Friday 8 April 2016

Spiritual Insights ( Part 5)

Spiritual Insights

                      (A Collection of Spiritual Teachings)

                                                 Part 5


1.The whole art of meditation is just to turn your consciousness inwards, so that you can become acquainted with yourself. You are not yet introduced to yourself. You know what your name is -- but you did not come with that name; that label has been put by others. You know you are a Christian, a Hindu, a Jew -- but you were not born as a Hindu, as a Mohammedan, as a Christian.

2.God is not a goal; God is the presence right now. If you are present, God is available. If you live in the moment, you are enlightened; there is no other enlightenment. And then ordinary life is so extraordinary. Then to be just a nobody is so fulfilling.

3.Meditation is the way from the head to the heart, from the heart to the being.

4.Pleasure is dependent on others. Happiness is not so dependent on others, but still it is separate from you. Bliss is not dependent, is not separate either; it is your very being, it is your very nature. To attain it is to attain to God, to nirvana.

5.Obsession is created by your so-called saints. Whatsoever they condemn becomes your obsession. In fact, the more they condemn, the more attractive it becomes, the more magnetic it becomes.

6.Desire is our imprisonment. The man who wants nothing, who is absolutely contented as he is, is free of all bondage. He has attained to ultimate freedom, nirvana -- and that is the goal of life. And it is only by attaining that freedom that you will know the significance of being, the song of being, the celebration of being. Your life will become a continuous bliss, and not only that YOU will be blissful, you will be able to bless others too. The whole existence will be blessed by you, by your very presence.

7.Unless you become conscious, unless you take possession of your own life, unless you become independent of your instincts, you will not be a master. And without being a master there is no bliss, no benediction; life remains a hell.

8.The whole humanity is suffering from obsession, either through indulgence or through repression. The whole humanity is concerned with sex twenty-four hours a day.

9.Meditation is the only thing that can transform a man into a spiritual being, without making him Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. Meditation can release all his potential and intelligence.

10.Every father wants, and every mother wants their children to live for them. It is a strange demand: if it is to be fulfilled, then nobody can live in this world, you have to live for your father, and your father has to live for his father, but nobody can live for himself, and unless you live for yourself you cannot find any joy, any bliss.

11.Love is essential; money is non-essential. To be alive is essential; to live in a big house or not is non-essential. To be fulfilled, contented, is essential; rushing, ambitious, always trying to reach somewhere, trying to perform, trying to prove that you are somebody, is non-essential. People live only in two dimensions: the dimension of the doer and the dimension of the non-doer.

12.Unless a man is happy, simply happy, for no reason at all, unless a man is mad enough to be happy without any reason, a man is not going to be happy ever. You will always find something destroying your happiness. You will always find something missing, something absent. And that missing will become your daydream again.

13.Beliefs are all against truth; they make your mind prejudiced. Belief means you don't know, still you pretend to know. Belief is a lie, it is hypocrisy.

14.The enlightened person is no more in any conflict with the ultimate law; he has surrendered. He floats, he flows with the river. He has almost become a wave in the river, he does not exist separately.

15.Meditation is not a tension, it is not a strain. One is never tired of meditation. It is relaxation -- how you can be tired of it? It is deep rest, it is utter restfulness. One is available to everything; nothing can distract you.

16.Relaxation means you don't have any shoulds. You are simply living moment to moment, not according to some future idea of yourself, but according to your reality that is herenow. To live with the reality, moment to moment, is to be sane. To live with the idea is to be insane. The whole earth has become almost a madhouse because of these perfectionists. Perfectionism is a sort of madness; only mad people try to be perfectionists. Sane people never try to be perfectionists.

17.If you become a little more meditative and less ambitious, if you become a little more religious and less political, if you become a little more unworldly than worldly, if you start moving more within wards than without, if you start becoming a little more alert than sleepy, if you come out of your drunk state, if you bring a little light into your being, then... then you will be close, close home. You have never been away. Then your whole life will be transformed, transfigured. Then you will live in a totally different way; a new quality will be there in your life which has nothing to do with your doing, which is a gift, a benediction.

18.Look at this mind. Look at its desires. Watch, become aware.

19.Life needs continuous growth. The moment you stop its growth, it starts dying. So go into the world full of songs, full of dance and abundant love, and give it unconditionally, without any judgment, to anybody who is receptive -- and you will go on growing in the experience both deeper and higher.

20.Unless life is a celebration you have lived in vain. Unless life turns into a Gautam Buddha you have been wasting a tremendous opportunity given to you by existence.

21.Encounter every situation with your total consciousness, without any guilt. Enjoy music, enjoy food, enjoy love -- enjoy everything that is natural.

22.The real thing is that you are suffering from your expectations. When they are not fulfilled -- and they are never going to be fulfilled -- frustration arises, failure arises, and you feel neglected, as if existence does not care for you. Drop expectations for the future. Remain open, remain available to whatsoever happens, but don't plan ahead. Don't make any psychological, fixed ideas about the future -- that things should be like this -- and much more suffering will disappear.

23.Passion is obsession, neurosis. Compassion is when your energy has flowered. You are so contented within yourself, you are so enough unto yourself, now you can share, you can shower your bliss. Now you HAVE to give. Neurosis is when you go on demanding and nobody is ready to give to you, and you are a hungry ghost. Your demands are great, and all that the world provides is just peanuts.

24.The moment you desire for happiness, you have moved away from the present, you have moved away from the existential, you have already moved into the future -- which is nowhere, which has not come yet. You have moved in a dream. Now, dreams can never be fulfilling. Your desire for happiness is a dream. The dream is unreal. Through the unreal, nobody has ever been able to reach to the real. You have taken a wrong train.

25.The ego is always going to the complaint department. Whatsoever happens is meaningless because even if God comes to you, you will say: Wait, let me first reach the complaint book. The ego is headed towards the complaint book; nothing can satisfy the ego.

26.To transform life into a celebration is the only authentic science of religion.

27.To be alive needs something more, something deeper, something more profound. To be alive needs more awareness, more meditativeness, more consciousness, not more information.

28.Life can still become a paradise; it is never too late. But great courage is needed to change. All that is really needed is a little more awareness. De-automatize your behavior; just watch what you have been doing up to now. You do the same thing, and the wife reacts in the same way. It has become a settled pattern.

29.Meditation brings you to the final peak of consciousness -- that is chit, exactly in the middle. On one side is truth; on another side is bliss. As meditation flowers, you find that on one hand truth has revealed to you all its mysteries and on the other blissfulness is showering all its treasures on you.

30.Love that depends on somebody is a poor love. Love that is created within you, love that you create out of your own being, is real energy. Then move anywhere with that ocean surrounding you and you will feel that everybody who comes close to you is suddenly under a different kind of energy.

31.Remember one thing: meditation means awareness. Whatsoever you do with awareness is meditation. Action is not the question, but the quality that you bring to your action. Walking can be a meditation if you walk alertly. Sitting can be a meditation if you sit alertly. Listening to the birds can be a meditation if you listen with awareness. Just listening to the inner noise of your mind can be a meditation if you remain alert and watchful. The whole point is: one should not move in sleep. Then whatsoever you do is meditation -- and don't be worried about it!

32.Transcendence is never through repression, transcendence is through understanding, transcendence is through awareness.

33.Remember, that is the difference between bliss and happiness: happiness is excitement; bliss is happiness without excitement. If there is excitement, sooner or later you will get bored, because only when the excitement is new it is excitement. But how can you be excited about the same thing again and again?

34.Man can also be as happy as the hills and as peaceful as the rivers if he looks at the moon and the surroundings without any mind. With no thought, he will also become part of the whole scene.

35.Love seems to be more eternal than your so-called life. Your life can be destroyed very easily... just a hit on the head, just a bullet through the heart; very simple... but nothing can destroy love. Love seems to be the only eternal thing; something not belonging to the world of time. You can give it, but nobody can take it.

36.Life is not given to you to murder, to destroy. Life has been given to you to create, and to rejoice, and to celebrate. When you cry and weep, when you are miserable, you are alone. When you celebrate, the whole existence participates with you. Only in celebration do we meet the ultimate, the eternal. Only in celebration do we go beyond the circle of birth and death.

37.Once you have become master of your mind, the mind is transcended. The moment you have become master of your mind, the mind is no longer there. It remains only if you are a slave. Once you have taken hold of the bull and you are riding on it, the bull disappears. The bull exists as separate from you only if you are not the master. This has to be understood.

38.The man of awareness becomes the man of the essence. Personality consists of the non-essential. Your soul consists of the essential, and the essential is immortal. The non-essential is momentary, and we cling to the non-essential; hence we suffer, because we cannot keep hold of it. It disappears sooner or later. Whatsoever we do is futile because the momentary cannot be forever. Just as it comes, it goes. It is a wave, a ripple, a bubble; sooner or later it will be gone. For the moment it looks so beautiful -- the sun is reflected in it and a small rainbow surrounds it -- but it is just a soap bubble. You can play with it but don't become attached to it, otherwise you will suffer. And that's why people are suffering: they become attached to soap bubbles.

39.Understanding is going to happen but not through the head, it is going to happen through the heart -- not through logic but through love.

40.Love is a ladder. It starts with one person, it ends with the totality. Love is the beginning, God is the end. To be afraid of love, to be afraid of the growing pains of love, is to remain enclosed in a dark cell.

41.Bliss doesn't mean happiness; bliss means the absence of both happiness and unhappiness. Happiness will be disturbed by unhappiness, unhappiness will be disturbed by happiness they are polarities, the wheel is moving. Bliss is never disturbed; it is silence, it is peace, it is a tranquillity -- absolute peace. You have come to understand; now nothing disturbs.

42.Keep this in your consciousness:
Nature is not anguish, it is blissfulness.
It is not anxiety, misery, suffering:
It is love, it is rejoicing.
It is a constant celebration.

43.Your love cannot be robbed. There is no way to rob it. You can give it voluntarily, you can give it freely, but nobody can rob it. You can be killed, but your love cannot be killed. There exists no way to murder love.

44.Remember: a saint is really a saint only when he has abandoned the whip and the rope. That is the criterion. If he is still trying to pray, to meditate, to do this and that, and to discipline himself, then he is still not yet enlightened. Then he is still there and some doing continues. And doing accumulates the ego. He has not reached home. The journey is yet to be completed.

45.Eating is right if it gives you nourishment. It is wrong if it only gives you weight. Eating is right if it gives you vitality; eating is wrong if it just makes you heavy. It is meaningless. To be heavy is not to be vital. The vital person is not heavy, he is light, he is almost weightless. He moves on the earth, but his feet never touch the earth. He can fly any moment -- any moment. Gravitation has no affect on him.

46.Spirituality is not a sensational experience -- it is maturity, it is let-go, it is becoming desire less.

47.If you love, you will find so many occasions to be loving. If you are afraid, you will find so many occasions to be afraid.

48.Awareness is just being with yourself in utter aloneness, just being alert. It is not a relationship, the other is not needed at all. It is not outgoing, it is ingoing.

49.The knowledgeable person lives in his memory, in the past. The wise man lives in the present, not in his memory but in his awareness this very moment.

50.Life is not a fasting, it is a continuous feast -- a celebration, a festival of lights. Love transforms your life into a festival of lights. And unless your life becomes a feast and a festival, remember: you have not done the thing you have come for on this earth.

51.Love life, be more happy. God can come only to a happy soul. Only when you are utterly happy is there a possibility, otherwise not -- because misery closes you, bliss opens you up. Have you not watched it, observed it, in your own life? Whenever you are miserable you become closed; a hard shell surrounds you. You start protecting yourself, you surround yourself with a great armour -- because you know you already have so much pain, you cannot afford any more hurt from anywhere. You have to harden your surface.

52.Remember, watching is the only key. Observation is meditation -- there is nothing more to meditation; it is another name for being aware. And the miracle is that when you become aware of something, utterly aware, it disappears. It remains only if you are unaware. Your unawareness is a food for distraction, for indolence. Your awareness means they are no longer being fed, they start starving. Sooner or later they wither away of their own accord.

53.Two things happen in orgasm: one is, mind stops the constant yakkety yak -- it becomes for a moment no-mind; and second, time stops. That single moment of orgasmic joy is so immense and so fulfilling that it is equal to eternity.

54.Enlightenment is not something that has to be fought for, it is something that you have to allow. It comes in a moment of let-go. In surrender it comes.

55.Remember, once a buddha you are always a buddha. Nobody has fallen from that point. It is just against nature.

56.The ego is always expecting and hence always being frustrated. The non-egoistic person expects nothing, hence everything is fulfilling; whatsoever happens is tremendous, whatsoever happens is fantastic. Even if he comes across a small grass flower, he is hypnotized by it.

57.When Buddha talks about a poor man, he does not mean a man without money. When Buddha talks about a poor man, he means a man who is not rich inside... a loveless man. How can he share? How can he become a tremendous sharing? No, charity is not possible. Charity is possible only when you are overflowing. Overflowing is charity.

58.The moment a person attains to this eternal light, his life has a single flavour. That flavour is contained by absolute awareness. His unconscious has disappeared. There is no longer any dark part in his being.

59.Awareness is the only secret key: it transforms. It doesn't matter what your illness is, awareness is the only medicine: it cures all illness. If you are politically minded -- and everybody is... In some way or other everybody is trying to be more powerful than the other. Even in relationships politics continue -- the husband tries to be more powerful than the wife, the wife tries to be more powerful than the husband -- hence the constant conflict, even between parents and children. Everywhere there is conflict. It is all politics, different faces of politics.

60.Remember, frustration is out of expectation, and ego is always expecting. The ego is a beggar.

61.Misery comes because we choose. Bliss is when we don't choose.

62.All desires are a nag, they go on nagging you, they go on forcing you, they go on goading you. You can't have a moment of rest, you can't be relaxed -- all those desires are there. Rest, relaxation, is known only by those who have understood the art of being desireless.

63.My work here is not to comfort you, is not to console you, is not to sing a lullaby by the side of your bed. My work is to wake you up.

64.Categories are created by the mind. Appreciation and condemnation are of the mind. Once mind is not there, everything is in its reality as it is. No evaluation arises. One makes everything untrue if one is untrue. You go on projecting yourself -- everything else functions as a screen.

65.A follower is never ready for insecurity; he comes to a guru, to a master, to seek protection, shelter, to hide behind him. He is seeking a father figure. A disciple is seeking a master, not a father figure. He wants to learn what life is. Even if life is insecurity, he is ready to learn. Even if life implies death, he is ready to learn.

66.Mind is a kind of insanity because it is carrying so many impressions which are conflicting, contradictory. It has got impressions from your mother, and also from your father; and they were both fighting continuously, and they both have given their minds and heritage to you. It has got impressions from the neighbors, it has got impressions from so many teachers in the school, in the college, in the university. It is a crowd of unrelated, irrelevant, inconsistent thoughts -- it does not have any organic unity. It is a miracle that somehow you go on keeping yourself together.

67.As far as biological reproduction is concerned, orgasm is not a necessity. But as far as spiritual growth is concerned, orgasm is a necessity.

68.If meditation does not radiate love then one is in some fallacy. What he is thinking is meditation is not meditation. It may be concentration, it may be contemplation, but it is not meditation.

69.Misery is because of the conflict. Misery is because your house is divided, misery is because you are not one, you are a crowd -- a thousand and one voices inside you pulling you and pushing you in all sorts of ways and all directions.

70.Truth cannot be practiced. You have to dissolve yourself into it. Truth can never become something that you can hold in your hand. It is vast. How can you hold it in your hand? It can never become your property. You have to relax into it, dissolve into it.

71.The mind either clings with the past or with the future. This is a way of not being. This is how we miss existence. This is how by and by we become phantoms, shadows, ghosts. Watch yourself. As I see people, millions of people remain in a life of a ghost.

72.Buddha says this world is just like darkness. Once you bring light to it, once you become aware, once you drop your passions and become meditative, once the mind attains to the purity of meditation, suddenly the light is there. Darkness dissipates, disappears instantly, immediately, within no time.

73.Beware of desires. Become more watchful, more alert. And you will see -- the more alert you are, the less desires are there. Ripples start subsiding, waves start disappearing. And one day, suddenly... any moment it can happen, because all moments are as potential as any other. There is no auspicious moment for it to happen. It can happen in any ordinary moment, because all ordinary moments are auspicious. There is no need for it to happen under a bodhi tree. It can happen under any tree, or even without a tree. It can happen under the roof of your house. It can happen anywhere... because god is everywhere.

74.A real man has no nostalgia at all. He never looks back because it is no longer there. He lives in the moment and remains open for the future. The present is his, and the present makes him capable of receiving the future. His doors are always open for the wind, for the rain, for the sun. He is an opening.

75.The danger is not to live in totality and intensity, not to make your life a dance, a celebration.
To me, to be innocent is all that is to be achieved. Be innocent, and the divine is always blissfully flowing towards you. Innocence is the capacity to receive, to be part of the divine. Be innocent, and the guest is there. Become the host.

76.When the mind is free of passion, the mind is free. Freedom means freedom from passion. And only a free mind can see what is real. Only a free mind -- free from passions -- can see what is here.

77.A mind full of consciousness will be empty of all contents. He will be neither a Christian nor a Hindu nor a Jew. He will not be a moral man nor an immoral man. He will simply be. That being, that be-ness, is purity. That's what I call primal innocence. Then all dust is washed and you are just a reflective force.

78.Meditation has to happen first, then character comes as a shadow to it. And if meditation does not happen, then your character is just a hypocrisy and nothing else. Your saints are great hypocrites; they say one thing, they think another, maybe just the opposite. They do one thing, but they want to do something exactly the opposite. On the surface they show one thing, but deep down they are just its contrary.

79.If you can allow your flame of life to reach the third eye, you will see there is no death. And you will suddenly see that you are no more attached to the world.

80.Love is the nourishment that is missing in the world.

81.Man can rise above gods and fall below animals. Man has a great spectrum. From the lowest to the highest, man is a ladder.

82.Enlightenment cannot be claimed. One has to utterly disappear for it to be. The mind has to cease for God to be. Call it God or enlightenment -- it is the same thing.

83.Innocence is religiousness. To be innocent is the peak of true realization. But true innocence comes only through a conscious revolution; it is not possible through any collective, unconscious evolution. Man is alone. He is free to choose heaven or hell, life or death, the ecstasy of realization or the misery of our so-called life.

84.Nothing has to be achieved, all is showering on you. Just be here now and celebrate. My definition of religion is celebration.

85.Look at old people: you will not find anything else but wounds; their whole being is nothing but wounds -- ulcers and ulcers and ulcers. When a person dies you don't see blossoming flowers in his being; you simply see stinking wounds. If a person has really lived and not been deceived by his dreams and illusory desires, the older he grows the more beautiful he becomes. In his death he is superb.

86.Misery makes you special. Misery makes you more egoistic. A miserable man can have a more concentrated ego than a happy man. A happy man really cannot have the ego, because a person becomes happy only when there is no ego. The more egoless, the more happy; the more happy, the more egoless. You dissolve into happiness. You cannot exist together with happiness; you exist only when there is misery. In happiness there is dissolution.

87.The urge to possess is the urge not to be alone. One cannot be alone, so he seeks company. But the company of other people is not reliable, so he seeks, instead, the company of things. To live with a wife is difficult; to live with a car is not so difficult. So ultimately, possessiveness turns toward things.

88.My vision of a good world is that people will be individuals, meeting with others, sharing their joy, their love, unconditionally. And not expecting that tomorrow also will be the same -- they will remain aware of the constantly changing existence.

89. The more empty you are within, the more you seek fame; it is a sort of substitute. The more  poor you are within, the more you seek riches; it is a substitute to somehow stuff yourself with something.

90.An enlightened person is the richest person possible, but his richness comes from surrender, not from fight. He does not... he has not any conflict with the whole. He has fallen in harmony, he is in a harmonia.

91.Misery is manufactured by man -- existence is just playfulness, bliss. It is a song, it is a dance, it is a continuous celebration all the year round.

92.If you really want to be with me, drop guilt. And the same energy that has become a guilt complex becomes celebration once it is released. Celebration is the right attitude. Celebrate all that God has given to you. I promise you that if you can celebrate all that God has given to you, you will become worthy of more.

93.The world is never going to be happy, it has never been so, and it is never going to be so. The world is bound to remain unhappy, only individuals can be happy. It is something personal. It needs consciousness to be happy. It needs intensity to be happy. It needs awareness to be happy. The world can never be happy because it has no awareness. Society has no soul, only man has it. But it is very difficult for the ego to accept this.


 94.My whole work is to demolish, to demolish all the lies that are surrounding you and not to replace them by anything else, but to leave you utterly naked in your aloneness. To me, only in your aloneness will you be able to know the truth -- because you are the truth.

95.Each child comes with a tremendous intelligence but the family makes him mediocre, because to live with an intelligent child is troublesome. He doubts, he is skeptical, he inquires, he is disobedient, he is rebellious -- and the family wants somebody who is obedient, ready to follow, imitate. Hence from the very beginning the seed of intelligence has to be destroyed, almost completely burnt, so there is no possibility of any sprouts coming out of it.

96The whole life people simply go on saving, saving -- for what? The life is slipping by; each moment a precious moment is gone and it cannot be reclaimed. Buddha says: Don't waste it in foolish things. Fame is foolish, it is pointless, meaningless. Even if the whole world knows you, how does it make you richer? How does it make your life more blissful? How does it help you to be more understanding? to be more aware? to be more alert? to be more alive?

97.Sexuality is possible without any understanding, without any meditation. Love is possible only with understanding. Compassion is possible only with understanding and meditation, understanding and awareness. Not only do you understand and respect the other person, but you have come to your deepest core of being. Seeing your own deepest core, you have become capable of seeing the deepest core in the other also. Now the other does not exist as a body or a mind; the other exists as a soul. And souls are not separate. Your soul and my soul are one.

98.Joy is something which happens as a consequence; it is not a result. You cannot make any effort to be joyful. You can move into some activity so deeply that you forget yourself, and joy arises. Joy arises only when you are not.

99.Rest should be the criterion of power. A man of power is absolutely at rest, he has no restlessness in him. Because restlessness is nothing but dissipation of energy. When you are feeling restless, you are dissipating energy.

100.All old people are not wise. Wisdom has nothing to do with old age. A real man of understanding can become wise any time. Even as a child he can become wise. If you have a penetrating understanding, even a single experience of anger and you will be finished with it. It is so ugly. A single experience of greed and you will be finished with it. It is so poisonous.

101.Remember, the whole effort of sadhana is to help you to become alone, because only when you are ready to become alone, when you are ready to fall into inner silence, when you are no more clinging to this constant talking, inner talk, then only can you become a unity. Because this constant inner talk helps you to remain dual, divided.

102.Buddha says this life, this world that you live in, that you are surrounded with, that you have created around yourself, is but a dream -- impermanent, temporary. Don't make your abode there, otherwise you will suffer. Because nobody can be contented with the temporary. By the time you think it is in your hands it is gone. By the time you think you have possessed it, it is no more there. You struggle for it -- by the time you achieve it, it has disappeared. The beauty is fleeting, love is fleeting, everything in this life is fleeting. You are running to catch shadows. They look real; by the time you have arrived they prove mirages.

103.To be herenow is to be attired in divine glory. To be herenow is to attain the splendour of existence. To be herenow is to be in bliss, is to be in paradise.

104. Watching is meditation. What you watch is irrelevant. You can watch the trees, you can watch the river, you can watch the clouds, you can watch children playing around. Watching is meditation. What you watch is not the point; the object is not the point. The quality of observation, the quality of being aware and alert -- that's what meditation is.



Spiritual Insights ( part 4)



Spiritual Insights

                      (A Collection of Spiritual Teachings)

                                                 Part 4


1. 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.

2. What does Buddha mean by "desire"? Desire means your whole mind. Desire means not to be here now. Desire means moving somewhere in the future which is not yet. Desire means a thousand and one ways of escaping from the present. Desire is equivalent to mind. In Buddha's terminology, desire is mind.
And desire is time too. When I say desire is time too, I don't mean the clock time, I mean the psychological time. How do you create future in your mind? -- by desiring. You want to do something tomorrow, you have created the tomorrow; otherwise the tomorrow is nowhere yet, it has not come. But you want to do something tomorrow, and because you want to do something tomorrow you have created a psychological tomorrow.

3. The man who lives in the future lives a counterfeit life. He does not really live, he only pretends to live. He hopes to live, he desires to live, but he never lives. And the tomorrow never comes, it is always today. And whatsoever comes is always now and here, and he does not know how to live now-here; he knows only how to escape from now-here. The way to escape is called "desire," tanha -- that is Buddha's word for what is an escape from the present, from the real into the unreal.
The man who desires is an escapist.
Now, this is very strange, that mediators are thought to be escapists. That is utter nonsense. Only the meditator is not an escapist -- everybody else is. Meditation means getting out of desire, getting out of thoughts, getting out of mind. Meditation means relaxing in the moment, in the present. Meditation is the only thing in the world which is not escapist, although it is thought to be the most escapist thing. People who condemn meditation always condemn it with the argument that it is escape, escaping from life. They are simply talking nonsense; they don't understand what they are saying.
Meditation is not escaping from life: it is escaping into life. Mind is escaping from life, desire is escaping from life.

4. Buddha is not for prayer, he is for meditation, because prayer is again somehow a kind of desiring. When you pray, you desire. Prayer is always for the future; prayer means you are asking for something. You may not be asking for money, you may be asking for God himself, but it is the same. Ask, and you have moved away. Meditation is a state of no asking, no questioning, and no thinking. Prayer is still part of thinking -- a beautiful thinking, but thinking is thinking; a beautiful prison, but a prison is still a prison.
Meditation is a state of no-mind. Prayer is a state of religious mind, but mind is there. And when it has the beautiful garment of religiousness around it, it becomes even more dangerous.

5. What is meditation? It does not mean meditating upon something; the English word is misleading. In English there is no word adequate enough to translate Buddha's word sammasati. It has been translated as meditation, as right mindfulness, as awareness, as consciousness, alertness, watchfulness, witnessing -- but there is not really a single word which has the quality of sammasati.
Sammasati means: consciousness is, but without any content. There is no thought, no desire, nothing is stirred in you. You are not contemplating about God or about great things...nature and its beauty, the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas, and their immensely significant statements. You are not contemplating! You are not concentrating on any special object either. You are not chanting a mantra, because those are all things of the mind, those are all contents of the mind. You are not doing anything! The mind is utterly empty, and you are simply there in that emptiness. A kind of presence, a pure presence, with nowhere to go -- utterly relaxed into oneself, at rest, at home. That is the meaning of Buddha's meditation.
And nobody else has ever reached such a beautiful expression about meditation as Buddha. Many people have attained, but nobody has been so expressive, so capable of conveying the message, as the Buddha.

6. Mind is confusion. Thoughts and thoughts -- thousands of thoughts clamoring, clashing, fighting with each other, fighting for your attention. Thousands of thoughts pulling you into thousands of directions. It is a miracle how you go on keeping yourself together. Somehow you manage this togetherness -- it is only somehow, it is only a facade. Deep behind it there is a clamoring crowd, a civil war, a continuous civil war. Thoughts fighting with each other, thoughts wanting you to fulfill them. It is a great confusion, what you call your mind.
But if you are aware that the mind is confusion, and you don't get identified with the mind, you will never fall. You will become fall proof! The mind will become impotent. And because you will be watching continuously, your energies will slowly be withdrawn, away from the mind; it will not be nourished any more.

7. You will have to relax from the circumference. The first step in relaxing is the body. Remember as many times as possible to look in the body, whether you are carrying some tension in the body somewhere -- at the neck, in the head, in the legs. Relax it consciously. Just go to that part of the body, and persuade that part, say to it lovingly "Relax!"
And you will be surprised that if you approach any part of your body, it listens, it follows you -- it is your body! With closed eyes, go inside the body from the toe to the head searching for any place where there is a tension. And then talk to that part as you talk to a friend; let there be a dialogue between you and your body. Tell it to relax, and tell it, "There is nothing to fear. Don't be afraid. I am here to take care -- you can relax." Slowly slowly, you will learn the knack of it. Then the body becomes relaxed.
Then take another step, a little deeper; tell the mind to relax. And if the body listens, mind also listens, but you cannot start with the mind -- you have to start from the beginning. You cannot start from the middle. Many people start with the mind and they fail; they fail because they start from a wrong place. Everything should be done in the right order.
If you become capable of relaxing the body voluntarily, then you will be able to help your mind relax voluntarily. Mind is a more complex phenomenon. Once you have become confident that the body listens to you, you will have a new trust in yourself. Now even the mind can listen to you. It will take a little longer with the mind, but it happens.
When the mind is relaxed, then start relaxing your heart, the world of your feelings, emotions -- which is even more complex, more subtle. But now you will be moving with trust, with great trust in yourself. Now you will know it is possible. If it is possible with the body and possible with the mind, it is possible with the heart too. And then only, when you have gone through these three steps, can you take the fourth. Now you can go to the innermost core of your being, which is beyond body, mind, heart: the very center of your existence. And you will be able to relax it too.
And that relaxation certainly brings the greatest joy possible, the ultimate in ecstasy, acceptance. You will be full of bliss and rejoicing. Your life will have the quality of dance to it.

8. The whole of existence is dancing, except man. The whole of existence is in a very relaxed movement; movement there is, certainly, but it is utterly relaxed. Trees are growing and birds are chirping and rivers are flowing, stars are moving: everything is going in a very relaxed way. No hurry, no haste, no worry, and no waste. Except man. Man has fallen a victim of his mind.
Man can rise above gods and fall below animals. Man has a great spectrum. From the lowest to the highest, man is a ladder.
And once the mind dies, you are born as a no-mind. That birth is enlightenment. That birth brings you for the first time to the land of peace, the lotus paradise. It brings you to the world of bliss, benediction. Otherwise you remain in hell. Right now you are in hell. But if you resolve, if you decide, if you choose consciousness, right now you can take a jump, a leap from hell into heaven.

9. Your so-called religions have made you very tense, because they have created guilt in you. My effort here is to help you get rid of all guilt and all fear. I would like to tell you: there is no hell and no heaven. So don't be afraid of hell and don't be greedy for heaven.
All that exists is this moment. You can make this moment a hell or a heaven -- that certainly is possible -- but there is no heaven or hell somewhere else. Hell is when you are all tense, and heaven is when you are all relaxed. Total relaxation is paradise.

10. Start relaxing. Start from the circumference -- that's where we are, and we can start only from where we are. Relax the circumference of your being -- relax your body, relax your behavior, relax your acts. Walk in a relaxed way, eat in a relaxed way, talk, listen in a relaxed way. Slow down every process. Don't be in a hurry and don't be in haste. Move as if all eternity is available to you -- in fact, it is available to you. We are here from the beginning and we are going to be here to the very end, if there is a beginning and there is an end. In fact, there is no beginning and no end. We have always been here and we will be here always. Forms go on changing, but not the substance; garments go on changing, but not the soul.

11.Tension means hurry, fear, doubt. Tension means a constant effort to protect, to be secure, to be safe. Tension means preparing for the tomorrow now, or for the afterlife -- afraid tomorrow you will not be able to face the reality, so be prepared. Tension means the past that you have not lived really but only somehow bypassed; it hangs, it is a hangover, it surrounds you.
Remember one very fundamental thing about life: any experience that has not been lived will hang around you, will persist: "Finish me! Live me! Complete me!" There is an intrinsic quality in every experience that it tends and wants to be finished, completed. Once completed, it evaporates; incomplete, it persists, it tortures you, it haunts you, it attracts your attention. It says, "What are you going to do about me? I am still incomplete -- fulfill me!"
Your whole past hangs around you with nothing completed -- because nothing has been lived really, everything somehow bypassed, partially lived, only so-so, in a lukewarm way. There has been no intensity, no passion. You have been moving like a somnambulist, a sleepwalker. So that past hangs, and the future creates fear. And between the past and the future is crushed your present, the only reality.
You will have to relax from the circumference. The first step in relaxing is the body. Remember as many times as possible to look in the body, whether you are carrying some tension in the body somewhere -- at the neck, in the head, in the legs. Relax it consciously. Just go to that part of the body, and persuade that part, say to it lovingly "Relax!"
And you will be surprised that if you approach any part of your body, it listens, it follows you -- it is your body! With closed eyes, go inside the body from the toe to the head searching for any place where there is a tension. And then talk to that part as you talk to a friend; let there be a dialogue between you and your body. Tell it to relax, and tell it, "There is nothing to fear. Don't be afraid. I am here to take care -- you can relax." Slowly slowly, you will learn the knack of it. Then the body becomes relaxed.
Then take another step, a little deeper; tell the mind to relax. And if the body listens, mind also listens, but you cannot start with the mind -- you have to start from the beginning. You cannot start from the middle. Many people start with the mind and they fail; they fail because they start from a wrong place. Everything should be done in the right order.
If you become capable of relaxing the body voluntarily, then you will be able to help your mind relax voluntarily. Mind is a more complex phenomenon. Once you have become confident that the body listens to you, you will have a new trust in yourself. Now even the mind can listen to you. It will take a little longer with the mind, but it happens.
When the mind is relaxed, then start relaxing your heart, the world of your feelings, emotions -- which is even more complex, more subtle. But now you will be moving with trust, with great trust in yourself. Now you will know it is possible. If it is possible with the body and possible with the mind, it is possible with the heart too. And then only, when you have gone through these three steps, can you take the fourth. Now you can go to the innermost core of your being, which is beyond body, mind, heart: the very center of your existence. And you will be able to relax it too. And that relaxation certainly brings the greatest joy possible, the ultimate in ecstasy, acceptance. You will be full of bliss and rejoicing. Your life will have the quality of dance to it.

12.The whole of existence is dancing, except man. The whole of existence is in a very relaxed movement; movement there is, certainly, but it is utterly relaxed. Trees are growing and birds are chirping and rivers are flowing, stars are moving: everything is going in a very relaxed way. No hurry, no haste, no worry, and no waste. Except man. Man has fallen a victim of his mind.
Man can rise above gods and fall below animals. Man has a great spectrum. From the lowest to the highest, man is a ladder.

13.The body is very limited; it has a simple polarity: food and sex. It moves like a pendulum between these two, food and sex; it has nothing more to it. But if you are identified with the mind, then mind has many dimensions. You can be interested in philosophy, you can be interested in science, you can be interested in religion -- you can be interested in as many things as you can imagine. If you are identified with the heart, then your desires will be of a still higher nature, higher than the mind. You will become more aesthetic, more sensitive, and more alert, more loving. The mind is aggressive, the heart is receptive. The mind is male, the heart is female.The mind is logic, the heart is love.
So it depends where you are stuck: at the body, at the mind, at the heart. These are the three most important places from which one can function. But there is also the fourth in you; in the East it is called TURIYA. Turiya simply means the fourth, the transcendental.
If you are aware of your transcendentalness, then all desires disappear. Then one simply IS with no desire at all, with nothing to be asked, to be fulfilled. There is no future and no past. Then one lives just in the moment, utterly contented, fulfilled. In the fourth, your one-thousand-petaled lotus opens up; you become divine.

14. Inquire, look for the exact place where you are. As far as I am concerned, all desire is a sheer wastage, all wanting is wrong. But if you are identified with the body I cannot say that to you because that will be too far away from you. If you are identified with the body I will say: move a little towards higher desires, the desires of the mind, and then a little higher, the desires of the heart, and then ultimately to the state of desirelessness. No desire can ever be fulfilled. This is the difference between the scientific approach and the religious approach. Science tries to fulfill your desires and of course science has succeeded in doing many things, but man remains in the same misery. Religion tries to wake you up to that great understanding from where you can see that all desires are intrinsically unfulfillable.
One has to go beyond all desires; only then is there contentment. Contentment is not at
the end of a desire, contentment is not by fulfilling the desire, because the desire cannot be fulfilled. By the time you come to the fulfillment of your desire, you will find a thousand and one other desires have arisen. Each desire branches out into many new
desires. And again and again it will happen, and your whole life will be wasted.
Those who have known, those who have seen -- the buddhas, the awakened ones -- have
all agreed on one point. It is not a philosophical thing, it is factual, the fact of the inner world: that contentment is when all desires have been dropped. It is with the absence of the desires that contentment arises within you -- in the absence. In fact, the very absence of desires IS contentment, IS fulfillment, fruition, flowering.

15. Move from lower desires to higher desires, from gross desires to more subtle
Desires, then to the subtlest, because from the subtlest the jump into no-desire, into
desirelessness, is easy. Desirelessness is NIRVANA.
Nirvana has two meanings. It is one of the most beautiful words; any language can be
proud of this word. It has two meanings, but those two meanings are like two sides of the same coin. One meaning is cessation of the ego, and the other meaning is cessation of all desires. It happens simultaneously. The ego and the desires are intrinsically together, they are inseparably together. The moment ego dies, desires disappear, or vice versa: the moment desires are transcended, ego is transcended. And to be desireless, to be egoless,is to know the ultimate bliss, is to know the eternal ecstasy. And that's what sannyas is all about: the quest for the eternal ecstasy that begins but never ends.

16. To accept the challenge of the unknown in spite of all fears, is courage. The fears are there, but if you go on accepting the challenge again and again, slowly slowly those fears disappear. The experience of the joy that the unknown brings, the great ecstasy that starts happening with the unknown, makes you strong enough, gives you a certain integrity,makes your intelligence sharp. For the first time you start feeling that life is not just a boredom but an adventure. Then slowly slowly fears disappear; then you are always seeking and searching for some adventure.
But basically courage is risking the known for the unknown, the familiar for the
unfamiliar, the comfortable for the uncomfortable arduous pilgrimage to some unknown
destination. One never knows whether one will be able to make it or not. It is gambling,
but only the gamblers know what life is.

17. All desires are insane!
The only sanity is to be desireless.
The only sanity is to be herenow.
This moment is more than enough.

18. While you are listening to a joke, if you can logically conclude what is going to happen,and if it actually happens the way you concluded, then there will be no laughter because there will be no build up of tension in the first place; and secondly, there will be no sudden change. These two things are needed: a building up of tension so you become more and more narrowed, more and more tense, and then suddenly an unexpected turn --the punch line. It triggers a new process; the whole logic falls flat. All jokes are illogical,and because they are illogical they bring great laughter to you.

19. All perfectionists are neurotic. The very effort to become perfect is obsessive -- it creates neurosis, it creates a sort of madness. Then you will never be sane. The only sanity there is, is to accept yourself as you are. Don't condemn, and don't judge. Don't make standards to judge and don't make criteria to judge. Suddenly you see that you have started moving, that the river is flowing. And the river reaches to the ocean of its own accord; nobody needs to force it. The more you try to change yourself, the more you will be in a vicious circle. And then guilt is created; and when you feel guilty, you feel condemned, and when you feel condemned, in that condemnation life becomes a hell. The hell does not exist somewhere; it exists in a wrong attitude. Then you live in hell, and then your whole being is surrounded by a nightmare.

20. Drop that nightmare. Start living and flowing -- a deep let-go, acceptance. And wherever you move, don't be worried, because God is everywhere. Wherever you reach, don't be worried: he is everywhere. You cannot miss him. How can you miss him? That is impossible. You can go on forgetting him, but you cannot miss him -- he is in you, he is everywhere; only he is. But when you create the idea of guilt, for whatsoever reason, then you create a gap; then you are surrounded by your own darkness. Drop that word guilt, and always remember that words are very potential and powerful.

21. I am cutting the root of the disease itself. I am not here to sell any medicine to you, but just to tell you how to cut the very root of the disease. So remember, each stage is right, each stage is necessary. Pass through each, and don't try to jump ahead.

22. And to be in trust is to be in ecstasy; to be in trust is to be in God; to be in trust is to be fulfilled.

23. I say experiment with meditation. From another angle try to understand it. Doubt means thinking. The more you doubt, the more you can think. All great thinkers are skeptical -- have to be. Skepticism creates thinking. When you say no, then thinking arises; if you say yes, finished -- there is no need to think. When you say no, then you have to think. Thinking is negative. Doubt is a basic necessity for thinking. People, who cannot doubt, cannot think; they cannot become great thinkers. So, more doubt means more thinking, more thinking means more doubt. Meditation is a way to come out of thinking. Once the clouds of thoughts are not there, and the process of thinking ceases, even for a single moment, you have a glimpse of your being.

24. One of the greatest thinkers in the West, Descartes, has said, "I think, therefore I am." COGITO ERGO SUM. And Descartes is the father of modern Western philosophy.'I think, therefore I am.'Just the opposite has been the experience in the East. Buddha, Nagarjuna, Sankara, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, they will laugh, they will laugh tremendously when they hear Descartes' dictum,'I think, therefore I am'; because they say, "I don't think, therefore I am."
Because when thinking ceases, only then does one know who one is. In a non-thinking state of consciousness one realizes one's being, not by thinking, but by non-thinking. Meditation is non-thinking; it is an effort to create a state of no-mind. Doubt is mind. In fact, to say 'doubting mind' is wrong; it is repetitive -- mind is doubt; doubt is mind. When doubt ceases, mind ceases; or when mind ceases, doubt ceases. And then self-evident truth arises within, a pinnacle of light, eternity, timelessness; and then there is trust.

25. The whole world is full of pseudo-religious people: churches, temples, gurudwaras, mosques, full of religious people. And can't you see the world is absolutely irreligious? With so many religious people, and the world is so irreligious, how is this miracle happening? Everybody is religious, and the total is irreligiousness. The religion is false. People have cultivated trust. Trust has become a belief, not an experience. They have been taught to believe; they have not been taught to know -- that's where humanity has missed. Never believe. If you cannot trust, it is better to doubt, because through doubt, some day or other, the possibility will arise; because you cannot live with doubt eternally. Doubt is disease; it is an illness. In doubt you can never feel fulfilled; in doubt you will always tremble, in doubt you will always remain in anguish and divided and indecisive. In doubt you will remain in a nightmare; so one day or other you will start seeking how to go beyond it. So I say it is good to be an atheist rather than a theist, a pseudo-theist.

26. Conditioned to believe: believe in God, believe in soul, believe in this and believe in that. Now that belief has entered into your bones and your blood, but it remains a belief: you have not known. And unless you know, you cannot be liberated. Knowledge liberates; only knowing liberates. All beliefs are borrowed; others have given them to you. They are not your flowerings. And how can a borrowed thing lead you towards the real, the absolutely real? Drop all that you have taken from others. It is better to be a beggar than to be rich; rich not by your own earning, but rich through stolen goods, rich through borrowed things, rich through tradition, rich through heritage. No, it is better to be a beggar, but to be on one's own. That poverty has a richness in it because it is true, and your richness of belief is very poor. Those beliefs can never go very deep; they remain skin-deep at the most. Scratch a little, and the disbelief comes out.

You believe in God. Then your business fails, and suddenly, the disbelief is there. You say, "I don't believe, I cannot believe in God." You believe in God, and your beloved dies, and the disbelief comes up. You believe in God, and just by the death of your beloved the belief is destroyed? It is not worth much. Trust can never be destroyed -- once it is there, nothing can destroy it; nothing, absolutely nothing can destroy it.

So remember, there is a great difference between trust and belief. Trust is personal; belief is social. Trust you have to grow in; belief you can remain in, whatsoever you are, and belief can be imposed on you. Drop beliefs. The fear will be there; because if you drop belief, doubt arises. Each belief is forcing doubt somewhere, repressing doubt. Don't be worried about it; let the doubt come. Everybody has to pass through a dark night before he reaches the sunrise. Everybody has to pass through doubt. Long is the journey, dark is the night. But when after the long journey and the dark night the morning arises, then you know it was all worthwhile. Trust cannot be cultivated. And never try to cultivate it -- that is what has been done by the whole of humanity. Cultivated trust becomes belief. Discover it within yourself, don't cultivate it. Go deeper into your being, to the very source of your being, and discover it.

27. It happened that when Alexander came to India he met a sannyasin, a great sage. The sage's name was Dandamis; that is how Greek historians have pronounced it. Alexander asked him, "Do you believe in God?" The sage remained silent. Alexander said, "I cannot see, so how can I believe? How do you believe without seeing him?" The naked sage laughed. He took Alexander by his hand towards the marketplace. Alexander followed -- maybe he was taking him somewhere where he could show him God. A small boy was flying a kite, and the kite had gone so far away that it was impossible to see it. The sage stopped there, and asked that boy, "Where is the kite? Because we cannot see it, and without seeing how can we believe? Where is the kite? How do you still believe that the kite exists?" The boy said, "I can feel the pull of it." And the sage said to Alexander, "I can also feel the pull of it."

28. Trust is nothing but the feel of the pull. You don't see -- one has never seen God; only the pull is felt. But that is enough, that is more than enough. But then you have to be in a certain state where the pull can be felt. It cannot be learned from scriptures; it is not a doctrine. Nobody can explain it: you have to feel the pull.

The old sage laughed. Alexander also realized that it had been a revelation. But the sage said, "Wait; no need to believe in me. You take the thread in your hand and feel the pull, because who knows? This boy may be deceiving. Never believe. Feel the pull." If Alexander had gone away just listening to the boy, it would have been a belief But he felt the pull: the kite was there on the other end, the pull was here on this end. He could feel the force. He thanked the old sage.

29. If you are frustrated in the first and don't become hopeless, you then enter the second. If you are frustrated in the first, get so much caught in the frustration, and become hopeless, you never enter the second. Then you remain a body; you never come to know that you are also a mind. In the second, if you are frustrated, as you will be -- it has to be so, because the second is not the goal, not the end -- if you are frustrated and you become hopeless, then you are caught in the second. But if you are frustrated and don't become hopeless, and your search and enquiry goes higher and higher, and you try to see why this love failed... the first love failed because it was only bodily -- it could not satisfy the mind; the second failed because it was only of the mind -- it could not satisfy the soul: and when the third type of love arises, then you will be near me.


30. Learn more and more to be in a state of non-chattering -- the inner talk has to stop. Then your mind is not hindering; then you are available; then your deepest shrine of being is available to me. But by and by, you will learn. In the beginning, it happens so. You have always been talking, and if you are very articulate in talking, then of course you feel crippled. If you are very articulate and you can talk beautifully, artistically, if you can play perfectly with language and then suddenly you come to me and your throat does not allow you to speak... and something goes wrong and the mechanism doesn't function: you feel that you are crippled. But you are not crippled -- the impact of my presence has simply given a shock to the mechanism of your mind. And it is good. Don't try to bring it back. Let it go. Be quiet, still, silent and waiting. Be feminine.



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.