the object you love, so be very cautious about your object of love because that is going to decide your destiny. Your love is your destiny. Love something superb; love something of the supra-existence; love something of the divine, and you will find your way.

Bauls say, "When there is no fear, just the love is enough; it will monitor you and it will guide you."

HONEY IS HIDDEN WITHIN THE LOTUS BLOOM -- BUT THE BEE KNOWS IT.

DUNG-BEETLES NESTLE IN DUNG, DISCOUNTING HONEY. SUBMISSION IS THE SECRET OF KNOWLEDGE.

Surrender is the secret of knowledge, because surrender is the secret of love-and

love is the only knowledge of worth. The Beloved, Vol 1

Chapter #2

Chapter title: I am just a midwife 22 June 1976 am in Buddha Hall Archive

code:

7606220

ShortTitle:

BELOV102

Audio:

Yes Video: No Length:

104

mins

The first question. Question 1

I ALWAYS YEARN TO BE HERE, BUT WHY, ON SEEING YOU, AM I FILLED

WITH AWE?

THAT'S HOW IT SHOULD BE. One should feel blessed, because awe is the only quality that can make man, religious. That is the only door. Through awe, you start feeling the divine around you. Eyes filled with awe cannot deny God; it is impossible.

And people who have forgotten how to be filled with awe cannot accept God. God is not the question. If you are still capable of being in a tremendous state of wonder, so tremendous, so penetrating that thinking stops, everything stops -- suddenly time is not there, space is not there, and you cannot figure it out, what it is -- some sublime presence is felt in those moments.

But man has become afraid of awe. That's why in language, in the ancient days, 'awful'

was a religious word, very sacred. Now, when you are feeling terrible you say you are feeling awful. Even the word has changed its meaning. People used to be awful when they were deep in prayer, when they were in close contact with the divine. When the divine was revealed to them, then they used to be awful. Now when they are feeling terrible, horrible, very bad, they say, "I am feeling awful." The word has completely been destroyed. It used to be at the peak; now it is at the bottom. It used to be the most positive feeling; now it is the most negative feeling. How has it happened? There are some reasons for it.

Whenever people used to feel awe, they also used to feel fear. That is natural, because through awe you come in contact with the unknown, unfamiliar, the strange, the mysterious. You cannot control it, you cannot manipulate, you cannot possess it.

Suddenly, something bigger than you, something vaster than you surrounds you, and you are at a loss. Fear arises; you start feeling afraid.

All the old religions describe God as both 'the mysterium' and 'the tremendum' --

mysterium because He is the mystery, a mystery that can never be solved, and tremendum because one feels terrible before Him. These two feelings arise together, but you should pay attention to the first feeling more. Otherwise, the doors of the temple will be closed for you. Emphasize the positivity of it, and learn how to be in the presence of the unknown, how to be in the presence of something that you cannot manipulate, how to be in the presence of something where you have to surrender, where surrender is the only thing that you can do,

that can be done -- that's all that's possible.

You should feel blessed; but you must be feeling afraid, hence the question. You must be paying more attention to the negative part, to the shadow part. If you do that, by and by, you will become closed. Then you will not feel awe, and if you cannot feel awe you cannot feel God.

They say philosophy arises out of wonder. It is right, absolutely right. Philosophy arises out of wonder; and religion? -- religion arises out of awe. And what is the difference between wonder and awe?

When you are full of wonder, you try to find a clue; how to dissolve that wonder? You try to think about it, figure out what it is. Wonder creates a question-mark in you, and you start struggling with it -- so philosophy is a fight with wonder. It arises out of wonder, then it tries to dissolve the wonder, to dissolve the inexpressible, the unexplainable, to find an explanation so the wonder can be dropped. Wonder is felt like a dis-ease, a tension. So the philosopher is continuously trying ways and means to be again at ease. He is trying to find some answer so the questions can be dropped, so the mystery is no more a mystery. Philosophy is against wonder.

Religion arises out of awe. Awe is also wonder with one different quality: that is, it does not create a question mark in you. Rather,.it creates deep love, it creates deep gratitude, it creates humbleness. It creates such a state in your consciousness that you would like to bow down before it. It is not a question to be solved, but a deep mystery to be respected.

You would like to kneel down and pray. You would not like to think about it because it is so vast; it is impossible to think about it. You would like to pray; you would like to fall into it in deep love.

Wonder becomes awe when it does not create a question-mark in you; awe becomes wonder if it creates a question-mark in you. That's the difference between philosophy and religion, and then the paths go diametrically opposite. A philosopher goes on thinking and thinking, and a religious person goes on dropping thinking.

God enters into you through awe.

"I always yearn to be here, but why, on seeing you, am I filled with awe?"

That's how it should be. If you are not filled with awe, then your coming to me is pointless. If you don't feel like praying, if you don't feel like bowing down, surrendering, then you have not come to me. Physically you may be here; spiritually we exist far apart.

It happens many times: every day I watch many people who yet have a living heart in them start feeling awe, but they start repressing it. It feels as if it is a kind of weakness and you are not to show it. If they want to cry, they stop their tears. They have come with many questions to ask and suddenly those questions are not there -- because in an awful mood, questioning stops. They forget their questions. And they are very worried about where their questions have gone, and they start searching hectically inside to find something to cling to so that awe does not become too overpowering. Sometimes they ask foolish questions, just to ask, so that nobody becomes aware that they have lost their grounding, that they have fallen into something deep, that they have not been strong enough to resist -- but then they miss. Then they come to me, and yet, they come not.

Coming to me, be ready. It is not a question of asking questions. In fact, there is no need.

Just being with me, just being close with me...fall in line with me, breathe with me, let your heart beat with me a little while so that you can see through my eyes, so that you can taste a little of that with which I am completely overtaken and possessed.

But fear will arise -- because whenever there is something bigger than your mind, the mind says, "Don't move; there can be danger. You may not be able to come back." And the mind says, "It is almost mad, retain your intelligence, retain your thinking capacity, retain your logic." What are you going to do? And you all have been trained for logic, and nobody has been in any way trained for love. That feeling of awe is simply trying to assert something from your heart that has been repressed by the society, by the forces that are trying to control you, by the mind.

Mind is nothing but society inside you: the priest, the politicians, the power-mad people -

- they have become your mind. They are trying to manipulate you from within. When awe arises, you are falling into an infinite ocean, not knowing what will

happen next. In that moment you would like to escape, you would like to close your eyes, you would like to somehow control yourself -- because you have always been told that control is a great value. So you go on controlling everywhere, where it is not needed at all, where it is a hindrance to life. Where it is almost a suicide, there too you go on controlling. You cannot trust, because trust means losing your controlling to somebody else's hands. You cannot surrender, you cannot love, you cannot pray. Even people making love cannot surrender; they go on controlling deep down. Hence, the real peak is missed. They learn techniques of how to make love. They can become very efficient lovemakers, but love is missed -- because it has nothing to do with you.

Love happens only when you are not there. Love happens only when you are surrendered to existence. Then there is a great orgasmic experience. Then you reach to the very peak of your being, and you look at existence from the top- most peak of the Himalayas; you look from the GOURISHANKAR. Then a totally different vision arises, and that vision transforms your life.

So when you come to me, be ready to lose control, be ready to lose yourself. That is the whole purpose of coming; otherwise, don't come. Even if you ask something, don't ask out of your knowledge. Your asking should also be out of your love. Your asking should also be how to go deeper in the mystery -- not how to demystify it, not how to explain it, but how to move deeper and deeper into the eternally unexplained -- because that's what God is.

So have a little taste of God with me. Allow me to be a door.

It will be difficult for you to face God directly, the Whole, because it will be too much, too dazzling. You cannot look at the sun directly; it will destroy your eyes. That's the meaning of a Master: he gives you God in quantities that you can bear. He gives you God in homeopathic doses, and he goes on increasing the dosage, by and by. The more you become capable of absorbing, the more he gives to you. One day, when you are ready to face the sun directly, he simply disappears. He is no longer between you and God.

It is just as you start learning swimming: first you learn in shallow water, just on the bank. It's natural, it is intelligible, it is practical. Then as you are becoming more and more capable, you start moving towards the deeper parts of the river. One day you are ready to go into the ocean.

When you come to me, allow me to be there rather than insisting for your own presence.

You dissolve; let me be there. You open your doors and windows and allow me to pass through you. Much will happen that way. Nothing is going to happen through your questions because they are nothing of worth -- irritations in the mind. But I always see that whenever people feel full of awe, they start defending themselves. Then they undo the whole purpose. Don't defend. If you defend, then how am I going to help you? --

there is no way. I cannot help you against you; I can help you only with your deep cooperation. If you participate, only then can the journey start.

But many times I have felt it -- many people would like to go on the journey, but when it starts, they start clinging to the place where they are standing. They don't want to lose their ground; but then, how can the journey start? You have to go on losing that which you have to attain that which you don't have.

Jesus has said, "Those who want to follow me, they should deny everything, including themselves. They should deny themselves"...and he is right, but it takes a long time.

Between a Master and a disciple, that which can happen right this moment takes much time because the disciple goes on defending in many ways, rationalizing in many ways.

The Bauls say, Look...

Look for Him in the temple of your limbs; He is there as the Lord of the world -- speaking, singing in enchanting tunes.

He is an expert at hide-and-seek; no one can see Him.

Do not try to catch Him, O my heart! He can never be caught --

you can only hope for Him in whole faith.

When you are deep in awe -- and if you are courageous enough to remain in it -- soon your consciousness will have a tremendous shift, a one-hundred-eighty degree turn. If you can remain in awe for a few moments without disrupting it, without corrupting it with your thoughts, your defences, your rationalizations; if you can remain purely in it --

not doing anything about it, just being in it -- there will be a turn That's what Christians call conversion. It doesn't mean that a Hindu becomes a Christian; that is foolish. It doesn't mean that a Christian becomes a Hindu.'Conversion' means: a great turning in your consciousness. If you can remain with me for a few moments, just in pure awe -- not corrupting it in any way, not doing anything whatsoever; just being in it, allowing it to be

-- there will be a shift, a one-hundred-eighty degree turn, a conversion. Suddenly, I will disappear and you will be face to face with your own being. The God is hiding within you.

Look...

Iook for Him in the temple of your limbs; He is there as the Lord of the world -- speaking, singing in enchanting tunes.

He is an expert at hide-and-seek; no one can see Him..

... because the very effort to see Him separates you from Him. The very effort to see Him makes Him an object, and He is not an object; He is your subjectivity. He cannot be reduced to being a thing -- He is not. He is not the sought, He is

the seeker. He is your consciousness, your purity of consciousness. He is your inner sky. You cannot see Him because He is hiding within you.

There is a beautiful parable:

When God created the world, He used to live here on this earth, but there was great trouble for Him. He was not even able to sleep, because complaints and complaints. And the whole day He was trying to solve people's problems, and in the night also they were knocking on His door. And there were so many suggestions to improve upon the world that He started becoming almost insane. It looked as if nothing was going right -- millions of advisers -- and He was fed up. If He listened to one man's advice, there were a thousand and one against it. It was very difficult to do anything. He asked His counsellors, His advisers, "What to do?" He said, "I would like to hide somewhere."

Somebody suggested, "Why don't you go to GOURISHANKAR, Everest. Nobody will ever be able to come there; you can make your abode there."

He said, "You don't know the future. Just within few minutes -- for God it is only few minutes, our centuries are seconds for Him -- just within a few minutes, this man Hilary will reach, and then the same trouble will start."

And somebody said, "Why not the moon?"

He said, "That too is only a question of few minutes. Soon, man will be walking on the moon. It will not solve anything. It will at the most postpone a little."

Then one old counsellor came close to Him and told Him something in His ear. And He was very happy, and He said, "Right! This appears to be the perfect solution."

The old man suggested, "You hide in man himself. There he will never find you. And even if he finds, a man who is so wise to find you within himself will not create any trouble for you. Hilarys can create trouble, but Buddhas cannot -- because by the time they find you inside themselves they will be almost like you. They will not have any complaints, they will not have any question. They will be as silent as you are, they will be as deep as you are. By the time they reach you inside themselves, they will have been transformed. The very journey will become a mutation."

God is hiding within you, but you cannot see God there directly because you don't know how to go there.

One method, one way, is of meditation: start dropping your thoughts. One day when there is no thinking, no ripple, and you are a no-mind, you will reach there; the conversion will happen. Another way is of prayer.

The SANNYASIN who has asked is Rama Bharti. Her path is going to be that of prayer and love. That's why she feels so much awe. When she comes close to me, I have seen her almost tremble, as if some unknown breeze is passing through her. I have seen her throbbing with an unknown rhythm. Love is her path. She has to use this quality of awe; it is rare. Very few people have it; it is disappearing from the world.

People have become much too intellectual, much too hung-up in their heads. They have forgotten the language of the heart. Awe is the script, the very script of that language.

Feel it, allow it to possess you, be possessed by it. It will lead you to the innermost temple of your own being. There will be a conversion, and in that moment your consciousness will have a great shift. Suddenly, it will not be looking at me, it will start looking at itself. That is the only way to know God.

The second question:

Question 2

WHEN YOU WERE A ZEN MASTER TELLING US TO CHOOSE OUR PATH AND

STICK TO IT, I FELT SURE THAT MY PATH WAS OF THE HEAD, THAT I WOULD NEVER BE ABLE TO SURRENDER TO ANYONE. NOW, AFTER ONE

LECTURE ON THE BAUL MYSTICS, I FEEL LIKE A LOVESICK SCHOOLGIRL.

HOW TO CHOOSE A PATH WHEN YOU HAVE NONE? HOW TO BE A LIGHT

UNTO MYSELF WHEN YOUR LIGHT DAZZLES ME EVERY MORNING?

I can understand your difficulty, but it is being created knowingly. I will throw you from one path to another many times, because that is the only way for you to find out which is your path. Sometimes I will push you, pull you towards meditation; sometimes I will force you towardslove, prayer. You will need the taste of both; only then can you be decisive about it, otherwise not. Just by listening to me you cannot decide, because while you are listening to me you are too much impressed by me.

So this is part of the device: that one day I am speaking on meditation, another day I am speaking on love. I would like you to taste both because that taste will be decisive. Only that will decide which your path is where you feel really flowing, where you feel really spontaneous Where things happen on their own accord and you need not force them, that is your path -- but how to know it?

When you listen to me when I am talking about love you will be impressed by it, but that is not going to decide it. Just being impressed is not going to help. It is a sort of hypnosis.

When I am chanting and singing about love you will be hypnotized by it. You will start thinking, "Yes, this my path." But this is just a wave created by me. It may be your wave, it may not be your wave; and you cannot know it. And your whole life has been conditioned so much by others that you have become very impressionable. You immediately take the imprint from the outside. If you listen to me on meditation, you will be impressed by that. That' why ordinarily Masters have not done that which I am doing here. They only insist on one path continuously, for their whole lives. But then many people follow that path only -- because their Master has impressed them so much about it continuously and consistently that they follow. That may not be their path. Hence, my ABSOLUTELY new effort.

I will be talking on all sorts of paths and all sorts of methods In the beginning it will be very confusing, but that is meant to be so. I would like to confuse you so much that you forget all about being impressed by anybody. My whole effort is to throw you to yourself.

How long can you go on doing this? -- one day you are thinking of meditation, an then I talk about love; you start thinking about love. Again I will talk about

meditation, and again the problem will arise. How long are you going to be impressed by me? One day or other you will say, "Now I have to decide. This man will drive me crazy!"

J. Krishnamurti says, "Don't be impressed by anybody," but he is a very consistent man, VERY consistent. And his consistency becomes a deep imprint on his followers. He goes on saying,'Don't be impressed by anybody," but he has been saying that for forty years so consistently that people have even become impressed about it. They say, "Because Krishnamurti says,'Don't be impressed by anybody,' we are not going to be impressed by anybody" -- but this is the impression.

What I am doing is exactly what Krishnamurti is saying. I am doing it; he is simply saying it.

I will not allow you to be impressed. Even if you want, there is no way. I will change continuously: I will plant a few seeds today, tomorrow I will take them back. I will plant something today, tomorrow it will be gone. How long are you going to wait for me? One day you will say, "Wait! Now let me decide. Enough is enough!" But by that time you will have been shifted and shunted from this to that so much that you will have had glimpses of both. You must have tasted a little of love, prayer, a little of meditation, a little of yoga; a little of Meera and Chaitanya, and a little of Buddha and Mahavir. You will have tasted both, and then decision will arise in you. And that will not be because of me, that will be because of you. And when something is because of you it is real, it is authentic; it transforms, it transfigures, it transports you into another world. If it is just an impression, because I have been consistently telling you about something again and again and again, then it becomes just a suggestion deeply implanted within your mind. You may think that you have decided, but it is not your decision.

Krishnamurti has never asserted a single contradiction. He simply goes on repeating the same thing. His note is simple, clear; there is nothing confused about him. Either you agree with him or you don't agree with him -- that is another thing -- but there is nothing to be confused about. Nobody can say that he is confusing. You can say he is right or you can say he is wrong, but not that he is confusing.

You cannot say about me whether I am right or whether I am wrong. At the most, you can say that I am confusing. But that is my whole device: to confuse

you so much. How long can you allow me to shift from this to that, from that to this? One day you are going to shout, "Keep your hands away! Now I want to decide"; and that decision will come out of you. And that will come not only because of intellectual conviction, it will come because of real experiences on both the paths. When you have tasted all, you can decide easily. And then you can remain with that decision for your whole life.

If you are impressed by me and then you decide, you can be impressed by somebody else tomorrow, and then you will decide that. And if you are impressionable for me, you are impressionable for anybody else. That's how people go from one Master to another.

Here there is no need to go anywhere because I am all the Masters together. You can just remain here and the Master changes; there is no need to go anywhere. I consistently contradict myself, so there is no problem. You need not go anywhere; you can just remain where you are.

People go on changing Masters because one day something impresses you and you are over-enthusiastic about it, and then there is a honeymoon -- but honeymoons end.

Anything that begins has to end. After a few days the enthusiasm is gone. Now the thing seems to be familiar. The enthusiasm was because of the unfamiliar, because it was new.

Try to understand this mechanism.

You fall in love with a woman because she is so new: the physiology, the proportions of her body, the face, the eyes, the eyebrows, the color of her hair, the way she walks, the way she turns, the way she says hello, the way she looks. Everything is new, the whole territory unknown. You would like to investigate this territory; it is inviting, it is very inviting. You are caught, hypnotized. And when you start approaching, she starts to run away; that is part of the game. The more she runs, the more enchanting she becomes. If she simply says, "Yes, I am ready," half of the enthusiasm will be dead that very moment.

In fact, you will start thinking how to run away. So, she gives you a chance to chase her.

People are never as happy as while the courting continues -- very happy --

because it is a chase. Man is basically a hunter, so when the woman is chased, running away, trying to hide here and there, avoiding, saying no, the man gets more and more hot. The challenge becomes intense; the woman has to be conquered. Now he is ready to die for her, or do whatsoever is needed, but the woman has to be conquered. He has to prove that he is no ordinary man.

But once they are married, then everything...because the whole interest was in the chase, the whole interest was in the unfamiliar, the whole interest was that the woman was apparently unconquerable. But now she is conquered; now how can that old interest remain? At the most one can pretend, but the old interest cannot remain. Things start becoming cold. They start getting bored with each other because now there are other women who are again new territories: they attract, they invoke, they call forth.

The same happens with thoughts: you are enchanted with one sort of thinking, but by the time you become acquainted with it the honeymoon is over, the love is over. Now you would like to be interested in something else, something new that again gives you a thrill, a kick. This way one goes from one woman to another, from one man to another, from one thinking to another thinking, from one path to another path, from one Master to another Master. This sort of searching will never allow you time enough to create trust.

In one aboriginal community of India in the very primitive parts of Madhya Pradesh, in Bastar, there lives a tribe -- aboriginals, very old people, primitive, almost three or four thousand years old. They are not contemporaries at all but something can be learned from them. One thing has happened in that community that has never happened before anywhere else, and that is: once a man marries a woman there is never any divorce.

Divorce is allowed, but never has divorce happened. And once a man marries a woman, he remains truly with her, and the woman remains truly with him. He never becomes again interested in any other woman in any other way, and the woman never becomes interested in any other man. How have they managed this miracle? They have managed very psychologically.

The structure of their society is such that every boy and every girl is allowed to meet and mix with every other boy and girl. So every boy comes to know each girl of the community, and each girl comes to know each boy of the community. In fact, by the time boys and girls are getting interested in the other sex, they

don't stay in their homes in the night. They have a small temple-like thing just in the middle of the village; they call it GHOTUL -- a youth house.

Once a boy becomes interested in girls he has to go to stay in the GHOTUL; once a girl starts becoming interested in the boys, she has to go to live in the GHOTUL. In the GHOTUL they live, all the boys of the village and all the girls of the village, and they make love to each other. Only one thing is insisted upon: the superintendent of the ghotul insists that no boy and girl should remain with each other more than three days. They should change, so that before their marriage time comes they have known everybody; then they can decide.

When you know all the women of your community and decide, that decision is totally different than the decision that is taken in civilized societies. You don't know other women; a better woman, a better man is always possible. Then what will you do? A more interesting personality can always be there; then there will be disruption, there will be distraction, there will be problems. These are small village communities: not many people -- two hundred, three hundred people, at the most, in one community. Every boy is allowed to know each girl. When he has known all the girls and all the girls have known all the boys, and then one girl and one boy decide to get married, before marriage happens they are given one more year to be together, to finally decide -- because to decide before knowing each other well is dangerous. The decision may be only because they want to know each other well. But once they have known each other well, then what will happen to their decision? So they have to know each other well for one year, two years; whatsoever time they need, they can be together. There is no interference on them by the society.

But once they decide to get married, of course that decision is very, very solid, absolute, unconditional -- because all conquering is gone, hunting is gone, chasing is gone. The honeymoon is before marriage in that community, and that seems to be more logical, psychological, more true to the human mind. The honeymoon is before the marriage.

Marriage has to happen only when the honeymoon is over. When two persons, knowing each other well, decide to be together, now it is not a question of conquering. It is not a question of novelty. It is not that they decide for marriage because they want to know each other; they decide for marriage because they know each other. This is totally different.

But that GHOTUL and the system of those communities is disappearing. They are being civilized by us, forced, because this seems to be immoral. At least for Christians, Hindus, Jains, it seems immoral. Their community is being destroyed; their GHOTUL is thought to be like a house of prostitution. So they are being taught against their experience: they are being taught to destroy GHOTULS and to stop this 'immoral' situation.

But man seems to be absolutely foolish. They are not immoral people; they are very moral people, very natural people. But Christians are there working and trying to convert them into Christians. They have converted many of those poor people into Christians.

Now GHOTULS are disappearing, and there, one of the most solid systems is being destroyed. In fact, we should learn something from them.

My whole device is to give you all the chances possible for spiritual growth so that you can have a feel for the right path. And that feel has to come through you. It has not to come through me, it has not to come through my, influence.

There are two ways not to influence you: one way is not to speak, to disappear somewhere so nobody can come close. Many people have done that too, but that doesn't seem to work. It has no compassion in it. The other way is to communicate to you, to say to you what I have attained, what I have known, what I have tasted. That has been done, but then people become impressed. They become so impressed that they are almost dragged out of their natures That too is dangerous. Maybe a hundred persons are influenced -- then ten, fifteen, at the most twenty, will reach to the goal. Eighty will be going against their nature.

My effort is to make you available to all possibilities and to make all possibilities available to you so you can move, you can change, you can have your own time, at your own pace. And then one day a feeling will arise, and tha. feeling will be totally yours. It will have nothing to do with me. Then you have come to a point where marriage happens: then you are married to a particular path.

I will continue talking about other paths, but from that moment you will listen to me, you will love me, you will be grateful to me, but if I am saying something which goes against your path you will not choose it, you will not be impressed by it. If something fits on your path you wil choose, but the decision will be your

chosen path. Now anything that fits with it you will take in; anything tha doesn't fit you will not take in. And you will not say, "That is wrong"; you know that on some other path it fits, so I may be right for somebody else.

But once you have chosen your path, whatsoever I say, you will be able to choose. You will become a chooser you will have an inner criterion -- what fits, what does no fit.

I am here for many sorts of people. I am not one dimensional; I am here for all sorts of people, and I am speaking to all of them. By and by, listening to me, being attentive to me, you will go on deciding by your feeling. Then I will continue to speak; you will love to listen, you will love to understand, but you will not be distracted. Once you are married you will not be distracted. Then there is no divorce.

"When you were a Zen Master telling us to choose our path and stick to it, I felt that my path was of the head, that I would never be able to surrender to anyone. Now, after one lecture on the Baul mystics, I feel like a lovesick schoolgirl. How to choose a path when you have none? How to be a light unto myself when your light dazzles me every moming?"

One day you will be saturated with it. One day, one morning you will arise in your own being, alert to your needs, alert to your direction. Once that direction is understood, recognized, then there will be no problem. But one has to wait for it; it takes time. And before it happens I will have to shift you, turn you, shunt you from here and there.

Sorry, but I have to do it. The Bauls say,

Blind one,

how can you stumble

on a straight spontaneous path? Be spontaneous in your own self and find the way

that is born in you.

That's what I am trying to do here -- I am a midwife. I'm not going to create something for you; it is already being created in your womb. It is already being created in your innermost shrine. At the most, I can help it to be born smoothly. At the most, if something goes wrong I can help you to remove the obstacle. But the child has been getting ready in you; I am just a midwife.…

Once you have found your child, your direction, then the path is very spontaneous.

Blind one,

how can you stumble

on a straight spontaneous path?

Be spontaneous in your own self, and find the way that is born in you

Words of wisdom describing God can reveal us riches

in a darkened room. Seeking in darkness is confusing.

Break the barriers and look at the sky; the formless

is held as a beautiful form in the arms of the moon.

I go on describing about the wealth, treasures, but your eyes are full of darkness. My description impresses you; greed arises in you. You would also like to become a possessor of great treasures -- but your eyes are full of darkness. Even if the treasure is right in front of you and I am describing it to you, you are impressed by my description but you are not aware of the treasure Iying just in front of you. My description is not going to help.

Words of wisdom describing God can reveal us riches

in a darkened room. Seeking in darkness is confusing.

Break the barriers and look at the sky;

the formless is held as a beautiful form in the arms of the moon.

So don't be too impressed by my words, and don't start feeling very sure while listening to me. But I know it is natural, it is human. Many times you will feel sure: "This is my path"; but next day it will change. So become a little unsure about your sureness. Hesitate a little. When I was talking on Zen you felt sure: "This is my path." Now I am talking about Bauls -- remember, tomorrow I may be talking about something else, so this time at least don't feel so sure. Listen to me, but don't give surety to what is heard. Wait, there is no hurry. Be patient, go on listening and trying, but don't feel sure because your surety is dangerous. Feel sure only when your child is born, when you have a sense of direction.

And you will be able to see the difference, because it is so tremendously

different. It will not be because of me. You will be able to see now that it is not that you are impressed by me; there is nothing like impression. Suddenly a great upsurge, a great energy has happened in you, and it is absolutely certain. But you will be able to see that it is not because of any influence from my side. Sometimes it may even happen contrary to what I am saying. Sometimes -- it is possible if you have been shifted too many times from one path to another -- I am talking about love, and listening to me about love a great certainty will arise in you that, "This is not my path; my path is meditation," or vice versa. It is difficult to say how you will be able to make sure that this is not the surety coming by influence, but your own. But I know that you will be able to do it.

It is exactly like when you have a headache: you know. You don't ask anybody, "Please tell me when I have a headache. How am I going to know that it is a headache, that I am really having it?" No, you will know. When the real certainty arises, it is so clear, so crystal-clear -- like a pillar of light; and just by its arising you are washed clean.

Just by its arising you feel a new being, altogether new, a new birth. It is not intellectual, it is not in the head. You will feel it all over your body, all over your body, all over your mind, all over your heart. Your totality will feel it. When that certainty arises, then it is faith, then it is trust. By being influenced, whatsoever you get is nothing but a belief. A belief is a very impotent thing;.it never changes anybody.

The third question:

Question 3

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE FOLLOWING: THINKING AND

UNDERSTANDING, REACTION AND RESPONSE, BELIEF AND FAITH, SYMPATHY AND COMPASSION, COMMUNICATION AND COMMUNION?

Thinking is the absence of understanding. You think because you don't understand. When understanding arises, thinking disappears. It is like a blind man groping his way; when eyes are there you don't grope for the way, you see it. Understanding is like eyes; you see it, you don't grope. Thinking is groping. Not knowing what is what, you go on thinking, guessing. Thinking cannot give

you the right answer because thinking can only repeat that which is known. Thinking has no vision for the unknown.

Have you ever tried thinking about the unknown? How will you think? You can think only that which you know; it is repetitive. You can go on thinking it again and again, you can make new combinations of old thoughts, but nothing really is new.

Understanding is fresh, new. It has nothing to do with the past. Understanding is here, now. It is an insight into reality.

With thinking there are questions and questions and no answers. Even sometimes when you feel that you have found an answer, it is just because one has to decide some way or other. It is not really the answer, but you have to decide for action so some answer has to be clung to. And if you look deeply into your answer, you will see a thousand and one questions arising out of it. Understanding has no questions but only answers, because it has eyes.

Thinking is borrowed. All your thoughts are given by others to you. Watch -- can you find a single thought that is yours, authentically yours, that you have given birth to? They are all borrowed. The sources may be known or unknown, but they are all borrowed. The mind functions like a computer, but before the computer can give you any answer you have to feed it. You have to supply all the information; then it will give you the answer.

That's what mind has been doing.

Mind is a biocomputer. You go on collecting data, knowledge, information, and then when a certain question arises your mind supplies the answer out of that collection. It is not a real response; it is just out of the dead past.

What is understanding? -- understanding is pure intelligence. That pure intelligence is originally yours; you are born with it. Nobody can give you intelligence. Knowledge can be given to you, not intelligence. Intelligence is your own sharpened being. Through deep meditation one sharpens one's being; through meditation one drops borrowed thoughts, reclaims one's own being, reclaims one's originality, redaims one's childhood, innocence, freshness. Out of that freshness, when you act, you act out of understanding. And then the response is total, here-now; and the response is because of the challenge, not because of the past.

For example: somebody asks you a question -- what do you do? You immediately go inside the mind and find out the answer. You immediately go into the basement of the rnind where you have collected all knowledge, and find the answer there. Then it is thinking. Somebody asks a question and you become silent; you look into the question with penetrating eyes; not into the memory, but into the question. You face the question, you encounter the question. If you don't know you say you don't know.

For example: somebody asks whether God exists or not. You immediately say, "Yes, God exists." From where is this answer coming? -- from your memory? Christian memory, Hindu memory, Muslim memory? Then it is almost useless, futile. If you have a communist memory you will say, "No, there is no God." If you have a Catholic memory you will say, "Yes, there is God." If you have a Buddhist memory you will say, "There is no God." But these answers are coming from the memory. If you are a man of understanding you will simply listen to the question, you will go deep into the question, you will simply watch. If you don't know, you will say, "I don't know." If you know, only then will you say you know. And when I say 'if you know', I mean, if you have realized.

A man of understanding is true. Even if he says, "I don't know," his ignorance is more valuable than the knowledge of the mind, because at least his ignorance, his acceptance of the ignorance is closer to truth. At least he is not trying to pretend, he is not a hypocrite.

Watch, and you will see that all your answers come from your memory. Then try to find out a way where memory does not function and pure consciousness functions. That is what understanding is.

I have heard.…

A doctor stepped into the patient's room. Five minutes later he came out and asked for a corkscrew, then he went back to his patient. In another five minutes he was out again and demanded a chisel and hammer.

The distraught husband couldn't stand it any longer. He pleaded, "For heaven's sake, doctor, what is wrong with my wife?"

"I don't know yet," the doctor replied. "I can't get my bag opened."

Even sometimes when you say, "I don't know," it is not necessary that it may be

coming out of understanding. It may be simply that you can't open your bag. It may be that you cannot open your memories, or you are not able to find something in the memory; you need time. You say, "I don't know"; you say "Give me time, let me think about it." What will you do by thinking? If you know, you know; if you don't know, you don't know.

What are you going to think about? But you say, "Give me time, I will think about it."

What are you saying? You are saying, "Give me a little, time; I will have to go into the basement of my mind and search. And there is such rubbish accumulated through the years that it is difficult to find, but I will try."

Meditate, and become free from this basement. It is not that the basement is not useful; it can be used. But it should not become a substitute for your understanding.

A man of understanding looks into things directly. His insight is direct, but he can use all his accumulation to help the insight to reach you. He can use all his accumulation to make everything that he is trying to convey to you clear. But that which he is trying to convey is his own. Words may be borrowed, language may be borrowed -- has to be borrowed -- concepts may be borrowed, but not what he is trying to convey to you. The container will come from the memory, but the contents will be his insight.

And of course, a man who has no understanding is continuously a victim of so many thoughts, because he has no one insight to give him a center. He has a crowd of thoughts, unrelated to each other, even diametrically opposite to each other, contradicting each other, with deep antagonism towards each other. He has a crowd -- not even a group, not even a society, but a mob of thoughts buzzing inside the mind. So if you go on with your thinking too far, one day you will become mad. Too much thought can create insanity.

In primitive societies madness is rare. The more civilized a society is, the more people go insane. Even in civilized societies, more people go insane who work with their intellects.

This is unfortunate but this is a fact: that more psychoanalysts go mad than in any other profession. Why? -- too much thinking. It is very difficult to manage so many contradictory thoughts together. In managing them, your whole being

becomes unmanaged, becomes a chaos.

Understanding is single, understanding is central. It is simple; thoughts are very complex.

A henpecked husband visited a psychiatrist and said he had a recurring nightmare.

"Every night," he said. "I dream I am shipwreck with twelve beautiful women." "What is so terrible about that?" asked the psychiatrist

"Have you ever tried cooing for twelve women?"

That was his problem: how to 'coo' twelve women Even to coo one woman is difficult.

Thinking is like cooing for thousands and thousands of women around you. One naturally goes mad. Understanding is very simple: you are married to one insight, but that insight works like a light, a torch. Wherever you focus your torch, mysteries are revealed.

Wherever you focus your torch, darkness disappears.

Try to find your hidden understanding, and the way is to drop thinking. And to drop thinking two are the possibilities: either meditation or love.

The second: 'reaction and response'.

Reaction is from the thoughts and response is understanding. Reaction comes from the past; response is always in the present. But ordinarily we react -- we have everything already ready inside.

Somebody is doing something and we react as if button has been pushed. Somebody insults you -- you be come angry. That has happened before. It has been happening the same all the while. It has become almost like a button: somebody pushes it, you become angry. There is not a single moment of waiting, not a single moment where you look at the situation -- because the situation may be different. The person who is insulting you may be right. He may have simply revealed a truth to you; that's why you feel insulted.

Or, he may be absolutely wrong, or he may be nasty person -- but you have to look into the person. If he is right, you have to thank him because he has shown some thing to you

-- he has shown compassion towards you. He has been friendly by bringing a truth to your heart. Maybe it hurts, but that is not his fault. Or, he is simply stupid ignorant: not knowing anything about you he has blurted something out. Then there is no need to be angry; he is simply wrong. Nobody is worried about something which is absolutely wrong. Unless it has some truth in it, you are never irritated by it. You can laugh at it, at the whole absurdity of it. It is ridiculous.

Or, the person is nasty and that is his way. He is being insulting to everybody. So he is not doing anything to you in particular; he is simply being himself -- that's all. So in fact, nothing is needed to be done. That man is that type.

Somebody insulted Buddha. His disciple Ananda asked him, "I was getting very angry and you kept quiet. You should have at least allowed me; I would have put him right."

Buddha said, "You surprise me. First he surprised me, now you surprise me. Whatsoever he was saying is simply irrelevant. It is unconnected with us, so why get into it? But you surprise me more: you have become very annoyed, you look angry. This is foolish. To punish oneself for somebody else's error is foolish. You are punishing yourself. Cool down. There is no need to be angry -- because anger is fire. Why are you burning your own soul? If he has committed some mistake, why do you punish yourself? It is stupid"...but we react.

I have heard.…

One man was saying to one of his friends, "To please my wife, I have given up smoking, drinking, and playing cards."

"That must make her very happy," said his friend.

"No, it has not. Now, every time she begins to talk to me, she can't think of anything to say."

People live mechanical,-robot-like lives. If your wife has been continuously nagging you to stop smoking, and you think that she will be happy if you stop,

you are wrong. If you smoke she is unhappy, if you stop smoking she will be unhappy, because then she will not find any excuse to nag you.

One woman has said to me that she doesn't want her husband to be perfect. I asked,

"Why?" She said, "Because I love nagging." If the husband is perfect what are you going to do? You will be simply at a loss.

Watch yourself, watch others, and see how they are behaving in a mechanical way: unconscious, like somnambulists, sleepwalkers.

Reaction is of the mind; response is of the no-mind.

Belief and faith? -- again the same: belief is of the mind, of the thinking; faith is of no-mind, of awareness, understanding.

It happened in a hillside village: the hunter said to his guide, "This seems to be a very dangerous cliff. It is a wonder they don't put up a warning sign."

"They had one up for two years," the native guide admitted, "but no one fell over so they took it down."

Belief is blind -- you believe because you have been taught to believe -- but it never goes very deep because it has no understanding of the situation. It is just a superfluous tag, just something added to you. It has not grown from you, it has not been a growth. It is just borrowed, so it never penetrates your being. A few days you carry it, and then seeing that it is useless, nothing is happening, you put it aside. There are Christians who are not Christians; there are Hindus who are not Hindus. They are Hindus only because of those beliefs that they have never used, those beliefs that have never been given any respect by them. They think they are Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, but how can you be a Mohammedan if you have not lived your belief?

But belief cannot be lived. If one starts becoming more alert, watching life, responding, then by and by a faith arises. Faith is yours; belief is somebody else's. Drop beliefs so that faith can arise. And don't be satisfied with beliefs, otherwise faith will never arise.

Sympathy and compassion.…

The same; the questioner has asked the same thing again and again.

Sympathy is of the mind: you feel somebody is in trouble, somebody is in misery; you think somebody is in misery and you have to help. You have been taught to help, to be of service, to be dutiful, to be a good human being, to be a good citizen, to be this and that.

You have been taught; you feel sympathy. Compassion has nothing to do with your teachings. Compassion arises as an empathy, not as a sympathy. Compassion arises when you can see the other person as he is, and when you can see him so totally that you start feeling him. You start feeling in the same situation.

It happened: A few people were beating a fisherman. Ramakrishna was moving from one bank to another of the Ganges, near Dakshineshwar. On the other shore a few people were beating a man. Ramakrishna was in the middle of the stream. He started crying and weeping, and he started shouting, "Stop, don't beat me!" People who were sitting around him, his disciples, could not believe what was happening: "Who is beating you? Who can beat him?" They said, "What are you saying, PARAMAHANSADEVA? Have you gone mad?" He said, "Look! They are beating me there on the other side." Then they looked; a few persons were beating a man, and Ramakrishna said, "Look at my back." He uncovered his back -- there were marks, blood was coming out. It was impossible to believe. They went, they rushed to the other shore, caught hold of the man who was beaten. They uncovered his back: exactly the same marks.

This is empathy -- putting oneself into somebody else's place so totally that what is happening to him starts happening to you. Then compassion arises. But these states are all of no-mind.

Communication and communion.…

Communication is of the mind: verbal, intellectual, conceptual. Communion is of no-mind, of deep silence; a transfer of energy, non-verbal; a jump from one heart to another -

- immediate, without any medium.

The basic, most essential thing to remember is -- because it divides your life, it divides the whole world into two worlds -- that if you are looking through a

screen of thoughts, then you live in one world: the world of belief, thinking, sympathy. If you are looking with clean eyes, unclouded eyes, your perception has a clarity: pure, just seeing into things as they are, not projecting anything upon them. Then you have understanding, then you have meditation. Then the whole world changes. And the problem is that mind can deceive you. It creates sympathy. It creates pseudo coins: for compassion it creates sympathy. Sympathy is a pseudo coin. For communion, it has only communication, which is a pseudo coin. For faith, it has belief, which is a pseudo coin.

Remember it -- mind tries to substitute. You are lacking something? -- mind tries to substitute it. Be very alert, because whatsoever mind can do is going to be false. Mind is the great falsifier, the greatest deceiver there is. It helps, it tries to console you, it gives you something.

For example: if in the day you have fasted, in the night you dream of foods, resting in great hotels, or being invited to the palaces of the kings and eating beautiful food. Why? -

- the whole day you have been hungry, now it is difficult to sleep because of hunger; the mind creates a substitute, a dream. Have you not watched?

In the night your bladder is full and you would like to go to the bathroom, but sleep will be disturbed -- the mind immediately creates a dream that you are in the bathroom. Then you can go on sleeping. It gives you a substitute. The substitute is conciliatory; it is not real -- but for the time being it helps.

So beware of mind's consolations. Seek reality, because only reality can fulfill.

Consolations will only post-pone; they can never be fulfilling. You can eat as much food as you like in the night in your dream, you can enjoy the fragrance of it, the taste of it, the color of it, everything, but it is not going to be nourishing. The one thing that is not going to happen: it cannot nourish. Belief can give you the whole fragrance of faith, the taste, the color. You can enjoy it but it will not nourish you. Only faith can nourish.

Always remember: that which nourishes you is real, and that which simply gives you a consolation is very dangerous. Because of this consolation you will not seek the real food. If you start living in dreams and you don't eat real food, then by and by, you will dissipate, disappear, become dry, and you will be dead.

So take immediate action: whenever mind is trying to give you a substitute, don't listen to it. It is a great salesman, a great seducer. It convinces you, and it says, "Those things are very cheap. Faith is very difficult to find because you will have to risk your life; belief is very easy, very cheap. You can get it for nothing." In fact, so many people are ready -- if you accept their belief they are ready to give you something more with it: become a Christian, become a Hindu, become a Mohammedan. People are ready to give you a great welcome and respect, respectability. Everything is available; just accept their belief.

Belief is not only cheap, it can even bring many more things with it.

Faith is dangerous, never cheap. You will have to put your whole life at stake. It needs courage, but only a courageous person can be religious.

The Beloved, Vol 1

Chapter #3

Chapter title: What is there, is there 23 June 1976 am in Buddha Hall Archive

code: 7606230

ShortTitle: BELOV103

Audio: Yes Video: No Length: 90

mins

NOTHING HAS HAPPENED AND NOTHING WILL HAPPEN. WHAT IS THERE, IS THERE.

I BECAME A KING IN MY DREAM AND MY SUBJECTS

OCCUPIED THE ENTIRE EARTH.

I SAT ON THE THRONE RULING LIKE A LION, LIVING A HAPPY LIFE.

THE WORLD OBEYED ME. AS I TURNED IN MY BED ALL WAS CLEAR:

I WAS NOT A LION BUT A LION'S UNCLE, A JACKASS,

THE VILLAGE IDIOT.… NOTHING HAS HAPPENED AND NOTHING WILL HAPPEN. WHAT IS THERE, IS THERE.

THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT ASSERTIONS EVER MADE. It

is so: the reality remains in its suchness. Nothing changes, nothing can change. But we see many changes happening all around. For us, everything is changing. Life is a flux.

Then something is wrong with us. Then the change appears not because it is there, but because we cannot see the eternal. Our inability to see the real, the eternal, creates a flux-like phenomenon all around us. It is our flickering consciousness.

Have you watched sometimes in a dark room? -- a small candle burns, and it goes on flickering. Because of its flickering the whole room seems to be moving, waving, changing. If the flame is constant, the room stops changing -- it becomes constant. Our consciousness creates the mirage, the illusion, the dream- like world that surrounds us.

This has to be understood very deeply, because this is the very base of all essential religions.

It is true as far as ordinary understanding goes: everything seems to be changing, nothing seems to be permanent. Nothing seems to be the same even for two moments, two consecutive moments. Nothing seems to be the same, everything goes on like a river. To think of anything permanent is almost impossible. To think of anything that has remained the same forever and ever is incomprehensible to the mind. The mind knows only the world of change. The mind knows only the dream, the illusion. A life lived through the mind is a life of dreams. That is the meaning of the concept of MAYA. It does not say anything about the reality, remember: it does not say that the reality is not real, it does not say that the existence is dream. It simply says that the way you look at it is so unconscious, the way you look at it is so wavering, unstable, that your inner wavering gives you a world of flux, dreams. Attain to inner integrity, attain to inner crystallization, and suddenly all flux-like phenomena disappear -- and suddenly you are face to face with the real, the substantial, the permanent; call it God. The world and God are not two things but the same reality looked at in two ways. One is through the mind, the other is through no-mind -- because if mind is there, there is going to remain, more or less, the flickering.

The mind cannot be constant. Have you watched? Even for a few seconds the mind cannot be constant. Just look at your watch someday, and just remember that you are looking at the watch, and you will not be able to retain this

remembrance that you are looking at the watch even for a few seconds. Your mind will slip somewhere else: some memory, some imagination, some work that is incomplete, some worry, some plan; you must go somewhere. Again you will realize and you will see that for a few seconds you have not been here. Try again; again the mind will go away.

Mind cannot be stable, so all efforts to make mind stable are impossible. That is not in the nature of the mind. The only way to be stable is to drop the whole mind as such. To look into reality without any thinking, to look so directly that the medium of the mind is not there; look immediately, then suddenly God is revealed. Then in all the forms the formless is revealed. Then you see that which the Bauls say: Nothing has happened, and nothing will happen. What is there, is there; and what is not there, is not there. But the mind goes on seeing that which is not there, and because of that which is not there, we cannot see that which is there. Because of the false, because of the projected, because of the dreamed, we cannot see the real, we cannot see the true. When the false is dropped, reality is revealed. There is no other way to seek reality. One has to drop the very mechanism that creates falseness.

Mind is a projector. You sit in a movie house and you see a thousand and one things passing on the screen, and the screen is empty; nothing is really passing except shadows.

You go on looking at the screen and there is every possibility that you may not even think of the projector behind you which is projecting all those shadows, pictures. You can start fighting with those shadows but that is not the way to stop them. The way is to look back, to turn a one hundred-eighty-degree turn and go and stop the projector. Once the projector is stopped, the screen is empty. Suddenly there is nothing, or, only the whiteness of the screen is left. Only the eternal is there and the changing has disappeared.

But one has to stop the projector.

There are many people who become interested in meditation, but in a wrong way. They start fighting with the mind, they start struggling and wrestling with the mind. Then they are not ever going to be victorious. Then they are fighting a losing battle. It is not possible because they have forgotten the projector. Where is the projector?. -- one has to find the projector hidden behind your back. Hidden deep in the unconscious is the projector, hidden in the unconscious:

becoming, desiring. It is what Buddhists call TRISHNA. The constant desire to be somebody, to be someone, to be somewhere else, is the cause of the mind; then the mind continues.

How to stop the projector? BE HERENOW. Don't try in any way to become somebody else; accept that which you are. Drop all ideas of improvement. Drop all ideas of bettering yourself. Drop all ideas of achieving something; there is nothing to be achieved.

Empty-handed we come, empty-handed we go, and in the meanwhile, empty- handed we remain. And if you think your hands are full then you are befooling yourself. Then you are taking dreams as real. Your hands may be full of dreams.

You must have heard about the Japanese discipline of KARATE. The word 'karate' is very meaningful. It comes from a root which means empty hand. It says: a man can become a great warrior if he understands totally the meaning of being empty. If somebody understands that, "Empty-handed I have come, empty- handed I will go, and empty-handed I am here," then there is nothing to lose. Who can conquer a person who has nothing to lose? Who can defeat a person who has nothing to lose? Who can frighten a person who has nothing to lose? By understanding this emptiness he becomes a great warrior. It is impossible to defeat him, it is impossible to rob him; it is impossible to kill him -- because he is already empty. He holds nothing in his hands. By not holding anything, he goes beyond life and death.

That is the meaning when Jesus says again and again, "Lose yourself." Those who are not going to lose themselves, they will lose; and those who are ready to lose, they will gain.

The losers will become winners, and the winners will become losers. Those who are empty will be fulfilled, and those who are trying to fulfill themselves will remain empty.

This is the paradox.

Understand the very motivation of all ideas, thoughts, desires. It is a seed-like thing.

Watch inside -- why can't you be herenow? Why is it always that you are thinking of somewhere else? Why can't you be happy as you are? Why are you

thinking that tomorrow you will be happy? How can you be happy tomorrow if you are not happy today?. -- because tomorrow is going to be born out of the moment. Out of this moment the next moment is going to be born. Today is going to become the parent of tomorrow.

If you are unhappy today, you will be more unhappy tomorrow. You will have learned, by that time, many more tricks to be unhappy. You are practicing it, and you hope tomorrow to be happy? Then you are in a hopeless rut. You desire for tomorrow? -- then you are continuously missing all that is here, and that is the only reality there is. If you can even for a single moment put aside desiring, then the projector stops, and the dreaming stops, and you are able to face reality.

Nothing has happened. The reality is as it has always been from the very beginning.

Nothing has happened and nothing will happen, so all your desiring is futile, because you are trying for something to happen. Your whole effort is to make something happen: riches, wealth, power, prestige. Your whole effort is for something to happen, but, NOTHING HAS HAPPENED

AND NOTHING WILL HAPPEN. WHAT IS THERE, IS THERE.

This is a tremendously significant sutra. All the scriptures can be condensed in such a sutra. If you can understand only these three lines, there is no need to understand anything else. Look at your life from your childhood up to now. What has happened?

Many things appear to happen, but what has really happened? You remain the same, the consciousness remains the same, and all that happens is just superficial, like a dream. If it has not happened up to now, how is it going to happen in the future? Only the present is; past and future are dreams. Even for a single moment, if you can penetrate into reality and you can see what is, face to face, you will laugh at the whole absurdity of your efforts. What are you trying?

-- you are trying something impossible: you are fighting against reality. The reality is; it knows no becoming, it is being. It knows no future; it is already here. It has always been already here. You have just to see it -- and once you can see it, all worry, all anxiety disappears. Then you stop trying, pulling yourself up by your shoestrings. Then you simply relax. Then there is no tension. Then

rather, you start delighting, you start being blissful as you are. Before we can understand it, a few things will be helpful.

One: ordinarily the Eastern psychology divides the human mind into three divisions. The first is deep sleep, very deep sleep when there are no more dreams: SUSHUPTI, dreamless sleep. In this state, ninety-nine percent unconsciousness and only one percent consciousness exists. A very small fragment of consciousness exists -- the whole continent is dark, just one ray. Because of that ray, in the morning you can say, "I had a very good sleep. It was absolutely silent and peaceful. There was not any dream."

Because of that one ray of consciousness, you can say this in the morning. If there were no consciousness at all, then who would remember? Then who would say that the sleep was beautiful, nourishing? Just a small ray, a very small ray exists in dreams.

That is the second stage -- dreaming -- a little more consciousness comes into existence.

You remember in a general way that you slept well. You can even remember dreams, details of the dreams. You can remember even the colors, the story, the pattern, the motif of the dream. You can relate the whole dream. You were a little more conscious.

Then you are awake in the morning; that is the third stage: wakefulness, a little more consciousness. But the greater continent of your soul remains dark. Even while you are awake, you are not totally awake. Just deep down in your wakefulness, dreams are floating. You can watch that.

Any moment close your eyes, rest for a single minute, and you will see that dreams are floating there. So just underneath your consciousness, a great world of dreams continues, and that goes on affecting your consciousness. Dreams are powerful things. They are projections; they go on shadowing your consciousness. And deep down in your dreams you will find again a sort of sleep. That's what happens when you fall asleep in the night.

When you have fallen asleep, first dreams start. That is the second stage. Then only rarely do you go deep. Then, dreams stop and you are in deep sleep. Again you start floating towards the surface, and this goes on continuously, the whole

night -- up and down, up and down you move. In the whole night if you can touch the deep layer of sleep for only fifteen minutes, that will be enough rest. That's why people who meditate don't need much sleep, because in deep meditation they can easily move into the depth of their beings. The rest of the night is wasted in dreaming. These three states are the ordinary states.

The East says, "Unless you attain to a greater awareness, your life will never know what the reality is, what God is." That greater awareness means becoming totally aware, not leaving a single corner of your consciousness dark, dropping all unconsciousness. What the Freudians call the unconscious disappears by and by. By methods of meditation, prayer, love, it disappears; more and more, you become conscious. One moment comes when your whole being becomes conscious, full of light, luminous. Then there is no dreaming and no sleep. Just awareness is the stuff you are made of. In that moment you will become able to know what this Baul is singing:

NOTHING HAS HAPPENED AND NOTHING WILL HAPPEN. WHAT IS THERE, IS THERE.

And if you understand this, even a glimpse of it, then how can you remain in an agonized existence, how can you worry, and how can you remain tense and feeding illnesses?

Henry Thoreau used to say that what man thinks is wealth -- when man thinks that he is becoming by and by wealthy -- is more like 'illth' than wealth. We become more and more ill. Well-being does not happen through it, so why call it wealth? Man thinks he is becoming more and more powerful, and deep down, more and more impotence happens.

On the outside you think you are achieving many things, but deep down you remain empty, hollow. The sooner you realize this hollowness the better because then you will not waste your time and energy. Then your whole life will be of a totally different quality: the search will begin. Then you will not be chasing dreams.

And dreams look very real. They are not, but they look very real. To an unconscious mind, dreams look as if they are the only reality. Have you not

watched that deep in sleep, dreaming, every night again you become a victim? You again start thinking that this is real. In the morning you realize it was false, just a dream, but in the night, again and again you are a victim and you start thinking it is real.

Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples, "Unless you realize in your dreams that they are dreams, you will not be able to awake." So he used to give them techniques of how to realize while dreaming that it is a dream, how to recognize that it is a dream. But the moment you recognize a dream as a dream, it stops. It immediately stops. It cannot be there then. With your recognition of the dream as dream, the dream dies. It exists only through your cooperation and recognition; you give it reality. Pull your hands away and it drops flat, and it has nothing in it. The dream has power only because you impart power to it.

Watch people on the street, in the marketplace. Just stand by the side and just look at people -- you will be surprised. It is so obvious that they are sleepwalkers. They are walking like somnambulists. Somehow, they are managing, but they are walking fast asleep. You can watch their lips moving as if they are talking with somebody, and there is nobody. They can even be found making gestures to somebody who is not present. Watch their faces; their faces have not the aura of awareness -- a dullness, a dark shadow, as if somehow they are forcing themselves to be aware, ready to fall any moment into dreaming, into sleep. Drunk with their dreams, people go on moving.

First watch others, because it will be easy for you to watch others. Then start watching yourself. Then start catching yourself red-handed. Then sometimes, just walking on the road, suddenly stop and see whether you are here or you are moving somewhere in a dream.

The more you become alert about your dreams, the more you will see gaps arising in your consciousness when dreams are not there and reality can be approached. But we have great investments in our dreams. We may be afraid of nightmares, but we are not yet fed-up with dreaming. We still go on cherishing sweet dreams.

I have heard.…

A man was talking to one of his friends. "I had a dream the other night," said Casey to his pal McGinn, "and it taught me a great lesson."

"What was it?" asked McGinn.

"I dreamed I was in Rome and I had an audience with the Pope. Would I have a drink, he asked me. Thinks I, 'Would a duck swim?' And seein' the whisky and lemons and sugar on the sideboard, I told him that I wouldn't mind a drop of punch.'Cold or hot?' he asked me. 'Hot, your Holiness,' said I, an' that's where I made me mistake!"

"I don't see anything wrong," said the friend.

"His Holiness stepped toward the kitchen to boil the water, and before he got back I woke up."

"What lesson did you learn?" asked McGinn.

"Next time," swore Casey, "I will say, 'I will take it cold, your Holiness, while the water is getting hot.'"

We have investments in our dreams. They don't exist without our help; we make them exist. Sweet dreams, golden dreams; we have a romance with them, a very long romance of many lives. We go on courting dreams, and of course when we court them they are there, and they bring nothing but frustration. Because they are against reality, they can never bring fulfillment. There is no way to make two plus two equal five; there is no way.

Whatsoever you do, two plus two will always be four, and you go on hoping that someday it is going to be five. Then you are simply in a mathematical error. Dreams can never be real; your thoughts can never be real; your hopes can never be realized; your desires can never be fulfilled. The only outcome can be more and more frustration.

That's why children look so beautiful: because they are yet full of hope, full of dreams, and they have not yet known frustration. Old people start looking very very dead. Hopes have leaked out, by and by, and only frustration -- a very bad taste on the tongue.

Experience makes people bitter. Experience makes people lose their innocence, lose their hope, lose their trust. But it is not experience really -- because they wanted to make their dreams real, that's why. Otherwise you could remain as innocent to the very end of your life as in the beginning -- in fact, even more --

because the innocence that happens in childhood is just natural. It has not been tested against fire; it is very fragile. It has no crystallization in it. It is just a gift; it has not been earned. But when an old man is childlike, innocent, then nothing can destroy it. Then it has a solidity to it, then it is substantial; he has earned it.

But how does one earn innocence? -- by learning from frustration, by going deep into frustrations and realizing the fact that each frustration is an outcome of a certain dream. If you don't want frustrations, drop dreaming. Life is not frustrating, dreaming is frustrating.

I have heard Mulla Nasrudin say to his son, "It is none of your business to know or enquire how I first met your mother, but I can tell you one thing: it sure cured me of whistling."

If your life can cure you of whistling and dreaming, it will be enough, more than enough, more than life can give to you. It will be a great realization.

But what happens? The moment one dream is frustrated, we immediately replace it, substitute it with another dream, maybe an even bigger dream. We never look into the reality. We go on saying that man proposes and God disposes. God has never disposed anything. It is you, in your very dream, who both proposes and disposes. It is your own proposal that carries the seeds of disposal, because it is not in tune with reality. It is your expectation that carries the seeds of frustration.

God, or call it reality, has never frustrated anybody. It is always showering on you; it is always ready to fulfill you to the deepest core of your being. But you won't listen to reality. You are too much with dreams.

This is what I call religious conversion: listening to reality and dropping the dreams is religious conversion. It will be difficult, hard, arduous in the beginning, because the dreams persuade you so easily, and they show you such wonderful visions, fantasies.

Dreams are great poets: they paint, they poetize, they fantasize; they create such beautiful hopes in you, paradises, heavens. They are all dreams. But you can live hoping, and today's misery can be tolerated because of tomorrow's dream.

It is very difficult to drop tomorrow's dream because then suddenly you become aware of the misery that is here today. But remember, that misery is created by yesterday's dream.

It has nothing to do with today. Yesterday's dream has created misery today; tomorrow's dream will create misery again. So when you drop tomorrow's dream, you will not suddenly become happy, because yesterday's dream will still linger on. You have sown the seeds -- who is going to reap the crop? But half is done when you drop tomorrow's dream. Yesterday's dream, its frustration, has to be passed through. That's what in India we call TAPAS, austerity. "Yesterday's dream was my dream. I have sown it, so I have to go through the suffering. I have to pass through the frustration. I accept it; it is my own doing. Nobody else is responsible, but now I am not going to sow any more seeds."

First, drop tomorrow's dream, then by and by yesterday's dream and its hang-ups and hangovers disappear. Then a man becomes aware. When your eyes are not full of dreams, your eyes are full of awareness.

It happened: MacGonigal was staggering up the street from telephone pole to lamp-post and back again. Father Daly stopped him and said, "Drunk again?"

"Are you?" said MacGonigal. "So am I, Father."

"This is no time for levity," admonished the priest. "After taking the pledge and promising me two weeks ago that you would never drink again! It is a sin against God and the church, and I am sorry to be saying so."

"You are sorry to see me so?" "Indeed I am!"

"Are you sure you are sorry?" "Yes, very, very sorry."

"Then if you are so sorry," said the drunkard, "I will forgive you Father."

Drunk, in our dreams, we go on interpreting in our own ways. We go on seeing things which are not. We go on listening to things which have not been said. We go on pretending what we are not, and we go on holding a dream-world around ourselves.

The befuddled group was hanging around a bar, when the door opened and a voice shouted, "McGuire, your house is on fire!"

One fellow rushed out, and after running a block at breakneck speed, suddenly skidded to a halt.

"Hell," he said to nobody in particular, "my name isn't McGuire."

This is what is happening to everybody: you don't know your name, you don't know your essence, you don't know who you are, you don't know why you are here, you don't know why you are running so fast. Where are you going? Why are you in such a hurry? Reality is here. Where are you going? But some conditioning -- what Hindus call SAMSKAR, from many lives of dreaming, desiring: that has become your only reality. You go on after it, not knowing why. It has become a habit. You cannot resist it; you are always on the move. The reality is here and you are always on the move, hence there happens no meeting. Unless that meeting happens, you will never be happy.

Happiness is when you are in tune with reality. Happiness is a harmony between you and the real. So if you are unhappy, remember, you must be going away from reality. Be aware that you must be somehow not falling in line with reality. There must be a conflict between you and the real, and of course you cannot win against the real; there is no way.

You have tried all the ways. The whole humanity has tried all the ways possible, but there is no way to win over reality and against reality.

You have to follow reality, you have to come into a deep accordance with reality, in tune with it. You have to become a note in the great orchestra that reality is -- not fighting but surrendering, submitting to it, ready to dissolve into it. That is what Bauls call love: the readiness to dissolve into reality, the readiness to merge, melt, the readiness to be one with reality. You will be losing something -- your dreams, your individuality, your ego; you will be losing that separation. You will disappear as a drop of water, but it is nothing to be worried about, because you will become the ocean. You will not be what you have been up to now: your ego, confined in a form, in a name. Your fences will disappear. You will not be an island, you will become part of the continent but you will become the continent.

Nothing is lost by losing yourself; everything is lost by resisting. But we go on misunderstanding reality. If reality tries to absorb us, it looks like death.

So many times, almost every day, somebody or other comes to me. Meditating

deeply, when reality starts absorbing you, you become frightened because it looks like death. It is like death, but it is not death. It is the door to life more abundant, to life infinite and eternal. But yes, in a way it is death -- death to the past, death to you as you are. But then, what are you? Why are you so afraid of dying? You have nothing to lose -- only a miserable self, only an imprisonment will be burned down, only the structure of misery and agony will be burned down. You have nothing to lose. Why do you go on clinging to it? But you have become very familiar with it, and you become afraid. Whenever in deep meditation sometimes, by chance, coincidence, you come close to reality and the reality starts spreading in you, you become afraid and you escape.

Your interpretation has to be dropped. You have to learn how to listen to the real

-- so when reality approaches you, welcome it. If God comes towards you, if you cannot move towards Him, at least don't run away. And He IS coming towards you in millions of ways. He wants to overpower you, to reclaim you. It is not only that you are seeking Him; He is also seeking you. In fact, your seeking is just pseudo. You talk about seeking God but you don't really mean it. You would like to find Him by the way. You don't want to stake anything. You don't want to pay for it. You don't want to earn Him. You would like to get Him free; that is not the way.

You will have to lose yourself; you will have to lose all. People don't mean it, and when God approaches them -- and He approaches you; I have seen His hands many times coming close to you -- I have seen you running away. And again, when you are far away you start seeking Him and you say, "How to find God?" Now this game has continued for too long, and it has become almost a habit that when He is far away you seek, when He comes close you escape. This pattern has to be broken.

I have heard.…

It was a Sunday morning when the clarinet player who had recently moved next to the small church started practicing some hot licks that brought the minister over on a run.

"See here," said the minister, "did you ever hear 'keep holy thy sabbath'?" "No," said the cat, "but if you whistle a few notes, I will do my best."

Our understanding is our understanding; our interpretation is our interpretation.

Beware --

when reality approaches you, don't try to interpret. Just wait, be patient; the reality that is coming closer to you will reveal itself to you. But before it reveals, if you take some interpretation to your heart, then you are again closed. You close your doors and then there is no way to know what was really going to happen.

Just the other night a SANNYASIN was crying, weeping: she had become so afraid of Dynamic Meditation, because she saw one SANNYASIN almost going mad in it. So she became very afraid. The fear arose in her that if this could happen to one person, this could happen to her also. The very words 'dynamic meditation', she could not utter, because the moment she would say 'dynamic meditation', she would start shaking and crying. She could not relate it accurately, what had happened, because the very words

'dynamic meditation'...She became so much afraid of the very word that she was not able to relate the whole thing, what had happened. Only in fragments could she say that somebody was becoming almost mad, and not only that, but the one who was becoming mad just by her side started pulling her hand also. That became very symbolic. This madman was going mad himself, and trying to pull her in also. But a deep fear of madness is in everybody.

If you are too afraid of madness you cannot be in love, you cannot meditate, you cannot pray, because all of these dimensions are, in a way, mad dimensions -- you wi]l be going beyond the normal boundary of humanity. The normal, routine, workaday world, the normal logic, reason, the so-called normal humanity -- you will be going beyond it, you will be transcending it. It will look like madness.

Bauls say,

Mad, mad, we are all mad!

Why is this word so derogatory then? Diving deep

into the heart's stream,

you will find that no one is better than, the one who is mad.

Madness is possible in two ways: either you fall below the normal, or you go above the normal. In both ways you become mad. If you fall below the normal you are ill; you need psychiatric treatment to be pulled back to normality. If you go beyond the normal you are not ill. For the first time you are becoming really healthy, because for the first time you are filled with wholeness. Then don't be afraid. If your madness brings you more sanity in life, then don't be afraid. And remember, the madness that is below the normal is always involuntary; that is the symptom: it is involuntary. You cannot do it, it happens; you are pulled into it. And the madness that is above the normal is voluntary -- you can do it --

and because you can do it, you remain the master of it. You can stop it at any moment. If you don't want to go further, you can stop it; if you want to go further, you can go on --

but you remain always in control.

In these meditations here, our whole effort is to give you a taste of the madness that is beyond the normal, but you remain the master. Any moment you want to come back, you can come back. This is the indication that you don't need any psychiatric help. This is totally different from ordinary madness: you are going on your own. And remember, if you go on your own, you will never be neurotic because you will release all possibilities of madness. You will not go on accumulating them. Ordinarily, we go on repressing.

The SANNYASIN who was so afraid had repressed much madness in herself. Now she was afraid to do meditation. That can create trouble someday. One day, the cup can be too full and overflowing; then she will not be able to control it. Right now is the moment to allow it, to move into catharsis, to throw it out, to act it out, so you are cleaned of it and your system is cleaned of it. But then you interpret, and fear arises.

Whenever God approaches you, you will see that you are going mad. You will vibrate into a new rhythm; your whole body will be full of shivering, shaking; you will feel a new energy pouring into you, and the energy is so tremendous

that your capacity is not that much. By and by, your capacity will grow. By and by, you will be able to absorb it.

By and by, the shaking and trembling will disappear. By and by, you will become perfectly silent -- but it takes time.

The Bauls say,

That enchanting river reflects the very form of the formless one.

Sense the essence of matter.…

You see only a little bit of life and remain involved in it in drunken stupor. You are satisfied with very, very little, with a very small fragment. While you could have been a king, you are content with being a beggar. You are born to be a king, but you have become habituated to being a beggar -- and you think this is your vocation, to be a beggar. In sleep, we are dreaming something which we are not.

Today's poem says, NOTHING HAS HAPPENED

AND NOTHING WILL HAPPEN. WHAT IS THERE, IS THERE.

I BECAME A KING IN MY DREAM AND MY SUBJECTS

OCCUPIED THE ENTIRE EARTH. I SAT ON A THRONE

RULING LIKE A LION, LIVING A HAPPY LIFE. THE WORLD OBEYED ME. AS I TURNED IN MY BED ALL WAS CLEAR:

I WAS NOT A LION, BUT A LION'S UNCLE, A JACKASS,

THE VILLAGE IDIOT.…

Turn in your sleep and you will see; immediately the dream changes. That is what I call SANNYAS -- turning in your sleep. Take a turn, and you will see the dream changes.

Just a small turn from this side to that, and you can never catch hold of the same dream again -- because dreams are not real. You cannot re-continue a broken dream. Once broken, it is broken forever. It is...there is no way to catch hold of it. You cannot re-connect yourself with the dream. And in dreams we are many things.

Chuang Tzu says, "In dream, I saw myself becoming a butterfly. In the morning I was very worried because a great problem arose: if I can become a butterfly in the dream, if Chuang Tzu can become a butterfly in the dream, then the reverse is also possible. Now the butterfly may be dreaming, and dreaming that she has become a Chuang Tzu. If Chuang Tzu can become a butterfly, why can't a butterfly become a Chuang Tzu?"

So Chuang Tzu gathered together his disciples and asked, "Please tell me, who am I -- the butterfly dreaming?"

In fact, he was giving a koan to his disciples. I know that he had never dreamt. Men like Chuang Tzu don't dream. When dreaming stops, then a man becomes like Chuang Tzu.

He was giving a koan, and a very beautiful koan, a great puzzle to be solved and meditated over. Those who meditate over it will find: you are neither Chuang Tzu, nor a butterfly; both are dreams. You are neither the lion nor the lion's uncle; both are dreams.

You are the one who recognizes the dream; you are the witness. Only the witness is the real.

In the day, you are awake, doing a thousand and one things. In the night, you fall asleep and you forget all about the day: your wife, your husband, your children -

- so close to you -- even they are no more there. You forget all about the world. You enter into a totally different dimension. You forget your degrees, your riches, your bank balance; you forget everything, even your name. Another world opens. You take another name, another identity, another wife, other children, another profession. In the morning again you are back in the old dream, and this goes on. If a person lives ninety years, he will dream for thirty years. It is not a small time. One-third of the time you are dreaming, in sleep. Thirty years out of ninety years is as big as your so-called world. The world is also a dream, maybe a common dream -- we dream together; and in the night the dream is

private -- you dream alone, but it makes no difference: private or common, a dream is a dream.

But what is the definition of a dream then? How to define dream, how to make it distinct, and how to distinguish it from reality? The Eastern definition is: if in your mind there is any thought, then it is dream. If the mind is thoughtless, then whatsoever is, is real --

because the thought process creates the flux-like life. It gives an appearance to the permanent, as if it is momentary.

The Bauls say,

A man unknown to me, and I, we both live together,

but with a gap

of millions of miles between us.

That is what they call the essential man.

You are two: one is the essential man at the center, and one is the acquired man at the periphery. And these two exist far apart, and you have become too identified with the periphery. How to fall back to the center, to the essential man, the ADHAR MANUSH?

Witnessing is the way. Do whatsoever you are doing but remain a witness. Watch it, observe it, continue to remember yourself. Walking on the road, remember that there is a point inside you which is not walking, which has never walked, which cannot walk with you. It has no legs to walk. That point is your center. Through that center you will come to know the reality, the reality that Bauls sing of:

NOTHING HAS HAPPENED, AND NOTHING WILL HAPPEN.

WHAT IS THERE, IS THERE.

Once you touch your source of permanence, your eternity, you have touched the eternity of life also. Parallel to you, things happen. If you are at the center, you are capable of looking into the very center of life. If you are on the periphery, you are capable of only looking at the periphery of life. The periphery goes on changing.

Have you seen a bullock-cart moving? The wheel moves, goes on moving, but at the center of the wheel something remains permanent. On that permanent hub the wheel moves. On that unmoving hub the wheel's movement exists. Exactly like that, you have a hub -- that hub is unmoving; and you have a wheel-like personality that goes on moving.

You have travelled far, thousands of miles and thousands of lives, and the wheel knows many roads and many paths, but the hub has remained where it is. Now you can look at reality in two ways: either from the wheel -- then everything is changing every moment; or from the hub -- then nothing is changing.

"Nothing has happened and nothing will happen. What is there, is there."

How to find this hub of life? -- by becoming a witness, one finds it. Eating, eat -- but remember that there is a point inside you which has never eaten. Food goes into the body; your consciousness remains watching. Somebody insults you, anger arises; you remain a witness. The insult comes from outside, the anger arises on the periphery, and you remain at the center, watching. Yes, somebody has done something, provoked your periphery, and there is anger on the periphery, and the anger is surrounding you like a smoke cloud, but you are at the hub, watching. You are not identified with the periphery. Then the insult is outside, and the anger is also outside of you. Both are separate and far away.

Both are different from you.

When this awareness grows, dreaming stops, by and by. When this awareness grows, the wheel moves slower and slower, because there is no point. You never move, so what is the point of travelling the whole earth? You remain the same; then desires slow down.

One day it happens: the wheel is as silent, as unmoving as the hub. That is the point when enlightenment happens.

The Bauls say, Scanning the cosmos you waste your hours.

He is present

in this little vessel. In this little body

He has made His abode.

He is here

in this little vessel; in you.

He is there,

the God of Gods, the King of Kings, the Beloved.

Scanning the cosmos you waste your hours. Moving from this point to that you are unnecessarily troubling yourself, creating misery. Look, see into your being; penetrate into the hub. And the Bauls say this is possible only if you become very humble.

That's why they say, I BECAME A KING IN MY DREAM,

AND MY SUBJECTS

OCCUPIED THE ENTIRE EARTH.

The dream is always egoistic; the ego is the dream. I BECAME A KING

IN MY DREAM AND MY SUBJECTS

OCCUPIED THE ENTIRE EARTH. I SAT ON THE THRONE

RULING LIKE A LION, LIVING A HAPPY LIFE. THE WORLD OBEYED ME.

This is what ego is.…

AS I TURNED IN MY BED ALL WAS CLEAR:

I WAS NOT A LION BUT A LION'S UNCLE, A JACKASS,

THE VILLAGE IDIOT.…

When one understands, one becomes humble. Then one says, "I am just an idiot, a jackass.'' One laughs at one's own ridiculousness.

The Bauls sing, The act of finding

is not for the highest.

By being humble

you can reach life's goal.

Clouds pour down

on the hollow of the earth, but the lowest of the wells guards the water

as a blessing.

Become humble. If you start becoming humble, dreams will start disappearing because dreams are possible only with the ego. The ego is the dreamer, the creator of the dreams, the projector. That's why all the religions insist on humbleness. Jesus goes on saying to his disciples, "Be poor in spirit...blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." Nobody has ever seen the poor inheriting the earth. Nobody has ever seen the meek inheriting the earth. Then why does Jesus go on repeating it? He himself was crucified; even he was not able to inherit the earth. But he is talking about some other earth, about some other reality -- a separate reality. He is not talking about this earth. This earth is the battlefield of the egos, great competition of the egos: struggle, fight, war. But when he says, "Blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the earth," he means, they shall inherit the real. People who are in their egos may inherit kingdoms in dreams, but their kingdoms are futile because they are just their own dreams, nothing else.

The act of finding

is not for the highest.

By being humble

you can reach life's goal. Clouds pour down

on the hollow of the earth, but the lowest of the wells guards the water

as a blessing.

I have heard a story: Willy Jones dreamed that he had died. After the funeral, he found himself in a gigantic room, lavishly furnished. He rested on an overstuffed couch for a while, but after an hour or so he began to get bored. "Is there anybody here?" he shouted.

In a minute, a white robed attendant appeared. "What do you want?" he asked.

"What can I have?" Willy asked.

The attendant shrugged, "Anything you want." Willy asked for something to eat.

"What do you want to eat?" the attendant asked. "You can have anything you want." And so they brought him just what he wanted, and he went on eating and sleeping and having a fine time.

He began to feel bored after a while, and finally he shouted for the attendant and insisted,

"I want something to do!"

"I'm sorry," the attendant told him, "but that is the one thing that we can't provide."

Willy looked around him. "I am sick and tired of it," he said. "I would rather go to hell."

"Well," said the attendant, "where do you think you are?"

The hell is a place where you cannot do anything, because doing is possible only in reality. Dreaming is possible in hell, doing is not possible. If you are living in your dreaming, you are living in a hell. You may dream a thousand and one

things, but you cannot DO anything.

Watch...you want to be happy, but why can't you be happy? Suddenly, you are impotent.

You want to be happy, you dream about it, but who is preventing you? Be happy? -- then suddenly you feel impotent. You want peace, silence; you desire your dream. But who is preventing you? -- just be silent; then suddenly you feel powerless. Doing is possible only when you are in contact with reality. Dreaming is possible on your own; you can go on dreaming.

So let this be your criterion: if you really want to be happy, then find out a way to be in contact with reality, and you will be happy. Just go on dreaming and don't try to find a way to reality -- then you will be dreaming, and you will become more and more unhappy, because again and again you will find that happiness is not happening.

Doing is a function of the real; dreaming is the function of the unreal. The Bauls say,

You must be single-minded to visit the court

of my beloved.

If your mind is torn in two, you will swim in a quandary and never reach the shore.

The dreamer's mind is divided in two: in witnessing and dreaming. Then you are not one; you are split. While you are simply witnessing you are one. There is no duality in you.

You are -- that's all. So try to become one, single-minded. Whatsoever you are doing, try to become one. To say that you are dual is not true -- you are many, you are a crowd. It is not only that you are two, you are many. Bring these

fragments together. Any one thing, continuously followed, will help you to crystallize.

For example: meditators try to meditate continuously. They do a thousand and one things, other things, but one thing continues as a current, as a thread running underground. They eat, but they make a meditation out of eating. They walk, but they make a meditation out of walking. They talk, but they make a meditation out of talking. They listen, but they listen meditatively. They do many things, but they connect everything with meditation.

That becomes their one-mindedness.

Lovers, the followers of the path of love, Bauls, make love their undercurrent. They eat, but they eat with love. The walk, but they walk with love -- because the earth is holy ground. They sit under a tree; they sit with love -- because the tree is divine. They look at somebody; they look with love -- because there also is divinity. Everywhere they see their beloved, in each movement they remember their beloved. It becomes their constant remembrance.

But whether on the path of meditation or on the path of love, one thing has to be done.

Doing a thousand and one things, you have to connect them with one thing. That connection, that running thread will make you one-pointed, one-minded. It will give you integration. In that integration, dreams dissolve. It is the crowd within you which dreams, it is the split that dreams. When the split is bridged, dreams disappear -- because then you start enjoying being here and now so tremendously that who bothers to desire? Who has time to think about the tomorrow? Today is more than enough. A single moment of undivided being is so big, bigger than eternity.

Then nobody thinks about the past -- the gone is gone; and nobody thinks about the future

-- that which has not come yet, has not come yet. One simply goes deeper and deeper into the present, and that is the door of God.

The present is the door, and your single-mindedness is the key. The Beloved, Vol 1

Chapter #4

Chapter title: The only criterion is your thirst 24 June 1976 am in Buddha Hall

Archive code:

7606240

ShortTitle:

BELOV104

Audio:

Yes Video: No Length:

98

mins

The first question:

Question 1

HOW TO START THE JOURNEY? WHAT DOES IT EXACTLY MEAN TO TRANSCEND SEX?

THE JOURNEY HAS ALREADY STARTED; you are in the journey. This has to be recognized. Unconsciously, you are inthe journey: that's why it feels as if you have to start it. Recognize it, become conscious about it; the very recognition becomes the beginning. The moment you recognize that you are always moving going somewhere-knowingly, unknowingly, willingly,

unwillingly-but you are going...some great force is constantly working within you: God is evolving. He is constantly creating something within you, so it is not how to start it. The right question will be, how to recognize it. It is there, but recognition is not there.

For example, trees die, but they don't know; birds and animals die, but they don't know.

Only man knows that he has to die. That knowledge is also very cloudy, not clear -- and the same is so with life. The birds are alive, but they don't know that they are alive --

because how can you know life if you don't know death? How can you know that you are alive if you don't know that you are going to die? Both recognitions come together. They are alive, but they don't recognize that they are alive. Man recognizes, a little, that he is going to die, but that recognition remains very cloudy, hidden in deep smoke. And the same is true about life: you are alive, but you don't know exactly what being alive means.

That too is cloudy, not clear. When I say recognition, I mean becoming alert to what this life energy is, that is already on the way. To become aware of one's own being is the beginning of the journey. To come to a point where you are so absolutely alert that not even a fragment of darkness exists around you is the end of the journey. But in fact, the journey never starts and never ends. You will continue even after that, but then the journey will have a totally different meaning, a totally different quality to it -- it will be sheer delight. Right now it is near misery.

"How to start the journey?" -- become more alert about your actions, about your relationships, about your movements. Whatsoever you do -- even an ordinary thing like walking on the street -- try to become alert, try to take steps with full awareness. Buddha used to say to his disciples, "When you take a step with the right foot, remember, now this is the right foot; when you take a step with the left, remember, now this is the left.

When you breathe in, remember, "Now I am breathing in"; when you breathe out, remember, "Now I am breathing out." Not that you have to verbalize it. Not that you have to say in words "I am breathing in", but just becoming alert that now the breath is going in. I am saying it to you so I have to use words, but

when you are becoming alert you need not use words because words are like smoke. Don't use words -- just feel the breath going in and filling your lungs then being emptied. Just watch, and soon you will come to a recognition, a great recognition. that it is not simply breathing that goes in and out, it is life itself. Each breath in is life infusing its energy into you. Each breath out is a short death. With each breath, you die and you are reborn. Each breath is a crucifixion and a resurrection.

And when you watch it, you will come to know a beautiful feeling of trust. When you breathe out, there is no certainty that you wiil ever be able to breathe in again. What is the certainty? Who has guaranteed it? Who CAN guarantee that you will be able to breathe in again? But somehow, a deep trust; you know that "I will breathe again". Otherwise breathing would become impossible. If you become so afraid that, "Who knows if I let my breath out, and if I go through this small death, what is the certainty that I will be able to breathe in again? If I can't breathe, then it is better not to breathe out", then you will die immediately. If you stop breathing out, you will die. But a deep trust exists -- that trust is part of life. Nobody has taught you.

When a child starts walking for the first time, tremendous trust exists in him that he will be able to walk. Nobody has taught him. He has just seen other people walk, that's all.

But how can he come to a conclusion that "I will be able to walk"? He is so tiny. People are so big, giants compared to him, and he knows that whenever he stands he falls down -

- but still he tries. Trust is in-built. It is in your every cell of life. He tries, many times he will fall; he will try again and again and again. And one day, trust wins over and he starts walking.

If you watch your breath you will become aware of a deep layer of trust, a subtle trust in life -- no doubt, no hesitation. If you walk, and walk alert, by and by you will become aware that you are not walking, you are 'being walked by'. That's a very subtle feeling: that life is moving through you, not that you are moving. When you feel hungry, if you are aware you will see life is feeling hungry within you, not you.

Becoming more alert will make you conscious of the fact that there is only one

thing you have got that you can call yours and that is witnessing. Everything else belongs to the universe; only witnessing belongs to you. But when you become aware of witnessing, even the idea of being I is dissolved. That too does not belong to you. That was part of darkness, part of the clouds that had gathered around you. In the clear light, when the sky is open and the clouds have disappeared and the sun is bright, there is no possibility of any idea of being I. Then simply witnessing is; nothing belongs to you. That witnessing is the goal of the journey.

How to start the journey? -- start becoming more and more a witness. Whatsoever you do, do it with deep alertness; then even small things become sacred. Then cooking or cleaning become sacred; they become worship. It is not a question of what you are doing, the question is how you are doing it. You can clean the floor like a robot, a mechanical thing; you have to clean it, so you clean it. Then you miss something beautiful. Then you waste those moments in only cleaning the floor. Cleaning the floor could have been a great experience; you missed it. The floor is cleaned but something that could have happened within you has not happened. If you were aware, not only the floor but YOU

would have felt a deep cleansing. Clean the floor full of awareness, luminous with awareness. Work or sit or walk, but one thing has to be a continuous thread: make more and more moments of your life luminous with awareness. Let the candle of awareness burn in each moment, in each act. The cumulative effect is what enlightenment is. The cumulative effect, all the moments together, all small candles together, become a great source of light.

And the second part of the question is: "WHAT DOES IT EXACTLY MEAN TO

TRANSCEND SEX?"

Sex is a subtle subject, delicate, because centuries of exploitation, corruption, centuries of perverted ideas, conditioning, are associated with the word 'sex'. The word is very loaded.

It is one of the most loaded words in existence. You say 'God'; it seems empty.

You say

'sex'; it seems too loaded. A thousand and one things arise in the mind: fear, perversion, attraction, a tremendous desire, and a tremendous anti-desire also.

They all arise together.

Sex -- the very word creates confusion, a chaos. It is as if somebody has thrown a rock in a silent pool; millions of ripples arise -- just the word 'sex'! Humanity has lived under very wrong ideas.

So the first thing: why do you ask how to transcend sex? Why do you want in the first place to transcend sex? You are using a beautiful word, 'transcend', but out of a hundred, ninety-nine are the possibilities that you mean, 'How to repress sex?'

A person who has understood that sex has to be transcended is not even worried about transcending it, because transcendence comes through experience. You cannot manage it.

It is not something that you have to do. You simply pass through many experiences, and those experiences make you more and more mature.

Have you watched that at a certain age, sex becomes important? Not that you make it important. It is not something that you make happen; it happens. At the age of fourteen, somewhere near there, suddenly the energy is flooded with sex. It happens as if the flood-gates have been opened in you. Subtle sources of energy which were not yet open have become open, and your whole energy becomes sexual, colored with sex. You think sex, you sing sex, you walk sex -- everything becomes sexual. Every act is colored. This happens; you have not done anything about it. It is natural; transcendence is also natural.

If sex is lived totally, with no condemnation, with no idea of getting rid of it, then at the age of forty-two -- just as at the age of fourteen sex gets opened and the whole energy becomes sexual, at the age of forty-two or near about -- those flood-gates close again.

And that too is as natural as sex becoming alive; it starts disappearing.

Sex is transcended not by any effort on your part. If you make any effort that will be repressive, because it has nothing to do with you. It is in-built in your body, in your biology. You are born as sexual beings; nothing is wrong in it. That is the only way to be born. To be human is to be sexual. When you were conceived, your mother and your father were not praying, they were not listening to a priest's sermon. They were not in the church, they were making love. Even

to think that your mother and father were making love when you were conceived seems to be difficult. They were making love; their sexual energies were meeting and merging into each other. Then you were conceived; in a deep sexual act you were conceived. The first cell was a sex cell, and then out of that cell other cells have arisen. But each cell remains sexual, basically. Your whole body is sexual, made of sex cells. Now they are millions.

Remember it: you exist as a sexual being. Once you accept it, the conflict that has been created down through the centuries dissolves. Once you accept it deeply, with no ideas in between, when sex is thought of as simply natural, you live it. You don't ask me how to transcend eating, you don't ask me how to transcend breathing -- because no religion has taught you to transcend breathing, that's why. Otherwise, you would be asking, "How to transcend breathing?" You breathe! You are a breathing animal; you are a sexual animal also. But there is a difference. Fourteen years of your life, in the beginning, are almost non-sexual, or at the most, just rudimentary sexual play which is not really sexual -- just preparing, rehearsing, that's all. At the age of fourteen, suddenly the energy is ripe.

Watch...a child is born -- immediately, within three seconds the child has to breathe, otherwise he will die. Then breathing is to remain the whole of his life, because it has come at the first step of life. It cannot be transcended. Maybe before you die then, just three seconds before, it will stop, but not before it. Always remember: both ends of life, the beginning and end, are exactly similar, symmetrical. The child is born, he starts breathing in three seconds. When the child is old and dying, the moment he stops breathing, within three seconds he will be dead.

Sex enters at a very late stage: for fourteen years the child has lived without sex. And if the society is not too repressed and hence obsessed with sex, a child can live completely oblivious to the fact that sex, or that anything like sex, exists. The child can remain absolutely innocent. That innocence is also not possible, because people are so repressed.

When repression happens, then side by side, obsession also happens.

So priests go on repressing; and there are anti-priests, Hefners and others -- they go on creating more and more pornography. So on one side there are priests who go on repressing, and then there are others, anti-priests, who go on making

sexuality more and more glamorous. They both exist together -- aspects of the same coin. When churches disappear, only then Playboy magazines will disappear, not before it. They are partners in the business. They look enemies, but don't be deceived by that. They talk against each other, but that's how things work.

I have heard about two men who were out of business, had gone broke, so they decided for a business, a very simple business. They started journeying, touring from one town to another town. First one would enter, and in the night he would throw coal tar on people's windows and doors. After two or three days the other would come to clean. He would advise that he could clean any coal tar, or anything that had gone wrong, and he would clean the windows. In that time the other would be doing half of the business in another town. This way, they started earning much money. This is what is happening between the church and Hugh Hefners and people who are continuously creating pornography.

I have heard.…

Pretty Miss Keneen sat in the confessional. "Father," she said, "I want to confess that I let my boyfriend kiss me."

"Is that all you did?" asked the priest, very interested. "Well, no. I let him put his hand on my leg too." "And then what?"

"And then I let him pull down my panties." "And then, and then...?"

"And then me mother walked into the room." "Oh shit," sighed the priest.

It is together; they are partners in a conspiracy. Whenever you are too repressed, you start finding a perverse interest. A perverted interest is the problem, not sex. Now this priest is neurotic. Sex is not the problem, but this man is in trouble.

Sisters Margaret Alice and Francis Catherine were out walking along a side-

street.

Suddenly they were grabbed by two men, dragged into a dark alley, and raped. "Father, forgive them," said Sister Margaret Alice, "for they know not what they do."

"Shut up!" cried Sister Catherine," this one does."

This is bound to be so. So never carry a single idea against sex in your mind, otherwise you will never be able to transcend it. People who transcend sex are people who accept it very naturally. It is difficult, I know, because you are born in a society which is neurotic about sex. Either this way or that, but it is neurotic all the same. It is very difficult to get out of this neurosis, but if you are a little alert, you can get out of it. So the real thing is not how to transcend sex, but how to transcend this perverted ideology of the society: this fear of sex, this repression of sex, this obsession with sex.

Sex is beautiful. Sex in itself is a natural rhythmic phenomenon. It happens when the child is ready to be conceived, and it is good that it happens -- otherwise life would not exist. Life exists through sex; sex is its medium. If you understand life, if you love life, you will know sex is sacred, holy. Then you live it, then you delight in it; and as naturally as it has come it goes, on its own accord. By the age of forty-two, or somewhere near there, sex starts disappearing as naturally as it had come into being. But it doesn't happen that way.

You will be surprised when I say near about forty two. You know people who are seventy, eighty, and yet they have not gone beyond. You know 'dirty old people'. They are victims of the society. Because they could not be natural, it is a hangover -- because they repressed when they should have enjoyed and delighted. In those moments of delight they were not totally in it. They were not orgasmic, they were half-hearted.

So whenever you are half-hearted in anything, it lingers longer. If you are sitting at your table and eating, and if you eat only half-heartedly and your hunger remains, then you will continue to think about food the whole day. You can try fasting and you will see: you will continuously think about food. But if you have eaten well -- and when I say eaten well, I don't mean only that you have stuffed your stomach. Then it is not necessarily so that you have eaten well. You could have stuffed yourself, but eating well is an art. It is not just stuffing. It is great

art: to taste the food, to smell the food, to touch the food, to chew the food, to digest the food, and to digest it as divine. It is divine; it is God's gift.

Hindus say, ANAM BRAHMA: food is divine. So with deep respect you eat, and while eating you forget everything, because it is prayer. It is existential prayer. You are eating God, and God is going to give you nourishment. It is a gift to be accepted with deep love and gratitude. And you don't stuff the body, because stuffing the body is being anti-body.

It is the other pole. There are people who are obsessed with fasting, and there are people who are obsessed with stuffing themselves. Both are wrong because in both the ways the body loses balance.

A real lover of the body eats only to the point where body feels perfectly quiet, balanced, tranquil; where body feels to be neither leaning to the left nor to the right, but just in the middle. It is an art to understand the language of the body, to understand the language of your stomach, to understand what is needed, to give only that which is needed, and to give that in an artistic way, in an aesthetic way.

Animals eat, man eats. Then what is the difference? Man makes a great aesthetic experience out of eating. What is the point of having a beautiful dining table? What is the point of having candles burning there? What is the point of incense? What is the point of asking friends to come and participate? It is to make it an art, not just stuffing. But these are outward signs of the art; the inward signs are to understand the language of your body: to listen to it, to be sensitive to its needs. And then you eat, and then the whole day you will not remember food at all. Only when the body is hungry again will the remembrance come. Then it is natural.

With sex the same happens. If you have no anti-attitude about it, you take it as a natural, divine gift, with great gratitude. You enjoy it; with prayer you enjoy it.

Tantra says that before you make love to a woman or to a man, first pray -- because it is going to be a divine meeting of energies. God will surround you. Wherever two lovers are, there is God. Wherever two lovers' energies are meeting and mingling, there is life, alive, at its best; God surrounds you. Churches are empty; love-chambers are full of God.

If you have tasted love the way Tantra says to taste it, if you have known love the way Tao says to know it, then by the time you reach forty-two, love starts

disappearing on its own accord. And you say goodbye to it with deep gratitude, because you are fulfilled. It has been delightful, it has been a blessing; you say good-bye to it.

And forty-two is the age for meditation, the right age. Sex disappears; that overflowing energy is no more there. One becomes more tranquil. Passion has gone, compassion arises. Now there is no more fever; one is not interested in the other. With sex disappearing, the other is no more the focus. One starts returning towards one's own source -- the return journey starts.

Sex is transcended not by your effort. It happens if you have lived it totally. So my suggestion is, drop all anti-attitudes, anti-life attitudes and accept the facticity: sex is, so who are you to drop it? And who is trying to drop it? -- it is just the ego. Remember, sex creates the greatest problem for the ego.

So there are two types of people: very egoistic people are always against sex; humble people are never against sex. But who listens to humble people? In fact, humble people don't go preaching, only egoists. Why is there a conflict between sex and ego? -- because sex is something in your life where you cannot be egoistic, where the other becomes more important than you. Your woman, your man, becomes more important than you. In every other case, you remain the most important. In a love relationship the other becomes very, very important, tremendously important. You become a satellite and the other becomes the nucleus; and the same is happening for the other: you become the nucleus and he becomes a satellite. It is a reciprocal surrender. Both are surrendering to the God of love, and both become humble.

Sex is the only energy that gives you hints that there is something which you cannot control. Money you can control, politics you can control, the market you can control, knowledge you can control, science you can control, morality you can control.

Somewhere, sex brings in a totally different world: you cannot control it. And the ego is the great controller. It is happy if it can control; it is unhappy if it cannot control. So there starts a conflict between ego and sex. Remember, it is a losing battle. The ego cannot win it because ego is just superficial. Sex is very deep-rooted. Sex is your life; ego is just your mind, your head. Sex has roots all over you; ego has roots only in your ideas -- very superficial, just in the head.

So who is trying to transcend sex? -- the head is trying to transcend sex. If you are too much in the head then you want to transcend sex, because sex brings you down to the guts. It does not allow you to remain hanging in the head. Everything else you can manage from there; sex you cannot manage from there. You cannot make love with your heads. You have to come down, you have to descend from your heights, you have to come closer to earth. Sex is humiliating to the ego, so egoist people are against, always against sex. They go on finding ways and means to transcend it. They can never transcend it. They can, at the most, become perverted. Their whole effort from the very beginning is doomed to failure.

I have heard.…

A boss was interviewing applicants to replace his private secretary who was resigning because of expectant motherhood. The boss's right-hand man sat with him as he looked the applicants over. The first girl was a beautiful buxom blond. She turned out to be intelligent, and had excellent secretarial skills. The second was a dark-haired beauty who was even more intelligent and proficient than the first. The third one was cross-eyed, had buck teeth, and weighed one hundred and ninety pounds. After interviewing all three candidates, the boss informed his associate that he was hiring the third applicant.

"But why?" asked the astonished employee.

"Well," boomed the boss, "in the first place, she looks very intelligent to me! In the second place, it is none of your damned business, and in the third place, she is my wife's sister."

So you may pretend that you have won over sex, but an undercurrent You may

rationalize, you may find reasons, you may pretend, you may create a very hard shell around you, but deep down the real reason, the reality, wi]l stand untouched: "She is my wife's sister" -- that is the real reason. "She looks intelligent"; that is just a rationalization.

"And it is none of your damned business"; that too is getting annoyed and irritated --

because the person is afraid that the other is poking his nose and may find the real cause.

But the real cause will explode; you cannot hide it, it is not possible.

So you can try to control sex, but an undercurrent of sexuality will run and it will show itself in many ways. Out of all your rationalizations, it will again and again raise its head.

I will not suggest that you make any effort to transcend it. What I suggest is just the contrary: forget about transcending it. Move into it as deeply as you can. While the energy is there, move as deeply as you can, love as deeply as you can, and make an art of it. It is not just to be done. That is the whole meaning of Tantra: making an art of lovemaking. There are subtle nuances which only people who enter with a great aesthetic sense will be able to know. Otherwise, you can make love for your whole life and still remain unsatisfied -- because you don't know that satisfaction is something very aesthetic. It is like a subtle music arising in your soul. If through sex you fall into harmony, if through love you become non-tense and relaxed, if love is not just throwing energy because you don't know what to do with it, if it is not just a relief but a relaxation, if you relax into your woman and your woman relaxes into you, if for a few seconds, for a few moments or a few hours you forget who you are and you are completely lost in oblivion, you will come out of it purer, more innocent, more virgin. And you will have a different type of being -- at ease, centered, rooted.

If this happens, one day suddenly you will see that the flood has gone and it has left you very, very rich. You will not be sorry that it has gone. You will be thankful, because now richer worlds open. When sex leaves you, the doors of meditation open. When sex leaves you, then you are not trying to lose yourself in the other. You become capable of losing yourself in yourself.

Now another world of orgasm, inner orgasm, of being with oneself, arises. But that arises only through being with the other; one grows, matures through the other. Then a moment comes when you can be alone, tremendously happy. There is no need for any other. The need has disappeared but you have learned much through it -- you have learned much about yourself. The other became the mirror, and you have not broken the mirror. You have learned so much about yourself. Now there is no need to look into the mirror. You can close your eyes and you can see your face there. But that face you would not be able to see if there had been no mirror from the very beginning.

Let your woman be your mirror; let your man be your mirror. Look into her eyes

and see your face; move into her to know yourself. Then one day the mirror will not be needed.

But you will not be against the mirror; you will be so grateful to it -- how can you be against it? You will be so thankful -- how can you be against it? Then, transcendence.

Transcendence is not repression. Transcendence is a natural outgrowing -- you grow above, you go beyond -- just as a seed breaks and a sprout starts rising above the ground.

When sex disappears, the seed disappears. In sex, you were able to give birth to somebody else, a child. When sex disappears, the whole energy starts giving birth to yourself. This is what Hindus have called DWIJA, the twice-born. One birth has been given to you by your parents, the other birth is waiting. It has to be given to you by yourself. You have to father and mother yourself. Then your whole energy is turning in --

it becomes an inner circle.

Right now it will be difficult for you to make an inner circle. It will be easier to connect it with another pole -- a woman or a man -- and then the circle becomes complete. Then you can enjoy the blessings of the circle. But by and by you will be able to make the inner circle, because inside you also you are man and woman, woman and man. Nobody is just man and nobody is just woman -- because you come from man and woman's communion. Both have participated; your mother has given something to you, you father has given something to you. Fifty-fifty, they have contributed to you. Both are there.

There is a possibility that both can meet inside you. Again your father and mother can love inside you. Then your reality will be born. Once they met when your body was born; now if they can meet inside you, your soul will be born. That's what transcendence of sex is: it is a higher sex.

Let me tell you this: when you transcend sex, you reach to a higher sex. Ordinary sex is gross, higher sex is not gross at all. Ordinary sex is outward- moving, higher sex is inward-moving. In ordinary sex, two bodies meet, and the meeting happens on the outside. In higher sex, your own inner energies meet. It is not physical, it is spiritual -- it is Tantra. Tantra is transcendence. If you don't understand this and you go on fighting with sex.…

The question has been asked by Prageeta. I know she is passing through some critical moments in her mind. She would like to be independent, but it is too early. She would like not to be bothered by anybody else, but it is too early, and it is too egoistic. Right now transcendence is not possible, repression is possible. And if you repress now, in your old age you will repent -- because then things become very messed up. Each thing has its own right time. Each thing has to be done in its moment. While young, don't be afraid of love. If you are afraid of love while young, in old age you will become obsessed; and then it will be difficult to move deeply in love, and the mind will be obsessed.

This is my understanding: that people, if they have lived rightly, lovingly, naturally, then by the forty-second year they start transcending sex. If they have not lived naturally and they have been fighting with sex, then forty two becomes their most dangerous time --

because by the time they are forty-two their energies are declining. When you are young you can repress something because you are very energetic. Look at the irony of the fact: a young man can repress sexuality very easily because he has energy to repress it. He can just put it down and sit upon it. When the energies are going, declining, then sex will assert itself and you will not be able to control it.

I have heard an anecdote: Stein, aged sixty-five, visited the office of his son, Dr. Stein, and asked for something that would increase his sexual potential. The

M.D. gave his father a shot, and then refused to accept a fee. Nevertheless, Stein insisted on giving him ten dollars. A week later Stein was back for another injection, and this time handed his son twenty dollars.

"But Pop, shots are only ten dollars."

"Take it!" said Stein, "the extra ten is from Momma."

That will continue...so before you become a poppa or a momma, please be finished with it. Don't wait for old age, because then things go ugly. Then everything goes out of season.

The second question: Question 2

IT IS SAID THAT UNLESS ONE IS IN CONTACT WITH ONE WHO IS

AWAKENED, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO COME OUT OF ONE'S IGNORANCE OR

DEEP SLEEP. HOW TO FIND OUT THAT ONE IS AWAKENED?

It is a difficult question. Not that it is difficult to find out -- the question is difficult because if you don't yet have the urge to find out, then there is no way to help you to find.

If you have the urge, that very urge helps. There is no other help needed. Your very urge becomes your path.

How do you find if you are thirsty, in a desert; how will you find water, how will you find an oasis? You will run hither and thither; you will do all that you can do because thirst will be killing. And your thirst will decide whether you have come across real water or not, because your thirst will be quenched whenever you come across real water. If it is a mirage and from far away it looked like water and you ran to it, when you come face to face with it you will know it is not water.

But the only criterion is your thirst.

How do you know that something is food? -- if you are hungry and it satisfies you, you know. It is very difficult for a man who has no appetite to find out what food is.

Psychologists have come across a very significant fact: that if small children are left to themselves, they always choose the right thing to eat. You put everything around, you leave it on the dining table, don't force anything, and don't say what to eat and what not to eat. It has been a tremendous discovery that children eat only the right thing in the right time. If a child is suffering from something and a certain thing is needed which will be helpful for it, he will choose to eat it. By the time that suffering disappears he will stop eating that. We confuse them. We tell them to eat this and don't eat that. Then by and by, their natural instinct functions no more.

Have you seen animals eating? They are not dieticians, and they never go to any dietician, but a buffalo or a cow just chooses the right grass for itself,

instinctively. They will leave other grasses; they will eat only the grass that is right for them. You cannot deceive. Somehow their inner nature, their appetite, decides.

The problem arises: how to find whether someone is enlightened, awakened, or not? If you have an appetite there will be no problem. If you don't have an appetite then I say the problem is very difficult, almost impossible to solve. If you have appetite and hunger, then something around an enlightened person will start fulfilling your desire. Something will start falling in harmony and in line. Your chaos will start subsiding. You will see a silence arising -- a new being is born. That is the only way. But if you don't have a real thirst, or if you have been confused by the society, and if you cling to outer symptoms.…

For example, a JAINA thinks an enlightened person should be naked. Now if you come across a person who is not naked, even Buddha or Jesus, the JAINA will not be satisfied.

He will say, "He is not an enlightened person because an enlightened person is always naked." This is foolish. He has no appetite. He has learned only through scriptures, he has learned only through tradition. Now if you have been a Christian, brought up as a Christian, and you know only that a Christ is one who is crucified, then what will you do if you come across Krishna playing on his flute? You will say, "This man looks like a clown. How can he be an enlightened person? An enlightened person is always on the cross suffering for others, trying to take everybody's sin on his own head, and this man is singing and dancing." No, with the mind that is too conditioned by the cross, a flute will not suit. It will be simply impossible to believe that a flute can also be a symbol of enlightenment. A cross, of course, is.

And the same happens with the follower of Krishna. He knows the flute, singing, dancing. He cannot believe for what Jesus was on the cross. If you ask him he will say,

"He must have done some very wrong deeds in his past life. Otherwise, how is he crucified? Crucifixion happens only to great sinners. He must have done something great, a very great sin. That is why he is suffering -- because no Hindu AVATAR has ever suffered like this. This is not possible."

Hindus have the theory of KARMA; whatsoever happens is your karma: Krishna

is playing on the flute because he has beautiful KARMAS which sing in him, and Jesus must have been a sinner. It is not a question that others have forced him on the cross.

Nobody can force anybody except your KARMAS. It is not that Judas has betrayed him; it is his own past. Nobody can betray anybody. If your KARMAS are good, nobody can make you suffer.

Now this is problematic. These people listen only to the scriptures, the tradition, the society they were born into -- accidental things. They don't have real thirst.

If you have real thirst, you will find that where Krishna is playing on his flute, you will be satisfied. And if you have real thirst, you will find the same satisfaction near Jesus also. Maybe he is on the cross and Krishna is playing on his flute, but you will find that both are food. Jesus says so many times to his disciples, "Eat me; make me your food.

Drink my blood and eat my body." He is food; that's what he is saying.

The questioner asked, "It is said that unless one is in contact with one who is awakened, it is impossible to come out of one's ignorance and deep sleep. How to find out that one is awakened?"

I have heard.…

A man walked into the police station to report that his wife was missing. The sergeant began writing up the case.

"How tall is she?"

"About so high, give or take a little." "How much does she weigh?" "About average, I guess."

"Color of eyes?"

"I would say they were neutral. I'm not too sure."

"Color of hair?"

"I don't know, it changes." "What was she wearing?" "I suppose a hat and coat."

"Was she carrying anything?" "Yes, she had a dog on a leash." "What kind of dog?"

"A pedigreed brindle-and-white German shepherd, weighing forty pounds, six hands high, licence No. 401278976 C.D.7, wearing a brown collar, slightly deaf in the right ear, and answers to the name Rover."

When it was a question of the dog, then the man came alive. When it was a question of his wife: how tall is she? -- about so high, give or take a little; and how much does she weigh? -- about average, I guess; and color of eyes? -- I would say they were neutral. I'm not too sure.

Whenever it is your desire, you know. If it is not your desire, then it is difficult. So the person who has asked the question may be greedy, but he has no desire yet.

And I know the man, and he has been to Sivananda ashram, to the Aurobindo ashram, to Shri Ramana Maharshi's ashram, to Satya Sai Baba, and to this and that; he has been everywhere. Now I am his last victim, and he cannot find anything anywhere that is satisfying. He has not asked the basic question: are you hungry? Just by going to this restaurant and that is not going to help; appetite is needed. The man is greedy but he has no appetite. The man is very learned but is not very aware. He knows the scriptures, he can repeat them parrot-like, but he has no understanding. He goes on asking such questions again and again. This is for the first time that I am answering, because when the appetite is not there it is futile to talk about. It is better that he should go and live in the world and forget all about religion. Let the appetite come, this life or next. There is no hurry; God can wait. But let it come. It should be authentic. His appetite is just false. He has listened to talks about food, or he has listened to

advertisements on the television about food, and he has become greedy. But he never looks inside to see that he has no appetite, so nothing happens.

Once he came to me and he said, "I have been to Shri Aurobindo ashram, I have been to Ramana ashram, to Sivananda, to Rishikesh, to Arunachal, to here and there, and nothing happens. Now I am here."

I said, "Before you say about me also that nothing happens, let me say to you that nothing will happen -- because I don't see any desire in you. I don't see any flicker, any passionate urge."

He has money so he can go anywhere. He is fed-up with his life, bored with his life, so he goes on finding, trying to find at least some thrill, some kick somewhere. And he is a very egoistic man, so he cannot try to find non-spiritual kicks. He tries to find spiritual kicks and nothing happens.

Watch... the basic thing to be remembered is whether you have an appetite. If you don't have, why bother? It is not for you. Let these people talk about God; it is not for you. You don't go to a musical concert if you don't have an ear for music, and you don't get bothered about it. You don't go to listen to some musician, you don't go to see a dancer, you don't go to visit an art gallery to look at paintings if you don't have any sense, artistic sense; you don't go there.

But this is one of the problems about religion: people who don't have any sense of religiousness, they also become greedy about religion. And now he is getting old, and death is approaching. Now he wants to achieve something which he can carry beyond death. He is simply afraid. He has not lived his life -- and unless you have lived your life, you cannot move into religion.

Only one who lives his life truly, one day comes to the point where a new desire for life beyond arises. See the difference between the two. You can be afraid of death; then your desire will be false. If you have lived life and loved life, and loved it so much that you would now like to know the unknown life also -- it is not out of fear of death, it is out of love for life -- then, you will recognize immediately whenever you come across an enlightened person. It is impossible to miss. You will recognize immediately. This recognition needs no knowledge. It will simply happen.

How do you recognize when a beautiful woman passes by? Have you any criterion? But if you have desire, suddenly you recognize that the woman is

beautiful. If somebody asks you and tries to force you to confess to what exactly beauty is, you will be in trouble.

You will not be able to define. Nobody has yet been able to define. Centuries and centuries of philosophers have been working on it, trying to define what beauty is, and ultimately they decide that it is indefinable. But still you feel beauty. If you talk to a small child whose desire has not yet ripened, and you say, "This woman is beautiful," he will look at you surprised, shrug his shoulders, and go on his way -- "Gone mad. All women are alike." For a small child, it makes no difference. He cannot see why one woman should be thought beautiful and another not.

In fact, he knows only one woman who is beautiful: she is his mother -- and that too, for some other reasons, not for beauty. She is his nourishment, his life, so she is beautiful.

But one day when his desire arises and his love ripens, he will start looking with different eyes. Then all women are not alike. Then certainly there are women who are beautiful; then certainly there are men who are tremendously appealing and magnetic. But one day again, when one becomes very alert, understanding, again all men and women are alike.

Then again beauty or ugliness don't matter. Then again duality is transcended.

When you come across an enlightened man, if you don't have desire, nothing will happen.

You will just shrug your shoulders -- "Why are people so attracted to this man?" You can't see anything; there is nothing. He is as ordinary as you, or maybe even more ordinary than you. You can't see why people are mad. But if the desire is there, if the search has started, if you have lived this life rightly and deeply, then you have earned that desire for another life. Then immediately, when you come across such a one, you will start feeling.

It is said, a beautiful myth about Mahavir, that people who had desire would become aware of Mahavir from a very faraway distance, twenty-four miles. The area of twenty four miles around Mahavir was so filled with his being that people who would come into that area, if they had some desire, would be pulled by Mahavir, against themselves. They might have been going somewhere else, but they would not be able to go. They would be pulled. They would have to

come; they would find this man in some unknown way. And he would be sitting under some tree or hiding in a cave, and they would find him. And there were people who would pass just in front of him and would be thinking that he was mad -- not only mad, but like a criminal, standing there naked. Either he was a criminal or he was a fool, and they would beat him, they would throw him out of their town, they would force him to leave their place. And both were people: one sort of person throws him away, beats him; the other sort of person is pulled. It depends on you.

I have heard one anecdote:

"Well my man, what is on your mind?" the worldly matron asked the marriage broker.

"I have picked out a wife for your son," he announced triumphantly. "She is the Princess Sessusi Wilnanee, the richest young woman in the world," said the marriage broker.

"The richest woman in the world?" snapped the mother. "Why have I never heard of her?"

"But she is a wonderful girl," insisted the marriage broker. "She is gorgeous, a terrific skin-diver and skier, and golfs in the low seventies. She is royalty all the way."

"It does not make sense to me, but all right, I will give you my consent. I will let my son marry the princess."

"Well," sighed the marriage broker, "that's half the battle. "

Half the battle about religion starts with you. If you have the desire, that is half the battle

-- and the other half is very easy. Then you have the eyes. But if you don't have an appetite, then it is almost impossible to recognize: you are blind, you cannot see. If a blind man comes and asks, "When I come across light, how am I to recognize it?" what to say to him? How can he recognize? -- he will need eyes. You always find that which you REALLY desire; it never happens otherwise. In fact, let me tell you: whatsoever you have found is that which you had desired passionately -- maybe it is hell, but you desired it -- and whatsoever you have

not found, you have not desired passionately.

Every time Mulla Nasrudin came home drunk, the wife would bawl the daylights out of him. One day a kindly neighbor gave her some advice: "You should not do that. You should not call attention to his drinking. Be lovable, be kind, and you will find he is a new man. Tonight when he comes home, give him a great big kiss."

That night Mulla staggered in, but the wife remembered the advice and puckered her lips:

"Darling, give me a kiss."

He puckered his lips, staggered to her, and kissed her on the forehead. He tried again, missed, and kissed her on the ear. The third time he missed again, landing his lips on her cheek.

"You bum," she said, pointing to her mouth,''if this were a saloon you would find it."

You always find that which you really want to find. Whatsoever you desire happens. If it is not happening, look inside; somewhere you must be missing in your desire.

There is a beautiful story in Hindu annals about a great saint, Valmiki. He was a robber, a murderer. He has written the story of Rama, one of the most beautiful epics in the world.

He became converted. His conversion happened in such a way that it is almost unbelievable. He was a great sinner, but he went to a great teacher and asked him how he could purify himself of his sins. "Chant Rama a thousand times a day," advised the great teacher.

The sinner went to a solitary mountain and chanted and chanted, but in spite of his good will, he made a mistake and chanted Mara instead of Rama.

It happens that if you chant Rama Rama Rama fast, you can get messed up; it can become Mara Mara Mara. That's how it happened: he was chanting so fast, and he had never heard this name. It was almost an unknown language to him. He tried hard to remember, but somehow he forgot, and for years he chanted

Mara, Mara, Mara.

After years of chanting he went back to the great teacher who immediately realized that the man was now pure -- not only pure, he was enlightened. "Did you sing the sacred name?" the teacher asked.

"Yes, great one," the ex-sinner answered, "for ten years every single day, thousands of times I have chanted Mara, Mara, Mara."

The teacher burst into a laughter that shook the mountains. As his laughter, like a pebble in the lake, vibrated farther and wider into the cosmos, the great teacher took the ex-sinner into his arms. "Your will to good, to do good, has saved you," he said, "even though you chanted Mara, Mara, Mara, millions of times: the name of the devil."

Rama is the name of God; Mara is the name of the devil -- but if the desire is there, the thirst is there, then everything is okay. Even the name of the devil will do. Just his intention, just his tremendous passion for God, to purify himself, for ten years, day in and day out, thousands of times he was continuously chanting Mara, Mara, Mara. Even a wrong technique will help if the desire is intense, and even a right technique will not be of much help if the desire is impotent.

Remember it: if you can't recognize enlightened people when you come across them, don't throw the responsibility on them. Watch inside -- are you ready yet? It has happened that people who were not enlightened have sometimes helped people to become enlightened. If the desire of the seeker is tremendous, then even an unenlightened Master is enough.

It is reported about one great mystic, Milarepa:

When he went to his Master in Tibet, he was so humble, so pure, so authentic, that other disciples became jealous of him. It was certain that he would be the successor. And of course there was politics, so they tried to kill him.

One day they said to him, "If you really believe in the Master, can you jump from the hill? If you really believe, if the trust is there, then nothing -- no harm is going to happen." And Milarepa jumped without even hesitating for a single moment. They rushed down because it was almost a three-thousand-foot deep valley. They went down to find his scattered bones, but he was sitting there in a lotus posture, very happy, tremendously happy.

He opened his eyes and said, "You are right; trust saves."

They thought it must be some coincidence, so when the house was on fire one day, they told him, "If you love your Master and you trust, you can go in." He rushed in to save the woman and the child who were left inside. He came, and the fire was too great and they were hoping that he would die, but he was not burned at all. And he became more and more radiant, because the trust.…

One day they were going somewhere, they were to cross a river, and they told him, "You need not go in the boat. You have such great trust; you can walk on the river" -- and he walked.

That was the first time the Master saw him. He was not aware that he had been told to jump into the valley and told to go into the burning house; he was not aware. But that time he was there on the bank and he saw him walking, and he said, "What are you doing? It is impossible!"

And Milarepa said, "Not impossible at all! I am doing it by your power, sir."

Now the Master thought, "If my name and my power can do this to this ignorant, stupid man.… I have never tried it myself"...so he tried. He drowned. Nothing has been heard about him after that.

Even an unenlightened Master, with deep trust, can revolutionize your life. And the reverse is also true: even an enlightened Master may not be of any help. It depends on you, it depends totally on you.

The Beloved, Vol 1

Chapter #5

Chapter title: Kali and Krishna are one 25 June 1976 am in Buddha Hall Archive

code: 7606250

ShortTitle:

BELOV105

Audio:

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76

mins

COME IF YOU WISH TO MEET THE NOVEL MAN.

HE HAS ABANDONED

HIS WORLDLY POSSESSIONS FOR THE BEGGAR'S SACK

THAT HANGS FROM HIS SHOULDER. HE SPEAKS OF THE ETERNAL MOTHER (KALI, THE GODDESS OF TIME)

EVEN AS HE ENTERS THE GANGES. SIMPLE WORDS CAN OVERCOME IGNORANCE AND DISBELIEF:

KALI AND KRISHNA ARE ONE. THE WORDS MAY DIFFER --

THE MEANING IS PRECISELY THE SAME. HE WHO HAS BROKEN

THE BARRIER OF WORDS, HAS CONQUERED LIMITS:

ALLAH OR JESUS, MOSES OR KALI, THE RICH OR THE POOR,

SAGE OR FOOL,

ALL ARE ONE AND THE SAME TO HIM. LOST IN HIS OWN THOUGHTS,

HE SEEMS INSANE TO OTHERS. HE OPENS HIS ARMS

TO WELCOME THE WORLD, CALLING ALL TO THE FERRY BOAT TIED TO THE COAST OF LIFE.

COME IF YOU WISH TO MEET THE NOVEL MAN

THE WHOLE BAUL SEARCH IS FOR THE SEARCH FOR THE NOVEL MAN, THE

NEW MAN. Who is this new man?

You can live your life in two ways. Either you can become a man of being, or you can become a man of having. Either you can have yourself or you can have many worldly things instead. Either you can possess many things and be possessed by them, or you can possess yourself and be not possessed by anything. The man of having has a totally different direction. That's what Bauls call 'the worldly man'. He thinks in terms of money, in terms of commodities, in

terms of bank balances; he thinks in terms of things. And he thinks that the more he has, the more he is. That is one of the most fundamental fallacies.

You can have the whole world and you can remain a beggar. You can have all that the world can give and yet remain empty.

The great Alexander died. He is the very symbol of the worldly man. He wanted to conquer the whole world, and he had done it, almost. But before he died he told his generals, "Then let both my hands hang out of the coffin." They said, "We have never heard. It is not traditionally done. And why do you want to do such an absurd thing?"

Alexander said,''It is not absurd. It has a certain relevance with my life. I want people to see that I am going with empty hands. So let both my hands hang out of the coffin, so everybody can see that even Alexander is going with empty hands. I came with empty hands, I am going with empty hands, and the whole life has been a wastage."

He must have been very perceptive, because many more die still clinging, still not aware that their hands are empty, still not aware that their hearts are empty, still not aware that they have wasted their whole lives, that it has been just a nightmare.

The man of having continues to accumulate more and more. What he accumulates is not the point; his emphasis is on accumulation. His soul exists in his accumulations. What he accumulates is not important. He may accumulate money, he may accumulate knowledge; he may accumulate ego, he may accumulate humility; he may accumulate things of this world, or he may start accumulating virtues, things of the other world, but he accumulates. He exists through things. He feels good when he has much, when he feels his hands are full, at least apparently full. He feels good, he feels he is achieving, he is being successful. This is 'the old man' -- in the terminology of the Bauls, this is the old man. It has always existed. This is the rotten man, this is the diseased man. It is a sort of illness, this very idea of having too many things, wasting your time and energy and not knowing at all who you are. The Bauls call that direction noble in which you start thinking in terms of being, in terms of a certain inner solidity, of a certain inner consciousness, of a certain rootedness, centering, of a certain realization of who you are.

Have you watched it, that sometimes you come across a person who may not have anything visible, but still you feel a tremendous energy surrounding him? His impact is almost magnetic, mesmeric. He looks into your eyes and you cannot look into his eyes --

a great power. It is not the power of things; he may not have any. He may be just a beggar on the road. It is not the power that comes through politics. He may not be a prime minister or a president because that power is bogus. That power belongs to the chair, not to the man. It belongs to the chair and not to the chairman. Once he is out of the chair, he is as powerless as you.

Look at Richard Nixon: a tremendous power was there when he was the president. Now, he is just simply citizen Nixon. All power has disappeared. That power was not his; it was a reflected glory. And you can see it, it is not very difficult. You know men who have much power -- power of things, power of big palaces, power of politics, money, prestige, heritage but you can see that they are poor people. They don't have any personal power. They don't have any magnetism in their souls. If you put their things aside, t]hey are more ordinary than ordinary. All extraordinariness disappears. Kings and queens, once they are not kings and queens, are simply ordinary human beings -- almost empty, nothing in them.

But you sometimes come across a person whose power is not derived from the outside, whose power comes from some inner spring, some inner source. He is a reservoir of power. Wherever he sits, the place becomes sacred; wherever he sits, the place becomes a throne; wherever he moves, he moves like a king amongst men. But his kingdom is of the within. That's what Jesus goes on talking about: the kingdom of God is within you. He knows his within. He has come to face his own within-ness. His eyes are turned within.

He is no longer dependent on the outside world. His glory is not a reflected glory, it is his own, authentic. He can be thrown into imprisonment, but he will remain a king there.

It is said about Diogenes, one of the contemporaries of Alexander the Great, that even Alexander the Great became jealous of Diogenes. He was just a naked fakir: he had nothing. He had renounced everything; he was searching his own inner world. It is said about him that when he renounced the world, he used to carry a small begging bowl. But then one day he saw a dog drinking water from

a river. He threw that begging-bowl. He said, "If the dog can do without it, then am I worse than the dog?" Then everything was thrown away. He remained naked.

Many stories, rumors, were reaching Alexander that this man had something in him.

Finally, fascinated, Alexander went to see him, and he could see that the man had something that he had not. He was just lying down -- it was a winter morning, it was cool and the sun was rising. He was lying down by the side of a river, bathing himself in the early sun, naked. Alexander said, "Can I do something for you, sir? I have much, and whatsoever you desire, I will be happy to do it for you."

Diogenes laughed and said, "The only thing that you can do is to please stand by the side.

Don't prevent the sun from coming to me. Nothing else do I need. And remember it, because you seem to be dangerous: never stand between the sun and anybody else. Don't disturb anybody else's life. That's enough; nothing else do I want from you -- because all that I want is within me."

And Alexander could feel that the man was true, literally true -- the solidity, the crystallized being, the 'vibe' of one who has attained, the surround, the climate of the person who is filled with inner light, inner realization, inner riches. He could see it. He bowed down and he said, "If next time I am to come into the world, I would ask God not to make me Alexander, but Diogenes."

Diogenes laughed and said, "There is no need to wait that long. You can become a Diogenes just now! For what are you struggling and conquering people, and moving continuously and warring? For what?"

Said Alexander, "First I want to conquer Middle Asia, then India, then the Far East..."

And Diogenes went on asking, "Then what? Then what?" Finally, when Alexander said he had conquered the whole world, he said he would then like to rest.

And Diogenes said, "You look to me almost stupid, because I am resting without

conquering the world. You can rest by my side. See, the bank is so big; we can share it.

And nobody comes here. You can rest to your heart's desire. Who is preventing you? And I don't see the point, that one needs to conquer the world first just to rest in the end. You can rest any moment."

In that moment Alexander must have felt his poverty. He said, "You are right. I am mad, but now it is difficult for me to come back. I have to conquer, only then can I come."

And when he was leaving, Diogenes said, "Remember, nobody can come back unless one is aware. And if you are aware right this moment, the journey stops. If you are not aware, you will never come back." And Alexander never could go back. He died before he reached back home.

The man of being is called 'the novel man', the new man. Why call him new? -- because in a sense he is as old as humanity; but he is so rare that whenever he comes he is always new -- rarely a Buddha, rarely a Jesus, a Krishna -- very rarely. In this rotten mass of humanity, very rarely does somebody arise with an authentic being and declare that his kingdom is of the within, It happens so rarely that Bauls are right to call him 'the novel man', the new man.

So this is the distinction to be understood: the man who is after having more and more will go on losing his being -- because the only way to have more is to pay with being.

Then you have to cut your being and throw it away. Everything has to be paid for, nothing is free. Even futile things have to be paid for.

One day the man of having is almost gone. He has much but he is no more. He has bargained with his soul. He has exchanged: he has dollars, rupees, pounds, but no soul in him. Just a negative emptiness exists. He is the beggar, but he may look to you like a king. Don't be deceived by appearances. Those who look like kings are not kings. Look deeply, watch deeply. They may have achieved much which can be counted, which can be shown and exhibited, but they have lost something of the invisible, something of their being.

Have you not observed it? -- whenever you purchase something you have to pay. If you want to compete with people you will have to pay. You will become less

and less loving.

A man who is a competitor cannot be loving simultaneously; it is impossible. A man who is trying to compete, a man who is ambitious, has to be non-loving. Then he is paying with love.

Politicians cannot be loving, they know only war. That's natural; they exist through conflict. So they may talk about peace, but their whole talk is. just nonsense, just gibberish. They talk about peace and they prepare for war. They never prepare for peace.

They prepare for war and they never talk about war, they talk about peace. And when the time comes, they even war and fight for peace. They say it has to be done to save peace.

But basically, the mind of the competitor is violent. One who is ambitious is violent and cannot be loving.

The hippie slogan -- Make love not war -- is very, very meaningful. If the world were more loving, war would disappear automatically, because who would be ready to fight?

For what?

No country wants its people to be very loving. No country wants its people to be deep in love -- because if they are deep in love they become incapable of war. Their sex, their love, has to be repressed. When love and sex are repressed, people are ready to jump out of their skins. They are so boiling; they are always ready to fight. That's why a poor country can fight better than a rich country. That is the story of Vietnam.

The American soldier knows a little of love -- he has the facility, he is not so repressed.

That is the problem with America now: America is not so repressed. It has tasted of love.

But when you fight with a small country like Vietnam you cannot win, because their soldiers are very repressed. It has always happened in the past: a richer country is always in danger of being invaded by a poorer country.

It has happened in India many times. For two, three thousand years, India had been continuously conquered by barbarians who were not rich, who were not affluent, who were not cultured at all. But India was defeated continuously. People were loving -- they had forgotten how to fight, they were not interested in fighting. There was no need inside for them to be continuously at war. Whenever a civilization reaches to the point where it becomes affluent, it is in danger of being invaded by barbarians. This is unfortunate, but this is so.

So every country and every politician tries not to allow love too much. It has to be given only in small quantities. If love is free, and people are very loving and they exist in an ocean of love, war is not possible. Without war, politics is not possible; without politics, presidents and premiers are not possible. They will simply disappear.

The hippie is the greatest danger signal to politicians yet. In the whole of history, for the first time a new sort of generation is arising. If this generation goes on flowering, spreading, politics is going to be just out of date. The days of presidents and premiers are gone! And the whole thing depends on love, because love is a quality of being.

Competition is for things, ambition is for things, ambition is for the kingdom without.

The inner kingdom knows no competition. You can simply delight in it this very moment.

It needs no future, it needs no achievement on your part. Already, as you are, you are ready to enjoy and delight and celebrate. Nothing is missing. Everything is absolutely available; as it should be, it is. You just have to drop your ambitious mind, and the celebration starts.

Can you see this? If you can see this you will be able to understand 'the novel man'.

The Bauls say, "The man who has understood the futility of things becomes religious." If you are running after having, you will become a manipulator: constantly in conflict with others, constantly trying to crush others, by any way and any means trying to reach to the top. You will lose all spontaneity.

The man of being, 'the novel man', is spontaneous. He lives in the moment, he

lives herenow. He knows no other way to live, he is unpredictable. You can predict a man of competition. You can predict, because the mind of the competitor runs like a mathematical formula. It has a logical syllogism in it. But the mind of one who is moving inwards, the man of being, is almost dissolving. The mind of the inward traveller is dissolving; you cannot predict him. He has no mathematical formula about him -- he simply lives in the moment, he responds to the moment.

Now let me tell you one thing: the man of having is very clear. The man of having has a destination, very clear, cut. If he wants to become the president of the United States or the premier of India, he has a clear-cut destination.

What about the man of being? -- he has a direction, but he has no destination. He has a very subtle direction, but no destination. He has a quality: he has a light inside, and wherever he moves that light falls on his path. He has eyes to see, a direction, but no destination. He is enjoying and he is moving, but his movement is not prefabricated. He has no plan. He is like a river, not like a railway train. Direction is there, but not like a railway train, not running in a fixed pattern. Zig- zag his life will be. Sometimes he will be moving towards the north and sometimes he will be moving towards the south. He cannot be very consistent because consistency is part of the logical mind, it is not part of the being. He will be found many times to be inconsistent, even contradictory; but those contradictions are just on the surface. If you look deep you will find a subtle direction.

Even in contradictions the direction is there.

But to know the man of being you need very deep eyes, penetrating eyes. To know the man of having, nothing is needed -- just a little mind will do, a mediocre mind will do --

because the man of having is also of the category of mediocre minds. But when you move into the inner world, all surfaces are lost and depth is infinite.

The Bauls call this spontaneous man, SAHAJA MANUSH. The novel man, he's the new man. He is the man as everyone should be. And unless you become the novel man, you will miss -- you will miss treasures, blessings, benedictions which were showering all around you, but you were blind and you could not see it.

I have heard.…

Mulla Nasrudin was in love with a woman.

"Look darling," he said to her, "here is a diamond engagement ring for you." "Oh, it is beautiful!" she claimed "But honey, the diamond has a flaw in it."

"You should not notice that," said the Mulla. "Why, you are in love and you know what they say -- 'love is blind'."

"Blind, yes," she said, "but not stone blind."

Even in love you continue to remain the man of the outside. Even in love you continue to think in terms of money, prestige, power. Even in love you don't allow the unpredictable to assert, you don't allow your innermost being to have its say. Even then you remain a manipulator.

Our minds are almost always interested in the very ordinary. It has to be so because mind is outward-oriented. The very orientation is towards the without. That's how Jesus was not understood; he was a Baul,'the novel man'. If he had been born in Bengal, the land of the Bauls, he would have been understood better. They would not have crucified him. For centuries they have known mad people of God. They would have understood his language.

Jews could not understand his language. His language was not of the mind, his language was not of money, of the outside. He talked about the kingdom and they asked, "Where is your kingdom? About what kingdom are you talking?" -- because they thought he was talking about the kingdom which is outside. He said, "I am the king," and they were worried. And they suspected that he was trying to sabotage the society, or that he was trying to conquer the society and become the king. They thought that he was a revolutionary.

He was a rebellious man, not a revolutionary at all. He was not planning for a revolution; he was not a politician. But the Jews were afraid: they thought that he was trying to conquer this world. And the Romans were afraid. They were afraid because it was thought that he was the king of men -- the king is born. When the king of the Romans heard that a child was going to be born who would become the king of men, he became so afraid that he ordered a massacre: to kill all the children below the age of two years.

When the three wise men of the East reached the capital in search of the child Jesus, the king heard of it. He invited them to the palace, and he asked them for what they had come. They said they were looking for the king who had been born in his country: "You should be happy that a king is born in your country, and the greatest king will walk on your earth." But the king was very afraid because he thought, "How can there exist two kings in one country? Then I will be dethroned." But he played diplomatic. He said to the wise men, "I am very happy, so if you succeed in finding him please come and inform me." But he was planning to kill the boy, and the three wise men understood it because they could see in his eyes. He was a cunning man.

Politicians are cunning.

After they had met Jesus and worshipped Jesus, they had to find another route because they were afraid that the king would be waiting, and they didn't want to become a part of this catastrophe. They didn't want to become part in killing and murdering Jesus. So they had to travel very far. They had to do a long journey because the shortcut was the one they had come by. And they were very old men, but still they took a very long route through deserts and mountains to reach back to their country. They didn't want to go back by the same route because it would pass through the capital, and the king would be waiting.

Jesus was crucified because of his terminology, but he was talking about the inner kingdom. He was not talking about the kingdom of the outside, and he was not talking about the treasures that you know, but the treasures of the unknown.

As far as the outside world is concerned, all treasures are just false. I have heard a beautiful anecdote.…

A man walking along a city street fell through an open sewer hole and broke his leg. He engaged a famous attorney, brought suit against the city for ten thousand dollars, and won the case. The city appealed the decision right on up to the Supreme Court, but again the lawyer won the decision. After the claim was settled, the lawyer sent for his client and handed him a dollar bill.

"What is this?" inquired the man, looking at the dollar.

"That's your damages after deducting my fee, the cost of appeals and other expenses,"

replied the attorney.

Out of ten thousand dollars, only one dollar!

The man looked at the dollar again, turned it over and scanned it carefully. "What is the matter with this dollar?" he said. "Is it counterfeit?"

But all money outside is counterfeit: all dollars are counterfeit, all rupees are counterfeit.

The real money does not exist that way; the real money does not exist outside. This conversion from the counterfeit to the real is what Bauls call the birth of the novel man.

COME IF YOU WISH TO MEET THE NOVEL MAN.

HE HAS ABANDONED

HIS WORLDLY POSSESSIONS FOR THE BEGGAR'S SACK

THAT HANGS FROM HIS SHOULDERS.

He has abandoned worldly possessions to become a beggar. Why abandon worldly possessions? The worldly possessions can be abandoned in two ways. Again you have to understand: the man who has lived his whole life in collecting possessions can abandon them out of greed. Then the novel man is not born. He can abandon them in order to get some advance booking in heaven, paradise. He can abandon his worldly possessions seeing that death will take them away. If that is the case, then the old man remains old, even if he abandons all.

In India it happens many times, more often than not: people abandon their possessions, they renounce, but if you watch them you will see they have not abandoned their greed.

In fact, they have renounced BECAUSE of the greed.

I know one man who renounced almost a million rupees many years ago, but he still goes on talking about it. Thirty years have passed, and whenever I meet him, he will again and again bring the subject up that he has renounced a million rupees. And you can see the light that starts shining in his eyes -- a million rupees!

The last time I saw him I asked him, "If you have really renounced then why talk about it? What is the point? As far as I can see, you have not renounced at all. The novel man is not born. You are as much attached to those one million rupees, or maybe even more than you were before. Now the very idea that you have renounced a million rupees has become your bank balance. Now you are living on it.'' I told him that if he went to God, the first thing he would relate to Him would be his million rupees: "Do you know or not that I have renounced one million rupees?" And he would be expecting something special for himself. This man is the same; the novel man is not born. It has been a miscarriage.

You can renounce, but if you enjoy ego through it, if you feel that you are a great man of renunciation, a MAHATMA, a great soul because you have renounced, you are not an ordinary man, you are not worldly, then your renunciation is not true.

When is the renunciation true? -- when you understand the futility. Not out of greed, not because you have to earn something in the other world, but just seeing the futility of it all, you renounce. This renunciation has no effort in it, just a deep insight. Every morning you clean your house and throw the rubbish on the rubbish heap, but you don't go declaring and advertising to the whole town that again you have renounced much rubbish, again this morning you have done a great deed of renunciation. No, you know that it is rubbish -- finished. What is there to tell about it?

The novel man is born when you have a deep insight that worldly things have no value; they are all counterfeit, unreal diamonds, and unreal real diamonds are also so. Real dollars are also as unreal as unreal dollars. When the whole outside world has no value for you, that is a real renunciation. Then you are not attached at all.

And Bauls say, My plaited hair

is still intact and dry.

Though I stand in the stream

and splash and swim about the river, I cannot be touched by the water.

Keep your soles dry as you coast the sea.

Let attachments share the same home, but live unattached.

Groping for the river, Oh my senseless heart!

In vain do you wander from place to place.

The ocean of your heart bears a priceless gem.

What good is life

if you fail to contact the spontaneous man

who dwells in your own body? Your destiny is shamed.

Do not give up gold for a piece of glass, nor leave heaven

for a visit to hell.

What good is there

in rushing round the world?

The eternal hero Iives in your own little room.

Who is there

for you to call your own? My heart,

for whom do you shed your futile tears?

Brothers and friends, let them be; the world is there.

Your own dear life is hardly your own.

You have come alone, you will go alone.…

The whole idea of renunciation is of a vision, of a great understanding, of looking into things in their reality. You need not escape from the world. You can remain in the world and become absolutely unattached. But if you feel, "Why carry the burden unnecessarily?" you can leave the world also. But remember, the world has no value this way or that. If it has no value, its renunciation also cannot have any value. If it is valuable, only then can its renunciation be valuable. But then there is no point in renouncing it; it is simply valueless. It is like a dream. When you awake, everything disappears.

You have come alone, you will go alone, and between these two exists the dream. To understand the dream, to become alert to it, is the birth of the novel man. "Come if you wish to meet the novel man," says the Baul. He invites the whole world: Come to see me; the novel man is born. "His worldly possessions he has abandoned for the beggar's sack that hangs from his shoulder."

HE SPEAKS OF THE ETERNAL MOTHER (KALI, THE GODDESS OF TIME)

EVEN AS HE ENTERS THE GANGES.

The novel man lives in eternity, the ordinary man lives in time.

This word 'Kali' has to be understood. Kali is the mother of time. In Sanskrit time is called KALA, and the mother of KALA is Kali, mother of time. But the mother of time is beyond time. Time is born out of it, but the womb out of which time is born is eternity.

Eternity is the mother of time. Time is just a reflection of the eternal. The Bauls worship Kali, the mother of time; they worship eternity. They seek and search eternity -- not that which changes but that which remains always and always, that which is beyond all flux, absolutely permanent, unmoving. They seek that hub of the existence. Symbolically it is called Kali.

This word 'KALA' is very meaningful: one meaning is time, another meaning is death.

The same word means time and death. It is beautiful, because time is death. The moment you enter into time, you are ready to die. With birth, death has entered into you. When the child is born, he has entered into the realm of death. The birthday is also the deathday.

Now only one thing is certain: that he will have to die. Everything else is just uncertain; it may happen, it may not happen. But the moment a child is born, the moment the child has taken his first breath, one thing is absolutely certain -- that he will die.

Entering into life is entering into death; entering into time is entering into death. Time is death, hence the Sanskrit word KALA is very beautiful. It means both

time and death.

And Kali means beyond time and beyond death. Eternity is deathlessness. How to find eternity? What is the way? One has to understand the process of time.

The process of time is horizontal: one moment passes, then comes another moment; that passes, then another moment -- a procession of moments, a queue of moments -- one passes, then another comes; another passes, then another comes. It is horizontal.

Eternity is vertical: you go deep into the moment, not moving in a line, but into depth.

You drown yourself in the moment. If you stand on the bank, then the river goes on passing. Ordinarily we are standing on the bank of time. The river goes on moving; one moment, another moment, and another, and the sequence of moments continues. This is how we ordinarily live, this is how we live in time.

Then there is another way -- take a jump into the river, drown in the moment, the herenow. Then suddenly, time stops. Then you are moving in an altogether different dimension; the vertical dimension is eternity. That is the meaning of Jesus' cross.

The cross is a time symbol. It is made of two lines: one vertical, one horizontal. On the horizontal line are the hands of Christ, and on the vertical line is his whole being. Hands are symbolic of action: doing, having. Having is in time; being is in eternity. So whatsoever you DO is in time, whatsoever you ARE is in eternity; whatsoever you achieve is in time, whatsoever is your nature is in eternity. Change from having, doing, towards being. This moment the turning can happen. This very moment, if you forget past and future, then time stops. Then nothing moves, then everything is absolutely silent and you start drowning in the here-now. That 'now' is eternity.

Kali is a symbol of now, of the eternal, of the absolutely real. To live moment to moment and not to bother about past and future is the way towards the novel man.

SIMPLE WORDS CAN OVERCOME IGNORANCE AND DISBELIEF:

KALI AND KRISHNA ARE ONE. THE WORDS MAY DIFFER --

THE MEANING IS PRECISELY THE SAME. HE WHO HAS BROKEN

THE BARRIER OF WORDS HAS CONQUERED LIMITS:

ALLAH OR JESUS, MOSES OR KALI, THE RICH OR THE POOR,

SAGE OR FOOL,

ALL ARE ONE AND THE SAME TO HIM.

Very significant sentences: "Simple words can overcome ignorance and disbelief." If you can listen, then very simple words are enough. If you are capable of being receptive, just simple words uttered by one who knows are enough. But if you don't understand, then things become very complex. Your non-understanding or non-receptivity makes things complex. It creates confusion, it puzzles you, it creates a chaos in your being. If you can listen silently without your mind interfering, then simple words can overcome ignorance and disbelief.

The Bauls say,

Even if you forbid, dear friend, I am helpless.

My songs contain my prayers.

Some flowers pray

through the glamour of colors,

and others, being dark, with fragrance.

As the VEENA prays with its vibrating strings, do I with my songs.

Bauls don't know much philosophy; they are not philosophers. They are simple people of the earth. They are very simple people who can sing and dance. Their words are simple.

If you love, if you trust, their small gestures can reveal much.

And it is always a question of love and trust. It is not a question of great metaphysical skill, because the more metaphysics you know, the more you will be puzzled. And the more you are acquainted with philosophy, the less is the possibility to come to understanding. The more you are full of knowledge, the less will be your understanding.

You will be too clouded, and too many thoughts will not allow you vision, clarity. Your mirror will be full of dust.

SIMPLE WORDS CAN OVERCOME IGNORANCE AND DISBELIEF; KALI AND KRISHNA ARE ONE.

Bauls say, "We don't make any distinction between a Hindu and a Mohammedan and a Christian...Kali and Krishna are one." They say, "We don't even make any distinction between male and female... Kali and Krishna are one, male and female are one." That is one of their great insights: that if you really dance and sing in deep trust and love, you will come to feel that man and woman are not two things, are not two beings. Inside you, a new alchemy starts, and your inside man melts with the inside woman...and Kali and Krishna become one.

They sing,

As the man and the woman in me unite in love,

the brilliance of beauty, balanced on the bi-petalled lotus blooms in me,

dazzles my eyes.

The rays outshine the moon, and the jewels

glowing on the hoods of snakes.

My skin and bone are turned to gold when the inner man and woman meet, when Krishna and Kali become one. My skin and bone are tumed to gold, I am the reservoir of love,

alive as the waves.

A single drop of water has grown into a sea, unnavigable.…

The whole problem of man is how to meet with the woman, and the whole problem of the woman is how to meet man.

In one ancient myth prevalent in many countries of the Far East, they say God created man and woman together, not as two beings; they were joined in one

body. But then it became difficult. There were conflicts and problems. The woman wanted to go to the East and the man was not willing. Or, the man was ready to do something and the woman wanted to rest. But they were together, their bodies were joined. So they complained and God cut their bodies separate. Since then, every man is searching the woman, his woman, and every woman is searching her man. Now it is such a big crowd that it is very difficult to find who is your woman, who is your man. So much misery, and one goes on stumbling and groping in the dark. It is almost impossible to find your woman. How will you find her?

The myth says that if you can find, everything fits; you again become one. But it is very difficult to find.

But there is a way to find your woman, because the woman is not outside. Outside, at the most, are parallel similarities.

When you fall in love with a woman, what really happens? This is what happens: somehow the outside woman fulfills your inner woman's image, fits with that image --

maybe not a hundred percent, but enough to fall in love. When you fall in love with a man, what happens? Something inside you clicks and says, "Yes, this is the man, the right man." It is not a logical conclusion, it is not a syllogism. It is not that you find out all the pros and cons about the man and then you decide, or you compare the man with all the other men in the world, then you decide. No, something happens out of the blue.

Suddenly you see that this is the man for whom you were waiting, for whom you were waiting for lives.

What happens? You carry an image of man, you carry an image of woman inside. You are both, and you go on looking outside. Nobody is going to fit one hundred percent, because the woman that you find outside has her own images about you; you have your own images. It is very difficult to fit with each other. So all marriages are always on the rocks, and people, by and by, learn how to carry on peacefully. They learn not to 'rock the boat'. But nothing more can happen outside.

Bauls say, "Deep inside you both exist -- Krishna and Kali. Let them meet there." That is the whole Tantra method: how to allow your inner man to meet

with the inner woman.

And when this becomes a circle, when this meeting, when this inner copulation happens, a great orgasm, a great explosive orgasm begins which knows a beginning but knows no end. Then you live an orgasmic life.

A single drop of water has grown into a sea, unnavigable.…

Then you are no more finite, you become infinite. SIMPLE WORDS CAN OVERCOME IGNORANCE AND DISBELIEF:

KALI AND KRISHNA ARE ONE. THE WORDS MAY DIFFER --

THE MEANING IS PRECISELY THE SAME. HE WHO HAS BROKEN

THE BARRIER OF WORDS, HAS CONQUERED LIMITS...

Break the barrier of words. Now, I am talking to you; I am using words. You can listen to my words -- then you have not listened to me. You can listen in such a way that the words are no more a barrier, but become vehicles. They no more create problems, but you listen exactly between the words, between two words, in the gaps. You listen to my silence; then words and their barriers are broken. Then limits are conquered.

ALLAH OR JESUS, MOSES OR KALI, THE RICH OR THE POOR,

SAGE OR FOOL,

ALL ARE ONE AND THE SAME TO HIM.

This is the novel man. Now he knows no duality. He does not make any distinction between the sage and the fool. He makes no distinction between the man and the woman.

All dualities have come to be united, all dualities have dissolved. Once you drop the words, dualities drop.

Language creates duality, language exists through duality. It cannot indicate the non-dual.

If I say 'day', immediately I create night. If I say 'life', immediately I create death. If I say

'good', immediately bad is created. If I say 'no', just by the side of the no, yes is existing.

Language can exist only through the opposite. That's why we see life as always divided --

God and devil. Drop language, drop this linguistic pattern. Once language is no more on your mind and you look directly into reality, day IS night. Suddenly you will start laughing at why you missed it so long! Day, every day turns into night; night turns into day every morning again, and you have been missing. Life is always turning into death, death always turns again into life, and you have been missing. They are not two, they are one whole. This is the non-dual, ADWAITA. This is the most essential religion.

LOST IN HIS OWN THOUGHTS, HE SEEMS INSANE TO OTHERS...

... because his consciousness is no longer divided by language. He is no longer looking at the world through words. He looks insane: he is absorbed in his own being, he is lost in his own vision. And the vision is so vast, as if a thousand and one suns have risen together. It is so dazzling.

LOST IN HIS OWN THOUGHTS, HE SEEMS INSANE TO OTHERS. HE OPENS HIS ARMS

TO WELCOME THE WORLD, CALLING ALL TO THE FERRY BOAT TIED TO THE COAST OF LIFE.

And he goes on calling, "Come to me, come, if you wish to meet the novel man," and the boat is ready. And his boat is not against life, it is tied to the coast of the life. He is not negative.

And he says, "Come, and I can take you to the other shore. Come, and I can make you new. Come, and I can take you into eternity."

The Beloved, Vol 1

Chapter #6

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