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‌CHAPTER 2

2 October 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[To a new sannyasin:]

You have come home! This was the search for your whole life – now the moment to fulfil it has come. And it is very rare, because many strive but very few reach. The desire to know, the desire to know the mystery of life is every heart’s desire, but very few fortunate people find a way to it, a door to it. And the moment bas come... you are on the verge of something unimaginable. All that is needed is to relax.

The only secret of attaining to the ultimate truth is non-doing. That’s what Buddha did sitting under the Bodhi tree when he became enlightened. He figured out that doing is not going to help. He did all that is humanly possible, and then one day it dawned upon him that if a confused mind is trying to do something, it will remain part of confusion. How can a confused mind do something that will lead you beyond confusion? It is impossible; because the doer is confused, the doing will remain confused. Seeing this he saw the greatest truth – that doing is our undoing. That evening he relaxed. Relaxation means he came to understand the secret of non-doing.

Nothing has to be done, because we are confused and whatsoever we do will create more confusion. It will drive us more and more neurotic. All that is needed is to sit silently and not to do a thing at all. Because the mind is confused it is better not to do anything at all, and in non-doing the mind disappears, because the mind is a doer. It exists through doings: do this, do that. It goes on giving new desires, new plans, new programmes. It is very inventive... it always keeps you engaged in the future. All doing is in the service of the future and the future never comes; tomorrow cannot come, by its very nature. Hence it becomes a vicious circle chasing shadows, and life becomes a wasteland because there is never a moment of fulfillment.

Non-doing means that you have taken away the very ground from underneath the mind; you have cut the very root. Non-doing is in the present – doing is future-oriented. Non-doing simply means you

are here, you are now, and you are not moving at all. There is no moving in the mind, no motivation. In this state of no motivation, non-doing, suddenly all that one was seeking and searching for forever happens. It is a happening.

Anand means bliss, nishkam means no desire – blissful desirelessness. Desire is the disease. Desire is the very foundation of the mind. It is desire that keeps the mind alive, sustained, nourished. And whenever one desire leaves, the mind immediately substitutes it with another desire.

Even the so-called spiritual people are not without desire, hence they are not spiritual; they are only so-called spiritual. They have left the worldly desires but now they have substituted them with other-worldly desires. They are no more seeking and searching for money, true, but now they are seeking and searching for god. The search remains, the seeking remains, the desiring remains; and desiring is the problem, not the object of desire. The very process of desire is the problem, not the object. The object is irrelevant. What you desire is not the point. You desire, that is the point.

That’s the way the mind plays tricks. You say ‘I am finished with the world. I don’t want to desire anything of the world. I have seen all the games and I have played with all the toys. They are all just toys and the time is just wasted – I am finished, I am fed up.’ The mind says ‘Perfectly good. So now desire god.’ You are right – the mind agrees with you: now desire god. And it looks so logical: ‘Drop the world, move to a monastery, pray, desire, knock on his door, and hope that some day in this life or in some future life’ Because in this life it doesn’t seem to be possible, hence the

mind has proposed other lives. It says ‘Don’t be worried. This is not the end – you will be reborn so that you can continue. So even if you desire the impossible, don’t be worried about time – time will be available; if not in this life then in another life.’ The mind creates the future, the mind creates this future too – future lives – so you can be at ease and you can go on desiring. But changing the object of the desire changes nothing. Hence the worldly and the other-worldly are absolutely alike, aspects of the same coin – apparently opposite to each other but deep down joined together. The really religious person is one who has seen through desire, who does not drop the object of desire but drops desiring.

That is the meaning of nishkam: dropping desire, becoming a no-desire, a no-ambition – spiritual or secularno ambition. Hence no future, hence no mind, hence there is nothing to do. One simply is,

and in that is-ness, god happens. God cannot be desired but can be attained, and is attained only when there is no desire hindering the path. k is desire that is keeping everybody distant from god. One goes on running and running and never stops to see who one is.

Your name is going to be your key. You have to use this key to unlock the door of existence. See desire, watch desire, witness desire. The moment you have understood the whole trap of desire, in that very understanding desire disappears. I am not saying to fight desire, because if you do you can fight only with another desire. Fight presupposes another desire – maybe the desire to become desireless. Again the mind has trapped you in the same pattern. Now the mind says ‘Good. So desire desirelessness, because in desirelessness god happens. So now this is the goal and we have to work for it, we have to fight desire.’ The action starts and the doing has come back and you are no more relaxed; again you are occupied.

Existential psychology has a very fundamental rule, and the rule is: to know the what is to know the how. If you know the what of a problem, in that very knowing you will know the how of it –

how to get out of it. If one watches desire intensely, consciously, without any enmity, judgement, condemnation, without taking any side for or against, if one simply witnesses desire, then the what of desire is known, and in that very knowing the how happens. Then you never ask how to drop desire; that question is irrelevant. Knowing the what is knowing the how.

So watch the desiring mind and start enjoying the moment; never wait for any future to come, never postpone – celebrate now! This is the deepest, the greatest teaching of aU the ages. This is tao.

Prem means love, pragyana means wisdom. The mind lives in knowledge; the heart lives in wisdom. They are as far away from each other as the earth and the sky. Knowledge can deceive one as wisdom, then the person remains ignorant – thinks that he knows, and he knows not. And that is real ignorance: when you think you know and you don’t know. The moment you start knowing that you don’t know, the first step towards wisdom has been taken. Then one understands the futility of the mind, one understands the impotence of the mind.

The mind cannot supply wisdom. The mind is a parrot, because it is a bio-computer: it only repeats what it has been fed. It is never original – it can’t be original; it is not in its power, it is not its function. It is just a mechanism to store. It is not creative. It is just a memory, a storage system... good, if one understands its use, but very dangerous if one starts thinking that the mind can give you original insights. It is not possible. The mind can only give you whatsoever is given to it from the outside. It is in the service of the outside. It is a byproduct of the society. Hence there are so many minds, because there are so many societies and so many ways of conditioning.

There is something like a Hindu mind, something like a Christian mind and something like a Communist mind, because in Soviet Russia a different kind of information is fed; in India another kind of information is fed. You can feed the child’s mind according to your prejudices, opinions, ideologies. The child becomes conditioned and later on he goes on repeating those same things and thinks that he knows. One can remain befooled for one’s whole life. One knows only when the the heart starts functioning.

By ‘heart’ I mean when you start functioning at your centre, not in the head – the head is the periphery – when you start functioning deep down in your belly.…

Just the other day I was reading about a professor of philosophy who went to Japan to study Zen under a master. And the first thing that the master did was: he poked the professor’s belly button with his staff. The professor was a little bit taken aback – what was he doing? And he said ‘What are you doing?’ The master said ‘You have to start thinking from there now. Remember.’ And he poked again just to remind him. He said ‘I will go on poking, because I can see that you are a professor of philosophy. I can see that you are in your head, and I have to bring you down to your belly.’

The heart is the centre of your being. That’s why, whenever you are in love, you feel a total change happening. Because love comes from the heart, and in love for the first time you are connected with your heart. Only in love is there a new kind of knowing – I call it wisdom. Love-knowing, love-intelligence is wisdom... when you know not by intellect, when you know not by thinking but by feeling.

One can know a flower by feeling; one can know a flower by studying books in the library. One may not have ever come across a lotus flower and still can know many things about the lotus – from

the library, pictures, films, from people who have known, and there are a thousand and one ways – but this will remain peripheral. He has never experienced for himself. No book can convey the beauty of the lotus; no picture, no photograph, no painting can convey the aliveness of the lotus. No description, howsoever poetic, can convey the fragrance of a lotus. That has to be experienced.…

Love is a totally different way of experiencing life, the world, existence, people, and it is through love that the heart starts becoming more and more nourished, strengthened, becomes more and more crystallised, and through which wisdom arises in you. Jesus talks from that wisdom, hence his statements have tremendous beauty. Buddha speaks from that centre, hence his statements have some unique authority.

The Bible says that Jesus speaks as one who has authority. Now this word ‘authority’ can be used in two ways. One is when we say that the president of the country has the authority to do this, to say that. That is a power trip. The authority has been bestowed upon him by the country – it is not his. The moment he is no more a president there will be no more authority. For example, Nixon – when he was the president he had the authority; now, no authority. It was borrowed, reflected – he was just functioning like a mirror. The authority belonged to the country, it was reflected by him. But one can be deceived by it. Such people become authoritarian.

Jesus is not an authoritarian – he does not function like an authoritarian; he does not function like an authoritarian but he speaks with authority. The meaning is totally different. He speaks as one who knows. The authority is not bestowed upon him by others but it has arisen out of his own experience, his own existential experience. Because he has known, he speaks with authority. I speak with authority but I am not an authoritarian.

The authoritarian speaks on behalf of others, of those who have bestowed the authority on him. The policeman comes – he is authoritarian; the state has given him authority. He can do certain things to you, he can force you to do certain things. He is authoritarian: if you don’t listen to him, he can punish you, he can throw you into prison. He is functioning on behalf of the state, he simply represents the state. The authoritarian represents somebody else and the man who speaks with authority simply represents himself, his own experience. These are two different meanings, totally different from each other. The authoritarian is an ugly person and the man with authority has splendour, beauty... he is blessed.

The moment you reach to your centre, your heart, your life starts functioning with a new trust. You are no more in doubt – hence the authority. You are no more wavering, you are centered – hence the authority. You are no more divided – you are certain, and when there is certainty, there is strength, power... not given by anybody else but arising in you, blooming in you.

That is the meaning of your name: let love become your wisdom, let love become the door of knowing. Know existence through the heart. Use your mind as a storage system but let the heart be the master. The mind is good as a slave, as a servant; it should not be the boss. The moment it is the boss everything is upside-down, and life becomes confused, a mess.…

[A sannyasin says: I seem to have lost my heart. I don’t know if it was the heart or just feelings.]

In fact you have become aware that you have lived without a heart. You have not lost it – you never had it! One cannot lose it; if you have it you cannot lose it! But when for the first time one becomes

aware that one has no heart, it feels as if one has lost it because one has always believed that one had it. Only your belief was there. Everybody believes that he has a heart.If everybody has a

heart the world will be too overflowing with love. It is NOT. It is really overflowing with hatred.

Everybody is overflowing with poison, pouring poison into everybody else: parents into children, husbands into wives, wives into husbands, friends into friends, one country into another country, one religion into another religion. Everybody is doing one work: pouring poison into others and others are pouring into you. A great exchange of poisons goes on and everybody believes that he has a heart.

Nobody has one. It is very rare that a person has a heart, and when a person has, he cannot be a Hindu, cannot be a Christian, cannot be a Communist, cannot be an Indian, cannot be a German, cannot be an Italian.… He cannot even be a man or a woman, white or black. All distinctions are lost – one merges into love energy, one becomes love energy, which knows no bounds. And then life is a benediction, it is grace.

This is a good sign that you have become aware that you have lost your heart. You have only lost the belief that you had a heart. This is a good sign. If you start feeling the absence of the heart, you will start searching for it; that’s how the journey begins. And this place is a love place. Anybody who hasn’t a heart will become immediately aware of it, because of the contrast. This is a love temple – all I teach is love and nothing else, and everybody here is growing into love.

The journey is arduous and painful, but sweet too, and each new experience of love brings a new plenitude, a new peak, a new fulfillment, and with it, new challenges. And the adventure continues.…

So when you come here, you can become aware, and the mind will say ‘What is happening? – you have lost your heart.’ It is not so. You never had it. Now you are painfully aware of it and you are feeling very sad. But no need to feel sad. Feel happy, because this is how one can learn to move towards the heart again. The heart is there – you just have to pour your energy into it. You have never watered it, you have never taken any care of it. Nobody is taught to take care of the heart. From the kindergarten to the university we are taught how to take care of the head. For almost twenty-five years – that is almost one-third of your life – you are trained to care about the head. And then you have to plunge into the world – into marriage, into money, into the market – and the occupations are so many, when will you find time to nourish your heart, to help it grow? Hence people live in the head and die in the head, and the greatest possibility of their being blissful remains unopened. The seed of the heart remains a seed – it never becomes a tree.

But it is good that you have become aware, and I can see – you are feeling sad, your whole being is full of sadness. But no need to feel sad. This is a good beginning – now start searching for the heart. It is there, because one cannot be without the heart. The heart is there, you just have to create a bridge between you and the heart. And that’s what my function here is – to help you to be bridged to the heart. But good that one is aware that one is in. Now he can go to the physician, now he can ask for medicines, exercises; now he can do something! The unfortunate person is one who is ill and is not aware of illness. He will never go to the physician – he is going to die.

Just do a few groups – things will start flowing.…

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