The Secret of Secrets

Never think of going somewhere. Think in terms of transforming yourself here. “There” is a cunning strategy of the mind to deceive you. The mind always makes you interested in things far away, there, so that you can be led away from here.

Man is not born to be a machine, but man lives like a machine and dies like a machine. Man has the seed of a great flowering of consciousness, man has the possibility to become God. But that doesn’t happen. It does not happen because man has been hypnotized – by the society, by the state, by the organized church, by the vested interests. The society needs slaves, and man can remain a slave only if he is not allowed to grow into his uttermost flowering. The society needs your flesh and your skins and naturally nobody likes it. Hence the whole process of socialization, of civilization, is nothing but a deep hypnosis.

man of soul is always dangerous because a man of soul is a free man, he cannot be reduced to slavery. A man who has an immortal soul in him has a deeper commitment to existence itself, to God himself. He does not care a bit about the man-made structures of society, civilization and culture; these are prison cells for him. He does not exist as a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. He cannot be part of a crowd. He exists as an individual. The body is part of a crowd, your soul is not. Your soul is deeply individual. Its flavor is that of freedom.

You start diving deep within your own being. And there is the source of immortality. The society prevents you from going inwards. And the best way is to give you a false idea that you are going inwards. The magician told the sheep that they are lions, suggested to them that they are immortals, hypnotized them into believing that they are not only men but they are great magicians.

The Secret of the Golden Flower is one of the most esoteric treatises in the world. It will show you the way to become more than the body. It will show you the way to go beyond death. It will show you the way to bloom – how not to remain a seed but to become a golden flower – what in India we have called the one-thousand-petaled lotus, in China they call the golden flower. It is a symbol.

half-truths because half-truths are more dangerous than lies, because they are powerful.

Half of you belongs to the earth and half of you belongs to the sky. Now you are nowhere. Now you are nobody. This can create madness. So for centuries The Secret of the Golden Flower was only conveyed orally.

The seed has to die, only then can it grow; the seed has to disappear, only then can the tree happen.

Past is just your memory and future is just your imagination. But you have been hypnotized to live in the past and you have been hypnotized to live in the future: Choose, either past or future. But no society allows you to live in the present.

Why are you so hard on me? I am dying and you are talking such great philosophy – ‘You never lived.’ Is this the time to say such things?” I listened silently. I just became absolutely silent. Then the rage disappeared and he started crying, and great tears came to his eyes. He held my hand with great love and then he said, “Maybe you are right. I never lived. Maybe you are not rude, you are just being true. And I know nobody else would have said this to me.” And then great gratitude, and for a moment he became so conscious that one could have seen the light on the face – it was there, he was all aura. And he thanked me. That night he died. I remained with him to the last moment. And he said, “If you had not been here I would have missed my death too, as I have missed my life. But I am dying consciously. At least one thing I am happy about – I am not dying unconsciously.” And his death was beautiful. He died without any regret, he died in a relaxed way. He died almost with a welcoming heart. He died full of gratitude. He died prayerfully. His next life is bound to have a different quality.

But one has to live each moment, whether it is of life, of love, of anger, of death…Whatsoever it is, one has to live each moment as consciously as possible.

Inattention is darkness, attention is light. And this treatise will teach you how to create more light in you, so that one day the golden flower will blossom.

Have you known anything about yourself directly? Have you ever encountered yourself directly without bringing the opinion of others into it? If you have not done it, you have not yet lived. Life starts only by encountering oneself, by seeing oneself directly, immediately. Life exists only when you are capable of seeing yourself as you are, not as others think about you. What can they think about you? What can they say about you? They can watch your behavior, they cannot watch you. If you want to watch yourself, only you can do that, nobody else. It cannot be done by servants, it cannot be delegated to somebody else. It cannot be done by the experts either. But we are so much interested in the opinions of others because we are absolutely absent, there is nobody awake inside – deeply asleep, we are snoring inside.

Watch your own absent-mindedness. Watching it will create attentiveness in you. Watch what is happening within you: thoughts passing, memories arising, a cloud of anger, a dark night of sadness, or a beautiful morning of joy. Watch all that passes in you, become more and more watchful. Slowly, slowly you will develop an integrated watchfulness. And the method taught by The Secret of The Golden Flower is how to become integrated in your inner light. This is the story of this book before we enter into the sutras.

He said: “One should be like water – flowing, fluid, fresh, always moving towards the ocean and one should be like water – soft, feminine, receptive, loving, nonviolent. One should not be like a rock. The rock appears to be very strong but is not, and water appears to be very weak but is not. Never be deceived by appearances. Finally the water wins over the rock and the rock is destroyed and becomes sand and is taken to the sea. The rock disappears finally – against the soft water.”

The water is always ready to surrender, but through surrender it conquers – that is the way of the woman. The woman always surrenders and conquers through it. And the man wants to conquer and the ultimate result is just a surrender and nothing else.

The book The Secret of the Golden Flower is one of the eternal sources where one can again become alive, one can again find the door to the divine. The sutras: Master Lu-tsu said: That which exists through itself is called the Way, Tao.

Truth will have to be your own experience. Nobody can define the truth, but the Way can be defined, the Way can be made clear. The master cannot give you the truth, but the master can give you the Way. And once the Way is there then all that is needed is to walk on it.

Tao simply means “the Way.” That which exists through itself is called the Way. And the definition is beautiful. Lu-tsu says, “That which exists by itself, that which needs nobody else’s support, that which has always existed whether you walk on it or not…”

We are in Tao, because where else can we be? To live is to be on the Way. To live is to live in God, to breathe is to breathe in God. Where else can we be? But just as the fish lives in the ocean and is completely oblivious of the ocean, we are living in Tao and are completely oblivious of Tao. In fact it is so obvious, that’s why we are so oblivious.

Life is possible only if there is a fundamental law holding it. Life is possible only if there is something that supports it. Look at the immense order in existence. It is not a chaos, it is a cosmos. What makes it a cosmos? Why is there so much harmony? There must be a law that keeps the harmony going, flowing, keeps everything in accord. But we don’t know about it. We don’t know anything about our own being, and we are joined through our being with Tao.

Tao has neither name nor shape. It is the one essence, the one primal spirit.

And a truth which is not absolutely certain is not truth at all. The truth has to be absolutely certain, it cannot be only approximately certain.

Jesus says: “When your two eyes become one, there will be light.” He is talking like a Taoist alchemist: When your two eyes become one there will be light. When your two eyes become one – when your male and female disappear into each other – that is the ultimate orgasmic experience. What you feel making love to a woman or to a man is only a glimpse of it, a very fleeting glimpse. It is so momentary that by the time you become aware of it, it is already gone. You become aware of it only in the past – it is so fleeting. But it is a glimpse, a glimpse of the meeting of the man and the woman. This is an exterior meeting. It is a miracle that it happens even for a single moment. But there is a deep possibility and this has been the work of Tantra, Tao, yoga, and all the great secret teachings of the world: to help you become aware of your feminine and your masculine inside. It is what Tantrikas call Shiva and Shakti and Taoists call yin and yang – the polarity of positive and negative, the day and night in you – will meet.

But you cannot see it unless they become one. Then it is released, then there is a great explosion of light. Zarathustra calls it “explosion of fire,” Lao Tzu calls it “explosion of light.” It is the same. You must have come across the statement of John the Baptist. He used to say to his disciples, “I baptize you with water. After me shall come one who will baptize you with fire.” That’s what he meant – “After me there will come one who will baptize you with fire”

Water always goes downward, hence it represents an outward flow, it goes away from itself; its journey is an exterior journey. Fire goes upward, always upward, and upward is synonymous…

Jesus himself again and again says, “Repent. Repent ye!” and the word has fallen into a wrong interpretation with the Christians. They have made it repentance for misdeeds. It has nothing to do with misdeeds. The word repent actually means return, go in, go back. It means turning back: restore your originality. The word repent means metanoia, turning back – a…

And when the two eyes, when these two flames, when these two hemispheres of your consciousness join together, are absolutely bridged and you become one flame, that one flame is what Plotinus calls the “flight of the alone to the alone.” The Great One is the term given to that which has nothing above it. And if you can become that one, you have become the Great One. This is the Taoist way of saying something about God without using the word God: if you…

What is the secret of making these two eyes one? How to make the male and the female one in you? How to let your woman and man dissolve into each other so that you are no more a duality, so that you are no more a divided house, against yourself, so that there is no longer any conflict and tension, so that all is one? In that oneness is…

Man represents action, woman represents nonaction. You have to use action to attain nonaction, you have to make effort to become effortless. You have to go and put in all your energies, you have to become so active that nothing is left behind – all energy becomes involved in that creativity – and then suddenly, when all energy is involved, there happens a transformation. Just as at a…

First you have to learn how to dance, and you have to put all your energies into dancing. And one day that strange experience happens when suddenly the dancer disappears in the dance and the dance happens without any effort. Then it is inaction. First you have to…

The golden flower is a symbol, the symbol of when your energies are no longer dual and have become one: great light is released, and the light is golden. It is as if a flower of golden light has opened inside of you. And it is not just a symbol. It is a symbol but it is almost literally true; it happens exactly like that. Right now you exist as a darkness, as a dark night. Then you exist as a sunrise. You cannot see the sun anywhere but the light is there. There is no source to it – it is a sourceless light. But once you have known that golden light in you, you have become an immortal. Then there is no death because the light never dies.

Many scriptures of the world begin with the word light. “In the beginning God said, ‘Let there be light.’” That is the beginning. If there had ever been a beginning, it cannot be otherwise; it had to have been with light. But there has never been a beginning; this is just a parable! Light has existed always.

The moment a person attains to this eternal light, his life has a single flavor. That flavor is contained by absolute awareness: his unconscious has disappeared, there is no longer any dark part in his being. Now if a Freudian looks into such a man, he will find only consciousness, only consciousness; he will not find the unconscious. If a Freudian looks into you, only one part is conscious, against this one part there are nine parts which are unconscious – only one-tenth of your mind is conscious. A buddha is one hundred percent consciousness. The work on the circulation of the light depends entirely on the backward-flowing movement, so that the thoughts are gathered together. The heavenly heart lies between sun and moon.

Too much speed – everything has to be done immediately – no patience, no waiting. They have forgotten how to be passive, how to be patient, how to wait for things. They have lost all capacity to be inactive. They don’t know how to go on a holiday. Even if they go on a holiday they are more active than ever.

They will do something rather than stop and enjoy just being. They will remain active. Their whole life people think that when they are retired then they will enjoy. But they cannot enjoy, they cannot rest. People die very fast once they become retired.

The West is sun-oriented, the East is moon-oriented. The East has become too passive, too fatalistic: “Nothing has to be done. Simply wait, God will do it.” This is another kind of foolishness and stupidity. The East is poor, lazy, lousy, and people are not worried by anything. The misery all around, the poverty, the beggars, the illness – nobody is worried, everything is accepted. “What can you do? It is God’s will. We have to accept. We have to just wait. When things are too much, God will come. What else can we do?” This is the feminine mind.

Then one is active and yet remains inactive deep inside, then one is inactive and yet remains active on the outside. On the outside be sun-oriented, on the inside be moon-oriented. Let sun and moon meet in you and be exactly in the middle. And in the middle is transcendence.

Man is a center and also a circumference. If you move towards the circumference, then you will have many thoughts. The circumference consists of many, the center is one. If you move towards the center, thoughts start disappearing. At the very core all thoughts disappear – there is only awareness. That’s what this secret treatise says: …so that the thoughts are gathered together. The light has to move inwards. When you look at a tree, your eyes are throwing their light on the tree – the light is moving outward. When you close your eyes, the light starts turning inward – metanoia, repent, return. And when the light falls on your own being, there is self-knowledge, self-knowing. And that self-knowing brings you freedom – freedom from all entanglements, freedom from all attachments, freedom from death, freedom from body. It creates the soul in you. That’s what Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples: that you are not born with a soul, you have to create it by metanoia.

And when the light moves inwards and circulates inside your being, because there is no outlet left – that’s what meditation is, that’s what Buddha is doing under the bodhi tree – you sit silently and patiently, you close all the doors and allow the light to circulate within. Then for the first time you become aware of the body and all that the body contains – all of its mysteries. This small body contains all the mysteries of the universe. It is a miniature cosmos. Therefore when the light circulates, the energies of the whole body appear before its throne, as, when a holy king has established the capital and has laid down the fundamental rules of order, all the states approach with tribute; or as, when the master is quiet and calm, manservants and maids obey his orders of their own accord, and each does his work. And when this light is there moving inside you, the body becomes a servant, the senses become obedient servants, you need not try to control them. Of their own accord they follow you. This is the beauty of Tao: it never enforces anything, it does not want to cultivate any character. It says: Simply become full of light and all else will follow.

A very significant thing is being said in this sutra: The light is easy to move; it is difficult to fix it, so don’t try to fix it.

That is the difference between Tao and yoga: yoga wants to fix it – concentrate on the third eye. In a nutshell, that is the whole philosophy of yoga: if you can concentrate your whole consciousness on the third eye you will be transformed, your two eyes will become one and you will be full of light. And just beyond the third eye – the third eye is the sixth center in the yoga map of consciousness – beyond the sixth is the seventh. The seventh is called the one-thousand-petaled lotus. If the light is concentrated at the third eye, when it becomes too much, it will give a push to the seventh center, it will start rising like water in a reservoir. And the push to the seventh center will open the bud that has remained a bud for centuries, for millions of lives. Tao works from a different route. Tao says: To fix the light is very difficult. Don’t become…

Tao is a spontaneous science: Don’t cultivate, don’t force, don’t create unnecessary troubles for yourself; use the natural capacity of the mind – that it moves, that it likes movement, that it is a wanderer. Use it, let light circulate. We will come to…

Through its circulation, Taoists came to discover the seven hundred points of acupuncture. Circulating it all over the body, they became aware that there are seven hundred points where light…

How did the Taoists come to know about it? They had no machines, no technology. Their only technique was to go in and circulate the light. We will come to know about the actual method – how to circulate it. This is just to make a background so you understand what exactly their approach is. They say if you circulate the light and go on circulating it, at a certain point it crystallizes on its own, you need not worry about fixing it. Circulating, circulating, circulating, one moment, suddenly, you find all has stopped, and the thing has happened that yoga tries to make happen. In Tao it is a happening, in yoga it is a hard, long journey of effort. Yoga is male-oriented. Tao is not female-oriented, Tao is both – a synthesis. Circulation is masculine energy and fixation is feminine energy. Reach to the nonactive, reach to the passive through action, through effort attain effortlessness. In…

It is the secret of all immortality. This is what the Western alchemists used to call the philosopher’s stone, what in India is called amrit, elixir, nectar. This is an alchemical treatise: it gives you the secrets for transforming your chemistry into alchemy, for transforming the baser metal into gold. Right now you are only a baser metal, but you contain the…

The Golden Flower is the Elixir of Life. Although it works very accurately, it is yet so fluid that it needs extreme intelligence and clarity,…

tranquility. People without this highest degree of intelligence and understanding do not find the way; people without this utmost capacity for absorption and tranquility cannot keep fast hold of it.

All are born intelligent, although their intelligences may differ in their expressions. One is intelligent in music, another is intelligent in mathematics, but if you make mathematics the criterion then the musician looks unintelligent. If you put them both into one examination where mathematics is the criterion, the musician fails.

If you accept your intelligence, if you accept yourself, you will become clear, absolutely clear; all clouds will disappear.

CHAPTER 2 Empty Eyes

But trust is not afraid of doubt because trust is not against doubt. Trust uses doubt, trust knows how to use the energy contained in doubt itself. That’s the difference between faith and trust. Faith is false; it creates a pseudo kind of religion, it creates hypocrites. Trust has a sublime beauty and truth about it. It grows through doubt, it uses doubt as manure, it transforms doubt. Doubt is a friend, doubt is not the enemy.

Trust is a transformation: you are becoming more illumined. And because you are using doubt as a challenge, as an opportunity, there is never any repression. Slowly, slowly doubt disappears because its energy has been taken by trust. Doubt, in fact, is nothing but trust growing; doubt is trust on the way. Always think of doubt in such a way: that doubt is trust on the way.

So please, never feel guilty around me. I am utterly against any kind of guilt. Guilt is absolutely wrong. But it has been used by the priests and the politicians and the puritans down the ages – for centuries. Guilt is a strategy, a strategy to exploit people: make them feel guilty.

Because of the guilt they will never be able to accept themselves, they will be always condemning. Because of the guilt they will be ready to believe in anything. Just to get rid of guilt they will do anything. Any nonsense, any nonsense ritual they will perform just to get rid of the guilt.

Only an undivided person can trust himself – his feeling, his intuition. You are always shaking, trembling inside; you need somebody to lean on. And once you lean on somebody, once you become dependent on somebody, you remain childish, you never grow. Your mind age remains that of a child. You never attain to any maturity, you never become independent.

I am utterly against any kind of guilt. Remember it always: if you start feeling guilty about something around me, then you are doing it on your own. Then you are still carrying the voices of your parents, the priests within you; you have not yet heard me, you have not yet listened to me. I want you to be totally free of all guilt. Once you are free of guilt you are a religious person. That’s my definition of a religious person.

Even though on the surface they seem to be opposed, deep down they are friends, helping each other.

Because you trust, hence you doubt. Your doubt proves your trust, not otherwise. Think of a man who cannot doubt – how can he trust? If he is even incapable of doubt, how can he be capable of trust? Trust is the highest form of the same energy; doubt is the lowest rung of the same ladder and trust is the highest rung of the same ladder. Use doubt, use it joyfully.

You are a crowd: you are not one person, you are many persons – how can you be at ease? There must be great noise inside you, one part pulling you in this direction and another part in that direction. How can you grow if you are pulled in so many

directions simultaneously? There is bound to be unease, tension, anguish, anxiety.

Nobody can live with doubt and in doubt. Doubt pushes you towards trust. Doubt says, “Go and find a place where you can relax, where you can be, totally.” Because doubt is your friend. It simply says, “This is not the home. Go ahead – search, seek, inquire.” It creates the urge to inquire, to explore.

A believer never moves – he has already believed.

You have to fight, you have to struggle, you have to earn. Nothing is without a price in life; you have to pay the price. They have not paid the price – and they think that just by worshipping in a temple they will attain? They are utter fools, they are wasting their time. All their worship is just an illusion.

You cannot go to the scientist to dissect the rose and find whether it contains beauty or not – it does not contain it. The beauty is not contained in the rose. The beauty is from the beyond, it simply dances on the rose: those who have eyes will see; those who don’t have eyes will not see.

Cause and effect is a blind relationship; it is materialistic, it is between matter and matter. But synchronicity is not material; it is spiritual, it is poetic, it is a love affair. If you become open to me, something will start happening to you. And remember, I am not the cause of it. You need not thank me, you need not be grateful to me, I am not the cause of it.

One is alone. Aloneness is ultimate – but aloneness is not loneliness. You are not lonely. And that’s where the whole misunderstanding lies and that’s what makes you so terrified. To be lonely means you are missing the other. To be lonely is a negative state. To be lonely means you are feeling empty, you are searching for the other: you believe in the other, you depend on the other – and the other is not there. And because the other is not

there, there is great nothingness, but that nothingness is a kind of negative nothingness.

When everything else has disappeared, you will have to disappear too, because you depend on others, you are just a reflection of the others. You have seen your face in the eyes of others; they have been mirrors. Now there are no longer any mirrors – who are you? All has disappeared, then how can you remain in this loneliness? You also start evaporating and that creates great fear – the fear of death.

The very idea of separation is our misery, the very idea that “I am an island” creates hell. Nobody is an island, we belong to the continent; we are part of this oceanic existence. Past, present, future, in all directions and all dimensions, it is all one. In fact, the word alone means all-oneness – that is aloneness. All-one is alone. But for that, you will have to go a little more into this nothingness. First the nothingness is negative; the negative is its outermost core, the shell part. If you go a little deeper you will find the positive negativeness. The positive negativeness is what Buddha calls nirvana, enlightenment, shunya. When you move deeper and you have crossed the shell part – the hard negative part, the dark part – suddenly there is light, the night is over. And then you feel a totally new kind of aloneness which you have never felt before, and then you know the distinction between loneliness

Now there is nobody inside and nobody outside, and all is one. This unity, this absolute oneness brings benediction. Then there is no fear, there cannot be, because now there can be no death – how can there be fear? The death has already happened, that which could die has died. Now you are in the world of immortality, you have found the elixir. This is the nectar we will be talking about again and again in these sutras of The Secret of the Golden Flower. This is the nectar, amrit. This is the elixir, the philosopher’s stone. Once you have tasted of it, all death has disappeared, all time has disappeared, all distinctions have disappeared.

Now the center is everywhere and nowhere. The “I” does not exist anywhere anymore. The very word has become utterly false.

When you go into your aloneness at first it is very lonely, because you have lived with the idea of the other. It was a dream idea; the other is not there. “I” and “thou” – both are false. Martin Buber says that the ultimate quality of prayer is a dialogue between “I” and “thou.” That’s where Judaism got stuck: the ultimate prayer is not a dialogue at all, the ultimate prayer is a monologue because the other is not there. A Zen master used to call his own name in the morning; every morning. He would shout his own name and say, “How are you?” And he would answer, “I am perfectly well, sir.”

Prayer is a play – playing with your own self. There is no “other.”

All that you see is a projection of your eyes. The world, as it is, you have not seen yet. What you have seen is just a projection, so when you start moving inwards, everything that you have projected on the world will come closer and closer and closer to the eyes and will disappear into your eyes. This world is a projection of your eyes. You don’t see that which is, you project a dream upon it.

Once the projection disappears and you open your eyes, empty eyes – not projecting anything at all, just seeing whatsoever it is, with no idea what it is, with no names, no labels, no interpretations, just seeing, emptied, passive – the world comes to have a totally different meaning and significance.

The only problem is that you are still there, that’s why you feel so alone. You mean lonely. The “I” remains alone, “thou” has disappeared, and without the “thou” the “I” is lonely. The “I” exists only in relationship; the “I” is not an entity but a relationship – it cannot exist without the “thou,” it needs the “thou.” How can the lover exist without the beloved? Once the beloved is not there the lover starts disappearing. You need the beloved, love is a relationship. So is the “I” a relationship. And because you are still protecting the “I” somehow, you have not yet been courageous enough to let it go too. Just as the whole world has disappeared, let this “I” also disappear. It will be frightening in the beginning; it will be a death process – it is a death process. It will look as if you are committing suicide, it will look… Who knows where you are going, whether you will be coming back again

or not? As if madness is exploding in you, great fear will arise and in that fear you will be thrown out again and again. It will happen many times. Slowly, slowly you will have to learn not to be so afraid – there is nothing to fear: you are very close to the treasure. These are the moments when a master is needed to help you, to give you courage, to hold your hand, to say to you, “All is perfectly right. Go in!”

But one day one has to face it and go through it, because again and again you fall upon it and you rush out and the out is not meaningful anymore. The out is all empty, and you come inside and the fear – you have to choose between the two. The outside is no more relevant. You can go on making empty gestures, but how long can you deceive yourself? You know the screen is empty and all your projections are dead and you go inside to the fear, a great storm of fear arises. But there is no other way – one has to go through it to know exactly what happens after this death. The sooner you gather courage the better. And I say again, you are more fortunate, because I am standing ahead of you in that utter emptiness, calling you forth: “Come on! Come ye all. Come again, and again!” And I go on calling you forth just as Christ called Lazarus from the grave: “Lazarus, come out!” In fact, that parable is not a historical fact. It is a parable. It is a parable of moving from the outside to the inside.

The outside becomes a grave when it loses meaning. The outside becomes just a futility, a wasteland, a grave. Nothing grows in it anymore, nothing flowers in it anymore – no possibility of any song and dance – and you live only in empty motions, empty gestures. But the master is standing where you are afraid to go and he calls from there. I am not only standing outside you; you will meet me in that innermost nothingness – not as me, of course – not as a person but as a presence, not separate from you but one with you.

So go on. Let this “me,” this “I” also disappear. And once this “I” disappears there is no loneliness, there is aloneness. And aloneness is beautiful, aloneness is freedom, it is a very positive feeling of wellbeing, a positive feeling of great joy. It is a very great, festive moment. It is celebration. “It seems as though there is nothing but me and I am so alone.” Yes, if “I” remains you will remain lonely. “But then people are on the scene interacting with me and I become confused. And what about you? You also seem just part of the painting.”

Mind creates the fear – when it comes very close to the no-mind, it becomes so afraid of death that it creates fear – and in that fear you rush out again. Next time it happens, go in, in spite of the fear. Just be like the elephant who goes on moving although the dogs go on barking. Let the dogs of the mind bark, go on moving like an elephant. Don’t care at all about the mind – what it is saying.

Fallen flowers don’t jump back to the branches. That is not possible. The enlightened person cannot slide back into illusion. There is no way; for many reasons there is no way. The first reason: the enlightened man is no more – who will slide back? Enlightenment is; there is nothing like an enlightened person. Enlightenment is perfectly there, but there is nobody who is enlightened. That is just a way of speaking, a linguistic fallacy. Who will slide back?

We know the duality, the duality never disappears, so we naturally think about enlightenment also as if one can slide back.

Enlightenment is the realization of the non-dual. That’s why Zen masters say samsara is nirvana – the very illusion is truth. There is no distinction left.

You have been told again and again, you have been taught again and again that to be joyous is wrong and to be miserable is right. You may not have been told so directly, but indirectly you have been conditioned and hypnotized for misery. You have started believing that misery is natural. You see misery all around, misery abounds, everybody is miserable. It seems to be the way things are.

I always suspect that Christianity became the greatest religion because of the cross. It represents misery, suffering. Krishna could not become a great religion because of his flute, because of his dance. Even those who worship him feel a little guilty about him. “How can you be so happy and dancing with girlfriends? And not just one – thousands!

This Christ is a myth; the real Christ was more like Krishna. In fact, if you go deep down into the word Christ you will be surprised: it comes from Krishna, its root is Krishna. Jesus must have been a very joyous man; otherwise how can you think of him eating, drinking, merrily? There are so many scenes where friends have gathered and they are eating and drinking and gossiping. He is not always “gospeling,” sometimes he is gossiping too! And he seems to be the only messenger from God who drinks and eats well and enjoys the small pleasures of life.

And you must have been taught from your very childhood that the world is a wrong place. How can you be happy in this place? We are suffering a kind of punishment.

People even make love with sad faces as if they are on the cross – doing a duty – and even if they want to enjoy, they hide it. They feel guilty. If people really make love with joy they will scream, they will shout, they will cry, they will weep, they will laugh. One never knows what kind of emotions will surface, so it is better to keep yourself in control; otherwise you will look so foolish. And then what will the neighbors think? And modern walls are so thin that you even have to make love in a yoga posture – shavasana, the dead-body posture – and be finished with it as soon as possible, don’t let it become orgasmic.

That’s why after making love people feel a kind of sadness, a kind of frustration, as if they have done something criminal. Again they enjoyed themselves and that is not right. Just see: whenever you are feeling miserable, something feels good. It will look like a contradiction, but it is like this: whenever you are miserable you feel blissful and whenever you are blissful you feel miserable.

There is no need to understand. You have to go into it with innocence, not with understanding, because that understanding is again a kind of calculation; that understanding is again the knowledge that has been given by the society. And that knowledge is creating the whole trouble! You have to become a child again, innocent.

Don’t be calculating, cunning with life. Now what kind of love will this be? Business and business and business… Knowledge is needed for business, innocence is needed for life. Knowledge is a must in the marketplace, but not needed at all when you are moving into the mysteries; you cannot know, you can only be. You drop this mind, you drop all this conditioning and start moving. When you feel joyous, feel joyous, help yourself to feel joyous: dance, sing.

The old habits will pull you back; don’t listen to them. You will have to get rid of the old habits slowly, slowly. It will be a kind of struggle, because no habit leaves you easily. But these habits are against you and against God, because anything that is against joy is against God. If God can be defined by any word, that word is bliss and nothing else.

Whenever you feel love arising, bliss arising, and pain also, choose the bliss. Neglect the pain, ignore it. Ignoring it, it will die. If you go on paying attention to it you will feed it. Attention is food. Never pay attention to anything that is wrong; otherwise you are helping it to be there, you are giving it more and more strength. Ignore it – there is nothing better than ignoring it.

all. Just leave the pain there, accept it for a few days. And go into love – go into love madly – and go into beauty. Dance around a tree, and you will feel something of the shape of the tree has started reaching you. Dance under the stars.

Each child knows how to dance, each child knows how to be joyous. You will have to learn it again, but because it is natural, it comes fast. Just a few efforts and suddenly one day, you are out of the trap. Your crutches have to be thrown away. Even if sometimes you fall it is perfectly good, but you have to stand on your own feet. The crutches of the society, of the organized religion, of the priests, have to be thrown. Even if for a few days you will feel impoverished – it is natural to feel impoverished for a few days – you have to accept it. But if you go on moving towards the natural, you will find Tao in your life. Tao is a natural flowering. Follow nature.

They do not want to be anything other than blissful and nobody is blissful. Listen to the desire: the deepest desire indicates the right path. Your longing is for bliss, for beauty, for something that will overwhelm you, for something that will take you to the other shore, for something which will be so tremendous and incredible that the past and the future will be washed away and you will just be in the here and now. But don’t try to understand. If you start trying to understand you will become a victim of psychoanalysis, and analysis is a process ad infinitum. You can go on analyzing and analyzing and it is never finished. There is not a single person in the world who is totally psychoanalyzed. There can never be.

There is no need to understand. All that is needed is to live, authentically live. All that is needed is to be.

CHAPTER 3 The Atomic Moment

The lower heart moves like a strong, powerful commander who despises the heavenly ruler because of his weakness, and has usurped the leadership in affairs of state. But when the primal castle can be fortified and defended, then it is as if a strong and wise ruler sat upon the throne. The eyes start the light circulating like two ministers at the right and left who support the ruler with all their might. When rule in the center is thus in order, all those rebellious heroes will present themselves with lances reversed, ready to take orders. The way to the Elixir of Life knows these three as supreme magic – seed-water, spirit-fire and thought-earth. What is seed-water? It is the true, one energy, eros. Spirit-fire is the light, logos. Thought-earth is intuition.

Life is an occasion to prepare for death and the beyond. If you don’t prepare for death and for the beyond you are a fool – you are missing a great opportunity. Life is only an opportunity. This life that you know is not real life. It is only an opportunity to attain real life. The real life is just hidden somewhere in this life, but it has to be provoked, it has to be awakened. It is fast asleep. It is not yet aware of itself. And if your real life is not aware of itself, your whole so-called life will be nothing but a long dream. And it cannot be sweet either – it will be a nightmare.

To live without being rooted in the real life is to live like a tree without being rooted in the soil. That’s why there is no beauty, that’s why there is no grace. That’s why you don’t see the splendor of man that the buddhas talk about.

just a little scratch and you lose your consciousness. Somebody insults you: just a word or just a glance, and all your consciousness is gone and you are rage, anger, violence, aggression. In a moment your humanity disappears – you are again wild, again an animal – and man can fall below the animals, because when he falls there is nothing to stop him. Man can rise above the angels, but it rarely happens because to rise above the angels is an uphill task, arduous; one has to work for it. It needs hard work, it needs guts, courage, to explore the unknown.

One has to go beyond the dreams to a state of mind where no thought, no dream, no desire exists; when all thinking… And dreaming is a kind of thinking, a primitive kind of thinking – thinking through pictures – but it is still thinking. When you have gone beyond thinking, and if you can still remain alert, aware, as if one is fast asleep but still alert – deep down at the very core of one’s being a lamp goes on burning, a small candle of light – then you will see your original face. And to see your original face is to be back in the Garden of Eden. Then you drop all your clothes. Your personality consists only of clothes and clothes and clothes – clothes upon clothes.

The Secret of the Golden Flower: one word is essence, the other word is personality. Personality comes from a root, persona which means a mask. In ancient days, the actors in Greek dramas used to wear masks. Persona means a mask; personality comes from persona. The actors used to wear one mask, you are wearing many, because for different situations you need different masks. When you are talking to your boss you need one kind of mask and when you are talking to your servant, of course, you need another kind of mask. How can you use the same mask?

You have to use many masks and you have many faces, and you go on changing them as circumstances change. Your personality consists only of false faces.

And what is essence? Essence is your original face without any masks. Essence is that which you brought into the world when you were born. Essence is that which was with you in the womb. Essence is that which has been given to you by God – or whatsoever you call the totality, the whole, existence. Essence is a gift from existence to you. Personality is a gift of the society, parents, school, college, culture, civilization. Personality is not you, it is pseudo – and we continue to polish this personality, and we have completely forgotten the essence. And unless you remember the essence, you will have lived in vain, because real life consists of essence.

But remember the distinction: you are not your clothes – not even your psychological clothes.

This is one of the most beautiful of Jewish parables: God is the fire, your personality is just the bush; and God is a cool fire – it will not burn your personality, the personality can remain green. God gives you so much freedom that if you want to be false, it is allowed, it is okay with him. If you want to be pseudo, it is also allowed. Freedom means that you can be right or you can be wrong – this is up to you. Your essence is always there, the flame is always there, and your personality is also always there.

Remember this: God never interferes, freedom is total. That is the dignity of man, the glory of man, and the agony too. If you were not given freedom you would not be false.

The world is very afraid of the essence because the essence is always rebellious. The essence is always individualistic, and the world does not need any individuals. It needs sheep, it does not need rebellious people. It does not need people like Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tzu – no, these people are dangerous. It wants people who are obedient – obedient to the status quo, obedient to the vested interests, obedient to the organized church, obedient to the state and the stupid politicians.

Don’t allow that, because that essential self is not obedient to anybody except to God. It has no other commitment, its sole commitment is to the source. It knows no other masters. That type of being will be very inconvenient to this so-called society, because this society is not created to fulfill the needs of human beings. It is created to exploit human beings. It is not according to you and for your growth.

The society is very much afraid of physical nakedness, because physical nakedness is the beginning of psychological nakedness. The society goes into a panic seeing a naked man because this is the beginning: if he is naked physically, he has taken the first step. Now who is going to prevent him from becoming psychologically naked? And the voice that called forth from the burning bush to Moses said, “Put off your shoes.” It is a very symbolic thing. “Put off all your clothes,” it says. “Put off your shoes.” Shoes cover your feet. Shoes cover you. “Be naked on the ground. Be without shoes.” The shoe represents personality, and nakedness represents essence. “You are on holy ground, put off your shoes.”

The moment you encounter your essence – the burning bush within you – you will have to take off your shoes, you will have to take off all your

clothes, you will have to take off all that is hiding your essence. That is revolution, metanoia. That is the turning point in a life: the society disappears and you become an individual – and only individuals can relate with God. But a great and visible consciousness will be needed to realise this.

The cause behind this distressing state of affairs, he continued, lay in the fact that people – especially Americans – never followed the dictates of intelligence or propriety, but only that of their genital organs. Then singling out one particularly handsome woman, Gurdjieff complimented her on her attire and makeup. He then confided with everyone in the room that in all honesty, between

them, the real explanation behind her adornment was an irresistible sexual urge she felt for some particular person – graphically spelled out by Gurdjieff with his newly acquired vocabulary. Before the guests could react, he launched into a discourse on his own sexual prowess, followed by intimate and detailed descriptions of the sexual mores of various races and nations.

Just when the carousal was at a climax, Gurdjieff briskly disengaged himself and thundered forth orders for the revels to cease. He proclaimed that the lesson had been accomplished, that the guests had already amply verified through their comportment the soundness of the observations he made earlier in the evening – that thanks to him they were now partly conscious of their true condition and that he would gladly accept checks and cash in payment for this important lesson. Peters noted – without surprise, knowing Gurdjieff – that the total came to several thousand dollars.

What is your real motive? Don’t try to convince yourself that this is not so. Just become a mirror and see your behavior. Just become a silent watcher of your behavior – always alert as to why you are doing a certain thing, from where it is coming – and then you will see you have a dual being. One is the personality which says one thing and the other is your reality which goes on doing just the opposite. And somehow they both have to manage with each other, hence the conflict, the friction, and the wastage of energy. And it happens almost in all cases that you have one desire inside and just the opposite on the outside. And why the opposite? – because through the opposite you are repressing that desire. The person who feels inferior deep inside pretends to be very superior on the outside. Only inferior people want to be superior. Those who are really superior don’t care a bit.

The person who has the look on his face of holier-than-thou knows that deep inside just the opposite is the case: he is suffering from guilt, he is suffering deep down from unworthiness – he knows that he is unholy. Now the only way to hide it from the world is to have a mask of holiness. Your so-called saints are not a bit different from the sinners. The only difference is that sinners are honest and your saints are not honest.

The real saint is not concerned with others at all. He knows who he is. Even if the whole world says that he is not a saint, that doesn’t matter. His understanding is inner, his encounter is directly with himself, his experience is immediate and existential. He knows his essence. And to know one’s essence is the first step to knowing God, to becoming immortal, to going beyond death. Henri Bergson spoke at the beginning of this century. He said, “The addition to the body brought by technology calls for a corresponding addition to the soul.”

The primal spirit is your essential soul, that which you have brought from God – untaught, unconditioned, as you were in your mother’s womb.

Those nine months were the most beautiful that you have known. Maybe you have forgotten consciously, but deep down in the very cells of your body, in the very fibers of your being, those days are still pulsating, those days are still carried by your existence.

You are not alert even when you are awake. The buddha is alert even when he is fast asleep. Only he knows where he goes.

hell. In deep sleep you simply slip back into the primal source of your being. That primal source is always there; you have not lost it, you have only forgotten it. And that primal source is beyond all dualities: it is neither light nor darkness, it is transcendental; it is neither life nor death as you know them, it is transcendental; it is neither man nor woman as you know them, it is transcendental. It is beyond all kinds of dualities. It is God.

When you are in the primal spirit you are in your true nature. When you are in your personality you are untrue, you are just a plastic phenomenon. Watch, and you will be surprised how many things are plastic in you. You smile when there is no smile in the heart, then it is plastic.

Drop all personas, all masks. Let all masks disappear. It will be painful because you have become identified with those masks; you think they are your faces. It is going to be a very painful process of death. And not only once – you will have to die many times – because each time a face falls you will find a death has happened. But again new life will be released in you, fresher, deeper, more vibrant. When all the faces disappear and the essence is left alone, you have transcended all duality, even the duality of time and space.

Who wants to be nothing? In his forty years of ministry, again and again Buddha is asked, “Why should one try to be nothing? That would be a death, ultimate death.”

But one thing is certain: time and space disappear. Either you have to declare, “I am all” – the whole space, the whole time – “I am everywhere and everywhen,” or you have to use the Buddhist expression, “I am not. Time is not. Space is not. There is only an absolute silent nothing – from eternity to eternity, a silence, not even a ripple.” But both statements indicate the same thing. Expressions are different, fingers are different, but they point to the same moon. That moon is your essence.

Man is the atomic constituent of this whole universe. If one atom is understood you have understood all matter. If one man is understood, if you can decipher your own mystery, you have deciphered all the mysteries that are possible – in the past, present, future – all. And these two things have to be remembered: body is space, mind is time. When you meditate you disappear from the body, you don’t know who you are. Man, woman, ugly, beautiful, black, white – you simply don’t know who you are. When you go in, the body is left far behind. A moment comes when you cannot even locate your body and you cannot even feel its presence. You are no more attached to the form; you have become formless. And the same happens with the mind: you don’t know where your mind is, where that mind has gone. All that noise, that traffic noise that was constantly inside becomes distant, distant, distant, and disappears. Suddenly a great silence explodes in you. In this state of no space and no time, you come to know your essence. And to know one’s essence is to have the first glimpse of Tao.

All the polar differences disappear. Man-woman, summer-winter, hot-cold, love-hate, positive-negative, time-space, life-death – all polar opposites disappear.

What kind of attainment is this? If there is fear there is no attainment.

Live in the marketplace and create a Himalaya in the heart, become silent in the noise. Remain a householder and yet be a sannyasin. That’s why I emphasize so much that I don’t want my sannyasins to renounce. Nothing has to be renounced. The way of renunciation is the way of the escapist, and the way of renunciation will make you attached to a polar phenomenon. That will not give you freedom. Freedom is in transcendence, and transcendence comes only when you live in the polar opposites simultaneously, together. So be in the world, but don’t let the world be in you. Love, and yet don’t be lost in it. Relate, and yet be alone, utterly alone. Know perfectly well that all relationship is a game: play the game and play it as beautifully as possible and as skillfully as possible. A game is after all a game and has to be played beautifully. And follow all the rules of the game, because a game cannot exist without rules. But remember always that it is just a game. Don’t become attached to it, don’t become serious in it. Always allow the sense of humor to remain alive in you: remain sincere but non-serious. And then, slowly, slowly you will see that the polarities are disappearing. Who is worldly and who is otherworldly? You are both or neither.

The present is an atomic moment – so small that you don’t see it. The moment you become aware of it, it is already past. To be present to the present one needs to be very attentive, utterly attentive. And that’s why to be present to the present becomes the door to going beyond time. You cannot go from the past, because the past is so vast – infinite; you can go on and on, you will not find the end of it. That’s why I say psychoanalysis will not help. It goes into the past and it goes on unraveling the past, digging up the past. You can go on… Psychoanalysis continues for years: three years, seven years, then too it is not complete.

It is through deep psychoanalysis that the East became aware of the phenomenon of many lives. Christianity, Judaism, Islam are not aware of it. They never tried so hard. They have never tried psychoanalysis.

If you go on digging you will find layer upon layer – where will you end? Thousands of lives you have lived as man and we have tried to penetrate all those; but then too there is no end. One day, suddenly you see that before this life you were not a man, you were an elephant or a tiger or a dog, and then you start moving into animal lives. And after millions of lives, you will suddenly one day discover that before that you were a bush or a tree, and then a rock. In India we say you have passed millions of lives. Where can it lead? The analysis of the past cannot lead anywhere. It can drive you crazy, but it leads nowhere. And so is the case with the future. Where to stop? How far is far enough? Where to make a point that “Now we will not look ahead”? In the East we have tried that too, because we have worked tremendously on the concept of time. And both are unending: memory is unending, imagination is unending. Between the two is the present moment, very tiny, so tiny that you cannot become aware of it if you are not absolutely alert – it goes so fast, it is so fleeting.

One thief is the past, the other thief is the future, and Jesus represents the present moment – closest to God, closest to essence.

When you come to the present and you will see eternity facing you – no past, no future, but eternity – a totally different dimension. Past, present, future are horizontal; eternity is vertical. Again, to me the cross is the symbol of these two lines crossing. A cross is made of two lines – one horizontal, the other vertical. This is a representation of time and eternity. Everybody hesitates when facing eternity, nowhereness, nothingness or all-ness. It is so much, one is going to disappear into it like a drop. And the ocean is so big, one will not be found again. Even a dewdrop falling into the ocean from a grass leaf hesitates.

But Jesus has lived with the Jewish idea of God as a person, hence this turmoil in his mind, the fear in his mind. He can’t see. He was waiting to see the beloved, the father. He used to call the father Abba – he was waiting to find his father. But there seems to be nobody. The world is finished and beyond is nothing but a yawning nothingness, an abyss with no bottom.

Every Christian, every Mohammedan, every Hindu, every Jew – whosoever has lived with the idea of God’s personality will have to face this, will have to go through this anxiety period, this anguish. That is the beauty of the Buddhist idea and the Taoist idea that God is nothingness, another name for nothingness. One who has lived with that idea of nothingness from the very beginning will not hesitate, he will simply disappear into it.

Taoists say the true heart is in the third eye; it moves not, it is unmoving, it is always the same.

It is order itself. That’s why Hindus have called it agya chakra – the center from which orders arise, discipline arises. If something comes from the third eye it is immediately followed; the whole body follows it, the whole being follows it. It is the center from which commandments are issued. But it is fast asleep. You live from the physical heart. You have not known your spiritual heart yet.

And the lower heart thinks itself very strong and thinks the heavenly heart, the spiritual heart, as being weak, almost dead, because it moves not. …and has usurped the leadership in affairs of state. And because of this, the lower heart has become the master of you. But when the primal castle can be fortified and defended, then it is as if a strong and wise ruler sat upon the throne. But if you start becoming more and more alert and more and more conscious, you will find that you have fortified the primal castle in the third eye. Whenever you become aware you will be surprised: you start functioning from the third eye. Just become a little bit aware and you will see a little…

That’s why Hindus call it a chakra. “Chakra” means a wheel. The wheel needs energy; once the energy comes in, the wheel starts moving. By “movement” I mean that it starts functioning. Then a great revolution happens in your being: immediately the lower heart bows down to the higher heart. When the higher comes, the lower always bows down. It rules only when the higher is not present. And that is the difference between a real religion and an unreal religion. The unreal religion says to you, “Try to control yourself. Control your senses. Discipline your body.” The real religion says, “Just go into the third eye center and let the spiritual heart function, and all will be controlled, and all will be disciplined. Let the master arrive and everything will be settled immediately.” The eyes start the light circulating like two ministers at the right and left who support the ruler with all their might. When rule in the center is thus in order, all those rebellious heroes will present themselves with lances reversed, ready to take orders. Just let the master come in, and there is no need to make any effort to create an order in your life, there is no need to cultivate character. That’s why I say don’t be worried about character. Simply put all your energy into being more conscious. Consciousness is followed by character as you are followed by your shadow. If you try to cultivate a character, your character will be false, pseudo, and you will become a hypocrite. And this is not the…

You were in constant tension: where to go, what to choose? Suddenly, as if somebody has performed a miracle: all confusion disappears, clarity arises, life becomes transparent – you simply do that which has to be done. In fact, once the heavenly heart has started functioning, all that you do is good; you cannot do wrong – it is impossible. The way to the Elixir of Life knows as supreme magic……

These are Taoist symbols. …these three. What is seed-water? It is the true, one energy, eros. Spirit-fire is the light,…

You will have to understand these three. Seed-water is eros – the energy that you know now as sexual energy, the energy of passion. Right now it creates only troubles for you and nothing else. Right now it pretends to be your friend but proves to be your foe. The more you follow it, the more it takes you into miseries. That’s why it is said that love is blind. Mulla Nasruddin was saying to me, “Love is blind and marriage is an eye-opener.”

And Freud is right to seek and search for everything in your eros, in your sexual energy. But he is wrong because he does not know that this ordinary state of sexual energy is not its natural state, it is a perverted state. In its natural state, sexual energy rises higher and higher, it takes you upwards not downwards. In its natural state, sexual energy becomes the golden flower within you. In the so-called ordinary, perverted state it simply takes you into new prisons, because it moves outward and downward. It dissipates you.

Just as the mud can become a lotus – the mud contains the lotus, the seed of it – so your sexual energy contains the seed of the golden flower. But the energy has to move upwards, you cannot move it upwards.

If you go outwards you will move into the world of duality. If you go inwards you will move into the world of non-duality; you will become non-polar. This is exactly the foundation of what I call metapsychology, or the psychology of the buddhas. This is pure religion – not the religion of the rituals, but pure religion: nothing to do with Christianity and Hinduism but something to do with your energy source. The second is spirit-fire. It is light, logos; it is conscious mind. Eros moving upwards takes you beyond conscious and unconscious mind. Logos is conscious mind. It is psychology, it is science. Thought-earth is darkness, unconsciousness, intuition. It is parapsychology, art. It is intuition, darkness. Women live in thought-earth, in the intuitive vision. Women live as unconscious, illogical beings. Men live in spirit-fire, logos, logic, conscious mind.

CHAPTER 4 I Mean Business Here

is no need to push anything, then everything happens of its own accord. Man has become a rock. And the reason why man has become a nonflowing rock is the mind. The body is perfectly flowing, so is the soul, but between the two, the link – the mind – is frozen ice. Once the mind goes deeper into meditation it starts melting. That’s what meditation is all about: an effort to melt the mind.

Mind desires, and if desires are there, then opportunities will arise in which those desires will be fulfilled. God cooperates with you. If you have desires like a dog, you will become a dog, you will have the body of a dog. Your mind creates the blueprint, and then the body follows.

You need not wait for an accident to happen when the car is destroyed to feel that you are not the car. And if you don’t know it when the car is there and you are in it, how are you going to know it when the car is not there? The death of the body alone will not show you that you are infinite. Either you are infinitely in the here and now, or you will never be. Infinity is your nature. The real problem is not the body. The body is not the culprit as the so-called religions have been telling you – “The body is the culprit!” The body is not the culprit at all. The body is utterly innocent and beautiful. The culprit is the mind, the mind is the devil. You will have to dissolve the mind, hence the urge, and the purpose of all the methodologies that have developed down the ages: Tao, Yoga, Tantra, Zen, Hassidism.

Love makes you more of an individual. It does not efface your individuality. It gives you individuality, it gives you uniqueness. Love is very respectful.

These are the ways of the ego. The other may have the ego, may not have the ego – I don’t know about the other, who is that other? – but one thing is certain: you have a very subtle ego. That ego becomes competitive. Ego is competitive, intrinsically competitive. The ego becomes resistant or frightened, and in the fear, in the resistance, in the struggle, in the competitiveness, love is destroyed. One thing is certain: you have to become aware of your subtle egoistic approach towards life. Drop it. At least from your side let it disappear. And then you will be surprised: maybe the other was not demanding any surrender; it was just your ego that projected it on the other. If it is so, now you can surrender to love. If it is not so and the other is still demanding…. And you will be able to know rightly only when there is no resistance in you, when there is no fear in you, no competition in you. Then you will have clarity, you will have a transparency, you will be able to see through and through, and immediately you will know whether the other is demanding a surrender to him, or the demand is coming from something which is beyond you both.

These people who have lived in such a monastery, if they are allowed to come back to the world, naturally, their meditation, their prayer, their religion, all will be disturbed.

Monks have been very afraid of money. Naturally, if they come into the world, money has to be tackled. You cannot live in the world without money. And monks have been so afraid that they will not even touch money. See the fear, the obsession.

One monkey is sitting with both his hands over his eyes, not looking: “Don’t look at many things in life because it is dangerous.” Another monkey is sitting with his hands over his ears: “Don’t listen to many things because it is dangerous.” And the third monkey is sitting with his hands over his mouth: “Don’t say many things because it is dangerous.” And the monk has to do all three things together. That’s why I say a monk is a monkey three times over.

calamity is that these monkeys have become the leaders of this country – perverted people, suffering from abnormalities, not natural, not flowing, not in Tao. My whole effort here is to create a miniature world where money is absolutely accepted; where women and men live together in joy, in celebration, without fear; where all that goes on in the world also continues,

and alongside the meditation grows. It becomes stronger and stronger because all the challenges are there. You can go anywhere you like: nobody can take your peace away. Your silence is yours! It is not because of me. You have earned it, you have gained it.

If you have to be here, you have to be according to me, only then can I be of any help. I know what is needed. It is not always that which you like which is your need. Your like comes out of your mind, and your mind has to be destroyed. I cannot listen to your likes and dislikes. All these rules are made by me. The moment you become a sannyasin, you give this much authority to me: that I will decide a few things for you. And if you want to become an ashramite, then you have to give one hundred percent authority to me – that is the meaning of becoming an inmate of the ashram. She wanted to be in the ashram and I have put her outside because she is not yet capable of it. Just listen to the question and you will see. You will have to earn it; and this is not the way to earn it, remember.

I am not concerned about general truths. I am talking to disciples! You have to look into yourself. If you are a woman disciple just look into yourself. Is there not somewhere a lurking desire to be raped? And if it is there, it is better to know about it, it is better to bring it to the conscious completely, because once something becomes conscious, it disappears. It can exist only in the unconscious. In the unconscious it is dangerous. If you bring it to the conscious, it evaporates. It is like pulling a tree out of the earth: bringing its roots to the light, then the tree dies. And that’s exactly what happens: anything that goes on lurking in the unconscious, in the dark chamber of your soul – which is nine times bigger than your

conscious mind – bring it into the conscious mind, bring it into sunlight, and if it comes there, it withers away.

Just go into yourself and you will find all kinds of desires lurking in you. You will find something of the sadist: that you want to torture others. You will find something of the masochist: that you want to torture yourself. You will find all kinds of things in you because man is vast and the unconscious is not an ordered place – it is chaos, it is a madhouse. But we go on repressing all that. We are so afraid to see. That’s why you felt so offended. I must have touched the right spot in you, hence the offense. It is not a question of whether it is proved right or wrong. And I am not interested in that at all.

And if the unconscious can be emptied completely, you will become a buddha.

But in the West particularly, since Freud opened the Pandora’s box the idea has arisen that you have to remain sexual to the very end, because sex is synonymous with life. So even if you are seventy or eighty you have to remain interested in sex. If you lose interest in sex that means you are losing interest in life, that means you are no more needed, that means you are useless now. You can drop dead or go to parliament, but you are useless. This idea that sex and life are synonymous is utterly baseless. Sex and life are synonymous at a certain stage. In childhood they are not synonymous, in youth they are synonymous, in old age they are again not synonymous.

He has lived the illusion and he has known the disillusionment of it all. Now he is wiser than he ever was; he is becoming innocent again.

Nobody wants anything to do with old people – as if they are meaningless, worthless. And they have lived their whole life, and they have learned many secrets of life – they can be great teachers, only they can be teachers.

You ask, “I am getting old and losing all interest in women. What should I do?” Lose interest. Allow it to happen. Don’t try to create it unnecessarily. If it is going on its own, it is beautiful.

And once you have known it, you are ready, ready for the journey, and when death comes you will go laughing and dancing and singing into it.

Do you know that it almost always happens…? In the East it has been one of the secrets to know about a man. When a man dies, if he is clinging too much to life and is still interested in sex, he will die with an erection. That shows that the poor fellow died without any readiness – even in death he was full of sex fantasies. It happens almost always – unless you have become a great meditator it is going to happen to you too – that while dying you will fantasize about sex: you will be making love, at least in your imagination. This is no way to die. This is very insulting to death, and insulting to God, and very insulting to yourself. Let sex disappear – it is time. Relax into nonsexuality. Nonsexuality will make you centered. Stop chasing women and start chasing yourself; you cannot do both. And get ready: death may knock you down any moment.

Transform your sexual energy into meditative energy. It is the same energy, just the direction changes: it no longer flows downward and outward, it starts flowing inward and upward. And this same energy opens the bud of the golden flower in you. This is the whole secret.

It is good when you are young because then you are foolish. It is very rare to become alert and aware and meditative when you are young. If you can become, you have a rare genius. But if you cannot become meditative even in old age, then you are just stupid, utterly stupid. It is good to fool around when you are young. That foolishness is part of growth, it helps you.

Even the mirror has to be dropped. One has to be alone. And the purity of aloneness is infinite. And the bliss of aloneness is eternal.

Now the moment has come. Just let this interest in women go and suddenly you will find another interest arising in you – it is almost simultaneous – the interest in meditation. And then you can have the last gift that life can give to you: a meditative death – a death in satori, in samadhi, in ecstasy – and you will know the total orgasmic experience. That experience is enough; then you will never be coming back into life, into the body, into this prison.

Science is objective, religion is subjective. Science is experimental, religion is experiential. Philosophy is neither; it is just hanging in a limbo between the two. And slowly, slowly it is disappearing because that which is objective is being taken by science every day, and that which is subjective has already been taken by religion. Nothing is left for philosophy. So now modern philosophy only goes on thinking about language – language analysis. Philosophers are asking the most absurd questions because they have lost all the meaningful questions; either those questions have been covered by science or by religion.

am very anti-philosophic and I avoid philosophy because it is playing with shadows, thoughts, speculation. And you can go on playing infinitely, ad infinitum, ad nauseam; there is no end to it. One word creates another word, one theory creates another theory, and you can go on and on and on. In five thousand years much philosophy has existed in the world, and to no purpose at all. But there are people who have the philosophic attitude. And if you are one of them, please drop it; otherwise you and your energy will be lost in a desert.

This is the fourth stage: slowly slowly, philosophy becomes a kind of madness, it leads you into neurosis because philosophy is a mind phenomenon. Science has taken the body, religion has taken the soul, only the mind is left for philosophy. And mind is potential madness. If you go on too much into the mind, you will be moving slowly slowly towards madness. It is very rare to find a philosopher who is sane. And vice versa is also true: it is very rare to find a madman who is not a philosopher.

Philosophy is a blind man in a dark room on a dark night, searching for a black cat which is not there….

CHAPTER 5 To Be One Again

In the body is the anima. The anima is feminine, yin; it is the substance of consciousness. But, besides this, there is the animus in which the spirit shelters. The animus lives in the eyes: it sees, it dreams. But whoever is in a dark and withdrawn mood, and chained to his bodily form, is fettered by the anima. Therefore the concentration of the animus is brought about by the circulation of the light, and in this way the spirit is maintained, the anima subjugated. The method used by the ancients for escaping from the world consisted in melting out completely the slag of darkness in order to return to the purely creative. This is nothing more than a reduction of the anima and a completion of the animus. And the circulation of the light is the magical means of reducing the dark, and gaining mastery

over the anima. If this method is followed, plenty of seed-water will be present of itself; the spirit-fire will be ignited, and the thought-earth will solidify and crystallize. And thus the holy fruit matures. The one nature, when it descends into the house of the Creative, divides into animus and anima. The animus is the heavenly heart. It is of the nature of light; it is the power of lightness and purity. It is that which we have received from the great emptiness, that which is identical in form with the primordial beginning. The anima partakes of the nature of the dark. It is the energy of the heavy and the turbid; it is bound to the bodily fleshly heart. The animus loves life. The anima seeks death. All sensuous desires and impulses of anger are effects of the anima. But the pupil understands how to distill the dark anima completely so that it transforms itself into pure light.

Once the Empress Wu asked the Master Fa-tsang if he could possibly give her a practical and simple demonstration of the principle of cosmic interrelatedness, of the relationship of the one and many, of God and his creatures, and of the creatures one to another.

Fa-tsang answered, “Just watch, Your Majesty, how each mirror not only reflects the one flame in the center, each mirror also reflects the reflections of the flame in all the other mirrors, until an infinite number of flames fills them all. All these reflections are mutually identical; in a sense they are interchangeable, in another sense each one exists individually.

Then the master covered one of the infinite number of reflections of the flame and showed how each apparently insignificant interference affects the whole organism of our world. Kegon expresses this relationship by following the simple formula: One in all, all in one, one in one, all in all. Then Fa-tsang, in order to conclude his command performance, held up a small crystal ball and said, “Now watch, Your Majesty, how all these large mirrors and all the myriad forms they reflect are mirrored in this little sphere. See, how in the ultimate reality, the infinitely small contains the infinitely large and the infinitely large the infinitely small, without obstruction. Oh, if only I could demonstrate to you the unimpeded mutual interpenetration of time and eternity, of past, present and future. But alas, this is a dynamic process that must be grasped on a different level…”

Everything is so deeply connected with everything else that nothing can exist apart. If you can understand a small roseflower in its totality, root and all, you will have understood the whole cosmos, because the whole cosmos is involved in that small roseflower. In the smallest leaf of grass all is contained. But remember, as Fa-tsang said to the empress: All illustrations, all descriptions are static, and…

to draw lines where one thing ends and another begins; there are no demarcating lines – there cannot be. So all distinctions are only for practical purposes, they have no existential value. This is the first thing to be understood. This is very fundamental to the Taoist alchemy. Once this is understood, then the whole alchemy of Taoism becomes comprehensible. Then the lower can be transformed into the higher, because the lower contains the higher already. The baser metal can be…

The very idea that all is interconnected makes transformation possible. Where things are not interconnected there is no possibility of any transformation. If the world consists of the philosopher Liebnitz’s monads – windowless, separate, atomic individuals, not connecting with each other at all…

Transformation is conceivable only because you are me, I am you; we interpenetrate. Can you think of yourself as separate even for a single moment? You cannot even imagine yourself as separate. The flower cannot be separated from the tree; the moment it is separated it dies. The tree cannot be separated from the earth, the earth cannot be separated from the sun, the sun cannot be separated from other stars, and so on and so forth. You separate the leaf and the leaf dies. You separate the flower, the flower dies. You separate the tree from the earth, the tree dies. You separate the earth from the sun and the earth dies. Death means separation; life means no separation. Hence the ego is bound to die because that is your idea of…

Jesus says, “Come to me and I will give you life abundant.” What is the secret of life abundant? The secret is: die as the ego, disappear as a separate entity, and the whole universe and all that it contains is yours. Stop possessing and all is yours. Possess, and you are tiny and limited, and you are going to die. The secret of becoming more alive consists of a single phenomenon of dropping the idea of…

To live in non-separation is heaven, to disappear completely, utterly into the whole is moksha, nirvana – it is ultimate freedom. The second thing that we must all understand: that life is polar. That is also very fundamental to the Taoist approach. But the polarity is not that of opposition. The polarity means that the opposites are complementary to each other, they support each other.

“Why love today if there is tomorrow? And if tomorrow is infinite, then why bother? Why dance today? We will see tomorrow.”

You cannot postpone because you are not certain whether there is going to be any tomorrow or not.

The wise man lives, and the wise man lives in the here and now. He cannot afford postponement because he knows, “Only this moment is mine, only this very moment is mine. The next moment may be, may not be. How can I postpone? How can I say ‘tomorrow’?” The foolish man postpones until tomorrow, the wise man lives now.

And it is simple advice: If you want to do anything wrong, postpone it for twenty-four hours and if you want to do something right, never postpone it even for a single moment. If you want to be angry, violent, aggressive, postpone it for twenty-four hours. If you want to be loving, sharing, do not postpone it even for a single moment. Just live it right now, immediately!”

Man cannot be without the woman, and the woman cannot be without the man. They are part of one dialectical process. Between these two poles there is both attraction and repulsion, because attraction and repulsion cannot be separated.

This is the problem between man and woman: they are attracted and repulsed together, simultaneously. They want to come to be together and they want to be separate and alone, on their own. Hence the constant conflict between man and woman.

If the man and the woman have decided not to fight, then it is a plastic marriage. They will be together, they will manage to be together, but they will never be together in reality; they will never know those moments of unity. They are only pretending. They are being polite, but not true, not authentic.

These are the three fundamentals. First: everything is interdependent. Second: life is polar and the polarities are not opposites but complementaries. And third: that each is double inside, no one is single.

Your attraction for the woman or for the man keeps you in manifestation. Now you will be able to understand why the great mystics down the ages have been teaching you how to go beyond sex – because unless you go beyond sex you will not go into God, unless you go beyond sex you will never go beyond the two; you will remain tethered to the duality of

the world. The “world” means God manifest, and “God” means the world disappearing into unmanifestation again. That too is a duality: manifestation, nonmanifestation.

Don’t escape. Live it through and through. Indulge in the world, and the very indulgence will become renunciation. Out of that very indulgence you will start feeling that now it is time to disappear into absolute aloneness. And if you are really tired, only then can you go into that absolute aloneness. People are bound to misunderstand me. In India I am one of the most misunderstood men. They think I am teaching people indulgence – I am teaching renunciation. They think I am teaching a worldly kind of sannyas. They don’t understand. I am teaching real sannyas, because real sannyas arises only out of worldly experience.

Woman cannot write poetry. She can inspire poetry – that is true. No great poetry arrives in the world without a woman somewhere in the background.

They think they have to do all the things that man has been doing. They think it is because of these things that man has become important. The logic is fallacious. They will only become merely imitation men; they will lose their own soul and in the end they will always remain secondhand. In the world of men, to compete with men, they will remain secondary. They will never be primary. That is not the way to compete.

implementation is wrong. Woman is equal to man, but she is not the same as man…and she should not be. She should follow her own nature, she should listen to her own soul. She has a different vibe, she has a different function to fulfill in the world, a different destiny. If she follows man and imitates, she is lost.

He said, “Whether God exists or not, whether there is a hell and heaven or not. All the great problems – that is for me. And the principle has worked out perfectly well. She never interferes in the great things, I never interfere in the small things. I am master of my own world, she is master of her own world. We never have the cause to overlap.”

And all women deep inside know that all men are childish: “Let them play, let them go and do their things.” She knows perfectly well that they are interested in foolish things. The football match, cricket – all nonsense, it makes no sense. You throw the ball on that side and they throw the ball to your side, and this goes on and on…What is the point of it? The woman is practical, down-to-earth. She is earthly. The male principle is like the sky and the female principle is like the earth.

The woman lives in the ears and the man lives in the eyes, hence the desire in women to gossip. Such immense joy in gossiping… Just look at two women gossiping – they look as if they are in such ecstasy. I have heard…

The light has to circulate in the eyes. The eyes are the most lighted part of your being. Taoists say your eyes are parallel to the sun. If you don’t have eyes you cannot see light, and only the similar can see the similar. Your eyes are condensed light, that’s why you can see light through the eyes. Your ears are condensed sound, that’s why you can hear through the ears. The anima in everybody, whether man or woman, has to be subjugated. Why? – because it is the form, it is the body, it is matter. The spirit has to be the master, the spirit has to rise above the body. The spirit has

to make the body follow it, not vice versa. So whether one is a man or a woman doesn’t matter; the anima inside has to be made a follower of the animus because only the animus can search and seek. And if the woman is following on behind, the animus can then go perfectly, deep into reality. If the poet knows that the woman is behind him, supporting him, his poetry can soar very high. If the man knows that the woman is always with him, he has great strength, he can go on any adventure; the moment he feels that the woman is not with him, his energy is cut off. Now he has only dreams, but they are impotent – they have no more energy, they cannot be realized.

The realizing factor is the woman, the dreaming factor is the man. In the search for God or truth, the man has to lead and the woman has to follow. Inside you the animus has to become the master and the anima has to become the disciple – and remember again, irrespective of whether you are man or woman.

Woman is stagnant, man is dynamic. That’s why you see women looking so restful and men looking so restless. Even when you were a child, just a small child, a baby, the difference was there. The boy baby is very restless, is trying to grab this, to grab that, trying to reach somewhere; he is a nuisance. And the girl baby is never a nuisance; she sits silently hugging her doll. She is also a doll, a tremendous restfulness. The principle of rest is woman and the principle of restlessness is man, hence the roundness and the beauty of woman and the constant feverish state of man.

Anything changing and he is for it. Whether it is changing for good or bad, that is not such an important thing: change is good.

The perfect man is one who has used his dynamism as the river and who has used his stasis as the banks. This is the perfect balance. Then you have used your animus to grow and you have used your anima to make your growth an established fact, not just a momentary phenomenon.

That’s my whole effort here: to release your animus from the grip of the anima. Once the animus is released from the grip of your anima, then we can use the anima too, but not before. Hence my insistence on dynamic methods of meditation. Only once in a while do I suggest that people go to Zazen, Vipassana – only when I see that their animus is flowing, now they can use their anima. Vipassana, Zazen are anima methods, feminine methods. Sufi Dancing, Dynamic Meditation, Nataraj, they are animus methods. First you have to become a river, only then can your banks be used as supports.

The holy fruit is neither male nor female. The holy fruit matures only in wholeness, when your anima and animus are supporting each other like the two wings of a bird. Then eros is released, logos is released, intuition is released. Then you start flying into the sky and yet you remain rooted in the earth. A tree, to go high in the sky, will need deep roots in the earth. The earth is anima, the sky is animus. And the higher the tree goes into the sky, the deeper it has to go into the earth – in the same proportion.

God is one, but when he becomes creative, he divides himself into two: animus and anima. Without it there is no possibility of manifestation, without it there will be no dialectic. God divides himself into thesis and antithesis, because only through thesis and antithesis the challenge, the conflict, the struggle.

Zen masters say, “Find the sound of one hand clapping.” What do they mean? They mean go beyond the two so you can find the One. But that One is the unmanifest God, that One is the very source from which we have come.

Man is interested in life, woman is interested in security. Man is interested in love, woman is interested in safety. Man is interested in adventure, woman is interested in comfort, convenience. Woman is death. By “death” there is no condemnation meant or supposed, just that the quality of death is security. You are secure only when you are dead: then nothing can happen to you anymore.

But you don’t understand the male principle. The male principle is basically polygamous and the feminine principle is monogamous. She wants to settle. She is more interested in marriage than in love. She is interested in love only to get married, and man gets married only because he is interested in love. There is an ancient saying that the world would be immensely joyful if every man remained unmarried and every woman was married. But how can it be done? It is impossible.

If your anima can help your animus that is real marriage, the inner marriage. Then you start becoming integrated, then your light is no more shallow – it has the depth of darkness; and your darkness is no more dark – it has the light of lightness. Then anima and animus melt into each other. And when they melt utterly, the world has disappeared, you are again one. And to be one is to know God, to remain two is to remain in the world. And the secret, the experiment, has to happen within you; it has nothing to do with the outside world. Inside you these two principles are constantly in fight. Call them life-death, darkness-light, man-woman, X-Y – whatsoever you will – but these two principles are there, continuously in fight. And that is your anguish, your misery, your hell.

Let them become friends. Let your energy circulate in them, not against each other. Let them come closer to each other. Let there be an inner orgasm, an inner intercourse between the woman and the man. That’s what in Tantra is called yuganaddha, the meeting of the man and woman within you. That is real Tantra. The meeting of the man and woman on the outside is just an introduction.

This is the greatest experiment that a man can go through. And this experiment releases in you cosmic ecstasy, total orgasm.

CHAPTER 6 Born with Joy

It is difficult to enjoy because you will have to disappear. Joy is possible if you are not. You and joy cannot coexist: when joy is there you are absent, when you are there joy is absent. They are like light and darkness – they can’t exist together in the same place.

And slowly, slowly you learn the way of the ego: remain miserable and people will pay attention to you, remain miserable and they will sympathize with you. And whenever you are enjoying, nobody sympathizes with you. That’s why people pay so much respect to ascetic people. Somebody is fasting and people say, “Look, what a great saint!” He is simply being miserable. If you are feasting, nobody is going to sympathize with you, but fast, and people sympathize. If you are in love with a woman, who is going to sympathize with you? On the contrary, people will be jealous. You are a competitor. They wanted the same woman themselves. You are an enemy. Renounce sex, become celibate, move to a cave, and people will come from faraway places to pay their respects – “Here is a great ascetic” – and you are simply being miserable…but misery pays. Misery can make you a mahatma.

That has been the whole history of humanity: misery has always paid, you have respected miserable people. And if the misery is self-inflicted, of course, you gain more respect; it is voluntary. Mahatma Gandhi became such a great name in the world because he was voluntarily miserable, inflicting misery upon himself. How can you not be attentive to him? If he had been enjoying and living a total life, a whole and healthy life, you would have been jealous, you would have been antagonistic. See these tricks and strategies of the mind and you will be able to drop them. Don’t ask for attention, otherwise you will remain miserable.

The husband comes home and the wife immediately starts being miserable. This I have watched.

Her face becomes miserable because the husband will only pay attention to her if she is in misery, otherwise not. This mechanism has to be made conscious. Watch out for it otherwise it will destroy all possibilities of joy in life – it has destroyed. Millions of people live in misery and hell because they hanker for attention. It is stupid to hanker for attention; it does not give you anything. It only strengthens the ego – which is not you. It is not your essence; it is only your personality, your pseudo self. It goes on nourishing the pseudo self and the essential self goes on starving.

And the essential self is capable of rejoicing in its aloneness. It does not even need the other, so what to say about attention? It does not even need the other. Its bliss is inner. It does not come from the outside, it does not depend on any condition. It is unconditional. It is a spontaneous, inner, intrinsic phenomenon.

Watch and see how you are profiting from misery, and then you will know why you are finding it so difficult to enjoy.

We are born with joy. Joy is our very being. It does not need anything to be joyous. One can simply be joyous sitting by oneself. Joy is natural, misery is unnatural. But misery is profitable and joy is purposeless – it will not bring you any profit.

People will not like you. People will like you only if you are in misery, then they will sympathize. In sympathy your ego is fulfilled and their ego is fulfilled. Whenever they sympathize with somebody, they are higher and you are lower. They have the upper hand. They are enjoying the trip of sympathy. Sympathy is violent.

When you are joyous, rejoicing, dancing, singing, just being happy for no reason at all, your ego will disappear because it will not get attention. And others will not feel good because you are not giving them an opportunity to fulfill their egos.

But if I live in my own way – and my way is the way of the feast, my way is the way of festivity – then they are shocked. They are perfectly happy if somebody leaves the palace and becomes a beggar. They are perfectly happy – they love the man. But if a beggar moves into the palace, they will all be against him. They will not like the idea at all.

This thing is happening on a smaller scale or a bigger scale everywhere. Beware of it – it is a very ancient trap – and then you can enjoy, then there is nothing else but to enjoy. If you are ready to become a nobody, if you are not in need of others’ attention, there is no problem at all. You can enjoy…in small things you can enjoy. Very small things can give you the greatest joy possible. Just see Jesus with his friends, eating, drinking… People could not tolerate it. They would have loved him if he had been an ascetic, but he was not.

“This is wrong. You should have prevented the woman. The perfume was very precious. It could have been sold. It could have fed a few poor people in the town.” Now with whom are you going to agree – with Judas or with Jesus? If you are honest you will agree with Judas. If you are honest with yourself, you will agree with Judas. He seems to be the beginning of socialism, communism, Gandhism. He seems to be very logically right. He was the most intellectual disciple of Jesus, the only educated disciple of Jesus, and his logic is flawless. But what did Jesus say? Jesus said something absurd. He said, “You can feed the poor when I am gone. The poor will always be there, you need not worry. But while I am here, rejoice.” Do you agree with Jesus? If you agree, you can be joyous. If you don’t agree, you are going to remain miserable. “But look,” your head will say, “Judas seems to be right.” Jesus seems to be utterly absurd. What is he saying? “The poor will always be there, but right now you are with the bridegroom: enjoy, celebrate.” This is celebration. Now if the people were against Jesus, it seems to be absolutely fitting with our so-called intellect. Jesus says, “I cannot prevent the woman because she is in such joy. I cannot destroy her joy. Look at her tears, look at her being. She is in such a festive mood. This is just symbolic. This pouring of the precious perfume on my feet is just symbolic that she is utterly happy. She is celebrating. I cannot stop anybody from celebrating.” Then, if you agree with Jesus, you can be joyous.

A master is one who is ready to answer you. A disciple is one who is not only asking from curiosity but is ready to stake his whole being on his questioning, is ready to transform his life according to the answer given.

Inquiry needs commitment, inquiry needs involvement, inquiry is risky, dangerous. It is not only intellectual, it is existential.

Secondly, you say, “You had no master.” That is true, I had no master. That does not mean that I was not a disciple. I accepted the whole existence as my master. It needs more courage to accept the whole existence as your master. If you cannot accept even a single man as your master, how can you accept the whole existence as your master – the trees and rocks and the rivers and the clouds? If you cannot love a single human being, how can you love the whole?

“And my second master was a dog. I was thirsty and I was going towards the river, and a dog came, he was also thirsty. He looked into the river, he saw another dog there – his own image – and became afraid. He barked and the other dog barked too. But his thirst was so much that he would hesitate. He would go back and come again and look into the water and find the dog there. But the thirst was so much that he suddenly jumped into the water and the image disappeared. He drank the water, he swam in the water – it was a hot summer. And I was watching. I knew that a message had come to me from God: one has to jump in spite of all fears. “When I was on the verge of jumping into the unknown, the same fear was there. I would go to the very edge, hesitate, and come back. And I would remember the dog – if the dog could manage, why can’t I? And then one day I jumped into the unknown: I disappeared and only the unknown was left behind. The dog was my second master.

“And the third master was a small child. I entered into a town and a small child was bringing a candle, a lit candle, hiding it in his hands and going to the mosque to put the candle there. Just jokingly I asked the boy, ‘Have you lit the candle yourself?’ He said, ‘Yes, sir.’ And I asked jokingly, ‘Can you tell me from where the light came? There was a moment when the candle was unlit, then there was a moment when the candle was lit, can you show me the source from which the light came? And you have lit it, so you must have seen the light coming – from where?’ And the boy laughed and blew out the candle and said, ‘Now you have seen the light going, where has it gone? You tell me!’ And my ego was shattered, and my whole knowledge was shattered. And that moment I felt my own stupidity. Since then I dropped all knowledgeability.”

And slowly slowly you see the point that if just being so close to one single person can be such a tremendous joy, how much more it will be when you are close to the whole. The master is just the beginning, the master is not the end. And the true master is only a door – through him you pass and go beyond. The true master helps you to go beyond…

Enlightenment is simply enlightenment; it is neither mine nor yours. The ego is separate, the essence is not separate. To think in terms of your own enlightenment is to be caught in the net, in the trap of the ego again. You miss the whole point. If you think of your own enlightenment just as you think of your own car, your own house, your own wife, you are starting to think of enlightenment also as something that you will possess. You will not be there to possess it. You will be possessed by it.

think in terms of your own enlightenment is to be caught in the net, in the trap of the ego again. You miss the whole point. If you think of your own enlightenment just as you think of your own car, your own house, your own wife, you are starting to think of enlightenment also as something that you will possess. You will not be there to possess it. You will be possessed by it.

The master is like a swimming pool where you can learn how to swim. Once you have learned, all the oceans are yours, then you can go anywhere. Then this whole existence belongs to you. But you are no more there. In fact, it will be better to say you belong to the whole existence – not that you possess enlightenment, enlightenment possesses you.

Getting caught by the master, getting caught into the master prevents enlightenment – and these are two different things. That is why Buddha says, “If you meet me on the way, kill me immediately.” And I say to you too: If you see me on the way, kill me immediately.

A religious person surrenders, he prays, he waits, he opens up his being, he trusts. He says to God, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.” He prays, “Let me be destroyed utterly, completely, so there is no hindrance left. Let me be absolutely empty so you can come and fill me totally.”

Do you think Jesus’ followers were old people? He himself was young and the people that surrounded him were young people. Parents were angry, very angry. Rabbis were angry, priests were angry, because he was bringing a revolution.

If they see you happy, they can only think you have gone mad, because they have lived an unhappy life and a very religious life. And they know religious people are unhappy people – sad, with long faces. They cannot believe that you can be religious and dancing, and you can be religious and laughing, and you can be religious and yet happy. Then what about all their saints? Were they fools?

Listen to them. Don’t start arguing. Listen patiently. Nobody has ever listened to them. That’s why psychoanalysis has become so important in the world. Psychoanalysis is nothing but just finding a patient listener, the psychoanalyst, to whom you can talk to your heart’s content and say whatsoever you want – sense, nonsense, whatsoever you want. People are feeling suffocated, boiling, within. They want to say something but nobody is there to hear, the world has turned deaf.

It is the same thing: somehow to drown oneself, to forget all about oneself and the world and the problems. Even children have so many problems because we teach them competition, ambition.

If you really go into meditation you will not need alcohol, you will not need drugs. If you really go into meditation, your life will be a life of love, of sharing, of joy – noncompetitive, nonambitious. You will not become a politician, you will live as a nobody. You will not suffer from an inferiority complex because you will not compare yourself with anybody else. And you will live in great gratitude because your life will have joy. You will not be attached to misery because you will not have any investment in misery. If you don’t have any ego, you need not have any investment in misery. Then you can feast and your life can be a festival. That’s what I am teaching here. And to me this is religion: to make life a feast, a festival; to transform energy in such a way that you become a celebration.

Transcendence means the disappearance of the need for the other, the disappearance of the desire to get lost into a woman or into a man. And this is possible only if you have understood – and understanding comes only through experience. So I don’t say drop out of your

Sex disappeared in Buddha’s life, sex disappeared in Christ’s life. People have seen sex disappearing, and people have seen that when sex disappears there is great splendor: something of the sky dances on the earth, the beyond reaches to the earth, the mundane becomes suffused with the sacred. And because people have seen these things, great desire has arisen in them too to transcend sex. But then the whole thing goes wrong: they start fighting with it. It is a secret science, and if you don’t move rightly, everything will go wrong.

Just a little mismanagement, just a thing here and a thing there misplaced and everything goes wrong. Transcendence is never through repression; transcendence is through understanding, transcendence is through awareness.

The first and the most significant thing is that when you are going into a deep orgasm –

when the climax is happening – there is great joy because in that…

Sex brings you to the orgasmic state, and once its purpose is fulfilled, sex disappears. In the orgasmic state there is no sexuality left in you: you are simply throbbing and there is no desire, you are utterly in the here and now; there is no future, no fantasy, no imagination, nothing. And when the orgasm happens, the man is alone – the woman may be there but he is not…

In deep orgasm you are simply inside yourself, there is no sex in it; hence the bliss. And after a good orgasm, for hours you will feel very very blissful, and for hours you will not think of sex again – the desire has left you. What has happened? If you are feeling blissful, the desire cannot be there. If…

Only then do you know the meaning of here and now, otherwise you are in the past or in the future. And when time disappears, mind disappears, because mind is another aspect of time, another name for time. Mind is past plus future. When there is no time there is no mind. Just…

CHAPTER 7 Turning…

Master Lu-tsu said: When the light is made to move in a circle, all the energies of heaven and Earth, of the light and the dark, are crystallized. When one begins to apply this magic it is as if, in the middle of being, there were nonbeing. When in the course of time the work is completed, and beyond the body there is a body, it is as if, in the middle of nonbeing, there were being. Only after concentrated work of a hundred days will the light be genuine, then only will it become spirit-fire. After a hundred days there develops by itself in the midst of the light a point of the true light-pole. Then suddenly there develops the seed-pearl. It is as if a man and woman embraced and a conception took place.…

the eye. This energy is directed outward – flows downward. Therefore the Way of the Golden Flower depends wholly on the backward-flowing method. The circulation of the light is not only a fantasy. By concentrating the thoughts, one can fly; by concentrating the desires, one falls. When a pupil takes little care of his thoughts and much care of his desires, he gets into the path of submersion. Only through…

“Then why did you say before, ‘Mind is the Buddha’?” “To stop the baby crying! Once the baby stops crying, I…

One must not be trivial and irresponsible in heart, but must strive to make deeds prove one’s words. If, when there is quiet, the spirit has continuously and uninterruptedly a sense of great joy as if intoxicated or freshly bathed, it is a sign that the light-principle is harmonious in the whole body; then the Golden Flower begins to bud.

This is the story of man. This is what has happened to everybody. We have completely forgotten why we are here, why we came in the first place – what to learn, what to earn, what to know, who we are and from whence and to where, what is our source and the cause of our journey into life, into body, into the world, and what we have attained up to now? And if a tidal wave comes – and it is going to come, it always comes, its name is death – all will be gone: children, family, name, fame, money, power, prestige. All will be gone in a single moment and you will be left alone, utterly alone. All that you had done will be undone by the tidal wave. All that you had worked for will prove nothing but a dream, and your hands and your heart will be empty. And you will have to face the Lord, you will have to face existence.

Reality cannot be washed away by death. Reality knows no death. Reality is undying. Reality is deathless. Reality is eternal. All that dies simply proves by its death that it was unreal, that it was an illusion, maya, a dream – maybe a nice dream, but a dream all the same.

Ego is another name for greed, it wants to possess. But all that you possess will be gone and all that you have done, you have done in your dream. The moment you will be awakened you will be surprised at how much time has been wasted, at how many lives you have been living in a dream, at how many dreams you have lived. To be a seeker means to come out of this dream, to come out of this dreaming state of consciousness. To be a seeker means: making an effort to wake up. To wake up is to become a buddha – to be alert, to be conscious, to be full of light within so that all unconsciousness disappears, so that all sleep disappears, so the darkness of sleep is no more inside you and you are fully awake.

A great astrologer saw Buddha. He could not believe his eyes – that body, that golden aura around the body, those beautiful eyes, as silent as any lake can be and as deep and as pure as any lake can be, that crystal-clarity, that walking grace. He fell at Buddha’s feet and he said, “I have studied astrology, palmistry. My whole life I have been studying types of men, but I have never come across a man like you! To what type do you belong? Are you a god who has descended on the earth? – because you don’t seem to belong to this earth. I can’t see any heaviness in you. You are absolutely light, weightless. I am wondering how you are walking on the earth because I don’t see any gravitation functioning on you. Are you a god who has descended from heaven just to have a look at what is happening on the earth? A messenger from God? A prophet? Who are you?” And Buddha said, “I am not a god.”

Somebody is dreaming he is a man, somebody else is dreaming she is a woman, and so on and so forth. Categories belong to the world of dreams. When one becomes awakened one is simply that principle of awakenedness, awareness. One is just a witness and nothing else: a pure witness. All clouds have disappeared.

One is just a formless awareness, the pure sky, endless, infinite, vast. This awareness is empty of clouds but full of the sky. This is positive emptiness, this is nirvana. Then there is a negative emptiness: you are full of clouds – so much so that not even a bit of sky can be seen, you are full of knowledge – so much knowledge not even a little space is left for meditation.

Buddha is just space, open space, openness, a name for openness, for open sky.

What happened? Could he not see the point? Who prevented him from seeing the point? His mind must have become much too crowded. All that he has been reading, accumulating – he has become overly attached to it. He had come here to seek and search. What kind of search is this if you are not ready to leave anything of your ego? What kind of inquiry is this?

Kabir has said, “If you really want to follow me, burn your house immediately!” What house was he talking about? The house of dreams in which you have lived has to be utterly burned so that you can be under the open sky again and the stars and the sun and the moon, so you can be in the wind again, in the rain, so you can be available to nature once more – because God is nothing but the hidden-most core of nature. God is not a kind of knowledge, God is innocence. You know God not by knowledge but by becoming utterly innocent. But it is very difficult for the ego…even to hear these words is difficult. And the ego will immediately distort them, manipulate them, change them, color them, paint them and make them in such a way that they support the ego rather than destroying it.

Remember, the ego is never right! And if something does oppose it, don’t miss the opportunity: use that occasion to destroy your ego. The moment you can destroy your ego will be the moment of great blessing because when you are not, God is, and when you are not, you are. This is the greatest paradox of life and existence: when you are not, you are.

These sutras are the keys to create that state of buddhahood – when you are just awareness and nobody, full of light but utter emptiness. The sutras: Master Lu-Tsu said: There are many kinds of confirmatory experiences.

Exactly like that, on the spiritual path there are experiences which are very confirmatory. It is as if you are moving towards a beautiful garden you cannot see; but the closer you come to the garden, the breezes are cooler – that you can feel.

The closer you are coming to your own inner center, the more you will start feeling the suffering of all beings of the world. On the one hand you will feel very calm and quiet, and on the other hand you will start feeling a deep sympathy for all those who suffer. And there is suffering and suffering and suffering, the whole place is full of suffering. On the one hand you will feel great joy arising in you, and on the other hand a great sadness too, that millions are suffering – and ridiculously suffering, for no reason suffering! This is their birthright, to attain to this blissfulness that is coming to you. And don’t become satisfied that you have become blissful, so all is finished. If you become blissful, all is not finished. Really, now the journey takes a new turn. When you have attained to buddhahood, when you have come home, now the real work starts. Up to now it was only a dream. Now the real work starts: help others to come out of their dreams. When the disciple has attained, he has to become a master.

Whoever becomes a buddha has to become, of necessity, a redeemer of all. One’s joy, one’s peace, one’s blessings are small things. Don’t be contented with them. Remember always that one day you have to share, one day you have to help others to be awakened. This seed must be planted deep in your heart, so that when your buddhahood blooms you don’t disappear from the world. Buddhists have two words; one is arhat. Arhat means: the person who has become enlightened but thinks all is finished, his work is complete – he disappears. The other is called bodhisattva: he has become enlightened but he does not disappear – he insists on being here, he prolongs himself to be here, as long as it is possible.

The story is that when Buddha reached the doors of nirvana the doors were opened, celestial music was played, golden flowers showered, angels with garlands were ready to receive him, but he refused to enter. He turned his back to the door. The angels were surprised, they could not believe it. They asked him again and again, “What are you doing? Your whole life – not only one but many lives – you have been searching for this door. Now you have arrived and you are turning your back to the door? And we have been waiting for you! And the whole paradise is full of joy – one more person has become a buddha. Come in! Let us celebrate your buddhahood together.” But Buddha said, “Unless all those who are in suffering are redeemed, I’m not going to enter. I will have to wait. I am going to be the last. Let others move first.”

The seeker cannot waste. His whole life has to be devoted and dedicated to one single point. He cannot waste here and there, he cannot go and sit in the coffee house and gossip unnecessarily, he cannot read that which is not going to help. He’s not going to do a single thing which is not going to help his journey, and he’s not going to collect a single thing that will become a burden later on and will have to be dropped. He remains simple. This simplicity has nothing to do with asceticism. This simplicity is simply scientific.

knowledge gets inside; it makes your head very heavy, and the head should be very light.

Have you watched, or have you seen a Japanese doll called daruma? Daruma is the Japanese name for Bodhidharma. The doll is beautiful: it represents the enlightened man, the daruma doll. It’s beauty is that you can throw it any way but it always sits back in full lotus posture. You throw it, you cannot topple it – it again comes back. Its bottom is heavy, its head is light, so you cannot put it upside down. It is always rightside up. Just the opposite is the case with human beings: they are upside down. Their heads are very heavy, they are top-heavy. They are standing on their heads. A man who is knowledgeable stands on his head. He is in a continuous sirshasana, a headstand. The man who has no knowledge in the head, whose head is empty, silent, is rightside up. He is in a lotus posture, he is a daruma doll. You cannot topple him, there is no way – he will always come back. You cannot disturb him, there is no way – his undisturbedness remains continuous.

Many times the man wanted to say something, but knowing Lao Tzu, looking at him, he controlled himself. But when the sun started rising and it was so beautiful, the temptation was so much that he forgot all about what Lao Tzu had said and he said, “Look! What a beautiful morning!” And Lao Tzu said, “So, you have become talkative. You are too talkative! You are here, I am here, the sun is here, the sun is rising – so what is the point of saying to me ‘The sun is beautiful’? Do you think I can’t see it? Am I blind? What is the point of saying it? I am also here.” In fact, the man who said, “The morning is beautiful”, was not there. He was repeating, it was a reaction. When you respond, words may not be needed at all or sometimes they may be needed – it will depend on the situation. But they will not necessarily be there: they may be, they may not be.

Thoughts are parasites: they live on the energy which is really for the feelings, they exploit it. Thoughts are like leakages in your being: they take your energy out. Then you are like a pot with holes – nothing can be contained in you, you remain poor. When there are no thoughts your energy is contained inside, its level starts rising higher and higher, you have a kind of fullness. In that fullness the heart responds. And then life is poetry, then life is music, and then only can you do the miracle of making deeds prove your words, not before it. Then you don’t only say “I love you,” your very existence proves the love. Then your words are not impotent words, they have a soul to them. And to live like that is the only life worth living: when your words and your deeds correspond, when your words

and deeds are not opposites, when your words are full of your sincerity, when whatsoever you say you are. Before that, you live in a kind of split: you say one thing, you do another. You remain schizophrenic – the whole humanity is schizophrenic – unless you come to this point where words and deeds are no more separate, but two aspects of the same phenomenon. You say what you feel, you feel what you say, you do what you say, you say what you do: one can simply watch you and will see the authenticity of your being. If, when there is quiet, the spirit has continuously and uninterruptedly a sense of great joy as if intoxicated or freshly bathed, it is a sign that the light-principle is harmonious in the whole body; then the Golden Flower begins to bud.

Now your whole body is functioning as a harmonious unity. Your whole body is in accord. You are no more split, you are no more fragmentary. This is individuation: you are one whole, all parts functioning and humming together, all parts functioning in an orchestra of being, nothing is out of tune. The body, the mind, the soul, the lowest and the highest, from sex to samadhi – all is functioning in a tremendous harmony and an incredible unison.

The essence never dies. When you know something abiding in you, something that never changes – the joy that continues irrespective of conditions – then you know for the first time that something is deathless in you, something in you is eternal. And that moment is the moment of strength, potentiality, fearlessness. Then one is not afraid. Then trembling disappears. For the first time you look into reality without fear. Otherwise your so-called gods are just out of fear: you have created them to console yourself, you have created them as props for your fear, as protection, as armor. You are afraid, you need somebody to cling to. These are false gods, these are not true gods. Out of fear how can you find the true God?

literally, and then they become a laughing stock. It is not a literal message,

But once you start thinking about enlightenment as a goal, you will become serious, you will be in tremendous trouble – and absolutely unnecessarily, of your own creation. And you will never succeed either, because to think of enlightenment as a goal is already to miss the whole point. It is not there to be sought, it is in the seeker.

What else is left? Where is the flute? The West is suffering from affluence: all is there now, but nobody knows what to do. They have worked for three hundred years, hard work, to make everything right. Now everything is right: the house is ready, food is available, technology has provided for all needs – now what to do? Except to commit suicide life seems meaningless, because the flute is missing. In the East man has lived with a half-vision: God is beautiful, and life is beautiful, but then he has been avoiding the ugly part of it and not trying to transform it at all. The East has lived in a very unrevolutionary way, an antirevolutionary way.

It needs a total vision. All these are aspects of that total vision: Mohammed is one door, Christ is another, Krishna is still another, and Buddha too. All are different doors to the same temple and all doors are needed, only then will the temple be rich. And even if all the doors are accepted, then truth has not been told in its fullness – because it is infinite.

The meditator starts by dropping thoughts. He starts by dropping thinking itself, and a moment comes when there is no thought: then there is immediacy, then there is nothing between you and that which is. Then there is nothing at all – you are bridged with reality. But that is an experience and whenever you would like to tell that experience to somebody else you will have to use words – out of necessity – and words cannot contain it.

It has always happened: the higher you go the more dumb you feel, and whatsoever you say you can immediately see it has been misunderstood.

Lao Tzu has said, “If I say something and people understand it, then I know it was not really worth saying. But if I say something and people don’t understand, then I know that there must have been some truth in it.”

But their puzzle, why they can’t understand it, is that they pretend to be religious, but deep down their whole obsession is materialistic. They carry a hypocrisy, and to fulfill their hypocrisy the whole Indian religious world has to compromise. If somebody wants to become a saint he has to live in utter poverty. It is almost a kind of masochism: he has to torture himself. The more he tortures himself, the more people think he is religious: “See how religiously he is living!” To live religiously means to live joyously. To live religiously means to live meditatively. To live religiously means to live this world as a gift of God. But their minds are obsessed and they can’t understand. Once the purpose of the car is served, it will be gone. The purpose is almost served, but it can show you… I can even come in a bullock cart. That would not be much. It would be even more colorful, and I would enjoy the ride more.

And a materialistic person is one who, even if he loves a man or a woman, a person, immediately reduces them into a thing. The woman becomes a wife – the wife is a thing; the man becomes a husband – the husband is a thing – an institution and all institutions are ugly, dead.

You are not aware, you cannot be aware of what I am intending to do. These are all devices, so never start making a conclusion just by seeing something: you may not be aware of its background, you may not be aware of the intention, and you may not be aware of what is going to happen through it.

Gurdjieff was not allowed to enter England, he was not allowed to settle in many countries. For his whole life he was moving from one country to another. He could not do his work. How could he do the work? The work needs a kind of settlement. He would gather his disciples and then the country had to be left and the disciples would be scattered again. Again he would gather, he would spend a few years in gathering, and by the time the disciples had gathered, the politicians were against him and he had to leave the country, and again everything was disturbed. This continued for his whole life. He could not help – not a single person could become enlightened through him, and many would have become. He had the potential. He was a rare genius, a rare Master – but the situations wouldn’t allow.

In politics you don’t need brains, you don’t need intelligence, you don’t need sensitivity, you don’t need awareness, you don’t need love, you don’t need compassion. These are all barriers! In politics you need just the opposite qualities. Disqualifications everywhere else are qualifications in politics. All that is needed is a mad hunger for power – and that is created by an inferiority complex. The religious man has no inferiority complex. Only the religious man has no inferiority complex because he never compares, and without comparison you cannot be superior or inferior. So the religious man is neither superior nor inferior, he is simply himself.

Once the followers leave him, he is nowhere. He cannot stand on his own, he has no ground of his own.

A hungry man cannot be interested in meditation. But Gandhi thinks that poverty has something spiritual in it. It is just ugly. It is the most unspiritual thing in the world, because it is the source of all crime and sin.

And my effort is that we will not be bringing anything inside, we will produce everything. It can become a great oasis in this desert country. It can be of much help, it can create great inspiration. So I am not going to leave it. The country will need me, and you too. Enough for today.

If early in the morning, one can rid oneself of all entanglements and meditate from one to two double hours, and then can orientate oneself towards all activities and outside things in a purely objective, reflex way, and if this can be continued without any interruption, then after two or three months all the perfected ones come from heaven and approve such behavior.

is easier to move into the center consciously, early in the morning, than at any other time – because for the whole night you have been there at the center, you have just left it. The world of a thousand and one things has not yet arisen. You are just on the way, moving towards things, moving into the outside world, but the inner center is very close, around the corner. Just a turning of the head and you will be able to see that which is: truth, God, enlightenment. You will be able to see that into which you had gone when dreams had stopped and sleep was profound. But then you were unconscious.

That’s why Patanjali says: Deep, dreamless sleep is almost like samadhi – but almost, not exactly samadhi. What is the difference? – only very small or very great – but this much difference is there: in sleep you are unconscious, in samadhi you are conscious. But the space is the same.

This is what meditation is all about. Hence, down the ages, in the morning, early morning – when the earth is awakening and the trees are awakening and the birds are awakening and the sun is awakening – when the whole atmosphere is full of awakening, you can use this situation. You can ride on this tide of awakening and you can enter into your own being, awake, alert, aware, and your whole life will be transformed. And your whole day will be transformed because then you will have a different orientation. Then you can go into the marketplace and still you will remain in contact with your inner core. And that is the greatest secret, the Secret of the Golden Flower. Buddha’s sannyasins were meditating under the mango trees that morning… As you have gathered around me, thousands had gathered around Buddha. There was nothing else to learn other than to meditate.

Life wants you to be automatic, robot-like. When you go to a Master, he requires that you drop your automatism, that you de-automatize yourself, that you become a little more alert, that you don’t go on looking at things…also remember your being.

He was, and yet he was not… In fact, the moment you really are, you drop all ideas of your ego. People carry the idea of the ego because they are not. Try to understand this paradox: those who are not, they brag about themselves – they have to brag, they have to prove to the world. They are constantly performing. They know if they don’t perform they are nobodies. They have to perform, they have to shout, they have to make noise, they have to force others to take note. Adolf Hitlers and Genghis Khans and Tamerlanes and all the stupid lot of politicians down the ages – all that they have been doing is to make more and more people take note of them. These are the people who are not. The people who are, are so contented with their being, who cares whether anybody takes note or not? They are so much to themselves, enough unto themselves. So this is the paradox: the man who is not tries, pretends that he is much, somebody special, and the man who is pretends not, brags not, becomes a very silent existence.

He had melted slowly and disappeared as a person… And when that happens, when that miracle happens, the very absence becomes a radiant presence. Subhuti was also sitting under a tree, not even meditating…. Others were meditating, he was simply sitting there doing nothing. That is the highest form of meditation. To do meditation is to be just a beginner. The beginner has to do the meditation. But one who has understood meditation cannot even think in terms of doing, because the moment that you do something you are stirred, the moment that you do something you are tense, the moment that you do something the ego enters again from the back door – because with the doing comes the doer.

So he was not doing meditation, remember. He was just sitting and doing nothing, and then suddenly, flowers began to fall around him. And those were not ordinary flowers – not of this world, not earthly – they were not falling from the trees. They were falling from the sky, from nowhere, out of the blue. He had never seen such beauty and such freshness and such fragrance. Those were the flowers of the beyond, Golden Flowers. He was naturally in awe and wonder. And then he heard the gods whispering to him, “We are praising you for your discourse on emptiness…” Now he was really puzzled. “Discourse on emptiness? But I have not spoken of emptiness,” said Subhuti. “You have not spoken of emptiness, we have not heard emptiness,” responded the gods. “This is true emptiness.” And blossoms showered upon Subhuti like rain. This is one of the most beautiful stories I have ever come across. A great meaning is hidden there: if you are silent, if you are utterly silent, existence starts showering on you – blessings shower on you like rain. If you are silent, if you are in the state of meditation, just being and doing nothing, the whole existence converges upon you with all its grace, with all its beauty and benediction. This is the state Jesus calls the state of beatitude. For the first time you become aware of the splendor of existence. Each moment is an eternity then, and even to breathe is such a joy, such a celebration. Misery disappears the moment you disappear.

Just that it exists is the mystery. There is no need to go anywhere else. The mystery is not hidden, the mystery is all over the place. Just that it exists is the mystery of it! You need not dig deep to find the mystery. Mystery is everywhere, on the surface as much as in the depth. All that is needed is a heart that feels. All that is needed is a being that is available, open. All that is needed is alertness – alertness without any effort and tension. All that is needed is a state of meditation, and then favors from existence start showering like rain.

First you were also a noise in all the noises, you were lost in it. Now you are a witness, an observer, and because you are so silent you can see everything distinctly, clearly. Although noises are far away, they are more clear than ever before. Each single note is heard.

They become less material, their matter disappears. They are no more heavy, they are light. You can see their weightlessness – they are like echoes. The whole existence becomes an echo. That is why Hindu mystics call the world maya, illusion. Illusion does not mean unreal, it simply means shadow-like, echo-like. It does not mean nonexistential, it simply means dream-like. Shadow-like, dream-like, echo-like – that will be the feeling: you cannot feel that these things are real. The whole existence becomes a dream – distinct, you are alert – and very dream-like because you are alert. First you were lost in the dream: not alert and you were thinking that this is reality. You were identified with your mind, now you are no more identified with the mind; a separate entity has arisen in you: the watchfulness, sakshi.

The outer madness is going to continue, because you have not produced it and you cannot destroy it. But you can destroy your inner madness very easily, it is within your capacity. Once the inner madness is not there, the outer madness becomes insubstantial; it loses all reality, it becomes illusory – you cannot find your own voice, there is no thought arising in you so no sound. This is called the gods are in the valley – you have become empty and everything has gone deep down in the valley – only echoes are heard. And when echoes are heard, certainly you are not affected. Just the other day a madman tried to rape Anuradha. He was caught before he could do any harm. I asked Anuradha to come to me, just to see whether she is affected by it or not – and I was tremendously happy that she is not affected at all – not at all, not even a trace. That’s the beauty of growing meditation: even if you are murdered you will remain unaffected.

Now, the second sign is called In the empty chamber it grows light. Unless you become empty, you will remain dark, you will remain darkness. In the empty chamber it grows light – when you are utterly empty, when there is nobody inside you, then light happens. The presence of the ego creates darkness. Darkness and ego are synonymous. No-ego and light are synonymous.

This light has a very mysterious quality: it has no source, no cause. It is not caused, hence once it appears it remains, it never disappears. In fact, it is already there, just that you are not empty enough to see it. And when this light starts growing in you these will be the experiences, as soon

as one is quiet – the moment you sit silently and you become quiet, still, unmoving within and without the light of the eyes begins to blaze up. Suddenly you will see your light is pouring through your eyes.

There is another part: the light pouring out of your eyes. And when the light starts pouring out of your eyes the light of the eyes begins to blaze up, so that everything before one becomes quite bright, then this whole existence brightens up. Then you see that trees are more green than ever, and their greenness has a quality of luminosity in it. Then you see the roses are rosier than ever. The same roses, the same trees, but something from you is pouring into them, revealing them more clearly than ever.

“The day I became enlightened, the whole existence became enlightened. The trees and the mountains and the rivers and the rocks – all became enlightened.” The whole existence was raised to a higher plenitude.

But even to see that light you will have to be a little more alert than you are. The sun may be rising and it may be morning, but you may be fast asleep – but then no sun is rising for you, and there is no morning; you may be lost in a dark night, in a nightmare. You have to be a little more wakeful…but this happens! In the modern consciousness an experience of this kind has come through psychedelics – a little bit. It is forced, it is violent – it is not natural, you are raping your chemistry – but the experience has happened. And many people have come to meditation through drugs because the drug has made them aware of something they were never aware of. When you have taken some drug, the world looks more beautiful, ordinary things look extraordinary. What is happening? The drug is forcing some inner light from your eyes to fall onto things – but it is a forced phenomenon, and dangerous – and after each drug-trip you will fall into a deeper darkness than before. And in the person who has been taking drugs long, you will find his eyes utterly empty – because he has been pouring light out of his eyes and he does not know how to create it. He does not know how to make his inner light circulate so that more light is created; he simply pours. So a man who takes drugs, by and by, loses the vitality of his eyes, the youth of his eyes. His eyes become dull, dark, black holes.

You are full of light and more light is coming in, streaming in every moment, and there is no end to it – now you can share: you can share with the trees and with the rocks and with people, you can give to the existence. This is a very favorable sign.

As if the sun is shining on the cloud and the whole cloud is afire, and you are in the cloud and the cloud is just fire reflecting the sun, one starts living in this cloud of light. One sleeps in it, one walks in it, one sits in it; this cloud continues. This cloud has been seen as the aura. Those who have eyes to see, they will see a light around the saints – a light around their heads, around their bodies. A subtle aura surrounds them.

And if you are happy, joyous, fulfilled, contented, then the aura grows bigger and stronger, becomes more and more bright.

That law I call “the law of grace”: it pulls you upwards. This experience of your fleshly body becoming quite shining like silk or jade, happens simultaneously whenever you start feeling that it is… …difficult to remain sitting: one feels as if drawn upward. This is called: “The spirit returns and touches heaven.” Now the upward journey is starting. And remember, the upward and inward are synonymous, outward and downward are synonymous. The more in you go, the more up you go. The deeper you reach upwards, the deeper you reach inwards. They are the same, one dimension; two aspects of the same dimension.

And that too happens: when this inner body starts rising so high and has tremendous power, then even the physical body can start floating with it. It is possible, but there is no need to make it happen. That is foolish. If it happens one day of its own accord, enjoy it and don’t take much note of it. These confirmatory signs have to be understood, not bragged about. Don’t talk to anybody about them, otherwise the ego will come back and will start exploiting these experiences.

of renouncing the world is utterly wrong – because it is in the storms of the world that integrity arises, it is in the challenges of the world that you crystallize.

So don’t be worried. Rather, use the opportunity. This challenging world, this constant turmoil on the outside, has to be used. You have to be a witness to it. Watch it. Learn how not to be affected by it. Learn to remain unaffected, untouched by it – like a lotus leaf in water. And then you will be grateful, because it is only by being watchful of all the turmoil that one day, suddenly, “the gods are in the valley” – you see the marketplace disappearing far away, becoming an echo. This is real growth.

Two times are the best. The first best time is the early morning: orient yourself to the center so you can live on the circumference but yet with full remembrance of the center. And the second time is before you go to bed: orient yourself again to the center, so in your deep sleep also – even while you are dreaming, while you are unconscious – you can remain

more and more, closer and closer to the center. These two times are the best. And if you can meditate these two times, you need not go anywhere else. You need not go to any monastery, to any cave, and you need not renounce the world – and one day suddenly you will see blossoms showering on you and gods whispering in your ear.

CHAPTER 22 Aloneness is Ultimate

Aloneness is ultimate. There is no way to be anything other than alone. One can forget it, one can drown oneself in so many things, but again and again the truth asserts. Hence, after each profound experience you will feel alone. After a great love experience you will feel alone, after a deep meditation you will feel alone.

That’s why all great experiences make people sad. In the wake of a profound experience, sadness always settles. It is because of this phenomenon that millions of people don’t hanker after profound experiences, they avoid them. They don’t want to go deep in love, sex is enough, because sex is superficial: it will not leave them alone. It will be fun, an entertainment, for a moment they will enjoy it and then they will forget all about it. It will not bring them to their own center. But love brings you to your center: love is so profound that it leaves you alone.

You can distract yourself for the moment, but no distraction is going to help. Aloneness has to be accepted because it is ultimate. It is not an accident, it is the very way things are. It is Tao. Once you accept it, the quality changes. Aloneness is not creating sadness. Your idea that you should not be alone, that is creating sadness; your idea that to be alone is to be sad is creating the problem. Aloneness is utterly beautiful because it is profoundly free. It is absolute freedom – how can it create sadness?

Aloneness, misinterpreted, looks like loneliness. Loneliness means you are missing the other. And who is the other? – any excuse that helps you to drown your consciousness, any intoxicant. It may be a woman, a man, a book, anything – anything that helps you to forget yourself, that takes away your self-remembrance, that unburdens you from your awareness. You mean loneliness really. Loneliness is a negative state: the other is missed and you start searching and seeking for the other. Aloneness is immensely beautiful. Aloneness means a moment when the other is no longer needed, you are enough unto yourself – so enough that you can share your aloneness with the whole existence, so inexhaustible is your aloneness that you can pour it unto the whole existence and it will still remain there. You are rich when you are alone, you are poor when you feel lonely. The lonely person is a beggar, his heart is a begging bowl. The alone person is an emperor. Buddha is alone…

Why should one want to escape from it? And I’m not saying that in this aloneness you will not be able to relate. In fact, for the first time you will be able to relate. A lonely person cannot relate because his need is so much, he clings, he leans upon the other. He tries to possess the other because he is constantly afraid: “If the other goes, then what? I will be left lonely again.”

Love becomes politics, love becomes domination, exploitation. It is because lonely people cannot love.

This is what is happening in your love-relationship: somebody is a prostitute, somebody is a taxi driver. It is a bargain, it is tit-for-tat. It is continuous conflict. That’s why couples are continuously fighting. They cannot leave each other; although they go on fighting they cannot leave. In fact that’s why they are fighting – so that nobody can leave.

Mulla Nasruddin goes to a hill station. He has a bungalow there. Sometimes he says, “I am going for three weeks,” but by the second week he is back, or even after seven days or ten days. I asked Nasruddin, “Many times you say, ‘I am going for three weeks and four weeks,’ then you come within two weeks or even earlier. What is the matter?”

He said, “There is something in it. I have kept a woman there to look after the house. She is the ugliest woman – horrible she is, repulsive she is! Just to look at her and one feels like vomiting.” I asked then, “But what has she to do with it, with your coming early?” He said, “There is a story in it. When I go to the hill station, she looks horrible. But slowly, slowly after four, five days, she is not so horrible. Then after eight, ten days, I start seeing some beauty in her. The day I start seeing beauty in her is the day I escape, because that means enough is enough! I have lived away from the world too much, away from my woman; now even this horrible woman has started looking beautiful! That simply means I have starved myself too much. So that is the criterion: whatsoever I say – three weeks, four weeks – is not the point. The real criterion is: the day I see the woman is beautiful and I start fantasizing about her, then I pack up my things and I escape. I know the woman is horrible, and if I stay one or two days more, then there is going to be danger – I may fall in love with this horrible woman!”

“Efforts to share or escape into distractions have bad results.” Don’t share right now. Let it gather, let it become a cloud full of rainwater, then the sharing will happen of its own accord, there will be no effort to share. Right now if you start sharing, it will be again just a way of finding the other in the name of sharing. It will be escape. Sharing has to be allowed to happen on its own. You just go on gathering this aloneness and one day you will see: the fragrance is released to the winds. One day you will see: the sharing has started – you will be a witness to it. You will not be a doer, but only a witness. “Why do I cling to this habit of escaping aloneness?” Because you have not yet understood it as aloneness! You go on interpreting it as loneliness. And I can understand it. This is how everybody does it. When you feel aloneness for the first time you interpret it as loneliness because that is a known phenomenon, you have felt it all your life. The moment the child leaves the mother’s womb, the first experience is of loneliness, he starts feeling lonely: he had to leave his home.

Why should he leave? He is being thrown out, expelled. He does not want to go out. Life – we call it birth – but the child thinks it is going to be death. It is death to him, because it is the end of the life that he has known for nine months. He is shocked, he feels punished. And he cannot think yet, so the feeling goes very deep in the body.

dangerous people. Try to understand. The mind of a revolutionary is a destructive mind: he knows how to destroy, he does not know how to create. He is very capable of provoking people into violence, but he is absolutely incapable of helping people to become calm and quiet and go to work and create. He does not know that language: his whole life he has been a revolutionary, his whole work, his whole expertise, was to provoke people, to destroy. He knows only that language and you cannot hope to change his whole life pattern at the end of his life.

Whenever you remove a program, remove it just as you remove your clothes. When your body grows, your clothes become small. You don’t feel guilty because you are removing pajamas your mother had given you that don’t fit you anymore. You have to remove them! And you don’t feel angry either. You need not first beat them and throw petrol on them and burn them and make such fuss about it. You don’t do that either, because you know they have served their purpose.

When they misunderstand, I perfectly understand their misunderstanding. I have no false hopes, it will take years or centuries for them to understand me. But this always happens.

That is my fate. I can only be understood by a new kind of being who has seen this totality: that man is both body and soul and that life matures only through experiences.