The Inner Journey

This is the final edit of the Hindi translation of Antar Yatra, later published as part of Sadhana Path.

Talks given from 3/2/68 am to 5/2/68 pm

Original in Hindi

CHAPTER 1

Body: The first step for a seeker

3 February 1968 am in Ajol Meditation Camp

[Note: This is the final edit of the Hindi translation of Antar Yatra, later published as part of Sadhana Path. This is for reference use only, pending publication.]

My Beloved Ones,

In this first meeting of the meditation camp, I would like to talk about the first step for a meditator, a seeker. What is the first step? A thinker or a lover follow certain paths but a seeker has to travel on a totally different journey. For a seeker, what is the first step on the journey?

The body is the first step for a seeker – but no attention or thought has been given to it. Not only at certain times, but for thousands of years, the body has been neglected. The neglect is of two kinds.

Firstly, there are the indulgent people who have neglected the body. They have no experience of life other than eating, drinking and wearing clothes. They have neglected the body, misused it, foolishly wasted it – they have ruined their instrument, their veena.

If a musical instrument – for example, a veena – is ruined, music cannot arise out of it. Music is an altogether different thing from the veena – music is one thing, the veena is another, but without the veena music cannot arise.

Those people who have misused the body through indulgence are one type and the other type of people are those who have neglected the body through yoga and renunciation. They have tortured the body, they have suppressed it and they have been hostile towards it. And neither the people who have indulged the body nor the ascetics who have tortured the body have understood its importance.

So there have been two kinds of neglect and torture of the veena of the body: one by the indulgers and another by the ascetics. Both have done harm to the body. In the West, the body has been harmed in one way and in the East, in another way, but we all are equal participants in harming it. The people going to the whorehouses or to the pubs harm the body in one way, and the people standing naked in the sun or rushing into the forests harm the body in another way.

Only through the veena of the body can the music of life arise. The music of life is an altogether different thing from the body – it is totally different, something else – but only through the veena of the body is there a possibility of attaining it. No proper attention has yet been given to this fact.

The first step is the body and the proper attention of the meditator towards the body. In this first meeting I want to talk to you about this point.

A few things need to be understood.

The first thing: the soul has a connection with the body at some centers – our life energy comes from these connections. The soul is closely related to these centers; from them our life energy flows into the body.

The seeker who is not aware of these centers will never be able to attain to the soul. If I ask you which is the most important center, which is the most important place in your body, you will probably point to your head.

Man’s very wrong education has made the head the most important part of the human body. The head or brain is not the most important center of life-energy in man. It is like going to a plant and asking it what its most important and vital part is. Because the flowers can be seen at the top of the plant, the plant and everybody else will say that the flowers are the most important part. So although the flowers seem to be the most important they are not, the most important part are the roots, which are not visible.

The brain is the flower on the plant of man, it is not the root. Roots come first; flowers come last. If the roots are ignored the flowers will wither away because they have no separate life of their own. If the roots are taken care of, the flowers get taken care of automatically; no special effort is needed to care for them. But looking at a plant it seems that the flowers are the most important part and in the same way it seems that, in man, the brain is most important. The brain is the final development in man’s body; it is not the root.

Mao Zedong has written a memoir of his childhood. He wrote, ”When I was small, there was a very beautiful garden near my mother’s hut. The garden was so beautiful, it had such beautiful flowers, that people from distant places used to come to see them. Then my mother became old and fell sick. She was neither worried about her sickness nor about her old age. Her only worry was about what would happen to her garden.” Mao was young. He said to his mother, ”Don’t be worried, I will take care of your garden.”

And Mao took care of the garden, working from the morning till the evening. After one month his mother got better, and as soon as she could walk a little she came into the garden. Seeing the condition of the garden she was shocked! The garden was ruined! All the plants had dried up. All the flowers had withered and fallen away. She became very much disturbed and said to Mao, ”You idiot! You were in the garden the whole day. What did you do here? All these flowers are destroyed.

The garden has withered away. All the plants are about to die. What were you doing?”

Mao started crying. He himself was troubled. Every day he used to work all day, but for some reason the garden went on drying out. He started crying and he said, ”I took great care. I used to kiss each flower and love it. I used to clean and wipe off the dust from each and every leaf, but I don’t know what happened. I was worried also, but the flowers went on withering away, the leaves went on drying out and the garden went on dying!” His mother started laughing. She said, ”You are an idiot!

You don’t know yet that the life of the flowers is not in the flowers and the life of the leaves is not in the leaves!”

The life of a plant is in a place that is not at all apparent to anyone. It is in the roots which are hidden beneath the ground. If one does not take care of those roots, the flowers and the leaves cannot be taken care of; howsoever much they may be kissed, howsoever much they may be loved, howsoever much the dust on them may be cleaned, the plant will wither away. But if one does not bother about the flowers at all and takes care of the roots, the flowers will take care of themselves. The flowers come out of the roots, not the other way round.

If we ask somebody which is the most important part in a human body then unknowingly his hand will point towards the head and he will say that the head is the most important. Or, if it is a woman, then maybe she will point towards her heart and say that the heart is the most important.

Neither the head nor the heart is the most important. Men have emphasized their heads and women have emphasized their hearts. But by emphasizing these two parts the society so formed is continuously being ruined every day, because neither of these parts are the most important part in a human body. Both are very late developments. Man’s roots are not in them.

What do I mean by the roots of man? Just as the plants have roots in the earth from which they draw their life-energy and life juices and live, similarly, in the human body, there are roots at some point which draw life-energy from the soul. Because of this the body remains alive. The day those roots become feeble, the body begins to die.

The roots of plants are in the earth; the roots of the human body are in the soul. But neither the head nor the heart is the place from where man is connected to his life-energy – and if we do not know anything about those roots then we can never enter the world of a meditator.

Then where are the roots of man? Perhaps you are not aware of the place. If even simple and common things are not given any attention for thousands of years, they are forgotten. A child is born in the womb of a mother and grows there. Through which part is the child connected to its mother?

Through the head or through the heart? No, it is connected through the navel. The life-energy is available to it through the navel – the heart and the brain develop later on. The life-energy of the mother becomes available to the child through the navel. The child is connected to his mother’s body through his navel. From there the roots spread out into the mother’s body and also, in the opposite direction, into his own body as well.

The most important point in the human body is the navel. After that the heart develops and after that the brain. These are all branches which develop later. It is on them that the flowers blossom.

Flowers of knowledge blossom in the brain; flowers of love blossom in the heart. It is these flowers which allure us, and then we think that they are everything. But the roots of man’s body and his life-energy are in the navel. No flowers blossom there. The roots are absolutely invisible, they are not even seen. But the degeneration that has happened to human life in the past five thousand years is because we have placed all our emphasis either on the brain or on the heart. Even on the heart we have placed very little emphasis; most of the emphasis has gone to the brain.

From early childhood, all education is an education of the brain; there is no education of the navel anywhere in the world. All education is of the brain so the brain goes on growing larger and larger and our roots go on becoming smaller and smaller. We take care of the brain because the flowers blossom there, so it becomes larger – and our roots go on disappearing. Then the life-energy flows more and more feebly and our contact with the soul becomes weak.

Slowly, slowly we have even come to a point where man is saying, ”Where is the soul? Who says there is a soul? Who says there is a God? We do not find anything.” We will not find anything. One cannot find anything. If somebody searches all over the body of the tree and says, ”Where are the roots? I cannot find anything,” then what he is saying is right. There are no roots anywhere on the tree. And we have no access to the place where the roots are; of that place we have no awareness.

From early childhood, all training, all education is of the brain, of the mind, so our whole attention gets entangled and ends up focused on the brain. Then for our whole life we wander around the brain. Our awareness does not ever go below it.

The journey of a meditator is downwards – towards the roots. One has to descend from the brain to the heart, and from the heart to the navel. Only from the navel can anybody enter into the soul; before that, one can never enter it.

Normally the movement of our life is from the navel towards the brain. The movement of a seeker is exactly opposite. He has to descend from the brain to the navel.

In these three days I will be talking to you and showing you, step by step, how to descend from the brain to the heart and from the heart to the navel – and then how to enter the soul from the navel.

Today it is necessary to say a few things about the body.

The first thing to understand is that the center of man’s life-energy is the navel. Only from there does the child acquire life; only from there do the branches and sub-branches of his life start spreading; only from there does he get energy; only from there does he get vitality. But our attention is never focused on that energy center – not even for a minute! Our focus is not on the system through which we get to know that energy center, that center of vitality; instead our whole attention and our whole education is focused on the system that helps to forget it! That is why our whole education has gone wrong.

Our whole education is taking man slowly, slowly towards madness.

The brain alone will only take man towards madness.

Do you know that the more a country becomes educated the more the number of mad people increases there? America has the highest number of mad people today. It is a matter of pride. It is proof that America is the most educated, the most civilized country. American psychologists say that if the same system continues for another hundred years, it will be difficult to find a sane man in America. Even today the minds of three out of four people are in a shaky condition.

In America alone, three million people are consulting psychoanalysts every day! Slowly, slowly in America the number of physicians is becoming less and psychoanalysts are increasing. The physicians also say that eighty percent of man’s diseases are of the mind, not of the body. And as the understanding grows this percentage increases. First they used to say forty percent, then they started saying fifty percent, now they say that eighty percent of diseases are of the mind, not of the body. And I assure you that after twenty to twenty-five years they will say that ninety-nine percent of diseases are of the mind, not of the body. They will have to say so because our whole emphasis is being given to man’s brain. The brain has become insane.

You have no idea that the brain is a very delicate, a very fragile, a very subtle thing. Man’s brain is the most delicate machine in the world. So much stress is being imposed on this machine that it is a wonder that it does not completely break down and become mad! The whole burden of life is on the brain, and we have no idea how delicate a thing it is. We have hardly any idea of how fine and delicate the nerves in the head are which have to carry all the burden, all the anxiety, all the suffering, all the knowledge, all the education... the whole weight of life.

Perhaps you may not know that in this small head there are about seventy million nerves. Just by their number you can tell how tiny they are. There is no machine or plant more delicate than this.

The fact that there are seventy million nerves in the small head of man shows how delicate it is.

There are so many nerves in a single man’s head that if they were spread out one after the other, they would encircle the whole earth.

In this small head there is such a subtle mechanism, such a delicate mechanism. In the past five thousand years all the stress of life has been placed on this delicate brain alone. The result was inevitable. The result is that the nerves have started breaking down, becoming insane, going mad.

The burden of thoughts cannot take man anywhere else other than into madness. Our whole life-energy has started moving around the brain. A meditator has to bring this life-energy deeper, more downwards, more towards the center; he has to turn it back. How can it be turned back? To understand this we must understand something about the body – the ’first sutra’.

The first thing: the body is not seen as a temple nor as a path for the spiritual journey nor as a passage for discovering the center of life-energy. The body is looked at either from the point of view of indulgence or from the point of view of renunciation. Both of these approaches are wrong.

The path to whatsoever is great in life and whatsoever is worth attaining, is within the body and goes through the body.

The body should be accepted as a temple, as a spiritual path – and as long as this is not our attitude we are either indulgers or we are renouncers. In both cases our attitude towards the body is neither right nor balanced.

A young prince was initiated by Buddha. He had seen all kinds of pleasures in his life, he had lived only for pleasure. Then he became a bhikshu, a monk. All the other bhikshus were very much surprised. They said, ”This person is becoming a bhikshu! He has never gone out of his palace; he has never walked without his chariot; the paths he used to walk on would be covered with velvety carpets! Now he wants to become a beggar! What kind of madness is he thinking of doing?”

Buddha said that man’s mind always moves between extremes – from one extreme to the other.

Man’s mind never stops in the middle. Just as a pendulum of a clock moves from one end to the other but never stays in the middle, in the same way the mind of man goes from one extreme to the other. Up to now this man had lived at one extreme – indulgence of his body; now he wanted to live at the other extreme – renunciation of his body.

And this happened. While all the bhikshus would walk on the highways, the prince, who had never walked anywhere except on the most valuable carpets, would walk on the pathways where there were thorns! When all the bhikshus would sit under the shadow of a tree, he would stand in the sun.

When all the bhikshus would eat once every day, he would fast one day and eat one day. Within six months he became a skeleton, his beautiful body turned black and his feet became wounded.

After six months Buddha went to him and said, ”Shrona!” – this was his name – ”I want to ask you one thing. I have heard that when you were a prince, you were very good at playing the veena. Is it true?”

The bhikshu said, ”Yes. People used to say that there was no one else who could play the veena like me.”

Buddha said, ”Then I have come to ask you one question – maybe you can answer. My question is that if the strings of the veena are too loose, can music arise or not?”

Shrona started laughing. He said, ”What kind of question are you asking? Even children know that if the strings of a veena are too loose then music will not arise, because sound cannot be created on loose strings, one cannot pluck them. So music cannot arise out of loose strings.”

Then Buddha said, ”And if the strings are too tight?”

Shrona answered, ”Music does not arise out of strings which are too tight either, because strings which are too tight break the moment they are touched.”

So Buddha asked, ”When does the music arise?”

Shrona said, ”Music arises when the strings are in such a state that we can neither say that they are very tight nor can we say that they are very loose. There is a state of the strings when they are neither loose nor tight. There is a point in-between, a midpoint. Music arises only there. And an expert musician, before he starts playing, checks the strings to see if they are too loose or too tight.”

Buddha said, ”Enough! I have received the answer! And I have come to tell you the same thing.

Just as you were an expert at playing the veena, in the same way I have also become a master of playing the veena of life. And the rule which applies to the veena also applies to the veena of life.

If the strings of life are too loose then music does not arise, and if the strings of life are too tight then also music does not arise. One who wants to create the music of life, first makes sure that the strings are not too tight or too loose.”

What is the veena of life?

Except for the body of man there is no other veena of life. And there are some strings in the body of man which should neither be too tight nor too loose. Only in that balance does man enter into music.

To know that music is to know the soul. When a man comes to know the music within himself, he knows the soul; and when he comes to know the music hidden within the whole, he knows God, the supreme soul.

Where are the strings of this veena of man’s body? The first thing is: there are many strings in the brain which are very tight. They are so tight that music cannot arise from them. If somebody touches them, only madness arises and nothing else. And we are all living with the strings of our brains being very tight. For twenty-four hours a day we are keeping them tense, from morning till evening. And if somebody thinks that they may be relaxed at night, he is mistaken. Even during the night our brain is stressed and tense.

Previously we did not know what goes on in a man’s brain during the night but now machines have been invented – while you are sleeping the machine will go on reporting what your brain is doing inside.

At this time, in America and Russia, there are about a hundred laboratories testing what a man does in his sleep. About forty thousand people have been experimented upon while sleeping during the night. The results that have been found are very surprising. The results are that whatever a man does during the day, he does during the night. Whatsoever he does the whole day.... If he runs a shop in the daytime then even at night he is running the shop. If the mind worries the whole day then it goes on worrying during the night. If it is angry during the day then it remains angry during the night.

The night is the reflection of the whole day, it is its echo. Whatsoever happens in the mind during the day resounds as an echo during the night. Whatsoever has been left incomplete, the mind tries to complete it during the night. If you were angry and you did not express anger totally towards some person, if the anger was left incomplete or stuck, then the mind releases it at night. By expressing total anger, the string of the veena tries to be reach its proper state. If somebody has fasted during the day, then at night he eats in his dream. Whatsoever has been left incomplete during the day tries to get completed at night. So whatsoever the mind does during the day, it does the same thing the whole night. For twenty-four hours the mind is tense; there is no rest. The strings of the mind are never relaxed. The strings of the mind are very tense.... That is one thing.

And the second thing is: the strings of the heart are very loose. The strings of our hearts are not tight at all. Do we know something like love? We know anger, we know envy, we know jealousy, we know hatred. Do we know something like love? Perhaps we would say that we do. Sometimes we love. Perhaps we would say that we hate and we love also. But do you know...? Can there be a heart which hates and loves also? It is the same as saying that a person is sometimes alive and sometimes dead. We cannot believe this, because a man can either be alive or he can be dead.

Both these things cannot happen simultaneously. That a man is sometimes alive and sometimes dead is not possible, it is impossible. Either the heart knows only hate or the heart knows only love. There can be no compromise between the two. In a heart which has love, hatred becomes impossible.

There was a fakir woman named Rabiya. In the holy book which she used to read, she canceled one line. She crossed out a line in it. Nobody cancels any line in the holy books because what can one improve in the holy books?

Another fakir came to stay with Rabiya. He read the book and he said, ”Rabiya, somebody has destroyed your holy book! It has become unholy, one line has been canceled from it. Who has canceled it?”

Rabiya said, ”I canceled it.”

The fakir was very shocked. He said, ”Why did you cancel this line?” The line was, ’Hate the devil’.

Rabiya said, ”I have got into a difficulty. From the day that love for God arose in me, hate disappeared within me. Even if I want to I cannot hate. Even if the devil comes in front of me then also I can only love him. I have no other choice, because before I can hate I need to have hate in me. Before I can hate, I must have hate in my heart. Otherwise where will I get it and how will I do it?”

The coexistence of love and hate is not possible in the same heart. These two things are as contrary as life and death; they cannot exist together in the same heart. Then what is that which we call love?

When there is less hate we call it love; when there is more hate we call it hate. They are lesser and greater proportions of hate itself. There is no love there at all. The mistake happens because of the degrees. Because of the degrees you may mistakenly think that cold and heat are two different things. They are not two different things. Heat and cold are gradations of the same thing. If the ratio of heat becomes less, then something starts feeling cold. If the ratio of heat becomes more, then the same thing starts feeling hot. Cold is another form of heat. They seem to be opposite, different, enemies of each other, but they are not. They are condensed and non-condensed forms of the same thing. We know hatred in the same way. The less condensed form of hate we understand as love and the very condensed form of hate we understand as hate – but love is in no way a form of hate. Love is a totally different thing to hate. Love has no relation to hate.

The strings of our heart are totally loose. From those loose strings the music of love does not arise

– neither does the music of bliss. Have you ever known bliss in your life? Can you say about some moment that it was a moment of bliss and that you recognized and experienced bliss? It is difficult to say with authenticity that you have ever known bliss.

Have you ever known love? Have you ever known peace? About them it is also difficult to say anything.

What do we know? We know restlessness. Yes, sometimes the restlessness is in a lesser degree –

which we take to be peace. Actually we are so restless that if the restlessness becomes a little less, it gives an illusion of peace. A man is sick. When the sickness becomes a little less, he says that he has become healthy. If the sickness that is surrounding him becomes a little less, he thinks that he has become healthy. But what is the relation of health to sickness? Health is a totally different thing.

Health is a completely different thing. Very few of us are able to know health. We know more sickness, we know less sickness, but we do not know health. We know more restlessness, we know less restlessness, but we do not know peace. We know more hatred, we know less hatred. We know more anger, we know less anger....

You may think that anger only happens sometimes. This idea is false. You are angry for twenty-four hours. Sometimes it is more, sometimes it is less, but you are angry for twenty-four hours. With just a little opportunity the anger will start surfacing. It is in search of an opportunity. The anger is ready inside; it is only in search of an opportunity on the outside to to give you an excuse to be angry. If you become angry without an excuse then people will think you are mad. But if opportunities are not given to you, you will start becoming angry even without any reason. Perhaps you do not know this.

For example, a person can be locked in a room provided with every facility and asked to note down any changes which happen to his mind. When he notes them down, he will find that without any reason sometimes he feels good in that closed room, sometimes he feels bad; sometimes he becomes sad, sometimes he becomes happy; sometimes he feels angry, sometimes he does not feel angry. There are no excuses there, the situation in the room is constantly the same – but what is happening to him? That is why man is so afraid of aloneness – because in aloneness there are no excuses from the outside. One will have to assume all the things are within oneself. Any person kept in isolation cannot remain healthy for more than six months, he will become mad.

A fakir told an Egyptian emperor about this but the emperor did not believe him so the fakir asked him to find the most healthy person in his city and to put him in isolation for six months. The city was searched. A healthy, young man, who was happy in every way – was just married, had a child, was earning well, was very happy – was brought to the emperor. The emperor told him, ”We will not give you any trouble. We are just making an experiment. Your family will be taken care of – food, clothing, and every arrangement will be made for them. It will be a better situation for them than it will be for you. You will have all comforts but for six months you will have to live alone.”

He was locked up in a big house. He was given every facility – but it was so lonely! Even the man who was guarding did not know his language so they could not speak to each other. Within only two or three days the man started becoming nervous. He had every comfort, there were no hardships whatsoever: at the right time food was available, at the right time he could go to sleep. Because it was a royal palace, every facility was available and there were no difficulties whatsoever. Sitting there he could do whatsoever he wanted to do. The only thing was that he could not talk to anybody, he could not meet anybody. Within just two or three days the uneasiness began and after eight days he started shouting, ”Take me out of here! I don’t want to stay here!”

What was the problem? The problems had started coming from within. The problems that, until yesterday, he had thought were coming from the outside, he now found, in his aloneness, were coming from the inside. Within six months the man became mad. After six months, when he was taken out, he had gone completely mad. He had started talking to himself. He had started cursing himself. He had started getting angry with himself. He had started loving himself. Now the other was not present. After six months he was taken out as a mad man. It took six years for him to get cured.

Any one of you would become mad. Other people give you opportunities hence you do not become mad. You find an excuse: ”This man has abused me, therefore I am filled with anger.” Nobody gets filled with anger by someone abusing him. The anger is present within; the abuse is only an opportunity for it to come out.

A well is full of water. If we drop a bucket in the well and pull it out, water comes out of the well. If there is no water in the well then howsoever many times we drop the bucket in, nothing can come out. The bucket in itself has no power to get water out. First there should be water in the well. If there is water in the well, then a bucket can draw water. If there is no water in the well, then the bucket cannot draw water.

If there is no anger within you, if there is no hatred within you, then no power in the world can bring anger or hatred out of you. During these moments in-between, when no one drops a bucket in the well, one can maintain an illusion that there is no water in the well. When someone does drop a bucket into it, water can be drawn; but when the well is not being used we would be mistaken if we think that now there is no water in it. In the same way, if nobody gives us the opportunity then no anger or hate or envy comes out of us. But do not think that there is no water in your well. Water is present in the well and it is waiting for someone to come with a bucket and take it out. But we think these empty, in between moments are moments of love, of peace. This is false.

Always after any war in the world, people say that now there is peace. But Gandhi said, ”In my understanding it is not like that. Either there is war or there is preparation for war; peace never comes. Peace is a deception.” Just now there is no war happening in the world; the second world war has ended and we are waiting for the third world war. If we say that these are days of peace, we are wrong. These are not days of peace. These are days of preparation for the third world war.

All over the world the preparations for the third world war are going on. Either there is war or there is preparation for war. As long as the world has existed it has not seen any peaceful days.

Within a man also there is either anger or there is preparation for anger – man does not know any state of non-anger. There is restlessness – either it surfaces or it prepares to surface. If we think that the moments of preparation within are moments of peace, we are mistaken.

The strings of our heart are very loose. Only anger comes out of them, only distortion and disharmony come out of them. No music can arise. If the strings of our brain are too tight then madness arises out of them, and if the strings of our heart are too loose then only anger, enmity, envy, hatred, arise out of them. The strings of our heart should be a little tighter so that love can arise out of them, and the strings of our brain should be a little looser so that an aware intelligence arises out of them, not insanity. If both these strings become balanced there is a possibility for the music of life to arise.

So we will discuss two things. One is how to relax the strings of the brain and the other is how to tighten, create a tension in the strings of the heart. The method of doing this is what I call meditation.

If these two things happen, then the third thing can happen; then it is possible to descend to the real center of our life – the navel. If music arises in both these centers it becomes possible to move within. That music itself becomes a boat to take us deeper. The more harmonious the personality, the more music arising within, the deeper we can descend. The more disharmony there is within, the more we remain shallow, the more we will remain on the surface. In the coming two days we will discuss these two points – not only discuss them but also experiment on how we can bring these strings of the veena of life into a balance.

The three points that I have just told you about have to be kept in mind so that you can connect them with the things I will now say to you.

The first thing: man’s soul is connected neither to the brain nor to the heart, man’s soul is connected to his navel. The most important point in a man’s body is the navel; it is the center. The navel is not only in the center of man’s body but also in the center of life. A child is born through it and his life ends through it. And for the people who discover truth it is the navel which becomes the door.

You may not be aware that the whole day you breathe with your chest but at night your breathing starts coming from the navel. The whole day your chest goes up and down, but at night when you are asleep your belly starts moving up and down. You must have seen a small child breathing; the chest of a small child is not moving, it is his belly that is moving up and down. Small children are still very close to the navel. As a child starts growing, he starts breathing from the chest only, and the tremors of the breath no longer reach the navel.

If you are going along a road, riding a bicycle or driving a car, and suddenly an accident happens, you will be surprised to notice that the first impact will be on the navel – not on the brain or the heart.

If a man suddenly attacks you with a knife, the first tremor will be felt at the navel, not anywhere else.

Even right now, if you suddenly become afraid, the first tremor will be felt at the navel. Whenever there is a danger to life, the first tremors are felt at the navel because the navel is the center of life. The tremors will not happen anywhere else. The sources of life are connected from there, and because our attention is not at all on the navel, man is left hanging in a limbo. The navel center is totally sick, there is no attention paid to it – and there are no arrangements for its development.

There should be some arrangements to develop the navel center. Just as we have created schools and colleges to develop the brain, in the same way some arrangement is absolutely necessary to develop the navel center because there are certain things by which the navel center develops and there are certain things by which it does not develop. As I said, if a situation of fear arises, then it is felt first of all at the navel center. So the more a man practices fearlessness the more his navel will become healthy; the more a man practices courage the more his navel center will develop. The more fearlessness grows the more the navel will be strong and healthy and the contacts with life deeper.

That is why all the great meditators of the world have considered fearlessness to be an essential quality in a seeker – there is no other significance of fearlessness. The significance of fearlessness is that it makes the navel center totally alive; it completely facilitates the total development of the navel.

We will talk about it step by step.

It is essential to give maximum attention to the navel center, so it is necessary to shift the attention slowly, slowly from the brain center and from the heart center so that it can go downwards and enter deeper and deeper. For this we will do two meditation experiments – one in the morning and one at night. I will explain the morning experiment to you and then for fifteen minutes we will sit and do that meditation.

If consciousness has to be brought downwards from the brain it is necessary to leave the brain completely relaxed. We keep the brain tense all the time. We have forgotten that we go on keeping it tense. It is totally tense. We are not aware of it. So first it is necessary to let it relax.

Now when we sit for meditation, there are three things....

The first thing: the whole brain has to be relaxed, so calm and relaxed that it is not doing anything.

But how will you know that it is relaxed? If we close the fist very tightly we become aware that all the muscles are very tense. Then when we open the fist we become aware that all the muscles have become loose and relaxed. Because our minds are tense all the time, we do not even know what it is to be tense and what it is to be relaxed. So we will do one thing. First we will make the brain as tense as we can – then we will relax it suddenly. You will realize what the difference between the brain being tense and being relaxed is.

Now, when we sit for meditation, for one minute make the brain as tense as you can, give it as much stress as you can. And then I will say, ”Now let it relax” – then let it relax totally. Gradually you will come to know what it is to be tense and what it is to be relaxed. You should be able to feel it, it should become your experience, and then you will be able to relax it more and more. So the first thing is to relax the brain totally.

Along with the brain the whole body has to be relaxed. One has to sit so comfortably that there is no tension or stress anywhere on the body. There should be no weight anywhere on the body. Then what will you do? The moment you allow everything to be relaxed the birds start singing, there is the sound of the watermill, somewhere a crow may cry, somewhere there will be some other sound

– you will start hearing all these sounds because the more relaxed the brain is, the more sensitive it will become. You will start hearing and feeling every little thing. You will also start hearing your own heartbeat and hearing and feeling the coming and going of your breath.

Then, sitting silently, one should experience quietly all that is happening around and do nothing else. You are hearing sounds, listen to them silently; a bird is singing, listen to it silently; the breath is moving in and out, go on watching it silently – nothing else has to be done. You do not have to do anything from your side because as soon as you do the brain will start becoming tense.

You have to just go on sitting in a state of relaxed awareness. Everything is happening on its own, you are simply listening to it quietly. And you will be amazed that as you listen silently, a deeper silence will start arising within you. The more deeply you listen, the more the silence will go on growing. Within ten minutes you will find that you have become an extraordinary center of silence, everything has become peaceful.

So we will do this as the first experiment of the morning. The first thing: you will make your brain totally tense. When I tell you to make the brain completely tense, then close your eyes and make your brain as tense as you can. Then I will tell you to let it relax – then let it relax, go on letting it relax.... In the same way also let the body relax. The eyes will be closed, and, sitting silently, listen quietly to whatever sounds are heard. For ten minutes you have to simply listen silently – nothing else has to be done. In these ten minutes, for the first time, you will start feeling that a stream of silence has started flowing and your life-energy has started descending within. It will start sinking downwards from the brain.

You will have to sit a little farther apart from each other. Nobody should touch anybody else. Some people can come at the back on the lawn. The people who are familiar with this morning meditation, those who have attended previous meditation camps, they can sit at the back on the lawn so that those who are new can listen. That way if I want to say something to them, if I want to give any instruction to them, they can hear. Those who are acquainted should go at the back so that the new people can sit in the front. Yes, old friends can go at the back and new friends can come forward.

Some friends can come up here, some friends can come behind, so that you can hear. Nobody should sit touching anybody else. Nobody should touch the other. You are still touching each other!

Move a little apart! Move a little further! Sit on the sand!

First of all close your eyes softly. Very softly close your eyes. There should be no strain on the eyes; it is not that you close them forcibly. Drop the eyelids slowly, there should be no weight on the eyes.

Close your eyes. Yes, close your eyes, close them softly.

Now allow the whole body to be relaxed and make only the brain tense. Put as much tension as you can on the brain, give it as much stress as you can, stress the whole brain! Force yourself to make the whole brain tense. Make it tense with all the strength you have. Make it tense with all your strength but let the whole body relax. Put all the energy on the brain so that the brain is totally tense

– just like a closed fist with all the muscles tense. For one minute keep it tense in every way. Don’t allow it to be loose; make it totally tense. Make it as tense as possible. Make the brain within tense in every way. Keep it tense. Make it tense with your full strength, at a climax. With whatever strength you have make it totally tense so that when you let it relax, it can be totally relaxed. Make it tense!

Tense it!

Now let it completely relax. Allow it to relax totally. Let the brain be relaxed totally! Release all the tension. A relaxation will start happening inside. You will feel inside that something has dropped, some tension has disappeared, something has become peaceful. Let it relax totally, just relax....

And the sounds which are all around – the wind passing through the leaves, some birds singing –

sitting silently, quietly listen to all these sounds. Just listen! Keep listening to the sounds all around.

As you listen, the mind will become even more silent, even more silent... listen! Listen silently, totally relaxed. Keep listening. For ten minutes just become a listening.... Go on listening and the mind will start becoming silent.... Go on listening silently, just listening, the mind will become silent. A silence will start arising within you on it’s own. You just listen... go on listening, the mind is becoming silent.

The mind is becoming totally silent. The mind is becoming silent. Go on listening in silence, the mind is becoming silent....

Enough for today.

CHAPTER 2

From the Head to the Heart, from the Heart to the Navel

3 February 1968 om in Ajol Meditation Camp

[Note: This is the final edit of the Hindi translation of Antar Yatra, later published as part of Sadhana Path. This is for reference use only, pending publication.]

My Beloved Ones,

This afternoon I would like to discuss a few more points relating to the real center of the body. A few questions have also been asked about it.

Neither the head nor the heart but the navel is the most important and basic center of man’s life.

Man has developed according to his brain so the direction and the flow of his life have gone wrong.

In the past five thousand years we have educated and developed only the brain, only the intellect.

The results have been very harmful. The results are that almost every human being is on the verge of madness – a little push and any person can become mad. The brain is almost on the verge of breakdown – a little push and the brain can collapse.

It is also a surprising thing that in the last half century, within the last fifty years, almost all the greatest thinkers of the world have gone mad. In the West in the last half century there has not been a single thinker who did not experience some kind of madness. Great poets, great thinkers, great philosophers, great scientists have been found to be suffering from some kind of madness. And slowly, slowly, as more and more of humanity is becoming educated, the symptoms of madness are reaching the common people also.

If a new man is to be created, it is absolutely essential to change the center of man’s life. If that center is closer to the navel instead of to the head, it will be closer to the life-energy.

Why do I say this? In this context, it is necessary to understand a few more things. The child which develops in the mother’s womb, the foetus which develops, is connected to the mother through the navel. The life-energy of the mother flows into the child through the navel itself. The life-energy of the mother is a very unknown, a very mysterious flow of electricity which nourishes the whole being of the child through his navel.

Then the child separates from the mother. He is born. Immediately after his birth his navel has to be cut and the separation from his mother begins. It is absolutely necessary for the child to separate from the mother otherwise he cannot have any life of his own. The child, who has grown in the mother and has been one with her body, has to separate from her at a certain point. This separation happens by cutting the connection which he had with her at the navel. When this connection is cut, the life-energy which he was getting from the navel stops totally. His whole being starts trembling.

His whole being starts asking for that flow of life-energy which he was getting until yesterday but which today has suddenly stopped.

The pain that the child feels, his crying after his birth is not because of hunger, it is because of the pain of being separated and disconnected from the life-energy. His connection with the whole life-energy has been broken; the source from which he attained life until yesterday has gone now.

The child struggles for life – and if the child does not cry, the doctors or the people who know, will say that something has gone wrong. If the child does not cry, it means that he will not be able to survive. That he has not felt that he has been separated from the life-energy can mean only one thing: he is almost close to his death, he will not survive. That is why every effort is made to make the child cry. His crying is absolutely necessary because if he is to live he should know that he has been separated from the life-energy. If he does not know, he is in great danger.

Then the child tries again to connect his life-energy with something in a new way. His life energy again gets connected through the mother’s milk. So a child’s second connection is through the heart. Together with his mother’s heart, his own heart center also slowly starts developing and the navel center is forgotten. The navel center has to be forgotten because it has been disconnected, it is no longer related to him. And now the energy which he was receiving through the navel, he starts receiving through the lips. He again gets united with the mother. Another circuit is created and through it he becomes connected.

You will be surprised to know that if a child does not get his nourishment through his mother’s milk, if he is not fed with his mother’s milk, then his life-energy remains weak forever. He can be fed milk in other ways also, but if he does not regularly receive the warm touch of his mother’s heart, then his life becomes frustrated forever and the possibility of his living long is reduced forever. Those children who are not fed on mother’s milk can never attain to much bliss and silence in their lives.

The whole younger generation in the West, and gradually in India also, is becoming filled with great rebellion. The deepest reason for this, the root cause, is that Western children are not being fed on mother’s milk. Their respect towards life and their relation to life is not full of love. From their very childhood their life-energy has received many shocks and they have become unloving. In those shocks, in the separation from their mother, they have become separated from life itself – because for a child there is primarily no other life than his mother.

All over the world, wherever women are becoming educated, they do not like to raise children close to them – and the effect has been extremely harmful. In tribal societies children are fed on mother’s milk for a long time. The more a society becomes educated, the earlier the children are separated from their mother’s milk. The sooner the children are separated from their mother’s milk, the more difficulty they will have in experiencing peace in their own life. A deep restlessness will prevail in their life from the very beginning. On whom will they take revenge for this restlessness?

The revenge will be taken on the parents themselves. All over the world children are taking revenge on their parents. On whom else will they take revenge? They do not know themselves what kind of reaction is happening within them, what kind of rebellion is arising within them, what kind of fire is arising within them. But unconsciously, deep within, they know that this rebellion is the result of being separated from their mother too soon. Their hearts know this, but their intellect doesn’t. The result is that they will take revenge on their mothers and fathers; they will take revenge on everyone.

The child who is against his mother and father can never be in favor of God. There is no possibility that he can be in favor of God because the first feelings which arise in him towards God are those which arise towards his mother and father.

It is not without reason that all over the world God is called ’the Father’. It is not without reason that God is seen as an image of one’s father. If the first experiences in a child’s life are of trust, gratitude and reverence towards his mother and father, only then will the same experiences develop towards God, otherwise not.

As soon as he is born, a child is immediately separated from his mother. His second source of life-energy is related to the heart of his mother. But at a certain point a child will have to separate from his mother’s milk too.

When does that right time come? It does not come as early as we think. Children should remain close to their mother’s heart a little longer if their love and heart are to develop rightly throughout their life. They are forced to separate very early. A mother should not separate the child from her milk; she should allow him to separate on his own. At a certain point the child will separate on his own. For the mother to force the separation is just like taking the baby out of the womb after four or five months instead of allowing him to come out after nine months. It is as dangerous for a mother to separate her child from her milk before he himself decides to give it up. This effort of the mother is dangerous and because of this effort the second center, the heart center, of the child does not develop rightly.

While we are talking about this I would like to tell you something more. You will be surprised to hear it. Why is it that all over the world, the part of the woman’s body towards which men are attracted to most is the woman’s breasts? These are all children who were separated very early from their mother’s milk. In their consciousness somewhere deep inside a desire has remained to be close to a woman’s breasts. It has not been fulfilled – there is no other reason, there is no other cause. In tribal societies, in primitive societies, where the children remain close to the mother’s breasts long enough, men have no such attraction towards the breasts.

But why are our poems, our novels, our movies, our dramas, our pictures all centered around the breasts of women? They have all been created by men who, in their childhood, could not remain close to their mother’s breast long enough. That desire is left unfulfilled and now it starts arising in new forms. Now pornographic pictures are being created, pornographic books and pornographic songs are being written. Now men harass women on the streets, throw stones at them. We create all these stupidities and then later on we complain about them and try to get rid of them.

It is very necessary for the child to remain close to his mother’s breasts long enough for his mental, his physical and his psychological growth to take place rightly. Otherwise his heart center will not develop properly – it remains immature, undeveloped, stuck. And when the heart center remains undeveloped then an impossible thing starts happening: the work which the heart could not complete, which the navel could not complete, the person tries to complete with his brain. This effort brings even more trouble, because each center has it’s own function and each center can only do its own work; it cannot do the work of other centers.

Neither the navel nor the brain can do the work of the heart. But as soon as the child is separated from the mother he has only one center left on which the whole burden falls – this is the brain center.

Education, teaching, schools and colleges are all arranged for the brain center. Then only those people whose brain is more developed and capable make progress in life. A race begins and one attempts to do all the work of one’s life with the brain.

The love of a person who loves through his brain will be false, because the brain has nothing to do with love. Love can happen through the heart not through the brain, but the centers of our heart are not properly developed so we start using the brain. We even think about love. Love has nothing to do with thinking, but in us even love is expressed as thinking. That is why there is so much sexuality all over the world.

Sexuality has only one meaning: it means that the brain is being used to do the work of the sex center. When sex enters the mind the whole of life is destroyed – and now all over the world sex has entered our minds.

The center of sex is the navel because the greatest energy of life is sex; birth comes through it, life comes through it, the growth of life comes through it. But our navel centers are undeveloped so we are using other centers for its functions.

There is sex in animals but not sexuality, so even the sex of animals is a beauty, a joy.

The sexuality of man is ugly because sex has become a thought process in his mind. He thinks even about sex.

A man can eat a meal, eating is very good – but if a man thinks about food for twenty-four hours then the man is mad. Eating is absolutely right, it is very necessary, one has to eat, but if somebody thinks about food for twenty-four hours then the centers of this man have become disturbed. He is using his mind to do the work of his stomach. The food cannot reach the mind, so the mind cannot digest it. The mind can only think, can only contemplate. The more the mind thinks about food, the more the work of the stomach will be wasted; it will become disturbed. Try sometime to digest your food by thinking!

Usually you eat your food, and then you don’t think about it. The food enters the stomach by itself and the stomach does the work of digesting it. It is an unconscious center, it does its job. You don’t have to think about it. But some day be alert and think about it: now the food has reached the stomach, now it is getting digested, now this may be happening, now that may be happening....

You will find that digesting your food has become impossible that day. The more thinking enters, the more there will be a disturbance in the unconscious process of the stomach. Such incidents happen rarely with food – except with those people who are obsessed with fasting.

If a person fasts without any reason, then gradually food enters his thoughts. He will not eat, he will fast; but he will be thinking about food. This thinking is even more dangerous than eating. Eating is certainly not dangerous. Food is very essential for life, but to think about food is a sickness. When a person starts thinking about food, all growth in his life will stop. He will be obsessed with these futile thoughts.

With sex this has happened. We have snatched it from its proper center and now we are thinking about it.

In this way we have gradually handed over the functions of the three important centers of our life to the brain. It is just as if a man tries to listen with his eyes or see with his mouth. It is as if a man tries to see or taste with his ears. We will say that this man is mad because the eye is the mechanism for seeing and the ear is the mechanism for hearing. The ear cannot see, the eye cannot hear. If we try to do things in this way the final result will be chaos.

In the same way man has three centers. The center of life is the navel, the center of feeling is the heart and the center of thinking is the brain. Thinking is the outer most of these three centers. The next center, deeper, is of feeling and even deeper than that is the center of being.

You may think that if the heart stops then the life-energy will also stop. But now scientists have come to the conclusion that although the heart may have stopped beating, the person can continue to live if it can be started again within six minutes. After the connection with the heart has ended, the life center at the navel remains active for six more minutes. If within those six minutes the heart can be started again, or if a new heart can be transplanted, the man can live again and there is no need for the man to die. But if life has gone from the navel center then nothing will happen by changing a heart. The deepest and most basic center within us is the navel.

This morning I talked a little about this navel center.

The humanity we have created so far is upside-down. It is as if man is standing on his head, doing shirshasana. A person doing shirshasana is standing on his head with his feet in the air. If a man is doing shirshasana for twenty-four hours what will his condition be? You can understand! He will certainly become mad. He is already mad otherwise he would not have stood on his head for twenty-four hours, he has no reason to. But in our life we have reversed things – we are all standing on our heads! We have made our head the basis of our life. Thinking and contemplating have become the basis of our life.

Authentic religion says that thinking and contemplating are not the basis of our life – to become free from thinking and contemplating, to become thought-less, should be the basis. But we live by thinking and contemplating, and we try to decide our way of our life by thinking and contemplating.

Because of this, all our ways have gone astray. By thinking and contemplating nothing can be decided – food is not digested by your thinking, blood does not flow in your veins by your thinking, your breath does not move by your thinking....

Have you ever thought that no significant process of life is related to your thinking? In fact, all the processes of life slow down and become disturbed by too much thinking. That is why every night you need to get lost in a deep sleep so that all your processes can function properly without you hindering them, and then in the morning you can feel fresh again.

The very survival of a person who cannot get lost in a deep sleep is at stake, because thinking continuously disturbs the basic processes of your life. So for a little while nature drowns you in a deep sleep, it takes you into a state of unconsciousness. All thinking stops and your real centers become active.

There is also a relationship between our real centers. For example, I can be related to you through your intellect. My thoughts may seem right to you, my thoughts may seem impressive to you – then there will be an intellectual relationship between you and me. This is a minimum kind of relationship.

The intellect does not form any deeper relationship.

Deeper kinds of relationships are those of the heart, of love. But the relationships of love do not happen through thinking. The relationships of love happen totally unknowingly, without your thinking.

And even deeper are the relationships of life which operate through the navel, not through the heart.

They are even more indescribable. It is difficult to even define what kind of relationships they are because we do not know at all.

I told you earlier that the life-force of a mother activates the navel of a child. A kind of electricity keeps moving between the mother’s navel and the child’s navel. Then throughout his life, whenever that child goes near any woman from whom the same kind of electricity as his mother’s is flowing, he will unconsciously feel a certain relationship. He will not understand at all what kind of relationship he has started to feel, or why. We have been calling this unknown relationship love. We are not able to recognize it hence we call it ’blind’ – love is blind, just as the ears can’t see, the tongue can’t smell and the eye can’t taste. In this way love is blind, because it is arising from levels which are so deep that it becomes difficult for us to understand the reasons for it.

With some people we suddenly feel a strong repulsion, we feel we want to get away from them.

We do not understand the reason for wanting to get away from them. Why do we want to get away from them? If your electricity and their electricity – which is affected by the navel – is opposite then without understanding it you will have to get away. It will seem to you as if something is forcing you to leave them.

But sometimes you suddenly feel pulled towards a person and you don’t understand why. There seems to be no reason for it. Your electricity and his electricity are perceived to be closer, similar, of the same type, connected with each other. That is why you are having such an experience.

In a man’s life there are three types of relationships. There are relationships of the intellect, which cannot be very deep. The relationship between a teacher and a student is this type of relationship.

There are relationships of love, which are deeper than the intellect. The relationships between a mother and child, between brothers, between husband and wife are these types of relationships.

They arise from the heart. Then there are even deeper relationships, which arise from the navel. I call the relationships which arise from the navel, friendships. They go deeper than love. Love can end; friendship never ends. We can hate tomorrow those whom we love today – but the one who is a friend can never become an enemy. If he becomes an enemy then know that there was no friendship in the first place.

The relationships of friendship are of the navel – they are relationships of deeper and unknown realms. That is why Buddha did not tell people to love each other. He called the relationship

’friendship’. He had a reason for this – he said that there should be friends in your life. Somebody even asked Buddha, ”Why do you not call it love?” Buddha replied, ”Friendship is a much deeper thing than love. Love can end, friendship never ends.”

Love binds, friendship gives freedom. Love can enslave somebody. It can possess, it can become a master. Friendship does not become someone’s master, it does not hold anyone back, it does not imprison – it frees. Love becomes a bondage because the lovers insist that the other should not not love anyone else but himself.

Friendship has no such insistence. One man can have thousands of friends, millions of friends, because friendship is a very vast, very deep experience. It arises from the deepest center of life.

That is why friendship ultimately becomes the greatest way to take us towards the divine. One who is a friend to all will reach the divine sooner or later, because his relationships are happening with everyone’s navel center. And some day or other he is bound to become related to the navel center of the universe.

One’s relationships in life should not be merely intellectual, they should not be only heartful – they should be deeper, they should be of the navel.

For example, nowhere in the world is it clear – sooner or later it will become clear, sooner or later we will come to know – that we are connected with very far away sources of life-energy which we cannot see. We know that the moon is very far away, yet it has some unknown influence on sea water. Sea water starts rising and falling with the moon. We know that the sun is very far away, but it is connected to life with some invisible threads. The sun rises in the morning and a revolution happens in life! All that was sleeping, all that was lying as if dead, all that was unconscious, starts becoming conscious. Something sleeping starts awakening, flowers start blossoming, birds start singing. An invisible flow from the sun leaves its influence on us.

There are some more invisible sources of life-energy which reach to us in this way – they manage our life continuously. Not only the sun, not only the moon, not only the stars in the sky, but life itself has a flow of energy which is not seen by us anywhere and which continuously influences and manages our centers. The more receptive our center is, the more this energy can influence our life.

The less receptive our center is, the less this energy will be able to influence it.

The sun rises, the flower blossoms. But if we raise a wall around the flower and the sunlight does not reach the flower then the flower will not blossom, it will wither away. Behind closed walls the flower will wither away. The sun cannot forcibly enter and open that flower. The flower has to be in the open, it has to be ready. The flower should give the sun the opportunity to come and open it.

The sun cannot go in search of one single flower – looking to see which flower is hiding behind a wall so that it can reach it. The sun does not even know about the flowers. It is all an absolutely unconscious life process: the sun rises, the flowers blossom. If a flower is closed inside a wall, it will not blossom, it will wither away and die.

Life-energy is flowing from all directions but those whose navel centers are not open will be deprived of that flow. They will not even know about it. They will not even realize that this energy was there and could have affected them, that there was something hidden within them which could have been opened. They will not even know this. This flowering of the navel, which has been called a lotus since ancient days, is called a lotus because it has the possibility of opening – some life-energy may open it. One needs some preparation for this. For this our center should be available to the open sky and we should give our attention to it. Then life-energy which is available to us can reach the navel center and give it life. I told you a few things about this in the morning.

How will it be possible, how can it become possible, that the center of our life becomes a blossomed flower, so that whatever invisible energy streams are coming from all around can make connections with it? In what way will it happen? There are a few things I have remembered which I will talk to you about now, tonight, so that tomorrow we can talk about the second point.

The first point: your breathing.... The deeper it is, the more you can become capable of working on your navel and developing it. But we have no idea about it. We do not even know how much we are breathing or how little we are breathing – or how much is necessary. The more we become worried, the more we become full of thoughts. You may be unaware that the more loaded the brain becomes, the less the flow of breathing is. It becomes obstructed.

Have you ever observed that breathing moves in one way when you are angry and in a different way when you are peaceful? Have you ever observed that if there is an intense sexual desire in the mind the breathing moves in a certain way, but if the mind is filled with beautiful feelings then the breathing moves in a different way? Have you ever observed that a sick person’s breathing moves in a certain way and a healthy person’s breathing moves in a different way? The flow of the breath changes moment to moment according to the state of your mind.

The contrary is also true. If the flow of your breath is absolutely harmonious, then it changes the state of your mind. Either you change the mind and the breath changes, or you change the breath and it affects the mind.

For the person who wants to develop and influence his life centers, the first thing is rhythmic breathing. While sitting, standing or moving, his breath should be so harmonious, so peaceful, so deep that he should be able to experience a different music, a different harmony of the breath day and night. If you are walking on the road, not doing any work, it will be very blissful if you breathe deeply, silently, slowly and harmoniously.

There will be two benefits. As long as breathing remains harmonious, your thinking will become less, there will be almost no thoughts. If the breathing is absolutely even, then the thoughts in the mind totally disappear. The breathing affects the thoughts in the mind very deeply and to a very great extent. It costs nothing to breathe properly and you do not have to spend any extra time to breathe properly. Sitting in a train, walking on the road, sitting at home – if the process of breathing deeply and peacefully continues then within a few days this process will become spontaneous. You will not even be aware of it. The breath will move deeply and slowly by itself.

The deeper and slower the flow of breath, the more your navel center will develop. Every time you breathe, the breath hits the navel center. If the breath goes in and out from above the navel center, then slowly the center becomes idle, it becomes weak. The breath does not hit it.

In the old days people found some clues, a formula, for breathing. But man is so unintelligent that he starts repeating the formulas without seeing their meaning, without even understanding them. It is just like scientists finding a formula for water – H20. They say that with the combination of both, hydrogen and oxygen, water is created. Two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen make the formula H2O. Now if a person starts repeating, ”H2O, H2O”, in the same way as people are repeating, ”Rama, Rama, Aum, Aum”, then we will say he is mad – because what can happen by repeating a formula? The formula is only an indication about something. If you understand what it is about, then the formula is significant.

You can often hear people sitting and repeating the sound of Aum. They do not know that Aum is a formula like H2O. There are three letters in Aum. They are ’A’, ’U’, ’M’. Perhaps you may not have noticed that if you close your mouth and say ’Aa’ loudly inside then you will feel the sound of ’A’

resounding in your head. ’A’ is an indication of the head center. If you say ’U’ inside then you will feel the sound of ’U’ resounding within your heart. ’U’ is an indication of the heart. And if you say

’M’ inside, the third part of Aum, then you will feel it resounding near your navel. ’A’, ’U’ and ’M’ are three sounds indicating sounds of the head, the heart and the navel. If you say ’M’, you will feel the whole force of it on the navel. If you say ’U’, you will feel the force going to the heart. If you say ’A’

then ’A’ will resound in the head and disappear.

This is a formula. One has to go from ’A’ to ’U’ and from ’U’ to ’M’. Nothing will happen by just repeating Aum. So those processes, which take us in this direction – from ’A’ to ’U’ and from ’U’ to

’M’ – are the ones one must pay attention to. Deep breathing is the first process. The deeper the breath, the more harmonious, the more in tune it becomes, the more the life-energy within you will start arising, will start radiating from your navel.

Your navel will become an alive center. Within a few days you will start feeling that some energy is flowing out from your navel and you will also feel that some energy is coming in. You will find that a very living, a dynamic center, is starting to develop near your navel.

As soon as you feel this, many more experiences will start happening around this center.

Physiologically, breath is the first thing to develop the navel center. Psychologically, certain qualities are helpful to develop the navel. I told you in the morning about fearlessness. The more a man is fearful, the less he will be able to reach close to the navel center. The more a man is fearless, the more he will reach close to the navel.

So in educating children it is my essential understanding that one should never tell a child, even by mistake, that because it is dark outside he shouldn’t go there. You do not know that you are harming his navel center forever. Wherever there is darkness, tell the children to go there certainly; tell them that the darkness is calling them. If the river is flooded, then do not tell the children not to enter it – because you do not know that the child who dares to enter a flooded river is developing his navel center. The navel center of a child who does not enter the river becomes weak and feeble.

If children want to climb mountains then let them. If children want to climb trees, let them. Wherever they can experience adventure and fearlessness, let them go there. Even if a few thousand children of a race die each year while climbing a mountain or entering a river or climbing a tree, it does not matter at all. Because if all the children of a whole race become filled with fear and become empty of fearlessness, then although the whole race may seem to be alive, it is actually dead.

In our country this misfortune has happened. We talk a lot about religion but we know nothing about courage. We do not know that without courage there is no religion whatsoever because without courage the central element of life remains undeveloped. One needs courage – so much courage that one is able to stand and face death. Our race talks so much about religion but our fear of death has no limit! Actually, the contrary should be the case – people who know the soul, recognize the soul, should not be afraid of death at all because death does not exist. But we talk very much about the soul yet we are very afraid of death, limitlessly afraid.

Perhaps we talk about the soul because we are afraid of death! By talking about the soul we get some consolation that we will not die, that the soul is immortal. Perhaps we talk because of the fear – the reality seems to be something like this. Fearlessness should develop. Immense fearlessness should develop. So, whenever there are opportunities in life to face danger, they should be welcomed.

Somebody once asked Nietzsche, ”How can one develop one’s personality?” He gave a very peculiar maxim, one which you could not have expected. He said, ”Live dangerously! Live dangerously if you want to develop your personality.” But we think that the more we live in security the better we will be – there is a bank balance, a house, policemen and military people are there, there is no fear.... We can have a quiet life in all this. We do not realize that in making these arrangements and these comforts, we have almost become dead. There is no point in living anymore because the only meaning of life is to live dangerously. There is no other meaning to living. Corpses are absolutely secure because now they cannot even die. Now nobody can kill them. Their graves are absolutely safe.

An emperor built a palace. Because of security he made only one door to the palace. The neighboring emperor came to see it. He liked it very much. He said, ”I would also like to build a similar palace. This is very secure. No enemy can enter it.” There was only one door and there were great security arrangements at the door. When the emperor departed, the host emperor gave him a send-off, and a big crowd gathered. While departing the emperor said, ”This has made me very happy. I will also make such a palace.”

There was an old man standing near him and he started laughing. The emperor asked, ”Why are you laughing?”

He said, ”If you make such a palace then do not make the mistake which he has made!”

”What is the mistake?” asked the emperor.

”Do not make even one door. Close all the doors. Then you will be absolutely out of danger,” replied the old man.

The emperor said, ”Then it will become a grave.”

The old man said, ”This palace has also become a grave. There is only one door and all kinds of security and there is no fear from anywhere! This is a grave!”

We think that the absence of fear is fearlessness; this is a mistake. Fearlessness is not the absence of fear. In the presence of fear, fearlessness is a totally different thing which happens within. It is not the absence of fear. Fearlessness is the total presence of fear, with the courage to face it. But this does not develop in our lives.

This is my suggestion to you – by praying in the temples you will not reach closer to the divine. But when the adventures of life and fearlessness are inviting you, when dangers are calling you, if you go, you will certainly reach closer to the divine. In dangers, in insecurity, the center which is hidden within you, which is sleeping, awakens and becomes alert. In danger, in insecurity, the center feels a challenge – and in this situation the center of the navel can develop.

In the old days sannyasins accepted this very insecurity. They left the home, but not because the home was wrong.... Later stupid people started thinking that sannyasins left the home because it was wrong, that they left their wives and children because they were a bondage. This idea is wrong.

The sannyasin wanted to drop security. He wanted to enter the state of insecurity, where there was no support, no friends, no acquaintances, no one to be called one’s own. Wherever there might be sickness, death, dangers, no money – he wanted to enter such a state of insecurity. So the one who chose insecurity was a sannyasin.

But later on sannyasins created a good security, better than the people living in the society. A person living in the society has to earn his living but a sannyasin does not. He is even more secure. He simply receives it. He gets clothes, he gets houses, he does not have to live without anything. The only difference is that he does not even have to earn it. The difficulty and insecurity of earning money is also finished. Someone else manages it for them, someone or other makes the arrangements for them. So a sannyasin became a person tied to a peg. That is why a sannyasin cannot be courageous. A sannyasin seems to be a person without any strength in this world. He cannot show even a little courage.

One sannyasin says, ”I am a Jaina.” One sannyasin says, ”I am a Hindu.” One sannyasin says, ”I am a Mohammedan.” Can a sannyasin be a Hindu, a Jaina or a Mohammedan? A sannyasin belongs to everybody. But there is a fear in saying, ”I belong to everybody,” because to say that may mean that the sannyasin belongs to no one. Then those who give him food, who make houses for him, may no longer be friendly to him. They will say, ”You do not belong to us. You belong to everybody, so you can go to everybody. We will make arrangements for you only if you are Jaina monk,” or, ”We will make arrangements for you if you are a Mohammedan monk. We are Mohammedans, so we will make arrangements only for Mohammedan monks.” So the monk says, ”I am a Mohammedan,”

or he says, ”I am a Hindu.” This is a search for security. This is a search for a new house. They have left the old house, now they want a new house. So these days the situation is such that those who are clever, who want a good house, do not make a house at all – they simply become sannyasins!

They say to others, ”You are not wise. You make your own house, you commit sins and maybe you will go to hell.” And they get these people to build a house for them, they live in it, they enjoy the thoughts of going to heaven, they earn virtue – and they escape from all the troubles of life. So sannyasins have created a security of their own.

But basically the meaning of a sannyasin is a longing to live in danger. Basically it means that there is no shelter, no companion, no certainty about tomorrow.

Christ was walking past a garden. He said to his friends, ”Do you see these flowers which have blossomed in the garden? They do not know whether the sun will rise tomorrow or not. They do not know whether they will get water or not, but today they have blossomed in their joy.” Man alone makes arrangements today for tomorrow, and then he makes arrangements for the day after tomorrow. There are people who make arrangements for how their grave should be built. Those who think they are wise create the memorials for their dead bodies to be kept in before their death.

We all make arrangements and we completely forget that when a person makes arrangements for tomorrow, he kills this day while making those arrangements. Then tomorrow again he will make arrangements for the next day and he kills that day also. Everyday he will make arrangements for the following day and goes on killing the present day.

And there is nothing else except the present day.

Tomorrow never comes. Whenever it comes, it is today. He kills today for tomorrow! This is the nature of a mind looking for security: it kills today for tomorrow. It sacrifices the present for the future. And the future never comes. Tomorrow never comes. In the end he finds that his whole life has slipped out of his hands.

The person who dares to live today and does not even bother about tomorrow, is living in danger –

because tomorrow there may be danger. There is no certainty about anything. It is possible that the wife who is loving today may not be loving tomorrow. The husband who is loving today may not be loving tomorrow. There is no certainty about tomorrow. Today there is money, tomorrow there may be no money; today there are clothes, tomorrow there may be no clothes.... In the person who totally accepts this insecurity about tomorrow, and waits for tomorrow, faces whatever tomorrow brings, a center starts developing which I call the navel center. Within him a power, an energy, a potency arises. Within him a base arises like a pillar of courage on which his life can grow.

So, on the physical level, breathing is needed and on the psychological level, courage is needed.

These two things are basically necessary for the development of the navel center. If there is something else or if you have some questions in your mind relating to this, I will talk to you about it tonight. But first before this present session is over, I must tell you one more thing.

Seven or eight hundred years ago in Japan they tried to create a different type of person – they called him a samurai. He was a monk and also a warrior. This is very strange – because what is the relation between a monk and a warrior? The temples in Japan are very strange. In these temples, where they teach meditation, they also teach jujitsu and judo and the arts of wrestling, swordsmanship and archery. If we were to go there and see, we would be surprised! What is the need to use a sword in a meditation temple? And teaching judo, jujitsu and wrestling – what relation do they have with meditation? In front of meditation temples there are symbols of swords! It is a very strange affair.

But there was a reason. The meditators in Japan slowly came to realize that if there is no possibility in a seeker’s life of developing courage and strength, then only the brain will exist in that seeker. His other deeper centers do not develop. He can only become a scholar, he cannot become a saint. He can become a so-called knowledgeable person. He can know the Gita, the Koran, the Bible, and the Upanishads, he can memorize them like a parrot, this is possible – but he has no experience of life.

So a meditator was taught how to use a sword and an arrow.

Recently one of my friends returned from Japan. Someone there gave him a statue. He was very much troubled by it. He could not understand what kind of statue it was. When he returned, he came to me with the statue and said, ”Somebody has presented me with this statue, so I have brought it here, but I have been wondering again and again what kind of a statue it is. What is its meaning?”

It was a statue of a samurai warrior. I told him, ”You cannot understand because for thousands of years we have created a wrong understanding.”

The statue is of a warrior with a naked sword in his hand. The side of the face on the same side as the hand with the sword, is shining with the reflection of the sword. His face on that side looks like the face of Arjuna may have done. In his other hand there is a lamp, and the light of the lamp is falling on the other side of his face. His face on that side looks like the face of Buddha may have done or of Mahavira or of Christ. There is a sword in one hand and a lamp in the other hand. We cannot understand it because there should be either a sword in the hand or a lamp. How can there be both things in the hands of one man?

So my friend was not able to understand anything. He said to me, ”I am very much puzzled. What is it all about?”

I told him that the lamp can only exist in the hand of a person who also has a shining sword in his other hand. With him it is not a question of using the sword; only weak people, fearful people, use the sword. A person whose whole life becomes like a sword, does not use it. There is no need for him to use it because his whole life is a sword. So do not think that if a person has a sword in his hands that he will use it, that he will hurt or kill somebody. A person only kills when he is afraid of being killed himself – otherwise no one will kill. A violent person is really only a fearful person. In reality a sword can only be held in the hands of a non-violent person. In fact, when a person himself becomes a sword, only then can he be non-violent, otherwise not.

The lamp of peace only benefits a man in whose being a sword of courage has been born, in whose being a sword of energy, of strength, has been born.

So on one hand the personality should be filled with total strength, and on the other hand with total peace – only then can an integrated personality, a total being, arise.

Up to now there have been two kinds of situations in the world. Either people have kept lamps in their hands and have become absolutely weak – if somebody blows out their lamp, they cannot even stop him or ask why he is blowing out the lamp. They will think that if this fellow goes away then they will light the lamp again, and if he does not go away then they will remain in darkness – anyway there is no problem so why take the trouble to resist? So on one hand, in one situation, there are people who have the lamp in their hands but have no strength to protect it....

India has become one of those weak countries. It has become a weak country because we did not develop the real centers of our life-energy. We simply stayed with the brain and memorized the Gita, and the Upanishads, and the sayings of Mahavira, and went on commenting upon them. The master and disciple went on sitting and talking about thousands of useless things which have no concern with life. Our whole country, our whole race, has become weak, without any strength. It has become impotent.

.... and on the other hand there are people who simply stopped caring about the lamp and took up the sword and started using it. Then, because they do not have a lamp, they cannot see who they are killing in the darkness. They don’t know whether they are killing their own people or others. So they just go on killing and if someone starts talking about lighting the lamp, they say, ”Stop talking nonsense. During the time we are lighting the lamp, we could be using the sword. Also one more sword could be made with the metal with which we will make the lamp, so why waste all that oil, all that metal? Life is all about using the sword.” The people in the West are using their swords in darkness; the people in the East are sitting there with a lamp but without a sword. And both are crying. The whole world is crying. A right man has not been created. The right man is a living sword and also a lamp of peace. I only call somebody a religious man if both of these things have arisen in him.

We have talked today on these first points. It is essential that many questions about them arise in your mind. They should arise. If you write down those questions then I can answer you tonight.

Then tomorrow we will start discussing some other points. So today ask questions only about what we have discussed today and not about anything else. Tomorrow we will talk about the other points, then you can ask questions about them. The day after tomorrow we will talk about still further points, then you can ask questions about them.

So today it will be better if you ask questions about whatever I have just talked about. If you have questions which are not concerned with these three days, then you can ask them on the last day and we can talk about them then.

Enough for this afternoon.

CHAPTER 3

The journey towards the navel: Right diet – labour – sleep 3 February 1968 pm in Ajol Meditation Camp

[Note: This is the final edit of the Hindi translation of Antar Yatra, later published as part of Sadhana Path. This is for reference use only, pending publication.]

My Beloved Ones,

How the life of man can become centered in his being, how he can experience himself, how he can attain his own self, we have discussed in the previous two talks of today. Some more things have been asked. In answer to them, I will talk to you now on three points. Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, I will answer the questions which are not related to today’s discussion.

And now I will answer the questions which are related to today’s discussion, dividing them into three points.

The first point is about how a man should start living his life from the center of the navel, centered in the self, centered in his being. Before I go into this I would like to discuss three other significant ways through which the energy that is dormant in the navel can become awake. Once it is awake it becomes a door through which man can experience a consciousness which is different from his body.

I will tell you the three points, then I will discuss them. The first point is right exercise. The second point is right diet. And the third point is right sleep. The person who does not get right exercise, right food and right sleep, can never become centered at the navel. Man has lost touch with all these three things.

Man is the only species whose diet is not predictable. The diet of all other animals is certain. Their basic physical needs and their nature decides what they should eat and what they should not; how much they should eat, how much they should not; when they should eat and when they should stop.

But man is absolutely unpredictable, he is absolutely uncertain. Neither his nature tells him what he should eat, nor his awareness tells him how much he should eat, nor his understanding decides when he should stop eating. As none of these qualities of man are predictable the life of man has gone in some very uncertain directions. But if there is even a little understanding – if man starts living with even a little intelligence, with even a little thoughtfulness, opening his eyes even a little, then it is not at all difficult to change to a right diet. It is very easy; there can be nothing more easy.

To understand right diet we can divide it into two parts.

The first thing: what should a man eat and what should he not eat? Man’s body is made of chemical elements. The whole process of the body is very much chemical. If alcohol is put into a man, then his body will be affected by the chemical – it will become intoxicated, unconscious. Howsoever healthy, howsoever peaceful the man may be, the chemistry of the intoxication will affect his body.

Howsoever saintly a man may be, if he is given poison then he will die.

Socrates died from poisoning and Gandhi died from a bullet. A bullet does not see whether the man is a saint or a sinner; neither does poison see whether a man is Socrates or some ordinary person. Neither the harmful intoxications and poisons nor the food sees who or what you are. Its functions are straightforward – it goes into the chemistry of the body and starts working. In this way any food which is intoxicating starts harming and creating disturbances in man’s consciousness.

Any food which takes man into any kind of unconsciousness, any kind of excitement, any kind of extremity, any kind of disturbance, is harmful. And the deepest, ultimate harm is when these things start reaching the navel.

Perhaps you are not aware that in naturopathy all over the world, mud packs, vegetarian food, light food, water-soaked cloth strips and tub baths are used to heal the body. But no naturopath has yet understood the point that the effects of water-soaked cloth strips, mud packs, or tub baths, on the body are not so much because of their special qualities but because of how they affect the navel center. And the navel center then affects the rest of the body. All these things – the mud, the water, the tub bath – affect the dormant energy in the navel center and when this energy arises, health starts arising in the person’s life.

But naturopathy is still not aware of this. Naturopathy thinks that perhaps these beneficial effects are coming from the mud packs or the tub baths or the wet strips on the stomach! They do have benefits, but the real benefits are coming from the awakening of energy in the dormant centers of the navel.

If the navel center is mistreated, if a wrong diet, wrong food is used, then slowly, slowly the navel center becomes dormant and its energy becomes weaker. Slowly, slowly that center starts falling asleep. Finally it almost goes to sleep. Then we don’t even notice it as any center.

Then we notice only two centers: one is the brain where thoughts are constantly moving, and the other is a little bit of the heart where emotions are moving. Deeper than this we have no contact with anything. So, the lighter the food is, the less it creates heaviness on the body, the more valuable and significant it will be for the beginning of your inner journey.

For a right diet the first thing to remember is that it should not create excitement, it should not be intoxicating, it should not be heavy. After eating rightly you should not feel heaviness and drowsiness. But perhaps all of us feel heaviness and drowsiness after our meals – then we should know that we are eating wrongly.

A very great doctor, Kenneth Walker, has said in his autobiography that according to his life-long experiences he can say that of whatever people eat, half of it fills their stomach and half of it fills the stomachs of the doctors. If they would eat only half of what they usually eat then they would not get sick at all, and there would be no need of doctors.

Some people get sick because they do not get enough food and some people get sick because they get too much food. Some people die of hunger and some people die of overeating. And the number of people dying of overeating has always been more than the people dying of hunger. Very few people die of hunger. Even if a man wants to remain hungry there is no possibility of him dying for at least three months. Any person can live without food for three months. But if a man overeats for three months then there is no possibility of his survival.

There have been people whose very ideas make us feel strange. There was a great emperor called Nero. He had two doctors whose job was just to make him vomit after his meals, so that he could enjoy eating at least fifteen to twenty times a day. So he would eat a meal, then he would take medicine to make him vomit so that he could enjoy food again. What we are doing is not very different.

Nero could have doctors at his palace because he was an emperor. We are not emperors but we have doctors in our neighborhood. Nero was making himself vomit every day, we make ourselves vomit every few months. We eat a wrong diet and accumulate all kinds of things and then the doctor gives us a cleansing. Then we start eating wrong food again. Nero was a wise man! He arranged for a cleansing everyday – we do it after every two or three months. If we were also emperors then we would do the same thing. But we are helpless, we do not have the facilities, so we cannot do it.

We laugh at Nero but in a certain way we are not different to him.

Our wrong attitudes towards food are becoming dangerous for us. They are proving to be very costly. They have taken us to a point where we are somehow just alive. Our food does not seem to create health in us, it seems to create sickness. It is a surprising situation when food starts making us sick. It is as if the sun rising in the morning creates darkness. This would be an equally surprising and strange thing to happen. But all the physicians in the world are of the opinion that most of the diseases of man are because of his wrong diet.

So the first thing is that every person should be very aware and conscious about his eating. And I am saying this especially for the meditator. It is necessary for a meditator to remain aware what he eats, how much he eats, and what its effects are on his body. If a man experiments for a few months with awareness, he will certainly find out which is the right food for him, which food gives him tranquility, peace and health. There are no real difficulties but because we do not pay any attention to food, we are never able to discover the right food.

The second thing about food is that the state of our mind when we eat is much more important than what we eat. Food will affect you differently if you eat joyously, happily, or if you eat when you are filled with sadness and worry. If you are eating in a worried state, then even the best food will have a poisonous effect. And if you are eating with joy then it is possible that sometimes even poison may not be able to have its total effect on you. It is very possible. So what state of mind you eat in is important.

In Russia there was a great psychologist called Pavlov. He did some experiments on animals and he reached an amazing conclusion. He experimented on some dogs and some cats. He gave food to a cat and he observed the cat through an X-ray machine to see what happened in her stomach after she ate her food. When the food went into the stomach the stomach immediately released digestive juices. At the same time a dog was brought to the window of the room the cat was in. When the dog barked, the cat became afraid and the X-ray machine showed that the secretion of digestive juices within her stopped. The stomach closed. It shrunk. Then the dog was taken away, but for six hours the stomach remained in the same condition. The digestive process of the food did not begin again and the food remained undigested in the stomach for six hours. After six hours, when the juices started flowing again, the food was not in a digestible state, it had become solid and had become difficult to digest. When the cat’s mind became worried about the presence of the dog the stomach stopped its work.

Then what about our situation? We live in worry for twenty-four hours a day. It is a miracle how the food we eat gets digested, how existence manages it in spite of us! We have no wish to digest it. It is absolutely a miracle how it gets digested. And how we remain alive! This is also a miracle! Our state of mind should be graceful and blissful.

But in our houses the dining table is in the most gloomy state. The wife waits the whole day for her husband to come home to eat and all the emotional sickness she has gathered in twenty-four hours comes out just when the husband is eating. She does not know that she is doing the work of an enemy. She does not know that she is serving poison on her husband’s plate.

The husband is also afraid and worried after the whole day’s work – he somehow dumps the food into his stomach and leaves. He has no idea that the act which he has finished so quickly and has run away from should have been a prayerful one. It was not an act which should have been done in a hurry. It should have been done in the same way as someone entering a temple, or as someone kneeling to pray, or as someone sitting to play his veena, or as somebody singing a song for the beloved. This act is even more important: he is giving food to his body. It should be done in a state of tremendous blissfulness. It should be a loving and prayerful act.

The more happily and joyously and the more relaxed and without worry a person can take his meal, the more his food starts becoming the right food.

A violent diet does not only mean that a man eats non-vegetarian food. It is also a violent diet when a man eats with anger. Both of these things are violent. While eating in anger, in suffering, in worry, man is also eating violently. He does not realize at all that just as he is violent when eating the flesh of something else, so when his own flesh burns up inside due to anger and worry, violence is present there too. Then the food which he is eating cannot be non-violent.

The other part of right food is that you should eat in a very peaceful, a very joyful state. If you are not in such a state, then it is better to wait until you are and not to eat for a while. When the mind is absolutely ready, only then should one take his meals. For how long will the mind not be ready? If you are aware enough to wait then at the most it can remain hungry for only one day – but we have never bothered to listen to it. We have made eating food a completely mechanical process. One has to put food into the body and then leave the dining table. It is no longer a psychological process –

that is dangerous.

On the body level, the right food should be healthy, non-stimulating and non-violent; on the psychological level the mind should be in a blissful state, graceful and joyous; and on the level of the soul there should be a feeling of gratefulness, of thankfulness. These three things make food the right food.

We should have a feeling that ”Because today food is available to me, I am grateful. I have been given one more day to live – I am tremendously grateful. This morning I have woken up alive again, today the sun has given its light to me again, today I will be able to see the moon again, I am alive again today! It was not necessary that I should have been alive today, today I could have been in a grave – but life has again been given to me. I have not earned it; it has been given to me free.” For this at least, a feeling of thankfulness, of gratitude, should be there in one’s heart. We are eating food, we are drinking water, we are breathing – we should have a sense of gratefulness about all this. Towards the whole life, towards the whole world, towards the whole universe, towards the whole nature, towards the divine, there should be a feeling of gratefulness – ”I have received one more day to live. Once more I have received food to eat. For one more day I am seeing the sun, seeing the flowers blossoming. I am again alive today.”

Two days before death came to Rabindranath, he said, ”Lord, how grateful I am! Oh God, how shall I express my gratitude? You gave this life to me when I was not in any way worthy of receiving it.

You gave breathing to me when I had no right to breathe. You gave me experiences of beauty and bliss which I had not earned at all. I am grateful. I am overpowered by your grace. And if in this life given by you, I may have received any pain, any suffering, any worry, it must have been my fault; because this life of yours is very blissful. It must have been my fault. So I do not ask you to give me liberation from life. If you feel me worthy, then send me into this life again and again. This life of yours is very blissful and I am utterly grateful for it.”

This feeling, this feeling of gratitude, should be there in all aspects of life – and very particularly with diet. Only then can diet become the right diet.

The second point is: right labor. That too is no longer an essential part of our lives. Physical labor has become a shameful act.

A Western thinker, Albert Camus, has written jokingly, in one of his letters, that a time will come when people will start asking their servants to make love for them. If someone falls in love with somebody, he will appoint a servant to go and make love on his behalf. This can happen some day.

We have already started getting everything done by others; love is the only thing which we still do ourselves. We appoint others to pray for us. We employ a priest and tell him to pray on our behalf, to do the rituals on our behalf. We appoint a priest in the temple and tell him to worship on our behalf.

Even the things like prayer and worship we are getting done by our servants. So if we are getting our servants to worship for us, it is not unthinkable that some day wise people will tell their servants to make love to their beloved on their behalf. What is the difficulty? And those who will not be able to afford servants to do their job, will feel ashamed that they are so poor that they have to make love themselves.

It is possible someday because there is so much in life which is significant but which we are now getting done by our servants! And we are not at all aware of what we have lost by losing the significant things.

All the strength, all the vitality of life is lost because man’s body and man’s being have been created for a certain amount of labor – and now he has been spared from all that work. Right labor is also an essential part in the awakening of man’s consciousness and energy.

One morning Abraham Lincoln was polishing his shoes in his house. One of his friends who was visiting him, said, ”Lincoln! What are you doing? You polish your own shoes?”

Lincoln said, ”You surprise me! Do you polish other people’s shoes? I am polishing my own shoes

– do you polish others’ shoes?”

The friend said, ”No, no, I get my shoes polished by others!”

Lincoln said, ”It is even worse to get your shoes polished by others than to polish others’ shoes.”

What does it mean? It means that we are losing our direct contact with life. Our direct contacts with life are those that come through labor.

In the time of Confucius – about three thousand years ago – Confucius once went to visit a village.

In a garden he saw an old gardener and his son pulling water out of a well. For the old man the work of drawing water out of a well was very difficult even with the help of his son. And the old man was very old.

Confucius wondered if this old man did not know that bulls and horses were now being used to draw water out of the well. He was drawing it himself. He was using such old methods!

So Confucius went to the old man and said, ”My friend! Don’t you know that there has been a new invention? People are drawing water out of wells with the help of horses and bulls. Why are you doing it yourself?”

The old man said, ”Speak softly, speak softly! For me, it does not matter what you say but I am afraid my young son may hear you.”

Confucius asked, ”What do you mean?”

The old man replied, ”I know about these inventions, but all inventions like this take man away from labor. I do not want my son to become disconnected because the day he becomes disconnected from labor, he will be disconnected from life itself.”

Life and labor are synonymous. Life and labor have the same meaning. But slowly, slowly we have started calling those people who do not have to do physical exertion, fortunate, and those who have to do physical exertion, unfortunate. And in a way it has become so, because in a way many people have dropped doing labor so some people have to do too much labor. Too much labor kills one.

Too little labor also kills one. Hence I said ”Right labor. Proper distribution of physical labor.” Each person should do some physical labor. The more intensely, the more blissfully, the more gratefully a man enters the labor part of his life, the more he will find that his life-energy has started moving down from the brain closer to the navel. For labor neither the brain nor the heart is needed. The energy for labor is derived directly from the navel. This is its source.

Along with the right diet a little physical labor is very essential. And it is not that it should be in the interest of others – that if you serve the poor, it benefits the poor; if you go to a village and do farming, it benefits the farmers; if you are doing some labor, you are doing a great social service.

These are all false things. It is for your own sake, not for anyone else’s sake. It is not concerned with benefiting anybody else. Someone else may benefit by it, but primarily it is for your own good.

When Churchill retired, one of my friends went to see him at his house. In his old age, Churchill was digging and planting some plants in his garden. My friend asked him some questions about politics.

Churchill said, ”Drop it! Now it is over. Now if you want to ask me something, you can ask me about two things. You can ask me about the Bible, because I read it at home, and you can ask me about gardening because I do it here in the garden. Now I have no concern about politics. That race is over. Now I am doing labor and prayer.”

When my friend returned he said to me, ”I do not understand what kind of man Churchill is. I thought he would give me some answers. But he said he was doing labor and prayer.”

I told him, ”Saying labor and prayer is a repetition. Labor and prayer mean the same, they are synonymous. And the day that labor becomes prayer and prayer becomes labor is the day that right labor is attained.”

A little labor is very essential but we have not paid any attention to it. Not even the traditional sannyasins of India paid any attention to labor – they refrained from doing it. There was no question of their doing it. They simply moved in another direction. Rich people stopped laboring because they had money and they could pay for it and sannyasins stopped because they had nothing to do with the world. They neither had to create anything, nor did they have to earn money, so what did they need labor for? The result was that two respected classes of society moved away from labor.

So those in whose hands labor remained, slowly, slowly became disrespected.

For a seeker labor has great significance and usefulness – not because you will produce something from it but because the more you are involved in some kind of labor, the more your consciousness will start becoming centered. It will start coming downwards from the brain. It is not necessary that the labor has to be productive. It can be non-productive also, it can be a simple exercise. But some labor is very essential for the agility of the body, complete alertness of the mind, and total awakening of the being. This is the second part.

There can be a mistake in this part also. Just as one can make a mistake with one’s diet – either one eats too little or one eats too much – so a mistake can happen here also. Either one does not do labour at all or one does too much. Wrestlers do too much labor. They are in a sick state. A wrestler is not a healthy person. A wrestler is putting too much of a burden on the body – he is raping the body. If the body is raped, then some parts of the body, some muscles, can be developed more. But no wrestler lives long! No wrestler dies in a healthy state. Do you know this? All wrestlers

– whether he is a Gama, or a Sandow, or anybody else with a great body, even the greatest in the world – die unhealthy. They die earlier and they die of violent diseases. Raping the body can swell the muscles and make the body worth looking at, worth exhibiting, but there is a great difference between exhibition and life. There is a great difference between living, being healthy and being an exhibitionist.

Each person should find out according to himself, according to his body, how much labor he should do to live more healthily and more freshly. The more fresh air there is inside the body, the more blissful each and every breath is, the more vitality a person has to explore the inner. Simonbel, a French philosopher, has written a very wonderful thing in her autobiography. She said, ”I was always sick until the age of thirty. I was unhealthy and I had many headaches. But it was only at the age of forty that I realized that until the age of thirty I was an atheist. I became healthy when I became a theist. Only later did I see that my being sick and unhealthy was related to my atheism.”

A person who is sick and unhealthy cannot be full of gratitude towards existence. There can be no thankfulness in him towards existence. There is only anger. It is impossible for such a person to accept something towards which he is full of anger. He simply rejects it. If one’s life does not attain a certain balance of health through right labor and right exercise, then it is natural that one will have some negativity, a resistance, an anger towards life.

Right labor is an essential rung on the ladder to ultimate theism.

The third point is right sleep. Food has become disorganized, labor has become disorganized – and sleep has been totally murdered! The thing which has been harmed the most in the development of human civilization is sleep. From the day man discovered artificial light, his sleep has become very troubled. And as more and more gadgets started falling into man’s hands, he started feeling that sleep is an unnecessary thing, too much time is wasted in it. The time when we are asleep is a complete waste. So the less sleep we can do with the better. It does not occur to people that sleep has any kind of contribution to the deeper processes of life. They think that the time spent sleeping is time gone to waste, so the less they sleep the better; the more quickly they reduce the amount of sleep, the better.

This was one group of people who wanted to reduce the amount of sleep needed and another group were the monks and the hermits who felt as if this sleep, this unconsciousness in the form of sleep, was the opposite state of self-realization or self-awakening. So, according to them, it wasn’t good to sleep and the less you slept the better.

There was one more problem for the monks: they had collected too many suppressions in their unconscious and in sleep all those suppressions started surfacing and entering their dreams! So a kind of fear about sleep arose, because all the things that they had ignored during the day started surfacing in their sleep at night. The women they had left and run away from into the forest started arriving in their sleep. The monks started seeing them in their dreams. The money, the fame that the monks had run away from started following them in their dreams. So they felt that sleep was a very dangerous thing – out of their control – so the less they slept the better. These monks created a kind of feeling in the whole world that sleep is something unspiritual. This is an extremely foolish notion.

So the first group of people opposed sleep and felt that it was a waste of time, that there was no need to sleep for so long. The more time a person remained awake the better. People who calculate everything, make statistics about everything, are really strange. They have calculated that a person sleeps for eight hours. One third of his day goes into sleeping. If a person lives for sixty years then twenty years have gone to waste. Out of a life-span of sixty years, only forty years are available for use. And then they have calculated even more. They have calculated how much time a man takes to eat food, to wear clothes, to shave, to bathe, and so on. After calculating everything they said that almost our whole life goes to waste. And when they started subtracting all that time, they realized that it just seems as if a person lives for sixty years – in reality, twenty years go in sleep, some years go in eating, some years go in bathing, some years go in reading a newspaper. Everything goes to waste and nothing remains in life. These people created a panic. Their advice was to cut down on all these things if you want to have some time to live. Sleep takes up the maximum time in a man’s life, so reduce it. So, while this group were advising a reduction in sleep and creating a wave of opposition against sleep, the second group, the monks and hermits, were calling sleep unspiritual and telling people to sleep as little as possible. The less a person slept the more of a holy person he was; and if he did not sleep at all, then he was a totally holy person.

These two groups and their ideas killed man’s ability to sleep, and with the murder of sleep all the deep centers of man’s life got shaken, disturbed and became uprooted. We have not even noticed that the cause behind all the illnesses, all the disorders that have entered man’s life is lack of sleep.

The person who cannot sleep rightly cannot live rightly. Sleep is not a waste of time. The eight hours of sleep are not being wasted; rather, because of those eight hours, you are able to stay awake for sixteen hours. Otherwise you would not be able to stay awake all that time. During those eight hours life-energy is accumulated, your life gets revitalized, the centers of your brain and heart calm down and your life functions from your navel center. For those eight hours of sleep you have again become one with nature and with existence – that is why you become revitalized.

If you want to torture somebody then the best method – invented thousands of years ago – is to prevent him from going to sleep. It has not been possible to improve upon this method so far. During the last war in Germany, and even now in Russia, the most popular method of torturing prisoners was prevention of sleep. You simply don’t allow the person to sleep. This is torture beyond all limits for the person So guards were put next to the prisoners to disturb their sleep.

The Chinese first discovered this method some two thousand years ago. Simply not allowing a person to sleep was a very cheap method of torture. They would make the man stand in a cell which was so small that he could not move at all, could neither sit nor lie down. Then they used to drip water from above which used to fall on his head, drop by drop. He could not move at all, could neither sit nor lie down, so after a maximum of twelve or sixteen or eighteen hours the man would start shouting and screaming – ”I will die! Save me! Get me out of here!” Then they would ask the man to tell them the things he was concealing. After three days even the most courageous person would give up.

Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Russia did the same thing with hundreds of thousands of people.

They kept them awake, would not let them sleep. One cannot experience a worse torture than this.

Even if you kill a person, he does not suffer as much as when you do not let him sleep – because it is only in sleeping that he regains what he has lost. If he is unable to sleep, then he goes on losing and losing his life-energy and does not get anything back. He becomes totally dried out. We are dried-out people because our doors for attaining something are closed, and our doors for losing everything have got more and more open.

Sleep needs to come back into man’s life. Really, there is no alternative, no other step, for the psychological health of humanity than that sleep should be made compulsory by law for the next one or two hundred years.

It is very important for a meditator to see to it that he sleeps properly and enough. And one more thing needs to be understood – right sleep will be different for everybody. It will not be equal because the body has needs which are different for everyone – according to age and to many other elements.

For example, when a child is in the mother’s womb, he sleeps for twenty-four hours because all his tissues are developing. He needs complete sleep; his body will develop only if he keeps on sleeping for twenty-four hours. It is possible that children who are born lame or crippled or blind woke up during the nine months in their mother’s womb. Perhaps some day science may be able to understand that the children who somehow wake up in the mother’s womb are born crippled, or with part of their body undeveloped.

It is necessary to remain asleep in the womb for twenty-four hours because the whole body is getting created, the whole body is developing. A very deep sleep is necessary, only then can all the activities of the body take place.

When a child is born, he sleeps for twenty hours. His body is still growing. Then he sleeps for eighteen hours, then fourteen hours.... Slowly, slowly, as his body starts becoming mature, his sleep also gets less and less. In the end it settles at a time between six to eight hours. The sleep of an old man gets less, it becomes five hours, four hours, even three hours – because the growth of the body of an old man has stopped. He has no need of much sleep every day because now his death is coming close. If an old man sleeps as much as a child sleeps, then he cannot die, death will be difficult. For death it is necessary that sleep becomes less and less. For life it is necessary that sleep is deep. That is why an old man by and by starts sleeping less and less but a child sleeps more.

If old people start expecting the same behavior from children as they do from themselves, it becomes dangerous.

Old people often do this. Old people treat children as if they are also old. They wake them up too early in the morning – ”It is three o’clock, it is four o’clock! Get up!” They are not aware that because they are old it is alright if they wake up at four o’clock. But children cannot wake up at four o’clock.

To wake them up is wrong. It is harming the body functions of the child, it is very harmful for him.

A child once said to me, ”My mother is very strange. When I am not feeling sleepy at all at night, she forces me to sleep and when I feel sleepy in the morning, she forces me to wake up. I do not understand why I am forced to sleep when I am not sleepy and I am forced to wake up when I am sleepy. You explain things to many people, can’t you explain this to my mother?” He wanted me to help his mother understand that what she was doing was very contradictory.

We are not aware that children are often treated like old people and then, as they grow older, they have to start living according to many fixed rules written in many books.

Perhaps you may not be aware that the latest research says that there cannot be one fixed time for everyone to wake up. It is always said that to wake up at five o’clock in the morning is good for everyone. This is absolutely wrong and unscientific. It is not good for everyone – it may be good for some people but it may be harmful for other people. Within twenty-four hours, for about three hours, the body temperature of each person goes down. And those three hours are the hours of deepest sleep. If the person is woken up during those three hours, his whole day will be spoiled and his whole energy will be disturbed.

Generally these three hours are between two to five in the morning. For most people these three hours are between two to five in the morning, but it is not the case with everyone. For some people their body temperature is low until six o’clock, for some it is low until seven. For some their temperature starts becoming normal at four in the morning. So if someone wakes up within these hours of low temperature, all twenty-four hours of his day will be spoiled and there will be harmful effects. Only when a person’s temperature starts rising to a normal level is it time for him to wake up.

Normally it is alright for everybody to wake up with the rising sun, because as the sun rises everyone’s temperature starts rising. But this is not a rule, there are some exceptions. For some people it may be necessary to sleep a little later than sunrise, because each individual’s body temperature rises at a different time, at a different pace. So each person should find out how many hours of sleep he needs and what is a healthy time for him to get up, and that is the rule for him –

whatever the scriptures may say, whatever the gurus may say. There is no need to listen to them at all.

For right sleep, the deeper and the longer you are able to sleep, the better. But I am telling you to sleep, not to keep on lying on the bed! Lying down on your bed is not sleep!

To wake up when you feel it is healthy for you to wake up should be the rule for you. Usually it happens along with the sunrise but it is possible that this does not happen to you. There is no need to be afraid or worried or to think that you are a sinner and to be afraid of going to hell. Many people who get up early in the morning go to hell and many people who get up late are living in heaven.

None of this has any relation whatsoever to being spiritual or unspiritual. But right sleep certainly does have a relationship with it.

So each person should discover what is the best arrangement for him. For three months each person should experiment with his work, with his sleep and with his diet, and should find out what are the most healthy, most peaceful and most blissful rules for him.

And everyone should make his own rules. No two persons are alike, so no common rule is ever applicable to anybody. Whenever someone tries to apply a common rule, it has a bad effect. Each person is an individual. Each person is unique and incomparable. Only he is like himself, there is no other person like him anywhere on the earth. So no rule can be a rule for him until he finds out what the rules for his own life-processes are.

Books, scriptures and gurus are dangerous because they have ready-made formulas. They tell you that you should wake up at a certain time, you should eat this, you should not eat that, you should sleep like this, you should do things in this way.... These ready-made formulas are dangerous. They are good to understand, but each person has to make his own arrangements for his life. Each person has to find his own path of meditation. Each person has to walk by himself and create a path for his spiritual journey. There is no ready-made highway for you to go and start walking on. There is no such highway anywhere. The path of the spiritual journey is like a small footpath – but a footpath that isn’t even there! You create it as you walk along it and it continues for howsoever long you walk on it. And the more you walk, the more your understanding of the journey that is yet to come develops.

So these three points have to be kept in mind: right diet, right labor and right sleep. If life proceeds rightly on these three points then there is more possibility of opening what I call the navel center –

which is the door to spiritual life. If it opens, if we get close to that door, then a very unique thing happens – something of which we have had no experience in our ordinary life.

Last evening, when I left here, a friend came and said, ”What you say is alright, but until we have contentment, it is very difficult to be convinced.” I did not say anything to him. Perhaps he thinks that he will get contentment by my talking about it – but he is absolutely wrong and is wasting his time.

I make whatever effort is needed from my side, but an even greater effort must be made from your side. If you do not make the effort, there is no purpose, no meaning in my saying anything.

People constantly say to me that they want peace, they want bliss, they want a soul. Yes, you want everything, but you do not get anything in the world just by wanting. Desire alone is absolutely impotent, there is no strength in it.

Desire alone is not enough – determination and effort are also needed. It is alright that you desire something, but how much effort do you make for that desire, how many steps do you take towards that desire, what do you do for that desire?

According to my criterion, the only proof of your desire is the effort you make to satisfy it; otherwise there is no proof that you have a desire. When a person desires something, he makes some effort to get it. That effort is the proof that the person desired something. You say that you desire, but you have no intention of making any effort to get it. You have no determination for it.

To close this talk I will repeat one more point. I told you about the three centers: the center of intellect is the brain, the center of feelings is the heart.... What is the navel the center of? The navel is the center of will power. The more activated the navel is, the more intense the will force becomes, and the more you can attain the determination, the power, the life-energy for doing something.

Or think of it in reverse: the more determined you are, the more you gather energy for doing, the more your navel center will develop. Both of these are interdependent, related to each other. The more you think, the more your intellect will develop. The more you love, the more your heart will develop. The more determined you are, the more the center of your inner energy, that central lotus of the navel, will develop.

A small story and then I will finish my talk.

A blind fakir was begging in a town and came to a mosque. He spread out his hands in front of the door of the mosque and asked, ”Can I get something to eat? I am hungry.”

The people passing by said, ”Idiot! This is not a house where you can get something to eat. This is a mosque, this is a temple. Nobody lives here. It is a mosque that you are begging at – you will not get anything here! Go somewhere else.”

The fakir laughed. He said, ”If I do not get anything from the house of God, then from what other house can I get anything? This is the last house I have come to and by mistake this final house is a temple. How can I move away from here? If I move, where will I go? There is no other house after this so now I will stay here and I will move only when I get something.”

The people started laughing at him. They said, ”Idiot! Nobody lives here. Who will give anything to you?”

He replied, ”That is not the question. If I have to go away from the house of God with empty hands then where will my hands be filled? Then my hands will not be filled anywhere. Now that I have stumbled upon this door I will leave only when my hands are full.”

The fakir remained there. And for one year his hands remained spread out in the same way and his being went on longing in the same way. The people of the town started saying he was mad. They said to him, ”You are absolutely a fool! Where do you think you are sitting with your hands spread out? There is nothing to be gained here.”

But the fakir was one of a kind, someone unique. He remained sitting and sitting and sitting.

After one year had passed by, the people of the town saw that perhaps the fakir had attained something. The aura of his face had changed. There was a kind of breeze of peace floating around him; a kind of light appeared around him, a fragrance.... The man started dancing. Where before there were tears in his eyes, now there was a smile on his face. He had been almost dead but in this one year his life blossomed again and he started dancing.

People asked, ”Have you gained something?”

He said, ”It would have been impossible not to have gained something because I had decided that either I would gain something or I would not stay. I have attained more than I desired. I desired only food for my body and I have gained food for my soul also. I wanted only to fulfill the hunger of my body but now the hunger of my soul has also been fulfilled.”

They started asking, ”How did you attain this? How did you gain this?”

He said, ”I did nothing, but I put all my will power behind my thirst. I said to myself that if there is thirst then along with it there should be total determination also. My total determination was behind my thirst and now my thirst is quenched. I reached the place where that water is available, and after drinking it my thirst remains no longer.”

The meaning of determination is to have the courage, the inner strength and will power to do something about whatever it is you want, to act according to whatever you think is right, and to follow whichever path seems right for you. If you do not have this determination, then nothing can happen through my or anybody else’s words. If something could happen through my words, then things would be very easy. There have been many people in the world who have said very good things. If things could happen just through their words, by now everything would have happened to the whole world. But neither Mahavira, nor Buddha, nor Christ, nor Krishna, nor Mohammed can do anything. Nobody can do anything unless you yourself are ready to do it.

The Ganges goes on flowing, the oceans are full, but you have no container in your hands – and you are shouting that you want water.

The Ganges says, ”There is water, but where is your container?”

You say, ”Don’t talk about the container. You are the Ganges, there is so much water in you, give some to me.”

The doors of the Ganges are not closed, the doors of the Ganges are open – but you need a container.

Where there is no container of determination, no fulfillment or contentment on the spiritual journey is ever attained.

You have listened to my talks so silently.... The three meetings of our first day come to an end now and from tomorrow we will start discussing the two other points. Now, after this meeting, we will sit for the night meditation for about ten minutes.

We should understand two or three things regarding the night meditation, then we will sit for it....

Would it be possible to lie down? Is there space enough for the meditators to lie down? First understand, then we will do the night meditation. The morning meditation is to be done sitting. Life arises, wakes up in the morning, so it is helpful to meditate sitting up. The night meditation has to be done lying in bed, before you go to sleep. After the meditation, just go to sleep silently. This is the last thing in the day. The morning meditation is the first thing that happens after waking up; the night meditation is the last thing that happens before going to sleep.

If one enters a state of meditation properly before sleeping, one’s whole sleep is transformed. One’s whole sleep can become a meditation, because sleep has certain rules. The first rule is that the last thought at night becomes the central thought in your sleep, and it will be your first thought on waking up in the morning. If you have gone to sleep at night in anger, then throughout the night your mind and your dreams will be filled with anger. And when you wake up in the morning, you will find that your first feeling and your first thought will be of anger. Whatever we take to sleep with us at night stays with us the whole night.

That is why I say that if you do need to carry something in your sleep, then it is better to carry meditation with you so that the whole sleep revolves around meditation, around its peace. Slowly, slowly, within a few days, you will find that the dreams disappear, that your sleep becomes a deep river. And when you wake up in the morning from a deep sleep – deep from this night meditation –

your first thoughts will be of peace, of bliss, of love.

So the morning journey has to be started with the morning meditation, and the night journey has to be started with the night meditation. The night meditation has to be done while lying down – while lying down in bed. We will do the experiment here lying down.

After you have lain down, you have to do three things.

The first thing is that the body has to be totally relaxed, as if there is no life in it. So loose, so relaxed, no life in the body.... And for three minutes one’s mind has to feel that the body is becoming relaxed, more relaxed, more relaxed.... Whatever the mind feels, the body will follow it.

The body is just a servant, a follower. The body expresses whatever we feel with action. If you feel anger, the body picks up a stone to throw; if you feel love, the body hugs somebody. Whatever you want to be, whatever you want to do, when the thought arises in the mind the body turns it into action.

Everyday we see the miracle of the body transforming a thought into action whenever it arises. We never think of becoming relaxed, otherwise the body would do that too. The body can relax so much that one does not even know if it exists or not – but this only happens after doing this experiment for a while. For three minutes you have to go on feeling relaxed.

Right now, I will give you suggestions so that you come to experience the feeling. When I give you the suggestion that the body is becoming relaxed, then you will feel that the body is becoming more relaxed, more relaxed.... The body will become relaxed!

As the body becomes relaxed, the breath will become calm. Calmness does not mean that breathing will stop, but it will become slow, tranquil and deep. Then for three minutes you have to feel that your breathing is becoming calmer and calmer, the breathing is becoming relaxed.... Then slowly the mind also becomes relaxed and tranquil. When the body becomes relaxed, the breath becomes calm; when the breath becomes calm, the mind automatically becomes silent – all these three things are related.

So first we will feel that the body is relaxed – this will make the breathing calm. Then we will feel that the breathing is relaxed – this will make the mind silent.

And then I will give you a third suggestion – that now your mind is becoming silent and empty. In this way, after following each of these three suggestions for a short time, I will say that now the mind has become completely silent. Then for ten minutes you will lie in silence in the same way that you were sitting in silence this morning.

You will hear the cry of a bird, you will hear the sound of a dog – and many other sounds – just keep listening silently. It is just as if there is an empty room and a sound comes in, resounds and goes. You should not think about why you are hearing these sounds, neither should you think about why the dog is barking – because you have nothing to do with the dog. There is no reason for you to think about why this dog is barking, nor why this stupid dog is disturbing you now that you are meditating! No, you have nothing to do with it either. The dog does not know at all that you are meditating. He has no idea about it, he is absolutely innocent – he is just doing his job. It is nothing to do with you. He is just barking, so you have to let him bark. It is not a disturbance to you unless you make it a disturbance. It becomes a disturbance only when you resist, when you want the dog to stop barking – the trouble begins there. The dog is barking – it should bark. We are meditating –

we should meditate. There is no conflict between these two; there is no opposition. You are silent, the dog’s sound will come, linger, and go; it is not a disturbance to you.

Once I was staying in a small village in a rest house. A political leader was also staying with me.

That night I don’t know what happened but all the dogs from the village gathered near the rest house and started barking. The leader became very disturbed. He got up, came into my room and asked,

”Have you gone to sleep? I am in a great difficulty. I have driven those dogs away two times, but they return again!”

I said, ”If you drive anybody away they will always return. It is a mistake to try to drive somebody away because whoever you drive away thinks that he is needed in some way. He thinks that he has some importance – that is why he is being driven away. And dogs are just poor dogs! They must think that they are needed in some way, that they are important to you, so they came back.

”And the other thing is that the dogs have no idea that a political leader is staying here, that they are barking for you. They are not human beings – if human beings hear that a political leader is here they will gather around him. Up to now dogs have not become intelligent enough to gather around when a political leader comes. The dogs come here every day. Do not have this unnecessary idea in your mind that they have come here because of your importance. They would definitely not know about it. And as far as the problem of your sleeping is concerned, the dogs are not keeping you awake, you are keeping yourself awake. You are unnecessarily thinking that the dogs should not bark. What right do you have? The dogs have the right to bark and you have the right to sleep. There is no contradiction between them, these things can happen simultaneously. There is no conflict or clash between them. Let the dogs go on barking and you go on sleeping. Neither the dogs can say that you shouldn’t sleep because your sleep creates a disturbance in their barking, nor can you say that they disturb you.”

And I told him, ”Just accept that the dogs are barking and listen silently. Drop the resistance. Accept their barking. And the moment you accept it, the barking of dogs is also transformed into a musical rhythm.”

I don’t know when he went to sleep but when he woke up in the morning, he said to me, ”I don’t have any idea what happened but I am really amazed. When there was nothing else to do I had to accept.

At first your idea made no sense to me....” My ideas do not immediately make sense to anybody! It did not make sense to him either.... ”but when I felt so helpless, I realized there was no other way: either I ruin my sleep or I accept what you say. There were only two alternatives. Then I thought that as I had given so much attention to the dogs, now I should give attention to your suggestion and see what happens. So I lay down silently and listened and accepted the barking. After that I have no idea when I fell asleep, and I have no idea how long the dogs kept on barking or when they became silent. I really had a good night’s sleep.”

So do not resist.

Listen silently to whatever is all around.

This listening silently is a very

miraculous phenomenon; this non-resistance, this non-opposition towards life is the clue to going into meditation.

So first we will become relaxed, and then we will listen silently in a state of non-resistance. Lights will be turned off so that you do not feel that others are present. It is easy to forget the dogs, it is far more difficult to forget the people around you.

CHAPTER 4

The ways to encounter the mind

4 February 1968 am in Ajol Meditation Camp

[Note: This is the final edit of the Hindi translation of Antar Yatra, later published as part of Sadhana Path. This is for reference use only, pending publication.]

My Beloved Ones,

The mind of man, his brain, has become a sick wound. It is no longer a healthy center, it has turned into an unhealthy ulcer. That is why all our attention is concentrated on it. Perhaps you may not have thought about the fact that when a part of the body becomes sick, all one’s attention moves towards it.

One only becomes aware of the leg if there is pain in the leg; if there is no pain then one is not aware of the leg at all. If there is a wound in the hand then one becomes aware of the hand; if there is no wound then one does not know about the hand at all. Our brain has certainly become sick in one way or the other, because for twenty-four hours we are aware only of it and nothing else.

The healthier a body is, the less it will be felt. One feels only that part which has become unhealthy.

The only part of the body which we feel now is the brain. Our consciousness only moves around it – only knows it, only recognizes it. A sick wound has appeared there. Without getting free of this wound, without becoming free of this very tense and very restless state of mind, no person can move towards his center of life. So today we will discuss this state of the brain and how to change it.

The first thing is that we should clearly understand the state of the brain. If you sit alone for ten minutes and sincerely write down on a piece of paper whatever thoughts are going through your mind, you will be unwilling to show that paper to even your dearest friend – because you will find thoughts which are so mad that neither yourself nor anyone else could have expected them from you. You will find such irrelevant, futile and contradictory thoughts that you will think you have gone mad.

If you sincerely write down whatever comes into your mind for ten minutes you will be very surprised at what is happening there. You will wonder if you are sane or crazy. We never look into our mind even for ten minutes to see what is going on there – or maybe it is that we do not look into it because deep down we already know what is happening there.

Perhaps we are afraid. That is why people are afraid of being alone and are looking for company twenty-four hours of the day – wanting to meet friends or go to a club or something. And if the person cannot find anybody then he will read a newspaper or listen to the radio. Nobody wants to be alone because the moment you are alone you start finding out about your real state.

When the other is present, we are involved in relating to him and we are not aware about ourself.

The search for the other is nothing but the search for an opportunity to escape from oneself. The basic reason that we become interested in other people is that we are afraid of ourselves, and we know very well that if we know ourselves completely, we will find that we are absolutely mad. To escape from this state man searches for company, searches for a companion, searches for a friend, searches for society, searches for a crowd.

Man is afraid of aloneness. He becomes afraid of aloneness because in aloneness he will find a reflection of his real state, he will come across the reflection of his own face. And it will be very frightening, very scary. So, from getting up in the morning till going to sleep at night, he uses all kinds of methods to escape from himself so that he doesn’t have to face himself. He is afraid that he may see himself.

Man has invented thousands of ways to escape from himself. And the worse the condition of man’s mind has become, the more we have made new inventions to escape from ourselves. If we look at the last fifty years, we will find that man has created more diversions to escape from himself than ever before in history. The movie-houses, the radio, the television, are all ways to escape from oneself. Man is becoming so restless. We are searching for entertainment, we are making many arrangements to forget about ourselves for awhile because our inner situation is becoming worse. All over the world, along with the development of civilization, the use of drugs has increased. Recently some new drugs have been discovered which are becoming very popular in Europe and in America.

There are drugs like L.S.D, mescaline, marijuana.... In all the cultured cities of Europe and America, among all educated people, the effort to discover new drugs is at its peak. The search to discover reliable means for man to forget himself continues – otherwise man will be in great difficulty.

What is the reason behind all this? Why do we want to forget ourselves? Why are we so eager for self-forgetfulness? And don’t think that only the people who are going to movies are trying to forget themselves. The people who are going to temples are also going for the same reason, there is no difference. The temple is an old way of forgetting oneself; the movie is a new way. If a man is sitting and chanting ”Rama-Rama”, don’t think that he is doing anything else than trying to forget himself in the chanting – just as somebody else is trying to forget himself by listening to a movie song. There is no difference between these two people.

The effort to get entangled in anything outside oneself – whether it is ”Rama”, or a movie, or music

– the effort to become entangled in anything is deep down nothing but an effort to escape from oneself. We are all engaged in escaping from the self in one way or the other. This shows that our condition inside is getting worse and we are losing the courage even to look at it. We are very afraid to look in that direction. We are acting like ostriches. Seeing the enemy an ostrich hides its face in the sand because it is dangerous to look at the enemy. Because the enemy is not visible, the ostrich’s logic says, ”That which is not visible is not there. I am safe.” But this logic is wrong.

Ostriches can be forgiven but man cannot. By not being visible something does not cease to exist.

If a thing is visible, something can be done about it, but if it is invisible there is no possibility of doing anything.

We want to forget the state which is inside; we don’t want to see it. It may be possible to convince our mind that something which is not visible is not there but that does not mean that it has gone away. There is no relation between not being visible and being non-existent. If something had been visible then perhaps we could have been able to change it, but as it is not visible, change is not possible. It will go on growing inside like a wound, like an ulcer which we have hidden and do not want to look at.

The brain has become a wound. Some day, if a machine is invented by which we could look at what is happening inside each person then everybody would probably commit suicide immediately!

Nobody would allow anybody else to see what is going on inside him. Some day or other it will become possible. Right now we can be grateful that there are no windows in our heads through which we can look into each others’ brains and see what is going on there.

What people are hiding inside and what they say on the outside are very different. What you see outside on their faces is completely different from what is going on inside them. It is possible that outside they are talking about love but inside they are full of hate. They may be saying to somebody,

”Good morning! I am pleased to see you. I am happy that I met you this morning,” but inside they are saying, ”Why do I have to see the face of this stupid person first thing in the morning?”

If there were windows to look into people’s heads, we would be in a great difficulty, life would become really difficult to live. We might be talking to someone in a friendly manner but thinking inside, ”When is this man going to die.” There is one thing on the surface and something else underneath and we don’t dare to look inwards, to look inside and see.

A mother and her daughter lived together and both of them walked in their sleep. One night at about three o’clock the mother got up and went into the garden behind the house. After awhile her daughter also got up in her sleep and walked into the garden. As soon as the old woman saw her daughter, she shouted, ”Bitch! You have taken away my youth. From the time you were born, I started growing old. You are my enemy. If you had not been born, I would still be young!”

And when the girl saw her mother, she shouted, ”You wicked woman! Because of you my life has become difficult and a bondage. You have always been a rock in the flow of my life. You are a heavy chain on my life!”

At that moment the cock crowed and they both woke up. Seeing the girl, the old women said, ”Dear!

Why did you get up so early? You may catch cold. Come, let’s go inside!”

Immediately the girl touched the feet of her old mother. She had a habit of touching the feet of her mother every morning. She said, ”Mother! You got up so early. Your health is not good. You should not get up so early. Come and rest!”

You can see the difference between what they said in their sleep and when they were awake.

Whatever a man says in his sleep is more authentic than what he says when he is awake, because it is more from the inside. What you see of yourself in your dreams is more of a reality than what you see in the marketplace and in the crowd. The face in the crowd is made up and artificial. Deep down within yourself you are a totally different person. You may manage to hide things by sticking some good thoughts on the surface, but inside the fire of thoughts is burning. On the surface you may seem absolutely silent and healthy, but inside everything is unhealthy and disturbed. On the surface you seem to be smiling but it can be possible that the smile is just covering a pile of tears.

In fact, it is a probability that you have been practicing your smiles just to hide the tears within. This is usually what people do.

Somebody once asked Nietzsche, ”You are always laughing! You are so joyous! Do you really feel this way?”

Nietzsche said, ”Now that you have asked, I will tell you the reality. I am laughing so that I don’t start crying instead. Before my crying can start, I suppress it by laughing. I stop it inside myself. My laughter must convince others that I am happy. And I laugh only because I am so sad that I feel a relief by laughing. Sometimes I can console myself.”

Nobody has seen Buddha laughing, nobody has seen Mahavira laughing, nobody has seen Christ laughing. There must be a reason. Perhaps there are no tears inside so there is no need to laugh to hide them. Perhaps inside no sorrow remains to hide by smiling. Whatever was disturbed inside has disappeared, so now there is no need to stick the flowers of laughter on the outside.

One whose body stinks needs to sprinkle perfume on it. One whose body is ugly needs to make an effort to look beautiful. One who is sad within has to learn to laugh, and one who is filled with tears inside has to keep smiling on the outside. One who is full of thorns within must stick flowers on himself outside.

Man is absolutely not as he appears to be, he is the total opposite. He is one thing on the inside and something else on the outside. And it is alright if others are deceived by what we have stuck on the outside, but the problem is that we ourselves get deceived by it. If only others were deceived by the outer appearance, it would be alright – it is not very surprising because people usually only see the outside. But we ourselves get deceived because we think we really are the image that other people see. We look at ourselves through the eyes of the other, we never see ourselves directly as we are, as we authentically are.

The image formed in other people’s eyes deceives us and we become afraid to look within. We want to see the image people have of us, not ourselves. What are people saying? We become very interested in knowing what people say about us. There is nothing else behind this curiosity to know.

We think we can recognize ourself through the image formed in others’ eyes. This is very surprising!

Even to know ourself we have to look into another person’s eyes.

Man is afraid that people might say something bad about him. He feels happy if people say something good about him because his knowledge of himself depends on their opinion. He doesn’t have immediate knowledge of himself; he does not have any direct experience of knowing himself.

This experience can happen, but it doesn’t because we try to escape from it.

The first thing in encountering the mind is not to bother about what others say or how one appears to others; rather, one has to have a direct encounter with what one essentially is. In one’s aloneness one has to open one’s mind totally and see what is there. It is an act of courage. It is an act of tremendous courage to decide to enter into the hell hidden within oneself. It is an act of great courage to see oneself in one’s nudity. Great courage is needed.

Once there was an emperor. Every day he used to disappear into a room built in the middle of his palace. His family, the people in his house, his friends, his ministers were all surprised about this habit. He used to always keep the key of that room on himself and when he went into the room he would lock the door from the inside. There was only one door to the room and not a single window.

During a period of twenty-four hours, he would stay in that room for at least one hour.

Even his wives did not know anything about the room because he had never told anybody about it.

If somebody asked, he would smile and remain silent, and he would not give the key to anybody. All the people were surprised about it, and their curiosity went on growing day by day – what does he do there? Nobody knew! He used to stay in that closed room for one hour, then he would come out silently and put the key in his pocket – and the next day he would do the same thing again. At last the people’s curiosity reached a peak and they conspired with each other to find out what he was doing. His ministers, his wives, his sons, his daughters were part of the conspiracy.

One night they made a hole in the wall so that they would be able to see what he was doing when he next went there. The next day, when the emperor went inside, everybody peeped through the hole one by one. But whoever put his eye to the hole immediately moved aside and said, ”What is he doing? What is he doing?” But nobody could say what he was doing!

The emperor had gone inside and taken off all his clothes. And he spread his hands towards the sky and said, ”O, God! The person who was wearing the clothes was not me. That is not my reality

– this is my reality!” And he started jumping and shouting and screaming abuses and behaving like a madman.

Whoever looked through the hole moved aside immediately in shock and said, ”What is our emperor doing? We used to think that perhaps he would be doing some yoga or saying some prayers. But this! What is he doing?”

And the emperor said to God, ”The silent and peaceful-looking person who was in front of you in clothes was absolutely false. He was a cultivated man. I made him like that through my efforts. In reality I am like this. This is my reality, this is my nakedness and this is my madness! If you accept my reality then it is alright – because I can deceive people but how can I deceive you? I can show people that I am not naked by wearing clothes but you know very well that I am naked. How can I deceive you? I can show to people that I am very silent and blissful, but you know me in my very depth. How can I deceive you? In front of you I am just a mad man!”

In front of God we are all like a madman. In fact, leave God aside – if we look within ourselves then even to our own eyes we will look like madmen. Our mind has become absolutely confused, but we have never paid any attention to this problem so we have not developed any methods to deal with it.

The first thing is to encounter our mind directly, but we must understand two or three points for this encounter to happen. After that we will be able to think about how the mind can be changed.

The first thing for a direct encounter with the mind is that we should drop all our fears about knowing ourselves. What is the fear of knowing oneself? The fear is that perhaps we are a bad person. The fear is that we may discover that we are a bad person after having cultivated an image of being a good person. We appear to be a good person – we are saintly, we are innocent, we are authentic, we are truthful. Our fear is that we may realize that inside we are unauthentic and false. We are afraid of finding out that we are irreligious, complicated, cunning, hypocritical, unsaintly. The fear is that the image of ourselves – what we think ourselves to be – may turn out to be false.

A person who is afraid in this way can never encounter the mind. It is very easy to go into the forests, it is easy to go into darkness, it is easy to sit fearlessly in front of wild animals, but it is very difficult to stand fearlessly in front of the wild man that is hidden within you. It is very arduous. It is not at all arduous to stand for years in the sun, any fool can do that. It is not difficult to stand on your head, any idiot can be taught such circus games. And it is not very difficult to lie down on thorns – the skin adjusts to the thorns very soon. If there is one thing that is really arduous, it is the courage to have an immediate knowing of however one is within – whether bad or mad, however one is.

So the first thing is to drop fear and to get ready to see oneself courageously. One who does not have this courage is in trouble. We are interested in attaining the soul, we are interested in knowing existence, but we do not have the courage to have a direct and simple encounter with ourselves.

The soul and existence are very far away – the first reality is our mind, our brain. The first reality is the thought center with which we are most closely related. One has to see it, know it, recognize it, first.

The first thing is the effort to know one’s own mind in aloneness without fear. For at least half an hour everyday give your mind a chance to express itself as it is. Close yourself in a room – like the emperor – and give total freedom to your mind. Tell it, ”Whatever you want to think, to contemplate, let it happen.” Drop all the censoring of yourself that has prevented things from surfacing – drop all that. Give your mind the freedom to allow whatever arises to arise; to allow whatever appears to appear. Don’t stop or suppress anything. You are ready to know what is inside.

And you should also not judge what is good or bad because the moment you judge, suppression begins. Whatever you call bad, the mind starts suppressing, and whatever you call good, the mind starts using as a cover-up. So you don’t need to judge anything as either good nor bad. Whatever there is in the mind, however it is, be prepared to know it as it is.

If you let your mind be totally free to think, to contemplate, to feel, you will feel very frightened and wonder if you are mad – but it is essential to know what is hidden inside in order to be free from it. Knowledge and recognition are the first steps to get free from it. We cannot conquer an enemy which we do not know or recognize. There is no way. The hidden enemy, the enemy standing behind you, is more dangerous than the enemy in front of you – the one you are acquainted with, whom you recognize.

The first thing is that because of the restrictions and inhibitions that we have imposed on the mind from all sides, we don’t let the mind express itself in its spontaneity. We have restricted all its spontaneity. Everything has become unnatural and false. We have covered everything in veils, we are wearing false faces, and we never allow the mind to express itself directly. So, in the beginning, at least allow it to express itself directly in front of you so that you become acquainted with all the contents which have been hidden and suppressed. A great part of the mind has been suppressed in darkness. We never take a lamp there. We live in the balcony of our own house and inside there is darkness in all the rooms and we don’t know how many insects and spiders and snakes and scorpions are hidden there. In darkness they are bound to gather. And we are afraid to take a light there, we don’t even want to think about the condition of our house. It is very essential for a seeker to drop this fear.

To bring about a revolution in our mind and thoughts, the first thing is to drop the fear, to be ready to know oneself without fear. The second thing is to get rid of all the censorship and restrictions we have imposed on the mind. And we have imposed many restrictions on it. Our education, our moral preachings, our civilization and culture have imposed many restrictions – ”Don’t think about this.

Don’t allow a thought of this kind to enter your mind. It is a bad thought! Don’t allow it!” When we suppress them, the bad thoughts do not get destroyed, they only go deeper into our subconscious.

By suppressing it, a thought does not leave, it goes more deeply into our being – because what we are suppressing arose from within, it did not come from somewhere outside.

Remember, whatever is there in your mind doesn’t come from somewhere outside, it comes from within. It is as if a spring is coming out of a mountain and we close its opening. The spring will not be destroyed, it will go deeper, and it will search for other ways to come out of the mountain. Originally there would have been one spring, but now perhaps there will be ten because the water will try to flow out by breaking into ten springs. And if we close these ten places then there will be a hundred springs.

Everything comes from within, not from the outside. And the more we suppress it, the more ugly and perverted it becomes. Then it finds new ways to come out, new complications are created –

but we go on suppressing it harder. The basis of our education from our very childhood is that if a certain thought in the mind is wrong, suppress it. That suppressed thought does not get destroyed, it enters deeper into our subconscious. And the more we go on suppressing it, the deeper it goes, and the more it gets a grip on us.

Anger is wrong, so we suppress it – then a current of anger spreads right through us. Sex is wrong, greed is wrong, this is wrong, that is wrong.... Whatever is wrong we suppress and in the end we find that we have become whatsoever we suppressed. How long can you block those suppressed springs by closing their openings?

And the mind functions in certain ways. For example, whatever we want to suppress or escape from, becomes central to the mind. Whatever we want to escape from becomes an attraction and the mind starts moving towards it. Try it! If you try to escape from something or suppress something, the mind will immediately become focussed on it.

Milarepa was a mystic who lived in Tibet. One day a young man came to him and said, ”I want to attain some powers. Please give me a mantra.”

Milarepa said, ”We don’t have any mantras. We are mystics. Mantras are for magicians, for jugglers

– go to them. We don’t have any mantras – why should we need powers?”

But the more Milarepa refused, the more the young man thought that there must be something there

– why else should he refuse? So he kept returning to Milarepa again and again.

Great crowds always gather around the saints who drive people away with sticks or throw stones at them. The crowds think that the saint must have something special otherwise he would not be driving people away.

But we don’t realize that attracting people through an advertisement in a newspaper or through throwing stones at them, is the same trick. The propaganda is the same. And the second way is more manipulative and cunning. When people are driven away by someone throwing stones, they don’t understand that they are actually being attracted. This is a subtle way of doing it. And the people do come although they have no idea that they have been seduced.

The young man thought that perhaps Milarepa was trying to hide something so he started coming everyday. In the end Milarepa got fed up so he wrote him a mantra on a paper and said, ”Take this.

Tonight is the night of no moon. Read this five times during the night. If you read it five times, you will get the power you want. Then you will be able to do whatever you want to do. Now go and leave me alone.”

The young man grabbed the paper and turned round and ran. He did not even thank Milarepa. But he had not descended the steps of the temple when Milarepa called after him, ”My friend! I forgot to tell you one thing. There is a certain condition attached to this mantra. When you read it, you should not have any thoughts in your mind about a monkey.”

The young man said, ”Don’t be worried, I have never had such a thought in my whole life. There has never been any reason to think of a monkey. I have to read this only five times. There is no problem.”

But he made a mistake. He had not even descended to the bottom of the steps when the monkeys started coming. He became very scared. He closed his eyes and there were monkeys inside; he looked outside and even where there were no monkeys, he saw some! It was already night, and every movement in the trees seemed to be a monkey. It seemed that monkeys were everywhere.

By the time he got home he was very worried because up until then he had never thought about monkeys. He had never had anything to do with them.

He took a bath, but while he was bathing the monkeys were with him. His whole mind was obsessed with only one thing – monkeys. Then he sat down to read the mantra. He picked up the paper, closed his eyes – and there was a crowd of monkeys inside teasing him. He became very much afraid, but still he persevered the whole night. He changed his positions; he tried to sit in this way, in that way, in padmasana, in siddhasana, in other different yoga postures. He prayed, he bowed, he begged; he cried out to anybody to help him get rid of these monkeys. But the monkeys were adamant. They were not ready to leave him that night.

By the morning the young man was almost mad with fear and he realized that the mantra power could not be attained so easily. He saw that Milarepa had been very clever, he had put a difficult condition on him. Milarepa was crazy! If there was going to be a hindrance because of the monkeys then at least he should not have mentioned them. Then perhaps the mantra power could have been attained.

In the morning he went back to Milarepa crying and said, ”Take your mantra back. You have made a big mistake! If monkeys were a hindrance in using this mantra, then you should not have mentioned them. I never usually think of monkeys but the whole of last night the monkeys chased me. Now I will have to wait for my next life to attain this mantra power because in this life this mantra and the monkeys have become united. Now it is not possible to get rid of them.”

The monkeys had become united with the mantra. How did they become united? His mind insisted that the monkeys should not be there and so the monkeys came. Whenever his mind tried to get rid of the monkeys, the monkeys appeared. Whenever his mind tried to escape from the monkeys the monkeys came. To forbid is to attract; to refuse is to invite; to prevent is to tempt.

Our mind has become very sick because we don’t understand this simple point. We don’t want to be angry – then anger comes like a monkey. We don’t want to be sexual – then sex appears like a monkey and gets a grip on our being. We don’t want greed, we don’t want ego – and they all come. But whatever we want – spirituality, religiousness, enlightenment – doesn’t seem to come.

That which we don’t want, comes, and that which we try to get, never appears. All this perversion happens because of not understanding this simple point of the mind.

The second thing to remember is that there is no need to insist on what should be in the mind and what shouldn’t. We should be ready to watch whatever appears in our mind without making any choices and without any conditions. In this way we can begin to see what the mind is in reality.

The simple fact of the contradictory nature of the mind is well understood by advertisers around the world, but religious leaders have not understood it at all. Propagandists all over the world understand this fact but the people teaching in society have not understood it. When a movie is advertised ’For Adults only’, children go to see it with a few paise worth of false moustache sticking on their faces.

The advertisers know that to attract children it is necessary to use the words ’For Adults Only’ on the advertisement. There are women’s magazines ’for women only’. Nobody reads them except men, women never read them. I enquired about it and found out that most of the buyers are men!

And when I asked the agents about the magazines they sell in the market, they said, ”Women buy

’women only’ magazines once in a while but usually they buy magazines for men only.”

The advertisers understand what attracts man’s mind but neither the religious leaders nor the teachers of morality have understood it yet. They still go on teaching people stupidities like ”Don’t be angry, fight with the anger”. A person fighting with his anger and trying to escape from it will be obsessed with anger his whole life. He can never be free from it. Only a person who is interested in knowing his anger face to face and not fighting it, gets free of it.

The second point is to drop all the feelings of conflict and struggle with any state of the mind. Just create a feeling of wanting to know, to understand – ”I should understand what my mind is.” One should enter the mind with this kind of simple feeling. That is the second point.

And the third point is not to make any judgment about whatever arises in the mind. Don’t make any judgement about what is bad or what is good. Badness and goodness are two sides of the same coin. Wherever there is badness, there is goodness on the other side. Wherever there is goodness, there is badness on the other side.

A bad person is hidden inside a good person and a good person is hidden inside a bad person.

A good person has the good side of his coin upwards and the bad side downwards. So if a good person becomes bad then he proves to be worse than the most bad person. And if a bad person becomes good then a good person seems pale in comparison. In a bad person the goodness has been completely hidden – only the badness shows. If he changes and becomes a good man then other good people will look pale next to him. A very fresh and hidden force of goodness arises from within him. Valmiki or Angulimal are good examples. They were very bad people who one day became good and they outshone all other saints with their goodness.

A good person and a bad person are not different; they are two sides of the same coin. But a sage is a third kind of person – inside him there is neither goodness nor badness. The coin disappears altogether. A sage is not a good man nor a gentleman nor a saint. A wicked man is always hidden inside a gentleman and a gentleman is always hidden inside a bad man. A sage is absolutely a third type of phenomenon. He is beyond both good and bad; he has no relation to either one. He has entered a totally different dimension where there is no question of good and bad.

A young monk lived in a village in Japan. He was very famous, and had great reputation. The whole village worshipped and respected him. Songs were sung all over the village in his honor. But one day everything changed. A young girl in the village became pregnant and gave birth to a child.

When her family asked her whose child it was she said it was the child of the young monk.

How long does it take for admirers to become enemies? How long? It does not take even a short while because inside the mind of an admirer condemnation is always hidden. The mind just waits for a chance, and the day admiration ends, condemnation begins. Those people who show respect can change in one minute to being disrespectful. The people who are touching a person’s feet can within a moment start cutting the same person’s head off. There is no difference between respect and disrespect – they are two faces of the same coin.

The people of the whole village attacked the monk’s hut. For a long time they had been showing respect to the monk but now all the anger that they had suppressed came out. Now they had the chance to be disrespectful, so they all ran to the monk’s hut and set it on fire and threw the tiny baby at him.

The monk asked, ”What is the matter?”

The people shouted, ”You are asking us what the matter is? This child is yours! Do we have to tell you what the matter is? Look at your burning house, look within your heart, look at this child and look at this girl. There is no need for us to tell you that this child is yours.”

The monk said, ”Is it so? Is this child mine?”

The child started crying so he started singing a song to make the child silent, and the people left him sitting by his burnt-out hut. Then he went to beg at his usual time, in the afternoon – but who would give him food today? Today every door he stood in front of was slammed shut. Today a crowd of children and people started walking behind him, teasing him, throwing stones. He reached the house of the girl whose child it was. He said, ”I may not get food for myself, but at least give some milk for this child ! I may be at fault, but what is the fault of this poor baby?”

The child was crying, the crowd was standing there – and it became unbearable for the girl. She fell at the feet of her father and said, ”Forgive me, I lied when I gave the name of the monk. I wanted to save the real father of the child, so I thought of using the name of this monk. I don’t even have any acquaintance with him.”

The father became nervous. This was a great mistake. He ran out of his house, fell at the feet of the monk and tried to take the baby from him.

The monk asked, ”What is the matter?”

The girl’s father said,” Forgive me, there has been a mistake. The child is not yours.”

The monk replied, ”Is this so? Is the child really not mine?”

Then the people of the village said to him, ”You are mad! Why didn’t you deny it this morning?”

The monk said, ”What difference would it have made? The child must belong to somebody. And you had already burnt one hut – you would have just burnt one more. You had enjoyed defaming one person, you would have enjoyed defaming one more. What difference would it make? The child must belong to someone – it could also be mine. So what is the problem? What difference does it make?”

The people said, ”Don’t you understand that everybody condemned you, insulted you, humiliated you very much?”

The monk answered, ”If I had been concerned with your condemnation, I would have been concerned about your respect also. I do as I feel right; you do whatever you feel to be right. Until yesterday you felt it right to respect me so you did. Today you felt it right not to respect me so you didn’t. But I am not concerned with either your respect or your disrespect.

The people said to him, ”Gentleman, you should have realized that you would lose your good reputation.”

He replied, ”I am neither bad nor good. I am simply myself. I have dropped this idea of good and bad. I have dropped all concern in becoming good because the more I tried to become good, the more I found that I became bad. The more I tried to escape from badness, the more I found that goodness was disappearing. I dropped the very idea. I became absolutely indifferent. And the day I became indifferent, I found that neither goodness nor badness remained inside. Rather, something new was born which is better than goodness, and which does not even have a shadow of badness about it.”

A sage is a third type of person. The journey of a seeker is not one of becoming a good man; the journey of a seeker is one of becoming a sage.

So my third point is: do not decide if a thought which is arising in the mind is good or bad. Don’t condemn or appreciate. Don’t say that this is bad or this is good. Just sit on the side of the stream of the mind, as if you are sitting on the bank of a river and indifferently watching the flow – water is flowing, stones are flowing, leaves are flowing, wood is flowing. And you are watching sitting silently on the bank.

These are the three points I wanted to tell you about this morning. The first thing is tremendous fearlessness in encountering the mind; the second thing is no restrictions, no conditions on the mind; the third point is no judgments about whatever thoughts and longings arise in the mind, no feelings of good or bad. Your attitude should simply be indifferent. These three points are necessary to understand the perversions of the mind. Then in the afternoon and evening we will talk about what can be done to get rid of these perversions, and go further – but these three basic points have to be kept in mind.

Now we will get ready for the morning meditation. First, two points to understand about the morning meditation, then we will sit for it.

The morning meditation is a very direct and simple process. Actually whatever is significant in life is very simple and direct. In life, the more futile a thing is, the more complicated and complex it is.

In life, the higher a thing is, the more simple and direct it is. It is a very direct and simple process.

The only thing you have to do is to sit silently and listen silently to the world of sound all around.

Listening has some wonderful effects. Usually we never listen. When I am speaking here, if you think that you are listening, then you are making a great mistake. A sound falling on the ear is not the meaning of listening.

If you are thinking simultaneously when I am talking, then you are not listening because the mind can do only one thing at a time, never two things. Either you can listen or you can think. As long as you are thinking, for that much time listening will stop; as long as you are listening, for that much time thinking will stop. So when I say that listening is a wonderful process, what I mean is if you just listen silently then the thinking will stop on its own – because it is one of the essential rules of the mind that it is incapable of doing two things at a time, absolutely incapable.

A man had fallen sick. For one year his leg had been paralyzed. The doctors told him that there was no paralysis in his body, it was his mind imagining it. But how could the man agree? He was paralyzed! Then his house caught fire. As it burned, all the people in the house ran out – and the paralyzed person also ran! He had not got out of his bed for one year. As he ran, he thought, ”My God! How did this happen? For one year, I was not even able to get up! How can I be walking now?

The man asked me about it, and I told him, ”Mind cannot think of two things at the same time. The paralysis was a thought of the mind, but when the house caught on fire, the mind became totally involved with the fire so the first thought – that my legs are paralyzed – disappeared and you ran out of the house! The mind can be intensely aware about only one thing.

This morning’s experiment is about listening silently to the songs of the birds and the wind, to the cacophony of all kinds of sounds around you. Listen to it very silently. Give attention to only one thing, ”I am listening. I am listening totally to whatever is happening. I am not doing anything else, just listening, totally listening.”

I am stressing listening because as you listen totally, the continuous movement of thoughts within you will become absolutely silent – because both of these things cannot happen simultaneously. So put your total effort into listening. This is a positive effort.

If you try to throw out the thoughts then the mistake which I just told you about will start happening.

It is a negative effort. Thoughts cannot be thrown out by making an effort to get rid of them, but if the energy of the mind, which usually goes into thinking, starts flowing into some other stream, then thoughts automatically become weak.

The doctors of the paralyzed man used to tell him, ”Drop the idea from your mind that you are paralyzed. You are not really paralyzed. But the more the man tried to throw out the thought that he was not paralyzed, the more he would be reminded of his paralysis. ”If I am not paralyzed then why am I repeating, ’I am not paralyzed’?” Every time he repeated, ”I am not paralyzed,” he was deepening and strengthening his feeling that he was paralyzed. The mind of this man needed a diversion. There was no need for him to try to stop his thought about paralysis. If he had had the opportunity to get involved in something else then his paralysis would have disappeared, because it was a paralysis of the mind, not of the body. It was necessary for his mind to totally move aside for the paralysis to disappear.

Fortunately his house caught on fire. It may happen that what looks like a disaster later proves to be a fortunate happening. This time it was fortunate that the man’s house caught fire because his whole attention went suddenly to the fire. His mind shifted from the paralysis which it was holding on to, and the illusion suddenly disappeared. It was an illusion, no more than that. In reality, there were no chains, there was only a web of thoughts. When the man’s mind became distracted, his thoughts dried up and became lifeless – because thoughts get their life from our attention. Thoughts have no life of their own. The more attention we give to a thought, the more alive it becomes. The more we remove our attention, the more dead it becomes. If attention is totally removed, then thoughts become lifeless, they die, they disappear immediately.

That is why I am saying that you should give all your attention to listening. Decide absolutely that even the smallest voice of a bird should not go unheard, should not be missed. You should hear everything, whatever is happening all around – you should hear it all. Then you will suddenly find that the mind is entering into a deep silence, the thoughts are fading away.

Only one thing has to be done. You have simply to relax your body. Yesterday I told you to first tense your brain but perhaps you misunderstood. Relax your brain. Do not tense it. That is not necessary

– because if you get caught up in the idea of tensing the brain, then that itself becomes a problem.

So drop that idea. It was not a part of the meditation. I had told you to do that just so that you could get some idea of what a tense brain and what a relaxed brain is. There is no need to worry about this idea. Drop it. And now relax. Let the mind be relaxed. Relax all the tense tissues and nerves of your brain. It is a matter of relaxing. The question is not of learning the art of making the brain tense.

You need to forget the art of keeping the brain tense. I told you that just so that you can understand the contrast between your brain being tense and being relaxed. For now, drop whatever you cannot understand. Just simply relax it.

So everybody please sit keeping some distance from each other. Nobody should be touching the other. Use this space in front. Come up here or go to the back, but nobody should be touching each other.

Allow the body to be totally relaxed and then close the eyes slowly. The eyes have to be closed so gently that there is no strain on the eyes. You should not close the eyes tightly otherwise you will feel a strain. The muscles of the eyes are very much related to the brain so let them be absolutely relaxed. Let your eyelids fall in the same way small children do. Let the eyelids fall slowly, relaxedly.

Then relax all the muscles of the face and head. You have seen the face of a small child, absolutely relaxed, nothing tense. Make your face like that – absolutely loose and relaxed. Let the body also be relaxed. The moment you let everything relax, the breath will become relaxed and silent on its own.

Then do only one thing: listen silently to whatever sounds are coming from all around. A crow will make a sound, a bird will make a sound, a child will speak on the road – listen to them silently. Go on listening and listening and listening, and everything will become silent inside.

Listen – listen silently for ten minutes. Let all the attention be on listening.

Be just listening, doing nothing else.

Listen... the birds are singing, the winds are shaking the trees – whatever sounds may come, listen to them silently.

Listen... and by and by, within you, a humming of silence will begin.

The mind is becoming silent. Go on listening and listening. The mind is becoming silent. The mind is becoming silent. The mind is becoming silent....

The mind has become silent, the mind has become absolutely silent. A deep silence is present inside. Listen to it, just listen to it. Listen... and by and by the mind will become silent.

The mind is becoming silent, the mind is becoming silent, the mind is becoming silent. Go on listening and listening, the mind is entering an absolute silence....

CHAPTER 5

Freedom from the illusion of knowledge

4 February 1968 om in Ajol Meditation Camp

[Note: This is the final edit of the Hindi translation of Antar Yatra, later published as part of Sadhana Path. This is for reference use only, pending publication.]

My Beloved Ones,

The state of man’s mind is like a disturbed hive of honey bees. Thoughts and thoughts and thoughts buzz round and round. Surrounded by these thoughts man lives in anxiety, tension and worry. To recognize and to know life, mind needs to be silent like a lake in which there are no ripples. To be acquainted with life, mind needs to be clear like a mirror on which there is no dust.

We have a mind like a hive of honey bees; it is neither a mirror nor a silent lake. If we think that we will be able to know something with such a mind, that we will be able to attain something, or we will be able to become something, we are making a great mistake.

It is very necessary to become free from this intense flow of thoughts. To have thoughts and thoughts and thoughts buzzing around is not a sign of health, it is a sign of a sick mind. When one’s mind is totally pure and clean, when it is healthy, then thoughts disappear. Consciousness remains but thoughts disappear. When mind is sick and unhealthy then consciousness disappears and only the crowd of thoughts remain. We live in that crowd of thoughts. From morning till evening, from evening till morning, from birth till death, we live in a crowd of thoughts.

How can we get free of this crowd of thoughts? We said a few things about this in the morning and some questions have been asked in connection with what I said. I will now answer those questions.

The first thing is that to get free of thoughts is the second step. The first step is not to create a collection of thoughts in the first place. If you go on collecting thoughts on the one hand and try to become free of thoughts on the other hand, how will you manage? If we want to be free from the leaves of a tree and go on giving water to the roots of the tree, then how will we be able to get free from the leaves of the tree? While watering the roots we don’t seem to realize that there is some relation between the roots and the leaves – some deep relation. The roots and leaves seem to be separate. But the leaves are not separate from the roots, and the water which is given to the roots goes right up to the leaves.

So we collect many thoughts and water their roots and then, when thoughts make the mind very uneasy and disturbed, we want to find a way to silence them. To stop the tree from growing leaves, we have to stop giving water to its roots. We should understand how we water the roots of our thoughts – if we come to understand this, we can stop it. Then it will not be long before the leaves wither away.

How do we water our thoughts?

For thousands of years man has had the illusion that one can attain knowledge by accumulating other people’s thoughts. This is absolutely false and wrong. No man can ever attain to knowledge by accumulating other people’s thoughts. Knowledge comes from the inside and thoughts come from the outside. Knowledge is ours, and thoughts are always of the other, always borrowed. Knowledge is the throbbing of your own being, it is an exposure of that which is hidden within yourself. Thoughts are a collection of what others have said – you can collect them from the Gita or from the Koran or from the Bible or from teachers or religious leaders.

Whatever we get from other people does not become our knowledge, it becomes a ways and a means to hide our ignorance. And when a man’s ignorance is hidden, he can never attain knowledge.

Because we have the idea that this is our knowledge, we cling to it with our whole being. We cling to our thoughts, we are not courageous enough to drop them. We support them because we think that they are our knowledge and if we lose them we will become ignorant. But remember, howsoever much one may cling to thoughts one does not become knowledgeable through them.

When a man digs a well he first takes out the soil and stones and then water seeps in from the sides of the well and fills it. The water was already there, it did not need to be brought from anywhere else. Only some stones and some layers of soil had to be removed. There were some hindrances, some obstacles; once they were removed the water appeared. It was not necessary to bring water to the well, it was already there – just some hindrances had to be removed.

Knowledge is present inside, it does not have to be got from somewhere else. Its springs are hidden inside; only the obstacles in-between, the stones and the soil, have to be removed by digging – then the springs of knowledge will start appearing.

But one can make a well, and one can make a pond. Making a pond is different. You do not need to look for springs of water to make a pond. The way of making a pond is completely opposite to that of making a well. To make a pond you do not need to dig out stones and soil, you have to bring them from somewhere else and make a wall of them. And when the wall has been built the water does not come by itself, you have to take water from other people’s wells and put it in the pond. On the surface a pond gives the illusion of a well. It appears to be a well. You can see water in a pond and you can see water in a well also, but the difference between a pond and a well is the same as the difference between the earth and sky.

The first difference is that a pond has no water of its own. No thirst in this world is quenched by something that is not one’s own. Whatever is in a pond is borrowed and soon becomes stale and rotten because – that which is borrowed is not alive, it is dead. The water standing in the pond becomes stagnant, rotten and will soon start stinking.

But a well has its own water source; the water never becomes stagnant. A well has its own flowing water.

Two different processes are happening with a pond and a well. A pond is afraid that somebody will take its water away – because if its water goes, it will become empty. And a well wants someone to take its water so that more fresh water can fill it – fresh and more alive. A well calls out, ”Take my water, I want to share it!” And a pond calls out, ”Keep away! Don’t touch my water, don’t take my water!” A pond wants somebody who has water to bring it and pour it into it, so its wealth grows.

But if somebody has a container, the well wants that person to take some of its water so that it can get rid of the water which has become old and get new water. A well wants to share, a pond wants to collect. A well has streams which are connected to the ocean. A well seems to be small, but deep inside it is connected with the infinite. And howsoever big a pond may look, it has no relation to anyone, it ends in itself and is closed. It has no streams. It has no way of connecting with the infinite.

If somebody goes to the pond and talks about the ocean, the pond will laugh and say, ”There is no such thing as an ocean. Everything is a pond. There is no ocean anywhere!” A pond has no idea of the ocean.

But if somebody praises the beauty of the well, then the well will think, ”What is mine? Everything comes from the ocean. What am I? Whatever comes to me is connected far away with something else.” A well cannot have any ’I’ of its own – ’I am’, but a pond has an ego – ’I am’. And the interesting thing is that a well is very big and a pond is very small. A well has its own wealth but a pond has no wealth of its own.

Man’s mind can become a well or a pond – these are the only two possibilities of how man’s mind can be. And a person whose mind becomes a pond, slowly, slowly becomes mad.

The minds of all of us have become a pond. We have not created a well, we have created a pond.

We collect things from all over the world – from books, from scriptures, from teachings – we collect all of them and think that we have become learned. We have made the same mistake as the pond.

The pond thought that it was a well – the illusion can be created because water is seen in both of them.

You can find knowledge in a pundit, a teacher, and in a conscious person, but a pundit is a pond and a conscious person is a well. There is a difference between the two. You cannot imagine how basic and how deep this difference is. The knowledge of a pundit is borrowed and stale and rotten.

Whatever troubles have arisen in the world are because of the pundits’ knowledge. Whose fight is the fight between Hindus and Mohammedans? It is the fight of scholars. The opposition between a Jaina and a Hindu is the opposition between scholars. It is an opposition of pundits, it is an opposition of minds which are rotten, borrowed and stale.

All the troubles that have happened all over the world are because of minds which have become ponds.

Otherwise there are just people in the world – nobody is a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Jaina. These are just the labels of the ponds. The pond puts a label on itself

– a label of the well from which it has drawn its water. Someone has drawn water from the Gita so he is a Hindu; someone has drawn water from the Koran so he is a Mohammedan. A conscious person does not take water from others, the water comes from within him, it comes from existence

– so he can be neither a Hindu nor a Mohammedan nor a Christian. A conscious person cannot belong to any sect but a pundit cannot be without a sect. Whenever there is a pundit, he will belong to a sect.

We have made our mind a stale, borrowed thing and then we cling to it. As I said – a pond shouts,

”Do not take away my water! If the water is gone then I will become empty, there will be nothing left inside me. My wealth is borrowed, so nobody should take it away!”

Remember, the wealth which becomes less by being taken away is always borrowed and false. The wealth which grows by being taken away is true. The wealth which is depleted by sharing is not a wealth at all, it is only an accumulation. Only a wealth which grows more by sharing is really wealth.

The quality of wealth is that it should grow by sharing; if it becomes less by sharing then it is not wealth. And someone who is afraid that their wealth will disappear through sharing must take great care of their wealth.

So all borrowed wealth is a trouble. Because it is never real, fear arises that it will disappear so we cling to it more tightly. We cling tightly to our thoughts. We care for them more than for our lives.

All this garbage which has accumulated in our minds did not get there just by chance – we have arranged it, we have collected it and we are taking care of it.

So if we think that knowledge arises with the accumulation of thoughts then we will never be able to become free from them. How will we be able to become free? It will be like giving water to the roots and then cutting the leaves – it cannot happen. So the first basic thing that has to be understood is that knowledge and a collection of thoughts are two different things. Thoughts acquired or borrowed from others is not knowledge. Thoughts taken from other sources do not lead a man to truth or to himself. This knowledge is false, it is pseudo-knowledge. It creates an illusion that we have attained knowledge but in reality nothing is known. We remain ignorant.

This situation is the same as somebody reading many books about swimming and learning so much about it that if he has to give a discourse on swimming or write a book about it, he can – but if somebody pushes him into a river it becomes obvious that he can’t swim! He had read and studied all about it, he knew all the theory – but in practice he could not swim.

There was a Mohammedan fakir called Nasruddin. Once he was crossing a river, sitting in a boat. He and the boatman talked on the way. Nasruddin was considered to be a very knowledgeable person.

If knowledgeable people get a chance to prove somebody ignorant they don’t miss it. Nasruddin asked the boatman, ”Do you know how to read?”

The boatman said, ”No, I know how to speak. I don’t know anything about reading and writing.”

Nasruddin said, ”One fourth of your life has been lost in futility, because if you don’t know how to read, how can you attain any knowledge in your life? Idiot! Can anybody attain knowledge without being able to read?” But the boatman started laughing silently.

Then they went a little further and Nasruddin asked, ”Do you know anything about mathematics?”

The boatman said, ”No, I don’t know anything about mathematics at all; I just count on my fingers.”

Nasruddin said, ”Another fourth of your life has been lost in futility, because one who does not know about mathematics, one who cannot calculate, cannot earn anything in his life. How can he earn?

One should know how to count, then one can earn something. What will you earn? Half of your life has been futile.”

Then a storm, a hurricane arose, and the boat turned over and sank. The boatman asked, ”Can you swim?”

Nasruddin cried, ”No, I can’t swim!”

The boatman shouted, ”Your whole life is wasted. I am going. I don’t know how to do mathematics, nor how to read a language, but I do know how to swim! So I am leaving you! Your whole life has gone to waste!”

In life there are some truths which can be known only by the self, they cannot be known through books or through scriptures. The truth of the soul or the truth of the universe can only be known by the self – there is no other way.

These things are written in the scriptures – we can read them, we can understand them, we can memorize them, we can learn them. We can tell others about them, but no knowledge has been attained.

The accumulation of facts and other people’s opinions is not a sign of knowledge, it is only a sign of ignorance. A person who is conscious and awake is free of all this ’knowledge’. There is no question of him collecting any more facts – he knows himself. With that self-knowledge the mind is not a disturbed hive of honey bees, it is a mirror, a lake.

Our mind is a buzzing hive of thoughts which we have been breeding because we think they are knowledge. We have given them space in our house; we have made them residents. We have made our mind a caravanserai: whoever comes can stay there as long as he is wearing the clothes of knowledge – then he has the right to stay. And the crowd in the caravanserai has increased and grown so much that it has become difficult to decide who is the master in this crowd. Those who are the guests make such a noise that the one who shouts the most becomes the master. And we don’t know who the real master is.

Each thought shouts loudly that it is the master, so in this crowded caravanserai it has become impossible to know the real master.

No thought wants to leave. How can someone whom we have invited to stay, get out? It is easy to invite a guest but it is not so easy to get rid of him. For thousands of years the guests have been gathering in man’s mind and if I ask you to say goodbye to them today, you cannot get rid of them immediately. But if we understand the nature of our illusions then it is possible to get rid of them. We cherish these thoughts because of our illusion that they are knowledge, so the first thing to understand is that all the thoughts learned from others are futile. If this becomes clear to us then we have cut the very root of our collection of thoughts and ideas, we have stopped giving water to the roots.

An old sage was passing through a jungle with one of his young monks. The night descended and it started becoming dark. The old sage asked the young monk, ”Son, do you think there is any danger along this path? This is a path through a dense forest and it is becoming dark. Is there anything to be afraid of?”

The young monk was very surprised because the question of being afraid should not arise in a sannyasin. Whether the night is dark or bright, whether it is a forest or a market, for a sannyasin to feel fear is very surprising. And this old man had never been afraid. What had happened today?

Why was he afraid? Something or other was wrong!

Then they went a little further and the night became darker. The old man asked again, ”Is there anything to worry about? Will we reach the other town soon? How far is it?” Then they stopped near a well to wash their hands and faces. The old man gave the bag on his shoulder to the young monk and said, ”Take care of it.”

The young man thought, ”Certainly there must be something in the bag, otherwise there would be no question of fear nor of taking care of it.”

If a sannyasin even takes care of something it is strange. Then there is no meaning in becoming a sannyasin because one who takes care of things is a family man. What does a sannyasin need to take care of?

The old man started washing his face. The young man put his hand inside the bag and saw a golden brick in the bag. Then he understood the cause of the fear. He threw the brick away in the forest and placed a stone of the same weight inside the bag. The old man came quickly after washing his face, quickly took the bag, touched it, felt the weight, placed his bag on his shoulder and started walking again.

Then after walking for a little while, he said, ”It is becoming very dark, have we forgotten the way? Is there any danger?”

The young man said, ”Don’t be afraid! I have thrown away the fear.”

The old sage was shocked. He immediately looked into the bag and saw that, instead of the gold, there was a stone inside. For a moment he stood there stunned, then he started laughing and said,

”I was an idiot. I have been carrying a stone yet I was afraid because I thought it was a golden brick.”

When he realized that he had been carrying a stone, he threw it away and said to the young monk,

”Tonight we will sleep here, because it is difficult to find the way in the dark.” That night they slept in the forest peacefully.

If you think your thoughts and ideas are bricks of gold you will take good care of them and remain very attached to them. But I want to say to you that they are not golden bricks, they are just heavy stones. What you think to be knowledge is not knowledge at all, it is not gold, it is absolutely a stone.

The knowledge obtained from others is just a stone. Only the knowledge that comes from within you is gold. The day you see that you are carrying a stone in your bag is the day the matter is over.

Then there will be no difficulty in throwing away the stone.

There is no difficulty in throwing away garbage, but there is difficulty in throwing away gold. As long as you feel that your thoughts are knowledge, you cannot throw them away – and your mind will remain troubled. You may try thousands of ways to calm it but nothing will work because deep down you want the thoughts to remain because you think they are knowledge. The greatest difficulties in life arise from the misunderstanding that we think something is which it is not. Then all kinds of troubles arise. If somebody thinks that a stone is a brick of gold then problems start. If somebody realizes that a stone is a stone, then the matter is over.

So the treasure of our thoughts is not a real treasure – this fact has to be understood. How to understand this? Will you understand by my saying it is so? If you understand by me saying it then this understanding will be a borrowed one, it will be futile. There is no question of your understanding something because I say it – you have to see, search and recognize for yourself.

If the young monk had said to the old man, ”Keep walking! There is no need to worry. There is a stone in your bag, not gold!” Still it would not have made any difference to the old man until he saw with his own eyes that this was the case. If the young man had simply told him, he would not have believed it. He would have just laughed at the young man and thought that he was just a boy, he was ignorant, he did not know anything. Or he could have believed him and accepted his words, but his acceptance would have been false – deep inside he would have still held on to the idea of keeping the gold brick safe. But seeing it for himself made the difference.

So it is necessary to look into the bag of your mind and see if what we think is knowledge, is really knowledge, or have we just collected garbage. We have collected the sutras of the Gita, the statements of the Vedas, the words of Mahavir and Buddha and we are continuously remembering them, thinking about them and finding meanings in them. We keep on reading and writing commentaries on them and discussing them with each other.

Absolute madness has been created. Knowledge has no relation to this madness. No flame, no light will arise in your lives from this. And by collecting this garbage, you will create the illusion that you have attained a great wealth of knowledge, that you are a great master, that you have so much, your vault is full – and you will live your life like this and destroy it.

A young monk was staying in a monastery. He had come to sit in the presence of an old sage but within a few days he felt that the old man did not know anything at all. Listening to the same things every day he got fed up. He thought that he should leave this monastery and search somewhere else for another master. This was not the place for him.

But on the day he was to leave, another monk visited the monastery. That night the inmates of the monastery gathered and they talked about many things. The new monk was very knowledgeable about so many things, very subtle and perceptive, very deep and very intense, and the young monk thought that this was how a master should be. Within two hours the new monk had mesmerized everyone. The young monk thought that the old master must be feeling a lot of pain and very depressed that he was so old and yet had not learnt anything, while this newcomer knew so much.

After two hours, when the talks were over, the guest monk looked at the old master and asked, ”How did you like my talks?”

The old man said, ”My talks? You were talking, but none of it was your own. I was listening very intently for you to say something but you did not say anything at all!”

The guest monk replied, ”If it was not me talking then who has been talking for the past two hours?”

The old man said, ”If you ask for my truthful and authentic opinion, then books and scriptures were talking from inside you, but you were not talking at all. You did not even say a single word. You were throwing out, vomiting out, whatever you have gathered. And because of your vomiting I became afraid that you are a very sick person. For two hours you went on vomiting whatever was collected in your stomach and you filled the whole room with dirt and stink. I did not smell even a little fragrance of knowledge because anything which is taken in from the outside and again thrown out is certain to have the stink of vomiting. You did not say anything yourself; not a single word was your own.”

After listening to the old sage, the young monk who had wanted to leave the monastery decided to stay. That day, for the first time, he came to know that there are different kinds of knowing. One kind of knowing is that which we collect from outside and another kind of knowing is that which arises from within. Whatever we collect from the outside becomes a bondage, it does not liberate us – we are liberated by that which comes from the inside.

So the first thing to look at inside is – do you really know whatever you know? It is necessary to question each thought and each word which you know – do you really know it? And if the answer is,

”I do not know it”, then all the golden bricks in your life will slowly turn into stones. It is possible to deceive everybody in the world but it is not possible to deceive yourself.

No man can deceive himself. Whatever you do not know, you do not know. If I ask you, ”Do you know truth?” and if you nod your head and say, ”Yes I do,” then you are unauthentic. Ask yourself inside, ”Do I know truth or have I just accepted the things which I have heard? And if I do not know then this truth is not worth a single penny. How can something I do not know change my life? Only the truth I know can become a revolution in my life. The truth that I do not know is not worth a penny.

This truth is false, this is not a truth at all; it is all borrowed and it is not going to change anything in my life.”

It is like asking you, ”Do you know about your soul?” and you answering, ”Yes I do, because I have read about it in books, and the priest who teaches in our temple teaches that the soul exists.” Man memorizes like a parrot whatever is taught to him, but this memorization has nothing to do with knowing. If you are born in a Hindu family then you become one kind of parrot, if you are born in a Jaina family then you become another kind of parrot, and if you are born in a Mohammedan family then you become a third kind of parrot – but in each situation you become a parrot. Whatever is taught to you, you go on repeating your whole life. And because there are similar parrots around you, nobody objects, nobody argues. These other parrots nod their heads – you are absolutely right – because they have learned the same thing that you have learned. In religious meetings, the religious leaders are teaching and everybody is nodding their heads and agreeing that they are absolutely right – because whatever the religious leaders have learnt, the people have also learnt.

And both groups are sitting there thinking that they have learnt this too and all are nodding their heads agreeing that ”Yes! What is being said is absolutely right! The same thing is written in our books also; we have also read the same thing.”

The whole of humanity has been deceived about knowledge. This deception is a conspiracy against man. All this knowledge has to be cleaned out and thrown away, only then can you acquire the kind of knowledge in the light of which existence is experienced and the flame of the soul is seen. This is not possible with pseudo-knowledge. Pseudo-knowledge is not light at all – the house is dark, the lamp is unlit, but people are convincing each other and explaining to each other that the lamp is lit.

And after hearing it said again and again we have also started saying that the lamp is lit, because somewhere inside there is fear. Others say that if you do not see the lit lamp then you will go to hell.

They can see the lit lamp, and so slowly, slowly you start seeing it too.

There was once a great king. One morning, a mysterious stranger came and said to him, ”You have now conquered the whole earth, so the clothes of human beings do not suit you. I will bring you clothes of the gods.” The king’s mind got greedy. His intellect was saying, ”How can there be clothes of gods?” – the intellect is doubtful even about the existence of gods – but he was greedy because he thought that perhaps there were gods somewhere and if their clothes were brought to him then he would be the first man on the earth in the history of mankind who has worn the clothes of god.

And in what way can this man deceive him? He was a great emperor. He had billions and trillions of rupees just lying around. Even if the man asked for ten or fifty thousand rupees, it wouldn’t matter!

He asked the man, ”Okay, what will be the cost?”

The man said, ”It will cost at least one hundred thousand rupees, because to reach the gods one has to pay a big bribe. Not only men take bribes, the gods are also very clever, they also ask for bribes! And a man will agree to a small amount of money – he is poor – but gods will not agree to a small amount. Only if it is a big pile of money will they look at it, otherwise they cannot even see it.

So it is very difficult, but at least one crore rupees will need to be spent.”

The king said, ”Alright, there is no problem. But remember, if you deceive me then you will lose your life – and from today onwards there will be armed guards around your house.

One hundred thousand rupees were given to the man and his house was put under guard. All the people of the neighborhood were surprised, amazed! They couldn’t believe this. They thought,

”Where are the gods and where is their heaven? This man does not seem to be going or coming anywhere.” He stayed inside his house and told everybody, ”After six months I will show you the clothes of god.” Everybody was doubtful but the king was unconcerned because the man was under a guard of naked swords. He could not have escaped, could not have deceived. But the man was much more intelligent than the king. After six months he came out of his house with a very beautiful box and said to the soldiers, ”Let us go to the palace. Today is the day! The clothes have arrived!”

The whole capital gathered. Kings and emperors from far away gathered to see. A great celebration was organized. The man had come into the court with the box, so there was no reason for any doubt.

He brought the box and put it down. He opened the lid of the box, put his hand inside, brought out an empty hand and said to the king, ”Take this turban!” The king looked and said, ”I cannot see any turban, your hand is empty.”

Immediately the man said, ”Let me remind you of one thing: the gods have said that only a person who is born of his own father will be able to see the turban and the clothes. Now do you see the turban?”

The king said, ”Of course I can see it!” There was no turban there, the man’s hand was empty – but all the courtiers started clapping. They too could not see the turban, but they all started saying, ”We have never seen such a beautiful turban. The turban is very beautiful, unique, wonderful! No man has ever seen such a turban.”

When all the courtiers started saying that the turban was very beautiful, the king was in a difficult situation. And then the man said, ”So now take off your turban and put this one on!”

The king removed his own turban and put on the turban which did not exist. If it had been only a turban that was involved, it would have been alright, but soon the king was really in trouble. First his coat was removed, then his shirt, and finally the time came when he had to remove his last garment.

The king was now naked but all the courtiers were shouting, ”Such beautiful clothes! Wonderful! We have never seen such clothes!” Every courtier had to say it very loudly in case other people might wonder if he was born of his own father or not.

And when the whole crowd was shouting about the clothes, each person thought that either something is wrong with his eyes or until now he has been mistaken about his father. If all the other people are shouting about the clothes they must be right. So many people cannot be wrong; there is such a majority. When everyone says the same thing it must be right. This is democracy –

everybody is in agreement. When so many people agree they cannot all be wrong. So each person thought that he alone was wrong and if he remained silent then people will think that he cannot see.

The king became afraid – should he take off the last article of clothing or not? On the one hand he was afraid that the whole court would see him naked and on the other hand he was afraid that if the world came to know that he was not born of his father then there would be many great difficulties –

perhaps it is better to be naked. It was a great problem – if he fell on one side there was a well, if he fell on the other side there was a ditch. In the end it seemed better to accept nudity. At least his father was saved, his dynasty was saved. He thought, ”The people will see me naked, what else! If everybody is seeing the clothes, then maybe they really can see them and only I am in the wrong

– and this will create unnecessary complications.” So he dropped the last garment and stood there naked.

Then the man said, ”O King! The clothes of gods have descended for the first time on earth. You should have a procession and travel around the city on a chariot.” The king became very afraid but now there was no way out.

When man commits a mistake at the first stage, then it becomes very difficult to stop at any later stage – and it becomes very difficult to return. If one is not honest at the first stage then one keeps on getting more and more hypocritical at the next stages; it becomes difficult for him to know where to return from because each stage has become connected with many other stages.

So the king was in difficulty. He could not refuse. He was taken in a procession on a chariot.... Maybe you were also there, because there were many people in that city. Everyone saw the procession so you might also have been there and you might have praised the clothes; nobody would want to miss the chance. All the people were praising the clothes loudly saying they were very beautiful.

Only a child who was in the crowd sitting on his father’s shoulders, said, ”Father, the king seems to be naked!”

His father said, ”Idiot, be silent! You are small, you have no experience. When you become experienced, you will also start seeing the clothes. I can see the clothes.”

Children sometimes say the truth, but old people don’t give credit to them, because old people have more experience. And experience is a very dangerous thing! Because of his experience the father said, ”Be silent! When you become experienced, you will see the clothes. We all can see them – do you think we are mad?”

Sometimes children say, ”We cannot see god in a statue.”

Then old people say, ”Be silent! We can see god. Rama is standing there. When you become experienced, you will also see him.”

Man is caught in a universal deception. And when everybody is caught in the same deception, it becomes difficult to see. You have to find out if the clothes of knowledge – which you have thought of as clothes – are really clothes, or are you standing naked in invisible clothes? You have to test each of your thoughts according to this criterion – ”Do I know it?” If you do not know, then be ready to go to hell rather than go on holding on to this pseudo-knowledge.

The first condition of authenticity is that whatever one does not know, one should say that he does not know – otherwise it will be the beginning of hypocrisy. Usually we cannot see the big deceptions, we can only see small deceptions. If a man cheats you for a few rupees, you notice it, but if a man stands with folded hands in front of a stone statue and says, ”O God! O Lord!” knowing very well that the statue is of stone and there is no god, no lord there, then although this man might seem to be authentic and religious, it is difficult to find a greater deceiver or hypocrite on this earth. He is being absolutely deceptive, he is saying something absolutely false – he is not feeling anything inside him.

But he cannot gather enough courage to understand what he is saying, what he is doing.

A religious person is one who recognizes what he knows and does not know; this recognition is the first step towards becoming a religious person. A religious person is not one who says that he knows god and the soul, that he has seen heaven and hell. A religious person is one who says that he doesn’t know anything, that he is absolutely ignorant – ”I have no knowledge. I don’t even know myself so how can I say that I know existence! I don’t even know the stone that is lying in front of my house. How can I say that I know the divine? Life is very mysterious, very unknown. I don’t know anything. I am absolutely ignorant.”

If you have the courage to be ignorant, and have the courage to accept that you are ignorant, then you can start on the path towards becoming free from the entanglement of your thoughts – otherwise you cannot even begin. So one thing needs to be understood: we are very ignorant, we don’t know anything. And whatever we seem to know is absolutely false, borrowed and stale. It is like a pond, it is not like a well. If one wants to create a well in one’s life then it is very necessary to be free from the illusion of the pond.

And now a question: Your teachings are very similar to those of J. Krishnamurti. What is your opinion of him?

I have no opinion. The first thing is that I don’t know Krishnamurti.

The second point is that if, when I am saying something, you compare it with someone else – who I am like, who I am not like – then you will not be able to listen to me. You will waste time in that comparison. It is absolutely impossible that there would be any similarity between the words of two persons, because two persons are not similar. Two leaves are not similar; two stones are not similar.

There can be a similarity in some words, there may be a superficial similarity in something, but each and every person in the world is so different and so separate that nothing can be exactly similar.

If you start comparing what I am saying with the Gita, or with Krishnamurti, or with Ramakrishna, or with Mahavira, then you will not be able to listen to me because these Ramakrishnas, these Krishnamurtis, these Mahaviras, will create so much trouble in-between that my words will not be able to reach you. There will not be any direct relation between you and me.

So I don’t know – but it is my suggestion that there is no need to compare and to find similarities. It is futile, it has no meaning; and nobody is helped by it.

But some common habits have been formed in our lives one of which is the habit of comparison.

We cannot evaluate something without comparing it. If we want to evaluate something we cannot conceive how to do it without comparing. And whenever we compare, the mistake begins.

If we compare a lily flower with a rose flower, then the mistake begins. A lily is a lily, and a rose is a rose, and a grass flower is a grass flower. The rose is neither higher than the grass flower nor lower.

The grass flower lives in its uniqueness; a rose flower lives in its uniqueness. Neither one is lower, or higher; neither one is equal or unequal; everyone is like himself and not like anybody else.

If this individuality of things, their personality, their uniqueness, starts appearing to us then we will stop comparing.

But we have the habit of comparing – we even compare small children with each other. We say,

”Look, the other child has gone farther than you. You are left behind.” We are being unjust to the child because the other child is the other child and this child is this child! There is no possibility of comparing the two. Their beings are totally different. They are completely different in their uniqueness, in their authenticity; they have no relation to each other.

We have habits of comparing – our educational systems teach comparison, our systems of thought involve comparison. Without comparing we cannot evaluate. And the result is that we do not understand anybody or any thought directly. Many things stand in-between.

So I will say only this much: that I don’t know how much similarity or dissimilarity there is between me and J. Krishnamurti, I have not compared. And I request you also not to compare – neither me with somebody else nor anybody with anybody else.

This comparison goes on – how much similarity is there between Mahavira and Buddha, how much similarity is there between Christ and Mohammed, and how much similarity is there between Krishna and Rama. This is all stupid! There is no question of similarity or dissimilarity because everyone is simply himself, he has nothing to do with the other, he has no relation with the other. It is absurd even to say dissimilarity because if there is no similarity then there is no question of dissimilarity.

Everyone is unique, himself. In this world, no two people are alike, no two events are repeated, no two experiences are repeated. There is nothing like repetition in life. Life goes on creating uniqueness continuously. So there is no need to compare or to evaluate. If you are listening to Krishnamurti then you need to understand him directly. If you are listening to me then you need to listen to me directly. If you are listening to your neighbor then you need to listen to him directly. if you are listening to your wife then you need to listen to her directly. If a third person comes in-between, problems and quarrels begin. There is no need of a third person to come in-between, our contact and communication should be direct and immediate.

If I am standing in front of a rose flower and if I remember the flowers that I saw yesterday, and if I start thinking of how much similarity there is between this flower and those flowers, then the observation of this flower will stop. One thing is certain – the shadow of those flowers which come in-between will not let you see this flower. And if I want to see this flower which is in front of me, then I need to forget all those flowers which I have ever seen. To bring them in between will be unjust to this flower. And there is no need to carry the memory of this flower otherwise tomorrow, looking at some other flower, this one may come in-between. So don’t bring Krishnamurti here. And don’t think that because of listening to me, you can bring me in-between while listening to someone else, because it will be unjust to that person.

See life directly. There is no need to bring anybody in-between. Nobody is equal or unequal.

Everybody is simply like himself, and I would like everybody to become just like himself.

Everybody should be like himself; this is what I see as the fundamental rule of life. But until now we have not been able to accept it. Until now mankind has not been ready to accept each individual as he is. We try to make him become like somebody else. He should become like Mahavira, like Buddha, like Gandhi. This is a direct insult to the individuality of each person. When we say to a person, ”Become like Gandhi,” we have insulted him greatly because he was born to become a Gandhi. One Gandhi has already been born, what is the use of another one!

To tell this man to become like Gandhi is to say that he has no right to be himself. He only has the right to be a copy of someone else, to imitate someone else. He can only be a carbon copy, he cannot become an original copy. This is an insult to this man.

So I do not say that everybody should become like everybody else. I only say that everybody should become like himself. Then this world can become a wonderful and beautiful world. Until now we have only tried to organize things so that everyone should become like everybody else. That is why we compare, we think, we search. There is no necessity to do this. It is absolutely unnecessary to think in such a way.

If there are any more questions in this context, we will talk about them tonight. Let me repeat again

– I have told you only one thing, one very fundamental thing: look at your knowledge and decide if it is your own or someone else’s. If you see that it belongs to somebody else then it is futile. But the day you see that you do not have any knowledge of your own, from that very moment the light of your own knowledge begins to arise from within. From that very moment the revolution begins.

If there are any more questions we will talk about them tonight. The afternoon meeting is over.

CHAPTER 6

Freedom from belief

4 February 1968 pm in Ajol Meditation Camp

[Note: This is the final edit of the Hindi translation of Antar Yatra, later published as part of Sadhana Path. This is for reference use only, pending publication.]

My Beloved Ones,

Man is tied up in chains of thoughts like a prisoner. In this prison of thoughts what kinds of stones have been used as a foundation? In the afternoon we talked about one of those stones. Tonight we will talk about the second but equally important one. If these two foundation stones are removed, the mistake of thinking that learned knowledge is real knowledge should be realized, and man can then very easily rise above his prison of thoughts.

What is the second stone? What is the other foundation stone on which the prison of thoughts in man’s mind has been built, on which the web of thoughts has been woven? Perhaps you do not know. Perhaps you have no idea how we got so full of so many contradictory thoughts.

Our situation is like a bullock cart which is being pulled by bulls from all four sides. The bulls are being forced to move so that different destinations can be reached. The bullock cart is in danger.

Its structure is becoming loose. The bulls are pulling it from all sides in different directions – can it reach anywhere? Can it reach any destination? There can be only one destination for it, only one destiny – it will be broken apart, destroyed. With the bulls pulling it apart, running away in opposite directions with all its pieces, nothing else but destruction can happen. The bullock cart cannot reach anywhere.

The inner conflict between the thoughts in our mind is killing us. All our thoughts are irrelevant and contradictory – in opposition to each other. All the bulls of our thoughts are pulling our mind in different directions and we are disturbed and suffering in the middle. We have no idea how this contradiction, this conflict, has come to be there within us.

I was a guest in the house of a very great doctor. In the morning, the doctor and I were about to go out of the house when suddenly his child sneezed. The doctor said, ”This means bad luck! Let us wait for a while, for a few minutes, and then we will go.”

I said, ”You seem to be a strange doctor! At least a doctor should know what causes a sneeze.

There is no relation between sneezing and somebody staying or going somewhere. This is just a superstition. It is very surprising that even a doctor isn’t clear about this.”

I told the doctor that even if I became sick and was close to death, I would not be treated by him.

In my opinion, his doctor’s certificate should be taken away! It is wrong. It is very surprising that because of a childhood superstition, he would stop going somewhere when somebody sneezed.

The ideas acquired in childhood are still working even though the man has become a doctor, an F.R.C.S. from London. Two thoughts are present in him at the same time: when somebody sneezes, his feet stop, and yet at the same time he knows very well that it is absolutely stupid, that there is no relation between the two. Both these thoughts exist and function in his mind together.

Thousands of these types of thoughts exist within us and they are all pulling us in different directions at the same time. We have become very disturbed – it is obvious. This is why man seems to be absolutely mad. What else can he be? Madness is an obvious consequence. An infinite number of contradictory thoughts from thousands and thousands of years have gathered in the mind of one man. Thousands of generations, thousands of centuries, are living in one person at the same time. A five-thousand-year-old thought and an ultramodern thought from the present time exist simultaneously within him – and there can be no comparison nor any harmony between these two thoughts.

Thoughts coming from thousands of different directions have collected within one man. The ideas of thousands of tirthankaras and digambaras, avataras and gurus are residing within him, and all of them have done a unique thing. Although they have not agreed on anything else, all the religions, all the teachers, all the preachers of the world have always agreed on one strategy: that is to tell people to believe in what they are saying. All of them say, ”Believe in what we are saying.” They disagree on everything else. A Hindu says something, a Mohammedan says something, a Jaina says something, a Christian says something else – but on this one point they all agree, ”Believe in what we say.” All of them say contradictory things and all their contradictory sayings land on man’s being, and all of them shout at him to believe in what they are saying. Man is poor and weak, he believes whatever all of these people say. They all laugh at each other’s words, but nobody laughs at their own stupidities.

Christians say that Jesus was born out of a virgin girl and one who will not accept this will go to hell.

The poor listener feels afraid. If he does not accept this point, he will go to hell! So he accepts that what these people say is right. What does it matter if a virgin girl gave birth to Jesus or not? There is no need to go to hell over such a point.

The rest of the people of the world laugh at this Christian idea. Mohammedans, Jainas, Hindus laugh at this stupidity. How can a child be born out of a virgin girl? It is absolutely absurd.

But Mohammedans say that while in his body, Mohammed went to heaven sitting on his female horse. Christians, Hindus, Jainas laugh at this – what kind of stupidity is this! The first thing is that a female horse cannot go to heaven. If it had been a male horse, it might have been able to go. A man can go to heaven but there is no provision for women to go – so a female horse cannot go to heaven. If it had been a male horse the idea might have been tolerated, it might have been alright.

And secondly, how can somebody go to heaven while in his body? The body has to be left here, the body is a thing of the earth. Mohammed cannot go to heaven in his body. Everybody laughs at the idea. Christians, Jainas and Hindus all laugh, but Mohammedans say, ”Believe it! If you don’t believe it then you will go to hell. You will be forced to rot in hell, you will suffer in hell. You will have to accept this. If you do not accept it, if you do not agree with Mohammed’s words, then know very well that you will get into great difficulty – because there is only one god in the world and Mohammed is his prophet.”

Man is under a threat to believe, so he accepts that what he is told may be right. Jainas laugh at Mohammedans and Christians, but they say that Mahavira was conceived in a brahmin woman’s womb. How can a Jaina tirthankara be born in a brahmin family? The real and the highest caste is kshatriya, so tirthankaras are always born in kshatriya families. They cannot be born in brahmin houses. Brahmins are beggars so how can tirthankaras be born in their house? Mahavira was conceived in a brahmin woman’s womb but when the gods saw that this was going to be a great mistake – ”How can a tirthankara be born in a brahmin family?” – they immediately removed the embryo and placed it in the womb of a kshatriya woman, and they took out the female embryo from the kshatriya woman’s womb and put it in the brahmin woman’s womb.

People all over the world laugh at all these things – they are very funny. First of all, what have gods to do with changing the embryo in somebody’s womb – how can this happen? The whole world laughs, but Jainas become angry. They say, ”You can laugh at this but you don’t know what our tirthankara has said and whatever has been said by our tirthankara is absolutely true. Whoever does not believe this will suffer in hell. If you do not believe we are not concerned, you can suffer!”

Man is asked to believe many things by many people. There was a time when man did not know everyone’s beliefs. People were living in their own circles. They knew only things within their own circles so there was not so much confusion. Now the world has become very small and everybody knows everyone else’s beliefs. So man’s confusion has reached a point of absolute madness. Now it is beyond his understanding what all this noise is about, what people are trying to convince us about.

But even in the past the situation was not much better. A Hindu not knowing about Mohammedan beliefs or a Jaina not knowing about Christian beliefs, did not make the situation any clearer.

Even Jainas do not believe in essentially the same things. The Digambaras say one thing, the Svetambaras say something else – you would be very surprised to know about what things they disagree on. It is amazing that people can have such diverse opinions about such things. One of the twenty-four Jaina tirthankaras was Mallinath. The Digambaras say that he was a man and the Svetambaras say that he was a woman. The Svetambaras say that he was Mallibai, the Digambaras say that he was Mallinath – and both of them say that if you don’t believe us you will go to hell.

Digambaras say that a woman can never be a tirthankara – the fact itself is false – so he must have been a man. He was Mallinath, not Mallibai. It is really too much to have a conflict over whether a person is a man or a woman. But man is threatened that if he does not believe he will go to hell and will have to suffer. So he had better believe it!

All over the world the teachings of the people who want you to believe them have created a chaos and a confusion in man’s mind. He listens to everybody and the impressions of all their teachings remain within him, and his being gets pulled in many different directions.

And then after all these religions, came communism. Communism said that religion is just opium.

There is no meaning in it, the idea of a god is absolutely false, it is all meaningless. Real religion is what Marx says: communism is the real religion. One should believe in it and nothing else. The Bible, the Gita, the Koran are all wrong – Das Kapital is the real religious scripture, one should believe only it. So a new belief started....

Then after communism came science. Science said that all these things are futile. Whatever is written in the religious scriptures is all wrong; only what science says is right. And even during the life of one scientist, another scientist gets a different idea and claims that he is right, that the first man is wrong. Then along comes a third scientist who claims that he is right and the previous two are wrong. And then perhaps a fourth scientist....

In the mind and psyche of man, these proclaimers of truth have created a confused entanglement of thoughts which is very diverse and pulls man in all directions. Fear and bribery have been used to create this entanglement; secret methods of fear and bribery have been used to impose a set of beliefs on man – if you believe you go to heaven, if you don’t believe you go to hell.

These religious leaders have been doing the same thing that today’s advertisers are doing, but the advertisers are not as bold or as courageous. The people selling Lux toilet soap advertise that a certain beauty queen says, ”I became beautiful because I used Lux toilet soap.” Therefore, whoever uses it will become beautiful and whoever doesn’t use it will not become beautiful. One then becomes afraid that he or she may become ugly so he or she goes out and buys Lux toilet soap.

It is as if people were not beautiful when Lux toilet soap was not there, as if Cleopatra, Mumtaj and Noorjehan were not beautiful because Lux toilet soap was not there. But the advertisers are not very courageous yet; perhaps in the future they will say, ”A certain tirthankara says, a certain prophet says, a certain teacher says, that one who does not use Lux toilet soap will go to hell, he cannot go to heaven. Only those people who use Lux toilet soap can go to heaven.”

Man can be threatened that only those people who smoke Panama cigarettes will go to heaven, because to smoke and to get others to smoke Panama Cigarettes is a very good thing. And one who does not smoke Panama cigarettes will have to go to hell. If he smokes Indian bidis, he will have to suffer much in hell! If somebody does not believe all this then he will have to face the consequences. One who believes will have good consequences and one who does not believe will have bad consequences.

Modern advertisers have not yet become as courageous as those old advertisers were. They threatened man by telling him absolutely false things and he went on listening to those things and accepting them without any resistance. In fact any untruth, if repeated many times for thousands of years, starts to look like truth. If somebody goes on repeating even the most untrue thing – goes on repeating and repeating it – slowly, slowly you start thinking that perhaps it may be true, otherwise how could it have been repeated so many times for so long?

A poor farmer from a village bought a baby goat in the city. As he started walking towards his village with the baby goat, a few of the city hooligans thought that if they could somehow manage to seize the baby goat, they would be able to enjoy a good meal and also a celebration. They could invite some friends and make a feast. But how to get it?

The illiterate villager seemed to be a very strong and healthy man and the hooligans of the city were a little weak. To take the goat directly from him could lead to a fight and there could be trouble, so they had to be very careful and trick him somehow. They decided on a trick. When the villager was about to leave the city, one of those four or five people met him on the road and said, ”Hello! Good morning!”

He replied, ”Good morning!”

Then the hooligan looked up and said, ”Why are you carrying this dog on your shoulders?” – in fact he was carrying the baby goat on his shoulders – ”From where did you buy this dog? It is a very good dog!”

The farmer laughed. He said, ”Have you gone mad? It is not a dog! I have bought a goat, it is a baby goat!”

The man said, ”Don’t enter your village carrying a dog, otherwise people will think you are mad. Do you think this is a goat?”

And the man went on his way. The farmer laughed and thought that this was very strange, but he touched the goat’s legs to see whether it is was a goat or a dog. That was the hooligan’s motive.

The farmer found that it really was a goat and feeling reassured he went on walking.

In the next lane a second hooligan met him. He said, ”Hello, you have bought a very good dog. I also want to buy a dog. From where did you buy it?” Now the villager could not say with the same confidence that this was not a dog because now a second man was saying the same thing and two people cannot be mistaken.

Still he laughed and said, ”This is not a dog, sir, it is a goat.”

The man said, ”Who told you that it is a goat? It seems that somebody has cheated you – is this a goat?” And he went away. The villager took the goat down from his shoulders to see what the matter was but it was definitely a goat. Both of those people were mistaken! But a fear arose within him that perhaps he was suffering from a delusion.

Now he felt rather afraid as he continued walking down the road – and then he met the third person who said, ”Hello! From where have you bought this dog?” This time he did not have the courage to say that this was a goat.

He answered, ”I bought it in the city.” It was very difficult for him to say that this was a goat and he started to think that maybe he shouldn’t take it to the village. He has wasted the money and he will be condemned in the village. People will think that he has gone mad. While he was thinking this, the fourth man met him. He said, ”This is strange! I have never seen anybody carrying a dog on his shoulders. Do you think that this a goat?”

The villager looked around and saw that he was alone, nobody was around – so he dropped the goat and ran quickly to his village. His five rupees had been wasted but at least he wouldn’t be called mad.

And the four hooligans took the goat away.

Because four people repeated something again and again, it became difficult for the farmer to believe that what they were saying could be wrong. And when the people who are telling you something are wearing orange clothes, it becomes more difficult. And when those people are models of truth and sincerity, it becomes even more difficult. And when they are sincere renouncers of the world, it becomes much more difficult – because there is no reason to disbelieve what they are saying. It is not necessarily that they are deceiving you – ninety-nine times out of a hundred they are people who have a wrong conception themselves and they themselves have been deceived. It is not necessarily that they are deceivers, but they are in the same rut as you are.

One thing is certain: as long as man is told to believe, he will continue to be exploited. As long as man is asked to believe, he cannot be free of exploitation. Then the belief may be of a Hindu or a Jaina or a Mohammedan, or of anybody else – it may be of a communist or of a non-communist, whomsoever – but as long as man is told to believe what somebody is saying, and is told that if you don’t believe you will suffer and if you do believe you will be happy... as long as this trick is used, it will be very difficult for man to get enough courage to get rid of the entanglement of thoughts within him.

What do I want to tell you? I want to tell you that if we want to get rid of the entanglement of thoughts which has been formed within us, to which thousands of centuries have contributed, in which impressions of hundreds of years are collected, then one thing must be fully understood: there is nothing more suicidal than belief. One thing we have to definitely understand is that to believe, to believe blindly, to accept silently with closed eyes, has been the basic cause of the crippling our lives until now.

But everybody asks you to believe them – they tell you to believe them, not to believe others. They say, ”Do not believe other people because they are wrong. I am right, believe me.”

I want to tell you that it is destructive to believe anybody and it will be harmful to your life. No belief, no belief at all! Whoever makes a belief system a basis for his life is entering into a world of blindness

– and no light to see with can ever enter into his life. He can never attain light in his life. One who believes in others will never be able to know himself.

So am I asking you to disbelieve? No! There is no need to disbelieve either. But we think that if we don’t believe something then we inevitably disbelieve it. This is an absolutely wrong idea. There is a state of mind which neither believes nor disbelieves.... Disbelief is a form of belief. When we say that we don’t believe in god, what are we saying? We are saying that we believe in the non-existence of god. When we say, ”I don’t believe in the soul,” then we are saying that we believe in the non-existence of the soul. Belief and disbelief are similar things, there is no difference between them. Belief is positive and disbelief is negative. Belief is a positive trust and disbelief is a negative trust, but both are trusts.

A person can only become free from his inner entanglement of thoughts if he becomes free of trust and belief, if he becomes free of continually looking towards others for their point of view, if he drops the very idea that anybody else can give him truth. As long as a person has the idea that someone else can give him truth, he will be in bondage in some way or other. If he gets free from one he will be tied to another, if he gets free from the second he will be tied to the third – he cannot get free from the bondage.

But to get free of one and to be tied to the other always gives relief for a while.

When a man dies, four people carry his dead body to the funeral ground on a bier on their shoulders.

When one shoulder starts aching then they change to another shoulder. For a while they get relief for the tired shoulder. Then the second shoulder gets tired and they change to the other shoulder again. One who changes his beliefs is only changing from one shoulder to another, the weight is always present, it makes no difference. One gets relief only for a while.

If a Hindu becomes a Mohammedan, if a Mohammedan becomes a Jaina, if a Jaina becomes a Christian, if someone drops all religions and becomes a communist or something else, if he is just dropping one belief system and catching hold of another, there is no change in the burden on his mind. He gets relief for a while but it is only a change in the weight on the shoulders – there is no meaning in that kind of relief.

I have heard that there were two men in a village – one a theist, an extreme theist, and one an atheist, an extreme atheist. The whole village was very troubled because of the two of them. Villages always get into difficulty because of such people. Day and night the theist used to explain about the existence of God, and day and night the atheist used to refute it. The people of the village were in great difficulty about who to follow and who not to follow. At last they decided that since they were so troubled both of the men should be told to debate among themselves in front of the whole village.

And the village people said, ”We will follow the one who wins. Don’t make difficulties for us. You must debate with each other and whosoever wins we will follow him!”

One night, a full-moon night, the debate was arranged in the village. The whole village gathered.

The theist explained the theories of theism, presented all his arguments, and refuted atheism. Then the atheist refuted theism and gave all his arguments in favor of atheism. The debate went on the whole night, and in the morning the result was that the theist became an atheist and the atheist became a theist! Both of them liked each other’s arguments.

But the problem of the villagers remained. It was not solved. The two men had convinced each other and agreed with each other so there was still an atheist and a theist in the village, the sum total remained the same – and the problem of the village remained the same as well.

If we change one belief for another belief it makes no difference to our life. The problem of our being remains the same. There is no difference. The problem of our being has nothing to do with being a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Jaina or a Christian or a communist or a fascist, the problem of our being is that we believe. As long as one believes, one puts oneself in bondage, one puts oneself in prison and one is tied in some way or other, somewhere or other.

How can an imprisoned person, an imprisoned mind, become free from thoughts? How can he become free from the thoughts which he is holding on to with his whole being and which he believes in? How can he get rid of them? It is very difficult. We can get rid of them if we remove the foundation stone.

Belief is the foundation stone at the bottom of the pile of thoughts. On the basis of belief, man has been initiated into thoughts and when thoughts grip the mind tightly then a fear also takes hold –

what will happen if I drop them? So man says that if he is given something better to hold on to then he can drop his present thoughts – but the thought of dropping the idea of ’holding on’ does not enter his mind.

Freedom, liberation of the mind, happens not from changing one’s beliefs but from becoming free from belief itself.

Buddha was visiting a small village. Some people brought a blind man to him and said, ”This man is blind and we are his closest friends. Although we try in every way to convince him that there is light, he is not ready to accept such a fact. His arguments are such that we are at a loss. Even though we know that there is light, we have to admit defeat. The man tells us that he wants to touch light. Now how do we make it possible for him to touch light? Then the man says, ’Ok, if it cannot be touched then I want to hear it. I have ears. Make the sound of light so that I can hear it. If this is also not possible then I want to taste it, or if the light has a fragrance I want to smell it.’”

There is no way to convince the man. Light can only be seen if one has eyes – and he has no eyes.

He complained to the village people that they were unnecessarily talking about light just to prove that he was blind. He felt that they had invented the story of light just to prove him blind.

So the people asked Buddha if, as he was in the village for a while, perhaps he could make their blind man understand.

Buddha said, ”I am not mad enough to try to convince him! Mankind’s problems have been created by people who have tried to explain things to those who cannot see. Preachers are a plague to humanity. They tell people things which they cannot understand.”

So he said, ”I won’t make this mistake. I will not explain to this blind man that there is light. You have brought him to the wrong person. There was no need to bring him to me, take him instead to a physician who can treat his eyes. He does not need preaching, he needs treatment. This is not a question of explanations, or of him believing in things you tell him, it is a question of treatment for his eyes. If his eyes get cured then there will be no need for you to explain; he himself will be able to see, he himself will be able to know.”

Buddha was saying that he didn’t consider religion to be just a philosophical teaching – it should be a practical cure. So he recommended that the blind man be taken to a physician.

The villagers liked what Buddha said so they took the blind man to a physician for treatment and fortunately he was cured after a few months. By that time Buddha had gone to another village so the blind man followed him. He bowed to Buddha, touched his feet and said, ”I was wrong. There is such a thing as light but I couldn’t see it.”

Buddha answered, ”You were certainly wrong, but your eyes got cured because you refused to believe what others told you unless you experienced it for yourself. If you had accepted what your friends had told you then the matter would have ended there and no question of treatment for your eyes would have arisen.”

People who believe are unable to reach any understanding. People who accept silently are unable have any experience of their own. The journey of those who are blind and hold on to the fact that if the others say that there is light then certainly there must be light, ends right there. The journey only continues when the restlessness stays and stays and stays and never disappears. Restlessness comes only when you feel there is something which people say is there, but you don’t see it so you cannot accept it. You can accept it only when you see it. This kind of restlessness: ”I will accept only when I see with my own eyes,” needs to be there in the mind.

The people who want you to have beliefs are the ones that say that you don’t need your own eyes.

Mahavira had eyes, that is enough. Buddha had eyes, that is enough. Why should everybody need eyes? Krishna had eyes and wrote the Gita, then why do you need eyes? Read the Gita and enjoy it. Krishna could see, and he described what he could see, so what is the need for everyone to see? You should simply believe. Those who could see have already spoken – your job is simply to believe. The knowledge has been attained – what is the need for you to know by yourself?

This preaching kept man blind. Most of the people on the earth remained blind and today most of them are still blind. And looking at the situation now, most people will probably stay blind in the future as well because the basic alchemy of correcting the blindness, the thirst to overcome the blindness, has been killed. It has been destroyed by giving strong belief systems.

In fact it should be said that however good Krishna’s eyes were and however far they could see, they are not your eyes. And however beautiful Mahavira’s eyes were – even like a lotus – they are not your eyes. Your eyes may not be very significant – they may be only like a field flower, not a lotus –

but they are your own eyes. Only with your own eyes can you see.

So one should search for one’s own understanding because one cannot attain anything by worshipping the insights of another. In fact, the search for one’s own understanding can only begin when one drops the idea of the other. As long as there is any outer substitute, as long as something is being supplied from the outside, the search cannot begin.

When there is no support or fulfillment from something else, when nothing can be attained from another, then a challenge arises within man to search for his own way, for his own understanding.

Man is very lazy. If he can attain knowledge without making any effort, why should he make the effort, why should he do any work? If enlightenment can be attained just by believing, without seeking, then why should he try to make the journey to enlightenment on his own? And when someone says, ”Believe in me, I will take you to enlightenment,” why should he make a huge effort by himself? When somebody says, ”Sit in my boat. I will take you to the other shore and then the matter is over,” he would prefer to sit silently in the boat and go to sleep.

But nobody can reach anywhere in somebody else’s boat. And nobody can see with another’s eye –

nobody ever has and nobody ever will. One has to walk on one’s own feet, one has to see with one’s own eyes, one has to live by one’s own heart beat. One has to live by oneself and one has to die by oneself. Nobody can live in another’s place; nobody can die in another’s place. Nobody can take another’s place; neither can one take anybody else’s place. If there is anything totally impossible in this world, it is the fact that no one can take anyone else’s place.

Two soldiers were lying in a battlefield during the second world war. One soldier was about to die.

He was so badly wounded that there was obviously no hope for him. The other soldier was wounded also but he was alive and there was no question of his dying. Both were friends.

The dying soldier hugged his friend and said, ”Now I must say goodbye to you because there is no possibility of my surviving. I suggest one thing: take my record book and give your record book to me. Your record book is not good, there are many humiliating comments in your record book, but my record is good. So let’s exchange our books. This way the officers will think that you have died, and I am alive. Because my record is good, you will be able to get a good promotion, you will become more respectable. So hurry! Exchange the book and the number.”

The dying friend’s wish was absolutely right, because soldiers have only numbers, they have no names. And a soldier has only a record book, no soul. So it was right that they should exchange the books – a bad man would have died and a good man would remain alive.

But the man who wasn’t going to die answered, ”Forgive me. I can take your book and your number but I will still be myself. I am a bad man and I will remain a bad man. I drink alcohol; I will still drink it. I go to prostitutes; I will still go to them. How long can your good record book remain good, how long can a book deceive anyone? On the contrary, two persons will become bad. You will die as a bad man, but a bad man will still be alive. Now at least people will say that a good man has died.

They will offer you flowers – if you are me they will not offer flowers. You cannot be in my place and I cannot be in your place. Your idea about changing places comes from your love for me, and it is good, but this is beyond the laws of life. Nobody can change places with another. Nobody can live or die in place of another. One cannot know on behalf of another; neither can one have the ability to see on behalf of another.”

The people who want you to have beliefs have told you to look through somebody else’s eyes – look through the eyes of the tirthankaras, look through the eyes of the avataras. We have continued to believe, which is why we have got entangled in a blind net. Thousands of teachers have created so much noise and the followers of the thousands of teachers have made so much noise, that they have created a great fear of hell and a great greed for heaven – so slowly, slowly we have accepted what they say. And the words of all of them have created such a contradiction within us that the journey of our life will be disrupted rather than going anywhere.

So the first thing for an intelligent person to do is to say goodbye to all his contradictory thoughts and decide, ”I will not believe. I want to know. The day that I understand for myself, that day only can I use the word ’belief’. Before that there can be nothing like belief for me. It is deception, it is self-deception. I cannot deceive myself and say that I know without knowing, that I recognize without recognizing. It is not possible for me to accept blindly.”

This does not mean that you are rejecting something; it simply means that you are standing aloof from both acceptance and rejection. You are saying, ”I do not agree nor disagree. I neither say that Mahavira is wrong nor do I say that he is right. I simply say that I do not know myself what Mahavira is saying so I have no right to agree or disagree. The day I come to know for myself that he is right, I will agree. If I come to know that what he says is wrong, then I will disagree. But I do not know yet, so how can I say yes or no?”

If our mind could distance itself from both acceptance and rejection, then the entanglement could break here and now. If the basic substance of this net gets broken, then it will be as fragile as a castle of cards which will fall down with a little push. Right now it is like a castle of stone with a solid foundation which cannot easily be seen. So our minds are conditioned to understand that those who believe and accept are religious and those who reject and do not believe are irreligious.

But I say unto you: one who believes is not religious, neither is one who does not believe. A religious person is one who is true. ’True’ means that he neither believes nor disbelieves what he does not know. He simply announces with utter sincerity that he does not know, he is ignorant, so there is no question at all of his acceptance or rejection.

Can you gather the courage and strength to take your being to this middle point? If you can, then this castle of thoughts can fall down immediately – there is no difficulty about it at all.

I told you three points this morning, one point this afternoon and one now. Think about these five points carefully. Don’t start using them just because I have talked about them, otherwise I will also become a preacher for you. Don’t believe something just because I have said it – because maybe what I have said is all wrong, maybe it is false and futile, so you may get into difficulty. Don’t believe what I have said.

Think, search and see – and if through your own experience you feel that there is some truth in what I say, if you feel because of your own search, because of looking into the window of your own mind, that there is some truth in it, then that truth will become a truth of your own, it does not remain only mine. Then it is not my understanding, it becomes an understanding of your own; then whatever you do becomes a way for your life to move towards wisdom and awakening. But whatever you do through believing takes you into more darkness and unconsciousness. It is helpful to think carefully about this point also.

Before we sit for the night meditation I will answer some questions about meditation which have been asked. First I will talk about them and then we will sit for the meditation.

A friend has asked that in meditation can chanting – chanting some sacred mantra – be helpful?

It cannot be helpful at all; on the contrary, it can become an obstacle – because when you chant a mantra, you repeat the same thought again and again. A mantra is a thought. When you chant a name, you repeat the same word again and again. A word is a part of a thought, a piece of a thought. So if you want to become free from thoughts by repeating a thought, you are making a mistake. As long as you go on repeating one thought, it will seem that there are no other thoughts in your mind because, as I told you, the nature of the mind is to be stuck on a single thought. But the thought which you are repeating is as much a thought as other thoughts are. There is nothing useful in repeating it. On the contrary, it is harmful because by repeating the same word again and again, an unconsciousness, a sleep is created in the mind.

Take any one word and repeat it again and again – soon sleep will arise within you, not an awakening. A repetition of any word is a way to create sleep. So if you cannot sleep, it will be helpful to repeat ’Rama, Rama’ or ’Aum, Aum’ at night, but it will not be helpful in the search for the realization of the self or of the truth, nor in a deeper realization of existence.

This method is known to everybody in every village but we have never thought about it. When a mother wants her child to go to sleep, she says, ”Go to sleep, my little darling – go to sleep, little darling – go to sleep, little darling.” She is using a mantra. She is repeating the same two words: little darling, little darling. ”Go to to sleep, little darling, go to sleep, little darling....” After a while the little darling will definitely go to sleep. If the mother thinks that he has gone to sleep because of her very musical voice then she is making a big mistake – the child goes to sleep because of boredom.

If you sit at somebody’s head and say, ”Go to sleep, little darling, go to sleep, little darling,” he gets irritated, bored. The small child cannot run away anywhere so the only way to escape is to go to sleep so that he can no longer hear this nonsense. The only way to get rid of this nonsense, the only escape, is to go to sleep, otherwise he will have to listen to this, ”Go to sleep, little darling, go to sleep, little one.” How long will the little darling be ready to listen to this nonsense? However darling the little one may be he will also start feeling irritated and in that irritation, in that boredom, the only alternative he has is to go to sleep quickly. Only then the nonsense will stop.

So if you go on repeating ’little darling, little darling’ or ’Rama, Rama’ – it doesn’t make any difference which word you use, they are all the same – then you start doing the same thing to your mind that the mother is doing to the little child. So after a time the mind will become annoyed, bored, fed up and then there is only one way to escape: it goes to sleep to avoid the nonsense. If you think this going to sleep is meditation, you are making a great mistake. This sleep is a state of unconsciousness.

Yes, you will feel good after it. After this sleep you will feel as good as after every sleep. You will feel some relief because for that time, you have escaped from worry, pain and life itself.

It is the same kind of feeling that an alcoholic or a drug addict or an opium user has as long as he is intoxicated. He forgets all his worries until he regains consciousness and finds that the pain is still there. Then he needs more opium. At first only a little portion of opium was enough, but then after a few days he needs double the amount and after a few more days even more than that.

There are sadhus who have used so much opium that after a while opium stops having any effect, so they breed snakes, and only when they get the snakes to bite their tongues can they get intoxicated

– otherwise nothing happens.

A person always needs more and more intoxication, so if today he chants ’Rama, Rama’ for fifteen minutes, then tomorrow he will need thirty minutes. After a month, he will need an hour. Then he will need two hours, then ten hours.... Then he cannot run his shop because he needs to chant ’Rama, Rama’ before starting work. So he has to go into the forest and drop everything because this Rama chant has become an addiction. And now the more often he does it, the more important it seems, because if he comes out of it he will feel pain. Then he says now he will chant totally, twenty-four hours a day.

This is touching the boundaries of madness. No knowledge, no understanding arises in a man’s life from this – and the countries and the races who get caught up in this kind of madness lose everything and become spiritless. Our country is a simple and living example. Our country has lost all its life, glory and spirit; it has become spiritless because of these kind of stupidities. Glory does not develop through repetition; repetition gives birth to unconsciousness. So those races which have learnt the method of repetition, learn to go to sleep by repeating something. If your child is sick in the house you can avoid the situation by chanting ’Rama, Rama’. As you become unconscious the child disappears, the world disappears, you do not know anything anymore. If you cannot find a job, you chant ’Rama, Rama’ and avoid the situation. Now you don’t need to worry about a job or food.

The poor races, the wretched and needy countries, go on finding these kinds of ways to avoid doing something constructive and so go on becoming more and more poor and destitute.

Life changes by fighting and by struggling. Life changes by the effort of facing it and changing it.

Life does not change by keeping your eyes closed and chanting mantras. All these things are simply opium – so forget about chanting words, names, mantras. Meditation is the way of waking up the consciousness deep inside you, not making it go to sleep. That which is hiding deep inside you should wake up, and become so aware that not a single part inside remains asleep. Your whole being should wake up. Meditation is the name of that state of awareness.

But in India you can lie there in an unconscious state and the people around you say that you have attained samadhi! Saliva is dribbling out of your mouth and you are lying there dizzy and in a fit and people are saying that you have attained samadhi! This is hysteria but people think that you are in samadhi. This is neither meditation nor samadhi, it is just a hysterical disease. Becoming unconscious is a disease. In America or Europe, if somebody gets hysterical or falls sick, he is treated, but in India people are so mad and ignorant that they will sing devotional songs around the person saying that this great man has attained samadhi! If the people were intelligent they would arrange for some treatment for all these great people. They are all sick, not healthy. Their disease is mental; it is the ultimate result of mental tension. It is not samadhi when a person is lying on the ground unconscious with saliva dribbling out of his mouth. It is sheer stupidity that the devotees are singing songs and saying that the person has attained samadhi. Samadhi means total awareness, it does not mean sleep, unconsciousness.

Samadhi means that the being has become so aware that no darkness remains; all has become illuminated. A lamp of awareness has been lit deep inside. Samadhi does not mean sleep and unconsciousness, it means awareness, alertness. A man in samadhi remains aware and awake all his life, every moment, every breath. All this madness and hysteria is not samadhi – but if somebody manages to collect devotees around him, why should he say that something is wrong?

What is happening is right, it is good! This stupidity has been going on for thousands of years and unfortunately we can’t say for how much longer it will continue. We are helping it to continue. I don’t call chanting or repetition, meditation. Meditation means two things: making the effort to meditate, and creating awareness inside oneself.

And in the meditation which we are going to do tonight, don’t go to sleep either!

Now we will do the night meditation. You should not go to sleep. Relax the body, relax the breath, make the mind silent, but do not go to sleep. Be totally awake inside. That’s why I have told you to keep listening to everything outside, because if you are listening you will remain awake but if you are not listening there is a possibility that you will go to sleep. Sleep is a good thing, sleep is not bad, but don’t think that sleep is meditation. Sleep is necessary but sleep is not meditation – one must remember that. If sleep does not come then you can produce sleep by doing some chanting but don’t make the mistake of thinking that you might experience something spiritual. You can make that mistake, it is not difficult. Just as a person takes sleeping pills, you can chant a mantra. It does not matter. It will work as a sleeping pill.

When Vivekananda was in America and said something about mantras and meditation, a newspaper reported in an article that what Vivekananda was saying sounded good. A mantra sounded like a non-medical tranquillizer. It was a good way to bring sleep.

If you want to induce sleep that is one thing, but bringing about a state of meditation is a totally different thing.

So in the experiment that we are doing here, everybody should become relaxed, everybody should go on listening, but everybody has to stay totally alert inside. Tomorrow we will talk more about the phenomenon of staying alert, then things will be clearer to you.

Before doing this experiment, first understand a few things. Firstly, this is a very simple experiment.

Don’t get the idea in your mind that you are doing something very difficult. Whatever we think of as difficult becomes difficult – not because it is difficult, but because our thinking makes it so. Whatever we think of as easy becomes easy. The difficulty is in our vision.

We have been told for thousands of years that meditation is a very difficult thing. It is available only to some rare people, it is like walking on the edge of a sword, and this, and that.... All these things have created a feeling in our mind that meditation is for rare people, it is not for everybody. All that we can do is pray and worship or chant ’Rama, Rama’ or sing some devotional songs non-stop for days together – usually very loudly into a microphone so that not only we are benefited but all the neighbors also! We think that this is all that is possible for us and meditation is only for the very few.

This is all false. Meditation is possible for every person. Meditation is so simple that it is difficult to find a man for whom meditation is not possible. But one has to prepare; one has to understand one’s capacity, one’s role and one’s attitude when entering such simplicity. It is very simple, it is as simple as the most simple thing can be.

As simply as a bud becomes a flower, so simply can the mind of man change into meditation. But for a bud to become a flower, light, water and fertilizer are needed. This is natural, these are its needs. In the same way the mind has certain needs to become meditative. This is what we are talking about.

Yesterday we talked about the needs of the body; today we talked about how to bring health to the mind and brain, how to become free of the entangling net of the brain. And tomorrow we will talk about the heart, the second center. If the heart and the mind are sorted out then it will be very easy to enter into the third center.

There may be some new people here today so I must tell them that now we will lie down for the meditation. This is a night meditation, to be done lying down before going to sleep. So everybody make your own space and lie down without touching anybody else. Some people can come up here and some lie on the floor in the front....

CHAPTER 7

The sutras of the veena of the heart

5 February 1968 am in Ajol Meditation Camp

[Note: This is the final edit of the Hindi translation of Antar Yatra, later published as part of Sadhana Path. This is for reference use only, pending publication.]

My Beloved Ones,

The center of thinking is the brain, the center of feeling is the heart, and the center of life-energy is the navel. Thinking, contemplation and pondering happen through the brain. We talked a little about the center of thought yesterday. Feeling, experiencing emotions such as love, hate and anger happen through the heart. Life-energy happens through the navel.

On the first day I told you that the cells of thought are very tense and have to be relaxed. In thinking there is great tension and stress, the brain is under much stress. The strings of the veena of thought are so taut that no music arises from them; rather, the strings break – and man becomes disturbed.

Man has become very disturbed. It has become very necessary to relax the strings of the veena of thought a little, so that they can be in tune for music to be created.

The situation of the heart is exactly opposite to that of the brain. The strings of the heart are very loose. They need to be tightened a little, so that they can also be in tune for music to be created.

The tension in the strings of thought has to be reduced and the loose strings of the heart have to be tightened a little.

If the strings of both thought and feeling are in tune, if they are balanced, then the music can be created through which the journey to the navel can be made.

Yesterday we talked about how thoughts can become silent. This morning we will talk about how the strings of feeling, of the heart, can be tightened.

But before we can understand this, we have to understand that for a long time mankind has been living under a curse. The curse is that we have condemned all the qualities of the heart.

We have considered all the qualities of the heart to be a curse, not a blessing. This ignorance, this mistake, has been inconceivably harmful. We have condemned anger, we have condemned pride, we have condemned hatred, we have condemned attachment, we have condemned everything. And we have done all this without understanding that all these qualities are just transformations of the same qualities we praise.

We have praised forgiveness, and we have condemned anger – without understanding that forgiveness is a transformed form of the energy of anger itself. We have condemned hatred and we have praised love – without understanding that the energy which appears as hatred can be transformed and appear as love. The energy behind both of these is not different. We have condemned pride and we have praised humbleness without understanding that the same energy which appears as pride becomes humbleness. There is no basic conflict between these two; they are two aspects of the same energy.

If the strings of the veena are too loose or too tight and a musician touches them, the sound that is created is unmusical, disturbing to the ears and frightening to the mind. If in protest against this disharmonious sound, a person gets angry and breaks the veena’s strings and throws the veena away, he can – but he shouldn’t forget that, with tuning, harmonious sounds could have been created on the same instrument.

The unmusical sound was not the fault of the veena. The mistake was that the veena was not tuned.

If the veena had been tuned then from the same strings which produced disharmony, music alluring to the soul could have also been created.

Musical and unmusical notes both arise from the same strings, although they appear to be absolutely contradictory and the results of both of them are contrary. One of them leads you into a state of bliss and the other one leads you into a state of sorrow, but the strings and the instrument are the same.

Anger arises in man’s heart if it is not balanced, systematic and organized. If the same heart becomes balanced then the energies which appear as anger start appearing as forgiveness.

Forgiveness is a transformation of anger.

If a child is born without anger then it is certain that forgiveness can never appear in the life of that child. If there is no possibility of hatred in the heart of a child then there will be no possibility of love either.

But until now we have lived with the illusion that feelings like these are contradictory and if we destroy one then the other will develop. This is absolutely wrong. There can be no teaching more dangerous than this. It is not psychological. It is very unintelligent. Forgiveness does not arise through the destruction of anger, it is attained through the transformation of anger. Forgiveness is not destruction of anger, it is anger becoming tuned and musical.

So if we are opposed to anger and try to destroy it, then we are trying to destroy the veena. And in destroying it, the man who develops will be very weak and feeble. None of the qualities of the heart will be able to develop in him. It is the same situation as somebody piling fertilizer around his house

– which spreads dirt and a bad smell everywhere – in order for flowers to blossom. But instead of the fragrance of flowers, he gets the stink of fertilizer and his life becomes intolerable.

Flowers will certainly blossom with fertilizer, but not by just piling it around the house. The fertilizer has to undergo a change. It must enter the plants through the roots and then one day the foul smell of the fertilizer will turn into the fragrance of flowers. But if somebody simply piles fertilizer around his house he will become mad with the stink, and if he throws the fertilizer away, his flowers will become lifeless and pale. The transformation of the fertilizer can change a foul smell into fragrance.

This very chemistry, this very alchemy is called yoga, religion. The art of transforming whatever is futile in life into something significant is religion.

But we are committing suicide in the name of religion, we are not transforming our consciousness.

We are living with some basic misunderstandings; a shadow of some deep curse hangs over us.

Our heart has remained undeveloped because we have condemned its basic qualities. We have to understand this a little.

If man is growing rightly, anger will play an important part in his life. Anger has its own color. If it is removed then the picture of man’s life will be in some sense incomplete, some color will be missing.

But from childhood we start teaching children to discard certain qualities, and the only result of discarding these qualities will be that the child will suppress whatever we call bad, he will suppress it in himself. A suppressed heart will be weak and floppy, its strings will not be rightly tuned.

And this suppression will happen in the brain, because our education does not go deeper than the brain.

When you tell children that anger is bad, this teaching will not reach the heart. The heart has no ears to listen with, no words to think with. This teaching will go into the brain and the brain cannot change the heart – so now a problem is created. The brain center thinks that anger is wrong, but the heart center doesn’t. It has no connection with the brain. So, every day you become angry, and every day you regret it and decide not to be angry again. But the next morning you wake up and again you get angry. You are surprised because you have decided so many times not to get angry, yet it still happens!

You don’t know that the center which feels angry is different from the brain center. The center which decides, ’I will not be angry’, is absolutely different from the center which becomes angry. They are two totally different centers. So decisions and repentance do not have any effect on your anger.

You go on being angry and you go on regretting it and you go on feeling upset about it. You do not understand that these two centers are so separate, that the decision taken by one does not reach the other at all. So man disintegrates within.

The heart center works in certain ways and needs certain things to develop. If the mind interferes in that center then it will become disturbed, chaotic. Everybody’s heart center has become absolutely chaotic, absolutely disturbed. The first thing certainly is that anger should be transformed – but it should not be destroyed.

So the first sutra to tighten the strings of the heart is to develop all the qualities of the heart, none should be destroyed. Maybe you will be a little puzzled. Does one need to develop anger? I say to you that one has certainly to develop anger – because anger can one day be transformed and become forgiveness. Otherwise forgiveness can never arise. If you read the life story of the greatest forgiving people in the world, you will find that in their early days they were very angry people. Anger has its own dignity and its own pride. If you read the life story of the greatest celibates who have been in the world, then you will find that in their early days they were very sexual people.

Gandhi became a great celibate as a result of being too sexual when he was young. When Gandhi’s father was dying, the physicians told him that his father would not be able to survive the night – but even that night Gandhi could not keep away from his wife. It was the last night of his father’s life.

It would have been very natural to sit with his father, it was the last farewell, he would not see his father again – but in the middle of the night, Gandhi went to his wife. His father died while Gandhi was in bed with his wife. It created a very strong shock in his mind. Gandhi’s celibacy developed because of this shock. The shock turned all the energy of this highly sexual mind into a desire for celibacy.

How could it happen? It could happen because energies are always neutral; there is only a change of directions. The energy which was flowing towards sex started flowing in the reverse direction.

If there is a lot of energy already it can flow in any other direction, but if there is no energy there is nothing to go anywhere! What will go?

All the energies should develop rightly. The very idea of moral teaching has turned man into a very miserable and impotent being. In the past people experienced life in a deeper way than we do.

Two Rajpoot youths came to the court of King Akbar. They were brothers. They went to Akbar and said, ”We are looking for a job.”

Akbar said, ”What can you do?”

They said, ”We don’t know how to do anything, but we are brave people. You may need us!”

Akbar said, ”Have you got a certificate of bravery? What proof do you have that you are brave?”

Both of them started laughing. They said, ”Can there be a certificate of bravery? We are brave!”

Akbar replied, ”You cannot get a job without a certificate!”

Again they laughed. They pulled out their swords and within a second they thrust the swords into each other’s chests. Akbar was shocked. Both the youths were lying on the ground, blood was flowing everywhere, but they were laughing. They said, ”Akbar, you don’t know that there can be only one certificate of bravery and that is death. There can be no other certificate!” Then they both died. Tears came into Akbar’s eyes. He had not even imagined that such a thing could happen.

He called one of his Rajpoot military commanders and said to him, ”A very grave accident has happened. Two Rajpoot youths have killed each other. I only asked them about a certificate!”

The commander said, ”You asked something wrong. This would have made any Rajpoot’s blood boil! What can be the certificate of bravery other than death? Only a coward and a weakling can have a certificate saying that he is brave, saying that somebody thinks he is brave. How can a brave man bring a character certificate? You asked a wrong question. You don’t know at all how to talk to a Rajpoot! What they have done is right, there was no possibility of doing anything else. It was a clear choice.”

Such intense anger! Such radiance! This kind of personality has an immense grandeur. Mankind is losing these qualities. All the radiance, all the courage and strength of man is being destroyed

– and we think that we are giving him a good education! But this is not the case; the children are developing in a very wrong way, nothing of a real human being grows inside them.

A very famous Lama has written in his autobiography, ”When I was five years old, I was sent to a university to study. At that time I was just five years old. In the evening my father told me that the next morning I would be sent to the university. And he said, ’Neither I nor your mother will be there to say goodbye to you. Your mother will not be there because there will be tears in her eyes, and if you see her crying then you will go on looking back at her and there has never been a man in our family who looks back. I also will not be there because after getting on the horse if you look back even once, then you will be my son no longer, then the doors of this house will be closed to you forever. The servants will say farewell to you tomorrow morning. Remember, do not look back after getting on the horse. There has never been a person in our family who has looked back.’”

Such an expectation from a child of five years old! The five-year child was woken up at four o’clock in the morning and put on a horse. The servants bade him farewell. As he left even a servant said,

”My child! Be careful! You can be seen until the crossroad, your father is watching from upstairs.

Do not look back before the crossroad. All the children in this house have departed this way but no one has looked back.” And the servant also told him, ”The place where you are being sent is not an ordinary university. The greatest men of the country have studied at that university. There will be a very difficult entrance examination. So, whatever happens, try in every way to pass the entrance examinations, because if you fail there will be no place for you in this house.”

Such harshness with a five year old child! He sat on the horse. In his autobiography he wrote that as he sat on the horse, ”tears started flowing from my eyes, but how could I look back to the house, to my father? I was leaving for the unknown. I was so small, but I could not look back, because nobody in my house had ever looked back. If my father should see it then I would be banned from my house for ever. So I controlled myself and looked forward. I never looked back.”

Something is being created in this child. Some will power, some life-energy, is being awakened in this child which can strengthen his navel system. This father is not hard; this father is very loving.

And all the mothers and fathers who seem to be loving are wrong, they are weakening all the inner centers. No strength, no determination is being created within.

The child reached the school. He was a five-year-old child – it could not be known what his capacities would be. The principal of the school said, ”The entrance test here is difficult. Sit near the door with your eyes closed and do not open them until I come back – whatever happens. This is your entrance test. If you open your eyes then we will send you back, because one who does not have even this much strength in himself to sit with his eyes closed for a while cannot learn anything. The door to learning has closed. Then you are not worthy. Go and do something else.” All this to a small child of five years...!

He sat near the entrance with his eyes closed. Flies started disturbing him, but he knew that he must not open his eyes because once he opened his eyes the matter would be over. The other children were coming in and out of the school, somebody started pushing him, somebody started disturbing him, but he was determined not to open his eyes, else the whole thing would be spoiled. And he remembered his servants telling him that if he failed the entrance test then his father’s house was closed to him forever.

One hour passed, two hours passed – he sat with closed eyes afraid that even by mistake he might open them. There were many temptations to open his eyes: the road was busy, children were running around, flies were harassing him, some children were pushing him and throwing pebbles at him. He wanted to open his eyes to see if his master had come. One hour passed, two hours passed, three hours, four hours – he sat there for six hours!

After six hours the master came and said, ”My child, your entrance test is over. Come in, you will become a youth of strong will. You have the determination within you to do whatsoever you want.

To sit for five to six hours with closed eyes at this age is a big thing!” The master hugged him and said, ”Don’t be worried, those children were told to harass you. They were told to disturb you a little so that you would be tempted to open your eyes!”

The Lama wrote, ”At that time I thought I was being treated very harshly, but now at the end of my life I am full of gratefulness towards those people who were hard on me. They awakened something in me, some dormant strength became active.”

We are doing the opposite. We say, ”Don’t be angry at the children, don’t beat them!” Now all over the world corporal punishment has been absolutely stopped. A child cannot be struck; no physical punishment can be given to a child. This is not wise because a punishment is out of love, it is not given with enmity. Those children who are given some kind of punishment get their centers awakened within them. Within them the spine is straightened and strengthened. A determination arises within them. Anger and pride also arise and an inner strength is born and grows.

We are creating people without spines who can only crawl on the earth and cannot fly in the sky like eagles. We are creating a creeping crawling man who has no spine. And we think that we are doing it out of compassion and love and morality.

We teach man not to become angry, we teach him not to express any intensity, we teach him to become weak and wishy-washy.

There can be no soul in the life of this man. There can be no soul within this man because he cannot have the intense feelings of the heart inside him which are needed for the soul.

There was a Mohammedan king, Omar. He was at war with a man for twelve years. In the last battle he killed his enemy’s horse with great difficulty, knocked the man to the ground and sat on his chest.

He lifted his spear and was about to plunge it in his chest, when the enemy spat in his face. Omar threw away the spear and stood up. The enemy was amazed. He said, ”Omar, after twelve years you finally got the chance to kill me. Why have you missed it?”

Omar said, ”I was thinking that you are an enemy worthy of me, but by spitting in my face you have shown such pettiness that now there is no question of killing you. The pettiness that you have shown is not the quality of a brave man. I thought that you are equal to me, so for twelve years I continued the war. But when I was going to kill you with the spear, you spat at me – this is not the quality of a brave man. I will commit a sin if I kill you. What will the world say to me if I kill a weak person who could only spit at me? The matter is finished; I am not going to commit a sin in killing you.”

Those were wonderful people. The invention of weapons and war materials has destroyed all that was significant in human beings.

Face-to-face battles had their own value. They used to expose whatever was hidden inside man.

Today not a single soldier fights directly. He throws a bomb from an aeroplane – this has no relation to bravery, this has no relation to the inner qualities. He simply sits and presses the button of a machine gun.

The possibility of awakening whatever is hidden in man’s inner being has become less and it is not surprising if man looks so weak and feeble! His authentic being cannot develop. All the elements within him cannot unite together and be expressed, manifested.

Our education systems are surprising. According to me all the heart qualities within man should be intensely and extremely developed. This should be the priority. Only if there is extreme development can there be a transformation. All transformations take place at extreme points; no transformations happen below that. If water is heated, it does not evaporate when it is lukewarm. Lukewarm water is also water, but at a hundred degrees, when the water reaches its ultimate temperature, then a transformation takes place and the water starts evaporating. Water turns into vapor at a hundred degrees, it does not become vapor before that. Lukewarm water does not become vapor.

We all are lukewarm people; no transformations take place in our lives. All the qualities of our minds, of our hearts, should be developed to a certain degree, only then can there be a revolution in them, only then can there be a change. When anger has an intensity, it can be transformed into forgiveness, otherwise not.

But we are enemies of anger, of greed, of passion, so we become lukewarm people. Then life remains just lukewarm; no transformation can ever happen. This lukewarmness has had a tremendously harmful effect on human beings. In my vision the first thing that has to be understood is that all the qualities of our personalties, of our hearts, should develop rightly. Intense anger has a beauty of its own which may not be apparent to us. Intense anger has a radiance, an energy, a meaning. It contributes to the personalty in its own way. All the feelings of the heart should be intensely developed.

So the first point is that the qualities of the heart should be developed not destroyed.

What is the second point? The second point is that there should be awareness but no suppression.

The more we suppress the feelings of the heart, the more it becomes unconscious.

We lose sight of whatever we suppress; it moves into darkness. All the energies of the heart should be clearly looked at. If you feel angry don’t try to suppress it by chanting ’Rama, Rama’. If you feel angry, sit alone in a room, close the door, and meditate on the anger. See the anger totally – ”What is this anger? What is the energy of this anger? From where does this anger arise? Why does it arise? How does it surround my mind and influence me?”

In aloneness meditate on anger. See the anger totally, understand it, recognize it. From where does it arise? Why does it arise? Then slowly, slowly you will become a master of the anger. And the person who becomes a master of his anger has great power, great strength. He becomes strong, he becomes a master of himself.

So it is not a question of fighting with the anger, it is a question of knowing the anger – because, remember, there is no greater energy than knowing, and there is no greater stupidity than fighting with one’s own energies. One who is fighting with his own energies is committing the same mistake as a man who is wrestling with his own hands. If one hand is wrestling with the other, no hand will ever be able to win, because they both belong to the same person. The energy is flowing in both hands and if there is a fight between these two hands the energy will be dissipated. There can be no question of winning. In this kind of fight you will be defeated. All your energy will be wasted.

Whose energy is in the anger? It is your own energy. The energy is yours but you are the one who is fighting it. If you divide yourself and fight, then you will go on breaking apart, you will disintegrate, you will not be a whole person. For the person who fights with himself there can be no attainment in life other than defeat. There cannot be. It is impossible. Do not fight. Know your own energies, recognize them, be acquainted with them.

So the second point is not suppression but awareness. Do not suppress, whenever, whatever, energy may arise within you. We are a collection of unknown energies. We are the center of very unknown energies, with which we have no acquaintance, of which we have no awareness.

Thousands of years ago, when thunderbolts would strike the earth, man used to become afraid. He would fold his hands and say, ”Oh God! Have you become angry? What happened?” He used to be afraid, the thunderbolt was a cause of fear. But today we know about electricity, we have enslaved it, so today it is not a cause of fear, rather it has become a slave. In every house it gives light, it helps the sick to be treated, it keeps machines operating. The whole life of man is influenced by it, run by it. Man has become a master of electricity. But for thousands of years man used to be afraid because he did not know what electricity was. Once we came to know what it was, then we became its master.

Knowing makes one a master. Within us many energies greater than electricity are alight, they shine. Anger glows, hatred glows, love glows. We become afraid of what is happening because we do not know what all these energies are.

Make your life an inner laboratory and start knowing all these powers within – watch them, recognize them. Never suppress even by mistake, never be afraid even by mistake, but try to know whatever is within. If anger comes, then feel fortunate and be thankful to the person who has made you angry.

He has given you an opportunity – some energy has arisen within you and now you can look at it.

Look at it silently, in aloneness; search to see what it is.

The more your knowing grows, the deeper your understanding will become. The more you become a master of your anger, the more you will find that it is under your control. The day you become a master of your anger is the day you can transform it.

We can transform that of which we are a master; we cannot change that of which we are not a master. And remember , you can never be a master of something you fight with because it is impossible to become a master of an enemy, one can only be a master of a friend. If you become an enemy of the energies within yourself, then you can never become a master of them. You can never win without love or friendship.

Neither be afraid nor condemn the infinite treasure of enemies within; start recognizing what is hidden within you.

So much is hidden within man – there is no limit. We are not even yet at the beginning of humanity.

Perhaps after ten or twenty-five thousand years the man who is on the earth will be as far away from us as monkeys are now. A totally new race can evolve – *??* are within man.

Scientists say that about half of man’s brain is still absolutely unused, no use is being made of it at all.

Just a small part of the brain is being used and the remaining part is lying idle. This remaining part cannot be useless, futile, because there is nothing futile in nature. It may be that if the experience and knowledge of man grows, then the part which is lying idle will become active and start working.

Then it is beyond imagination what man will be able to know.

If a man is blind there is nothing like light in his world. Light does not exist for him. If there are no eyes then there is no light. Those animals who do not have eyes do not even know that light exists in the world. They cannot even imagine, they cannot even dream that light exists. We have five senses. Who knows – if we had a sixth sense maybe we would know many more things which might exist in the world! And if there were seven senses then we could know even more things.... Who knows what the limits of our senses are and how great they could become?

We know very little and we live even less that that. The more we know about the inner, the more we can enter the inner, the more we become acquainted with the inner, the more our life-energy will develop and our soul will crystalize.

The second sutra to keep in mind is that we should not suppress any of our energies – we should know them, recognize them, look into them and see them. From this you will have a very surprising experience: if you try to look at anger, if, sitting silently, you come to see it, then the anger will disappear. As you watch the anger, it disappears. If sexual feelings arise in your mind and if you go on watching them, then you will find that they will disappear. You will find that sex arises in unconsciousness and it disappears by watching it.

Then you will realize that you have discovered an amazing method: you will have discovered that, except in unconsciousness, anger and sex and greed have no power over man. With watching, with awareness, they all disappear.

I had a friend who had a problem with anger. He said, ”I am very much disturbed by it and how much it is beyond my control. Show me a method to control it without me doing something myself –

because I have almost given up, I don’t think I can do anything about it. I don’t think that I can get out of this anger by my own efforts.”

I gave him a paper on which were written the words: ’Now I am getting angry’. I told him, ”Keep this paper in your pocket and whenever you feel angry, take it out, read it and put it back again.” And I said, ”You can do at least this much; this is the minimum. I can’t tell you to do anything less! Read this paper and then put it back in your pocket.” He said he would try.

After two or three months, when I met him again, I asked, ”What happened?”

He said, ”I am surprised. This paper has worked as a mantra. Whenever I feel angry I take it out.

The moment I take it out, my hands and feet become numb. As I put my hand in my pocket I realize that I am feeling angry and then something in me loosens up; the grip that the anger used to have on me inside suddenly disappears. As my hand goes into the pocket, it relaxes, and there is no longer any need even to read it. When I feel the anger I start seeing the paper in my pocket.”

He asked me, ”How did this paper have this effect? What is the secret?”

I said, ”There is no secret to it. It is simple. Whenever you are unconscious, the perversions, the imbalances, the chaos of the mind take hold of you. But when you become aware everything disappears.”

So watching will have two results. Firstly your knowledge of your own energies will develop and knowing them makes you a master. And secondly, the strength of the grip these energies have on you will decrease. Slowly, slowly you will find that first anger comes and then you watch. Then after a while, gradually, you will find that anger comes and the watchfulness comes at the same time. And finally you will find that the anger is about to arise but the watchfulness is already there. From the day the watchfulness comes before the anger, there is no longer any possibility of anger arising.

Awareness of things before they happen has a value. Being sorry has no value because it happens later on. Nothing can be done later on; crying and weeping later on is futile, because it is impossible to undo whatever has happened. There is no chance of going back, no way, no door. But whatever has not happened can be changed. Being sorry is simply experiencing pain after something has happened. It is meaningless, it is absolutely unintelligent. You became angry, this was a mistake –

and now you are sorry, this is one more mistake. You are becoming unnecessarily disturbed. It has no value. An awareness beforehand is needed; such an awareness will develop as we slowly, slowly watch all the emotions of the heart.

The second sutra is watching and not suppressing.

And the third sutra is transformation. Each quality of the heart can be transformed. Everything has many forms; everything can change into an opposite form. There is no quality or energy which cannot be diverted towards good, towards benediction. And remember, that which can become bad can always become good. That which can become harmful can always become helpful. Helpful and harmful, good and bad are directions. It is only a question of transforming by changing the direction, and things becomes different.

A man was running away from Delhi. He stopped and asked somebody, ”How far is it to Delhi?”

The man replied, ”If you go on running in the direction you are going, you will have to run around the world before you reach Delhi – because right now you are running away from it! However, if you turn back, then Delhi is the nearest town. It is a matter of turning around.”

Running in the direction the man was running, it would take him a long time to reach Delhi. But if he made a hundred-and-eighty degree turn he would be already there.

If we go on moving in the directions we are moving in now we will reach nowhere. We cannot reach anywhere, even if we go around the whole earth – because the earth is small and the mind is huge.

A man may go around the earth but moving around the mind is impossible; it is very big, very vast, infinite. One can complete a rotation of the earth – the man can get back to Delhi – but the mind is bigger than the earth and to move around it is a very long journey. So this understanding of making a total turn-around, a total change of direction, is the third point to be kept in mind.

The way we are moving now is wrong. What is the proof that something is wrong? The proof that something is wrong is that the more we move, the more we become empty; the more we move, the more we become sad; the more we move, the more we become restless; the more we move, the more we are filled with darkness. If this is the situation then certainly we are moving wrongly.

Bliss is the only criterion for life. If your life is not blissful then know you are moving wrongly. Suffering is the criterion of being wrong and bliss is the criterion of being right – there are no other criteria.

There is no need to read any scriptures nor is there any need to ask a guru. All that is needed is to see if you are becoming more and more blissful, if your bliss is going deeper and deeper. If it is, you are moving rightly. And if suffering, pain and anguish are growing then you are moving wrongly. There is no question of believing somebody else, it is a question of looking into your own life, everyday, and seeing whether you are becoming more sad or more blissful. If you ask yourself there will be no difficulty.

Old people say that their childhood was very joyful. What does this mean? Have they grown in a wrong way? Childhood, the time of joy, was the beginning of life, and now, at the end of life, they are sad. The beginning was joyful and the end is sad; then life has moved in a wrong way. The contrary should have happened. What should have happened is that the joy of childhood should have grown day by day as man grows. Then in his old age, man would say that his childhood was the most painful state – because it was the beginning of life, it was the first stage.

If a student has gone to a university to study but then says that slowly, slowly the knowledge he had when he first started to study is disappearing, we would ask him, ”Aren’t you learning? Aren’t you acquiring any knowledge? This is very strange!” We could have understood if he had said that he was more ignorant at the beginning of his studies – naturally, after studying for a few years, a student should know more not less – but to say that he now knows less sounds very strange!

People always say that they were more joyful when they were children. Poets sing songs of a blissful childhood. They must be mad! If childhood was blissful then does it mean that, because you are sad now, you have wasted your life? It would have been better if you had died in childhood; at least you would have died blissfully. Now you will die in sorrow. So those who die in childhood are fortunate!

The longer a person lives, the more his joy should grow – but our joy gets less. The poets are not saying something wrong, they are sharing the experiences of their life. They are correct. Our joy goes on getting less and less. Day by day everything goes on getting less when in fact it should be growing. So we are growing in a wrong way.

The direction of our life is wrong; our energy is wrong. One should be constantly vigilant, constantly inquiring; one should keep the criteria clearly in one’s mind. If the criteria are clear to you and if you see you are moving wrongly, then nobody except yourself is preventing you from moving in the right direction.

One evening two monks arrived at their hut. For four months they had been away travelling but now, as it was the rainy season, they had returned to their hut. But when they reached their hut, the younger monk who was walking ahead suddenly became angry and sad. The winds of the rains had carried away half of the hut; only half of it was left. They had come back after four months in the hope that they would be able to rest in the hut and be safe from the rain. But now it was difficult.

Half of the hut had fallen down and half of its roof had been carried away by the winds.

The young monk said to his old companion, ”This is too much! These are the things which create doubt about the existence of god. The sinners have palaces in the cities, nothing has happened to them, but the hut of poor people like us, who spend day and night in prayer, is in ruins. I doubt whether god exists! Is this prayer real! Or are we making a mistake? Maybe there is truth in sin –

because the palaces of the sinful stand safe and the huts of the people who pray are carried away by the winds.”

The young monk was full of anger and condemnation and he felt that all his prayers were futile. But his old companion raised his folded hands towards the sky and tears of joy started flowing from his eyes. The young man was surprised. He said,”What are you doing?”

The old man said, ”I am thanking god, because who knows what the winds might have done? They could have blown away the whole hut, but god must have created some obstacles for the wind and in that way saved half our hut for us. God is concerned about us poor people also, so we should thank him. Our prayers have been heard, our prayers have not been futile – otherwise the whole roof might have been blown away.”

That night both of them slept – but as you can imagine, both slept in different ways. The one who was full of anger and rage, and who thought that all his prayers were futile, kept on changing his position all night, and all kinds of nightmares and worries were racing around in his mind. He was worried. There were clouds in the sky; it was about to rain. Half of the roof had been blown away by the winds and they could see the sky. Tomorrow the rain would start, then what would happen?

The other slept a very deep sleep. Who else can sleep so peacefully except one whose being is filled with gratitude and thankfulness? He got up in the morning and started dancing, and singing a song.

In the song he said, ”O God! We didn’t know that there could be so much bliss in a broken-down hut. If we had known it before, then we would not have even bothered your winds, we ourselves would have taken away half of the roof. I never slept so blissfully. Because half of the roof was not there, I saw the stars and the gathering clouds in your sky whenever I opened my eyes during the night. And now that the rains are about to start it will be even more beautiful because, with half the roof gone, we will be able to hear the music of your rain-drops much more clearly. We have been idiots! We have spent so many rainy seasons sheltering inside the hut. We had no idea what joy it could be to be exposed to the sky and the wind and the rain. If we had realized it we would not have bothered your winds, we ourselves would have got rid of half the roof.”

The young man asked, ”What is this I am hearing? What is all this nonsense? What is this madness?

What are you saying?”

The old man said, ”I have looked at things deeply and my experience is that whatever makes us more happy, that is the right direction in life for us, and whatever makes us suffer more, that is the wrong direction. I thanked god and my bliss increased. You became angry at god and your anguish increased. You were restless last night, I slept peacefully. Now I am able to sing a song and you are burning with anger. Very early I came to understand that the direction in which life becomes more blissful is the right direction. And I have directed my whole consciousness towards that direction. I don’t know whether god exists or not, I don’t know whether he has heard our prayers or not, but my proof is that I am happy and dancing, and you are crying and angry and worried. My bliss proves that my way of living is right; your anguish proves that the way you are living is wrong.”

The third point is to keep a continuous check on which direction it is that deepens your joy. There is no need to ask anybody else. We can use the criterion every day, in our everyday life. The criterion is bliss. It is just like the criterion for testing gold by rubbing it on a stone – the goldsmith will throw away whatever is not pure and put whatever is pure into his vault. Go on checking everyday using the criterion of bliss: see what is right and what is wrong. Whatever is wrong can be thrown away, but the right will slowly start accumulating like a treasure.

These are the three sutras for the morning. In the evening we will talk a little more about them.

Now we will sit for the morning meditation. It will be better if you sit keeping a little distance from each other. Nobody should be touching anybody else. You need to understand two things – I’ll explain again because perhaps some new friends are here.

What we are going to do is a very simple and easy thing. But often it happens that the easy things seem very difficult to do because we are not used to doing simple things. We are accustomed to doing difficult things, not easy things.

Firstly, it is very easy and simple to allow our body to be absolutely relaxed and silent for a while.

Close your eyes slowly and just remain sitting, without doing anything – and then, secondly, listen silently to the sounds happening around – just listen. Just listening will start creating a silence and a depth inside.

In Japan the word they use for meditation is very interesting. They call it zazen. Zazen means, ’just sitting, doing nothing’. It means only this and nothing else: sit silently and do nothing. It is a very meaningful word.

So, sit silently, doing nothing. Eyes are closed, ears are open, so the ears will listen. Just go on listening silently. Go on listening silently. While listening you will find that within you a deep silence and emptiness has arisen. It is in this emptiness that one has to go on moving – deeper and deeper, deeper and deeper. It is through the door of this emptiness that some day we will realize the whole.

Through this door of emptiness we will attain that which is whole. And in this way becoming more and more silent, listening to the birds and the sounds around you – one day we will start to hear the sound which is of the inner being. So we will listen silently.

Firstly, relax the body completely. Then easily, slowly, gently, close the eyes. Drop the eyelids very slowly, so that there is no weight on the eyes. Close the eyes and relax the body. Sit absolutely silently – we are sitting silently and doing nothing. There are sounds of birds all around, just listen to them silently. Keep listening to all the sounds around you. Just keep listening and don’t do anything.

Slowly, slowly within you something will become silent, something will settle. Just listen, and a silence will descend inside you. For ten minutes listen silently. Listen absolutely relaxed. Listen...

mind has become silent, mind has become absolutely silent, mind has become silent, mind has become silent. In deep silence... listen to each sound. Birds are singing... listen.

CHAPTER 8

Freedom from the ”I”

5 February 1968 pm in Ajol Meditation Camp

[Note: This is the final edit of the Hindi translation of Antar Yatra, later published as part of Sadhana Path. This is for reference use only, pending publication.]

My Beloved Ones,

Tonight is the last meeting of the camp, and in this last meeting I want to talk to you about some last sutras.

In the mind of man there is intense tension and this tension has reached a level of near madness.

One has to relax this tension. And along with it, there is much looseness in the heart of man; the strings of the veena of man’s heart are loose. They have to be tightened. I told you a few sutras in the morning about how to tighten these strings of the heart. And now we will talk about the last sutra.

Out of the veena of man’s life, the greatest music possible comes from the heart whose strings are in tune. The society which has lost its heart, the age or century in which all the values of the heart have been weakened – has lost all that is good, truthful and beautiful. If we want that truth, beauty and godliness to enter our lives, there is no other way except to tune the strings of the veena of the heart.

Love is the way to tune the strings of the heart, the way to bring the strings of the heart into the right condition from where music can arise. That is why I call love ’prayer’, I call love the way of attaining god, I call love ’god’. Prayer without love is false, hollow and futile. The words of prayer without love have no value at all. And nobody who becomes interested in the journey towards god will ever be able to reach god without love. Love is the way to make the veena of the heart musical. We have to understand some things about love itself.

The first illusion is that we all think we know about love. This illusion is tremendously harmful because we will never make any effort to acquire or awaken that which we think we already know.

But we are not aware that the one who knows love has simultaneously acquired the capacity to know the divine. If we know love, then nothing else remains to be known in life. But the way we are, we know nothing. Everything is still to be known.

So the love which we think of as love is probably not love. We have called something else love, and as long as we have this illusion, as long as we have the idea that we know all about love, how can we search and seek it? The first thing to be understood is that we don’t know love at all.

One hot afternoon, Jesus Christ stopped under a tree in a garden. It was very hot and he was tired.

He slept in the shadow of a tree. He did not even know to whom the house, the garden or the tree belonged. It was the garden of Magdalene, a very beautiful prostitute of that time.

Magdalene looked out of the window and saw a very unique person sleeping under the tree. She had never seen such a beautiful person. As there is a beauty of the body, there is a beauty of the soul. One can often see beauty of the body, but beauty of the soul is rarely seen, and when the beauty of the soul appears, then even the ugliest body becomes the most beautiful flower. She had seen many beautiful people because there was always a crowd at her door, it was often difficult even to enter her house. Magdalene was drawn to the tree as if pulled by some magic.

Jesus Christ was about to get up and leave. He had completed his rest. Magdalene said, ”Will you do me the favor of coming into my house to rest?”

Christ said, ”I have finished resting now – and it was your house, it was your tree. Now it is time for me to leave. But if I happen to pass by here again and I am tired, then I will certainly rest in your house.”

Magdalene felt insulted. Great princes were turned away from her door but now when she had invited a beggar from the streets to rest in her house, he refused. This was an insult for Magdalene.

She said, ”No, I cannot listen to this. You will have to come inside – won’t you even do this much for my love? Won’t you come and rest in my house for a few moments?”

Christ said, ”In your very invitation I have in a way entered your house because, except in the feelings of the heart, where else is your house? And if you ask, ’Can’t you show even this much love?’ then I will say to you that you may have seen many people who may have said, ’I love you’, but none of them loved you, because in their innermost core, they loved something else. And I can assure you that, actually, I am one of the few people who can love you and who does love you because only a person in whose heart love has arisen, can love.”

None of us can love because within us there is no flow of love. When we say to somebody, ”I love you”, we are in fact not giving love, we are asking for love. All of us ask for love, and how can one who is himself asking for love, give love? How can beggars be emperors? How can people who are asking for love, be givers of love?

All of us ask for love from each other. Our beings are beggars asking somebody to give us love. The wife asks for love from the husband; the husband asks for love from the wife. The mother asks from the son, the son asks from the mother. Friends ask friends for love. All of us ask for love from one another without realizing that the friend from whom we are asking for love, is himself asking for love from you. You are like two beggars standing in front of each other holding your begging bowls.

As long as someone is asking for love, he cannot be capable of giving love because the asking for love is an indication that there is no source of love within him – otherwise why should he have to ask for love from the outside? Only a person who has risen above the need of asking for love, can give love. Love is a sharing, it is not begging. Love is an emperor, it is not a beggar. Love knows only giving, it does not know anything about asking.

Do we know love?

The love which is asked for, cannot be love. And remember, the one who asks for love will never get love in this world. One of the essential laws, one of the eternal laws of life, is that one who asks for love never gets it, ever.

Love comes only to the door of the house from where the hankering for love has disappeared. Love starts showering on the house of one who has stopped asking for love, but on the house of one who is still hankering for love, no rains will fall. Love will not flow towards an asking heart. The asking heart does not have the kind of receptivity that makes it possible for love to enter. Only a sharing heart, a giving heart has the kind of receptivity for love to come to his door and say, ”Open the door!

I have come.”

Has love ever knocked at our doors? No, because as yet we have not been able to give love. And remember also that whatever we give comes back to us. One of the eternal laws of life is that whatever we give comes back to us.

The whole world is not more than an echo. We give hate, and hate comes back to us. We give anger, and anger comes back to us. We abuse others, and abuses return to us. We put out thorns, and thorns return to us. Whatever we have given returns to us, it comes back to us in infinite ways.

And if we share love then love comes back to us in infinite ways. If love has not returned to us in an immeasureable number of ways, then know that we have not given love.

But how can we give love? We do not have it at all to give. If we had love then why would we wander from door to door asking for love? Why would we become beggars wandering from place to place?

Why would we ask for love?

There was a fakir called Farid. The people of his town said to him, ”Farid, Akbar respects you very much. Ask Akbar to open a school in our town!”

Farid said, ”I have never asked for anything from anybody. I am a fakir, I only know giving!”

The people of the town were very surprised. They said, ”We have always thought that a fakir always asks, but you say that a fakir only knows how to give. We do not understand these subtle and serious things. Please just do us a favor and ask Akbar to open a school for us.”

The people of the town were persistent, so early in the morning Farid went to meet Akbar. Akbar was praying in his mosque and Farid went and stood behind him. After Akbar finished his prayers he raised both his hands towards the sky and cried, ”O God! Increase my wealth, increase my treasure, increase my kingdom.”

Hearing this, Farid started to turn away. Akbar got up and saw that Farid was going away. He rushed after him and stopped him and asked, ”Why did you come and why are you going away?”

Farid said, ”I thought that you were an emperor but I have found that you are also a beggar. I thought that I would ask for a school for the town. I did not know that you also ask God to increase your wealth and your treasure. It does not look right to ask for something from a beggar. I thought that you were an emperor and now I see that you are also a beggar so I am leaving.

We are all beggars and we all go on asking other beggars for that which they do not have. And when we do not get it we become sad; we weep and cry and feel that we are not getting love.

Love is not something to be obtained from the outside. Love is the music of your inner being. Nobody can give you love. Love can arise within you, but it cannot be obtained from the outside. There is no shop, no market, no salesman where you can buy love. Love cannot be bought at any cost.

Love is an inner flowering. It arises from some dormant energy within, yet all of us search for love outside. All of us search for love in the beloved – which is an absolutely false and futile action.

Search for love within yourself. We cannot even imagine how love can be inside ourselves because love is always associated with an idea of a beloved. It gives us the idea of someone else outside.

Because we don’t remember how love can arise within us, the energy of love remains dormant.

We don’t realize that we are always asking for something outside which is already within us. And because we ask for it outside we do not look inside – then that which could arise never does.

Love is the essential treasure with which each individual is born. Man is not born with money –

money is social accumulation – but man is born with love. It is man’s birthright, it is his individual wealth, it is in him. It is a companion which was given to him by birth and which can accompany him his whole life. But very few are fortunate enough to look within to see where love is – how it can be found and how it can be developed.

So we are born but our wealth remains unexplored; it is never explored at all. And we go on begging at others’ doors, holding out our hands because we want love. All over the world there is only one desire – ’We want love’; and all over the world there is only one complaint – ’We do not get love’. And when we do not get love, we accuse others of being at fault because we do not get love. A wife says to her husband, ”There is something wrong with you, that’s why I do not get love.” A husband says to his wife, ”There is some mistake inside you, hence I am not getting love.” And no one wonders if it ever is possible to get love from the outside.

Love is the inner treasure, and love itself is the music of the veena of the heart. The veena of the heart of man has become very disturbed. The music for which it was created does not arise. How can this music be created? What is the obstacle standing in the way of the creation of this music?

What is the hindrance which does not let it happen? Have you ever thought about the hindrance?

Have you ever thought what the hindrance could be?

An actor who was a good dramatist and a good poet, died. Many people gathered at the cremation ground for his funeral. The director of the film company in which he was working was also present and he said a few words of condolence.

The director said, ”I made this man an actor. It was me who took him out of the back roads and put him on the highways. It was me who gave him his first role in the cinema. It was me who published his first book. I am the reason he became famous all over the world.” He had said this much – I was present at the funeral and some of you may also have been there – the director had said this much when suddenly the corpse which was lying there, got up and said, ”Excuse me, sir, who is to be buried here – you or me? Who are you talking about?”

The director was saying, ”I am the one who made him famous, I am the one who published his book, I am the one who gave him his first role in the movies.... I am the one....”

Even the corpse could not tolerate this noise of ’I’. It got up and said, ”Forgive me, but please tell me one thing: who is to be buried in the grave, you or me? About whom are you talking?” Even corpses cannot tolerate this noise of ’I’ – and man goes on making this noise of ’I’ continually.

How can alive people tolerate it?

There can be only two voices inside man. There is no voice of love within the person who is filled with the voice of ’I’. And there is no voice of ’I’ within the person who is filled with the voice of love.

The two of them can never be found together. It is impossible.

It is the same kind of impossibility as darkness and light existing together.

Once darkness went to god and said, ”The sun keeps chasing after me. He is giving me much trouble. He follows me from morning till night and by the evening I am very tired. And when it is night, before I have completed my sleep and my rest, he starts to follow me again. I do not remember doing anything wrong to him; I don’t think that I have ever made him angry. So why is he following me? Why am I continually harassed? What wrong have I done?”

Then god called the sun and asked, ”Why are you chasing after that poor darkness? He is always moving, hiding, taking shelter here and there. Why do you follow him for twenty-four hours? What is the need?

The sun said, ”Who is this darkness? I have not yet met him. I don’t even know him. Who is darkness? What is darkness? I have not seen him yet, I have not met him yet, but if I have unknowingly committed some mistake then I am ready to ask for forgiveness. And once I recognize him, I will never follow him again.”

They say that millions and trillions of years have passed since this event. This case is pending in the files of god. Yet god has not been able to put darkness and the sun together and I tell you that never in the future will he be able to do so howsoever almighty he may be. Even the almighty does not have the ability to bring darkness in front of the sun, because darkness and light cannot exist together.

There is a reason why they cannot exist together. The reason is that darkness has no being of its own, so it cannot exist in front of the sun. Darkness is only the absence of sun – so how can the absence and the presence of the same thing exist together?

Darkness is only the absence of sun. Darkness is nothing in itself. It is just the absence of sun, it is just the absence of light. So how can the absence of light appear? How can both the things exist together? God will not be able to arrange it.

In the same way ego and love also cannot exist together. Ego is like darkness. It is the absence of love, it is not the presence of love. Within us love is absent so within us the voice of ’I’ goes on resounding. And with this voice of ’I’ we say that ’I’ want to love, ’I’ want to give love; ’I’ want to receive love. Have you gone mad! There has never been any relation between ’I’ and love. And this

’I’ goes on speaking for love – ’I’ want to pray, ’I’ want to attain god, ’I’ want to be liberated.”

This is the same thing as darkness saying, ”I want to hug the sun. I want to love the sun. I want to be a guest in the house of the sun.” It is inconceivable.

’I’ is the absence of love itself. ’I’ is the lack of love, and the more we go on strengthening this voice of ’I’, the less possibility there will be of love within us. The more the ego is there, the more love will be absent; when there is total ego, love will die totally.

There can be no love within us, because if we search inside we will find that the voice of ’I’ is resounding there for twenty-four hours continuously. We breathe with this ’I’, we drink water with this

’I’, we enter a temple with this ’I’. What else is there in our lives except this ’I’?

Our clothes are the clothes of our ’I’. Our positions are the positions of our ’I’. Our knowledge is the knowledge of our ’I’. Our spiritual practice, our helping others, is the helping of our ’I’. Our everything, even our sannyas, is also the sannyas of our ’I’. A strong feeling arises inside that ’I’ am a sannyasin;

’I’ am not a household man; ’I’ am not an ordinary person; ’I’ am a sannyasin; ”I” am a helper; ”I” am a knowledgeable person; ’I’ am rich; ’I’ am this; ’I’ am that....

The house that has been built around this ’I’, will not be acquainted with love. And then that music which could bring the heart to the innermost core, which could make it acquainted with the truth of life, will not arise from the veena of the heart. That door will not open, it will always remain closed.

It has to be very basically understood how strong your ’I’ is, how deep it is! And you have to clearly see if you are giving it more strength, if you are making it deeper, making it stronger and stronger every day. If you are making it stronger yourself, then drop the hope that love can arise within you or that the closed knot of love can open or that the treasure of love can be attained. Drop the very idea. There is no way it can happen.

So I do not tell you to start loving because the ego can also say that ’I’ am a lover and ’I’ love. The love which comes from the ego is absolutely false hence I said that all our love is false – because it comes out of ego, it is the shadow of ego. And remember that the love which comes out of ego is more dangerous than the hate, because hate is clear, direct and simple but love comes with a changed face and it will be difficult to recognize it.

If you are loved with a love that comes out of ego you will feel after a while that you are being held with iron chains instead of loving hands. After a while you will come to know that the love which makes beautiful speeches and sings beautiful songs to you is just tempting you in the beginning.

There is much poison in those sweet songs. And if a love which comes in the form of flowers is a shadow of the ego, then, when you touch the flowers, you will find thorns inside which will pierce you.

When people go to catch fish they put some bait on a hook. The ego wants to become a master of others, it wants to possess them, so it pierces them deeply with the bait of love on a hook. So many people end up in pain and suffering because of their illusions about love; not even in hell do so many people suffer so much. Because of this illusion of love the whole earth, the whole humanity is suffering. But still we do not understand that the love from the ego is false.... This is why this hell has been created.

The love to which ego is attached is a form of jealousy – this is why nobody is as jealous as lovers are. The love which is attached to the ego is a conspiracy and a trick to possess the other. It is a conspiracy – that is why nobody suffocates so many people as those who talk of love. This situation is created because of the ’love’ which comes from the ego – there can never be any relation between love and the ego.

Jalaluddin used to sing a song, a very beautiful song. He used to go from town to town singing the song. Whenever people would ask him to tell them something about god, he would sing the song.

The song was very wonderful. In that song he said that a lover went to the door of his beloved and knocked at the door. And the beloved asked, ”Who are you?”

The lover said – as all lovers say – ”I am your lover!” There was a silence inside. No answer came, no voice was heard from inside. The lover started knocking on the door again, loudly but it seemed that there was no one inside. He started shouting, ”Why is there silence inside? Answer me. I am your lover. I have come.” But the louder he said ”I have come, I am you lover,” the more the house became silent like a graveyard. There was no answer from within.

Then he started beating his head on the door and said, ”At least answer once.”

And one answer came from inside. It was, ”There can be no space in this house for two. You say ’I have come, I am your lover’ but I am already present here. There can be no space for two here. The door of love can open only for those who have dropped the ’I’. Go now! Come some other time.”

The lover left and he prayed and did meditation for years. Many moons passed, many sunrises and sunsets passed, many years passed – and then he returned to the door. When he knocked he again heard the same question, ”Who are you?” This time the lover said, ”There is no ’I’! There is only you.”

Jalaluddin said that at this point the door opened.

I would not have opened the door. Jalaluddin died many years ago, so there is no way for me to tell him that the time was not right for the doors to be opened; he allowed the doors to be opened too soon – because one who says ”There is only you”, still experiences himself as an ’I’. Only one who does not know a ’you’ does not experience himself as an ’I’ either.

So although it is wrong to say love does not contain ’two’, it is equally wrong to say that love contains only one. In love neither two nor one exists. If there is an idea of one, know that another is also present because only the other can be aware of one. Where ’you’ is present, ’I’ is also present.

So I would have sent that lover away again. He said, ”There is no ’I’, there is only you.” But one who says this, is there, totally there. He has just learned a trick. The first time he had answered, ’I am’, and the doors remained closed, so after years of contemplating he decided to say, ”I am not, only you are.”

But who will say this? Why will he say this? One who knows ’you’, also knows ’I’.

Remember that ’you’ is the shadow of ’I’. For one whose ’I’ has disappeared ’you’ does not remain either.

So I would have sent the lover away because the beloved said, ”There is no space for two.” The man did not get it; he started shouting and saying, ”Where are the two? Now I’m not, there is only you!”

The beloved had told him to leave because he had only learned a trick. He still saw two people.

The beloved said that if two were no longer there then the lover would not even have tried to open the door – because who is there to ask to open the door, and who does he want to open it? In the house of two there cannot be love.

The lover went away. Years passed, and he did not return – he never returned. Then the beloved went in search of him.

So I say that the day the shadow of our ’I’ disappears, the day neither ’I’ nor ’you’ remains, that day you do not have to search for the divine, the divine will come searching for you.

No man can seek the divine, because he has no capacity for such a search. But when somebody has become ready to disappear, has become ready to be nothing, has become ready to become an emptiness, then the divine will certainly find him. Only the divine can seek for man, man can never seek for the divine, because even in seeking, the ego is present – ”I am seeking, I have to attain god. I have attained wealth, I have attained a position in parliament, I have got a big house, now the last goal remains: I want also to attain the divine. How can I let go of the prestige of attaining god! It will be my final victory. I must attain this victory. I must also attain the divine.” This is a proclamation, an insistence, a search of the ego itself.

So a religious person is not one who sets out on a search for the divine. A religious person is one who sets out on the search for his ’I’ and the more he goes on searching, the more he finds out that his ’I’ is not there at all. And the day ’I’ does not remain, that day the door which is hiding love opens for him.

So the last thing is: go on a search to find your ’I’, not on a search to find the soul. You do not know anything about your soul at all. Do not go in search of the divine because you do not have even the slightest idea of the divine. How will you seek that about which you do not have any idea at all?

Where will you seek someone for whom you have no address? Where will you seek someone about whom you have no information? Where will you seek for one who has no beginning and no end, one whose location you have no idea of? You will become mad! You will not know where to look.

But we know one thing: we know this ’I’ of ours. So first of all we have to seek this ’I’ – find out what it is, where it is, and who it is. And as you search for it, you will be surprised to find that this ’I’ does not exist; it was an absolutely false notion. It was your imagination that an ’I’ exists; it was an illusion nourished by yourself.

When small children are born, we give them a name for the sake of convenience. We call someone Rama, someone Krishna, someone something else. Nobody has any name, all names are for the sake of convenience, but later on, listening and listening to it continuously, the person gets an illusion that this is his name – I am Rama, I am Krishna. And if you say something bad about Rama he will be ready to fight you – you have abused him. And where did he get his name?

Nobody is born with a name. Everyone is born nameless, but the name has social utility. To make a label without a name is difficult, hence we give a name. We give a name so that others can identify you. It is a social utility. And if we use the name to identify ourself then there will be confusion –

are we calling ourself or someone else? So, to avoid confusion we call ourself ’I’. ’I’ is the title one calls oneself, and the name is the title to call another. Both titles are imaginary, social utilities. And we build the house of our life around these two titles which are simply two blank words and nothing else, behind them there is no truth, behind them there is no substance. There are only names, only titles.

Once such a mistake happened. There was a small girl called Alice. And Alice went wandering in a strange land, a wonderland. When she reached the Queen of Wonderland, the Queen asked Alice a question. She said, ”Did you meet somebody on the way here?” Alice replied, ”I met nobody.”

But the Queen thought that she met someone called ”Nobody”. And this illusion became stronger because then the Queen’s messenger arrived and the Queen asked him also if he had met anybody.

He also said, ”Nobody.”

The Queen said, ”This is very strange.” She thought that a person called ”nobody” had met both Alice and the messenger. So she said to the messenger, ”It seems that Nobody walks slower than you.”

That statement has two meanings. One meaning is that nobody walks slower than the messenger.

The messenger became afraid because a messenger should be able to walk very fast. So he said,

”No! Nobody walks faster than me.”

The Queen said, ”This is a difficult situation! You say that Nobody walks faster than you. But if Nobody walks faster than you, then he should have arrived before you, he should have arrived already.” By now the poor messenger realized that some kind of misunderstanding had happened!

He said, ”Nobody is nobody.”

The Queen said, ”I know that Nobody is Nobody. But who is he? Tell me. He must have arrived by now. Where is he?”

With man, the same misunderstanding through language happens. Everyone’s name is ’nobody’.

No name has any more meaning than this. All the idea of ’I’ is nobody, not more than that. But through the misunderstanding of language an illusion is created that I am something. I have a name.

Man dies but leaves his name written on stones, hoping that perhaps the stones will remain. We do not know if they will. All the sand on the sea shores was stones at one time. All stones become sand. Whether you write your name on sand or you write it on stone, it is the same thing. In this long story of the world there is no difference between sand and stone. Children write their names on the sand at the sea shore; maybe they think that tomorrow people will pass by and see. But the waves come and wipe the sand clean – and the older people laugh and say, ”Are you mad! There is no meaning in names written on sand!”

But the older people write on stones and they do not know that sand is created out of stones. There is no difference between old people and children. In foolishness we are all of equal age.

An emperor became a chakravartin. This happens rarely. A chakravartin means a master of the whole earth. An old story says that chakravartins had a special privilege which was not available to anybody else, which others could not have. They had a chance to sign their name on Mt. Sumeru, the mountain in heaven. Even in infinite time it is rare for someone to become a chakravartin, so signatures on Mt. Sumeru, the eternal mountain, are a rare phenomenon.

When the emperor became a chakravartin, he was very happy. Now he had the privilege of signing his name on Mt. Sumeru. He reached the entrance of heaven with great pomp and show, accompanied by a great army. The doorkeeper said, ”You have arrived? You can come in but this crowd cannot come inside, they will have to go home. Have you brought some tools to carve your name with?” The emperor replied, ”I have brought the instruments.”

The doorkeeper told him, ”This Mt. Sumeru is infinite, but there have been so many chakravartins that now there is no space left to sign on it. So first of all you will have to erase someone’s name and then you can sign your name there because no space is left; the whole mountain is covered.”

The emperor went through the gate. The mountain was infinite. Many Himalayas could be contained in its smaller ranges, and on its surface not even an inch of space was left. He had thought that someone became a chakravartin in infinite time, but he had no idea that so much time has passed that even with one person becoming a chakravartin in infinite time, the whole mountain would be full, no space would be left.

The emperor became very sad and upset. The doorkeeper said to him, ”Don’t be sad. My father and his father and his father also used to do this job – for generations we have known that whenever you want to sign, you have to erase the surface. You never get an empty space.”

Then the emperor turned around. He said, ”If one can sign only after erasing somebody’s name, then it is madness – because I will sign and go and then somebody else will come tomorrow, erase my signature and sign theirs. When this mountain is so big and there are so many names, who reads them? And what is the point? Forgive me, I am making a mistake. This is futile.”

There are only a few such intelligent people. The others get their names written on stones, on temples; they build memorials and get their names written on them and forget that they were born without names. They have no names of their own. So on one hand stone is wasted, and on the other hand labour is wasted and when they die and say goodbye, they go nameless. We do not have any name of our own. The ’name’ is the illusion visible to the outside world and the ’I’ is the illusion visible to the inside. ’I’ and ’name’ are two sides of the same coin. The name is visible from the outer side and the ’I’ is visible from the inner side. And as long as this illusion of ’name’ and ’I’

remains, the space from where love arises does not open.

So the last thing that I want to say is: search a little bit. Go to Mt. Sumeru and see how many signatures have been put there. Do you also want to add your name by erasing the surface? Go a little bit closer to the mountains and watch them turning into sand. Watch the children signing their names on the sea beach. Look all around you at what we are doing. Are we wasting our lives signing names on the sand? And if you feel like that then search a little bit further; enter inside this

’I’ and seek. One day you will find that ’I’ is nobody. There is nobody there. There is a deep silence and peace there but there is no ’I’. And the day you come to know that there is no ’I’ inside you, you come to know the whole, that which really is – the being, the existence, the divine.

That is why I say that love is the door to the divine and ego is the door to ignorance. Love is the door to light and ego is the door to darkness. I had to say this last thing before we depart. Make some explorations into love from this dimension. But this exploration will begin with the ego and it will end with the attainment of love. So explore in this direction: does this shadow of the ego really exist, does this ’I’ really exist? The man who sets out on this exploration not only doesn’t find an ’I’

but he also attains to the divine. One who is tied to the stake of ’I’ is not able to make any voyage into the ocean of the divine. This was the last thing I wanted to say to you. In fact this is the first and last thing to be said.

’I’ is the first in a person’s life and ’I’ is the last. The person tied up in ’I’ experiences pain – and after getting free of ’I’, he attains to bliss. There is no story, no tale except ’I’. There is no dream except

’I’. There is no lie except ’I’.

Find this ’I’ and the doors to bliss can open. If the rock of ’I’ is shattered the springs of love will start flowing. Then the heart fills with the music of love. When the heart is filled with love, a new journey starts which is difficult to describe in words. That journey will take you to the very center of life.

I wanted to say these few things before leaving.

Now we will sit for the night meditation. For ten minutes we will sit for the night meditation and then we will say goodbye. And I will say goodbye to you with a hope and a prayer to god that that everybody will be blessed enough to attain to love, that everybody will be blessed enough to get rid of the sickness of ’I’, that everybody will be blessed enough to find that which is already within him.

A beggar had died in a very big town – I hope to god that you will not die like that beggar! The beggar had died after begging in the same place for forty years. He had thought that he would become an emperor while begging, but can anybody become an emperor by begging? The more a person begs, the greater a beggar he becomes.

The day he started he was a small beggar, the day he died he was a great beggar, but he did not become an emperor. He died. So the people in the neighborhood behaved in the same way with him as they did with other dead people – they took away his corpse and burnt it and the rags he had left lying there. Then the people of the neighborhood thought that for forty years this beggar made this very earth dirty and it would be good to dig up some of that earth and throw it away. So they started digging.

Then they got a big surprise – if the beggar had been alive he would have gone mad! After digging up the earth they found a huge treasure buried right under where the beggar used to sit and beg.

He did not know that if he had dug up the earth underneath him he would have become an emperor and there would have been no need to beg.

But what did the poor man know? His eyes were looking outside, his hands were spread out, so he died begging. All the people of the neighborhood stood there quite shocked – what kind of beggar was this! This idiot did not even realize that a treasure was buried in the place where he was sitting.

I went to that area and met the people of the neighborhood and I said to them, ”Idiots, don’t be concerned about the beggar. Drop your judgments of the beggar. Sometime you also dig up your earth beneath you – else it may be that when you die other people will laugh at you.” When a person dies other people laugh at him saying that he was mad, he could not achieve anything in his life.

And they do not know that other people are just waiting for them to die so that they can also laugh and say that this person was really mad and could not achieve anything.

Living people laugh at somebody when he dies, but if a living person could get the idea of laughing at himself while he is still alive, then his life would change. He would become a different person. If in these three days of the camp you remember to laugh at yourself then the matter is finished. If you remember to dig up the place where you are standing now then the matter is finished. Then all that I have said can certainly come to its fruition in you.

In the end I just pray that you will not die a beggar but an emperor. I pray that you will not give the people of the neighborhood the chance to laugh. For these days you have listened to my talks so silently and so lovingly, I am very grateful. And I bow down to the god present in everybody. Please accept my greetings.

Now we will sit for the night meditation. All of you make some space so that you can lie down. This is the last meditation so use it as totally as you can. Everybody should be at some distance from each other.

Don’t talk. Nobody should talk. Those people sitting there should spread out. Nobody should be touching anybody else. Move away from there, move where there is space. Don’t talk at all because this has nothing to do with talking. Some people should come here in the front and be careful that nobody should be disturbed because of somebody else.

First of all lie down with your body totally relaxed. Allow it to be completely loose and relaxed. Then slowly close your eyes. Close your eyes.

You have closed the eyes and have completely relaxed the body. Now I will give suggestions – go on listening, your body and mind will follow them.

Feel that the body is becoming relaxed, the body is becoming relaxed, the body is getting relaxed, the body is becoming relaxed. Feel that the body is getting relaxed, allow the body to be totally relaxed. And feel in the mind that the body has become totally relaxed, the body has become relaxed, the body has become totally relaxed....

The breath is becoming silent. Feel in the mind that the breath is becoming silent, the breath is becoming silent.... The breath has become silent, the breath has become silent....

The mind is also becoming empty. The mind is becoming silent. Feel that the mind is becoming silent, the mind has become silent....

Now for ten minutes remain awake inside and keep listening silently to all the sounds around. Stay awake inside, don’t go to sleep. Remain conscious inside. Stay awake inside and keep listening silently. Just keep listening. Keep listening to the silence of the night, and while listening, a deep emptiness will arise.

Listen!

For ten minutes keep listening silently, just silently listening.

The mind is becoming

completely empty. The mind is becoming empty. The mind has become empty, the mind has become empty....

The mind has become totally empty. The mind is becoming empty. Drown in the emptiness created all around. The mind is becoming empty. The mind is becoming empty, the mind is becoming empty.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8