Spiritual Insights ( part 3)

Spiritual Insights

                      (A Collection of Spiritual Teachings)

                                                  part  3

1. What is meditation? Is it a technique that can be practiced? Is it an effort that you have to do? Is it something which the mind can achieve? It is not. All that the mind can do cannot be meditation - it is something beyond the mind, the mind is absolutely helpless there.

2. The mind cannot penetrate meditation; where mind ends, meditation begins. This has to be remembered, because in our life, whatsoever we do, we do through the mind; whatsoever we achieve, we achieve through the mind. And then, when we turn inwards, we again start thinking in terms of techniques, methods, doings, because the whole of life's experience shows us that everything can be done by the mind. Yes - except meditation, everything can be done by the mind. Everything is done by the mind except meditation. Because meditation is not an achievement - it is already the case, it is your nature. It has not to be achieved; it has not only to be recognized, it has only to be remembered. It is there waiting for you - just a turning in, and it is available. You have been carrying it always and always.

3. Meditation is your intrinsic nature - it is you, it is your being, it has nothing to do with your doings. You cannot have it and you cannot have it. It cannot be possessed, it is not a thing. It is you. It is your being.

4. Meditation Is Non-doing:-When people come to me and they ask, "How to meditate?" I tell them, "There is no need to ask how to meditate, just ask how to remain unoccupied. Meditation happens spontaneously. Just ask how to remain unoccupied, that's all. That's the whole trick of meditation - how to remain unoccupied. Then you cannot do anything. The meditation will flower.

5. When you are not doing anything the energy moves towards the center, it settles down towards the center. When you are doing something the energy moves out. Doing is a way of moving out. Non-doing is a way of moving in. Occupation is an escape. You can read the Bible; you can make it an occupation. There is no difference between religious occupation and secular occupation: all occupations are occupations, and they help you to cling outside your being. They are excuses to remain outside.

6. Man is ignorant and blind, and he wants to remain ignorant and blind, because to come inwards looks like entering a chaos. And it is so; inside you have created a chaos. You have to encounter it and go through it. Courage is needed - courage to be oneself, and courage to move inwards. I have not come across a greater courage than that - the courage to be meditative.

But people who are engaged outside - with worldly things or no worldly things, but occupied all the same, they think ....and they have created a rumor around it, they have their own philosophers. They say that if you are introvert you are somehow morbid, something is wrong with you. And they are in the majority. If you meditate, if you sit silently, they will joke about you: "What are you doing? - gazing at your navel? What are you doing? - opening the third eye? Where are you going? Are you morbid?...because what is there to do inside? There is nothing inside."

Inside doesn't exist for the majority of people, only the outside exists. And just the opposite is the case - only inside is real; outside is nothing but a dream. But they call introverts morbid, they call meditators morbid. In the West they think that the East is little morbid. What is the point of sitting alone and looking inwards? What are you going to get there? There is nothing.

And this is the understanding of many people. What are going to get inside? There is darkness, thoughts floating here and there. What will you do? What will come out of it? If Hume had waited a little longer - and that is difficult for such people - if he had been a little more patient, by and by thought disappear, emotions subside. But if it had happened to him he would have said, "That is even worse, because emptiness comes. At least first there were thoughts, something to be occupied with, to look at, to think about. Now even thoughts have disappeared; only emptiness....What to do with emptiness? It is absolutely useless."

But if he had waited a little more, then darkness also disappears. It is just like when you come from the hot sun and you enter your house: everything looks dark because your eyes need a little attunement. They are fixed on the hot sun outside; comparatively, your house looks dark. You cannot see, you feel as if it is night. But you wait, you sit, you rest in a chair, and after few seconds the eyes get attuned. Now it is not dark, a little more light........You rest for an hour, and everything is light, there is no darkness at all.

7.In haste nobody can come to know himself. It is a very very deep awaiting. Infinite patience is needed. By and by darkness disappears. There comes a light with no source There is no flame in it, no lamp is burning, no sun is there. A light, just like it is morning: the night has disappeared, and the sun has not risen.... Or in the evening - the twilight, when the sun has set and night has not yet descended. That's why Hindus call their prayer time sandhya. Sandhya means twilight, light without any source.

8.When you move inwards you will come to the light without any source. In that light, for the first time you start understanding yourself, who you are, because you are that light. You are that twilight, that sandhya, that pure clarity, that perception, where the observer and the observed disappear, and only the light remains.

9. Meditation Is Silence :-Mind means words: self means silence. Mind is nothing but all the words that you have accumulated; silence is that which has always been with you, it is not an accumulation. That is the meaning of self. It is your intrinsic quality. On the background of silence you go on accumulating words, and the words in total are known as the mind. Silence is meditation. It is a question of changing the gestalt, shifting the attention from words into silence - which is always there.

10.. “Life cannot be lived through no, and those who try to live life through no simply go on missing life. One cannot make an abode out of no, because no is just empty. No is like darkness. Darkness has no real existence; it is simply the absence of light. That’s why you cannot do anything with darkness directly. You cannot push it out of the room, you cannot throw it into the neighbor's house; you cannot bring more darkness into your house. Nothing can be done directly with darkness, because it is not. If you want to do something with the darkness, turn the light off; if you don’t want darkness, put the light on. But all that you have to do has to be done with light.

“In exactly the same way, yes is light, no is darkness. If you really want to do anything in your life, you have to learn the way of yes. And yes is tremendously beautiful; just to say it is so relaxing. Let it become your very lifestyle. Say yes to the trees and the birds and people, and you will be surprised: life becomes a blessing if you are there to say yes to it. Life becomes a great adventure

11. Let this be the definition of happiness: To be with the whole is to be happy. To be with the whole is to be healthy. To be with the whole is to be holy. To be separate is to be unhealthy. To be separate is to be neurotic. To be separate is to fall from grace.

The fall of man is not because he has disobeyed God. The fall is because he thinks HE IS. The fall is because man thinks that he is a separate entity. This is foolish: you could not have existed if your parents were not there, and your parents’ parents, and their parents’ parents back... go to Adam and Eve. If Adam and Eve had not existed you would not be here. So you are connected with the whole past.

12. When you exist separately from existence you exist in misery, because you become disconnected; and nobody else is responsible for it – it is you. When you are happy, watch what happens. Whenever you are happy, you don’t have the ego. In those moments of happiness, joy, bliss, suddenly the ego disappears – you are more melting into the whole; boundaries are less clear, boundaries are more blurred. When the boundaries are totally blurred as if the river has disappeared into the ocean when all boundaries are blurred and you are one, throbbing with the whole, there is happiness.

13. Drop your intellect, and you will not lose anything. Carry your intellect with yourself and you will lose all. Drop your intellect, and you will lose only your imprisonment, your falsity. Drop your intellect. And suddenly your consciousness will soar high, will be on its wings... and you can go to the very south, to the open seas where you belong. Intellect is the burden on man.

14. You are never born and you can never die, but how to know it? Would you like to wait until death comes? That is very risky, because if you live your whole life unconsciously, there is not much possibility that you may become conscious when you die. It is not possible if your whole life has been a continuity of unconscious living, you will die unconsciously, you will not be able to know. You will die in a coma, you will not be able to observe and see what is happening. You were not even able to see life, how can you see death? Death is more subtle.

15. If you really want to know. Then start becoming alert, aware. Live consciously, learn consciousness, and accumulate consciousness. Become a great flame of consciousness, then, when death comes. You will be able to witness it, you will be able to see it and you will know ’The body is dying, the ego is dying, but I am not dying because I am the witness.’ That witness is the very core of existence. That witness is what other religions call ’God’. and what Lieh Tzu. Chuang Tzu call ’Tao’: the knower, the knowing element, consciousness, awareness, alertness.

16. Start living a conscious life. Do whatsoever you are doing, but do as if you are a witness to it – watch it, silently go on observing it. Don’t get lost into things; remain alert, remain beyond. Start from small things: walking on the road, eating, taking a bath, holding the hand of a friend, talking, listening –small things. But keep alert. You will forget again and again. Pick it up again, find it out again.  remember it again. This is what Buddha calls ’mindfulness’. what Gurdjieff calls ’self-remembering’.

17.Go on remembering that you are a witness. In the beginning it is arduous, hard, because our sleep is long. We have slept for many lives. we have become accustomed to sleep. we are snoring –metaphysically. It is difficult. but if you try. by and by a ray of alertness will enter in your being. It is possible – difficult, but possible – not impossible. And this is the most valuable thing in life.

18. I imagine sitting at a train station, watching the trains arrive and depart. My pure awareness is the station and my thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc. are the trains. If I am not mindful, I will hop on a train and take it to who knows where. But the moment I realize I am on the train, I am magically off of it, back at the station, just watching without judgment, with compassion.

19.  If you’re aware of the breath, you’re aware of the present moment. Our breath is with us from the moment of birth until the moment of death. It is the one bodily function that we can consciously control. Deep breathing is calming. Awareness of breath is the most fundamental meditation technique—and one that I always return to no matter what.

20. Our minds are small, our comprehension is limited; we cannot see the whole, we always see only a small part. We are like a person who is hiding behind his door and looking through the keyhole into the street. He always sees things...yes, somebody is moving, a car suddenly passes by. One moment it was not there, one moment it is there, and another moment it is gone forever. That's how we are looking at existence. We say something is in the future, then it comes into the present, and then it has gone into the past.

In fact, time is a human invention. It is always now! Existence knows no past, no future -- it knows only the present.

But we are sitting behind a keyhole and looking. A person is not there, then suddenly he appears; and then as suddenly as he appears he disappears too. Now you have to create time. Before the person appeared he was in the future; he was there, but for you he was in the future. Then he appeared; now he is in the present -- he is the same! And you cannot see him anymore through your small keyhole -- he has become past. Nothing is past, nothing is future -- all is always present. But our ways of seeing are very limited.

Hence we go on asking why there is misery in the world, why there is this and that...why? If we can look at the whole, all these whys disappear. And to look at the whole, you will have to come out of your room, you will have to open the door...you will have to drop this keyhole vision.

This is what mind is: a keyhole, and a very small keyhole it is. Compared to the vast universe, what are our eyes, ears, hands? What can we grasp? Nothing of much importance. And those tiny fragments of truth, we become too much attached to them.

If you see the whole, everything is as it should be -- that is the meaning of "everything is right." Wrong exists not. Only God exists; the Devil is man's creation.

21. Truth is subjectivity. That is the difference between fact and truth. A fact is an objective thing. Science goes on searching for more and more facts, and science will never arrive at truth -- it cannot by the very definition of the word. Truth is the interiority of the scientist, but he never looks at it. He goes on observing other things. He never becomes aware of his own being.

That is the last meaning of 'dhamma': your interiority, your subjectivity, your truth.

One thing very significant -- allow it to sink deep into your heart: truth is never a theory, a hypothesis; it is always an experience. Hence my truth cannot be your truth. My truth is inescapably my truth; it will remain my truth, it cannot be yours. We cannot share it. Truth is unsharable, untransferable, incommunicable, and inexpressible.

I can explain to you how I have attained it, but I cannot say what it is. The "how" is explainable, but not the "why." The discipline can be shown, but not the goal. Each one has to come to it in his own way. Each one has to come to it in his own inner being. In absolute aloneness it is revealed.

22. Just imagine for a single moment that all thoughts have ceased...then who are you? If all thoughts cease for a single moment, then who are you? No answer will be coming. You cannot say, "I am a Catholic," "I am a Protestant," "I am a Hindu," "I am a Mohammedan" -- you cannot say that. All thoughts have ceased. So the Koran has disappeared, the Bible, the Gita...all words have ceased! You cannot even utter your name. All language has disappeared so you cannot say to which country you belong, to which race. When thoughts cease, who are you? An utter emptiness, nothingness, no-thingness.

23. Meditation will make you awake, strong and humble. Meditation will make you awake because it will give you the first experience of yourself. You are not the body, you are not the mind -- you are the pure witnessing consciousness. And when this witnessing consciousness is touched, a great awakening happens -- as if a snake was sitting coiled up and suddenly it uncoils, as if somebody was asleep and has been shaken and awakened. Suddenly a great awakening inside: for the first time you feel you are. For the first time you feel the truth of your being.

24.  There is a temple in Japan, absolutely empty, not even a statue of the Buddha in the temple, and it is known as a temple dedicated to Buddha. When visitors come and they ask, "Where is the Buddha? The temple is dedicated to him..." the priest laughs and he says, "This empty space, this silence -- this is Buddha!"

25. Can't you simply be silent, not doing anything at all -- not on the intellectual level, not on the physical level, not on the emotional level -- doing nothing at all, just being there, utterly quiet? And then you will be possessed by it. And the only way to know it is to be possessed by it.

You say, "It is about this feeling that it has always been there...."

Yes, it has always been there. It is our very being. It is the stuff we are made of. Truth is not something separate from you: you are truth. It is your very consciousness, the very ground of your being. You need not go anywhere else to seek and search, to Kashi or to Kaaba. Not even a single step is needed.

26.A few people collect postage stamps -- now, see the stupidity of it -- and they call it a hobby. And all hobbies are like that. These are ways and means to keep escaping from yourself.

I am utterly blissful with myself. To be alone, to be, without doing anything, is such a profound experience that if once you have tasted it you will drop all these stupid activities called hobbies. Hobbies are pseudo occupations. When real occupations are not there, you get into pseudo occupations. Now, see the foolishness of it. Six days of the week you are waiting for Sunday -- so that you can relax, so that you can rest, so that you can be with yourself. You are tired of the world; the world is too much with you. You are tired of people, you are tired of everything. And you are hoping Sunday will come soon, and when Sunday comes you are again occupied -- now it is your hobby. You cannot remain unoccupied; that is your problem.

27. You cannot rest! You don't know how to rest. You cannot relax -- you don't know how to relax. Even in the name of relaxation you will get into some work, some kind of work; even in the name of rest you will start some kind of work. Simply because you are not paid for it, does it become rest? You will play cards or chess. You are not paid for it, that's true, but that doesn't make much difference; it is only unpaid work.

Rather than searching for hobbies, use the opportunities. Whenever you are capable of having a time empty, utterly unoccupied, with yourself, remain...remain in it, don't move out of it. Don't start collecting stamps.

28. It is like you come with me, we go along, we walk side by side for the time being. I have a light in my hand, but because of my light, your path is also lighted. Then the moment comes when we part -- we have to part; a crossroad has come, our paths separate. I move in one direction, you move in another. Suddenly you are in darkness and you are very much puzzled: "What happened to the light?"

That light was not yours. Of course, your path was lighted, but the light was not yours. So when you are with me, there is a light surrounding you. In that light, things are very clear. When you are not with me suddenly there is darkness, and in that darkness you will doubt everything that you had trusted, and in that darkness you will doubt even the possibility of light. You will doubt even the reality of the light that you had lived just a few moments before. Your mind will say, "You must have been dreaming. You must have been hallucinating. What light? Where is the light? If it was there, where has it gone?"

29.. So when you are here, under my impact, when you are here physically with me, my presence can put your mind aside. But when you are not physically with me, your mind will come back -- you have not put it aside! Learn a lesson: when you go away from me, when you cannot see me, try to still be with me. Imbibe the spirit of closeness, intimacy -- then even death cannot separate us. Then there is no question of space and time. Then you are with me forever. And the trust will persist, and the trust will continue; it will become a constant factor in you. The only thing that will be constant will be your trust. Everything else will change, but not the trust.

You will have found the center of your being. And that finding is arriving home.

30. Mind is desire, and you go on filling yourself with more and more desire, more and more ambition, more and more longing for power, prestige, and wealth. And you completely forget that there is a heart beating within you which already lives in God, which is already part of the ultimate law -- aes dhammo sanantano -- which is already part of the inexhaustible, eternal law. You are joined from the heart to God. Your hearts are the roots in the soil of God.

Your hearts are still being nourished by God, by truth, but you are not there. You have vacated the place. You live in your head. Day in, day out, you live in your head; you never descend from there. Even in the night while asleep you go on rumbling in the head...dreams, and dreams upon dreams. In the day thoughts, in the night dreams. They are not different.

31.

32. Man is a potential god -- a bodhisattva. Man is meant to become a god. Less than that won't satisfy you, less than that is of no use. You can have all the money in the world, all the power, all the prestige possible, and still you will remain empty -- unless your divine nature flowers, opens its buds, unless you become a lotus, a one-thousand-petaled lotus, unless your divinity is revealed to you, you can never be contented.

33. God still speaks, he has not stopped speaking. He is not partial -- it is not that he spoke to Mohammed and to Moses and he does not speak to you. He is speaking to you as much as he was speaking to Mohammed. The only difference is, Mohammed was ready to listen and you are not ready to listen. Mohammed was available and you are not available.

To become available to your inner nature is what I call meditation.

34. Just the other day someone asked:

"Beloved Master, what do you mean when you say 'Go in'?" Such a simple statement -- "Go in" -- and you ask me, "What do you mean?" Can't you understand these simple words, 'go in'? I know you understand the words, but going in has become so difficult because you have been taught only how to go out. You can only go out, you only know how to go out. Your consciousness has been turned towards others; it has forgotten the way to itself. You go on knocking on others' doors, and whenever it is said to you, "Go home," you say, "What do you mean by 'going home'?" You know only others' houses, but you don't know your own home. And you are carrying it within yourself. You have been forced to become extroverts. One has to learn again ways of inwardness.

Soren Kierkegaard has said: Religion means inwardness -- going into your own interiority. But the simple words, 'go in', have become so difficult to understand. Mind only knows how to go out; it has no reverse gear in it.

35.. Thinking is going out: no thinking is going in. Think and you have started moving away from yourself. Thought is the way leading you farther away. Thought is a project. No-thought...and suddenly you are in. Without thought you cannot go out, without desire you cannot go out. You need the fuel of desire and the vehicle of thought to go out.

Sitting silently, doing nothing...not even thinking, not even desiring...and where will you be?

Going in is not really going in. It is simply stopping going out...and suddenly you find yourself in.

36.. Going means going out. Stop going! Stop going anywhere! Can't you sit silently without going anywhere? Yes, physically you can sit, that is not very difficult. You can learn a yoga posture and you can make your body almost a statue, but the problem is -- what are you doing inside? Desires, thoughts, memories, imagination, all kinds of projects? -- stop them too.

How to stop them? Just become indifferent to them, unconcerned. Even if they are there, don't pay attention to them. Even if they are there, don't give them any importance. Even if they are there, let them be. You sit silently inside -- watching. Remember that word 'watching' -- witnessing, just being alert.

And as watching grows, becomes deeper, the same energy that was becoming desires and thoughts and memories and imagination -- the same energy is absorbed in the new depth. The same energy is used by this deepening inwardness. And you will know what it means when I say "Go in."

37. My whole approach is existential. If you really want to know what it means to go in, go in! And the way is: watch your thoughts and don't get identified with them. Just remain a watcher, utterly indifferent, neither for nor against. Don't judge, because every judgment brings identification. Don't say, "These thoughts are wrong," and don't say, "These thoughts are good." Don't comment on the thoughts. Just let them pass as if it is just traffic passing by, and you are standing by the side of the road unconcerned, looking at the traffic.

It does not matter what is passing by -- a bus, a truck, a bicycle. If you can watch the thought process of your mind with such unconcern, with such detachment, that moment is not very far away when one day the whole traffic disappears...because the traffic can exist only if you go on giving energy to it. If you stop giving energy to it.... And that's what watching is: stopping giving energy to it, stopping energy moving into the traffic. It is your energy that makes those thoughts move. When your energy is not coming they start falling; they cannot stand on their own.

And when the road of the mind is utterly empty, you are in.

38. A mind that has forgotten how to mirror the truth is always a victim of desire -- a victim of the head, a victim of the future, a victim of constant longing for this and for that. And no desire can ever be fulfilled. By the time one desire is fulfilled it has created ten more desires.

And this goes on and on...and life is short, and death may knock you down any moment.

You come into the world to be fulfilled, but you go empty-handed, you go unfulfilled. Hence you will have to come again. Unless you learn the lesson you will have to be thrown back again and again into some womb, you will have to be reborn. You will be sent back to the school. Millions of times you have been sent, and if you don't pay attention, this life also you are going to miss the train.

Be aware! Start cleansing your mirror so that you can reflect.

39.. All thoughts are impure. A thought cannot be pure. So let me remind you again: whenever Buddha says "impure thoughts" he means thoughts. He uses the adjective 'impure' to emphasize it, because if he simply says "thoughts" you may not understand rightly. So he says "impure thoughts," but he always means thoughts. All thoughts are impure, because a thought means you are thinking of the other, a desire has arisen. And whenever he says "a pure thought" he means a no-thought.

Only a no-thought is pure, because then you are utterly yourself, alone, nothing interfering.

Jean-Paul Sartre says: The other is hell. And he is right in a way, because whenever you are thinking of the other you are in hell. And all thoughts are addressed to others. When you are in a state of no-thought you are alone, and aloneness is purity. And in that aloneness happens all that is worth happening.

40. Don't be bothered with the next moment, or the next life, or the next world. Make this moment rejoicing, make this moment a moment of bliss, and the next will follow it, and the next life, and the next world. And everything that you are this moment is going to become deepened more and more. And when you see that you are responsible for your bliss, your bliss will be far more. When you see that nobody has given it to you, that you have not been a beggar, that it is not a gift from somebody else -- because nobody has given it to you, nobody can take it away -- when you see this you will be far happier.

41. If you are convinced of some truth, act upon it, and act immediately! -- because mind is very cunning, and the greatest cunningness of the mind is postponement. It says, "Tomorrow..." and tomorrow never comes. It says, "Yes, we are going to meditate one day. Let us first understand what meditation is." And then you can go on understanding what meditation is your whole life, and you will never act. And unless you act nothing is ever going to happen, no transformation is going to happen.

42. One thing to be remembered: whatsoever you think about yourself, think the same for everybody else and the ego will disappear. The ego is the illusion that is created by thinking about yourself in one way and thinking about others in another. It is double thinking. If you drop the double thinking, ego dies of its own accord.

43. One of the most important things to be understood about man is that man is asleep. Even while he thinks he is awake, he is not. His wakefulness is very fragile; his wakefulness is so tiny it doesn't matter at all. His wakefulness is only a beautiful name, but utterly empty.

You sleep in the night, you sleep in the day; from birth to death you go on changing your patterns of sleep, but you never really awake. Just by opening the eyes don't befool yourself that you are awake. Unless the inner eyes open, unless your inside becomes full of light, unless you can see yourself, who you are, don't think that you are awake.

That is the greatest illusion man lives in. And once you accept that you are already awake, then there is no question of making any effort to be awake.

The first thing to sink deep in your heart is that you are asleep, utterly asleep. You are dreaming, day in, day out. You are dreaming sometimes with open eyes and sometimes with closed eyes, but you are dreaming, you are a dream. You are not yet a reality.

And, of course, in a dream whatsoever you do is meaningless, whatsoever you think is pointless, whatsoever you project remains part of your dreams and never allows you to see that which is. Hence Buddha's insistence...and not only Gautama the Buddha but all the buddhas have insisted on only one thing: Awake! Continuously, for centuries, their whole teaching can be contained in a single word: Be awake!

44. If on any one single theme all the buddhas of the world agree, this is the theme: that man as he is is asleep, and man as he should be should be awake. Wakefulness is the goal, and wakefulness is the taste of all their teachings. Zarathustra, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Buddha, Bahauddin, Kabir, Nanak -- all the awakened ones have been teaching one single theme, in different languages, in different metaphors, but their song is the same. Just as the sea tastes of salt -- whether the sea is tasted from the north or from the east or from the west, the sea always tastes of salt -- the taste of buddhahood is wakefulness.

45. Silence is the space in which one awakens, and the noisy mind is the space in which one remains asleep. If your mind continues chattering, you are asleep. Sitting silently, if the mind disappears and you can hear the chattering birds and no mind inside, a silence...this whistle of the bird, the chirping, and no mind functioning in your head, utter silence...then awareness wells up in you. It does not come from the outside, it arises in you, it grows in you. Otherwise remember: you are asleep.

46. A husband and wife were asleep. About 3 AM the wife dreamt of secretly meeting another man. Then she dreamt she saw her husband coming.

In her sleep she shrieked, "Heavens, my husband!"

Her husband, waking suddenly, leapt out of the window.

And remember, it is not a laughing matter; it is the reality, it is how you are living. It is how man exists in his ordinary state.

47. Have you seen a deer in the jungle -- how alert he looks, how watchfully he walks? Have you seen a bird sitting on the tree -- how intelligently he goes on watching what is happening all around? You move towards the bird -- there is a certain space he allows; beyond that, one step more, and he flies away. He has a certain alertness about his territory. If somebody enters into that territory then it is dangerous.

If you look around you will be surprised: man seems to be the most asleep animal on the earth.

48. Man is in a very fallen state. In fact, that is the meaning of the Christian parable of the fall of Adam, his expulsion. But why were Adam and Eve expelled from paradise? They were expelled because they had eaten the fruit of knowledge. They were expelled because they had become minds, and they had lost their consciousness. If you become a mind you lose consciousness -- mind means sleep, mind means noise, mind means mechanicalness.

If you become a mind you lose consciousness. Hence, the whole work that has to be done is: how to become consciousness again and lose the mind. You have to throw out of your system all that you have gathered as knowledge. It is knowledge that keeps you asleep; hence, the more knowledgeable a person is the more asleep.

49. WAKEFULNESS IS THE WAY TO LIFE, says Buddha. Become more wakeful and you will become more alive. And life is God -- there is no other God. Hence Buddha talks about life and awareness. Life is the goal and awareness is the methodology, the technique to attain it.

50. Awareness is eternal, it knows no death. Only unawareness dies. So if you remain unconscious, asleep, you will have to die again. If you want to get rid of this whole misery of being born and dying again and again, if you want to get rid of the wheel of birth and death, you will have to become absolutely alert. You will have to reach higher and higher into consciousness.

51.. That's my whole work here. I am not here to give you more information; that you can get anywhere. Thousands of universities exist, thousands of libraries exist. Information you can get anywhere, you can become knowledgeable anywhere. My effort is to make you unlearn whatsoever you have learned up to now, to make you innocent so that you can start functioning from a state of not-knowing. So that you don't have any answers, so that you act spontaneously, not out of the past and out of the conclusions already arrived at. So that you don't have any ready-made formula for anything...so that you are like a small child mirroring reality.

And when you are silent, no knowledge clamoring inside you, your perception is clear -- no dust on the mirror...you reflect that which is. And out of that reflection whatever action arises is virtue.

52.You have to be just yourself and nobody else. And in fact that's what buddhahood means: to be yourself. That is what christ-consciousness means: just to be yourself. Buddha was not an imitation of somebody else. Don't you think there were many many great men who had preceded him? He must have been told, "Be a Krishna! Be a Parshvanath! Be an Adinatha!" He must have heard beautiful stories, mythologies. He must have read the PURANAS, ancient stories about the great men, Rama, Krishna, Parasuram. He must have heard all that, he must have received the heritage. But he never tried to be somebody. He wanted to be himself, he wanted to know who he is. He never became an imitator; that's why one day he became awakened.

53. The message of all the buddhas is always the same because the truth is one. Expressions may differ, different languages may be used, but that which is indicated towards is the same.

Millions of fingers can point to the same moon. Fingers are bound to be different -- my finger is different from the finger of Jesus or Buddha or Moses or Abraham -- but the moon is the same. And this hymn is a beautiful finger pointing to the moon. It is the very essence of all the teachings of all the buddhas of all the ages -- past, present, and future too.

54.The religious man is again one-dimensional, just as the scientist is. Albert Einstein is one-dimensional, so is Gautama the Buddha. And because the East has become one-dimensionally religious it has suffered much. And now the West is suffering much, and the cause is one-dimensionality. The West is bankrupt as far as the inner world is concerned and the East is bankrupt as far as the outer world is concerned.

The East is not accidentally poor and starving. It has chosen to be that way. It has denied science; it has even denied the world of objective reality. It says the world is illusory. If the world is illusory, how can you create a science? The very first requirement is missing. You cannot create a science out of maya, illusion. How can you create a science out of something which is not, which does not even exist? If you deny the world, you have denied the dimension of science altogether.

That is the reason why the East is poor and starving. And unless the Eastern genius understands this, we can go on importing science from the West but it will not get roots into our beings. If our approach remains the same as it has been for five thousand years, science will only be something foreign. That's how it is.