Meditation means how to be not a mind. How to be not a mind! Meditation means how to create the state of no-mindedness. It doesn't mean unconsciousness. It means conscious and still, without any disturbance in the consciousness; conscious with no ripples, with no waves, with no vibrations; conscious as a deep, calm, silent pool with no ripples on it, with no disturbances on the surface; just a calm silent pool with no breeze to disturb, just mirrorlike.

And that is the trouble with all lovers: they want more love, because they don't understand that the real desire is not for more love, but for something more than love. Their language ends with love; they don't know any way that is higher than love, and love does not satisfy. On the contrary, the more you love the more thirsty you become. At the fourth center of love, one feels a tremendous satisfaction only when energy starts moving to the fifth center.

Sannyas means dropping the fight with the river, going with the river, allowing the river to take you, learning the art of let-go. Those two small, simple words 'let', 'go', define the very spirit of sannyas. Then one can say 'Let thy kingdom come, thy will be done.' Then one withdraws one's will, and the moment you withdraw your will your life becomes immensely rich. Suddenly the whole is with you, and we can be victorious only when the whole is with us.

People are not afraid of death, they are afraid of losing their separation, they are afraid of losing their ego. Once you start feeling separate from existence the fear of death arises because then death seems to be dangerous. You will no longer be separate; what will happen to your ego, your personality? And you have cultivated the personality with such care, with such great effort; you have polished it your whole life, and death will come and destroy it

As your consciousness becomes more settled, all your life patterns change. What religions have called sin will disappear from your life, and what they have called virtue will automatically flow from your being, from your actions. But they have been doing just vice versa: first change the acts... It is as if you are in a dark house, and you are stumbling over furniture and over things, and you are told that unless you stop stumbling, light is not possible.

Our whole life is a fooling around. You can do it because you are not aware of how you waste time, how you waste energy - how life is wasted you are not aware. It is going down the drain. Everything is going down the drain. Only when death comes to you, you may become aware, alert: What have I been doing? What have I done with life? A great opportunity has been lost. What was I doing fooling around? I was not sober. I never reflected upon what I was doing.

If life is a gift then all that belongs to life is going to be a gift. Happiness, love, meditation - all that is beautiful is going to be a gift from the holy, from the whole. You cannot deserve it in any way and you cannot force existence to make you happy, or to make you loving, or to make you meditative. That very effort is of the ego. That very effort creates misery. That very effort goes against you. That very effort has destroyed you - it is suicidal.

I am not saying that you should renounce things, that you should escape from your home and renounce the marketplace. No, don't misunderstand my statement. What is, is good. Nothing will happen either by dropping things and escaping from them or by clinging to them. Remain where you are, but begin the search within. Much outer searching has already been done, now go within. Now know the one, in this knowing one attains all. All desires are at once fulfilled.

Small children smoking, and the mother is not aware that it is because the breast has been taken away. In all primitive communities a seven-year-old child, or even an eight or nine-year-old child, will continue breast-feeding. Then there is a satisfaction and smoking will not be so necessary. That's why in primitive communities men are not so much interested in women's breasts; there is no problem that somebody will attack them. Nobody looks at the breasts.

This is what meditation means: how to be not identified with the mind - how to create a space between yourself and your own mind. It is difficult because we never make any separation. We go on thinking in terms that the mind means me: mind and me are totally identified. If they are totally identified, then you will never be at peace; then you will never be able to enter the divine, because the divine can be entered only when the social has been left behind.

Heaven and hell are not very distant, they are neighbors; only a small fence divides them. You can jump that fence, even without a gate. You go on jumping from this to that. In the morning you may be in heaven; by evening you are in hell. This moment heaven, that moment hell. It is just an attitude, just a state of your mind, just how you are feeling. Many times, in a single life, you may visit hell, and many times you may visit heaven. In a single day also.

The whole existence is surrounded by a divine energy that protects you, cares for you, is always available. If you go on missing it, it is only because of you. If you keep your doors closed, the sun may be outside but you will live in darkness. Even if the doors are open and the sun is there, you can keep your eyes closed and you will still live in darkness. So is the case with god: his love is always there but our hearts are not open, our hearts are closed.

Zen's greatest contribution is to give you an alternative to the serious man. The serious man has made the world, the serious man has made all the religions. He has created all the philosophies, all the cultures, all the moralities; everything that exists around you is a creation of the serious man. Zen has dropped out of the serious world. It has created a world of its own which is very playful, full of laughter, where even great masters behave like children.

Love and ego cannot go together. Knowledge and ego go together perfectly well, but love and ego cannot go together, not at all. They cannot keep company. They are like darkness and light: if light is there darkness cannot be. Darkness can only be if light is not there. If love is not there the ego can be; if love is there the ego cannot be. And vice versa, if ego is dropped, love arrives from all the directions. It simply starts pouring in you from everywhere.

This is the deepest experiment of life. And whatever has been discovered in regard to life, this is the most significant finding of all: don't ask for happiness if you want to be happy, don't ask for peace if you want to be peaceful. Whatever you ask for will be lost. Whatever you do not ask for you will get. You have asked many times and seen that you do not receive it. Now try not asking and see. There is no need to believe me; there is a need to experiment.

I have never said that love is destroyed by marriage. How can marriage destroy love? Yes, it is destroyed in marriage, but it is destroyed by you, not by marriage. It is destroyed by the partners. How can marriage destroy love? It is you who destroy it, because you don't know what love is. You simply pretend to know, you simply hope that you know, you dream that you know, but you don't know what love is. Love has to be learned; it is the greatest art there is.

All the great masters in the world have been saying only one thing down the centuries, "Have your own mind and have your own individuality. Don't be a part of the crowd; don't be a wheel in the whole mechanism of a vast society. Be individual, on your own. Live life with your own eyes; listen to music with your own ears." But we are not doing anything with our own ears, with our own eyes, with our own minds; everything is being taught, and we are following it.

A buddha laughs too, but his laughter has the quality of a smile. His laughter has the feminine quality of grace. When an ignorant person laughs, his laughter is very aggressive, egoistic. The ignorant person always laughs at others. The contented person, the person who knows life a little, laughs at himself - at the whole play of life itself. It is not addressed to anybody in particular. He just laughs at the absurdity of it all... the impossibility of it all.

Then ego goes on growing, because the society needs you as an ego, not as a Self. The Self is irrelevant for the society; your periphery is meaningful. And there are many problems. The ego can be taught and the ego can be made docile and the ego can be forced to be obedient. The ego can be made to adjust, but not the Self. The Self cannot be taught, the Self cannot be forced. The Self is intrinsically rebellious, individual. It cannot be made a part of society.

Take a good look at your mind. Examine it closely. The first thing you will come to know is that the mind has become the master - not you and not your soul! The mind says: Do this! And you do it! If you don't the mind creates problems. It become sad, and the sadness of the mind becomes your sadness. If you do as it says you get nowhere, for the mind is blind. Where can you reach by obeying the mind! The is unconsciousness. If you listen to it you reach nowhere.

There is no greater enjoyment than that of sharing something. Have you given something to somebody? That`s why people enjoy giving gifts so much. It is a sheer delight. When you give something to somebody - maybe valueless, may not be of much value - but just the way, just the gesture that you give, satisfies tremendously. Just think of a person whose whole life is a gift! whose every moment is a sharing - he lives in heaven. There is no other heaven than that.

The question of surrender is political, it is not a question of love. And relationship is not love at all; it means love has ended and relationship has begun. It begins very soon after the honeymoon - mostly in the middle of the honeymoon. It is not easy to live with another person whose life-style is different, whose likings are different, whose education and culture is different, and above all the other happens to be a woman - even their biology is different.

Be light-hearted, light-footed. Be of light step. Don't carry religion like a burden. And don't expect religion to be a teaching; it is not. It is certainly a discipline, but not a teaching at all. Teaching has to be imposed upon you from the outside and teaching can only reach to your mind, never to your heart, and never, never to the very center of your being. Teaching remains intellectual. It is an answer to human curiosity, and curiosity is not a true search.

Every child is simple, just a clean slate. Then the parents start writing on his slate - what he has to become. Then the teachers, the priests, the leaders - they all go on emphasizing that you have to become somebody; otherwise, you have wasted your life. Just the opposite is the case. You are a being. You need not become anybody else. That is the meaning of simplicity: remaining at ease with one's being, and not going on any track of becoming - which is unending.

The man who has lived his life totally, intensely, passionately, without any fear - without any fear that has been created in you by the priests for centuries and centuries - if a person lives his life without any fear, authentically, spontaneously, death will not create any fear in him, not at all. In fact, death will come as a great rest. Death will come as the ultimate flowering of life. He will be able to enjoy death too; he will be able to celebrate death too.

Laughter. Yes, laughter is the Zen attitude towards death and towards life too, because life and death are not separate. Whatsoever is your attitude towards life will be your attitude towards death, because death comes as the ultimate flowering of life. Life exists for death. Life exists through death. Without death there will be no life at all. Death is not the end but the culmination, the crescendo. Death is not the enemy it is the friend. It makes life possible.

Meditation means getting out of the mind, looking at the mind from the outside. That`s exactly the meaning of the word `ecstasy`: to stand out. To stand out of the mind makes you ecstatic, brings bliss to you. And great intelligence is released. When you are identified with the mind you cannot be very intelligent because you become identified with an instrument, you become confined by the instrument and its limitations. And you are unlimited - you are consciousness.

Your politicians, priests, parents, they all are guilt-creators, because that is the only way that you can be controlled and manipulated. A very simple, but very cunning trick to manipulate you. They have condemned you, because if you are accepted, not condemned - loved, appreciated, and if it is relayed to you from everywhere that you are okay - then it will be difficult to control you. How to control a person who is absolutely okay? The very problem doesn`t arise.

We have forced everyone to go into marriage because of love. Because you cannot love outside it, so we have unnecessarily forced love and marriage to be together - unnecessarily. Marriage is for deeper things - even more deep: for intimacy, for a "co-inherence," to work on something which cannot be done alone, which can be done together, which needs a togetherness, a deep togetherness. Because of this love-starved society, we fall into marriage out of romantic love.

Awareness means to listen to me unfocused - alert of course, not fallen asleep, but alert to these birds, their chirping, alert to the wind that passes through the trees, alert to everything that is happening. Concentration excludes much, includes little. Awareness excludes nothing, includes all. Awareness is a state of no-mind. You are, yet you are not focused. You are just a mirror reflecting all, echoing all; see the beauty of it and the silence and the stillness.

Once you know it, you move as a nonbeing. Nobody can make you angry, nobody can make you happy, unhappy, miserable. No! In that emptiness all dualities dissolve: happy, unhappy, miserable, blissful - all dissolve. This is buddhahood. This is what happened under the bodhi tree to Gautam Siddhartha. He reached emptiness. Then everything is silent. You have gone beyond opposites. A master is to help you to go to your inner emptiness, the inner silence, the inner temple.

You earn money, and one day money is there -- then life says to you, 'What have you got?' But you don't listen. Now you think you have to put your money into politics, you have to become a prime minister or a president -- then everything will be okay. One day you are a prime minister, and life again says, 'What have you got?' You don't listen. You go on thinking of something else and something else and something else. Life is vast -- that's why many lives are wasted.

Many times people ask me, "What is sin and what is virtue? And how to decide?" If you decide your decision will be wrong. If you choose you will be wrong. All choice is wrong. There is no way to decide. There is no need to decide what is sin and what is virtue. You only need a transparent mind, a clarity, a thoughtless mind, a no-mind, a mirror-like consciousness. In that consciousness WHATSOEVER HAPPENS is virtue. In that consciousness WHATSOEVER CANNOT HAPPEN is sin.

In fact, entertainment has taken the place of celebration in the present world. But entertainment is quite different from celebration; entertainment and celebration are never the same. In celebration you are a participant; in entertainment you are only a spectator. In entertainment you watch others playing for you. So while celebration is active, entertainment is passive. In celebration you dance, while in entertainment you watch someone dancing, for which you pay him.

Do you think the people who were trying to reach to the Everest were not full of doubts? For a hundred years, how many people tried and how many people lost their lives? Do you know how many people never came back? But, still, people come from all over the world, risking, knowing they may never return. For them it is worth it - because in the very risk something is born inside of them: the center. It is born only in the risk. That's the beauty of risk, the gift of risk.

Meditation means: remain as relaxed as you are in deep sleep and yet alert. Keep awareness there; let thoughts disappear but awareness has to be retained. And this is not difficult: it is just that we have not tried it, that's all. It is like swimming: if you have not tried it, it looks very difficult; it looks very dangerous too. And you cannot believe how people can swim because you simply drown! But once you have tried a little bit it comes easily; it is very natural.

Everybody knows what celebration is. I have never come across a person who does not know what celebration is. Just rejoicing in your being, just rejoicing in this moment, this tremendous universe. You had not asked for it, you have simply been given a universe which is infinite and eternal. You have not asked and you have been given a consciousness which is eternal, which can become festive. If you allow it, it can make you the sanest, the most graceful, the most loving.

Remember that hate is not the opposite of love as people think. Hate is love standing upside down; it is not the opposite of love. The real opposite of love is fear. In love one expands, in fear one shrinks. In fear one becomes closed, in love one opens. In fear one doubts, in love one trusts. In fear one is left lonely. In love one disappears; hence there is no question of loneliness at all. Love is when you have known your inner sky. There is no higher religion than love

Sannyas is celebration of life, and sin is natural: natural in the sense that you are unconscious - what else can you do? In unconsciousness, sin is bound to happen. Sin simply means that you don't know what you are doing, you are unaware, so whatsoever you do goes wrong. But to recognize that "I am a sinner" is the beginning of a great pilgrimage. To recognize that "I am a sinner" is the beginning of real virtue. To see that "I am ignorant" is the first glimpse of wisdom.

These firecrackers outside and these lights outside cannot make you rejoice. They are only for children; for you, they are just a nuisance. But in your inner world there can be a continuity of lights, songs, joys. Always remember that society compensates you when it feels that the repressed may explode into a dangerous situation if it is not compensated. Society finds some way of allowing you to let out the repressed. But this is not true celebration, and it cannot be true.

What do marriage vows show? They show that you may want to separate sometime in the future. If there is love between two people, the thought of taking vows never arises. This is only an indication of the absence of love. People do not marry out of love; they marry out of fear. If there is love on this earth, marriage will become redundant. When love is not, marriage is a must. We make arrangements for that which we cannot do. We make rules for that which we are not sure of.

I teach contentment. And the basic principle of contentment is to drop your ego. Don`t think for a single moment, "To be or not to be." Just not to be is the rule. What have you gained by trying to be? Just for a change try not to be, and you will be amazed. The moment you are not, there is contentment, there is silence, there is beauty, there is bliss. Meditation is only a methodology to make you aware that your only disease is your ego, and your only health is egolessness.

If I fulfill YOUR expectations, how am I going to transform you? I have to DESTROY your expectations. I have to destroy the very mind that creates those expectations. If you come to me, never come with expectations, otherwise you will be disappointed - because I have no obligation to fulfill your expectations in any way. In fact, if I see that there are some expectations, I do things DELIBERATELY to destroy those expectations. That is the price you have to pay to be with me.

This is the case with millions of people. They talk about love, they know all the poetries about love, but they have never loved. Or even if they thought they were in love, they were never in love. That too was a 'heady' thing, it was not of the heart. People live and go on missing life. It needs courage. It needs courage to be realistic, it needs courage to move with life wherever it leads, because the paths are uncharted, there exists no map. One has to go into the unknown.

I would like you to accept only one prayer, and that is laughter, because when you are totally laughing you are in the present. You cannot laugh in the future and you cannot laugh in the past. All those people who have created this retarded humanity have taken away all juice, all laughter, all smiles, and dragged everybody into being inauthentic. And if you are inauthentic, insincere, you can never grow the seed that has been given to you by this great compassionate universe.

Religion is not based on belief or faith: religion is based on awe, religion is based on wonder. Religion is based on the mysterious that is your surround. To feel it, to be aware of it, to see it, open your eyes and drop the dust of the ages. Clean your mirror! and see what beauty surrounds you, what tremendous grandeur goes on knocking at your doors. Why are you sitting with closed eyes? Why are you sitting with such long faces? Why can't you dance? and why can't you laugh?

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

Greed, desire, ambition, jealousy, possessiveness, domination - you have to watch everything. And they are all interconnected, remember. If greed disappears, then anger will disappear. If anger disappears, jealousy will disappear. If jealousy disappears, violence will disappear. If violence disappears, possessiveness will disappear. They are all intertwined. In fact, they are spokes of the same wheel, and the hub that supports them all is the ego. So watch the ways of the ego.

You know your inside, and you know the others' outside: that creates jealousy. They know your outside, and they know their inside: that creates jealousy. Nobody else knows your inside. There you know you are nothing, worthless. And the others on the outside look so smiling. Their smiles may be phony, but how can you know that they are phony? Maybe their hearts are also smiling. You know your smile is phony, because your heart is not smiling at all, it may be crying and weeping.

Each moment life is new and you have to respond from your inner newness, you have to be available to the new as the new. And you have to respond, not out of your knowledge, but out of your present awareness. Only then life works, otherwise life stops working. If your life is not working, remember, it is the ego that is hindering, the mechanical has encroached upon the organic. To be free from the mechanical is to be in God, because it is to be in the organic unity of existence.

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