Chapter 2 – Decoding Life-Negative Conditioning

CHAPTER TWO

Decoding Life-Negative
Conditioning

The only duty you have is to be happy. Make it a religion to be happy. If you are not happy, then whatsoever you are doing, something must be wrong and some drastic change is needed. Let happiness decide.

I am a hedonist. And happiness is the only criterion man has.
So always look at what happens when you do something: if you become peaceful or restful at home relaxed, it is right. This is the criterion; nothing else is the criterion. What is right for you may not be right for somebody else; remember that too. Because what is easy for you may not be easy for somebody else; something else may be easy for him. So there can be no universal law about it. Every individual has to work it out for himself. What is easy for you?

WHY WE CHOOSE TO BE UNHAPPY

This is one of the most complex human problems. It has to be considered very deeply, and it is not theoretical ——it concerns you. This you.This is how everybody is behaving ——always choosing the wrong way, always choosing to be the sad, the depressed, the miserable. There must be profound reasons for it, and there are.

First, thing: the way human beings are brought up plays a very definite role in it. If you are unhappy, you gain something from it, ; you always gain. If you are happy, you always lose.
From the very beginning an alert child senses starts feeling the distinction. Whenever he is unhappy, everybody is sympathetic towards him, he gains sympathy. Everybody tries to be loving towards him, he gains love. And even more than that whenever he is unhappy everybody is attentive towards him, he gains attention. Attention works like food for the ego, a very alcoholic stimulant. It gives you energy; you feel you are somebody. Hence so much need, so much desire to get attention.
If everybody is looking at you, you become important. If nobody is looking at you, you feel as if you are not there, you are no more, you are a non-being. People looking at you, people caring about you gives you energy.

The ego exists in relationship. The more people pay attention to you, the more you gain ego. If nobody looks at you, the ego dissolves. If everybody has completely forgotten you, how can the ego exist? How can you feel that you are? Hence the need for societies, associations, clubs. All over the world clubs exist ——Rotary, Lions, Masonic Lodges ——millions of clubs and societies. These societies and clubs exist only to give attention to people who cannot get attention in other ways.

It is difficult to become a president of a country. It is difficult to become a mayor of a corporation. It is easier to become the president of a Lions Club, then a particular group gives you attention. You are very important — doing nothing! Lions Clubs, Rotary Clubs…doing nothing at all but still they feel they are something important. And the president goes on changing — one this year, another next year. Everybody gets attention. It is a mutual arrangement, and everybody feels important.
From the very beginning a the child learns the politics. The politics are: look miserable, then you get sympathy, then everybody is attentive. Look ill ——you become important. An ill child becomes dictatorial; the whole family has to follow him —— whatever whatsoever he says is the rule.

When he is happy, nobody listens to him. When he is healthy, nobody cares about him. When he is perfect, nobody is attentive. From the very beginning we start choosing the miserable, the sad, the pessimistic, the darker side of life. That’s one reality thing.

A second thing related to it is: whenever you are happy, whenever you are joyful, whenever you feel ecstatic and blissful, everybody is jealous of you. Jealousy means that everybody is antagonistic, nobody is friendly; at that moment, everybody is an enemy. So you have learned learnt not to be so ecstatic that everybody becomes inimical towards you ——not to show your bliss, not to laugh.

Look at people when they laugh. They laugh very calculatingly. It is not a belly-laugh, it is not coming from the very depth of their being. They first look at you, then they judge… . . . and then they laugh. And they laugh to a particular extent, the extent you will tolerate, the extent which will not be taken amiss, the extent where nobody will become jealous.

Even our smiles are political. Laughter has disappeared, bliss has become absolutely unknown, and to be ecstatic is almost impossible because it is not allowed. If you are miserable, nobody will think you are mad. If you are ecstatic and dancing everybody will think you are mad. Dance is rejected, singing is not accepted. A blissful man —— and we think something has gone wrong if we see one.

What type of society is this? If someone is miserable, everything is okay; he fits because the whole society is miserable, more or less. He is a member, he belongs to us. If somebody becomes ecstatic, we think he has gone berserk, insane. He doesn’t belong to us ——and we feel jealous.
Because of jealousy we condemn him. Because of jealousy we will try in every way to put him back to his old state. We call that old state normality. Psychoanalysts will help, psychiatrists will help to bring that man to the normal misery.

In the West, the whole society is turning against psychedelics. The law, the state, the government, the legal experts, the high courts, the legislators, priests, popes — everybody is turning against. They are not really against psychedelics — they are against people being ecstatic. They are not against alcohol, they are not against other things which are drugs, but they are against psychedelics because psychedelics can create a chemical change in you. And the old crust that the society has created around you, the imprisonment in misery, can be broken, there can be a break-through. You can come out of it, even for a few moments, and be ecstatic.
Society cannot allow ecstasy. Ecstasy is the greatest revolution. I repeat it: ecstasy is the greatest revolution. If people become ecstatic the whole society will have to change, because this society is based on misery.

If people are blissful, you cannot lead them to war ——to Vietnam, or to Egypt, or to Israel. No. Someone who is blissful will just laugh and say: This is nonsense!
If people are blissful, you cannot make them obsessed with money. They will not waste their whole lives just accumulating money. It will look like madness to them that a person is destroying his whole life, just exchanging his life for dead money, dying and accumulating money. And the money will be there when he is dead. This is absolute madness! But this madness cannot be seen unless you are ecstatic.

If people are ecstatic then the whole pattern of this society will have to change. This society exists on misery. Misery is a great investment for this society. So we bring up children… . . . from the very beginning we create a leaning towards misery. That’s why they always choose misery.

In the morning for everybody has there is a choice. And not only in the morning, every moment there is a choice to be miserable or to be happy. You always choose to be miserable because there is an investment. You always choose to be miserable because that has become a habit, a pattern, ; you have always done that. You have become efficient at doing it, ; it has become a track. The moment your mind has to choose, it immediately flows towards misery.

Misery seems to be downhill, ; ecstasy seems to be uphill. Ecstasy looks very difficult to reach ——but it is not so. The real thing is quite the opposite: ecstasy is downhill, misery is uphill. Misery is a very difficult thing to achieve, but you have achieved it, you have done the impossible —— because misery is so antinature anti-nature. Nobody wants to be miserable and everybody IS miserable.
Society has done a great job. Education, culture, and the culturing agencies, parents, teachers ——they have done a great job. They have made miserable creatures out of ecstatic creators. Every child is born ecstatic. Every child is born a god. And every man dies a madman.

Unless you recover, unless you reclaim your childhood, you will not be able to become the white clouds I am talking about. This is your the whole work for you, the whole SADHANA ——how to regain childhood, how to reclaim it. If you can become a child children again, then there is no misery.
I don’t mean that for a child there are no moments of misery ——there are. But still there is no misery. Try to understand this.

A child can become miserable, he can be unhappy, intensely unhappy in a moment, but he is so total in that unhappiness, he is so one with that unhappiness, that there is no division. The child separate from unhappiness does is not exist there. The child is not looking at his unhappiness separate, divided. The child is IS unhappiness ——he is so involved in it. And when you become one with unhappiness, unhappiness is not unhappiness. If you become so one with it, even that has a beauty of its own.

So look at a child ——an unspoilt child, I mean. If he is angry, then his whole energy becomes anger; nothing is left behind, nothing is reserved hold-up. He has moved and become anger; there is nobody manipulating and controlling the anger it. There is no mind. The child has become anger —— he is not angry, he has become the anger. And then see the beauty, the flowering of anger. The child never looks ugly ——even in anger he looks beautiful. He just looks more intense, more vital, more alive ——a volcano ready to erupt. Such a small child, such a great energy, such an atomic being ——with the whole universe to explode.

And after this anger the child will be silent. After this anger the child will be very peaceful. After this anger the child will relax. We may think it is very miserable to be in that anger, but the child is not miserable ——he has enjoyed it.
If you become one with anything you become blissful. If you separate yourself from anything, even if it is happiness, you will become miserable.
So this is the key. To be separate as an ego is the base of all misery; to be one, to be flowing, with whatever whatsoever life brings to you, to be in it so intensely, so totally, that you are no more, you are lost, then everything is blissful.
The choice is there, but you have even become unaware of the choice. You have been choosing the wrong thing so continuously, it has become such a dead habit, that you simply choose it automatically. There is no choice left.

Become alert. Each moment when you are choosing to be miserable remember: this is your choice. Even this mindfulness will help, the alertness that this is my choice and I am responsible, and this is what I am doing to myself, this is my doing. Immediately you will feel a difference. The quality of mind will have changed. It will be easier for you to move towards happiness.
And once you know that this is your choice, then the whole thing has become a game. Then if you love to be miserable, be miserable, but remember, that this is your choice and don’t complain. There is nobody else who is responsible for it. This is your drama. If you like it this way, if you like the a miserable way, if you want to pass through life in misery, then this is your choice, your game. You are playing it. Play it well!

Then dDon’t go and ask people how not to be miserable. That is absurd. Don’t go and ask masters and gurus how to be happy. The so-called gurus exist because you are foolish. You create the misery, and then you go and ask others how to uncreate it. And you will wi]l go on creating misery because you are not alert to what you are doing. From this very moment try, try to be happy and blissful.

Note: This matter is taken from

TWO WAYS TO LIVE

There are two ways to live, to be, to know: one is of effort, will, ego; the other is of no effort, no struggle, but being in a let-go with existence.

All the religions of the world have been teaching you the first way, to fight ——fight against nature, fight against the world, fight against your own body, fight against the mind. Only then can you achieve the truth, the ultimate, the eternal. But it is enough proof that this will to power, this path of the ego, this fighting and war has utterly failed. In millions of years, very few people have achieved the ultimate experience of life, so few that they only prove the exception, they don’t prove the rule.
I teach you the second way: don’t go against the current of existence, go with it; it is not your enemy. Just as a person can try to go upstream, fighting with the river, soon he will be tired and he is not going to get reach anywhere. The river is vast and he is a small part.

In this vast existence, you are smaller than an atom. How can you fight against the whole? The very idea is unintelligent. And you are produced by the whole — , so how can it be your enemy? Nature is your mother, it cannot be against you. Your body is your very life, it cannot be antagonistic to you. It serves you in spite of your continuous fight with it. It serves you when you are awake, it serves you even when you are asleep. Who goes on breathing? You are fast asleep and snoring. Your The body has its own wisdom. It continues to breathe, the heart continues to beat, the body goes on functioning without you. In fact, it functions better when you are not present. Your presence is always a disturbance, because your mind is conditioned by people who have told you to be against it.

I teach you to have a friendship with existence. I do not want you to renounce the world, because the world is yours, ours. Nothing that exists is against you. All that you have to learn is the art of living ——not the art of renouncing, but the art of rejoicing. It is only a question of learning an art and you can change the poison into nectar.
On so many medicines you will find written, the word poison, but in the hands of a scientific expert the poison has become a medicine. It does not kill you, ; it saves you.

If you find that somewhere your body, nature, the world is against you, remember one thing: it must be your ignorance, ; it must be some wrong attitude. It must be that you don’t know the art of living. You are unaware that existence cannot be against you. You are born out of it, you live in it, it has given everything to you and you are not even grateful. On the contrary, all the religions have been teaching you to condemn it from the very beginning.

Any religion that teaches you condemnation of life is poisonous. It is anti-life, ; it is in the service of death; it is not in the service of you, it is not in the service of existence. But why does the question arise?
All these religions went against nature. Why did they create a certain logic that unless you are against this world, you will never be able to achieve the other world, the higher one? Why did they make such a division between this world and that world? There is a reason for to it.
If this world is not to be renounced but lived in its totality, then the priest is no longer needed. If this world has to be fought, renounced, you have to repress your natural instincts. Then of course, you are going to be in a sick state. Against nature you can never be healthy, you can never be whole. You will always be split and schizophrenic. Naturally, you will need somebody to guide you, somebody to help you ——you will need the priest.

Religion up to now has been the profession of the priest. It has nothing to do with God, it has nothing to do with the other world. It has just one purpose: how to exploit you, how to enslave you. And the priests have made the whole world into a vast slave camp.
There are different religions; they are simply different slave camps. When you get fed up with one slave camp, you enter into another thinking that perhaps there will be freedom, but you are only changing jails.
A Christian becomes a Hindu, a Hindu becomes a Christian: perhaps for the time being he may think that there is freedom, because of the newness. But soon he will be surprised that he is again in chains. Although the chains have different colors, are made of different metals, he has again been encaged into a certain theology. His mind is programmed again into lies he is being asked to believe.

When he was a Hindu he was asked to believe that Rama is God, that Krishna is the perfect incarnation of God. Now he is a Christian — Rama and Krishna are no longer relevant, they are no longer gods — now Jesus Christ is the only begotten son of God. Just the language differs, but deep down it is the same bondage.
Just the other day I rejected one question, seeing that it must have come from a Hindu. The question was: “Mohammed has nine wives, eats meat, and his whole life is nothing but a continuous war — killing people; Jesus eats meat, drinks wine. Gautam Buddha is against wine; Mahavira is against wine, against meat. How can we decide who is the right savior?”
But he left out the Hindus — and his name is Hindu. He had not mentioned that Rama is always pictured, sculpted, with a bow and arrows. He is not nonviolent. He fought a war; he must have killed thousands of people. He has the guts to ask why Mohammed had nine wives, but he does not ask why Krishna had sixteen thousand wives.

The very question of how one is to choose who is the right savior is basically wrong. If you understand me, you are the only savior for yourself. There is no question of choice. Whenever you will choose, you will choose something wrong. Choice is wrong, so it doesn’t matter whom you are going to choose.
You are always asking which prison to choose. This is painted white, this is painted blue, this is painted green… which prison to choose? But can’t you choose freedom? Have you decided to remain a slave forever, a prisoner?
And I can see the cunning mind. You are only asking about other religions, not mentioning your own religion. All the religions are criminals, more or less. There may be a difference of degrees, but they are criminals, for the simple reason that they have been promising you something which they cannot deliver. Otherwise, the whole world would have been saved long ago. So many saviors have been around, and I simply wonder how you escaped from being saved!

Every religion has saviors, prophets, gods, and the followers are in the same misery. Misery is neither Mohammedan nor Christian, nor Hindu nor Buddhist. Misery is simply misery. And everybody in the world is in misery, in suffering, in anguish. They have believed for thousands of years, but their belief has not helped at all.

It is time enough. You have to declare a certain maturity, and you have to say to these saviors and these prophets and their representatives, “Enough is enough. Now close the doors of all your shops. We are not interested in being saved, we are interested in being totally alive.” It is total living that is going to save you, and all these religions have been cutting your life: this is wrong, that is wrong… making your life more miserable, making your life nothing but a guilt, full of wounds.

Naturally, when you are guilty, you go to the church, you go to the mosque, you go to the synagogue; you ask the priest, you ask the minister, you ask the rabbi to help you, because in your deep darkness ——which they are responsible for creating ——you are so helpless, you need somebody to protect you, somebody to help you, somebody to show you the light. You are in such a desperate need that you don’t ever think about whether the priest knows anything more than you do, or whether that he is just a paid servant.

It happened in Ramakrishna’s life….
One sudra woman — sudras are the lowest caste of Hindus, reduced almost to inhuman beings. Cows are more respected, and human beings are not even that much respected. The woman was a queen, but she was a sudra. She had enough money. She could not go to any temple, although she was the queen. And the story is not very old, just one hundred years old.

She made a beautiful temple in Dakshineshwar, near Calcutta, so that she could worship. But then a problem arose: no priest was willing to worship in her temple. The temple also became untouchable. The god inside the temple also became untouchable because an untouchable woman had made the temple — strange logic. The woman had not even touched the temple — and all the temples are made by untouchables. The bricks are made by them, everything that a temple needs for its construction is made by the lowest untouchable class, but no temple is untouchable. Even the statues of the gods are carved by untouchables — stonecutters — but those gods are not untouchables. And this woman had simply used her money… Now can you say because the money comes from an untouchable, it becomes untouchable?

Money passes through thousands of hands. That’s why it’s other name is currency — it is always moving, it is a current. The notes that you have in your pocket may have moved through thousands of hands. Many untouchable people, Mohammedans, Christians, may have touched them. They may be carrying all kinds of diseases, because people who have tuberculosis, who have cancer, who have AIDS, may have used them. In fact, the whole system of currency is absolutely unhygienic and it should be changed. It is unscientific.

You should have credit cards which belong to you and remain with you and that don’t change hands. Currency is simply ugly, and it may be spreading many diseases. But no medical experts are raising their voices against it.
But in Dakshineshwar, Rani Rukmani Devi’s temple remained empty, because no brahmin was ready to worship in it. She searched all over Bengal, and this young man, Ramakrishna — he was only twenty years old — said, “There is no problem. I will come.”
His whole society condemned him. People told him, “You are destroying yourself. You will be expelled from brahmin status. You are falling down. You are becoming an untouchable.”
He said, “I don’t care, but I cannot see one god remaining unworshipped. I am ready to risk myself, but I cannot risk that poor god.”
Against everybody — against his family, against everybody — he went, but he was a strange person. He started worshipping.

Rani Rukmani was really a graceful woman, very wise. Even though the temple started with a priest, she never entered the temple. She would always come, remain outside where people leave their shoes, sit there — and she was the queen — and just watch from the door, the worship, Ramakrishna dancing, singing… But the problem was that sometimes Ramakrishna would sing for hours and dance for hours. All the other people who had come would leave — he would continue alone. And sometimes he would not even open the doors of the temple, he would put a lock on the door.

Rani Rukmani called him and asked, “What is the matter? Sometimes you worship for hours. I have heard that some days you worship the whole day, and sometimes for days you don’t open the temple.”
He said, “It is between me and my god. Nobody has to interfere. When he is graceful to me, I am graceful to him. When he starts behaving rudely, then I give him a lesson! Then I tell him, `Remain without food for two or three days and you will come to your senses.'”
Rani Rukmani Devi said, “What are you talking about? It is just a stone statue.”
Ramakrishna said, “If it was just a stone statue, I would not have lost my caste. Against the whole society I would not have come. To me it is not.”

Rani said, “And I have also heard that the food you prepare to offer to the god — first you taste it. That is against all scriptures. You have to offer it first to the god, then it can be distributed to the devotees and then you can take it. But you are not supposed to taste it first.”

He said, “You can take your temple and I resign from it, because I know perfectly — my mother used to taste first before she would give anything to me. And when I asked her why she was doing that, she said, `If it is not good, I will not give it to you.’ How can I do otherwise? I don’t care about your scriptures; I don’t know them. I have learned only from my mother that if there is love, love cannot give something which is not tasteful. First I have to taste it, and then only can I offer it.”

Now this man, Ramakrishna, is expelled from Brahmanism, and you will not find another brahmin of the same status, of the same insight. He was not there just to get some salary. He was there really to worship, and worship is a love affair. It knows no other rules except love. Love is decisive, not any other law.
So it is not a question of whom you have to choose, the question is, are you going to love existence, are you going to love existence as divine? Then it does not matter in which religion you are born. All those things become unnecessary. You have found the essential core. And if you are going to decide, you will never be able to decide.
For example, no Jaina is going to accept Christ as enlightened, for the simple reason that it is inconceivable according to the Jaina perception that any enlightened man will drink alcohol. When you are enlightened, you have tasted the ultimate ecstasy — now what can alcohol give to you? Alcohol is for miserable people to forget their misery. Alcohol helps you to forget something. You want to forget misery and suffering, but nobody wants to forget blissfulness, ecstasy.

If an ecstatic person drinks alcohol, he will forget all about it. No meditator is going to drink alcohol. That is simply illogical, unscientific. So no Jaina, no Buddhist, is going to agree that Jesus is enlightened. But on the other hand, the Christian also has questions, because Buddha neither served the poor nor helped the sick to become healthy, nor did Mahavira raise the dead back to life. They had no concern at all for other people.

According to the Christian attitude, these people are utterly selfish, they are simply meditating for their own enlightenment. While millions of people are dying, starving, or sick, they are not doing anything for them. How can these people be enlightened if they don’t have compassion, service, as their prayer? If they can’t serve others, it is certain they don’t see the divine in others. You will be caught into such difficult arguments that you will not be able to choose — but there is no need at all.
The very need to choose is wrong. You are not to decide who is right and who is wrong. That is their problem. Whether Jesus is enlightened or not, whether Gautam Buddha is enlightened or not, is not your problem. Your problem is whether you are enlightened or not!
There is no way to decide about Jesus, Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, but there is absolute certainty about you. You can decide yourself. You know perfectly well you are not enlightened. Is this the time, when you are not enlightened, to decide about others… wasting your life, your time, your energy? And still you cannot come to any conclusion, because they all have their arguments.
Christians say Jesus is crucified to save humanity; he gives his own life. And in the Christian context it looks perfectly right. But looked at from the Hindu, Jaina, Buddhist or Tao context it is absurd. According to these four religions, the crucifixion of Jesus is possible only if he had done some great evil acts in his past life. Otherwise crucifixion is not possible. What to say of the crucifixion?
Jainas say that Mahavira is naked, walks barefooted and that even thorns on the way, seeing that Mahavira is coming, get out of his way. They simply jump out of his way because his karmas are finished! He cannot have even that much suffering, because suffering needs some cause, and he has destroyed all the causes. The thorn has to move.
The Buddhists say that when Buddha sits underneath a tree, it may not be the season for the tree to blossom, but it simply blossoms abundantly. It has to because the existence of an enlightened man is so rare, so precious, that the tree even forgets that this is not the season to blossom. But who cares about the season? When an enlightened person is sitting underneath, the tree is so joyous; it is her way of singing and dancing and celebrating.

Now Buddhists cannot believe that Jesus comes to a tree, a fig tree — for three days he has been hungry, and because there are no figs on the tree, he is very angry. Although he is called the prince of peace and he talks about loving your enemies just like yourself, he behaved in such a retarded way with the fig tree. He cursed it “because you are not welcoming me and my friends who have been hungry for three days. Where are the fruits?” But it was not the season. What could the poor fig tree do?
And to curse a tree which is incapable of producing fruits out of season is simply nonsense. It simply shows a man in absolute anger, almost insane. He is behaving like a retarded child, who because he stumbles on a table, starts beating the table as if the table had struck him. That’s what Jesus is doing — cursing the fig tree because there are no fruits.

No Eastern religion can accept Jesus and his behavior. But Christians cannot accept the thousand and one things in the Eastern prophets. Mahavira standing naked simply shows that he is an exhibitionist. You will know exactly. Just tomorrow stand on the road naked. Nobody is going to worship you. Immediately the police will be called and you will be taken to the police station, because to stand naked on the road is illegal and criminal.

Sigmund Freud has decisively given his testimony that when you want to show your naked body to people it is exhibitionism, and that is a mental disease. And there are other things which go along with it. There are mad people all around the world who pull their hairs out; Mahavira used to do that. He never got shaved by a barber, because he never wanted to be dependent on anybody. He never used a poor razor blade, because he never wanted to use any technology. So the only way was to pull his own hairs, beard, mustache. Every year he would do it, and thousands of his followers, with tears in their eyes, would watch it thinking what great austerity he was showing.

But according to Sigmund Freud, this man had some streak of insanity. And these people who were standing there, dropping all their jobs, closing their shops, tears in their eyes… they are also psychologically sick. According to psychoanalysis, these people are sadists; they enjoy somebody torturing himself.

And the person who tortures himself — and I don’t think in the whole history of man anybody has tortured himself more than Mahavira — is a masochist. He loves to torture himself, and he loves to show how much he is torturing himself. He will attract only the sadistic people — those who want to see somebody torturing himself. They want to torture, but they are not brave enough to do it because that is risky and dangerous. But when somebody is doing it on his own, this is a beautiful moment not to be missed.

If you go on analyzing these people you will never come to any conclusion, you will get more and more confused. My suggestion is that it is none of your affair whether they were enlightened or insane, it is their problem. Your problem is basically to look within yourself, where you are. And if you are in misery, in suffering, in anxiety, in anguish; if you are missing something in life, if you are discontented, if you don’t see any meaning anywhere and you are simply dragging yourself towards death… . . .

The darkness goes on growing darker, every day death goes on coming nearer ——is this the time to get into great theological problems? It is the time to change your being. You don’t have much time.

You will be surprised to know that one of the great masters of this age, George Gurdjieff, has stated something which has never been stated in the whole history of man by any mystic, by any master. He has said to his disciples, “Don’t remain in the illusion that you all have souls. You are not born with souls. You are soulless. Only very few people have been able to create a soul. Those who create a soul may survive death, but the majority are simply vegetables. You will die completely; nothing will be left behind.”

It was very shocking, because all the mystics down the ages have been telling you just the opposite — that you are born with a spiritual being, you are just not aware of it. So learn the art of awareness and you will discover it.

Why did Gurdjieff say that that is absolutely wrong — “The reality is that nobody is born with a soul. The soul is something to be created with arduous effort and intelligence, and very few succeed. Only those go on living in a future life, others disappear with death, they did not use the opportunity.”

I have often been asked what the truth is, whether what Gurdjieff said is true or what all the mystics of all the ages have said is true. Both are true. The mystics of the past have told you the truth simply, but man is so unconscious and cunning. Listening to the truth, whether you do anything or not, you always have the hidden potential of becoming an enlightened person.

The sleepy people thought, “Then there is no hurry. First, do other things which tomorrow you may not be able to do” — and there are a thousand and one things in the world which attract your attention. As far as the soul is concerned, it is always there. You can have it today, you can have it tomorrow, you can have it in the next life. It is only a question of time — and anyway, you have it. It is just a question of becoming aware. So why not do other things which you don’t have and just by becoming aware you won’t get?

By becoming aware you won’t become rich. On the contrary, you may become poor, because you will start trusting people and people will start cheating you. You may start being compassionate and people will take advantage of it.
I was coming from Indore, and going to Nagpur….
In the middle, at the junction Khandava, I had to change trains. I had almost two hours to wait, so I waited in the old train which had brought me to Khandava. I was sitting alone in the compartment when one beggar came towards me and he said, “My wife has died.”

I said, “That’s very bad,” and gave him one rupee.
He looked at me. He could not believe — he looked at the rupee — whether it was authentic or fake.
I said, “Don’t be worried. It is absolutely authentic. It is not like your wife.”
He said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “I don’t mean anything. Just by the way, I reminded you that it is not like your wife, it is a real rupee.”
He went away, but he remained puzzled.

After five to ten minutes he came back again. Last time he had a coat and a cap; this time he had dropped the coat and the cap, thinking that now he would not be recognized. But as he came I asked, “What happened? Has somebody else died?”
He said, “What? How did you know? My father has just died.”
I said, “I knew it, and I would like you to know that I am going to be here for two hours, so you can let your relatives die — as many as you want. And it is not costly for me. Take one rupee and finish another relative.”

He said, “It is a sad thing and you are making a joke of it.”
I said, “It is really sad: first your wife died, and within ten minutes your father died. You just go home to find… somebody else must have died!”
He said, “If you say, I will go.”
“But you should go and you should come back, because somebody is bound to be dead. I am here for two hours.”
Within ten minutes he was back. He said, “You seem to be very prophetic. I went home and my mother has died.”
And I said, “Take one rupee. How many relatives do you have in all, the total?”
He said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “I can give you advance money. You let them die, because it is such a torture for you”… the poor man running home, coming back… again somebody will die…. “Your whole family is going to die today, so you just tell me the whole number — how many people have you got still alive?”

At that moment something happened in the man and he said, “No. I cannot take advance money. This is too much. This is too much, because I have been cheating people. Every day my wife dies. Today you have killed three of my people and now you are giving me the advance for everybody. No, that is too much. I cannot do that.”

And he asked me did I not feel cheated. I said, “No, I am enjoying! Just sitting here alone — I have nothing else to do, and you are such an entertainment. I am enjoying the whole scene. I was simply wondering how many relatives you could invent. You must have a joint family: uncles and their wives and their children. You just count them all and I am ready to give one rupee for each.”

He took the three rupees that I had given to him and he said, “Please take them back. I cannot cheat you.”

I said, “What happened? What is the trouble? You have been doing this business your whole life, and I am just another man who passes in these trains, and you cheat.”

He said, “No, you are not one of them. You… you are making me feel so bad that it is not only a question of cheating you. I am showing my ugliness too — that just to get some money, every day I have to kill my people. No, I cannot take, and you please take these three rupees back. If you don’t take it, I am not going to leave from here. You will have to take these three rupees back, because my wife is alive, my father is alive and my mother is alive.”

Then I said, “Take them just as a celebration because they have not died, they are alive. If I can give for the dead, why cannot I give for the living ones? I give them more joyously; don’t you feel guilty.”

The more aware you become, the more loving you will be, the more compassionate you will be. You will not be cunning, you will not be cheating, and everybody around you will take advantage of you.

Naturally, the whole world of sleepy people decided that the soul is something which you need not bother about — even death cannot take it away! It is with you always, whatever you do. Be a sinner, be a saint, but the soul is your eternal possession. It can be postponed; you can do other things first.

Seeing this, Gurdjieff told a lie out of compassion, out of sheer compassion. He wanted to shock you that you have misused the old mystics’ simplicity, their innocent statements about truth. He shocked his disciples by saying, “You have to do something urgent. This is the most important thing to do, the first priority. You cannot postpone it even for a single moment.”

To make it such an intense longing in you, he had to lie. And he helped many people to go into deep, arduous training, self-discipline, to become aware. Because if somebody declares that you don’t have a soul, naturally, you will forget all about your factory and your shop, and all about your children and all about your wife. Your first priority will be how to attain your innermost being, because all these things that you have will be taken away. And if you don’t have a soul, death will be total, nothing will survive.

I don’t want to say to you that you don’t have a soul. But still, I want you to understand and not misinterpret what I am saying. You have a soul as much as anybody else has ever had. In fact there is no possibility of any communism other than the communism of spirituality. Only spirituality is equally the same. The greatest was Gautam Buddha, and you are no different in potential. He has actualized it, he has recognized it; your potential is lying dormant.

And the methods that all the religions have been teaching to you are methods of fighting; they don’t lead anywhere. They simply spoil your joys of life. They poison everything enjoyable in this life. They have created a sad humanity. I would like a humanity full of love and full of song and full of dance.

So I want it to be clearly understood that my method is the second one, and by the second method I mean you are not to fight the current and go upstream ——that is stupid. You cannot fight, because the current of nature is too big and too strong. The best way is to learn from a dead body. Dead people know a few secrets that which living people don’t know.

Living people drown, if they don’t know how to swim, drown. This is very strange. because Bby the time they are dead, they surface again. When they were living, they went down; when they died, they came up. Certainly, the dead person knows something which the living person does not know. What happened? Why do the river and the ocean behave differently with the dead person? The dead person is in absolute let-go. He is not even swimming. He is not doing anything.

The best swimmer simply floats. The ultimate swimmer, just goes like a dead body, just goes with the current, wherever the river leads ——it always leads to the ocean. Every river leads to the ocean, so you need not be worried whether you are in a holy river or not. Holy or unholy, every river is destined to reach sooner or later the ocean to the ocean. You just go on floating with the river. And this I call trust ——trusting in existence that wherever it leads is leading, it leads is leading to the right path, to the right goal. It is not your enemy. Trust in nature that wherever it is taking you, there is your home.

If the whole of humanity learns relaxation rather than fighting, learns let-go rather than making arduous effort, there will be a great change in the quality of consciousness. Relaxed people, simply moving silently with the flow of the river, having no goals of their own, having no egos… . . .

In such a relaxed floating you cannot have any ego. Ego needs effort —— you have to do something. Ego is a doer, and by floating you have become a non-doer. In this inaction, you will be surprised how your anxieties and miseries start dropping away and how you start becoming contented with whatever whatsoever existence gives to you.

Let me tell you about Oone Sufi mystic who was traveling.…

And eEvery evening he would thank existence: “You have done so much for me and I have not been able to repay it, and I will never be able to repay it.” His disciples were a little disgusted, because sometimes life was so arduous.

The Sufi mystic was a rebellious person. It happened this time that for three days they had no food, because every village they passed refused them because they were not orthodox Mohammedans. They had joined a rebellious group of Sufis. They people wouldn’t give them shelter for the night, so they were sleeping in the desert. They were hungry, they were thirsty, and it was now the third day. At the evening prayer, the mystic again said to existence, “I am so grateful. You have been doing so much for us and we cannot ever repay it.”

One of the disciples said, “This is too much. Now for three days please tell us what existence has done for us? For what are you thanking existence?”

The old man laughed. He said, “You are still not aware of what existence has done for us. These three days have been very significant for me. I was hungry, I was thirsty; we had no shelter, ; we were rejected, condemned. Stones were thrown at us, and I was watching within myself ——no anger arose. I am thanking existence. Its gifts are invaluable. I can never repay them. Three days of hunger, three days of thirst, three days of no sleep, people throwing stones… . . . and yet I have not felt any enmity, any anger, any hatred, any failure, any disappointment. It must be your mercy; it must be existence supporting me.

“These three days have revealed so many things to me which would not have been revealed if food had been given, reception had been given, shelter had been given, stones had not been thrown ——and you are asking me for what I am thanking existence? I will thank existence even when I am dying, because even in death I know existence is going to reveal mysteries to me as it has been revealing them in life, because death is not the end but the very climax of life.”

Learn to flow with existence so you don’t have any guilt and any wounds. Don’t fight with your body, or nature, or anything, so you are at peace and at home, calm and collected.

This situation will help you to become more alert, more aware, more conscious, which finally leads to the ocean of ultimate awakening ——liberation nirvana.

Note: This matter is taken from

The Sword and the Lotus
Chapter – 18 title: The Art of Living
Question – 1

THE BODY IS YOUR FRIEND

The body serves you for seventy, eighty, ninety, even a hundred years, and there is no other mechanism that science has been able to invent that which can be compared to the body. Its complexities, its miracles that it goes on doing for you… . . . and you don’t even say thank you. You treat your body as your enemy, but and your body is your friend.

It takes care of you in every possible way, while you are awake, and while you are asleep. Even in sleep it goes on taking care of you. When you are asleep and a spider starts crawling moving on your leg, your leg throws it off away without bothering you. The leg has a small brain of its own. So for small matters there is no need to go to the central system, to go to the brain ——that much the leg can do that much on its own. If Aa mosquito is biting you, your hands move it or kill it, and your sleep is not disturbed. So Even while you are asleep your body protects is continuously protecting you, and does doing things which you are not generally aware supposed. The hand is not supposed to have a brain, but certainly it has something that which can only be called a very small brain. Perhaps every cell of your body has a small brain in it. And there are millions of cells in your body, millions of small brains, moving around, continuously taking care.

You go on eating all kinds of things without bothering to think about what happens when you swallow them. You don’t ask your the body whether its mechanism, its chemistry, will be able to digest what you are eating. But somehow your inner chemistry goes on working for almost a century. It has an automatic system that replaces of replacing parts which have gone wrong. It goes on expelling defective parts throwing them out, creating new parts; and you do not have to do anything nothing about it, it happens goes on happening on its own. The body has a certain wisdom of its own.

And the religions say the body is your enemy, you have to starve it, you have to hit it hard, because unless you starve it, torture it, how are you going to be free of it? The only way to be free of it is to cut all attachments to it. They teach you hatred for your body, and this is something so dangerous. The very idea turns your greatest friend into your greatest enemy.

These rReligions go on saying to you, “You have to fight be always fighting, you have to move against the current. Don’t listen to the body ——whatever it says, do just the opposite.” Jainism says, “The body is hungry, ; let it be hungry. You starve it, ; it needs that treatment.” It simply serves you without any payment from you your side, no salary, no facilities, and Jainism says to go against it. When your body it wants to fall asleep, Jainism says you should try to remain awake.

Gurdjieff was doing the same thing in this twentieth century. This It certainly gives you a great ego power. When the body wants food, you say no. “No” has great power to in it. You are the master. You reduce the body to a slave ——not only to a slave, you force the body to keep its mouth shut: “Whatsoever I decide is going to be done; you are not to interfere.” Gurdjieff used to do just the opposite of what Jainism does. Jainism starves you — but the method is the same and the result is the same; Gurdjieff used to force his disciples to go on eating. When the body was saying no, he would say, “Go on….” Every night, that was the peak point for Gurdjieff’s disciples.

He was a great cook, and as far as exotic foods are concerned he was incomparable, but that does not make him a religious man. He used to cook strange foods which you have never eaten, your body is absolutely unacquainted with how to absorb them, what kind of ingredients he is putting in those foods! And then he used to stand there, forcing everybody; nobody could say no to the master. The body was in revolt but he would go on forcing them to eat, and then the drinking would begin. Then he would force you to drink. Soon, by the middle of the night…. The ritual used to continue from three to six hours, it was not a small affair. In the middle of the night, in that whole place only Gurdjieff was awake. All the others were unconscious, vomiting, everybody falling, in every kind of posture. It was a dead place, ugly.

What was the purpose? The purpose was the same: to teach you how to fight the body. The old disciples would slowly start getting accustomed to it. They would not vomit, although they had eaten so much that it was coming to their throats, but they would not vomit. Now they had controlled it enough. The disciples that had followed him from Russia were the oldest group. They would drink as much wine as he wanted and they would not fall unconscious. That gave great power — that you are no longer a slave of the body, you are a master of the body. It is the same power that the Jaina monks get from fasting for months together. The same ego is satisfied.

My eighth request to you is: Do not fight with your body.

It is not your foe, it is your friend. It is natural’s a gift of nature to you. It is part of nature. It is joined with nature in every possible way. You are connected to bridged not only with breathing; you are connected to the with sunrays you are bridged, to with the fragrance of flowers you are bridged, to with the moonlight you are bridged. You are connected to all bridged from everywhere; you are not a separate island. Drop that idea. You are part of this whole continent, and yet… it has given you an individuality. This is what I call a miracle.

You are part and parcel of existence, yet you have an individuality. Existence has performed done a miracle, has made possible something impossible.

So bBeing in harmony with your body, you also will be in harmony with nature, with existence. So instead of going against the current, go with the current. Be in a let-go letgo. Allow life to happen. Don’t force anything, in any good name. not even Ffor the sake of some holy book, for the sake of some holy ideal, . Never don’t disturb your harmony.

Nothing is more valuable than to be harmonious, in accord with the whole.

My ninth request….

All the religions are agreed upon one point — that real life begins after death. This life is only a rehearsal, not the real drama. The real drama will happen after death. Here, you are only preparing for the drama. So sacrifice everything to get ready for the drama that is going to happen after death. They teach sacrifice. Sacrifice love, sacrifice life, sacrifice joy, sacrifice everything. The more you sacrifice, the more you will be capable of participating in the drama, the great drama, after death. They have tried to focus your mind on life after death.

One man was asking me — I was in Calcutta, and he was one of the richest men of India, Sahu Shanti Prasad; he had the greatest palace in Calcutta. We were walking in his big garden… because he has, in the middle of Calcutta, at least a hundred acre green garden. The palace once used to belong to the viceroy of India, when Calcutta was the capital. When the capital shifted to New Delhi, the palace was sold. Now the president of India lives in the same kind of palace in New Delhi, with a one hundred acre garden.

So we both were walking and he asked me, “I always wanted to ask you what happens after death.”

I said, “Are you alive or not?”

He said, “What kind of question is this? I am alive.”

I said, “You are alive. Do you know what life is?”

He said, “That I cannot answer. Honestly, I don’t know.”

I said, “When you are alive, even then you don’t know what life is. How can you know death when you are not dead yet? So wait. While you are alive, try to know life; and soon you will be dead, then in your grave contemplate about death. Nobody will be bothering you. But why are you concerned what happens after death? Why are you not concerned what happens before death? That should be the real concern. When death comes we will face it, we will see it, we will see what it is. I am not dead so how can I say? You will have to ask somebody who is dead what happens. I am alive. I can tell you what life is, and I can tell you how to know what life is.”

“But,” he said, “all the religious teachers I go to listen to talk about death; nobody talks about life.”

They are not interested in life, in fact; they want you all not to be interested in life. Their business depends on your interest in death. And about death, the most beautiful thing is that you can create any kind of fiction and nobody can argue against it. Neither you can prove it, nor can anybody disprove it. And if you are a believer, then of course all your scriptures are in support of the priest, the monk, the rabbi, and he can quote those scriptures.

I would like you to remember: Live, and try to know what life is.

Don’t be bothered about death, heaven and hell, and this goddammed God. You simply remain with the life that is dancing in you, breathing in you, alive in you. You have to come closer to yourself to know it. Perhaps you are standing too far away from yourself. Your concerns have taken you far away. You have to come back home.

So remember that while you are alive it is so precious — don’t miss a single moment. Squeeze the whole juice of it, and that juice will give you the taste of the existential, and that will be a revelation of all that is hidden from you and will remain hidden from you.

Respect life, revere life. There is nothing more holy than life, nothing more divine than life. And life does not consist of big things. Those religious fools have been telling you, to “Do big things,” but and life consists of small things. Their strategy is clear. They tell you, “Do big things, do something great, something that your name will be remembered for afterwards.” Do something great.” And of course this it appeals to the ego. The ego is the agent of the priest. All the churches and all the synagogues and all the temples have only one agent, and that is the ego. They don’t use different agencies. ; Tthere are none not other agencies. There is only one agency, and that is the ego ——do something great, something big.

I want to tell you, that there is nothing big, nothing great. Life consists of very small things. So if you become interested in the so-called big things, you will be missing life.

Life consists of sipping a cup of tea, of gossiping with a friend; going for a morning walk, but not going anywhere in particular, just for a walk, with no goal, no end, from any point you can turn back; cooking food for someone you love; cooking food for yourself, because you love your body too; washing your clothes, cleaning the floor, watering the garden…—these small things, very small things... sSaying hello to a stranger, which was not needed at all because there was no question of any business with the stranger.

The man who can say hello to a stranger can also say hello to a flower, can also say hello to the tree, can sing a song to the birds. The birds They sing every day and you have not considered bothered at all with then, but that some day you should return the call. Just small things, very small things…. . . .

And I am not talking about going to the synagogue — that is a big thing; going to the church — that is a big thing. Leave all that to fools. There are many. And they also need some kind of engagement, occupation; those synagogues, and churches and temples provide it. But to you, existence, nothing but existence, is the only temple.

Nothing but life is the only God I teach you.

Respect your life. Out of that respect you will start respecting life in others.

Note: This matter is taken from

Krishna Prabhu, this is how we all have been brought up. Our whole education ——in the family, in the society, in the school, in the college, in the university ——creates tension in us. And the fundamental tension is that you are not doing that which you “ought” to do.

The Then it persists in your whole life; it follows you like a nightmare, it goes on haunting you. It will never leave you at rest, ; it will never allow you to relax. If you relax, it will say, “What are you doing? You are not supposed to relax; you should be doing something.” If you are doing something, it will say, “What are you doing? You need some rest, it is a must, otherwise you will drive yourself crazy ——you are already on the verge.”

If you do something good, it will say, “You are a fool. Doing good is not going to pay, people will cheat you.” If you do something bad, it will say, “What are you doing? You are preparing the way to go to hell, you will have to suffer for it.” It will never leave you at rest; whatsoever you do, it will be there condemning you.

This condemner has been implanted in you. This is the greatest calamity that has been implanted in you happened to humanity. And unless we get rid of this condemner inside us we cannot be truly human, we cannot be truly joyous, and we cannot participate in the celebration that life existence is.

And now nobody can drop it except you. And this is not only your problem, Krishna Prabhu, this it is the problem of almost every human being. Whatever Whatsoever country you are born in, whatever whatsoever religion you belong to, it doesn’t matter ——Catholic, communist, Hindu, Muslim Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist, it does not matter to what kind of ideology you belong, the essential is the same. The essential is to create a split in you, so one part always condemns the other part. If you follow the first part, then the second part starts condemning you. You are in an inner conflict, a civil war.

This civil war has to be dropped, otherwise you will miss the whole beauty, the benediction of life. You will never be able to laugh to your heart’s content, you will never be able to love, you will never be able to be total in anything. And it is only out of totality that one blooms, that the spring comes, and your life starts having color and music and poetry.

It is only out of totality that suddenly you feel the presence of God all around you. But the irony is that the split has been created by your so-called saints, priests and churches. In fact, the priest has been the greatest enemy of God on the earth.

We have to get rid of all the priests; they are the root cause of human pathology. They have made everybody ill at ease, ; they have caused an epidemic of neurosis. And the neurosis has become so prevalent that we take it for granted. We think that this is all life is about, we think this is what life is ——a suffering, a long, long, delayed suffering; a painful, agonizing existence; an autobiography of much ado about nothing.

And if we look at our so-called life, it seems so, because there is never a single flower, never a single song in the heart, never a ray of divine delight.

It is not surprising that intelligent people all over the world are asking what the meaning of life is. “Why should we go on living? Why are we so cowardly as to go on living? Why can’t we gather a little courage and put a stop to all this nonsense? Why can’t we commit suicide?”

Never before in the world were there so many people thinking that life is so utterly meaningless. Why has this happened in this age? First, Iit has nothing to do with this age. For centuries, for at least five thousand years, the priests have been doing the harm. Now we have come it has reached to the ultimate crisis peak.

It is not our doing; work, we are victims. We are the victims of history. If man want to becomes a little more conscious, the first thing to be done is to burn all the history books. Forget the past, ; it was nightmarish. Start anew from ABC abc, as if Adam is born again. Start as if we are again in the garden of Eden, innocent, uncontaminated, unpolluted by mean priests. . . .

The priests have been very mean, because they discovered something tremendously significant for themselves: divide a man, split a man, make him basically schizophrenic and you always remain in power. A divided man is a weak man. An undivided man, an individual, has strength — strength to accept any adventure, any challenge.

A man was looking for a good church to attend and found a small one in which the congregation was reading with the minister. They were saying, “We have left undone those things we ought to have done and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.”

The man dropped into a seat and sighed with relief as he said to himself, “Thank goodness, I’ve found my crowd at last.”

Go to any church and you will find your crowd, you will find replicas of your being. Maybe the language is a little bit different, the ritual a little bit different, but the fundamentals are the same. The fundamental is: man has to be reduced to a civil war.

The first day when you recognize this, what the priests have done to you, is a day of great insight. And the first day when you drop all this nonsense is the day of the beginning of liberation.

Do what your nature wants to do, do what your intrinsic qualities hanker to do. Don’t listen to the scriptures, listen to your own heart; that is the only scripture I prescribe. Yes, listen very attentively, very consciously, and you will never be wrong. And if you listening to your own heart, you will never be divided. Listening to your own heart, you will start moving in the right direction, without ever thinking of what is right and what is wrong.

So the whole art for the new humanity will consist in the secret of listening to the heart consciously, alertly, attentively. And follow it through any means, and go wherever it takes you. Yes, sometimes it will take you into dangers ——but then remember, those dangers are needed to make you ripe. And sometimes it will take you astray ——but remember again, those goings astray are part of growth. Many times you will fall. Rise up again, because this is how one gathers strength ——by falling and rising again. This is how one becomes integrated.

But don’t follow rules imposed from the outside. No imposed rule can ever be right, because rules are invented by people who want to rule you. Yes, sometimes there have been great enlightened people in the world too ——a Buddha, a Jesus, a Krishna, a Mohammed. They have not given the world rules to the world, they have given their love. But sooner or later the disciples gather together and start drawing up making codes of conduct. Once the master is gone, once the light is gone and they are in deep darkness, they start groping for certain rules to follow, because now the light in which they could have seen is no longer more there. Now they will have to depend on rules.

What Jesus did was his own heart’s whispering, and what Christians go on doing is not their own hearts’ whispering. They are imitators ——and the moment you imitate, you insult your humanity, you insult your God.

Never be an imitator, ; be always be original. Don’t become a carbon copy. But that’s what is happening all over the world ——carbon copies and more carbon copies.

Life is really a dance if you are an original ——and you are meant to be an original. And no two men are alike, so my way of life can never become your way of life.

Imbibe the spirit, imbibe the silence of the master, learn his grace. Drink as much out of his being as possible, but don’t imitate him. Imbibing his spirit, drinking his love, receiving his compassion, you will be able to listen to your own heart’s whisperings. And they are whisperings. The heart speaks in a very still, small voice; it does not shout.

Listen to the master’s silence so one day you can listen to your own innermost core. And then this problem will never arise: “I am doing something that I should not do, and I am not doing something that I should do.” This problem arises only because you are being dominated by outer rules; you are imitators.

What is right for a buddha is not right for you. Just look how different Krishna is from Buddha. If Krishna had followed Buddha we would have missed one of the most beautiful men of this earth. Or if Buddha had followed Krishna he would have been just a poor specimen. Just think of Buddha playing on the flute; he would have disturbed many people’s sleep, he was not a flute player. Just think of Buddha dancing; it looks so ridiculous, just absurd.

But the same is the case with Krishna. Sitting underneath a tree with no flute, with no crown of peacock feathers, with no beautiful clothes, just sitting like a beggar under a tree with closed eyes, nobody dancing around him, nothing of the dance, nothing of the song, and Krishna looks so poor, so impoverished.

A Buddha is a Buddha, a Krishna is a Krishna, and you are you. And you are not in any way less than anybody else. Respect yourself, respect your own inner voice and follow it.

And remember, I am not guaranteeing you that it will always lead you to the right. Many times it will take you to the wrong, because to come to the right door one has to knock first on many wrong doors. That’s how it is. If you suddenly stumble upon the right door, you will not be able to recognize that it is right.

There are many people who come here directly, they have never been to anybody else. It is almost impossible to have any contact with them. They cannot understand what is happening here, they have no background, they have no context for it. They have not learned what is wrong, so how can they understand what is right?

But when people come here, and they have lived with many many so-called masters and lived with many many seekers and been part of many schools, when they come here something immediately is lit in their hearts. They have seen so much that now they can recognize what is true.

So remember, in the ultimate reckoning no effort is ever wasted, all efforts contribute to the ultimate climax of your growth. So don’t be hesitant, don’t be worried too much about going wrong. That is one of the problems; people have been taught never to do anything wrong, and then they become so hesitant, so fearful, so frightened of doing wrong, that they become stuck. They cannot move, something wrong may happen. So they become like rocks, they lose all movement.

I teach you: Commit as many mistakes as possible, remembering only one thing: don’t commit the same mistake again. And you will be growing. It is part of your freedom to go astray, it is part of your dignity to go even against God. And it is sometimes beautiful to go even against God. This is how you will start having a spine; otherwise there are millions of people, spineless.

Because I say such things, many people are angered. Just the other day a journalist came here. He had come to cover what is happening here in this ashram, and he wanted to have both stories — the people who are for it, and the people who are against it. So he went around the town. He talked to police officers, he went to see the mayor of Poona. And what the mayor said was really beautiful, I loved it.

He said, “This man is so dangerous that he should be expelled from Poona — not only from Poona but from India, not only from India but from the world!”

I loved it. And I started thinking about it. Where will they expel me from the world? That’s a really fantastic idea! If they can manage it, I am willing to go.

Why is there so much anger? The anger has a reason in it, it has a rationale behind it. The rationale is that I am trying to give you a totally new vision of religious life — and if the new vision succeeds, then all the old visions will have to die.

Krishna Prabhu, fForget all about what you have been told,—“This is right and this is wrong.” Life is not so fixed. The thing that is right today may be wrong tomorrow, the thing that is wrong this moment may be right the next moment. Life cannot be pigeonholed; you cannot label it so easily as, “This is right and this is wrong.” Life is not a chemist’s shop where every bottle is labeled and you know what is what. Life is a mystery; one moment something fits and then it is right. Another moment, so much water has gone down the Ganges that it no longer fits and it is wrong.

What is my definition of right? That which is harmonious with existence is right, and that which is disharmonious with existence is wrong. You will have to be very alert each moment, because it has to be decided each moment afresh. You cannot depend on ready–made answers for what is right and what is wrong. Only stupid people depend on readymade answers, because then they need not be intelligent. There is no need; you already know what is right and what is wrong, you can cram the list, the list is not very big.

The Jews have ten commandments, so simple, you know what is right and what is wrong. But life goes on changing continuously. If Moses comes back, I don’t think he will give you the same ten commandments — he cannot. After three thousand years, how can he give you the same commandments? He will have to invent something new.

But my own understanding is this, that whenever commandments are given they create difficulties for people, because by the time they are given they are already out of date. Life moves so fast; it is a dynamism, it is not static. It is not a stagnant pool, it is a Ganges, it goes on flowing. It is never the same for two consecutive moments. So one thing may be right this moment, and may not be right the next.

Then what to do? The only possible thing is to make people so aware that they themselves can decide how to respond to a changing life.

There is Aan old Zen story: . There were two temples, rivals. Both the masters ——they must have been so-called masters, must have really been priests ——were so much against each other that they told their followers never to look at the other temple.

Each of the priests had a boy to serve him, to go and fetch things for him, to go on errands. The priest of the first temple told his boy servant, “Never talk to the other boy. Those people are dangerous.”

But boys are boys. One day they met on the road, and the boy from the first temple asked the other, “Where are you going?”

The other said, “Wherever the wind takes me.” He must have been listening to great Zen things in the temple; because he said, “Wherever the wind takes me.” A great statement, pure Tao.

But the first boy was very much embarrassed, offended, and he could not find how to answer him. Frustrated, angry, and also feeling guilty because, “My master said not to talk with these people. These people really are dangerous. Now, what kind of answer is this? He has humiliated me.”

He went to his master and told him what had happened. “I am sorry that I talked to him. You were right, those people are strange. What kind of answer is this? I asked him, ‘Where are you going?’ ——a simple formal question ——and I knew he was going to the market, just as I was going to the market. But he said, ‘Wherever the winds take me.‘” ’ ”

The master said, “I warned you, but you didn’t listen. Now look, tomorrow you stand at the same place again. When he comes ask him, ‘Where are you going?’ and he will say, ‘Wherever the winds take me.’ Then you also be a little more philosophical. Say, ‘If you don’t have any legs, then? Because the soul is bodiless and the wind cannot take the soul anywhere!’ What about that?”

Absolutely ready, the whole night the boy he repeated it again and again and again. And next morning, very early, he went there, stood on the right spot, and at the exact time the boy came again. The first boy He was very happy, now he was going to show him what real philosophy is. So he asked, “Where are you going?” And he was waiting…. . . .

But the second boy said, “I am going to fetch vegetables from the market.”

Now, what to do with the philosophy that he had learned?

Life is like that. You cannot prepare for it, you cannot be ready for it. That’s its beauty, that’s its wonder, that it always takes you unawares, it always comes as a surprise. If you have eyes you will see that each moment is a surprise and no ready–made answer is ever applicable.

And all the old religions have supplied you with readymade answers. Manu has given his commandments, Moses has given his commandments, and so on and so forth.

I don’t give you any commandment. In fact the very word commandment is ugly. To command somebody is to reduce him to a slave. I don’t give you any orders, you are not to be obedient to me or to anybody else. I simply teach you an intrinsic law of life. Be obedient to your own self, be a light unto yourself and follow the light, and this problem will never arise. Then whatever whatsoever you do is the thing to do, and whatever whatsoever you don’t do is the thing that has not to be done. . . .

And remember, don’t go on looking back again and again, because life goes on changing. Tomorrow you may start thinking what you did yesterday was wrong. It was not wrong yesterday, it may look wrong tomorrow. There is no need to look back; life goes ahead. But there are many drivers who go on looking in the rear-view mirror. They drive onwards but they look backwards; their life is going to be a catastrophe.

Look ahead. The road that you have passed, you have passed. It is finished, don’t carry it any more. Don’t be unnecessarily burdened by the past. Go on closing the chapters that you have read; there is no need to go back again and again. And never judge anything of the past through the new perspective that is arriving, because the new is new, incomparably new. The old was right in its own context, and the new is right in its own context, and they are incomparable.

What I am trying to explain to you is: drop guilt! — because to be guilty is to live in hell. Not being guilty, you will have the freshness of dewdrops in the early morning sun, you will have the freshness of lotus petals in the lake, you will have the freshness of the stars in the night. Once guilt disappears you will have a totally different kind of life, luminous and radiant. You will have a dance to your feet and your heart will be singing a thousand and one songs.

To live in such rejoicing is to be a sannyasin, to live in such joy is to live a divine life. To live burdened with guilt is simply to be exploited by the priests.

Get out of your prisons — Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist, communist. Get out of all your prisons, get out of all your ideologies, because ideologies supply you readymade answers. If you ask the communist a question he will have to look in Das Kapital. In the same way, if you ask the Hindu he turns the pages of the Gita.

When are you going to use your own consciousness? When? How long are you going to remain tethered to the dead past? The Gita was born five thousand years back; life has changed so much. If you want to read the Gita, read it as beautiful literature — but just like that, no more than that. It is beautiful literature, it is beautiful poetry, but it has no dictums to be followed and no commandments to be followed. Enjoy it as a gift from the past, as the gift of a great poet, Vyasa. But don’t make it a discipline for your life; it is utterly irrelevant.

And everything becomes irrelevant, because life never remains confined. It goes on and on; it crosses all borders, all boundaries, it is an infinite process. The Gita comes to a full stop somewhere, the Koran comes to a full stop somewhere, but life never comes to a full stop, remember it. Remind yourself of it.

And the only way to be in contact with life, the only way not to lag behind life, is to have a heart that which is not guilty, a heart that which is innocent. Forget all about what you have been told ——what has to be done and what has not to be done ——nobody else can decide that it for you.

Avoid those pretenders who want to decide for you; take the reins in your own hands. You have to decide. In fact, in that very decisiveness, your soul is born. When others decide for you, your soul remains asleep and dull. When you start deciding on your own, a sharpness arises. To decide means to take risks, to decide means you may be doing wrong ——who knows, that is the risk. Who knows what is going to happen? That is the risk, ; there is no guarantee.

With the old, there is a guarantee. Millions and millions of people have followed it, . hHow can so many people be wrong? That is the guarantee. If so many people say it is right, it must be right.

In fact the logic of life is just the opposite. If so many people are following a certain thing, be certain it is wrong, because so many people are not so enlightened and cannot be so enlightened. The majority consists of fools, utter fools. Beware of the majority. If so many people are following something, that is enough proof that it is wrong.

Truth happens to individuals, not to crowds. Have you ever heard of a crowd becoming enlightened? Truth happens to individuals — a Tilopa, an Atisha, a Nanak, a Kabir, a Farid.

Truth happens to individuals.

Be an individual if you really want truth to happen to you.

Take all the risks that are needed to be an individual, and accept the challenges so that they can sharpen you, can give you brilliance and intelligence.

Truth is not a belief, it is utter intelligence. It is a flaring-up of the hidden sources of your life, ; it is an enlightening experience of your consciousness. But you will have to provide the right space for it to happen. And the right space is accepting yourself as you are. Don’t deny anything, don’t become split, don’t feel guilty.

Rejoice! And I say to you again, rejoice as you are.

Note: This matter is taken from

It is one of the most fundamental questions that a man can ask.
It is also strange, because iIt should be easy to drop suffering, anguish, misery. It should not be difficult: you don’t want to be miserable, so there must be some deep complication behind it. The complication is that from your very childhood you have not been allowed to be happy, to be blissful, to be joyous.

You have been forced to be serious, and seriousness implies sadness. You were forced to do things that you never wanted to do. You were helpless, weak, dependent on people; naturally you had to do what they were saying. You did those things unwillingly, miserably, in deep resistance. Against yourself, you have been forced to do so much that by and by one thing became clear to you: that anything that is against you is right, and anything that is not against you is bound to be wrong. And constantly, this whole upbringing filled you with sadness, which is not natural.

To be joyous is natural, just as to be healthy is natural. When you are healthy you don’t go to the doctor to inquire, “Why am I healthy?” There is no need for any question about your health. But when you are sick, you immediately ask, “Why am I sick? What is the reason, the cause of my disease?”

It is perfectly right to ask why you are miserable. It is not right to ask why you are blissful. You have been brought up in an insane society where to be blissful without reason is thought to be madness. If you are simply smiling for no reason at all, people will think something is loose in your head ——why are you smiling? why are you looking so happy? And if you say “I don’t know, I am just being happy,” your answer will only strengthen their idea that something has gone wrong with you.

But if you are miserable, nobody will ask why you are miserable. To be miserable is natural; everybody is. It is nothing special to you. You are not doing something unique.

Unconsciously this idea goes on settling in you, that misery is natural and blissfulness is unnatural. Blissfulness has to be proved. Misery needs no proof. Slowly it sinks deeper into you ——into your blood, into your bones, into your marrow ——although naturally it is against you. So you have been forced to be a schizophrenic; something that is against your nature has been forced on you. You have been distracted from yourself into something which you are not.

This creates the whole misery of humanity, that everybody is where he should not be, what he should not be. And because man he cannot be where he needs to be ——where it is his birthright to be ——he is miserable. And yYou have been in this state of going away from yourself farther and farther away from yourself; you have forgotten the way back home. So wherever you are, you think this is your home ——misery has become your home, anguish has become your nature. Suffering has been accepted as health, not as sickness.

And when somebody says, “Drop this miserable life, drop this suffering that you are carrying unnecessarily,” a very significant question arises: “This is all that I we have got! If I we drop it I we will be no one, I we will lose my our identity. At least right now I am somebody ——somebody miserable, somebody sad, somebody in suffering. If I drop all this then the question will be, what is my identity? Who am I? I don’t know the way back home, and you have taken away the hypocrisy, the false home that was created by the society.”

Nobody wants to stand naked in the street.
It is better to be miserable ——at least you have something to wear, although it is misery…—but there is no harm, ; everyone everybody else is wearing the same kind of clothes. For those who can afford it, their miseries are costly. Those who cannot afford it are doubly miserable ——they have to live in a poor kind of misery, nothing much to brag about.

So there are rich miserable people and poor miserable people. And the poor miserable people are trying their hardest to reach somehow reach to the status of rich miserable people. These are the only two types available.

The third type has been completely forgotten. The third is your reality, and it has no misery in it.
You are asking me why man cannot drop his misery; it is for the simple reason that that’s all he has got. You want to make him even more poor? He is already poor. There are rich miserable people; he has a small, tiny misery. He cannot brag about it. And you are telling him to drop even this. Then he will be nobody; then he will be empty, a nothingness.

And all the cultures, all the societies, all the religions have committed a crime against humanity: they have created a fear of nothingnness, of emptiness.

The truth is that nothingness is the door to richness. Nothingness is the door to blissfulness — and the door has to be nothing. The wall is there; you cannot enter a wall, you will simply hit your head, may have some broken ribs. Why can you not enter the wall? — because the wall has no emptiness, it is solid, it objects. That’s why we call things `objects’: they are objective, they don’t allow you to pass through them, they prevent you.

A door has to be non-objective, it has to be emptiness. A door means there is nothing to prevent you. You can go in.

And because we have been conditioned that emptiness is something bad, nothingness is something bad, we are being prevented by the conditioning from dropping the misery, dropping the anguish, dropping all the suffering and just being nothing.

The moment you are nothing, you become a door — a door to the divine, a door to yourself, a door that leads to your home, a door that connects you back to your intrinsic nature. And mMan’s intrinsic nature is blissful.

Blissfulness is not something to be achieved.
It is already there; we are born with it.
We have not lost it, we have simply gone farther away, keeping our backs to ourselves.
It is just behind us; a small turn and a great revolution.

But there are fake religions all over the world which are telling you that you are miserable because in the past life you committed evil acts. All nonsense. Because why should existence wait for one life to punish you? There seems to be no need. In nature things happen immediately. You put your hand in the fire in this life and in the next life you will be burned? Strange! You will be burned immediately, here and now herenow. Cause and effect are connected, ; there cannot be any distance.

But these fake religions go on consoling people: “Don’t be worried. Just do good acts, worship more. Go to the temple or the church, and in the next life you will not be miserable.” Nothing seems to be cash; everything is in the next life. And nobody comes back from the next life and says, “These people are telling absolute lies.”

Religion is cash, it is not even a check.
Different religions have found different strategies, but the reason behind them is the same. Christians, Jews, Mohammedans, religions born outside India say to people, “You are suffering because Adam and Eve committed a sin.” The first couple, thousands of years back… . . . and not a great sin —— you are committing it every day. They simply ate apples, and God had has forbidden them to eat apples.

The problem question is not apples, the problem question is that they disobeyed. Thousands of years back somebody disobeyed God. And he was punished, he was thrown out of the Garden of Eden, thrown out of God’s paradise. Why are we suffering? ——because they were our forefathers. But strange, nobody asked these idiots — these Christians, Mohammedans, Jews, their great rabbis, popes and imams, “If that is the reason for our miseries, then why are our miseries different? Because the sin was one and single and the same, our miseries should be the same. But every man is suffering differently. His anxiety is different, his anguish is different, his problems are different — how come this variety of miseries?”

Nobody has raised the question, and they don’t have any answer if somebody asks it. If the whole of humanity were suffering the same misery, there would be some logical grounds to believe that there must be a singular cause, but it is not so.

The religions that were born in India have all taken another excuse: that you are suffering because of your past lives. I used to meet Jaina monks, Buddhist monks, and ask them, “I can understand that I am suffering because of my past life. But what about the first life? There must have been a first life, in the very beginning. Why did people suffer then? They had no past life. And if they did not suffer then the first generation of humanity lived in blissfulness; it is impossible that their children should suffer. Their children should have learned the blissfulness of their parents — children imitate. Then how did misery enter in?”

And they always said, “You — whenever you come you bring some embarrassing question. We don’t know…first life? Nobody knows what happened, when it happened.”
But I said, “Hypothetically there must have been a first life, or you have to accept another hypothesis — that this vicious circle has been going on eternally. Always there was a past life, always there was a past life — then you cannot get out of this vicious circle, because in the next life you will suffer from this life’s acts. And then for seventy years you cannot remain a saint; even for twenty-four hours one cannot remain a saint. One needs holidays. Even your saints have holidays. And in the next life you will again commit a few evil acts….”

And what are evil acts? They are so simple it is impossible not to commit them. You see a beautiful woman; the scriptures say, “Close your eyes. Don’t see her.” But they forget completely that you close your eyes only because you have seen her! The evil act has been committed; otherwise, why are you closing your eyes?

You don’t close your eyes seeing an ugly woman; no scripture says, “When you see an ugly woman close your eyes.” Strange. You yourself close them, without any scriptures, without any teachers, without any religions. But when you see a beautiful woman you don’t want to close your eyes, you really forget to blink — and it is natural.

Not only that, the latest scientific experiments about this phenomenon have revealed strange things. I can give you a deck of cards in which there are beautiful women, ugly women, naked women, beautiful flowers — different things on different cards. And I need not see the cards. You can go on looking at the cards, and when you come to a beautiful naked woman I can just watch your eyes and I can say, “Now you have come to a beautiful woman” — because your eyes are windows. You want to absorb that beauty more, so your eyes become wider. That is a natural mechanism.

When you go outside in the sun your eyes become smaller, the window shrinks, because the sun is too much and there is no need to take that much light in. When you come home, slowly the eyes again open to their normal size. But when you see something beautiful, they become wider, wide open. It is not in your hands, it is not that you are doing it. Even a saint will have to do it because it is not a voluntary thing. It is non-voluntary, it happens on its own accord. It is biologically set up.

You have this word in English, `respect’. People have destroyed its meaning. It does not mean `honor’ — or it means honor in a very different way than you understand. `Respect’ means the desire to see again, re-spect — spect means seeing. If it is honor, it is honor for beauty — because you want to see it again. The woman has passed…. You find some excuse to see her again, as if somebody has called you or you have forgotten something, and you turn back.

These are sins.
But if to appreciate beauty is sin then all art is sin. Then all paintings are sin, all great music is sin, all great literature is sin, and all great poetry is sin. Why confine it to women? When you look at a sunset and you are filled with the beauty of it, you are committing a sin. Or when you see a roseflower and it overpowers you with its beauty, its delicateness, you are committing a sin.

These religious people have managed such simple things so that it is impossible to get out of the wheel of life. You will be committing sins, and you will be coming back to suffer the punishment.
To eat tastefully is a sin. In Jainism — and Mahatma Gandhi has borrowed from Jainas because Gujarat, although it is Hindu its mind is ninety percent Jaina; Mahatma Gandhi has borrowed all five principles of the Jainas.

The first is aswad, to eat without taste. You are asking human beings to do inhuman things — it is better not to eat, and commit suicide. Even taste is not allowed! And who will tell the child, “Don’t drink the mother’s milk with taste; otherwise, finished — you have already arranged for your next life.” He enjoys the mother’s breast… in fact, he enjoys so much that his whole life he remembers it again and again.

The interest of men in women’s breasts is not without any psychology. Why are all the painters, all the poets, all the sculptors making beautiful breasts? — so beautiful that really that kind of breast doesn’t exist.

I was very close to Khajuraho. I used to go there because it has the most beautiful sculpture in the whole world. And as far as breasts are concerned, Khajuraho is just at the very top; nobody anywhere in the world has been able to create such beautiful breasts. But seeing those breasts I said, “These breasts are not possible. If these breasts were there humanity would die.”

The minister of education who was showing me around said, “Why?”

I said, “Just see the roundness of the breast — the little child on this round breast… his nose will get closed, he will not be able to drink milk. Either he can drink milk or he can breathe, two alternatives are before him.”

And nature has not created those breasts for the sculptors, but for that small child. It creates breasts in such a way that the child can breathe and drink milk too. Just a completely round breast, a full moon, will kill anybody — not just the child but the child’s father also! If you cannot breathe…. It is good in a sculpture.

But why is man so obsessed? In every magazine, in every poem… somehow the breasts seem to be the central theme of all art. The reason is that the child has enjoyed the taste, the warmth, the feeling that flows from the mother’s breast — which is invisible to us, which is now being explored by scientists.

They have tried on monkeys: one monkey is given every necessary ingredient that he needs for his physical growth; no ordinary monkey gets such balanced food. The other monkey gets just ordinary food, as monkeys can get. But the other monkey has the mother’s breast, and the first monkey has just a mechanical breast. Whenever he wants to drink milk the breast is available but it is cold, the breast is just mechanical. There is no warmth, there is no human aura around it.

And the scientists have found repeatedly that the child who gets perfect nourishment dies — just because he is not getting the mother’s warmth, her body. And the child that is not getting perfect nourishment lives healthily, because he is getting the mother’s warmth.
Somehow in the psychology of man, that childhood continues. All this art is just a remembrance of a past golden time when there were no worries, no responsibilities, and life was just love.

These Jaina principles make it impossible to live. No taste, no possessions…. I can understand, and I teach no possessiveness, but I cannot understand `no possessions’. And there is a great difference between the two. You can live in a palace remembering that you are simply living in a caravanserai, it is not yours; tomorrow you will be gone, somebody else will become the possessor. One day you were not here, somebody else was the possessor.

My sannyasins have been looking for a beautiful house for me. Sixteen years ago they were also looking for a beautiful house, and I had chosen a house. Everything was settled, but there were some legal difficulties. The man had not all the necessary papers in his possession, so we had to wait. But the man died. His son was not interested in selling the house.

I moved to Poona.
Then I went to America.
And now when my friends started looking for a house, I remembered that house. The man with whom I had talked about the house, who was the owner, has died. His son, who was against selling it, has died — now his son is in possession. But he has made many other houses around it, and destroyed the whole beauty of the place. He wants to sell all the other houses that he has made — it had a big campus, a beautiful lawn and garden. And my whole interest was in the big campus, so thousands of people could sit there under the trees on the lawn. The main house is still there — it was a beautiful house, but now it is surrounded by so many other houses it has lost its whole beauty. Its whole beauty was in those trees, the rocks, the lawn, the vast campus.

I inquired, “Who is the possessor of the house?” And when I came to know that it is now the third generation, I said, “Still people go on thinking that they possess things! They go on dying, new people go on becoming the owners.”

You should live in the world, but not let the world live in you — that’s perfectly right. But to make it a point that you should not have any possessions creates insanity. Mahavira lived naked because he could not have clothes, it would be a possession. You are asking inhuman things. There is cold, there is old age, there is sickness.

He would not sleep on a mattress, just on the bare floor. He would not cut his hairs with scissors or shave his beard with razors because those are mechanical things, and he cannot possess anything. So he used to pull out his hairs: every year there was a festival time for the insane followers who would come to see the naked Mahavira pulling his hairs out. And it was thought to be a great religious ascetic discipline. But do you want the whole of humanity to do it?

The Jaina scriptures don’t mention what he was doing with his nails. I have been looking very minutely into the Jaina scriptures to find out about the nails — I am also a crazy man! Because what did he do with his nails? You cannot pull out your nails the way you pull out your hair. And if you don’t cut your nails for eighty years, you will become almost like an animal. People cannot even come close to you, your nails will reach at least six feet. They will keep everybody away, particularly women — a good device… nuclear weapons!

No, you cannot expect to get out of this vicious circle of life and death. If cause and effect are put at a distance — in one life is the cause, in another life is the effect — then it is absolutely impossible. But it is a good consolation for people, for their misery, that they had committed evil acts. What evil acts? I don’t see people committing evil acts in such a proportion that the whole humanity should be miserable.

The rReality is something totally different. It is not a question of evil acts, it is a question of your having been taken away from yourself, from your natural blissfulness. And no religion wants you to be so easily blissful; otherwise what will happen to their disciplines? What will happen to their great practices, ascetic practices, ? people torturing themselves in a thousand and one ways. People beat themselves until they fall unconscious, and that is thought to be a religious discipline.

If dropping the misery is as easy as I say it is, then all these fake religions lose their business. It is a question of their business. Blissfulness has to be made so difficult ——almost impossible ——that people can only hope for it in some future life, after long arduous journeys.

But I say to you on my authority: it has happened to me so easily. I have also lived many past lives and certainly I must have committed more evil acts than any of you ——because I don’t consider them to be evil acts. Appreciation of beauty, appreciation of taste, appreciation of everything that makes life more livable liveable, more lovable loveable, are not evil things to me.

I want you to become sensitive, aesthetically sensitive to all these things. They will make you more human, they will create more softness in you, more gratitude towards existence.
And it is not a theoretical question with me. I have just accepted nothingness as a door ——which I call meditation, which is nothing but another name for nothingness. And the moment nothingness happens, suddenly you are standing face to face with yourself, and all misery disappears.

The first thing you do is simply to laugh at yourself, at what an idiot you have been. That misery was never there; you were creating it with one hand and you were trying to destroy it with the other another hand ——and naturally you were in a split, in a schizophrenic condition.

It is absolutely easy, simple.
The most simple thing in existence is to be yourself oneself.
It needs no effort; you are already there it.

Just a remembrance… . . . just getting out of all those stupid ideas that the society has imposed on you. And that is as simple as a snake slipping out of its old skin and never even looking back. It is just an old skin, nothing more.

If you understand it, it can happen at this very moment.
Because at this very moment you can see there is no misery, no anguish.
You are silent, standing on the door of nothing; just a step more inwards and you have found the greatest treasure that has been waiting for you for thousands of lives.

Note: This matter is taken from
The Osho Upanishad
Chapter – 4 title: Miser is the prison, nothingness is the door
Question – 1

BE CONSCIOUS OF BLISS

Anand means bliss, manja means consciousness — bliss consciousness. Ordinarily the mind is always conscious of pain, never conscious of bliss. If you have a headache you are conscious of it. When you don’t have a headache you are not conscious of the well-being of the head. When the body hurts you are conscious of it, but when the body is perfectly healthy you are not conscious of the health.

This is the root cause of why we feel so miserable: our whole consciousness is focused focussed on pain. We only count the thorns ——we never look at the flowers. Somehow we select the thorns and neglect the flowers. If we are wounded and continuously hurt, there is no surprise in it; it has to be so. For a certain biological reason it has happened: nature makes you aware of pain so that you can avoid it. It is a built-in system. Otherwise, your hand may be burning and you may not be conscious; of it, and it will be difficult to survive. So nature has made it very essential and inevitable that you have to be conscious of the pain. But nature has no built-in mechanism to make you conscious of pleasure, joy, bliss. That has to be learned, that has to be worked out. That is an art.

From this moment start becoming aware of things that which are not natural. For example, your body is feeling perfectly healthy: sit silently, become conscious of it. Enjoy the well-being. Nothing is wrong ——enjoy it! Make a deliberate effort to be conscious of it. You have eaten well and your the body is satisfied, contented; become conscious of it.
When you are hungry, nature makes you conscious, but nature has no system to make you conscious of when you are satiated; that has to be grown. Nature need not grow it because survival is all that nature wants; more than that is luxury. Bliss is luxury, the greatest luxury.

And this is my observation about why people are so miserable ——they are not really as miserable as they look. They have many moments of great joy, but those moments pass by; they never become aware of them. Their memories remain full of pain and wounds. Their minds remain full of nightmares. Not that there are not beautiful dreams and poetic visions —— they are also there, but nobody is there to take note of them. In twenty-four hours’ time thousands of things happen for which you would feel grateful to gGod, but you don’t take note!

That has to be started from this moment. And you will be surprised that bliss grows more and more every day, and, proportionately, pain and misery will become less and less. And the a moment comes when life is almost a celebration. Pain is only once in a while, and that pain is part of the game. One is not distracted by it, not disturbed by it. One accepts it.

If you enjoy the satiation that comes after you have eaten, naturally you know that when you are hungry there will be a little pain… . . . and that is good. When you have slept a good night’s sleep and in the morning you are feeling so fresh and so alive, rejuvenated, naturally if one night you cannot sleep, there will be a little agony, but that is part of the game also.

My own experience is that life consists of 99 ninety-nine percent bliss and one percent pain. But people’s peoples’ lives consist of 99 ninety-nine percent . pain and one percent of bliss; everything is upside-down.

So this name is going to be your method. Become more and more conscious of pleasure, joy, the positive, the flowers, the silver white linings in the black dark clouds.
Note: This matter is taken from